Seduction in Regency Society: One Unashamed Night

Taris Wellingham and his carriage arrived at her door almost exactly at two, after sending a note earlier to ask whether this time would be suitable.

Dressed in her bonnet, coat and gloves, Bea found him standing outside next to his coach. Today he wore brown, the colour showing up the darkness of his hair. Surprisingly he also wore a patch of the finest leather across his left eye.

‘My lord,’ she began, hating the tremor in her voice, ‘have you been hurt?’

‘No.’ He did not elaborate or embellish his reply as he held open the door to a carriage emblazoned with a family crest and pulled by four perfect chestnut horses. Two footmen tipped their hats to her when she acknowledged them, both adorned in the livery of gold and blue.

Taris Wellingham followed her in, sitting in the seat opposite hers. Taking a breath, she smiled and tried to initiate some conversation between them.

‘It is a beautiful day for this time of the year, is it not?’

‘It is.’

‘I have heard it said that such weather augurs well for the summer season. Some say that we should expect a very mild May.’

‘A happy thought,’ he returned in a voice that suggested anything but. ‘And I would prefer it if you would call me Taris. With our history…’ He stopped.

Our history? The weight of what had been between them settled like a stone in her stomach and the swelling bruise on his cheek underlined everything about him that was dangerous.

Today the ease of yesterday had gone, replaced by a tension that Beatrice could not understand as he watched her with a disconcerting directness, a small tic on the smooth skin below his one uncovered eye.

Hell! Taris thought. His eye was smarting and the headache that had been threatening all morning bloomed into pain. A familiar headache, the little sight that was left to him disappearing into nothingness. He should never have come, should have noted the heaviness in his temples and the tiredness in his eyes and cried off. But he was here and Beatrice-Maude was opposite with her quick-witted brain that might expose him as the cripple he was should he make even one false step. His fingers tightened on his cane, the silver ball his only connection to the world, his only certainty. All about him now lay the creeping dark of chaos and a discomfort that made him feel sick.

He had given his men instructions to stop at St James’s Park, a place he often walked alone, because with the fences along the pathways on the western side he had a touchstone to know exactly where he was.

‘I have been thinking up ways to try to help you with your…problem and was wondering if you would be averse to answering a few questions?’

She waited for his answer and he nodded.

‘Do you drink often?’

‘No.’

‘But when you do drink, you drink a lot?’

The lies that were piling one on the other were nowhere near as humorous as he had found them yesterday.

I am almost blind and that is why I fell.

He should say it, just spit it out here and now and then that would be the end of it, for the truth would send any woman fleeing.

But he did not say that because, even nauseous and in pain, the words just would not come.

Avoided. Adrift. Lessened.

Turning his face to the window, he pretended to look out, forcing away all the righteous arguments that rang in his head whilst protecting himself in-stinctively from pity.

As the conversation between them again spluttered to a halt, Beatrice tucked her hands into the dark red fabric of her new dress and stayed silent.

He did not want to speak, perhaps? He had asked her for this walk and now he regretted it? Her intent to help had become intrusive and he wished he might have never given her the chance to take the experiment further?

She hardly knew him, hardly understood a thing about him; this morning, with the patch across his eye, he looked not only wildly handsome, but also unbearably distant.

A lord and a man who walked his world in the very highest echelons of society and one who could hardly be relishing her busy-bodying ways and her plain, plain looks.

Her strident lecture on the ills of strong drink suddenly looked inadvisable and naïve. What did she truly know of him, after all, that a whore in one of the establishments off Covent Garden might not? An affair of the flesh and nothing of the heart.

‘If you would prefer to leave our outing to another day, my lord, I would quite understand.’

She did not dare to chance the use of his Christian name, even given his directive of a few moments prior.

As if he suddenly remembered she was there, he turned.

‘No, I should like to walk.’ Again he did not look directly at her, his face guarded today and distant.

‘Your horses are beautiful. I saw you once in Regent Street tooling greys.’

