Читать книгу Ruined By The Reckless Viscount - Sophia James - Страница 11

Chapter Four

Winterton had agreed to everything Florentia had stipulated save the place to meet.

His note was in her hand, the letter stamped in wax and delivered that very afternoon.

His writing looked as beautiful as he himself was purported to be—a long slanted hand with an air of arrogance in the words alongside a tinge of question.

Dear Mr Rutherford,

I was pleased to receive your letter and would be most interested in your offer. I hope that my visage will indeed do your style a justice.

I would, however, prefer to have the painting completed here at the town house I am renting for the Season in St James’s Square. The light is good and I should enjoy it more than sitting for hours in the gallery of a stranger.

If you could give me by return post the time and day you would like to commence I shall have my carriage sent for you. Warrenden intimated you have been staying with his family on and off. Is this the location you would want to be met?

I look forward to our association on this matter.

Yours sincerely,

James Waverley

He had used neither his title nor his crest. The wax was of a plain sort one could buy for a smaller coin than the scented kind in any of the market places of London.

Not a man inclined to waste, then? Not a man who might lay his cards on the table either, for all to admire.

You should be careful of Winterton, Florentia. Her sister’s words came back. He is not a milksop lord who would be easily duped.

She swallowed. Well, she was not a milksop lady either. The shrieking sharpness inside her had been honed in anger for years and years and her kidnapper was a great part of that. To be thrown off into a netherworld and away from society made one more independent, more resourceful.

The commission of a portrait was a medium to understand Winterton, to weigh up her options, to evaluate which way her dice would roll and what pathway her vengeance might take.

Vengeance?

She had never imagined herself as a vengeful person, even the word made her slightly horrified, but if Lord Winterton was indeed her kidnapper then he had to understand the ramifications of what he had done to her, to her family, to her father in particular who had withdrawn to Albany Manor much changed after his flight north to save her.

Ruination came in a series of degrees, it came in sickness and sleeplessness and in fright. It came in the nights when she would wake in a sweat and wonder what else she could have done to make it different. It came in the mornings when she looked in the mirror to see the fear there lurking in her eyes and the dark sleep-deprived circles beneath them.

Maria had married and was talking of having children, but she herself had faltered, trapped in the horror of her history and hiding from all that it had exposed. She needed to see Winterton privately in order to understand what she might do from now on, what pathway to a better life she would follow.

Forgiveness might bring around absolution. She only hoped she could find such mercy within herself.

* * *

She’d dressed this morning carefully, in Frederick Rutherford’s clothes. She had jammed cloth down into the edges of her cheeks and practised breathing through her mouth so that her voice was more hollow and stuffed up. When she looked at her reflection she could barely remember the frightened woman she had been when she had first donned her disguise before coming to London. She seemed to have grown into the role in every way that mattered and was heartened by such a fact.

Lord Winterton had not seen her for six years and even then in the brevity and tenseness of the whole situation he probably had not observed her closely. These clothes would maintain her anonymity, she was sure of it.

As an added insurance she had placed a small paper knife in her left pocket wrapped in leather and within easy reach.

She knew she would not use it on him, but it was a protection to keep him at bay if all else failed. She would avoid confrontation if she could, but if it was impossible she at least wanted to have a weapon in order to escape.

Her sister knocked on the door and came in, her face set in an expression that told Florentia she was not pleased.

‘I think you should reconsider this whole mad scheme of yours, Flora. This may be the last chance for you to do so for once you are in that carriage—’

Florentia interrupted her. ‘I shall be fine. Winterton is hardly going to jump on a young and sickly artist. He is from society, for goodness sake, and a product of years of manners and propriety.’

This observation did not seem to alleviate her sister’s worries whatsoever, nor her own, in fact, given what had already transpired between them.

‘Manners and propriety are not words that come easily to my mind when I think of Winterton, Flora. I could come with you?’

‘No.’ They had had this conversation a number of times. ‘I do not need you there and from what I have read of the workings of a private commission it would be very odd to take an onlooker.’

‘But the whole thing is odd and you should not be risking the chance of discovery. There might be others there.’

