Читать книгу Regency Society - Хелен Диксон, Ann Lethbridge, Хелен Диксон - Страница 90

Four steps down, to the street. He felt the edge of the kerb with his cane and stepped a little back from it. And now, a left. It would be two roads down in this direction, he remembered, before turning onto the busier street ahead. He listened closely as he set out, to gauge his surroundings. It was more difficult in darkness than it might have been in the light, for he could not use the rays of the sun to set a direction.

But for this first trip, it was better to be out when the way was not so crowded. He heard a single walker on the other side of the street from him, and remembered that he would have to be cautious of footpads and cutpurses. Though the areas he travelled were good ones, not all that ventured out after dark could be trusted.

He tapped ahead of him with his stick, to make sure there were no obstacles, and set out at a pace that was slower than normal, but still little different from a stroll. He almost stumbled, as the pavement gave way in another kerb. But then he caught himself and stood, looking both ways for changes in the shadows that obscured his sight, and listening for the sound of horses’ hooves and the rattle of carts or carriages.

When he was sure there was nothing, he made sure his course was straight, stepped forwards, and made an uneventful crossing, gaining the opposite side. He proceeded for a little while longer in the same fashion, before everything began to go wrong.

He could hear the increase of traffic around him as the way became busier. While most passers-by gave him a safe space to walk in, he was occasionally jostled and forced to adjust his pace to those around him. The changes in speed made it harder to keep a straight course, and the corner seemed to come much sooner than he expected. Had he passed two or three streets?

Suddenly, he felt a hand, light as a moth’s touch, on the pocket that held his purse.

He caught the tiny wrist easily in the fingers of his left hand. ‘Here, you. What are you about?’

‘Please, sir. I didn’t mean nothing.’ A child. A girl? No. A boy. He was sure of it; though the wrist he held was bony, it did not feel delicate, and the sleeve that it jutted from was rough wool.

‘You just choose to walk with your hand in my pocket, then? No more of this nonsense, boy. You meant to have my purse. And now the Runners shall have you.’

‘Please, sir …’ there was the loud, wet sniff of a child who was near tears and with a perpetual cold ‘… I didn’t mean any harm. And I was hungry.’

‘And I am blind, not stupid. And certainly not as insensate as you expected. I am much harder to sneak up upon, because I pay better attention to small things such as you.’ He gave a frustrated sigh to persuade the boy that he was serious in his intent, but not without sympathy. Then he said, ‘If you want to avoid the law, then you had best prove your worth. I am walking to St James’s Square. Do you know the way?’

‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

‘Then take my hand and lead me the rest of the distance. Keep a sharp eye out and steer me clear of any pickpockets. And I will know if you lead me wrong, so do not try it, or it will be off to the Runners with you.’ Then he pretended to soften. ‘But if you lead me right, there will be a shilling for you, and a nice dinner.’ And at the sound of another sniff, he added, ‘And a clean handkerchief.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He felt a small hand creep into his, and a tug, as the boy turned him, and set off at a brisk pace in the other direction. After a while, he could tell that the boy was honest, for the sounds around him and the echoes off the buildings of the square changed to something more like he had expected.

It annoyed him that, in his first outing, he had proved himself unable to find a house he had visited hundreds of times. Perhaps that meant that he was as helpless as he feared, a useless invalid that would only be a burden to his wife.

Or perhaps it proved that he would manage as best he could, under the circumstances. In any case, it had been better than hiding in his bedroom. Even having accepted aid, he felt an unaccustomed sense of power.

The boy read off the numbers to him as they passed, and then led him up to the door he specified. ‘Here we are, sir.’ The boy was hesitating as though afraid to lift the knocker.

For a moment, Adrian hesitated as well, then mounted the step and fumbled and then grabbed the ring, giving a sharp rap against the wood. ‘Very good.’

‘Lord Folbroke?’ The butler’s greeting was unsure, for it had been a long time since he’d visited. And if the servants’ gossip here was as effective as it was in his own home, the whole household must be buzzing since the return of his wife and her brother.

