Читать книгу Regency Society Collection Part 1 - Sarah Mallory - Страница 42

‘Florencia. Where are you?’

A small giggle alerted Eleanor to the fact that her daughter now hid behind the oak tree at the far end of the garden and she made her way down the line of ill-cut box hedging.

‘Is she here? No. Could she be here?’ She lifted the leaves of a large plant that drooped across the garden. ‘No, not there either.’ The giggles began again and the skirt of Florencia’s dress was blowing in the wind outside the line of bark.

With a quick dash to the left she caught her daughter to her and swung her round, their hair catching together, undressed and falling long in the slight edge of sun.

It was how Cristo saw them first, laughing and entangled, a mother showing all the affection in the world to a child who plainly loved her. Eleanor was in black, though the lace at her bodice was loose and the swell of her breasts made the colour alluring in a way the pastel shades had never been. His daughter was wreathed in dark blue with a string of what looked to be her mother’s pearls draped in a single strand around her neck.

Interest replaced shock, which in its own turn was replaced by wariness. Had Eleanor fashioned this meeting?

When their eyes caught the rose in her cheeks was flushed high.

He stepped forwards and removed his hat, his fingers gripping the fabric so hard he wondered how it did not tear.

‘Lady Dromorne?’ Florencia lost her smile in the instant of his question and hid in the dark skirts, but Eleanor said nothing, the edges of her lips bound together as though she would not allow even the hint of an answer.

Emerald’s evasive dissembling was suddenly explained. She had set this whole thing up and Asher’s withdrawal from the trip five minutes before departure meant that he was also in on the plot. Lord, when he returned he would strangle them both. He swore he would.

Right now he needed to at least address the worry he saw so prominently in Eleanor’s eyes.

But how?

The wriggling bundle under the jacket of his coat solved the whole problem for, as a small black-and-white head poked out from beneath the lapels of his jacket, he saw in the wide smile on his daughter’s face an absolute delight.

She ran forwards, stopping only a foot or so away from him, the silver in her hair whipped by wind and for the first time ever he heard her speak.

‘Patch? You brought Patch here?’ A small hand reached out to tickle the dog’s nose, wonder in her eyes.

‘Florencia, this is Lord Cristo Wellingham.’

Cristo’s brows were raised, but he did not correct her. Not father, not papa, only a title that a child might or might not remember. The smile looked as fixed on Eleanor’s face as it was on his.

‘Hello.’ He brought out the squirming puppy and held it towards her. She took it immediately, cuddling it in the way only small children can, his pink tongue licking her chin.

When she laughed he saw a child so like him that there could be no possible question of her parentage.

‘I love animals.’

He smiled. ‘And what else do you love?’

‘I am learning to play the piano.’

‘Perhaps one day you might play it to me?’ He thought of his own Stein sitting at Graveson. It had been so long since he had played anything at all.

Eleanor saw that Florencia was unusually brave, this notice from a stranger overcoming her more normal shyness. Her feet scuffed the ground as the puppy jiggled and she saw Cristo take in the movement, the hunger in his eyes poignant. I have missed years, his expression said, and I am not going to miss another moment.

‘You could show Lord Cristo some of your drawings,’ she suggested. The bag Florencia often carried with her lay on the brick steps four feet away and she hurried to get it.

‘There is a seat just here.’ Eleanor indicated an old bench. ‘If you sat on his knee, it might be easier for you both to see, darling.’

Keep it light and easy and natural, Eleanor thought, her hand trembling as she handed her daughter the book. She was pleased when Florencia did as she was asked and stood before him and the look of wonder on Cristo’s face as he touched his child so carefully brought mistiness to her eyes. She made much of doing up the buckle of the bag as he made room for Florencia and the puppy on his lap.

‘This is our house,’ her daughter said after a moment, ‘and this is Papa. He is in Heaven because he likes being there now. This is Sophie in her yellow gown and Margaret in her blue one. They don’t live with us any more but they used to. And this is my dog.’

Eleanor craned her neck forward. A black-and-white dog who looked a lot like Patch gambolled on the page.

‘The dog she imagines, I’m afraid, as Martin was allergic to any pet hair.’

‘And is this you next to your mama? The beautiful girl with the princess locks?’

