Regency Society

Chapter Thirteen

Dinner proceeded in the same fashion as her afternoon had, all laughter and teasing and talking. Azziz, Emerald’s friend, was a large tattooed man with one ring in the remains of his right ear and a number of white scars across his hands. The same sort of scars she had seen on Emerald’s hands.

At his family table Taris gave as good as he got and Beatrice listened to his explanation of the newest farming methods with admiration.

Asher’s talk was mostly about the building of a new ship.

‘She’s due out to India in four months’ time, Taris, and you said you wanted to be involved in the maiden voyage.’

‘I doubt if I can get away.’

‘But you had it all planned!’

‘I know, but something else has transpired.’

‘Something such as…?’

Taris did not answer and a slight awkwardness filled the room, though it was dissipated by Lucinda when she knocked over her wine and sent that end of the table into a flurry, until the footman mopped it up.

Taris was glad when his brother dropped the subject of the journey out to India. He could not go because the child Beatrice carried would be almost born and there was no trip in the world that would justify missing the birth of a son or daughter.

A cousin for Ruby, Ashton and Ianthe, missing pieces of the Wellingham family puzzle falling into place. Tonight Beatrice was beautiful. To him. Beautiful in the way of a woman who did not know that she was, no vanity or artifice in it, her husky lisp answering questions and giving opinions and laughing at exactly the right time when Ashe chanced a joke. He imagined her dimples deep shadowed in the light, and her leaf-green eyes and the swell of bosom above the silken creation she was in.

He felt the unseemly rise of his sex beneath the table as he mulled over the chances of being accepted into her bed tonight. Cristo’s rooms were easily accessed from his own and he was pleased about his mother’s unexpected intervention.

The thought that perhaps the sleeping arrangements had not been as coincidental as they appeared did cross his mind, as he had spent a greater part of the past two hours fending off questions from Lucinda and Asher about his relationship with Bea and her presence here at Falder.

Beatrice was speaking now on the topic of banking, proposing that country banks be monitored by the Bank of England, much to the delight of Emerald and the chagrin of his brother.

‘The panic for cash is hardly the fault of the country banking system, Mrs Bassingstoke.’ The tone in Ashe’s voice was firm, but Bea replied quickly.

‘Oh, I disagree, Duke. When people lose faith in an institution’s ability to meet their obligations, one would imagine Parliament would elect a stronger body to step in and lay down stricter rules.’

‘I have always favoured a less vigorous approach—’

Emerald did not let him finish. ‘Because he is a partner in a number of the country banks.’

‘A vested interest, then?’ Beatrice continued, her tone full of a feigned rebuke. ‘Making it harder to be impartial?’

‘Two against one is a difficult way to win any argument,’ Ashe parried, ‘though if you had supported me, Taris, we might have managed it.’

‘After my last public drubbing at the hands of Mrs Bassingstoke, I dare not risk another one.’

‘Public drubbing?’ Lucinda had joined the fray. ‘Oh, do tell us of it, Beatrice.’

‘The argument that your brother refers to was hardly a good example, as I always felt that he lost it on purpose.’

‘On purpose?’ Her suspicion was so evident that Taris began to laugh, though his mother was nowhere near as amused.

‘In my day well-bred young ladies went to all lengths to stay out of any argument not pertaining to the running of the marital home.’

‘We have come a long way since the 1770s, Mama,’ Lucinda managed.

‘Thank goodness!’ Emerald interjected. ‘Besides, women these days are encouraged to have an opinion on whatever they fancy, Mama, and it would be most unwise not to take up such opportunity.’

Taris felt Asher move beside him. ‘A Wellingham man would not swap a feisty wife for all her weight in gold.’

‘Or all the money still left in the besieged country banks.’ Emerald laughed.

Bea watched as the Duchess of Carisbrook smiled down the table at her husband. A woman who was happy in her world and cherished. For her opinions and her debate, for her originality and her arguments.

And right then, at that very moment, something thawed inside Beatrice. Some icy guilt that had insisted her husband’s intractability was somehow her fault. That she deserved punishment for not being pretty enough or interesting enough or barren.

For twelve years she had laboured under a false premise and a dreadful error. For twelve long years she had obeyed and submitted and conformed.

Tears filled her eyes and she stood, excusing herself from the table under the pretence of feeling ill. If she stayed, she would embarrass everyone, for her long held-in tension was finally demanding release.

Taris heard her sobbing as he opened the unlocked door. Crossing the room, he felt her shoulders shaking and the tears on her cheeks as he held her close.

‘Shh, it may not be as bad as you think.’

‘I…am…sorry,’ she said, when the tempest seemed past. ‘Rudeness is something that should never be excused and your mother will not be thanking me for my strong opinion at the table.’

‘You think you were being rude to offer an opinion? My God, Beatrice, if you cannot say what you think, how could you live?’

