Regency Society

‘Thank you.’

He waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t.

‘Have you read many?’

She ignored this line of conversation completely.

‘Eleanor Westbury is not a woman who would survive being duped. She is young, after all, and her husband of some years is sick …’

‘Did Taris send you here?’

‘No. I am here because a few weeks ago Lady Dromorne told me that you might defame her character. Given the time you spent alone with her today I wondered if there was indeed some truth in her fear?’

Taris’s wife was not a woman to bandy her thoughts around and yet all his training told him that she held the best interests of Eleanor Westbury at heart. He could use a woman like her on his side.

‘I knew Eleanor once many years ago in Paris and under another name.’

‘How many years?’

‘Five.’

The number lay between them coated in question.

‘Her daughter …’

‘Is five.’ He finished the sentence for her and leant against the wall, the rushing in his head alerting him to another onslaught of his ailment.

‘God.’ Two attacks in two weeks. They never came this close.

‘Are you quite well?’

‘Very.’

‘Your eyes are turning red even as we speak.’

He let go of the wall and just made it to the bed. Once horizontal, he felt immeasurably better.

‘Could you do something for me, Beatrice-Maude?’ It was the first time he had called her by her name.

She nodded.

‘Could you let the party below know that I have been called away to town and that I send my very sincerest apologies? I need peace and quiet, and that will stop people coming up to see me. Could you also tell Lady Dromorne that I will call on her in town this week.’

‘Indeed, brother-in-law, I think it would be most wise if I did just that.’

He frowned as she let herself out and shut the door behind her.

I love you. Eleanor had whispered the words beneath her breath, but he had heard them plainly. Lord, he thought as he laid his arm against his face to block out the last bands of light, his hand fisting against pain. She was a wife and a mother and a woman who would not court the danger of ruin. But there were secrets in her eyes and in her words that could be there because of him and her sadness here in England simply broke his heart.

He had left and gone back to London. In haste. Eleanor knew exactly why he had.

I love you. So, so unwise. Why had she said it? She knew the answer as soon as she asked herself the question.

Because the last waves of lust had still been within her, reforming the way she looked at herself, a woman who might enjoy the acts between a man and a woman with a singular abandon. Young. Free. Sensual. No longer scared and careful, the restraints of manners and culture pulling her into greyness.

Today with Cristo Wellingham she had felt powerful and true. To herself. A woman who could not wait another five years to feel … something.

Beatrice-Maude was looking at her now as she sipped at a cup of tea from the breakfast table.

‘Cristo has been unfortunately recalled to town and he has asked me to give his most sincere apologies. I should imagine that there is much to do when one is newly back in a country one has not lived in for years. He did, however, promise to visit your family when he was able. Mayhap we could all come.’

Her words brought a smile to Taris Wellingham’s face as he watched her.

A love match.

It was said their union was such, but in a town that spawned a thousand marriages a year, few were of that ilk.

Regret surfaced in an unexpected deluge as she thought of her own marriage. Martin had protected her, but never touched her. Perhaps it was his illness or his age, or the fact that when he had first met her she had been so very near to death, and a pattern had formed. Eleanor remembered the hospital in Aix and the blood and the tiny twin who had been left in the cemetery of the Chapel de la Francis, his body marked with a simple white stone.

Paris.

She had called him that. A strong name. A warrior’s name. The name of the beautiful Trojan prince who had stolen Helen from Menelaus, and the name of the city in which he had been conceived. The hair on the crown of his tiny head had been pure silver. His father’s son. She had never known the colour of his eyes because it had been a full week until the fever had left her and another two before she could even speak. The anger in her solidified and she hated the thick thump of her grief.

So alone.

If she had been braver she might have saved him … in a bigger city … with better attendants …

Shaking her head, she came back into the moment, leaving behind fury, but the light had gone out of her evening and all she wanted to do was to depart Beaconsmeade and go home to Florencia.

