Regency Society

Chapter Nine

Eleanor visited Cristo Wellingham on the second afternoon of his confinement. She had slept so badly for the past two nights that she had come to the conclusion some sense of resolution needed to be reached between them. He received her in the drawing room, the look on his face one of astonished surprise.

‘You have come alone?’

‘Indeed I have, my lord. I realise, of course, that such a thing is more than inappropriate, but I find I have reached the very end of my patience.’

‘A difficult place to be,’ he returned and gestured her to a sofa in the middle of the room. Today his hair was pulled back into a queue, and the blond looked almost ash. With his jacket cut in the French fashion and braided along one edge, he seemed much less of the English gentleman and far more of the stranger. Sitting in a wing chair opposite, he stretched out his long legs; when he did not speak, Eleanor felt the need to. ‘Are you recovered?’

‘Completely.’ His tone was distant, as if any more questions on the state of his health would be unwelcomed. Still, she was not deterred.

‘My reading on the subject of migraines suggests the case to be the exact opposite. Every tome I browsed made mention of a lack of a cure.’

‘A visitor to a sick room generally tries to bring more uplifting news, madame.’

The shadows beneath his eyes were visible and one still held the remains of redness. Neither a small ailment nor an easy one.

‘In truth, I am surprised to see you here at all, Lady Dromorne.’

The beat of her heart was so loud she felt sure that he must hear it. ‘I have prayed every morning and night for some guidance on how to handle our … situation. So far no answer has been forthcoming.’

He laughed. ‘How fortuitously honest.’

‘What is it you want of me?’ She looked him straight in the eye.

‘Everything.’ His tone was sharp, more honed than she had ever heard it, giving Eleanor the feeling that she was a fly who had tripped heedlessly into a well-laid and intricate web. ‘I want to know why every time we touch each other it feels as it did in Paris. I want to understand why you say one thing and mean another. I want to learn how a beautiful English girl masquerading as a whore in Paris can turn up in London five years later in the guise of the wife of an Earl three times older than she is.’

Eleanor stood, her head in a spin, but he had risen as well, amber eyes glinting.

‘What was in the letter, Eleanor?’

‘I told you once before that I had never read it. My grandfather said to deliver it. He said I could trust you. He said you were a good man …’

His laugh was bitter. ‘We both know how very wrong he was!’ The words lay between them laced with guilt.

‘The travesty at the Château Giraudon was not all your fault …’

‘You are more than gracious.’ Intent tumbled between the cracks of what was truly being said, and his eyes were fierce and predatory. ‘After you left I tried to find you.’

‘To entice me back into your bed?’

There it was, out and said, the night of her ruin plain between them, remembered in words and not just thoughts, the pull of flesh and the rush of release. No longer hidden. She could do nothing save wait.

‘I didn’t forget you, Eleanor.’

‘Lady Dromorne,’ she corrected.

‘I didn’t forget anything at all about you, Lady Dromorne.’ His stillness belied the words, honey soft and languid. Making love with his voice and his eyes and his hands.

The clock on the mantel struck the hour and outside the clatter of hooves on the cobbles could be heard. But here, now, all she felt lodged in her throat and in her stomach.

A magician. A trickster. A man who had been tutored well in the art of loving and in saying things that any woman might want to hear!

She did not move as he reached out and took her hand, his forefinger running along the lines of her inner palm, gently. Barely there! The breath left her body and the room fell away beneath them, the light streaming hot and golden. As she closed her eyes, the stretch of her belly was long as heat seared into quickness.

Mirrors and gauze and the satiny wet folds between her thighs. Rocking. Wanting. Hours when she had forgotten time and only lived. Desire became a roar as warmth coursed through her, loosening the tight, dry centre with dampness.

His silvered hair and velvet eyes, the smell of masculinity unfettered by age or illness. She revelled in the brown smooth skin on his hands and the strong muscles moving beneath the fabric of his jacket.

‘Cristo?’

Even the word was like a salvation, transformed in wonder, spilling from her lips in a lush and radiant question.

Leaning forwards he took her mouth, not gently either, but daring her to resist, a seductive naked want that carried the unsaid promise of all that had been lost between them.

But found again here in the ornate gilded front salon of his London town house, the very Englishness of the décor adding an unreal flavour to what had already been.

She could not stop, could not pull back from his heady vividness. A feast after five years of famine and compromise, her skin sparking as his touch glided along her arm to her throat, reeling her in with only a little force.

Taking everything. Her hat fell away, the ribbons anchoring the bonnet to her shoulders in a drunken uncertainty, his hands through her hair, closer again as all reality was lost against passion.

Like an angel, she thought, as he whispered her name between the loving, even as the terrible heartbreaking need that had brought her ruin once again surfaced. But she could not care. Would not care.

She placed her hand across his cheek and smiled as he turned into her palm, the warm pulse of his flesh beneath making her nipples stand proud against the silk of her bodice. She knew he saw the promise of her lust and her capitulation, but, shaking his head, he held her against him, heartbeat loud and quick.

