A Gentleman's Position (Society of Gentlemen) (3 page)

“I can’t see the point. There’s nothing one can do about them, after all. My mother says the sole point of the past is to ensure you don’t fall into the same traps in the future.”

“That is certainly a tempting philosophy.” Lord Richard sighed. “And has some truth to it. You are ever a comfort, my Cyprian.”

David stared at the embroidery in front of him, giving himself a self-indulgent second to absorb the words.
Your Cyprian. All yours if you just ask.
“I hope to give you satisfaction, my lord.”

“You do.”

“Whatever you need,” David said on a breath, and felt Lord Richard jolt under his hands. He moved his fingers to the next button of the waistcoat, the top one, close to the opening of the fine lawn shirt, and Lord Richard’s hand came down over his, skin against skin, trapping David’s fingers against his master’s chest.

He might as well have grabbed David by the balls.

David looked up into Lord Richard’s face, his eyes indigo in the candlelight and a little wide, as if he was startled by his own act. They stood inches apart, in silence, Lord Richard’s heart beating under David’s hand, and David felt his hard-fought poise crumble like sand walls under the tide.

Lord Richard’s big hand was over his, engulfing it, and either Lord Richard’s fingers were trembling or David’s were, or perhaps it was both. David flattened his fingers against Lord Richard’s chest and felt his master’s fingers tense over them.

There was an endless second, and then Lord Richard lifted his hand. “Enough. I’ll do the rest myself. Go to bed.”

David’s mouth opened. Lord Richard stepped back, not quite meeting his eyes. “It’s late. Go on.”

It was just one in the morning. David had the rest of the evening’s duties to perform. He didn’t want to go, not now with his master’s touch hot on his hand. “My lord—”

“Good night.”

It was a flat dismissal, not to be argued with. “Yes, my lord,” David said in his usual neutral tone, and turned away.

He had reached the door when Lord Richard spoke again. “You are—invaluable to me, Cyprian. I hope you know that.”

“Thank you, my lord,” David managed, wondering how his own voice was so level. “Good night.”

He shut the door without a sound and padded down the hall, face blank, manner correct. Nobody who saw him would see anything but a valet going about his duties. Nobody ever did.

Silas had gone when David reached his own room. He sat on the bed and put his face in his hands, breathing hard.

It was weeks since that touch in the book room, that moment of connection that couldn’t be explained away as valeting duties or accident or anything else. Weeks since Lord Richard had been forced to accept Mason into his own house, to acknowledge that the lost love of his life was happy elsewhere. Weeks of mornings and nights together in a bedchamber, of feeling Lord Richard trying not to respond to his touch, of David knowing that he was right.

Weeks with an increasing conviction that he wasn’t going to get what he wanted.

His lordship might embrace the future, but he wouldn’t embrace a servant. That was all there was to it. He was the marquess’s son, and he held his place with pride and with duty. He did not stoop, and he didn’t abuse his position either. David recalled him dressing down a cousin who’d been a nuisance to a housemaid, his deep voice carrying through two sets of walls with unrestrained anger. He’d forced the scarlet young gentleman to make his near-tearful apologies to the wide-eyed girl and then escorted him out of the house in a way that reminded David of his friend who threw drunks out of a gentlemen’s club. Lord Richard protected his own. It was no wonder his servants adored him.

His lordship carried his birth, responsibility, and principles very heavily indeed. Desire didn’t stand a chance against those serried ranks, particularly not desire for a servant with hair of such a repulsive shade that he’d been ordered to wear it powdered at all times.

He’d seen Lord Richard watching him. He’d felt his lord’s breathing coming harder sometimes as David’s fingers moved over him, felt his big body tense, maintaining control. Another master would have reached for him. David was no stranger to this game; he knew hungry eyes when he felt them on his skin. Lord Richard had wanted him a hundred times, and if he had extended a hand or spoken a word, David would have come willingly. But Lord Richard had not; he never would.

It only made it worse that they both knew. David had felt the crackle of attraction all those years back at his interview for the post, and it hadn’t gone away any more than the sensation of that accidental, long-held touch on his fingers, which had felt so much like a door opening.

But Lord Richard had shut it. He would not reach for David no matter how much he wanted to. And for once in his life, David didn’t know what to do.

He solved his master’s problems and those of his master’s friends. That was easy enough for an ingenious man unencumbered by principles and backed by money and influence. With Lord Richard behind him, he could do anything. With Lord Richard in flat opposition…

In the end, David was only a valet. He could persuade, even disagree, since his master generously permitted disagreement. He could not argue or overrule, defy or persist. He could manipulate, of course; he was fairly sure that he could overcome his master’s objections for a night. Lord Richard was a man, and men could be led; it was what David did best. But a single night was not what David wanted. Not at all.

