“Doesn’t anyone have anything better to talk about?” he asked. “I hear Napoleon is safely ensconced on Elba, never to terrorize the world again.” But these men were different from the officers he’d known in Spain. His comrades had been sober and keen in battle, but after, once the dead and the living had been accounted for, they wagered and whored and drank as hard as these idle lords. But they did it to remind themselves they were still alive, and to forget that good men died every day. He looked at Wilton, Howard, and even Sebastian. What did these silly fops have to forget?
Boredom, he supposed.
He’d been back in England for five weeks, and he had not met a gentleman of rank with a useful occupation, or one who stayed sober past noon, if they were awake that early. He also remembered being one of the worst of them, the most incorrigible rake, the wildest, the drunkest, the most ridiculous rich, bored lordling of the bunch.
But that was before he went to war.
He was a different man—harder, stronger, and smarter. Yet they expected him to be the same drunken fool.
Charles Wilton raised his brows. “Napoleon? Not interesting enough. Not when the Devil is about to be shackled to the daughter of the virtuous Earl of Wycliffe. What’s she like?”
Nicholas kept his expression bland, as if he knew all about her and didn’t care that she was—what? Ugly? A stranger he must wed and bed within the month? He shifted uncomfortably, realizing he did care after all. Slightly.
He wished himself back in Spain, where the world made sense. If not for his brother’s sudden and mysterious death, he wouldn’t be here at all.
And if his grandmother had not insisted he remain in London, he would have retired to Temberlay weeks ago to calculate the full damage of David’s mismanagement, and to discover just what had happened to his brother. The accident that killed him seemed to be the greatest secret in London, the details as deeply and hastily buried as David’s corpse.
He worried about his grandmother when news of his brother’s death finally reached Spain in a solicitor’s letter, months after it had happened. She’d raised David, doted on him. Even in her terrible grief, she had managed the dukedom as best she could.
Or so he thought.
She had rushed at him the moment he’d arrived home, a virago in black bombazine. She’d slapped his face with the full strength in her arm, blamed him for everything that had befallen her, from David’s death to the ruin of the dukedom. She had squelched the scandal, and hidden the details of how her beloved grandson had died, but she hissed them in Nicholas’s ear.
He sipped his whisky and let it burn.
David had died in her arms after a duel, carried home barely alive, his body riddled with wounds. “It’s all Nicholas’s fault,” were his last words.
Nicholas had no idea what that meant. Unfortunately, he’d found nothing to explain it. No witnesses, no bystanders, no gossip at all . . . but he would. Finding other people’s secrets was what he was best at. Which made the total surprise of his own wedding all the more unbearable.
Sebastian spilled his drink. Nicholas watched the brandy soak into the swirls of the club’s Turkey carpet.
His grandmother had refused to allow anyone to clean David’s blood from the rug in her study. It had been there when she called him into that room and insisted that he must do his duty and marry. Over his brother’s blood, she’d told him the estate was ruined, that only her personal fortune was keeping them. She would continue to pay only if he agreed to marry where she wished.
He respectfully took her money for debts and current expenses, and agreed to the wedding, but refused to let her manage his estates.
“They say Wycliffe raised his girls to be pillars of feminine virtue and modesty!” Sebastian said, and grinned encouragement at Nicholas, as if he truly expected him to add more details. Nicholas sent him a flat look of warning, but Augustus Howard laughed.