He dreamed that night of the ship he had taken when he left England. The Hell Ship. The Hell Captain. Things done to his body that he had never told anyone, an eighteen-year-old green boy straight out of Cambridge. The sears of whiplashes on his back ached in memory.

The canker of secrecy had eaten him up, piece by piece, catapulting him into the underworld of Paris with an easy transition.

Wrong. It was all wrong.

I love you. Eleanor’s whispered words. The first right thing in his whole damn life.

Feeling the movement of somebody else in the room, he opened his eyes. Ashe sat above him.

Cristo knew he had heard his secrets as he turned away, anger leaving only heartbeat in his ears.

‘Smitherton got to you, didn’t he? At Cambridge? God, and he promised me that he wouldn’t. That’s what you were doing in Paris?’

‘I could have left.’

‘No.’ The word was rough with fury. ‘No one ever leaves until their very soul is gone. It’s the way he works it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because he got to me first and it was years before I could loosen the grip of it all. Wasted lonely years that taught me only how to hate.’

The light breeze from outside billowed the gauze curtains into a soft cloud, a summer night in the heart of Kent so far from the paths that they both had travelled.

‘Buy the damn Graveson property, Cris, and come home.’ His brother’s hand lay across his arm.

‘My lawyers got it yesterday. That’s why I was late down to Beaconsmeade.’

Laughter lit Asher’s eyes, the amber in them so very like his own. ‘This calls for a toast.’ He filled two glasses with lemonade and handed one over.

‘To family.’

With a headache pounding his temples, Cristo smiled. ‘Everything has a pattern, Ashe. And Graveson is the very first link of the chain.’

An hour later when Asher had left, Cristo sat up on the side of his bed, watching the candle on the side table burn.

I love you.

If he had had even a little bit of decency in him he would pack up his things and return to the Château Giraudon. Away from temptation, delivered from evil.

He could only hurt her. Then he amended. He could only hurt them both with his reappearance and this damnable attraction simmering between them.

I love you.

He had said the words to himself a hundred times. I love you enough to leave my husband? I love you enough to risk my daughter’s name? I love you so much I would throw caution to the wind and follow you to the edge of the world?

Reality stung and the ache in his heart was a signpost to a more virtuous truth. He should leave her to the life she was living and a family who had taken her as one of their own.

His name held only a little of what Martin Dromorne offered her, dogged as it was by scandal and mayhem. Oh, granted his brothers had gone out of their way to make him a son of Falder, but even that truth was cankered.

A half-brother. A bastard child. The son of a mother whom he had killed in childbirth and had been sent away summarily, no place in the hearts of her relatives for the reminder of such tragedy!

It was Alice who had saved him. Alice with her kind eyes and an open heart that had never once wavered in its love. And in the end he had failed her as well with his wild anger and bad choices.

He seldom allowed himself the time to wallow in self-pity but tonight, with the circumstances heavily weighed against him, he did. He frowned at the notion of a virtuous withdrawal from London for he knew he would never do it.

Fighting for what he wanted to have and hold was far more his style, but he would need to be careful and prudent.

‘Bide your time,’ he whispered and the candle caught the breath of the words and flickered.

‘I love you,’ he added and this time the flame barely moved.

Eleanor spent the next few days pleading tiredness when anyone suggested an outing. Even the park seemed dangerous, an open space that might bring her face to face with the one man in the world she could no longer even bear to think about.

I love you.

She screwed up her eyes and swore beneath her breath, the silence in the blue drawing room making the memory worse. Why had she said it? Had he heard? Was he laughing with a friend at this very moment somewhere in a club in London as he remembered her ill-advised confession?

Certainly Cristo Wellingham had not contacted her at all and Sophie and Margaret lamented the fact that he was not at the dances that they had chosen to attend. Disappeared. Gone. She hoped with all of her heart that he had said nothing about her to Lady Beatrice-Maude or the Duchess of Carisbrook.

