Regency Society

Chapter Thirteen

Cristo crouched against one of the piles under the warehouse, quiet against the river water. The sun slanted against the glass of a dirty window above him, smears of age and grease and dust. The only sunbeam for miles, he thought, his eyes scanning the alleyway winding up around the corner, the dark press of buildings sending shadowed danger into everything.

He was here because Etienne Beraud was in London. The Foreign Office had told him when Cristo had contacted them about the blackmail notes Eleanor had received, but he had disappeared, a known French spy who could only be up to no good.

Today, however, Cristo had intercepted a note with the name of his old rival upon it and written in a code that had been easily broken, a note that told of a safe house they were using by the docks.

Swearing softly, he rubbed at his left eye, aching from a punch he had failed to escape the evening before last when the piece of information had fallen into his hands.

Paris seemed to reach out and consume him again, the subterfuge of ten lonely years lying heavily across the last weeks in England when his body had begun to uncoil into something approaching a normal life. With a hat pulled down over his eyes he was the man he had once been, the knife strapped to his ankle sharp and honed and another one hidden beneath the folds of his shirt equally as keen. He made his breathing slower by sheer dint of will, a trick he had learned from endless nights of marking time.

Finally, just as the sun had gone and the moon had taken its place, there was movement and the sound of footsteps on the wooden decking.

Hoisting himself up, Cristo stayed under the shelter of shadow, a silent shape stalking his quarry without sound. When he was close enough he pulled the knife from his belt, the silver tang of it heavy in his hand as he pressed it against the throat of the one he had caught.

‘Pas un mot, vous comprendez?’

Not a word, you understand?

As the man realized the danger, his fingers reached for his pocket. Cristo pressed his blade in harder and they instantly stilled.

‘De Caviglione.’

‘Dupont.’

Manners in the heart of death-dealing.

‘Where is Beraud?’

‘I do not know.’

The blade nicked through the cloth, drawing blood.

‘Wrong answer. Where is he?’

True fear beaded Dupont’s upper lip and the bottom one began to quiver.

‘In the building with the tower next to this one! He has your lady.’

‘He …? What …?’ Anger made the words lethal and fear chilled Cristo to the bone. ‘They have Eleanor? Why?’

The time to tread carefully was long gone and Dupont, reading his fury, began to sob. ‘I did not know he planned to do this. The child is only young …’

A child as well? Florencia.

Lifting the heavy hilt of his knife, he brought it down hard across Dupont’s temple and left him face down on the dirtied cobblestones.

Beraud’s lair was exactly where Dupont had said it would be and Cristo came in through the back door, dispensing with the locks in less than a minute.

Two men outside the room on the second floor were on guard. He met them in French with his beret pulled down low.

‘Beraud wants you downstairs now …’

By the time he had finished speaking they had seen his eyes and by then it was far too late. They fell quietly for large men and he dragged both into an empty room at one end of the corridor, binding their mouths, feet and hands with strips of leather he had brought with him for the purpose.

A chink of light showed beneath a door at the end of the passage way and even as he listened he heard the quiet crying of a child.

Eleanor came back to consciousness in a room that smelt of fish. Florencia was tucked in beside her, sobbing quietly. When Eleanor brought her finger to her mouth to ask for silence, she could hear the sea lapping at the floorboards.

A warehouse on the dock. She was sure that was where they had been taken and the next thought made her temples throb. If they were transported by boat out of London, anything might happen to them. Fear dried her mouth.

Lifting her other hand, she saw that the blood on her fingers was congealed and sticky. Pain lanced through her lip and her side and she shifted her position to accommodate the ache. To the left some twenty yards away the man from Paris and another stood talking, a pile of money stacked between them on a table.

Florencia shook in fear, hot tears running onto her silken dress and shadowing the yellow.

‘It will be all right, Florencia. I promise.’ Sometimes lies were a balm to truth but the terror in her was growing with each passing second.

‘The man gave me a bon-bon.’ She raised the sticky sweetness up, wailing as Eleanor knocked the treat from her hands and it rolled across the floor, collecting dust and wheat grains and fibre.

‘You must not eat anything they give you,’ she said even as she sidled to the right. There had to be something here she could hide, some solid sharp object that would allow her at least a moment of surprise. She found it in a hook embedded in a sack of grain, the shaft of it threaded with rope. When she tested the point, blood welled on the pad on her finger. If anyone touched Florencia, she would gouge out their eyes. She swore she would as she fitted the weapon into her palm.

Noises from outside made her start. A crash and some swearing and then the door was flung open, a voice she knew rising above others further out.

