Regency Society
Cristo swore as he remembered Eleanor’s words.
‘Know that you have already taken the full measure of happiness from my family.’
Another sin. A further damnation!
Falder spoke to him with the wisdom of generations enfolded in its soil, a prudent and enlightened message that bore the weight of ancestry reaching back into living history, and beyond, his body only a vassal of wardship for the few paltry years that God had allotted to him.
Eight-and-twenty gone, many frittered away in the quest for a justice that he himself had never gained. A wanderer. A stranger. A lover. A spy. A man with as many faces as he had needed: the list as endless as the sea, and as changing. But for now he wanted permanence. Bending down again, he filtered a handful of sand through his fingers and watched it fall onto a shore that was known, understood and cherished.
Tears blurred his eyes and he wiped them away with the cloth of his jacket, quickly, shaken by the depth of his love for the place and he knelt on the living and breathing ground, praying aloud to the Lord for deliverance.
‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned …’
Eleanor saw Lord Cristo in the park a few days later, his head a good couple of inches above those of the men about him and the material of his jacket straining across the breadth of his back. She was glad he was looking away, for it gave her a chance to seek out another trail that would lead her nowhere near him. The sun in his hair marked it with every shade of pale, the length creeping onto the material of his collar and tousled thick. She turned her gold wedding ring and remembered the feel of him beneath her fingers before hot guilt made her heart beat faster.
Angling the broad brim on her bonnet, she tipped her head, slicing off the whole end of the pathway.
She had slept badly in the past few days, dreams and nightmares entwined with shame and forbidden passion and banishing her to church early each dawn to pray for some ease from the sins of the flesh. The image of Jesus stretched on the cross in the stained glass etching was a timely reminder of what might happen to her should her indiscretion ever be known. She smiled at the word ‘indiscretion’ for it intimated such a small mistake, an ill-chosen pathway of moderate consequence. The truth of her ruin and loss was something far more brutal.
Two shiny brown boots suddenly blocked her path and she knew exactly to whom they belonged even before she looked up.
‘Ma’am.’ Cristo Wellingham gave her his greeting, eyes in the sunshine much lighter than she had seen them.
Beautiful eyes, her daughter’s eyes!
The very thought chased away fright and replaced it with a channelled resolve. Quietly asking her maid to allow her some space to talk, she walked over to the shelter of a line of elms and stopped there.
No one was in sight save her servant, and farther off two old men whom she did not know. Five moments at the most, she thought, and took a breath.
‘Your sister-in-law sent an invitation for a soirée at Beaconsmeade. Did you know that she had done so?’
He shook his head.
‘You of all people must realise that I cannot possibly come.’ She kept her voice as low as she might manage it and the frown on his brow indicated thought.
‘Because it might compromise your carefully constructed public persona?’ He stepped back as her glance raked across his, anger and uncertainty and sheer desperation melded with another growing truth. ‘Are you happily married, Lady Dromorne?’
The veneer of civilisation that he had affected here in England was suddenly much less obvious. Eleanor tasted fear as she never had before, because in the bare, cold amber she detected something she had seen in her own eyes in the mirror over the past few days.
Longing.
Longing that even anger and vigilance and sense had failed to dislodge. She stood wordless, the dreadful chasm of loss between them echoing in every breath that she took.
Tell him, yes, I am very happily married, she heard her mind say. Tell him that you love your husband and your life and your place in the world and that any interference from him would be most unwelcome and unacceptable. Tell him to go and to never look back and insist that the history between them was so repugnant she needed no more reminding of any of it.
She opened her mouth and then closed it again, the warm summer wind streaming between them and the silk of her dress touching her skin in the way he had once touched it, inviting passion, igniting lust.
Even for Florencia she could not say the words.
‘Meet me tonight. I have rooms here in London …’ He spoke as she did not.
Pulled from the past into the present, this harsh truth of seduction was a far easier thing to counter.