When she burst into tears again Taris knew that he had said the wrong thing.

‘I did…didn’t live,’ she whispered after a few more moments. ‘I was always…scared…of him.’

‘Your husband?’

She nodded and her whole body shook. ‘He would hit me if I did not say the right thing.’

‘God.’ He pulled her closer.

‘He would hit me and hit me and hit me.’

Her heart raced at twice the normal pace and made Taris want to find the dead man and strangle him anew.

‘I have never told anyone that. Not anyone,’ she repeated.

‘Then I thank you for telling me,’ he replied, liking the way her fingers buried themselves beneath his jacket as though his warmth was her sanctuary.

‘But I won’t be that way again,’ she vowed a few moments later when she had collected herself. ‘If I think something is wrong, I will always say it.’

‘Good for you.’

A teary half-laugh ensued. ‘And I will read books in bed till after midnight should I wish to.’

‘Would you read them to me?’

‘Yes.’

‘In bed, you say?’

She laughed again. ‘Thank you for bringing me to your family home.’

‘Falder has a legend that insists those who love the place will always return.’

Return!

Bea smiled into the superfine of his well-cut jacket. Taris’s voice was soft and his hands were gentle, the firelight on his hair showing up the darkness.

A good man. A strong man. A man who walked his world with the certainty of one who was both moral and ethical.

She loved him. She did. She loved Taris Wellingham with an ache. The realisation hit her like a lightning strike.

My Lord, she had fallen in love. Hopelessly! Desperately! Completely! And she dared not tell him any of it.

Tell him and risk the end of a friendship.

Tell him and see pity where respect now stood.

Tell him and know that he would never love her back.

Her stomach heaved in a new bout of rising nausea and she swallowed heavily.

She needed time to regroup, to understand the implications of what was happening between them and to protect herself.

‘I would like to rest now…’ She left the ending unfinished and saw the flick of uncertainty as he realised she wanted him gone.

But he went. Without anger or shouted words or recriminations. A different man completely to Frankwell.

Taris walked around the gardens, not trusting himself on a steed at this time of night. He would have liked to have saddled up Thunder and run across Falder with the wind in his face and the stars at his back just like he used to. He would have liked to gallop to the highest hill above Fleetness Point and shout at the sky. Shout with anger and pain and agony, not for himself but for Bea. For a younger Bea. Trapped. Fearful. Silent.

But tonight he could only walk fast around his mother’s garden, the fence along the edge keeping him to a pathway, coriander, rosemary and thyme pungent when his cane brushed the heads of the cuttings his mother had nurtured.

Behind him he heard footsteps.

‘You look like a man who is wrestling with demons.’

Ashe’s voice.

Taris shook his head. ‘Not demons, but truth.’

‘An even trickier adversary.’

The wind in the elm trees on the ridges wailed across silence.

‘Emerald thinks that Mrs Bassingstoke might be with child. Could it be yours?’

Taris looked up, trying in the greyness to see anything of his brother’s face and failing. He remained silent as Ashe kept talking. ‘Beatrice reminds me of Emerald. She has the same steely determination and the same vulnerability.’

‘Her husband hurt her badly.’ Taris hadn’t meant to say it but the secret was too new and too raw to keep in.

‘Hell.’ His brother’s shock underlined his own, making him feel better.

‘She spent twelve years married to a bully. Now all she wants is independence.’

‘A difficult ask.’

‘I know.’

‘Tread carefully, then, for I like her and Emerald is determined she wants to keep her.’

Taris knocked on Bea’s door and she answered it very quickly. He felt the heat of her room against his face and smelt violets.

‘May I come in?’

‘Yes.’ No hesitation in her assent. He heard the rustle of her nightwear as he followed her inside. Satin, probably. He wished he might have been able to run his hands across the garment and know. But he stood still instead.

‘We need to talk, Beatrice-Maude.’

‘Because you would like me gone?’ Fear threaded her reply.

‘Gone? Lord, Bea.’ He reached out, palm up, and was pleased when he felt her fingers steal into his. A contact. Drawing her closer, he could feel the satin was cool and her hair tickled against the bare skin on his hand. Long and heavy, she had let it down for slumber. The thought made him take in a sharp breath and he scarcely knew how to start.

‘When we made love at Maldon, Beatrice, I did not protect you against the possibility of a baby.’

‘With my history it does not matter.’

He smiled into her hair and wished that he could look into her eyes. Really look.

‘I think that it might have mattered…’

She pulled back, but he did not let her go.

‘Marry me.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I cannot marry you.’ Her voice was shaky. ‘Last time I married a man who did not love me I learnt the mistake of that.’

The air around them was charged with question.

‘Love?’

The way he said it was like a dagger to Bea’s heart. Love was not something to be considered or questioned. Love was simply a knowledge, unconscious and untempered.

