A Gentleman’s Position(12)

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.”