She could not believe he had said such words to her here in the wind and in the sunlight. A man who would throw away her good name on a whim, never even imagining whom else he would hurt. ‘My husband loves me, Lord Cristo, and I am a wife who applauds loyalty.’
‘Touch me, then.’
Shock filled her eyes.
‘Touch me and tell me that there is nothing at all left between us.’
She held her fists tight against her skirt. ‘The pull of flesh is only a fleeting thing, monseigneur.’ The title she gave him was deliberate, a grim reminder of the misunderstanding that trembled beneath anger. ‘Honour and trust and duty are the tenets that a sensible woman lives by.’
‘And you are sensible?’
‘Very.’ The word was as forceful as she could make it, moulded by her depth of fear.
Unexpectedly, he took three steps back. ‘Logic and reason run a poor second to the heat of passion, ma chérie. Should you relax your guard for a moment, the truth of all you deny might be a revelation to you.’
Pursing her lips, Eleanor allowed him no leeway. ‘I do not think you should presume to believe that you know anything of my fidelity. My life has changed completely since Paris and I am a woman who learns well from her mistakes.’
‘Mistakes?’ He echoed the word, turning it on his tongue as if trying to understand the very nature of its meaning before finding a retort. ‘I have relegated our night together to neither blunder nor error. Indeed, were I to give it a label, as you seem want to do, I might have chanced something very different.’
The glint in his eye was so carnal and lascivious that Eleanor knew exactly where he would have placed it. The smile he gave her showed off his gleaming white teeth.
Biting back impatience, she inclined her head as he gave her his leave without another word, his figure receding into the distance until he was lost altogether when the next corner claimed him.
It was over between them, the truth of circumstance bitingly clear: just a matter of the flesh, easily duplicated in a room for rent by the hour.
Turning, she watched the ducks on the lake in their small family groups. Mother. Father. Ducklings. How it should be. How it had been designed and planned. Florencia knew who her parents were and without Martin, Eleanor might never have made it back to England. Dark days and lonely days. Days when she had wondered if it might not have been easier to simply cease to exist at all. Pressing down on her chest in alarm, she tried to breathe, her composure reasserting itself as the tableau before her took shape. The trees, the birds, the pathways, people now further afield and the distant clatter of hooves.
A good life. Untainted and wholesome. A real life.
Her life.
Not thrilling or adventurous or even passionate, but safe and prudent and certain.
With a wave of her hand she gestured her maid forwards, resolutely ignoring the question in her eyes as she struck down the pathway for home, hating the tears that blurred everything before her. Disappointment lent her gait a tense anger that was almost as unreal as her honour, dissolved under the meaning of Cristo Wellingham’s words.
Meet me tonight. I have rooms here in London.
Only that. Only that.
The words rolled around in the empty corridors of her hope, a bitter pill pointing to the real character of a man of whom she had no true knowledge. It was done between them. Finished. Her nails dug into her palms, causing hurt until she released her grip and opened her fingers to the air.
Chapter Eight
The dinner at the Baxters’ was unavoidable, as an invitation had been sent and accepted weeks in advance.
It was the first time she had been out in society since the fiasco at the Haymarket Theatre and Eleanor was pleased that the gathering was a small one.
Cristo Wellingham would not be there.
He frequented the more racy events by all the news she was given through her nieces’ fascination with the man. The age of all those present tonight promised to be well over fifty and the host was a devout man who countenanced no form of rudeness or vulgarity. The very thought made her swallow, for if Anthony Baxter had an inkling of her past she would not get a foot in the doorway.
Anger welled. The headstrong exuberance of her youth was hardly a fault that should lead to such consequences and had she not made up for her mistakes ever since with a pious and selfless existence? Hiding everything.
She jolted as Martin came into the room, for she had not heard the whirr of the wheels on the chair.
‘You are so jumpy these days, Eleanor, and in one so young it is rather worrying. You need to get out more, for Florencia is well able to cope without your presence in the house for a few hours.’