‘You need to get some colour back in your cheeks, Lainie.’ Diana had entered the chamber with her small basket of tapestry threads and a pair of spectacles. ‘We could go shopping if you wish, for I have some colours I need to procure,’ and held up her stitchwork. Eleanor saw the picture to be a Christmas one, a hearth dressed in gold and silver and the full moon in the window to one side.

‘It’s for Geoffrey’s mother,’ Diana said as she saw her looking. ‘She asked me last year if I would do one and I was determined to begin it early. You could all come up to Edinburgh for the Yule season. Martin always loved Scotland.’

‘I am not certain …’

‘Because of his health?’

It was the first time his sister had even mentioned the topic and Eleanor nodded.

‘You need to get out more, Eleanor. At your age I was—’ She stopped. ‘Are you crying?’

‘No. Of course not.’ The tears that welled in her eyes were dashed away on the material of her sleeve as Eleanor turned to the window. ‘It’s just sometimes I think I should be a better wife to your brother.’

‘Nonsense.’ Diana laid down her sewing and came to put her arms around her. ‘He could not have wished for a more caring helpmate. But he is a good thirty years older than you, Lainie, and sometimes that must be difficult.’ She paused briefly. ‘Is it morning sickness, perhaps, that makes you so up and down, for lately you have seemed very emotional?’

For a second Eleanor could not quite work out the change of conversation.

Morning sickness? My God, Diana thought she could be pregnant? She shook her head vigorously, and her sister-in-law retreated a little.

‘It was just after you fainted at the theatre and I thought … But of course not! Martin hardly has enough energy for the daytime, let alone the night. Besides, another child with his problems …’ She let her words tail off.

Another child?

The whitewashed hospital walls with the small effigy of the Mother Mary built into a shelf filled with dried rosemary. Bile rose in her mouth. She had hated the smell of rosemary ever since. Cloying. Smothering. The doctor had been a man of high principle and he had known she was unmarried. As such, he had not even attempted to hide his condemnation when she had delivered a child who had failed to take a breath. Even his words had been ones of blame.

‘Every babe needs a father and this is the Lord’s way of making certain of it. Be thankful for your reprieve.’

Be thankful for your reprieve. The words still had the propensity to make her feel sick. He had smiled as he said it before placing her baby into a basin on the floor and leaving it there. Cold. Untended.

No cuddles or gentleness. No prayer for an innocent soul as it went into Heaven. Eleanor had tried to say the communion herself, but the incantation had been muddled, and the red wash of her own blood had left her mute and terrified.

Paris. Lost in guilt and censure and fear.

‘Lainie? Are you quite all right? I shouldn’t pry, of course, and you have the perfect right to tell me to mind my own business.’

Shaking her head, the anger twisted back into some workable thing. She had had much practice in tethering it, after all, though her ill-advised confession to Cristo in the forest had changed things somewhat and all for the worse.

‘I love you.’

What if she had stayed with Cristo in Paris as his mistress, would her son have lived? If she had gone to him and told him and pleaded her case? Their case. An eighteen-year-old girl in limbo in a land that was not home.

Choices, good and bad, and now other decisions, the stakes rising again because of her daughter!

‘Ever since Beaconsmeade you have been distracted. I should never have left you alone in the woods, of course, and I kick myself for following my daughters.’

‘No. The fault was mine. Exploring the pathway was such a silly idea.’

‘Indeed, it was one I could not for the life of me understand. You are usually such a cautious girl, Lainie, which is probably a characteristic my brother saw in you that appealed the most for, God bless him, he is exactly the same.’

Chapter Twelve

Eleanor led Florencia around the park on her daughter’s tiny pony enjoying the summer day. She had not heard a word from Cristo Wellingham in well over a week and for that she was glad, the respite from the constant fear of seeing him lessening her worry.

‘When I am bigger, Mama, I will buy the very best, best horse and race it around the park.’

Her father’s daughter, for all had heard the rumours that Cristo Wellingham was in town to select prime horseflesh.

‘Not too fast, darling, for there are always people in these places.’ Lord, Eleanor thought grimly. Already I am clipping her wings just as my mother clipped mine.