Adrian gave a nod of affirmation and held out his hat, hoping that the man could understand the nature of his difficulty by the vagueness of his gaze. ‘And an associate,’ he said, gesturing down to the boy with his other hand. ‘Could someone take this young man to the kitchen and feed him? And give him the shilling I have promised him.’ He glanced down in the general direction of the child and heard another sniff. ‘And wipe his nose.’

Then he reached out, and found the boy’s shoulder, giving it a pat. ‘And you, lad. If you are interested in honest work, some might be found for you in my house.’ If he meant to walk the city in future, a guide would not go amiss. And he suspected a child of the streets should know them better than most.

‘Yes, sir,’ the boy answered.

‘Yes, my lord,’ Adrian corrected. ‘Now get some dinner into yourself and wait until I can figure what is to be done with you.’

Then he turned back, looking down the entrance hall of his brother-in-law’s home and trying to remember what he could of the arrangement. The butler stood behind him, still awaiting an explanation. ‘Is my wife in residence?’ he asked. ‘I wish to speak with her.’

He suspected the man had nodded, for there was no immediate answer, so he tipped his head and prompted, ‘I am sorry, I could not hear that.’

The man cleared his throat. ‘Yes, my lord. If you would wait in the salon …’

Adrian felt the touch on his arm, and shrugged it away. ‘If you would describe the way to me, I prefer to walk under my own power.’ The man gave him instructions, and Adrian reached out with his stick to tap the way into the sitting room.

As he crossed the threshold, he heard a gasp from the left, on the other side of the hall. Higher than it should be. There were stairs, certainly. And a woman in soft slippers, running down them with short light steps.

‘Adrian.’ Her voice was breathless and girlish, as he had remembered it, as though she could not quite overcome the awe she felt, and her pace was that of his eager young bride.

But now, before she reached him, she slowed herself so he would not think her too tractable, and changed her tone. ‘Adrian.’ In a few paces she had changed from the girl he’d left to the woman who had come to London for him. She was still angry with him. And pretending to be quite unimpressed with his arrival.

‘You notice I have come to you.’ He held his arms wide for her, hoping that she would step into them.

‘It is about time,’ she said. ‘According to David, you never visit him here any more, though it is not far, and the way is not unknown to your coachman. Not an onerous journey at all. Hardly worthy of comment.’

He stepped a little closer to inhale her scent. Lemons. His mouth watered for her. ‘I did not request a coach. The night is clear, the breeze fresh. And so I walked.’

He thought he heard a faint gasp of surprise.

‘I very nearly got lost along the way. But there was a boy in the street, trying to pick my pocket. And so I caught him, and forced him to help me.’

Now he could imagine the little quirk of her mouth, as though she said the next stern words through half a smile. ‘That was very resourceful of you. There is no shame, you know, admitting that you need help from time to time. Nor should a minor setback on the journey keep you from taking it.’

‘Trying to teach me independence, are you?’

‘I think you do not need teaching in that. It is dependence that you fear.’

‘True enough.’ It had made him resist her for far too long. ‘It was wrong of you to lie to me, you know. I felt quite foolish, to think I had been seducing my own wife.’ And now he had wrong footed it, for that sounded like she was not worth the effort.

The smile was gone from her voice. ‘If you had not kept the truth from me in the first place, then I would not have needed to lie to you. And I doubt you’d have bothered to seduce me at all, had you known who I was. If the first week of our marriage was any indication of our future, you’d have grown bored and left me by now.’ Her voice was smaller, and with the breathless lack of confidence that he remembered from the girl he had married. Then there was the tiniest sniff, as though she might have a tear in her eye at the thought, but it was stifled and replaced with the firmer resolve of the new Emily. ‘And I would have found a less tame lover to satisfy me.’

