A Gentleman's Position (Society of Gentlemen) (4 page)

“No. Really, sister, no.”

She sighed again. “It troubles Philip that you are alone, and it is impossible to see you with the children without thinking that you ought to set up your own nursery. I may add that you would be an excellent husband, and I can think of at least five ladies who would make you a very suitable wife. If you would but
try.
I don’t understand why you will not try.”

Richard looked into the delicate china cup. “I have considered it.” It was the truth. Marriage might be quite satisfactory, if only he could believe it was fair to the lady. “I don’t feel I can make a
suitable
marriage, Eustacia, even on Philip’s command. But if I change my mind, I will gladly consult your list.” He smiled to support his words.

She didn’t return it. “I am sorry to hear that. Oh, Richard.”

“Is something wrong?”

“You must be wondering why we have spoken to you about this. It is because we both wish you had someone with you now.”

The note in her voice sent the hair prickling up his spine. “What is it? Is Philip unwell? Not the children?”

“No, nothing like that. Philip did not wish to tell you this, and I was not sure we should, but I think we must. Richard, we have had a letter.”

He sat in his book room, reading the letter a few lines at a time. That seemed to be all he could manage before he had to break off and look around. It was lighter in here, somehow, more alive. The shelves were filled with his own books, but over the years they had become furniture. Mason had been working through them, rearranging them, and it had given them the feeling of things that he wanted to read once more.

He’d need to choose a few for the journey.

He reached for the bell, stopped himself. He’d already ordered that Cyprian should come to him as soon as the valet returned to the house; repeating himself would be as fruitless as making querulous demands as to where the man had gone.

Cyprian would be about his work. Buying whatever he required for his secret recipe for blacking, or arranging matters with his cronies in gambling hells and assignation houses to ensure that Richard’s friends could find comfort in safety, or exchanging news with fellow servants in a coffee house to ensure he knew more about Richard’s world than Richard did himself.

His ally, his helpmeet. His valet.

Richard stared at the letter, looking through rather than at the spiky handwriting. He tried not to think about Cyprian, ever, but the choices of what he could think about now were both limited and unpleasant.

He should not have touched Cyprian the previous night. Should never touch him. Other men might give in to temptation or self-indulgence; Richard owed his valet far too much to do that. He owed himself a duty, come to that. But the sensation of those buttons coming undone one by one, the feel of those sure fingers approaching the opening of his shirt, where the skin of his chest had felt so naked…

He’d stopped Cyprian’s hand to stop himself, and he’d seen the look on his valet’s face as he did it.

He could have Cyprian. He could pull him close, claim that clever mouth, lay him down on the bed that made itself so very obtrusive in the room whenever they were there. He knew, from nights of imagining, how Cyprian’s slender body would give way to his own bulk, how he’d clutch Richard’s shoulders, how Cyprian’s lips would welcome the invasion…

Or they might not, and in that case, there would be damn all that Cyprian could do about it, because Richard was his master. Richard remembered his cousin, outraged and bewildered at his fury because of course the housemaid whose breasts the man had fondled had made no objection to the master’s relative having his way. How could she, when she needed her place?

Richard was sure—almost sure, so close to sure—that Cyprian wanted him. That moment in the book room…Richard had not been able to move his hand, though every decent instinct, every self-protective part of his brain had screamed at him to do so. He had not been able to take his eyes off Cyprian’s face, so often expressionless, but at that moment giving away so much. Richard had wanted more than anything to reach out and pull him close, and he believed his valet would have welcomed it.

But Dominic had welcomed Richard’s touch once too. Men deceived themselves and one another. They made mistakes or simply changed. And what the devil would Cyprian do if that happened? To think of him forced to pretend enthusiasm or endure unwanted attentions…The very idea made Richard angry. That it could be his doing made him queasy.

Keep your hands off the staff.
It was as simple as that. There could be no justice where one party had all the power and the other risked his livelihood with refusal. Therefore, one did not even ask, because one could never be sure that a “yes” didn’t mask “because I must.”