‘All I want is a pet, Mama. Even just a kitten …’ There was a tone in her voice that was sullen, a tone she had heard more often of late when Florencia addressed her—almost five and needing the boundaries only a strong father might offer.

‘Excuse me, ma’am.’ A young boy stood before her with a letter in his hand. ‘The man said that I was to give you this.’

‘The man. What man?’ For one moment she thought perhaps Cristo Wellingham had sent it and looked around, her cheeks flushing with the thought that he could be close.

‘Oh, he has gone already. He paid me a shilling.’ The coin caught the sunlight as he opened his palm.

‘Who is he, Mama?’ Florencia had watched them, this unusual occurrence widening her eyes and when Eleanor turned again the boy had rushed off, his back seen between a line of oaks farther off in the park.

Slitting the envelope with her finger, she opened out the single sheet of paper, her heart contracting in horror as she read the message inside.

You are the whore from the Château Giraudon. If you want to stay safe leave a hundred pounds in this envelope with the boy waiting outside the instrument shop in Regent Street next Monday morning at ten.

Unsigned, the letter represented everything that she had always feared might happen. Blackmail. Finally. Placing the note in her reticule, she turned the pony for home, ignoring the wails of her irritated daughter.

Two days after she had paid, another letter came. This time directly to her house, sitting in the salver at the front door, the blue of the envelope familiar. Pouncing on complacency.

In her room she understood the danger of paying anything in the first place. This time five hundred pounds was demanded, a sum that even her personal pin money could not hope to conceal. She stuffed the note into the fire burning low in the front salon due to an unseasonably cold day, and watched it go up into flames, each word curling into ash and then cinder.

My God, what on earth should she do? Who could it be writing such things? The paper was expensive and the hand was correct and well formed. A small idea began to crystallise in her brain. Pulling out a sheet of her own stationery, she wrote a plea to the only man who might help her, the only man who would be as implicated as she was in the uncertainty of blackmail.

She hired a hack and waited at the corner of Beak and Regent Street at exactly the hour she had indicated, fear, excitement and discomposure racing through her in equal measures.

Cristo Wellingham would be here at any second, her last foolish confession unanswered between them, and already her body was knotting into the memory of his touch. Taking in breath, she held it, tight, as though in the movement she might harness a longing that came just with the thought of him. Her hands shook in her lap.

And then he was there, dressed today in the finest of his London finery, the white cravat at his throat throwing up the darkness of his skin and eyes. The gloves he removed after he entered the carriage and sat opposite her, his hat joining them on the leather seat.

‘Eleanor?’ She had forgotten how tall he was and how the smell of him made her want to just breathe in for ever. His hair was pulled back and damp.

‘Thank you for coming.’ Her voice sounded nothing like her own as he told the jarvey to drive on and shut the door.

‘I have been away from London, otherwise I should have called on you.’ The note in his answer was puzzling, an undercurrent of emotion she could not fathom. Wariness, perhaps, or even anger? Nothing quite made sense.

‘I think your butler may be blackmailing me.’

‘Milne?’ The question was choked out.

‘I have received two letters in the past week. One demanding one hundred pounds and the next five hundred. The first I paid, but the more recent one …’ She stopped unable to go on and hating the way her voice shook.

‘Where are they? The letters?’

‘I burnt them both.’

‘Unwise. Can you remember the exact words?’

She did, and parroting the messages made her feel slightly better. If he could help her, there might still be a way …

‘How were the envelopes sealed?’

‘With red wax.’

‘And the slope to the writing?’

‘Was unremarkable.’

‘Did the footman remember anything of the way the second note had come?’

‘I did ask. A child of the street brought that one, too.’

‘The same child?’

Eleanor frowned. ‘I did not bother him for a description.’

‘Damn.’

‘And the second drop?’

‘Drop?’

‘The place you were to leave the money?’

‘He said I was to walk down Regent Street this morning and he would come and speak to me. But I did not go.’