Damn the woman. He had forgotten her assessment of his abilities, in the early days of their union. And she had chosen to remind him of it, in a common hallway where anyone might hear. He stepped the rest of the way into the salon and pulled her in after him, closing the door so that they could be alone together. Then he let the heat of anger spread lower in him, to change to another kind of heat entirely. ‘Or you would have learned to speak aloud what you wished from me, so that you were sure I understood. I am blind, you know, and need an understanding woman.’ He tried to sound pitiful.

But she was having none of it. ‘Your eyes were good enough when we married, and yet you were blind to my charms.’

‘Which are considerable,’ he added. ‘Given a little time, I’d have discovered them. It is far more likely that I would have crept away to London by now just to get some rest.’ He leaned closer to her, so that he could whisper into her ear, ‘I swear, after only a week in your company, I am exhausted by your appetites.’

‘Exhausted already?’ She was definitely smiling again. ‘I thought it was just getting interesting. But, of course, you had already begun to think of another while you bedded me. Some paragon of innocence and common sense named Emily who is most unlike me.’ She caught him by the lapel and fumbled in his coat pocket to be sure that the locket was still where he always carried it. ‘And she is most unattractive, to judge by this likeness.’

He gripped her wrist to stay her hand. ‘She is a goddess.’

‘Your picture of her is spoiled.’

‘And yet I am loathe to part with it. It got me through Talavera unscathed, and many other battles after that one. I do not need to see it, for I carried it halfway across Portugal and I memorised every line.’

‘Really.’ There was a quiet awe in her voice as she softened to him, and he knew he had won. ‘But I am not the girl in the picture any more. I have changed, Adrian.’

He eased the locket from her hand, and replaced it in his pocket, marvelling that he had not known her from the first. ‘Not as much as you think. You were beautiful then, and you are beautiful now. Emily,’ he said, enjoying the sound of the word on his lips and the little cooing noise she made when he named her. ‘Emily.’ His body tightened in anticipation, just knowing she was with him after so long. ‘Have I ever told you how completely I love you?’

‘I don’t believe you have.’ She leaned against him until his shoulders bumped against the door behind them.

‘I expect you will hear it frequently, now that I have returned to you.’ He kissed her gently, marvelling at how right it felt, holding her close, enjoying the warmth of her body, the now familiar curves of it, and the smell of her hair, and wondering why he had been foolish enough to deny himself.

And then he remembered what she had said to him on the night that they had spoken of their marriages. ‘Three times?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You told me that your husband had made love to you only three times, before leaving you.’

‘Yes, Adrian,’ she said, giving an impatient little stamp of her foot. ‘Of course, the number is greater after this week. Now it is four. Or perhaps four and a half. I am not sure how to count some of the things that have happened.’

‘But still. Three times.’ He shook his head in amazement. ‘I could swear it was more.’

‘And you would be wrong. It was only three.’ She pressed her body tight to his. ‘Now you are treating me so politely that it makes me wonder if I must force you to tend to your obligations.’

‘My obligations?’ he asked.

‘To your wife,’ she said significantly. And she slipped her hands beneath his vest, spreading her fingers over his ribs, then tugging at the tails of his shirt. She was eager for him again. And he remembered what Hendricks had said, and did his best not to wonder at the reason for it.

He stayed her hands. ‘Before we continue. When I went to White’s yesterday, I chanced to meet Rupert.’

‘How unfortunate for you,’ she responded. ‘But it explains the nonsense you were ranting at me a few hours ago. Your cousin has been harassing me endlessly in Derbyshire over your absence. You had been away so long that he had begun to doubt your existence.’ She went up on her toes to kiss him, catching his lower lip in her teeth and nibbling upon it.

‘Rupert is a blockhead,’ he muttered around the kiss, wondering if he cared one way or the other for the truth. If she meant to distract him from it, she was doing a damn fine job, for her hands had started to move again, reaching for the buttons of his trousers. ‘The next time he visits, I will box his ears and send him on his way. As I wished I could have yesterday. He was quick to offer me congratulations on the impending birth. I assured him that you told the truth, of course. And that I was very happy. As I am, of course.’ He felt her shoulders begin to shake and feared that tears were imminent. He reached up to wipe them from her cheek and his hand felt nothing but her soft, kissable skin. ‘What the devil? You are laughing at me. What do you find so amusing about this?’