Florencia laughed and suddenly reached out to his hair, her small fingers threading through the colour. ‘Your hair is exactly the same as mine,’ she said before returning to the book and flicking the page.

Over their daughter’s head Cristo’s eyes met hers, a scar she had not seen before marking the skin beneath the left one. The fight on the docks had scarred him and she wished she might have touched it, wished she might have simply leant over and run her finger across the sharp angles in his cheek. But she sat there, listening to the explanations of each page and the interested comments that followed them until the book was finished, a chronicle of everyday life explained away in ink.

‘There is a stretch of grass just through those trees. I saw it in the carriage as we came in. Would you ladies like a walk?’

The question was addressed to Eleanor, but it was Florencia who answered.

‘Oh, yes, please, Mama. Please let us have a walk. I could take Patch.’

Eleanor weighed up her options.

‘Very well, but just for a few moments.’ She hated that part in her voice that sounded so stern and tight.

Cristo felt his daughter’s hand creep into his own as they made their way through the hedge and into the open ground.

Florencia was small and fragile like Eleanor, but that was where any similarity ended. Her hair and her eyes and the shape of her face were exactly his own and she played the piano as he did. A great weight of love tugged his heart into a different beat and he wished that they might have been truly a family taking in the air before going back home.

When Florencia skipped off to pick a bunch of daisies Eleanor was quick to use the moment.

‘I did not ever think that you would travel to High Wycombe.’

‘Indeed, Lady Dromorne, I may not have if I had known you to be here. In London when you did not return to help me I promised to forget you. But Emerald asked me to look at the property for her—a ruse on her part to get us together, no doubt.’

‘I could not come—’

He broke in. ‘Or write or send a messenger? It was only that I needed, Eleanor, and instead there was nothing.’

‘I could do none of these things you speak of because Diana, Martin’s sister, kidnapped me and took me up north. She fed me laudanum until a servant who had a brother in our London town house got word to Martin. By then you were free of all charges.’

‘Diana kidnapped you?’ He could barely take in the truth of what she told him. ‘Why would she do that?’

‘For her daughters’ sake, after I told her that you were Florencia’s father. She wanted the family reputation protected against scandal, you see, and thought that was the way to do it.’

‘Lord, you could have died. Where the hell is she now?’

‘In Scotland. She has promised not to return to London for a very long time.’

The silence between them grew; clearing her throat, Eleanor began uncertainly. ‘I realise that Martin came to see you and you made it very clear to him that you did not wish for any further communication between us.’

‘Your husband told you that?’

‘He did. I understand how very easily I could be an embarrassment to your family, but …’

The words were whipped from her as eyes of ice bored into her own.

‘I never gave Martin Westbury such a message. Dromorne said that you blamed me for everything and that you would not risk the life of Florencia again after the débâcle at the docks. He said that you wished me dead with all of your heart. I took that as the truth and withdrew.’

Eleanor shook her head. ‘Martin told you that?’ The sheer enormity of such a betrayal was impossible to contemplate. ‘I cannot believe that of him …’

‘He forbade me visit Bath under oath for as long as you resided there and said you never wanted to set eyes on me again. Given the events that had unfolded with Beraud, I assented. You appeared to enjoy a social life that kept you out till all hours, according to the newssheets, and never once tried to regain contact. It was hard to believe otherwise.’

‘He used us both, then.’

As she spoke he saw the girl on the bed at the Château Giraudon, her eyes full of hurt and despair, though when Patch gambolled back to jump at her skirts with his long black-and-white ears blowing in the wind her expression changed.

‘The dog was a lovely gift, but we cannot possible accept it, for a cousin of Martin’s will take over the Dromorne properties and I have yet to find a new home.’

‘Then he can stay with me until you are ready for him.’

She shook her head. ‘If the world sees you together with Florencia …’

He stopped her by placing his finger on her lower lip, the wind catching at her hair and throwing the length of chestnut back across her shoulders. For a moment he felt he could not breath with the sheer desire he felt for her, the bodice of her gown tight across breasts he had once fondled and suckled. The ache in his groin had him bring his coat farther across his thighs. God, he was becoming erect in the middle of the day with his daughter not ten feet from them. It was Eleanor who looked away first.

‘If people talk of the likeness between you, it will be difficult for all of us.’

