Kitabı oku: «Regency Society», sayfa 20

‘Now look what has happened,’ she continued, ‘and it is all your fault. Come on. We have to get home before it becomes dark.’

A noise a little way away made her stiffen. Something was coming their way. Some forest predator? Finding a substantial piece of wood near her feet, she lifted it and went to stand at the head of the stubborn horse.

‘It will be perfectly all right. Don’t you worry, I will make certain that nothing eats you.’

She hated the tremble she could hear in her voice and the ache of fright banding her stomach.

It was coming closer through the trees, she determined, along the path she had turned off a moment or so back. Her fingers tightened about the wood.

She was talking to the horse? Telling him it was all his fault and that she would allow nothing to eat him, a stick in her hand of such old timber that it would break into pieces at the very first contact.

If he wasn’t so angry he might have smiled, but the afternoon was darkening with rain, and Eleanor Westbury was hardly wearing anything to warm her save a thin jacket and a piece of lace around her neck. Her hair was everywhere and very wet. If he had not found her, what then …? The very thought of it made him scowl as he strode into the clearing.

Cristo Wellingham was here? In the glade far from anyone with the fading light about them and anger in his eyes. She did not lower the piece of wood, but held it as a barrier between them.

‘People in trouble generally don’t hit their rescuers.’

His eyes were amber brittle as she tried to stop the shaking that had overcome her.

‘Your sister-in-law is, as we speak, imagining you to be in all sorts of trouble.’ His glance took in her sorry-looking mount with a singular understanding of its intractability.

‘How did you find me?’

‘The stone and some flowers! At least you thought to do that.’

‘You walked in?’

‘No. My bay is tethered a few minutes back. I heard your voice and followed the sound.’

He came forwards, but did not stop when he reached her, leaning down instead to check the saddle of her horse.

‘This is the problem,’ he said after a moment, disengaging a sprig of prickles. ‘They sometimes get burred on the skin and hurt with any movement or pressure.’

Straightening, he removed his hat and dusted it against the pale brown of his riding breeches. He was dressed today as an English country gentleman and Eleanor wondered if he would ever stop surprising her. Silence was punctuated only by the call of birds settling in the trees and by the trill of the river water a few yards away.

‘I arrived at Beaconsmeade as the rescue parties were being dispatched,’ he said finally. ‘I am glad it was me who found you.’

The last words were said in a different tone from the others and the skin on her arms rose in response. Pure and utter awareness, no pretence in any of it.

‘Glad?’

‘It gives us some time to talk.’

‘Talk?’ The heat in her was fiery red and she wondered if he could see the blush of it in her face.

‘Unless you would want more.’ He reached out as though to touch her and she stepped back. Not trusting his touch. Not trusting him.

Today he wore a ring on his little finger, the man in Paris creeping back in slow measures here. ‘Honour Baxter said that you had a daughter.’

‘I do.’ She made herself look at him, straight in the eye, as though they spoke of the weather or the lie of the land or some other insignificant thing. Only bravado and confidence would throw him off track.

‘Could I meet her?’

‘Why?’

‘She is almost five and I hear that she is a fair child with dark eyes.’

‘And you think because of it she could be yours?’ She laughed. ‘My mother was a beauty of some note and her colouring was the same.’

‘Your husband looks too ill to father a child.’

‘Now, perhaps, that might be the case. But back then …’

The ending was left unsaid.

‘Honour says the child is named Florencia?’

‘Martin and I lived in Florence for a good few years before coming back to England. It was in compliment to the city that she was named such.’ Pushing the boundaries further, she dredged up sympathy. ‘I am very sorry if you are disappointed or if you had imagined …’

Shrugging the sentiment away, he was closer now, so close she could feel the breath of him against her face when he spoke. Yet still he did not touch.

‘Is your husband kind, Eleanor?’

Martin’s name here under a canopy of trees, here in the wind as the day turned into dusk and the leaves rustled.

‘Of course.’

He smiled at that, the corners of his eyes creasing and showing up the depth of colour in his skin. Not a man who was trapped indoors, nor a man whose muscles and bone were wasting daily. She shook the thought away and concentrated on other things.

‘In Paris I was a fool to let you go so easily.’ The velvet in his eyes was lighter against the low sun, the colour of dark brandy with fire behind it.

Tears were close. She could feel them pooling, at the waste of it all and at the yearning that she could no longer deny.

She knew she should turn away this moment, now, or at the very least direct the conversation into a more indifferent topic. She should stake her claim on being a sensible woman, a prudent woman, a woman who had no thought for the passion consuming her.

But when he reached out she let him touch her and when he brought her knuckles to his lips and kissed the back of them she felt his tongue like the sharp blade of a razor drawing her blood into shivers.

‘Do you feel that?’ The question was fierce. ‘Do you, Eleanor. Feel that?’