‘That you insist on being so noble about my poor unwanted child.’ Her hands left his body, and he heard the rustle of her skirts and felt the hems brushing his fingers as she drew them up to her waist, then pressed his hands against her belly to prove to him that it was soft, flat and empty. ‘Have you not touched me here often enough to find the truth?’

‘I was not paying attention,’ he said. Nor was he now. He was too busy feeling the bottom of her stays, the tops of her stockings, and all the delicious flesh in between. He ran a finger under the bow in her garter. ‘This is new.’

A silk-clad leg twined about his to help her balance as she kissed his throat. ‘Your darling Emily is a virtuous lady and does not go naked beneath her gown. But there are limits to my propriety. Your tiresome cousin would not stop bothering me about his plans for the estate when he was Folbroke. So to put him off, I told him I was pregnant with your child and he had been cut out of the succession.’

‘You little liar. Do you know what agonies I went through, thinking you loved another?’

‘I suspect I do. For I have felt them every day that we have been parted.’

He winced, imagining the pain of the last day, magnified by weeks and months and years, and then pulled her close to him for a kiss that was not nearly enough to expiate it. But it seemed to help, for she purred in satisfaction against the skin of his throat. ‘Tell me, when you discovered this supposed truth about my infidelity, did you rush your mistress’s bed so that you might vent your frustrations?’

‘Perhaps,’ he admitted.

‘Then I hope that we might go back to my rooms to be alone, and that you are similarly frustrated tonight.’

He remembered their lovemaking of the previous night, and her eager response to it, after her lies to Rupert. ‘And when my cousin came back in nine months with a christening gift, where were you planning to get a baby?’

‘From you, of course. I came to London to seduce you.’

They were the last words he had thought to hear from his wife. Not unwelcome, of course. Merely unexpected. In response, his pulse increased and his mind filled with possibilities.

‘And do not tell me that you do not want a child, for I will not hear of it. Sighted or blind, it will not matter, as long as he has a strong father to show him the way.’

‘You think that, do you?’ He could not help smiling at the prospect. For a child who had such a mother could not help but grow right.

‘And his brothers and sisters as well.’

‘Brothers and sisters?’

‘You do not know it,’ she assured him, ‘but brothers, when they are not cutting up one’s peace, are a great comfort.’

‘We do not have one, yet, and you are already planning a family.’

‘And I am quite tired of planning,’ she whispered. ‘Now that you have taught me what it means to act on the desire.’

He gave a weary sigh, as though it was a burden to please her and to hide how perfectly wicked he found her plan, now that he had grown used to it. ‘You are a most trying woman, my Lady Folbroke. If that is all that will please you, then I am tired of fighting you on it. Take me, and get it over with.’

‘As you wish, my lord.’ And she was reaching for his buttons again. He grabbed for her wrists. He had not expected that she would take him seriously and now things were getting quite out of hand.

‘Emily.’ That had been a mistake. For while the feeling of her hands was making him hard, speaking that beloved name nearly made him lose control. ‘Can you not wait until I might take you to bed?’

She tugged at the end of his cravat with her teeth. ‘I have waited three years, Adrian.’ She pulled her hands up until she could kiss his fingers, sucking the tips of them into her mouth. He released her hands, trying not to imagine the lurid things that he wished to do with the mother of those future children.

He would act on them, in time. Soon, he reminded himself, firmly. Very soon. Just not now. He had a lifetime with her. Surely he could wait a few minutes, until they could go to her rooms. Or his. He withdrew his fingers and ran them over her face, tracing her smile, her cheeks, her jaw, in a chaste examination of each feature. How could he not have known this face? It should have been as familiar to him as his own. ‘You are so lovely,’ he said, trying to fill the void of neglect he had created with a more worthy emotion than lust. ‘If you mean to take the locket from me, then I must find something else to carry, so that I can share your beauty with others while I enjoy it myself. Will you sit for a cameo?’