‘He has said there would not be.’

‘He might be able to see through your disguise.’

‘Can you?’

‘Well, no. If I did not know any of this, I would barely recognise you myself.’

‘The painting shall take at the most four mornings. Twelve hours. After that I’ll have a good amount of money for Papa and Mama and me to live on. My reputation with Mr Ward will stay wholly intact as well and so hopefully more sales of work will follow.’

And I will know exactly what I am facing, for better or for worse.

‘I have already said to Papa that I can help, but he won’t accept it.’

‘Because it would be Roy’s money, Maria, and Papa is too proud a man to take it.’

‘Proud and foolish and if any of this leads to a problem for you I shall berate him for ever. I do hope you are not late back and if you need me at any time...’

‘I won’t.’

‘Roy said if Winterton hurts even one hair on your body he will kill him.’

Privately Flora wondered if her sister truly believed in this absurdity. Roy was slight and short whereas everything she remembered of the Viscount was the exact opposite. ‘I will bear that in mind.’

There were tears in her sister’s eyes.

‘Trust me, Maria. Please.’

The brown curls jolted up and down as she nodded and then the butler was there with Florentia’s coat and hat and she simply followed him out.

* * *

Winterton’s town house on St James’s Square was far grander than any she had ever seen before. Certainly the Viscount must be somewhere at the very top of the social tree and climbing higher by the moment if the tales Maria told were anything at all to go by.

Suddenly Flora felt less certain, the clothes she wore that had seemed like a shield at home were now only thin layers over the heart of her deceit. But it was too late to back out and when the man waiting at the bottom of the wide steps leading up to the house asked her to follow him in she did so.

Once at the front door a different and even sterner-looking servant indicated a chair just inside the reception hall and, taking her prepared canvas and the small satchel filled with paint and charcoal, Flora sat down to wait.

* * *

Thirty minutes later she was still there and the bravery garnered over years of hurt had dissipated into a much lesser force beneath the heavy ticking of a clock in the corner.

The same servant finally returned, his face as dismissive as before. A mere artist was not to be bothered with or coddled, she supposed. She was surprised she had not been dispatched around to the back door when first she had come, reasoning it would be the carriage, no doubt. Anyone who arrived in his lordship’s own conveyance was probably to be treated with some amount of care.

The room she was now taken to was darkened, the curtains pulled and a single candle glowing on the desk behind which a figure sat quite still.

‘Thank you for coming, Mr Rutherford.’ A hand gestured to the seat in front of him but he did not come to his feet.

Florentia sat as carefully as she could and as her eyes became accustomed to the dimness she saw exactly what she had hoped...and feared.

James Waverley, Lord Winterton, was indeed her kidnapper.

Still undeniably beautiful, but dishevelled somewhat, one pale and clear green eye wholly shot with red and his bottom lip split at the corner.

Her heart began to thump rapidly and she hoped the movement did not show through her clothing. The cloth at her neck felt as if it might rob her of all breath with its tightness. Please God let the asthma stay at bay, she found herself thinking, the catch in her throat worrying.

‘I have been indisposed, Mr Rutherford, and I apologise for keeping you waiting.’ The Viscount said this quietly and the voice was nothing like the one she remembered. It was hoarse and scratchy and deep.

Tipping her head by way of response, Florentia sniffed without decorum. The lump in her throat was so large she thought suddenly that she might just begin to cry. In deliverance? In shock? In the solace of seeing that he was alive and that her father had not killed him after all.

Years of guilt and anger melded into this one moment of utter relief. She swallowed a number of times to try to find a balance, uncaring as to what the Viscount might think of her and glad for the dimness in the room.

Another clock above the mantel beat out the seconds. This house was full of clocks, she thought, the sound of time passing, life disappearing by the second. Or rediscovered, she mused, the stoppage of life between them now running on again with a different rhythm, another truth?

The hand nearest to her lying on the table held deep bruising, the fight echoed on his face. The violence of such lacerations made the room seem smaller. Last time she had met him there’d been blood, too. And force.