‘Eleanor, I cannot.’

Only that with the sunshine flooding in and the sound of church bells close! She squeezed her eyes against panic as all she had allowed him became real.

What was she to say now? The glint of her marriage rings caught her eyes as she moved her hand, the small scar Florencia had left there when she had thrown a stick as a toddler, opaque above them.

A wife and a mother who would chance it all away on the promise of lust? She could not even raise her eyes to look at him. Guilt and shame and humiliation all wrapped in stupidity, and the thought that she could be so guileless twice was barely comprehensible.

Cristo stepped back towards the window, trying to assert some sort of control on the situation. No one had ever made him feel the way Eleanor Westbury did. Frustrated. Furious. Desperate. He wanted to drown in her pale eyes and feel the satin smoothness of her skin again. Wanted to lie beside her under an English sun for all the hours that he needed to dull the urgency that had built up inside him.

But he couldn’t. A husband stood between them and a whole night’s worth of loving that should never have happened.

She did not glance at him once as she rearranged her hat, the brim of it tilted so that it shaded her face from his.

Lord help him! For just a moment, when she had arrived alone, the world was exactly as it should have been before it had skewed into something less tenable.

He needed to tell her how he felt, but for the life of him he could not quite work it out.

Leave your husband and stay with me for ever! Risk the ire of society. Be banned entirely from proper company.

As he was thinking Eleanor began to speak. ‘My husband is a principled man of high moral fortitude and unequalled fairness.’ The timbre of her voice had risen, almost desperate.

‘A Samaritan, then?’ In the light of what had happened he should have been kinder.

‘Indeed.’

He hated the glint of tears in her eyes. If he had been less scrupulous, he might have reached forwards then and thrown all caution to the wind, taken her upstairs to his room and damned any repercussions. But he had done this once before, and look where that had got them both.

When he did not speak she walked to the door and let herself out. Cristo counted each step that she took across the tiled floor of his foyer as Milne saw to her exit.

Eleanor’s hands fisted as she climbed into the carriage waiting for her around the corner. Had Milne recognised her? Had the old butler known her as the woman he had shepherded from the room in the Château Giraudon, with the luridly coloured gypsy skirt swirling around her ankles and an unmade bed left behind? She could barely credit the danger she had allowed herself to be subjected to and the fact that the servant had not seemed to know her was no reason at all to let her guard down.

The truth shattered into fragments. Not quite this or quite that, but an amalgam. Eleanor remembered her father’s suicide the year after her brother’s death. Her mother had died eighteen months later in a carriage accident with a man who had a reputation for having a way with older women. Her maternal grandfather had denied such rumour, of course, as they sat in the big house after the funeral, but she had seen the look in his eyes that suggested otherwise, and the need for care given that they were the last surviving members of a family that luck had deserted.

Her own youth had been sandwiched between falsities and now here they were again, hemming her into all that she had never thought to become. Well, she could not let them. She would not allow herself to be alone with Cristo Wellingham again. Ever. Cradling the cross she often wore at her neck, she made the promise to herself before turning to look at the people on the busy streets outside and dreaded the Wellingham weekend that she had said she would attend in three days’ time.

Honour Baxter arrived less than an hour after Eleanor had left, and she looked neither relaxed nor happy.

‘You watch Lady Dromorne like a lover might, Cristo, a dangerous tendency given the power of her name and of yours.’

He stayed still. Honour was no fool, despite the rather frivolous appearance she presented to the world, as he well knew from her Paris days, before she had made her way to England and married.

‘I think she wants you, too.’

He turned as she said it.

‘There is a child, of course, and the Earl of Dromorne would never countenance any threat to his daughter’s happiness and stability.’

Shock rendered him speechless. A child? Eleanor had a child? He had heard no word of one at all.

‘How old is she?’

Honour shrugged her shoulders. ‘Nearly five. A girl who is rarely seen out in public. Florencia is her name.’

Nearly five.

Florencia.

If Eleanor had been fertile at Giraudon, then conception would have been the easiest thing in the world.

Nearly five. He counted back. Was the child his? Could he be a father? The heavy beat of his heart vibrated in his ears and he shut his eyes as he sat on the sofa.

‘Are you quite well, Cristo? Should I call someone?’

‘No, please don’t.’ His voice sounded like the string of some instrument tuned to the very last of its strength, a breaking point just waiting to happen as loss welled in his throat. Florencia. Even her name was beautiful. Swallowing, he made himself listen to Honour’s next words.

‘London has rules that would be ludicrous in the more passionate arena of Paris. What is acceptable there would not be here and there are many unwed and beautiful English girls just waiting for you to notice them, women without the ties of children and husbands. Let me introduce you to these girls of good family and unblemished name.’