He laughed and wished that he hadn’t as the line between her eyes deepened.

‘You worry too much, Eleanor, and I think already it may be too late for that. Did you think to hide her for ever?’

‘No. But I don’t want her hurt.’

‘I promise that she will not be.’

When he hesitated on the path she did the same, the distance between them lessened by the action. Reaching out his hand, he took her gloveless fingers into his own.

‘When was she born?’

Eleanor took in a breath. She had known, of course, that he would ask, that the facts hidden would soon not be and that a father had as much right as a mother to all the small details of childhood.

‘On July the first in 1826 in Aix-en-Provence. I travelled there after Paris. After that I went to Florence. Martin had offered help and I took hold of such a chance.’

‘Because you could not come to me.’

Not a question, but a rebuke. Of himself. Of his part in all that had happened. For the first time she thought of how young they both had been.

‘I needed a safe place, Cristo.’

He glanced up at the use of his name. ‘And if you had returned, I would have given you one.’

But she did not let him off so lightly. ‘A mansion that was renowned for its debauchery and its licentiousness and a kitchen whose food was counted by the number of brandy bottles lining its shelves? I think in truth that there are better homes for a little girl to be raised in.’

‘I’ll sell the Château Giraudon and buy a place in London for you. I have other money, too.’

‘No, she stays a Westbury until …’

Until you marry me.

Lord, she had so very nearly said it. Her hand came to her mouth and she was silent, though the determination that had kept her going all the way up here and through all the days of waiting for him to follow, began to gel.

The sheer negligence of care made her dizzy. ‘Until?’ His eyes were as dark as she had ever seen them, the pupils lost in ebony.

‘Until I marry again.’

‘You have someone in mind?’

‘Indeed, I do.’

‘That would be a mistake.’ The words were ground out before he knew it, his hands at his side clenched into fists. Westbury had been dead for less than a month and already she was lining up a successor? The papers from Bath suddenly came to mind. An Original. The toast of society. He wanted to throw her across his back and take her up to bed, now, without words, their bodies melded into one and for ever joined. He wanted to stay here in this ramshackle house in the little village of High Wycombe, away from everyone and everything.

But he could see in her eyes a misgiving that would need a more careful diplomacy. Changing tack, he came in from another angle.

‘Emerald no doubt sent us on such a wild goose chase for a purpose.’

Eleanor blushed and he stepped back.

‘Not both of us, then?’ He swore beneath his breath at the duplicity.

Eyes the colour of an afternoon summer sky met his. ‘The Duchess had guessed about your relationship with Florencia. When she suggested we should at least talk, I could hardly refuse to do so.’

‘My town house in London would have been a lot closer.’

‘And a lot easier to leave.’

‘My carriage is here.’

‘Actually it isn’t quite where you might think it, though of course I shall ask for it to be returned—’

He didn’t let her finish.

‘For a woman who has an intended groom waiting in the wings, you are astoundingly careless.’

‘A groom?’

‘The man you have just told me you have in mind to marry. Do you not think he would take offence at our being alone here?’

Surprisingly she smiled and the dimples in her cheeks were deep. Lord. The broadsheets of Bath had not understated her beauty one little bit. In London she had been swathed in pastels, caution and sorrow. Here, in the open air with her hair down and the generous spill of her bosom over a simple gown of mourning, she was unforgettable.

Cursing, he looked away, though not before he had seen a flicker of satisfaction on her face. The world spun into another angle as he mulled upon it. Could she have meant him to stay here for more than just talk? The magnitude of the plan hardly indicated fainthearted trepidation after all and any woman must have realised the danger inherent in such a proposition.

Alone, together, with the past between them and the present strewn across a need that had never settled.

He wanted her with a plain and utter hunger. Still, there were questions that he needed answers to; seeing that Florencia was a good distance away playing with Patch, he took his chance.

‘If I am alone with you in the house tonight, Eleanor, I doubt that I would have the temperance to sleep in a separate bed.’

‘Is that a warning, my lord?’

‘No, ma chérie. It’s a certainty.’

Florencia’s cry brought their attention to her.

‘Look, Mama. Patch is chasing his tail.’

‘Just as I am chasing mine,’ he murmured to himself and was again confused by Eleanor’s returning smile as she slipped from his side to view the puppy’s antics with their daughter.