She felt the nails of her fingers dig into the skin on her forearm.

Love me. Love me. Love me.

But as the silence lengthened she knew that he would not say it, could not say it.

‘I have enough money to disappear, to make a new life. You need not feel hemmed in by a simple mistake.’

‘Mistake?’ he countered. ‘You think this child is a mistake?’

‘This child?’

‘Our child.’ His hand fell to her stomach. ‘You must have known.’

Bea shook her head.

‘Your sickness in the morning…’

She shook it again. ‘No, that can’t be. I am barren.’

‘With your husband that might have been the case, but with me…’

‘Pregnant?’ She could not go on. The word quivering between them like a barely believable truth!

‘Ahh, sweetheart.’ He stood, not touching, but only a breath away. ‘You did not know?’ Gentle sorrow tempered his question. ‘I thought that you must have known.’

‘I thought I was ill.’ Tears blurred her eyes, but she willed them back. ‘I would not hold you to any promises.’

‘It is too late for that, I think, with a new life growing.’

His finger ran up her arm and then across her cheek and settled on the soft skin of her forehead. ‘Where in all of this lies the place for compromise? Is it here?’ His hand fell lower. ‘Or here?’ he questioned, as the beat of her heart began to thud. ‘Anything could be possible…’

She should have said nay. Should have loosed his hold and stepped back. Should have said that the joining of their flesh was only a fleeting thing, ephemeral and unimportant. But she could not say that and mean it, as his warmth spread across her, increasing her desire, and the man who was the Lord of Darkness lifted her in his arms and took her to bed.

He was not there when she woke, the warmth in the sheets long gone. So she lay with her hands across her stomach, trying in the silence to listen, to understand and believe that another soul lay within her, waiting for its own chance at life.

A child. A Wellingham child. A child conceived on a snowy night when the old fetters of restraint had been washed away and freedom left in its place. She smiled and wondered if tears were the preserve of impending motherhood as a warm wetness ran down her cheeks.

Victory.

Finally.

And so unexpected.

Joy juxtaposed with worry. Would Taris now feel bound to her in a way he might not have otherwise?

She shook away the idea as nonsense. A family. Home. Unity. Love. She could not turn away from this astonishing second chance.

When she came downstairs after eleven o’clock she learnt that Taris had taken the carriage for Ipswich and would not be back again until the morrow.

Emerald had given her the news as she sat at her own breakfast.

‘Perhaps he had some business that could not wait to be attended to?’

‘Perhaps.’ The poached eggs on toast that she had selected were suddenly very hard to swallow.

‘May I offer you a piece of advice, Beatrice?’ Emerald’s look was measured. She waited until Bea nodded.

‘The Wellingham men are hard to catch, but very easy to keep. Once they love, they love well.’

‘Taris does not love me. He has never said it.’

She blurted the truth out like a green girl, though Emerald’s smile unnerved her.

‘Taris was an intelligence officer under Wellington. For years he scouted across Northern France and Spain under the guise of one from those climes and never once was he unmasked. Did you know that he speaks fluent Spanish and French and was one of the finest marksmen the army had ever seen?’ Stopping, she took a sip of strong black tea. ‘When he came to the Caribbean to rescue my husband from the clutches of a pirate colony…’ Emerald noted Bea’s surprise at this revelation ‘…he was the only man to have ever discovered their lair and the only man to leave it on his terms. The bullet hit him as he dragged Asher out into the sea and to safety.’

‘A bullet?’

‘His sight was damaged when he saved my husband and because of that I owe him everything!’ She leaned forwards. ‘Give him a chance to know what it is he thinks. Give him the same knowledge that I had to give to Ashe.’

‘The knowledge?’

That he cannot live without you.’

Bea pulled back. ‘I do not think…’

Emerald’s fingers covered her own.

‘Taris has a need to understand that the man he is now is the one you want, not the one he once was. He needs to redefine himself and only you can help him do that.’

‘By loving him?’ Finally Beatrice saw where she was going with her argument.

‘Exactly.’

Chapter Fourteen

The talk with Emerald turned her sadness into something different altogether.

Challenge now fired her imagination and the new ruthless single-mindedness was as freeing as it was unexpected. By the next evening she was watching for Taris to return to Falder, the plan in her mind fully formed.

She had borrowed from Emerald a nightgown of lace and silk and the violet attar she wore had been sprinkled liberally over it. Around her bed candles fluttered, the scent of flowers vivid in the wax.

Now she had a need of only the man himself, though as the hours raced on into night she began to think that he might not come at all.

Bates had assured him that the light was still showing beneath Beatrice’s door, though Taris knew the hour to be past twelve. Thanking his man, he waited as his footsteps receded and lent against the wall to mull over his options, for his talk with the solicitor had confirmed his own suspicions.