He nodded, simply because to do otherwise would have incited question. His glance took in the clock on the mantel that showed up the hour of four and he wondered what outings little girls and their mothers went on in London at such a time. The park? The shops? The library on Bond Street?

When the hell had Eleanor met Martin Dromorne? He longed to ask Honour, but sense stopped him. He felt like he had at eighteen, abandoned by his family. No safety net. Unsettled. The very room swam with a hundred questions and just as many answers and everything was dangerous.

Florencia. Derived from the city of Florence in Italy? He listened as Honour prattled on about a list of possible candidates suitable in the marriage stakes.

Florencia. The word turned in his mind as Honour gave high praise to the three débutantes shortlisted in her attempt at matchmaking.

Florencia. His? A daughter conceived in lust in the high rooflines above Paris? If that was true, where had Eleanor birthed the child? Here? In France? Ruined from a husbandless pregnancy?

What of Martin Dromorne? Did he know this daughter was not his? Had she met him soon afterwards, perhaps, seizing the opportunity for redemption that marriage offered? Or was all he thought mere conjecture based on a groundless hope?

Eleanor and Florencia.

He dared not ask Honour another thing about either of them as a servant came in with a pot of tea and the conversation turned to more general things.

Taris arrived about ten minutes after Honour had departed. His man Bates was with him, though after seeing his master into the room he slipped out of it. His brother had a bright yellow flower threaded through his lapel.

‘You look festive?’

Taris lifted his hand up and smiled. ‘This is the handiwork of my oldest son, who is inclined to mischief. His twin brother enjoys the school lessons and yet all Alfred can think of is to escape his and head for the gardens.’

‘Ahh, the danger of comparisons. I never thought that you would make them.’

‘When you are a parent you do many things that you had not thought you would. But out of love, you understand. Only out of that.’

Parenthood! In the light of Honour’s visit the raw nerve of hope was exposed and Cristo was glad that his brother could not read his expression.

‘Ashe said that he had been to visit you and so I decided to do the same. He said that you seemed pleased to see him.’

‘Sickness has a habit of making one re-evaluate the usefulness of family.’

‘So cynical?’ Laughter rang around the room. ‘Our father always swore that you were stubborn.’

‘And did he ever tell you why?’ Cristo had suddenly had enough of all the secrecy. ‘Did he ever let you know that I was not entirely a Wellingham?’

When Taris’s face came up to his own with a slight flush Cristo suddenly knew that he had.

‘Alice never blamed him for his indiscretion. She told us that as she took her last breath. She also said that you were a gift she was meant to have. She kept track of you at Giraudon through your man Milne, you realise. The old valet at Falder was his brother and she never let him go.’

Cristo swore. What other confidences was he destined to hear this morning? A child who might be his? A mother who had never stopped loving him? Two brothers who had known he was not a full-blooded son of Falder and had treated him as one anyway? A feeling he had forgotten he knew was again budding. No longer alone. No longer just him against the world.

Shared secrets and trust, and beside a brother whose eyes saw what others never did, and with all the unexpected twists and turns Cristo found himself talking.

‘When I left England I thought to have seen the last of it.’

‘What changed your mind?’

His hands opened and then he smiled, because of course Taris would not see the gesture. ‘When the wild anger died there was only loneliness to replace it.’

‘Beatrice thinks that there might be a woman.’

‘She told you that?’

‘She thinks the woman to be Martin Westbury’s wife, Lady Eleanor Dromorne?’

Cristo stayed silent.

‘The mistakes of youth can come back to haunt even the most circumspect. The thing that I cannot quite determine is where your shared history took place.’

‘I met her in Paris five years ago.’

‘Before she was married?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you made no effort to take the relationship further?’

‘I think it had gone the furthest it could go.’

A ripe curse greeted this outburst.

‘If I could go back I would do things differently. In my defence, I might add that I did not know she was an English lady.’

‘Surely you could tell that by her clothes and her accent?’

‘She wasn’t wearing any clothes and she was speaking Provençal French.’

‘Lord, so that was why she fainted at the theatre? Does Martin Westbury know of any of this?’

‘I am certain that he doesn’t. He didn’t seem to want to kill me when we met at the Baxters’.’

Taris picked the marigold from his buttonhole and the stringent smell of it filled the air as he fiddled with the petals. Bright yellow pollen dusted the back of one hand.

‘Everyone has their battles. Martin Westbury, for example, is so ill some say it won’t be long before he loses his fight against whatever it is that ails him. Eleanor Westbury may then need a man who would not disappoint her.’

‘I doubt that she would trust me again.’

‘Well, that all depends. You can let your past mistakes define you or transform you. A wise man might take the latter option.’

Cristo breathed out. ‘I thought she was a prostitute brought to my room. With the amount of brandy she had consumed, she could not tell me otherwise and by then I had discovered that she was a virgin.’

‘An inauspicious beginning?’ Dark amber eyes looked straight at him and Cristo began to laugh at the absurdity of a word that only Taris might get away with.