It was easy to lie when one didn’t care for the truth, to play when it was just a game with living pieces. He couldn’t do that to Lord Richard, because Lord Richard’s truth mattered to David as none other. He did not want to get his way with tricks now, to be the invisible puppet master. He wanted Lord Richard to see him. He wanted him to
choose.

And that left David, whose weapons were manipulation and deception, quite hopelessly adrift. All he could do was offer, as blatantly as he might but without saying anything that would force Lord Richard to a decision, because he was too afraid that the decision would be no.

He was perhaps the best-paid valet in London and certainly one of the most envied.
The great Cyprian,
he was called by some, just as Brummell’s valet had been
the great Robinson,
and if David ever left Lord Richard’s service, he would be able to name his next master and his salary too. That should have been enough for any man in his position and of his background. More than enough.

But it wasn’t. Because if David Cyprian had been asked to define his own particular hell, it would be night after night in Lord Richard’s bedroom, night after night undressing him with murmured words and infinite care and then walking away to an empty room, again, alone.

“Excellent, brother. A neat solution.” Philip, Marquess of Cirencester, scrawled his signature on the lawyer’s letter and sat back with a sigh of satisfaction. “Thank you, Richard. That has been a thorn in my side.”

“My pleasure.” Richard piled the papers together so that they were ready to pass to his brother’s man of business. “I think that’s all the outstanding matters dealt with. Have you anything else for me?”

Philip struggled with the written word as badly as any untaught rustic, and no amount of beating at Harrow had helped him acquire scholarship. He did not speak of it, but Richard knew it was a constant humiliation to him and a worry too, since a dishonest clerk might do much harm with an illiterate master. So Philip relied on his younger brother for the administration of the vast Vane estates, as he did his wife for personal communication, and Richard was happy to do it. He was the second son, and had become quite unnecessary when the first of Philip’s three boys was born, but as his brother’s aide-de-camp he was vital to the Vane interests, even if hardly anyone knew it.

Philip shook his head. “No, I think that is everything. Well. Not everything. Do you have a moment more?”

The tone of his voice was worrying. “Brother?”

“I, uh.” Philip interlaced his fingers. “Richard, when will you marry?”

“Marry? Good heavens, where is that sprung from?”

The Marquess of Cirencester was head of the sprawling Vane family and took that duty seriously. Richard preferred to count himself Philip’s ally rather than his responsibility, but if his brother chose to interest himself in Richard’s affairs, that was without question his right.

“You will be thirty-eight on your next birthday. It is not an unreasonable question,” Philip said. “I had five children by your age. Yet you remain resolutely single.”

“Some might say you have children enough for us both. Why do you ask?”

“You must know why.”

That was a cold draught down the back of Richard’s neck. He had always been discreet and had had very little to be discreet about recently, but his circle of friends included men who were not so. They had banded together some years ago, their little society of gentlemen with a taste for gentlemen, because the isolation had been intolerable, but he had come to feel that their mutual allegiance was a danger in itself. If one fell, they might all fall.

If the Marquess of Cirencester, high in the instep to a fault, had heard whispers about his brother, the whispers must have been loud indeed. But that was impossible: Cyprian would have warned him.

He kept his voice as calm as he could. “I don’t know why. Enlighten me.”

“Father,” Philip said, and Richard blinked.

“Father? I don’t follow you.”

“Need I spell it out?” Philip demanded. “Our father married late in life. Do you think I wish to see you wed as our parents were?”

Richard had to take a few seconds to suit his mind to this turn of the conversation, unwelcome but so much better than he’d feared. “You think I intend to follow Father’s example? Wait until my declining years and then wed a girl from the schoolroom? Philip, really. I am not in my dotage, and I have no need to marry, thanks to that well-stocked nursery of yours. If I cannot find a lady with whom I can suit, I shall leave my fortune to my namesake, just as our Uncle Richard did me.”

“Dickie would doubtless appreciate it. But…” Philip picked up a pen and turned it in his fingers as if considering it with close attention. “Eustacia is concerned. She wonders if you are becoming addicted to bachelorhood.”

“I bow to none except you in my affection for your wife,” Richard said. “However, on this matter…”

“You are set in your ways. When a man is too used to being his own master in his own household, can it be easy to change his state?”

“I dare say I shall find out when a lady makes it necessary for me to do so.”