Richard had made too many mistakes in his life; this one would be unforgivable. He was damned if he would put his own selfish wants first with Cyprian.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Cyprian. His lordship requests you in the book room at once.” Schooler coughed behind his hand, shooting a glance at David’s state of dress. “I believe it is urgent.”

David dropped his parcel on the kitchen table and shrugged off his topcoat. “Thank you, Mr. Schooler. Do you know what’s the matter?”

Lord Richard’s butler was an imposing man, as butlers usually were, and an intelligent one. Other men would have resented David’s peculiar preeminence in the household, where the butler should have reigned unchallenged. Schooler, no fool, had considered whether he was more dispensable than David, as well as Lord Richard’s dislike of domestic brangling, and the two servants had settled into a relationship of weighty courtesy on both sides. Schooler doubtless relished seeing David go to Lord Richard’s presence improperly clad, but he would not say so. “I could not speculate, Mr. Cyprian. His lordship returned from Cirencester House over two hours ago and requested you should attend him at once.”
Which you have signally failed to do,
he did not add. The two footmen polishing silver didn’t comment either, but David saw the glance flash between them.

He could not expect to be popular. He was too close to the master, too intimate with him, too often the mouthpiece of Lord Richard’s wishes. He was not one with the other servants, and so they enjoyed his discomfiture.

“Thank you,” David said, and hurried through.

It took a little nerve for him to open the book room door. The first order that he had received in Lord Richard’s service was that he should keep his hair powdered. He couldn’t resent it, little as he liked the thick, dry coating; nobody wanted to see that garish red. He was also obliged to wear livery, which had been harder to swallow, but if Lord Richard’s whim was to have his valet clad like his footmen, it was not David’s place to object.

He was redheaded and black coated now, quite out of uniform, but “at once” was “at once,” and if Lord Richard needed him urgently after a visit to the marquess, something was up.

He slipped into the room. The light was poor, as evening was approaching, but no candles had been lit. Lord Richard sat in his comfortable reading chair with a letter in his hand and an untouched glass of wine on the table, staring into space.

“My lord?” Lord Richard looked around, and David saw the little jolt as his master noticed the glaring hair. “I beg pardon. You wanted me at once.”

“Cyprian. Where have you been? No, it doesn’t matter. Sit down. Bring that chair over.” He waved a hand toward the desk.

Sit? David carried the chair over, placed it opposite Lord Richard, waited. And waited some more, because Lord Richard was looking at the letter he held and did not seem quite able to speak.

“My lord, is all well?”

“No. No, it is not.” He glanced at David, at his hair, and then hurriedly away to stare over his shoulder. “I, uh. Cyprian.”

“My lord?”

“Do you know about my mother?”

That was unexpected. David turned the question in his mind, not sure of Lord Richard’s angle. “A very little.”

“What do you know?”

This was not good. “I know that she was a very young lady when she married the marquess your father,” he began with care.

“She was seventeen, he fifty-nine. Go on.”

“She was a Miss Ranelagh, I believe. My lord—”

“Go on, I said. I know you know something. I want to know what.”

Lord Richard was still watching the wall over David’s shoulder. David watched him. “It is my understanding that the marriage was an unhappy one. That Lady Cirencester found matrimony restrictive, and Lord Cirencester found his wife resistant to his authority. I understand that she became ill and was confined for her own safety at the same time as the marquess suffered a severe fall.”

“A fall. Is that all you know, or are you being tactful?”

“My lord, this is not a subject on which I should repeat gossip. If there is something you wish me to know…”

“I was ten years old.” Lord Richard shut his eyes. “It was the school holidays, and we were at Tarlton March, of course. My father liked to be at the family seat. My mother hated it there. She hated it as much as she hated him, and us.”

David sat rigid.

“There was no society. Father did not greatly like society himself, and he did not like Mother to be in London at all. He would not go to Bath for the summer either. That would have been as bad as London.”

Lord Richard didn’t say why. David didn’t ask, because he already knew. Long-ago scandal, a very young woman indiscreetly seeking solace from her marriage to an aged and demanding husband and the marquess’s iron assertion of control.