In the light of her thoughts from a few moments prior, the criticism stung more than it might have otherwise. ‘I am quite happy as I am,’ she returned, hearing in her retort an anger that was not becoming, but today, with her carefully constructed world in danger of falling apart, any censure rankled.
‘If I could venture on a word, “distracted” might be the one to describe you of late, and it doesn’t suit you.’ He held his cravat out to her and she took it. ‘Would you help me with this?’
She had always tied his cravat, though today she felt irritation as she finished off the last of the intricate folds. She was distracted. Distracted to the point of bewilderment. She pushed down on the feeling as he lifted a box she had not noticed from his lap and gave it to her.
Garrard’s, the jewellers? When she opened the case a necklace of turquoise lay in the velvet with matching earrings beside it.
‘It is not my birthday for another month …?’ she began, questioningly.
‘No. But you have seemed preoccupied and I thought a tonic in order. Besides it is almost five years ago that I asked you to marry me and I wanted to remember that.’
Eleanor’s mind went back: Florence in the summer with its plane trees sculptured green and the Arno winding its way in front of the villa he owned beside the Piazza della Signoria. They had been sitting in the gazebo when she had felt nauseous and he had brought her out a warm wet towel scented in lavender to wipe her face and hands.
Luxury after the débâcle in France. A man who might take care of everything, even a daughter conceived out of wedlock on a gaudy velvet bed in the Chateau Giraudon.
Stroking one turquoise stone and then another, the sheer goodness of her husband left her speechless. ‘I have never deserved you, Martin.’
He stopped her words by a touch against her arm, no passion in it. ‘If I had been younger, healthier …’
With a shake of her head she leant down and gave him a kiss on the cheek, wishing just for a moment that she might have wanted passion and found his lips. But she did not wish to spoil everything with a careless gesture and five years of togetherness had never included any sort of lust.
‘Would you wear these today?’ he asked and she bent as he fastened the stones, the gold adjusting quickly to the temperature of her skin.
When he had finished she walked to the mirror and saw a woman of means looking back, the necklace lavish and expensive, the bodice of the gown adorned in Honiton lace and her hair fashioned in a style that might suit … an older woman.
The thought came from nowhere. A woman who was cautious, and careful and proper! Forcing gaiety as she turned back to her husband, she thanked him for her gift.
Cristo noticed Eleanor Westbury the moment she walked into the small salon, her husband in the chair before her. This evening she wore a gown of much the same cut as the older female guests, the bodice high and proper and a heavy turquoise bauble of gold and blue sitting in the lace. Did the Earl of Dromorne choose her clothes as well as her jewellery? He wondered how wealth seemed bent on squandering taste with such dreadful choices.
Close up the man was more ancient than he had imagined him at the theatre, though the grey in his hair was not as pronounced as he had first thought it.
Sixty, he imagined. Or nearly sixty. The image of Eleanor lying in bed with her husband brought a vision he did not wish for and he dismissed it, the lingering memory of their own tryst replacing the illusion.
Satin skin and warmth, the sounds of winter Paris and its Sunday bells, soft mist across the Seine coating the charcoal branches of elms in greyness. She had a presence he had never quite fathomed. Haunting. Calling. A woman who had stirred his blood in a way no other had ever managed to do before or since.
Did Martin Westbury now feel the same pleasure? He noticed how the man placed his fingers across her arm in a singular proclamation of ownership, and noticed too the way her fingers curled about his in return. Anger blossomed, though given his own part in the débâcle in Paris it was guilt that should have surfaced. He was the one, after all, who had left a young lady ruined in a strange and foreign city, a man who should have behaved differently and more honourably. If he could take it back he would. If he could have the moment again he would have kept her safe and unscathed, a tiny incident that would cause only a ripple in the fabric of Eleanor Dromorne’s life.
And instead? He did not like to even think of what had happened after she had disembarked from the carriage that he had sent her away in!
With a sigh he looked up and straight into the eyes of Honour Baxter, the wife of his host.
‘She is beautiful, no?’ Her accent was marked, the French slurring the words into a longer version of the English.