‘Greys?’ He looked puzzled.

‘With a woman. A young woman with light hair.’

‘Lucy. My sister. She insisted that she learn the art of managing a team.’

Relief turned inside Bea. Not a paramour, then, but a sibling. ‘Indeed, she did look competent.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Buying a hat, my lord, and in awe of such a display as everyone else on the street most surely was.’

‘I am sorry I did not see you.’

She could not let him off the hook so easily. ‘Even though your glance brushed directly across mine…?’

He leaned forwards at her reprimand, his movements strangely careful. No clumsiness in them or extra exertion.

‘Were you married long, Beatrice-Maude?’

The question was so personal that Bea wondered if she should have made certain that Sarah, her maid, had accompanied her. She shook her head, knowing that Taris Wellingham could not be interested in another dalliance three long months after so decidedly ending the first one.

‘I was, my lord.’

‘And he drank?’

Hot shame filled her and confusion. ‘Occasionally.’

Nightly. Daily. Every moment by the end of it.

‘But you showed him the error of his ways and led him into abstinence?’

‘No, my lord, God in his wisdom showed him that.’

A malady to take away any choice.

He nodded, but did not reply. The sweat that had built upon his forehead worried her, the sheen of it mirrored by the heavy lines on his forehead.

Pain!

He was in pain, she thought, and was doing his level best not to let her see it. His knuckles showed white where he clutched on to the silver ball of his cane and the scar that trailed from his hairline into the soft leather of his patch twitched. She wondered how he had received it. A bullet when he had served in the army? Or was it a duelling scar?

The shout of the footman stopped any further thoughts, however, and Beatrice saw that they were now at the park.

On alighting she noticed that the pathway in this particular section of the park was ringed with a fence, markings carved into the railings. Taris Wellingham’s fingers ran across the nicks in the wood. He seldom wore gloves, she noted, as was more customary for gentlemen of the ton, and often ran his open palm along objects. As in the carriage outside Maldon when his touch had run along the line of her cheek. As in the barn where they had ventured further and she had turned into his loving…

Taris felt the directions carved into the railings, something he had had Bates take care of to ensure the continuation of a sense of independence that was being constantly threatened. He always used this place, always walked in exactly the same arc, down to the lake and then back again, the lack of any steps or rough areas a boon when he was alone. Or in company, he amended and smiled.

His headache was lessening in the fresh air, the tightness around his eyes dissipating. Even his sight seemed a little restored. He could now make out the row of trees at the end of the pathway and the rough shape of a bonnet that Beatrice wore. Not quite helpless, then. His black mood lightened.

‘The smell of the trees in St James’s reminds me of my home in Kent, which is why I come here.’

‘You don’t live in London?’

‘I moved out three years ago when I inherited land.’

‘Yet you choose to ride in a public conveyance?’

He nodded. How could he answer her? What could he say?

Sometimes I like to be by myself in the midst of people who know nothing about me, who would not care if I slipped or fell. People who might simply pick me up and go on their way, no labels attached because of the way our paths have crossed…

‘I think I can understand the reason.’ She was talking again, the lilt in her words attractive. ‘I too gained a good living on my husband’s death and old habits are hard to forget. Not that you would have old habits, of course, with your birth and name, but for me it was such.’

‘Was he a good man…your husband? A man of honour?’

‘I was sixteen years old when I married him and twenty-eight when he died. To admit failure over that many years…’ Her voice petered out and he stepped in.

‘So you admit to nothing?’

Her laughter was unexpected and freeing. A woman who would not take umbrage at even the most delicate of questions.

‘I am now in a city that allows me the luxury of being whatever I want to be.’

‘And that is?’

‘Free.’

He remembered back to her questions on their night in the snowstorm and everything began to make more sense. Perhaps they were a pair in more ways than she had realised it? Two people trying to hew a future from the past and survive. Independently.

‘But you still wear his ring.’

‘Because I have chosen to accept what has been and move on.’