The silence was thick and when he said no more she chanced her own observation. ‘I didn’t know who else to call on for help.’

He looked her straight in the eyes. ‘You did not think that I could be the culprit?’

‘No.’

When she smiled he swore. In French. She had never heard any of the words he used, but guessed them to be ripe given his tone of delivery. Even that made her feel better, for he was every bit as angry as she was.

‘Did you tell your husband?’

She shook her head. ‘He is ill and would not wish to know …’

‘Then don’t. I’ll deal with it all, I promise you. If another letter comes, leave it sealed, but have it delivered straight to my town house.’

She nodded, the relief of having him shouldering the burden of her secret immense.

‘Would they harm my daughter, do you think?’

‘No.’ He did not even hesitate, the certainty in his tone an elixir against all the ‘what ifs’ she had been imagining.

‘I do not care about my reputation, but if Florencia is hurt because of this …’

‘No one will harm her, I promise you, Eleanor. No one.’

‘I will pay any expenses incurred, of course.’

He shook his head and placed one hand on his knee, palm up.

He would help her.

His eyes were black and undeniably furious. No milk-livered fop or dandy with little notion of the fighting arts, but a man who had survived the baser ways of others by his wits and by his knowledge. The scar across one whole side of his palm was a badge of experience.

A new worry surfaced. ‘You would not kill anyone …?’

‘… innocent?’ He finished off the sentence and her disquiet heightened.

‘England affords harsh punishments to those who take the law into their own hands.’

‘You are the second person in the space of two weeks who has reminded me of the differences.’

‘The second?’

‘My brother Taris warned me off an affair of the heart.’

‘Oh.’ She coloured and looked out of the window. The dome of St Paul’s could be seen far in the distance. Did he speak of a mistress perhaps, a kind of warning to make her realise the impossibility of anything intimate ever happening again between them?

Inside the carriage she could smell the soap he used, the perfume clean and unfussy. His hair caught all the colours of the light. Corn and wheat and pure plain silver. Cristo Wellingham was by far the most handsome man she had ever laid her eyes on and she could understand the fuss he had engendered in all the beating hearts of London’s younger women. For a moment she wished she had been younger, prettier, unencumbered. And more daring. But she wasn’t. She was a twenty-three-year-old married mother with the shame of sin about to be proclaimed to all who might listen.

Unless she could stop it!

‘My husband is dying.’ The words were out before she meant them to be and she blanched at the echo. She had not admitted that even to herself and to hear them said so unbidden was shocking. Still she could not take them back. ‘I need him to go to the grave with a soul that is not troubled.’

‘Is Florencia mine, Eleanor?’ He asked the question a second time, and everything stopped. Breath. Blood. Movement.

They were no longer in a carriage on the road around London town, no longer part of a day scrawled with blue and green and yellow. Instead they sat in a void of empty loss, the grey whir of deceit pulling them apart, bruising his eyes and twisting his face into something that was not known.

‘No,’ she denied again, the word creeping between her lips, bending in question and in fright. One different word and a whole world could change with it. One other word and her daughter was no longer just hers. The regret that marked his face was only some comfort.

‘I don’t believe you. Martin was married twice before and there were no offspring from either marriage.’

‘Both wives were barren.’

‘Or perhaps you were already pregnant from our coupling and England had ceased to be an option to return to?’

Eleanor remembered the whispers about the Comte de Caviglione. A spy, the women had said in the Château Giraudon that night, and one of the cleverest around. She remained silent under the watchfulness of his gaze, the frown on his forehead deeper now as his glance fell to her hand wringing the fabric in her skirt this way and that. The cut-diamond face of her wedding ring sparkled like ice. Mocking everything.

‘At Beaconsmeade you said that you loved me.’

The ache at the back of her throat almost made her cry out and say it again and again, here in the space of the carriage cocooned from society and propriety. Kiss me, she longed to demand, reach out and take away choice and kiss me, but he did not move, and the silence between them grew full with doubt and hesitancy.