He had spent the day in Ipswich after contacting Beatrice’s lawyer, Robert Nelson, and the man had had a story to tell that had been entirely different from the one James Radcliff had told.

‘I trusted the young man and all I was repaid with were lies. If I were to see the scoundrel again, I’d have a few choice words to blister his ears with before I set the police upon him, I can tell you that, for it seems that he had been siphoning off rightful money for all of the three years he was in my employment and withholding funds from Mrs Bassingstoke with her husband so dreadfully ill.’

‘And the ledgers you talk of. Where are they now?’

‘Not here. I have looked high and low for them—if we can lay our hands on them the proof will be irrefutable.’

Suddenly things began to make more sense to Taris. ‘Did Radcliff know that he was under suspicion?’

The man nodded.

‘Lord.’ If Radcliff had thought the books were with Bea in the carriage he might have sawn through the axle in an attempt to reclaim them. The accident in Regent Street could have been his doing too, for the scent of the man had been in the house when they had returned. Perhaps he had paid an urchin to create an incident, giving him the time he needed to visit her house. Without the ledgers any case would be far harder to prove and paper was easily destroyed. Danger began to mount, for time would only sharpen a man’s desire for what it was he sought, especially one with blood on his hands and a future that was at best uncertain.

Returning to Falder to see if Bea stayed safe was suddenly vitally important, for if there was any risk to her at all…

The memory of her refusal of marriage still rankled and the walls he had put up against a world that was becoming increasingly darker seemed more of a prison now than a fortress. Isolation and exile had their drawbacks and his inability to be honest was one of them. Still, years of coming to terms with his loss of sight could not be easily translated into acceptance and it had been a long time since he had ever let the more frivolous emotions of love and trust take over from caution and denial.

He wanted back what he had been and knew that he could never have it. He doubted he could hit a target now at ten yards, let alone a hundred, and even the smallest trip to town involved the eyes of his man Bates. Always dependent, never alone.

He laid his hands against Bea’s door. The only place he felt truly himself now was with her, curled beside him in the darkness, feeling the soft truth of comfort and knowing the fineness of her mind and the generosity of her body.

Home.

With Bea.

The thought struck him sharply, piercing all the defences he held in place. No longer just himself.

The smell of violets wafted close as he pushed open the door. And perfumed wax? Candles, he determined, the warmth of flame felt even from this distance. So many?

Beatrice’s soft breathing from the sofa had him turning, puzzlement at her slumber and anger at her forgetfulness in not dousing the wicks. When his fingers touched warmth he wondered what it was that she wore, lace and skin in equal measure along the fine lines of her legs. Like the garments a courtesan might wear in the better establishments off Curzon Street.

He knew the instant she came awake.

‘I fell asleep?’

‘It is well after twelve. Why did you not seek your bed?’

‘I was hoping that you might come.’

He sniffed as she moved, the scent of violets almost overpowering. Much more potent than usual! ‘Did you spill your bottle of perfume?’

‘No?’ The word came back to him as a question.

‘There is strong smell of violets in the room.’ He crossed to the candles. ‘And it is dangerous to leave so many candles alight whilst you slumber, Bea.’

She laughed easily, but ceased the instant his hands covered the full abundance of her breasts. He loved the way she did not pull back.

‘What is it that you are wearing?’

‘A nightdress that Emerald lent me.’ The shyness in her voice was easily heard as she explained. ‘I have been waiting for you to return home.’

Suddenly he understood. ‘This was all for me? The candles, the perfume, waiting up…?’ Taris felt something inside himself that was foreign and unfamiliar and disturbing. Something undeniable. Something so empowering that the very essence of it made him still.

‘Emerald told me a little of your time in the army under Wellington. She said that you were a master of disguise who never once was caught.’

‘That was a long time ago and I was a different man.’

‘Have you forgotten the languages Emerald insists that you speak fluently?’

‘No.’

‘And are you not still involved in the deciphering of ciphers for the British Army?’

He smiled and the amber in his eyes was dancing light. ‘Yes, but if anyone else knew that you knew I’d undoubtedly be instantly dismissed.’

‘You negotiate a world that every other person might simply have given up on, Taris, and that to me is heroic.’

He stayed silent.

‘The lace on this gown is almost silver and I am wearing nothing at all underneath it. My hair is newly washed and scented and the nails on my feet and hands have been very carefully painted. Pink,’ she added, as though the colour might be important to him. ‘And I have done none of this to entice a man whom I pity or patronise. Frankwell abused me for years, you see, and the scars that I bear are the scars of shame and fury. Fury that I did not fight back or seek help or say what it was that was happening to me. Your scars, on the other hand, come from honour and valour and bravery, wounds that tell the story of saving your brother and escaping from a place that no other ever had before. If I could exchange my damage for yours I would, Taris. I would do it in a second.’