“So it was just Father and Mother and me in that great house, since Philip had been sent off to a crammer’s. Dominic came over most days and we roamed the grounds together. I recall enjoying that summer, you know. It was hot, and we were boys with trees to climb and streams to fish. And then one day we came into the house to carry out some piece of mischief, and I heard screaming.”

David wanted to touch him. Wanted to hold his hand, kiss it, give comfort, do anything about the look on Lord Richard’s face.

“She had hit Father—he was seventy-six years old—hit him with a brass candlestick about the head and then beat him with it as he lay on the floor. There was blood on the metal, and her hands. We tried to pull her off, Dominic and I, but we were only ten, and she was enraged. She screamed, at my father on the floor and at me.”

“My lord.” David was on the edge of his seat, and be damned to correctness. Lord Richard needed to spill the words out, and it was David he’d sought to hear them. Not Dominic Frey, not any of the other gentlemen who so casually leaned on Lord Richard’s strength. David reached for his master’s hand and felt his fingers, cold and sweaty, close around his own with startling force.

“She informed me,” Lord Richard said remotely, “that every contact with my father had been repellent to her. That his children were nothing but reminders of a period of disgust that had been ended only by his advancing age. That she hated him and us. And all the while, my father lay with a pool of blood widening around his head.”

“Oh, my lord,” David whispered. Both his hands were gripping both Lord Richard’s now, holding tight.

“Dominic ran for help. It was not the first time the servants had heard screams, so they had not interfered. Philip was called, and my cousin Gideon. It was put about that Father had had a stroke and fallen down the stairs, and Mother was taken away. I believe there was a great deal of wrangling with the Ranelaghs about it. My father would not divorce her; she expressed her intention to kill him or herself if she was forced to share a house with him any longer; the Ranelaghs threatened legal action if she was confined to a madhouse. Naturally, nobody wanted that dirty linen washed in public. So in the end, she took Arncliffe House—a Vane property in North Yorkshire—on the understanding that she would not trouble the family further. Father lived another twelve years, and…I have never seen her again.”

“Never?”

“The last I saw of my mother was when Wellsbury—he was the butler, a very grand, stately man—when Wellsbury dragged her off with an arm round her neck, she struggling, my father’s blood on her hands. She screamed, ‘I hate you.’ I did not know, have never known, if she was addressing me.”

“My lord.” David bowed his head so Lord Richard need not hide the sheen in his eyes and held on tight. There was a silence that lasted too long.

“And I mention it now,” Lord Richard said at last, “because she has asked to see me.”

David looked up, startled. “See you? I thought—”

“That she was dead?”

He could have sworn it. The dowager marchioness had already been ancient history when he’d entered Lord Richard’s service.

“She might as well have been.” Lord Richard’s voice rasped. “It was never to be mentioned—her disgrace, the shame…her existence. I was only ten. Philip was seventeen and making his appearance in society since he did not choose to attend Oxford, and when I did see him, he did not want to speak of it. So I…forgot, because I was obliged to forget, until I was grown. I didn’t even think it was strange that she wasn’t at Philip’s wedding. It did not cross my mind.”

“No.”

“And then Father died, and Dominic left me, and I wrote to her. She did not reply. I wrote again. I asked if I might visit her. Nothing.” He grimaced. “I have written to her three times a year for fifteen years and not once received a reply. I don’t know why I kept writing. Duty, I suppose. And now…” There was a husk in his voice that could have driven David to his knees then and there. “She wrote to say she is dying. She said, ‘I wonder if either of Lord Cirencester’s sons would care to bid me farewell.’ And she sent the letter to Philip.” His voice broke on that. “Philip
hated
her. He has never written to her, not once, but she wrote to him, not me, and— Dear God, how can this still matter? I have not seen her since I was ten, but it feels just as it always did.”

His hands were so tight on David’s that his knuckles felt crushed. He tightened his own grip as best he could. “Oh, my lord.”

“She called us the heir and the reserve. It’s what we were, of course, but it seemed to be all we were. ‘Oh, here is your heir, my lord, and your reserve son with him.’ It seems that has not changed.”

David bit back what he would have liked to say about the dowager marchioness of Cirencester. “What will you do? Will you go?”