‘Where is she?’ The sound of a gun firing and then the stench of powder curling into the room!

Florencia screamed, frozen in terror, her dark eyes like two holes in her pale face, and then Cristo Wellingham was there, the boot of his heel through the door and the shot fired, loud and fierce, no quarter given. It was the metal shield he carried that had saved him, Eleanor realised later, though how he had known the man might aim for his head and not his chest …

Two knives flew almost in unison and then there was silence, the smoke curling as Cristo’s eyes met her own, dark amber cold as steel.

‘Eleanor?’ Her name? She could see him say it, but there was no sound, only his mouth opening as the distance between them closed. Two feet and then one. Her face damp with blood and sweat and tears as she came against him, Florencia in her arms.

Her heartbeat was dull in her head and then they were outside in the rain, heavy and cleansing, the chill of it washing away all traces of death.

She grabbed at her daughter, hands threading through silver and silver, hardly knowing where one of them began and the other one ended. As sound returned his words were not in English but in French, quiet and honest and infinitely calming.

‘It is over, Eleanor. You are safe.’

Nodding, she stayed there in his arms until her breathing softened. When she finally pulled away she saw his eyes were full of a pain that had nothing to do with the physical as he gazed at Florencia.

‘You would not have told me?’ His injured hand reached out for the silver in her hair.

Still in French. A protection, she realized, against his daughter listening. The muscles in his arms showed through the material in his jacket. Powerful. Strong. She watched as he touched Florencia for the very first time, infinite care and love in the movement.

‘Tell me that you would have told me, damn it. Eleanor. I need to hear at least that.’

His eyes were closed now and the muscle on the side of the jaw rippled in tension.

‘No. She is mine, Cristo, because to say anything else would be to destroy her. Don’t you see that?’

The shadows in his eyes when he opened them again were bruised with both anger and want.

‘Yet by saying nothing you destroy me?’

Her bottom lip quivered as the challenge registered. A choice, then? A man who had walked in the shadows of the world and whose sins were coming back to be visited upon those all about him, dangerous, perilous, the fortunate outcome of the evening’s happenings only decided by a miracle! He had killed two men right in front of her eyes and never blinked once.

Pulling back, she broke contact, the guilt of another feeling sticking in her throat.

‘The man you killed was from the Château Giraudon. I remember him as the one who hurt my thigh.’

He nodded. ‘Etienne Beraud. He was a French spy.’

‘As you were an English one? If anything had happened to Florencia because of our past … because of your past …’

Reality crashed in and his eyes acknowledged her withdrawal. Already the sounds of others were coming closer, the real world of London and its people, running steps and voices of authority. The constabulary. She saw the shape of their hats even as Cristo Wellingham drew away.

‘Our coachman followed the carriage on foot to the docks after you were taken in the park, Lainie, and when he saw where they had stopped he came back to tell us.’ Her sister-in-law’s arms were firmly around her, helping her into the Dromorne conveyance, and settling a blanket across both her and Florencia’s knees once inside. ‘Martin was beside himself, of course, and had to be sedated, but I sent for the constabulary and we came straight here. I would not have believed it was Cristo Wellingham who took you until I saw him pulling at you, trying to make you stay. He will be hanged for this, of course.’ Diana’s voice was flat. ‘He will be hanged and drawn and quartered for the kidnap of a lady and her child, and God knows what it will do to the Wellingham family name.’ Barking out an order to the driver, she shut the door with a clang.

‘No. It was not him … it was not Cristo Wellingham who did this. He saved us, Diana. He came and saved us.’

‘Why?’ Her sister-in-law’s eyes had narrowed, the gleam in them deadened with the confession. ‘Why would he do that, Eleanor? Why would a man with whom you have had very little contact risk his life to save yours?’

The truth was caught again in choice. Spare her reputation or save Cristo’s life.

‘I knew Cristo Wellingham intimately in Paris.’

Florencia between them looked up as the silence lengthened, and Eleanor saw the very second that the truth of her daughter’s parentage dawned in Diana’s glance.

‘What have you done? Does my brother know any of this?’ Her question was full of horror as she comprehended what it was that was implied. ‘This sort of scandal will kill Martin and he has been nothing but kind to you. And my girls … This will ruin their chances of any union whatsoever if any of it gets out … you do know that?’

The weight of choice became heavier.

‘If you could find it in yourself to protect our family and to say nothing … to let a man well connected take his chances …’

‘There were people killed tonight, Diana. If he should be blamed for that, they would crucify him.’ Eleanor shook her head firmly and reached for the handle of the carriage, but already the horses were moving at some speed. She felt a new dread creep into her heart as the anger flashed in her sister-in-law’s eyes.