Cristo realised that she spoke of Lady Dromorne and schooled all expression on his face.
‘Indeed.’
‘But sad I think, too. A young flower who has not yet had the chance to open.’
He remained silent.
‘I knew her mother, you know. A melancholic woman who was constantly worried about her health. Eleanor was always different, for she was vibrant and alive in a way few other girls her age were. I often wonder just what happened to douse such … passion?’
Her legs entwined about his own. Her teeth nipping at his throat.
Hardly passionless!
What happened after she had left him and disappeared into a waking day?
Where had she met Dromorne and why had she married a man old enough to be her father?
Necessity! The answer came unbidden and rang with the clearness of an unwanted truth.
Had she rolled the dice and taken her chances? An older man who might not notice a lack of maidenhead and a lie that would suck the living out of anybody. And had.
Passionless.
Now?
Because of him?
The awful verity of such a thought almost brought him to his knees and the first stab of pain in his head made him worry.
Lord help her, Eleanor thought, Cristo Wellingham was here, in this room not five yards away and speaking with the host’s wife, Honour Baxter, a Frenchwoman who had made her home in London for many years.
Her fingers tightened across those of her husband and as he patted her hand she held on, the turquoise stones in her new necklace glinting under a fine chandelier above them, pinning her into the light, like an insect under glass. When Cristo Wellingham’s eyes suddenly found hers she looked away and for the first time in a long while she swore beneath her breath, sheer fury reshaping her more normal carefulness. The skin on her arms rose up into goose-bumps as he came closer and she steeled herself to greet him.
‘Lord Cristo. I don’t believe you have met the Earl of Dromorne and his charming young wife, Lady Dromorne.’ Anthony Baxter gave the introductions as Martin held out his hand. Eleanor merely nodded, her title and sex affording her the ability to remain as glacial as she wished.
‘My wife was delighted with Lord Cristo’s return from Paris as she now has someone to reminisce on the beauty of a city that has long been in her heart. Have you spent much time there, Lady Dromorne?’
Eleanor shook her head. ‘No, I am afraid not.’
‘Then you must entice your husband there, my dear. It is in the spring when the city is at its most beautiful, would you not agree, my lord?’
‘I would beg to differ and say that it is the season of winter that appeals to me the most, sir.’
Dark eyes bored straight into her own and the room tilted and then straightened, a bend in time that had her leaning against Martin’s chair, the faint echo of bells in her mind and a man who wore too many rings upon his fingers. Embellished. Foreign. The weight of years of adventure scrawled into both his clothes and the furnishings of his room!
Surreptitiously she glanced at his hands to see them bare. Just another difference. Stripped of gold and silver in London, but with the same sense of recklessness still upon him, simmering in his height and his stance and in the rough beauty of his face.
‘Did you live in Paris for long?’ Martin’s question was quietly phrased, his lisp giving the city’s name a burnished edge.
‘Too long.’ Cristo Wellingham’s reply held no hint of any such temperance and Eleanor wondered if her husband might have sensed his irony, but it seemed that he had not for his next question was even more to the point.
‘I enjoyed the area around the Louvre the most when I was there last. Where did you reside?’
‘Near Montmartre.’
Anthony Baxter coughed, the mention of a name that boasted more than its fair share of the evils of the night heard in the noise. An English gentleman’s way of shelving a topic for a more pleasant one. She wondered at the smile that was momentarily on Lord Cristo’s lips before he had the chance to hide it.
Neither tame nor amenable, he was a man who ruled a room with a sheer and easy power. The ache in her stomach leapt into fear and she was pleased when Honour Baxter took her by the arm and led her away to admire a recently completed tapestry.
Mon Dieu, Cristo thought, as the sixth course of the unending dinner was served, the formal English fare of lamb cutlets, chicken patties and lobster rissoles richer than he remembered, and heavy.
He wished he might have been seated somewhere near Eleanor Westbury but he was not, his place almost as far from hers as could be managed and the table splintering into groups that denied him even the pleasure of hearing her opinions.