“Philip won’t. He won’t forgive her. He doesn’t want me to.”

“You don’t have to forgive, my lord. You don’t have to go, and if you go, you are not obliged to forgive, and if you forgive, you are not obliged to forget.”

Lord Richard swallowed hard. “That is— Yes. Thank you.” He leaned forward then, resting his head against David’s, forehead to forehead, hands joined, and David wondered why people spoke of hearts breaking. His did not break. It crumpled, as if squeezed in a giant’s fist till the blood ran.

I’m here. I will always be here.

Another moment’s silence, and then Lord Richard said, “We shall leave as soon as possible.” His voice was quite calm, quite level. An instruction to a servant whose hands he gripped as if they were a lifeline.

“Yes, my lord. I shall pack directly.”

It was a long journey to Yorkshire, and not a comfortable one. The coach had to be as light as possible for speed, so Richard had brought only his groom, Doone, to drive, and Cyprian. Of course he had Cyprian. He could hardly travel without his valet.

Cyprian’s hair was red. The powdering was a time-consuming business and would have been an unnecessary concern on a long journey. Richard had instructed him not to trouble with it. He’d said it didn’t matter.

It is not so, nor it was not so.

He couldn’t seem to forget that damned story. The aggressively red hair, the deep brown eyes, the sharp-toothed grin: Cyprian was Mr. Fox in person, padding silently around the room of the inn where they rested for the night. Richard wanted to push his hands into that hair, to feel those teeth biting into his lips, his neck.

Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.

This was their fourth night on the road, the last before they arrived at Ingleby Arncliffe and Arncliffe House. Days in the coach together, talking casually or in comfortable silence—if Richard didn’t look, that was. If he didn’t look at that damned red hair against pale skin and set himself imagining, because that was not comfortable at all.

At least Cyprian still wore Richard’s dark green livery. The shade that screamed:
Servant, do not touch.

He was sitting up in bed in his nightshirt, watching Cyprian arrange his own truckle bed. The usual arrangement for master and man on travels. He would not watch Cyprian undressing; he had not that right. It was none of Richard’s affair if his valet’s chest was sprinkled with golden-red hair, if it trailed down his belly, below his waistband…

Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.

The words popped into his head, a line from some half-mad poet that Dominic had quoted during an argument. Richard had never felt more like landing his best friend a facer, because it was absolutely, insultingly wrong in every way.

Richard restrained his desire not because it was weak but because he was not. Weakness would be reaching out now, whispering Cyprian’s name, knowing that he would turn, a dark figure in the light of the single candle, and extend his slim, clever fingers to meet Richard’s. Weakness, contemptible weakness, would be indulging his desire when all the risk of it fell on Cyprian’s slender shoulders.

Or, not
all.
Richard risked losing a valet of superlative skill, a henchman so invaluable he could not remember how he had managed without him, a beloved companion. He might still have taken that risk if it had been his alone, to put an end to the gnawing hunger, but it was not.

It is not so, nor it was not so, and I wish to God it could be so.

“We will be there tomorrow,” he observed, to stop himself thinking.

“Another four hours on the road, perhaps.” The candlelight cast shadows on Cyprian’s face, made his eyes look deeper, his cheekbones more prominent.

“I shall be glad to be out of the coach for a while.” Not that Richard was confident they would be staying long. He had visions of a brief, cold exchange of greetings, or a blazing argument, and getting back in the coach to return to London after a half hour’s visit. “I suppose we will be expected,” he added. He had written to advise the dowager marchioness that he was setting forth at once; but given his purse, his well-sprung coach, and the teams of horses he could call on, he would not be surprised to arrive at Arncliffe House before his letter.

With the decision made, it had been crucial to leave as soon as possible. Cyprian had worked at full stretch to prepare in a couple of hours for a journey of indeterminate length and unpredictable weather. Richard had even waved away Harry, who had emerged from his room with the headache he deserved and something on his mind. Fond though he was of his cousin, Richard had not felt able to hear confessions of drunken misdeeds. And now he was almost there and still had no idea what to think, or feel, or do.