“Good heavens, Richard. You are sentimental.”

“
I,
sentimental? You are the most devoted husband alive.”

Philip flushed. “Nonsense.”

“Yes, you are, and with reason. If I had the good fortune to find a helpmeet like Eustacia, I should secure her at once. If I could,” Richard added, to make it less of a lie.

“Of course you could. Don’t be absurd. And Eustacia and I met only once before our engagement and no more than a dozen times before the wedding,” Philip pointed out. “Neither of us had more than a tolerable liking for each other at the time of our marriage. You cannot expect affection and loyalty to arise from nowhere; that is youthful fancy. They develop.”

“Not in our parents.”

Philip’s brows drew together. Richard turned up his palms. “It’s the truth. Your marriage would be a matter of envy to me were I not so happy for you. Our parents’ marriage…But both sprang from the same beginnings, a practical arrangement.”

“Eustacia thought you would say that.” Philip sounded grave. “She fears that you will deprive yourself of the chance of companionship and family because you will not risk a mistake.”

“A bad marriage is more than a mistake. And I may not be married, but I don’t lack companionship.” Philip’s brows shot up, and Richard grinned at him. “Not that sort. I have good friends; I have you and Eustacia and a number of children to indulge. I count myself a very fortunate man. On the topic of your children,” he went on before Philip could reply, “I have a paper of sweetmeats to smuggle up in the teeth of Nanny’s disapproval and a wish to see my namesake. May I pay a visit?”

“I see you’re determined to change the subject. As you wish, but if you would consider it, brother? We are only concerned for your happiness.”

Philip’s words nagged at Richard as he headed up the stairs, pausing to examine a new portrait of his eldest nephew and give himself a moment’s respite. He had spoken the truth to Philip, more or less, with the trifling exception of gender. If Richard had such a partner as his brother had, that loving, unflinching ally, he would count himself the happiest of men.

Once, he had. He remembered Philip’s wedding day. Richard had been just twenty-one years old and so overwhelmingly in love with Dominic that he could imagine no other state. He had stood with his remote, solitary older brother as he married a horse-faced woman he barely knew and looked down the great church to where his dearest friend and lover sat smiling at him, and he had pitied Philip with all his heart.

Fourteen months later, as Eustacia and Philip were glowing with passionate joy over their first son, Dominic had left him because Richard had refused to inflict abuse in the guise of love.

Or so he had thought. So he had felt for years, with a raw humiliation that he had mattered so little that Dominic could turn from him to seek degradation in back alleys. Until he had been forced to see the situation from another perspective and had not liked what he saw of himself.

Dominic had been lost, confused, frightened by his own desires, and as devastated by the gap growing between them as Richard had been. Dominic had been in desperate need of friendship, and instead Richard had spent years condemning him, holding on to his own shame and pain without considering how much it added to his best friend’s burden. Their love affair had been doomed, without question, but if he had just accepted Dominic as he was all those years ago…

Richard had failed his dearest friend cruelly and repeatedly and then been forced to watch a penniless Ludgate radical make him content in his own skin for the first time in fifteen years.

It
hurt.
Painful, ulcerating shame, a wound rubbed more raw every time Richard set eyes on Mason, and he deserved the hurt. He had put his own wants first with Dominic, his longing for their lost happiness, and his friend had suffered for it.

He would not be so damned selfish again.

He stopped outside the nursery door, took a long, deep breath, and requested admittance. One good thing about a gaggle of children shrieking “Uncle Rich!” and demanding largesse was that there was no time for self-indulgent thoughts.

After a lengthy period of handing out smuggled sweets and being a horse for four-year-old Lady Abigail—Cyprian would raise an eyebrow at the state of Richard’s pantaloons—he settled down with his namesake to read. Young Lord Richard, Dickie to his intimates, was a sturdy seven-year-old with bright eyes and a taste for terror, and the book he handed his uncle looked quite bloodcurdling. Richard shot a plaintive look at the nurse, who returned a disapproving one, even as he read out the tale of Lady Mary visiting the sinister Mr. Fox.

“ ‘Over the door of a chamber, she saw the words,
BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD, LEST THAT YOUR HEART’S BLOOD SHOULD RUN COLD!
She opened it; it was full of skeletons and tubs of blood.’ Good heavens, Dickie.”

“Go on, Uncle Rich!”

“ ‘She left the room in haste and, coming downstairs, saw from a window Mr. Fox coming towards the house, dragging along a young lady by her hair. Lady Mary hid herself under the stairs. As Mr. Fox dragged his victim upstairs, she caught hold of one of the banisters with her hand, on which was a golden bracelet. Mr. Fox cut her hand off with his sword
. Snick!
The hand with its bracelet fell into Lady Mary’s lap—’ I hope you know that if you have nightmares, your mother will blame me.”