Baxter was a man who took his position as a lay preacher with a depressing seriousness and every word he uttered seemed more and more conservative, the teachings of the Bible translated so literally Cristo could barely bother to listen. He had only deigned to come in the first place because of Honour, a woman whom he admired, with her quick laughter and relaxed ways. He wondered how her marriage had lasted the distance of time and reasoned perhaps opposites did in some way attract.
Still, the wine was a fine one, though a headache that was familiar had begun to pound, and he switched over to water to try to keep it at bay, alarmed by the tremors he felt in his hand as he lifted the glass to his lips. Beneath the thick layers of English cloth his body prickled with sweat; finishing the water, he poured himself another from the silver jug on the table in front of him and the liquid settled his stomach.
When the men finally joined the women later in the drawing room he noticed Eleanor alone at the window on the far side of the room. He was very careful not to touch her as he came close.
‘I would like to apologise for my words the other day. They were ill put and you were right to chastise me for them.’
She said nothing, though the flints of ice in her eyes drew back into only blueness. Her hair curled in ringlets around the line of her face.
‘You are easily the most beautiful woman in all of London town, though I suppose many have told you such.’
The line marking the skin between her eyes deepened. ‘Perhaps, my lord, you have consumed too much of the wine the Baxter table is famous for.’
‘You think my judgement so askew?’
Her bottom lip trembled, the fullness of it inviting notice. ‘Askew and imprudent.’ The words were said without any form of artifice and her fingers worried the oversized turquoise stones at her neck.
‘Your husband must have surely—’ She did not let him finish.
‘My husband has many other more important things to occupy his time and besides, he knows that I do not demand such empty flattery.’
‘If it were empty, I should never voice it.’ He reached out for the sill to steady a sudden light-headedness, for the slur in his words was obvious. Lord, this attack was worse than all the others before it in the intensity and speed of its onslaught.
The pain in his temple blurred his vision, the room falling into a haze of yellow, and making him feel clammy and strange. Still, he had other things to ask her and for the moment they remained alone.
‘My sister-in-law said she had seen you in the park the other day?’ He was pleased his voice seemed more or less normal.
‘Lady Beatrice-Maude?’
‘Indeed.’
‘I had hoped for her confidence.’
‘Pardon?’ The topic had got away with him somewhat and he could not discern the connection.
‘Lady Beatrice-Maude? Is it on her bidding that you now approach me? Please do disregard anything that she might have inferred from our meeting, for I was not myself that day.’
He shook his head and tried to get the conversation to make sense. ‘My brother’s wife is usually very circumspect.’
‘I made a mistake once and will never do so again.’ Her hand touched his then, almost as a plea, and the world about them simply stopped. He felt as if they could have been anywhere, alone, singled out, adrift from all that held them tethered, floating into a place that was only theirs, his lifeline in a stormy and wind-tossed sea.
‘Eleanor.’ He said her name as a lover might, the sweet music of it making him want to repeat it again and again as his fingers tightened about hers. For a moment she allowed such a caress, watching him, the knowledge of their small embrace mirrored in her pale blue gaze, softening with an unexpected yearning before being snatched away. The rounded shape of her derrière was all that was left to him as she rejoined her husband.
‘Damn.’ As he shook his head against the growing ache in his temple, the rush of pain made his brow wet and his hands relaxed as swirling lights of dizzy unbalance reached out to claim him.
Cristo Wellingham was deathly white, the pale set of his more usually bronzed skin visible even from a distance. He was trying to sit up, trying to make sense of what had happened and reclaim a lost control.
‘The doctor should be here within a few moments.’ Anthony Baxter’s statement contained more than a measure of worry.
‘No need.’ Shakily moving his head from side to side, Cristo Wellingham dislodged the wet cloth draping his forehead as shards of amber caught her glance again, drawing her in like finely-honed magnets, and the guilt and uncertainty that had blossomed in such a startling way when she had touched him a few moments ago returned.