‘Then you leave me no choice whatsoever, for both my brother and daughters and for Florencia. And for you, too, Eleanor! One day you might even thank me for saving you from yourself.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Banging twice on the roof of the carriage, Diana looked at her sadly.

‘Unfortunately, my dear, you soon will.’

Cristo was thrown into goal, the baton marks on his shoulders protesting the movement. His legs were shackled and one of his eyes was swollen closed. The constabulary had come into the chaos and found him guilty, the blood on his clothes, the hysteria of Eleanor’s sister-in-law, the gathering group of onlookers who had all pointed him out as one of the French kidnappers.

The blood on his hands had convicted him, the garb he had donned for his sojourn in the heart of the docks doing the rest. No longer an English gentleman. Only a felon with scant regard for the letter of the law.

No light punishment. No careful handling. For six hours now he had been kicked and punched and hurt, and still Eleanor did not come.

Could not come, Cristo reasoned, the truth of all that had happened closing in on him. Could not come because to do so would ruin her reputation completely. It was only that thought that kept him silent. Only the thought of protecting what was left of her honour.

But for how long? The thought of Ashe and Taris worried him. When would they know of the night’s happenings?

Sitting on the cold stone floor, he nursed his right hand. Two fingers broken and his thumbnail gone; the jagged remains of what was left hurt like hell and he tore the final piece off with his teeth before sucking at the blood that welled.

His shirt was lost, too, and his shoes and the watch that his mother had given him when he was eleven. All around him the groans and shouts of other prisoners echoed, a reminder of other times when he had been bound and hurt and held.

But here in England it was different. His eyes skimmed the locks on the door. Two minutes and he would have them opened. Another five and he would be in fresh air. The fastening on his legs was such child’s play he might have released the chains in his sleep.

‘Ye’ll be wanting a drink, no doubt.’ The voice of the guard broke into his thoughts as a stream of water was thrown through the bars. The cold made him start even as training held him still.

‘Thank you.’

The curse was ripe and the cup hit him fully on the cheek, breaking open the skin. ‘With a noose around that pretty neck, ye may not be as polite.’

He refrained from answering and when the footsteps receded he stood, a dizzy lightness of head making him reach for the wall behind.

‘Steady,’ he said to himself and sucked at the moisture covering his arms. Even a little liquid was better than none at all and he needed his wits fully about him.

Florencia.

A daughter.

Their daughter.

Almost five. The same age as William and Alfred, Taris and Beatrice’s twins.

Part of a family. A big family. A child of Falder and of the Carisbrook line and the de Caviglione blood that he had inherited from his mother.

God! He had seen himself in her chocolate eyes and silvered hair, reflections of his own childhood in the determined set of her jaw and the sweep of her forehead.

Eleanor had been eighteen and pregnant when she had simply stepped out of his carriage into a European winter. How could that have felt, hemmed in as she was by ruin and by the mistake of identity shattering every single tenet of proper behaviour and righteous convention that she had no doubt been raised to believe in.

Slapping his hands against the stone, he pushed away from the wall. No matter what happened now he would protect her. Protect them. This was his responsibility. He would say nothing of the threat of kidnap or of the identity of Beraud and his henchmen until he knew exactly what it was that Eleanor wanted to be said.

She lay drifting between night and day, reaching for the sweet smell of something close.

‘Drink up, Lainie dear. It will help you.’ A feminine voice that she knew well. Diana? Leaning forwards, she did as she was told and the room swam into bands of colour. Pink and red and orange.

She laughed as the hues mixed together and the thoughts in her head that were difficult glided away on the edge of peace.

‘Florencia?’ A name that was important. She reached for the sound of it even as the mist rose up again, the close timbre of the voice receding into distance.

Chapter Fourteen

‘You killed these criminals in defence of a woman and her child, Cris. Tell the law of your relationship with Eleanor Westbury and the letters that were sent to her demanding money and that will be the end of it. They will believe you for who you are, and you can come home.’

Asher was there again. Had he been there already today? The minutes had turned into hours and then into more, as one day moved into two. Time skewered and bent into a never-ending stretch, the cold water, the careful bruising, shivering in black nights on a hard cobbled floor.

He had clothes now and food and while his brothers were about nothing untoward ever happened. He made it his mission in life not to complain about ill treatment and to never question the whereabouts of Eleanor Westbury.

Still, today Ashe had come armed with news. The Dromorne family had decamped into the country, to heal, it was rumoured, and to forget. One of their maids had let it slip to Beatrice’s servant. Eleanor had left before the others with her daughter and sister-in-law, her things packed up in her absence.