Christine Merrill – A Convenient Bride For The Soldier (страница 10)

He had three sisters still in the schoolroom: Mariah, Sarah, and the unfortunately named Josephine. When she’d been born, Mother could not be bothered with the fact that they had been at war. No matter how she fancied the name, his youngest sister reminded everyone of the Empress of France. Of course, neither had she been bothered to find lovers that resembled Father. After his own birth, the family resemblance varied widely from child to child. Though Father had acknowledged them all, when the lot of them were lined up side by side, it was difficult to ignore the truth.

‘We have lost him, again.’ Jake was waving a hand in front of his face, trying to regain his attention.

‘He is distracted by things that concern him more than they do the rest of us,’ Oliver said, dismissing his family problems with a shake of his head. ‘Do not worry, my friend. We are here to stand by you, just as we always have been.’

‘I think, as best men, it is our duty to protect you from the family of the bride, should they ever arrive,’ Jake added.

‘Or to help you escape them and the bride as well,’ Oliver added. ‘There is a rumour that she was seen at the club last week.’

Fred could guess where the rumour had started. Now that he had been thwarted, Bowles meant to do what damage he could.

‘That is the last place I’d have expected to find a marriageable young lady,’ Oliver prodded gently.

‘Or a gentleman inclined to marry,’ added Jake. ‘Especially if that gentleman was you. We did not think, when you chose a bride, that we would read her name in The Times along with the rest of London.’

They were right to be hurt that he had not told them before posting the announcement. There had been no secrets between the three of them, since the day they’d met at Eton. But until the girl was properly married and safe from scandal, the truth of their meeting was not his to reveal. Fred did his best to manufacture a happy, bridegroom’s smile. ‘You have both complained that I lacked spirit for the festivities at the club. Now you know the reason. My heart was engaged.’ Though he had not meant to use it on his friends, the lie came surprisingly easy to him. Now that it was started, he could not seem to return to the truth. ‘As for her presence there? She meant to surprise me.’

But such behaviour made his intended sound less than virtuous. If he had been marrying in truth, would he have allowed his fiancée to take such a risk? He liked to think he would have resisted temptation until the wedding night. Instead, he was going to resist indefinitely. ‘She was a little idiot to be there at all,’ he added, not wanting to seem too approving of the visit.

‘All the more reason to marry her,’ Jake said drily.

‘I had to offer for her, after that,’ Fred added. But that made him sound desperate. Trapped. And he had just called the supposed light of his life an idiot.

Finally, he gave up and offered something surprisingly close to the truth. ‘If I hadn’t married her, she’d have ended up marrying Nash Bowles, as her family intended.’

‘A fate worse than death,’ Oliver agreed with a theatrical shudder.

‘Or you,’ Jake seconded.

From across the church, his mother’s voice echoed yet another unneeded opinion. ‘I do not see why he chose to marry this girl. A viscount’s daughter is no catch at all when there is a duke’s sister waiting single in his immediate set.’

Jake stiffened in shock. Then he relaxed again, choosing to ignore the gossip about his beloved Eleanor. Jake’s sister was a dark and quiet beauty, and the mother of a five-year-old girl. The family declared her a widow. But though her surname had changed there had been no mention of a husband by his friend, or even a man that his sister had courted long enough to explain the presence of the child.

Fred shot a quelling glare in his mother’s direction which went unheeded, as usual. But the point was moot. Even if he’d wanted to marry Jake’s sister, he doubted his friend would have sanctioned the match. They knew far too much about each other to spoil a friendship by becoming family. And he had offered for her, just once, when he’d felt the family was in need of someone to claim the child and hush the rumours. He had been resoundingly refused and they had never spoken of it again.

No matter what the world thought of it, Eleanor gave no indication that she wished to be rescued from any kind of scandal and he had been faintly relieved not to have thrown his lot in with a woman he hardly knew.