She stepped with her little slipper-covered feet onto his boots to make it easier to kiss him. ‘What a clever idea.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’ He smiled and ran a finger down her cheek. ‘Something Greek, I think. I see you posed as Athena.’

‘Aphrodite,’ she offered, ‘with bare shoulders.’

He ran his fingers lower, touching her throat. ‘And bare there as well. And here.’ His fingers touched her skirt, still raised and crushed between them, and remembered the treasures exposed beneath it. ‘Perhaps an artfully arranged drape,’ he conceded, stroking diagonally across her body until his hand rested on her bare hip.

‘And you could touch me, whenever you liked,’ she encouraged. And her hands slipped lower again.

‘This is madness,’ he said, without much conviction. ‘Stop it this instant.’

‘Why?’ she whispered.

‘Because we are in a salon and not a bedroom. It is not respectful of your brother. It is not proper.’ He tried to think of other reasons. But as she exposed him, stroked him and eased him between her legs, he did nothing to stop her.

‘And I am your wife and not your lover,’ she said, stopping herself. In her voice, he heard the hesitance and resignation that had been there on their first nights together.

She was soft, warm and willing. And he was harder than he’d ever been for her. The contact with her body made every nerve in him tingle with eagerness. The air was full of the scent of lemons, and he was wasting time with propriety. ‘You are both,’ he said. ‘Wife and lover. Let me prove it to you.’ Then he leaned back against the door, shifted his weight, bent his knees, found her body and lost himself.

The next minutes were a blur. His hand behind her knee. Her leg wrapped around his hip. His hand on her breast. Her mouth on his, kissing as though she could suck the life from him. And their bodies meeting, over and over in subtle, silent thrusts so as not to summon the servants or alert his childhood friend to the delightful debauchery taking place in his home. And all the while, the thought echoing in his head was that most men would give two good eyes for the opportunity to have a woman like this, even for a single night.

But the lascivious creature panting out her climax in his ear was his wife. His Emily. Emily. Emily. And he finished in her with a soul-wrenching shudder, and a single rattle of the door that they rested against. As their bodies calmed, he held her, amazed.

Behind them, the door rattled, and bounced against his shoulders as though someone was attempting to open it. ‘What the devil?’

‘David,’ Adrian said, remembering why he had resisted this interlude. ‘A moment, please.’

‘Folbroke?’ There was a moment of suspicious silence. ‘And I suppose my sister is in there with you.’

He smiled, and said, ‘My wife. Yes.’

‘We are working out our differences,’ Emily said, with the smallest sway of her hips before she parted from him and let her skirts fall back into place with a rustle.

‘But must you do it in the salon?’ David muttered from the hall.

His wife was giggling into his lapel and smoothing his clothing back into place as he said, ‘My apologies for the momentary lapse of judgement, Eston. It was …’ he rolled his eyes towards heaven for the benefit of Emily ‘… unavoidable. In a moment, we will be retiring to Emily’s rooms, and will bother you no further.’

‘But perhaps you might join us for dinner,’ Emily offered.

‘Later in the week,’ Adrian added.

‘Several days from now,’ she corrected.

From the other side of the door, there was a disgusted snort and the sound of retreating footsteps. Emily burst into another fit of giggling, then she was reaching for him again.

This time he stopped her, ignoring her pouts and the demands of his own body. ‘Lady Folbroke, your behaviour is disgraceful.’ And then he whispered in her ear, ‘And I was a fool to have run from you.’

‘Yes, you were,’ she agreed. ‘But you are my fool, and you will not get away from me again.’

‘Quite true.’ He grinned. ‘Thanks to you, I think I will be the first in a long line of Folbrokes to die in his bed.’