Such honesty made him turn away. Not so easy for him, as the scar across his temple burned with fear and loss. Not so easy for him when the darkness was there every morning when he awoke. Still, in such logic there was a gleam of something he detected that might save him.

Not acceptance, but something akin to it; for the first time in three years Taris felt the anger that had dogged him shift and become lighter.

She had said something that unsettled him, and wished she might have taken back her words to replace them with something gentler. But she couldn’t and any time for regrets was long past. Here with the wind in her hair she felt a sort of excitement that challenged restraint and allowed a wilder emotion to rule.

Her whole life had been lived carefully and judiciously. Today she felt neither, the feeling directly related to the man who walked beside her.

Walked fast too, his frame suggesting a man who was seldom indolent and her scheme of exercise in the light of that looked…questionable.

‘I think perhaps you have not been quite honest with me, sir,’ she began and he turned quickly, guilt seen and then gone, the intensity of it leaving her to wonder what he thought she might say. ‘At a guess I would say that you are far more industrious in the art of exertion than I have given you credit for.’

‘Honesty has its drawbacks,’ he returned. ‘With it, for example, I would not be enjoying this walk in the park.’

‘You think I might pass you off as one who has no hope of resurrection?’ She began to laugh. ‘You do not strike me as a man who would have any need at all to lose himself in drink, my lord.’

‘You might be surprised at the demons that sit on my shoulders, Mrs Bassingstoke.’

‘Name one.’

‘Your inability to treat me with the reverence I deserve.’

She laughed again. ‘A paltry excuse, that. And if you do not have another better reason for taking to the bottle then I might abandon you altogether!’

‘Would an inability to see anything properly at all be enough of an exoneration?’

Bea turned towards him. The tone of his voice had changed, no longer as light as it had been or as nonchalant.

And then she suddenly knew!

The patch. The cane. His fall at his brother’s and the scar that ran full across his left eye. Like skittles, the clues fell into place one by one by one. No kind way to say it. No preparation. No easy laughter or words to qualify exactly how much he could see. Only the amber in his one undamaged eye burning brittle golden bright! Challenging and defiant.

The wind off the lake blew cold between them, his cloak spreading in its grip and his hand on the fence with its notched wooden carvings. Sight through touch. In that one second everything Bea had ever wondered about made a perfect and dreadful sense.

Blind?

‘So you do not have a problem with drinking?’ Her voice was quiet, laced with a truth that had not quite yet settled.

He shook his head. ‘I do not.’

‘Yet I have never heard anyone mention—’

‘Because I have never told,’ he shot back, defence in his posture and tight protection in the lines of his face.

‘Anyone?’

‘Asher, Emerald, Lucy, Jack Henshaw and Bates,’ he murmured, the list as short as five.

Six now with her. Nobody really, for such a secret. ‘And that is why you fell?’

He nodded. ‘When you suggested a fondness of the bottle, it was easier than this.’ His free hand gestured to his face, the silver-topped cane swinging in an arc as he did so, his anchor in a world of darkness.

Need. His need. Sliding in unbidden. Need of help and succour and support. She could not help the dread that crept into her voice, a thousand days of care for her husband reflected in such an unexpected truth.

‘I promise you that I will be sworn to silence on this news, my lord,’ she began, hating the withdrawal she could see, his head tilted against the wind as though listening to all that was further away. ‘I would give you my word.’

‘And I would thank you for it.’

Honourable even in hurt, fatigue written plainly on his face.

She no longer knew how to respond.

Blind! Such a small word for everything that it implied. Dependent. Reliant. Like Frankwell had been?

‘Perhaps we should walk back to the coach. It is getting late and cold…’

His suggestion was formal and polite, the choice of escape given under the illusion of time and weather. He did not wait for any answer, but surged ahead, his lack of sight pulling at her as he made his way up the path using the rail to guide him and his stick to monitor the lay of the ground.