‘No.’ She could not let him speak any longer, could not allow him to say the words that marked a truth.

‘No?’ He laid his other hand across the jutting flesh of her bosom, feeling the beat of her heart. The rain wet his hand as she looked down, cold against warmth. She almost expected to see steam.

‘Eleanor. Whatever this is …?’

‘Is between us,’ she finished and laid a finger on his lips against further words, tracing the line of them, carefully. She felt in his constraint a terrible desperation.

‘I failed you once and I should not have….’

Once! Her other hand was held rigidly against her side, gripped into a fist as she thought of the tiny grave at the chapel in Aix-en-Provence planted with spring bulbs because they were all she could leave untended.

Not now. Not now. The guilt that rode her dreams nightly opened into full bloom, reaching down into the very core of her heart. Swallowing, she made herself relax as puzzlement crept into his eyes.

‘I would not hurt you, Eleanor.’

She blanched at the pitch of need so clearly heard and the distance that held them apart lessened. Closer and closer as his hands tightened on her shoulders, drawing her in. Six inches and then her breasts flattened against his chest, finding home.

No child. No husband. Only him. Only him with his silvered wet hair and his magical mouth and his hand around her head tilting her into more, their breath heavy and torrid as she matched his desire with her own.

Mine. Again. Amongst the trees and the oncoming darkness and the call of the birds as they settled for the night, watching. Watching a dam break in the circle of flesh, tipping into utter need, his grip tightening in her hair as an anchor, no breath or ease or quiet exploration. Only five years of apartness and ten thousand hours of regret. Only the sweet rush of his breath and the clamp of passion that knotted her body from tip to toe into some other unknown force, giving back all that she was getting, opening to him so that he could come in, deeper, closer, the feel of him against her body so very, very right.

‘I want you …’

His voice was strained, no longer distant, no longer indifferent, only pain within them.

‘I am married.’

Martin. She tried to bring his face to her thoughts, but couldn’t. Cristo smelt of soap and musk and strength and the memory of Paris flooded back, of arching into delight and finding the hidden notes of pleasure in the slightest of caresses. Potent memory, honed with a celibacy that had taken all her passionate years since, month by month by month.

Sweat dripped beneath the raindrops as ecstasy boiled, and then the seconds ran out under the urgent shadow of lust and she surrendered to the sheer promise of what was offered. Her toes arched in her boots and her head tipped back, his hands steadying her.

Even then she could not feel shame or contrition. Nay, all she could feel was the throbbing release through the very core of her body, untying all the knots and the pressure and leaving a freedom that she remembered from only once before.

‘I love you.’

Had she whispered it? Please God, let it not be so!

He broke away and laid her face against his chest, his heart wild-beating fast.

‘Damn. Others are coming.’

She could not hear a sound.

‘They will be here inside two minutes.’

She was glad he did not look back at her as he walked away.

Chapter Eleven

Asher Wellingham and his men came into the glade by foot and along the same route that Cristo had taken.

‘Her steed was lame,’ Cristo said from his place on the other side of the horse. He sounded normal, indifferent, the kiss of a moment back a long-forgotten thing. ‘You found the marker, I guess.’

The Duke of Carisbrook nodded. Up close, Eleanor could see a familial resemblance that had nothing to do with the shape of nose or mouth or face. It was menace and danger that entwined the Wellingham brothers as well as height and darkness of eye. Both looked at each other with a glance that held a myriad questions beneath the polite exterior.

‘Are you quite well, Lady Dromorne?’ Asher Wellingham addressed her now, as he picked up a stick and threw it into the undergrowth.

‘Very well, thank you, your Grace. I walked along the path and was lost …’

‘But now you are found.’ The sentiment was not quite said in the way Eleanor would have expected it and when she turned to Cristo she saw him send a flinty glance in warning to his oldest brother.

The Duke laughed.

‘Is your mount able to be ridden at all, Lady Dromorne?’

All she could do was nod.

‘Then if you will ride behind me, Cristo will bring up the rear. Would that meet with your approval?’

Such formality in the middle of nowhere was confusing, but she was pleased for the proposed distance.

Cristo dried himself off in the bedroom he had been given and one that reminded him of his own childhood chamber at Falder. Even the fabric on the bed was similar. Golden. Sheer curtains and French doors along one whole side of the room. But it was the books that caught his attention. His books, title by title, of collections he had begun as a youth. He ran his finger across the spines in wonder. Who had brought these here? Who had cared for them? Hearing footfalls, he turned and Beatrice-Maude swept into his room after a quick and perfunctory knock.

‘I hope you do not mind about the books.’

‘You took them?’

‘Cared for them,’ she amended, ‘until you should want them back. At Falder they had begun to wilt and I thought if they had been mine I would hope someone should watch over them.’

‘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.’