Chapter Eleven
Bernard Trentham was only half a dozen years older than Tom, but he behaved as if he was in his fifties: staid, pompous, disapproving. But Bernard had been a fifty-year-old his whole life—or at least as long as Tom had known him, which was almost twenty years.
Bernard shook Tom’s hand and made the same not-quite-joke he always did: “Ah, the Honorable Thomas.”
Tom smiled tightly.
“And how is your brother, the earl?” Bernard asked.
“I haven’t seen him yet.” And he realized, with a faint sense of shock, that he hadn’t written to tell Daniel he was back in England, hadn’t even thought about Daniel. He felt a twinge of guilt. I must visit Daniel before I leave England, he told himself.
Bernard droned on and it was nearly ten minutes before Tom escaped. “Christ,” he said to