Dickie gave Richard a look calculated to cow any uncle into obedience. Richard sighed and went on with the tale. Lady Mary left Mr. Fox’s hall with what seemed to him a reprehensibly casual attitude toward the other young lady’s well-being and held her peace until the next time Mr. Fox came to dinner, at which time she began to tell of a terrible dream she had had of a visit to his house.

“ ‘She described the room full of skeletons, and Mr. Fox said, “It is not so, nor it was not so, and God forbid it should be so!” which he continued to repeat at every turn of the tale till she came to his cutting off the young lady’s hand. Then Mr. Fox said again, “It is not so, nor it was not so, and God forbid it should be so.” But Lady Mary retorted, “But it is so, and it was so, and here the hand I have to show!,” at the same moment producing the hand and bracelet from her lap. Whereupon the guests all drew their swords, and—’ ”

“Richard Vane,” Eustacia said from the doorway. “
Both
Richard Vanes. Put that book down at once.”

They took tea in Eustacia’s drawing room. She doubtless had a roster of engagements, but she always had time for her family.

Lady Cirencester was not a beautiful woman, or even an attractive one, in an age where women’s beauty was all-important, nor was she charming. Like Philip, she presented a face of aristocratic pride and haughty reserve to the world. Richard was one of the very few privileged to see behind the façade, and that had taken time. Even as Eustacia and Philip had been turning their dynastic marriage into society’s least-known love affair, she had not been prepared to trust her husband’s younger brother with her private self, and he, puppy that he was, had seen only the plain-faced woman his father had inflicted on his solitary brother.

Until he had noticed that she was always, somehow, there when people tried to make Philip read anything. She would interpose herself with a look down her beaky nose that suggested it was an imposition to expect the marquess to do such menial activity, a repellent gesture of worldly self-consequence that made her few friends and diverted all attention her way. And Richard, who had tried so often to protect Philip from the shame of his illiteracy, had felt his heart lurch in his chest.

The day he had stood godfather to the howling red-faced scrap called Lord Richard Godfrey Nevile Vane and seen his brother as happy with his sixth child as with his first remained one of Richard’s dearest memories, and it was all because of Eustacia. He would, therefore, put up with almost anything she chose to hand to him, but there were limits.

“Philip did speak to me on the subject, yes,” he said now. “Don’t feel obliged to add your voice.”

Eustacia gave a very small sigh. “I wish you would consider marriage, Richard. Philip worries for you.”

“Philip worries for everyone.”

“Yes, he does. There is a streak of melancholy in the Vane family that I cannot like.” She must have observed something on his face, because she went on quite deliberately. “I do not scruple to tell you, Richard, that my parents felt a little concern in making the marriage. There is a certain instability in the Vanes. And your mother—”

“We may be grateful you did not heed those concerns.” She was more devoted to the family interests than he was, Richard reminded himself.

“I am.” She smiled unconsciously, as she sometimes did with the children. If there was a painter capable of capturing those smiles, her portrait would be a sensation. “But Philip fears that you will either go the way of your cousin Alexander and plunge into some unsuitable affair—”

“Really, Eustacia—”

“—or of your father and contract a marriage for worldly reasons that cannot lead to happiness.”

“That I shall not. He had the line to consider. He needed to marry; I do not.”

“But men
do.
” Eustacia looked just slightly pink. “I am aware of masculine…needs.” That was almost impossible to imagine, but her seven children were far-from-silent testimony. “And more than that, to have a partner, someone at your side. Philip—”

“I do understand.” She didn’t need to spell it out. Philip would have shrunk into a miserable, isolated parody of a man without Eustacia.

“And you are more like him than you think,” Eustacia went on. “You have a gift for friendship, of course, which he does not, but you need a…an ally as much as he does. What is it?”

“Nothing.” She gave him a look. “Or merely that someone else has made that observation to me.”

You want an ally. I prefer a challenge.
Dominic had told him that, and it was true, curse it. He wanted what Philip had in Eustacia. Someone by his side, working with him, someone who
knew
him, a partner in every sense.

Richard knew exactly who he wanted, and he could not have him.

“May we help you, then?” Eustacia asked. “I don’t suppose you would have any great difficulty in securing a lady’s hand if you chose.” That was an understatement; Richard knew himself to be one of the more desirable properties on the marriage mart. “I have made a list—”