Now he had done it anyway. Apparently, he grew no wiser with time. ‘Having a wife will not change my life so very much, I am sure,’ Fred said, trying to reassure himself. ‘Once the honeymoon is over, she will be retiring to my house in Surrey and I will be staying in London.’

His friends were staring at him as though he had gone mad in midsentence. Perhaps too much truth was not a good thing. ‘I will visit her on weekends, of course,’ he added, not wanting to sound unfeeling.

‘So you mean no alteration in lifestyle?’ It was hard to tell if Oliver was disappointed by this, or reassured. ‘I thought you claimed to have grown tired of the club since returning from Waterloo.’

‘Not tired, precisely,’ Frederick hedged. ‘We have been running the place since university. And I thought your responsibilities...’ He glanced to Jake.

His friend, whom he should now be calling Westmoor, passed a hand over his forehead as if it were so easy to wipe away the evidence of the previous night’s excess. He had been spending far too much time at Vitium et Virtus with both the ledger books and the brandy bottle. ‘I will mind my business and you mind yours.’

‘Or we shall both meddle in Fred’s life, just as we planned,’ Oliver said to distract the brooding Duke. Then he looked to Fred with a grin. ‘There is a new dancer at the club. She has ginger hair and a kiss like sweet cinnamon. If you change your mind, it is not too late for us to create a diversion...’

Were his true feelings so obvious, or was this another of Oliver’s attempts to cheer him? If the latter, it was not working. ‘You know damn well that I cannot run at this late stage without ruining both the girl and myself.’

‘Language,’ Jake chastised, his smile returning. ‘We are in a church, after all. And we know how you hate scandal.’

‘Which is why we should not have brought you this.’ Oliver reached into his pocket for a flask, passing it forward.

They were right. He loathed scandal. He should not have taken the sip of brandy that they were offering, but he needed a drink. He had not expected to have battlefield nerves over something as unimportant as his own wedding.

‘It is perfectly normal to be a bit on edge. We all are,’ Jake reminded him. ‘After all, you are the first of us to enter that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’

Fred looked at him in puzzlement.

‘Marriage,’ Oliver supplied.

‘I believe Hamlet was referring to death,’ Fred said, finally able to manage a smile.

‘One of us has likely taken that journey already,’ Jake said, looking more dour than usual.

‘We do not know that,’ Oliver said quickly. ‘Nicholas is missing. That does not mean he is dead.’

‘There was a prodigious amount of blood,’ Jake reminded him.

‘But if it were a robbery, surely the thief would have taken his ring.’ Oliver produced it from his pocket, holding it out. Usually it was kept in a gilded box in the club’s private suite and Fred was surprised to see it.

‘If Nick meant to leave his old life behind, for whatever reason, it makes perfect sense that he would have abandoned an identifying piece of jewellery.’

Fred stopped himself before snapping that it was in bad taste to bring a momento mori to a wedding. But it might be nothing of the kind. As Oliver had said, they could not be sure that their friend was dead.

The alternatives were almost worse. If the blood was not his, whose had it been? Had their friend disappeared to escape a hangman’s noose? Fred would have thought that, had it been anything less than murder, Nick would have come to his three best friends for help.

‘It is all we have left of him now,’ Jake said, staring at the ring. ‘We were together at the start. We should be together now, if only in spirit. He would have wanted to be here for you, standing at your side with the rest of us.’

To be honest, some small part of Fred had hoped that, once the announcement appeared in the paper, Nicholas Bartlett might show up in the church, as suddenly and unexpectedly as he had disappeared almost six years ago. Fred had been in Portugal when he’d got the news. One night, Nick had been at the club, just as always. The next morning, the only evidence of him they’d found was a puddle of blood in the alley behind the club and Nick’s signet trampled into the mud.

At the sight of the ring, Fred thought what he’d always thought, when Nick was remembered.

If I had been here, it would not have happened. Whatever it was, I’d have stopped it.

He stared at the ring, which normally resided on the seat of Nick’s old chair. ‘I suppose, since you have brought this, it is time again?’