The patch across his left eye was a banner of the shame that she felt when she failed to call him back to say that it did not matter, that it made no difference, and for the second time in two days a man, who had never been exactly as he seemed, threw her equilibrium into chaos.

Taris felt the ache around his temple tighten, constricting the blood that flowed into his last fading sight and band around a building pain.

God. What had made him tell her? What mistaken and stupid idea had crept into his head and made him blurt it out?

Take it back…take it back…take it back…

The voice of his anger was thickly strangled, bewildered by his admission and lost in fatigue.

All he wanted was to be home, away from her promises and the whisper of pity in her reply, the shocked honesty in her words underlain by another truth.

‘I promise you that I will be sworn to silence on this news, my lord.’

Sworn to the silence of one who would distance herself from needing to be beleaguered by it? Sworn to the silence of one who would make a hurried escape from his person and count herself lucky? That sort of silence? In Beatrice-Maude’s restraint he had a sudden feeling of breakage.

Spirit. Heart. And pride.

Tell anyone and open yourself up to the shame. Tell anyone and hear the shallow offer of charity.

When his hand clasped the rail on the carriage steps he hauled himself in and laid his cane across his knee. A fragile barrier against all that he wasn’t any more and would never be again.

A lessened man. A needy man. A man who could barely get to the front steps of his own house without help. His unwise confession burnt humiliation into his anger at everything.

Bea did not cry when she was finally home. Did not rant and rail as she had when she had thought an inability to limit strong drink was his only problem.

Today she merely sat on the window-seat with the rain on the glass behind blurring the vista and the small clock beating out the minutes and the hours of silence.

The same sound she had measured her life against for ever!

Reaching across to the table, she picked it up and threw it hard against the ground, the glass shattering as the workings inside disintegrated. Springs and metal and the face of numbers spinning around, time flown into chaos and the beginning of a quiet that she could finally think in!

Exhaling, she stood and crossed to the mantelpiece, extracting a card from a small china plate and holding it close.

The Rutledge Ball would begin at ten and Taris Wellingham was one of the patrons.

Her heart beat faster as she formulated a plan.

Chapter Six

Taris Wellingham stood with his brother and Lord Jack Henshaw at the top of the room. Tonight he was in black and was ‘much dressed’, the cut of his coat and trousers impeccable, his hair slicked back in a fashionable manner and his boots of the finest leather. But it was the glasses that he wore tonight which drew Beatrice’s attention.

She took a breath, hating the fact that he was by far the most handsome man in the room and she was by far the least beautiful woman. Still, she was not one to do things by halves and, starting forwards, she hoped that he would at least hear her out.

The arrival of the Countess of Griffin’s daughter, Lady Arabella Fisher, a woman of whom Beatrice-Maude had heard much, thwarted her intentions as she rushed through the burgeoning crowd to the side of Taris Wellingham. Her smile told Bea that she was more than enamoured by him, though his answering expression seemed tight.

Others joined them, laughing at the things he said, though Bea was too far away to make sense of any words.

What she did make sense of was the sheer and utter number of women in this room who threw him hooded glances before making their way to his side.

She swallowed. Those around him were the very pick of this Season’s debutantes, the cream of a society priding itself on lineage and ancestry. She recognised the Wilford sisters and the Wellsworth heiress, along with Lady Arabella, and was about to withdraw when a voice beside her made her jump.

‘I did not think of you as a coward, Mrs Bassingstoke.’

Emerald Wellingham stood beside her, blocking her retreat.

‘It seems then that my rudeness at your house the other day is not my only failure, your Grace.’

‘Ahh, so formal when I thought you might be a friend?’

Bea’s heart raced at the tone in her voice. Satirical. Taunting. And she could well understand why. ‘You have cause to chastise me.’

The laugh that followed set Beatrice’s nerves on edge.

‘I would say you might have to fight your way through the gathering crowd of adoring females if you wish to speak to Taris.’

‘So I see.’

