A Gentleman’s Position(9)

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.”