‘And if I thought that was all that you saw, Mrs Bassingstoke, I might turn this minute from your company and hope that you might never darken my family’s door again with your prejudices. But there is more to you, I think. More to the singular reaction of panic that I saw on your face when you comprehended the nature of my brother-in-law’s shortfalls.’

A voice behind made both turn and the Duke of Carisbrook joined them. ‘Mrs Bassingstoke.’ Said with all the indifference of a man who could barely feign politeness.

‘Your Grace.’ Bea wished that she just might disappear into the polished floor beneath her feet. Her palms, where she held her hands like fists, were damp with nervousness, though she made herself smile.

‘If you will excuse me…’

She turned and walked through the crowd, the music of Mozart softening the hard cracks of anger that she felt boiling up in herself.

‘Tell no one…‘

Her mantra for the past decade as life had flung crisis after crisis her way, the little difficulties escalating into bigger ones, and all eminently unrectifiable.

Loud giggles from the group at the top of the room pierced her bewilderment, and she could not think what exactly to do next, though a balcony provided a way out and she slipped on to it, wiping the tears she felt pooling in her eyes as she tried to take stock of the situation.

She was twenty-eight years old and any histrionics on her part would be reprehensible and overblown, an aged woman who should have been well past undisciplined and unbecoming emotion.

The sheer and utter hopelessness of it all left her gasping and she placed her hands upon her chest, barely breathing, the silence of just standing there bringing a measure of control.

And then the door opened and Taris Wellingham came towards her, his hands around the silver ball on his ebony cane.

‘My sister-in-law informed me that you wished to see me.’

He sounded nothing like the man who had walked with her earlier in the afternoon, but all imperious and lofty.

‘I did, my lord. I came tonight to tell you that I do not quite know what came over me today and that I would like to thank you.’ Her voice was pulled from embarrassment, barely audible.

‘Thank me?’ His words were brittle. Almost harsh.

‘Thank you for entrusting me with your secret…’ She faltered and as he turned away she tried anew. ‘I would also like to say that your affliction of poor eyesight is infinitely more appealing to me than the other option of drunkenness.’

Unexpectedly he turned back and smiled, though as the silence lengthened between them she simply could not think of one other thing to say.

‘My sister-in-law tells me you have discussions on “matters of importance” at your residence.’ He looked exactly at her tonight, amber magnified through the thick spectacles.

‘Put like that, it all seems rather absurd,’ she returned.

‘She tells me that you are a woman of strong opinion and that your eyes are green. Leaf green,’ he amended when she did not say anything. ‘She also tells me that you worry a lot.’

‘She could see that?’

‘In the line on your brow.’

‘An unbecoming feature, then,’ Beatrice said, all her hackles rising. What else had Emerald Wellingham related to him? ‘I am a plain woman, my lord.’

‘Plain is an adjective that has many different interpretations. A carp in a river can be plain to the eyes of one who does not fish, yet vibrant to an angler. A deer in the forest can look insignificant amidst a band of sun-speckled trees and magnificent away from them. Which plain are you?’

‘The type that recognises the truth despite any amount of flowery rhetoric.’

He laughed.

‘Describe yourself to me, then.’

She hesitated. ‘You can see nothing at all?’

‘With my glasses on I know that you are not a large woman. I know too that your hair is long and thick and that you have dimples in your cheeks.’ He held out his hands. ‘From touch,’ he qualified. ‘There is a lot to be learned in touch. On a good day I can see more.’

‘I am five feet two inches tall and some may call me…thin.’

‘Some?’

‘My husband always did. He thought that if I ate more I should appeal to him better, but no matter how much I tried—’ She stopped, horrified as to what she had just confided in him, when for all the years of her marriage she had told every other soul nothing.

‘Pride can be a dangerous thing, Beatrice-Maude.’

She pretended not to understand what he meant. But she knew exactly the tack that he was following because pride was all that had ever stood between her and chaos. Pride kept her quiet and biddable, because the alternative of others knowing what she had suffered was just too humiliating.