Читать книгу Ruined By The Reckless Viscount - Sophia James - Страница 9

Chapter Two

Albany Manor, Kent—April 1816

‘Come to London with me, Flora. I am tired of you never being there and that ridiculous scandal from years ago is old news now. No one will remember it, I promise. There are far worse wrongdoings in society catching people’s imaginations. Your downfall is barely recalled.’

Her sister, Maria, had always been difficult to say no to, Florentia thought, as she finished the final touches of a painting depicting the faces of three men caught in dark light at a dinner table.

‘Roy will be there, too, and his mother. We will have a number of people all about us at every important social occasion. It won’t be like the last time at all, I promise.’

The last time.

Three years ago when Florentia had finally decided to step again into society the whole thing had been a disaster. No one had wanted to talk to her, though Timothy Calderwood to his credit had made an effort to try and converse before his new wife had pulled him away. The memory of it stung. She had felt like an outcast and even Maria’s marriage to one of the ton’s favourite sons, Lord Warrenden, had not softened her dislike of social occasions.

Shaking away the memories, Flora stood and took off her smock before hanging it across the back of her easel.

‘If I did decide to come, I’d need your promise that I can leave as soon as I want and return to Albany without argument.’

Maria smiled. ‘I’d just like the chance for you to see the worries you harbour are totally unfounded. You cannot possibly let the unlawful actions of one unhinged individual ruin your life for ever. A stranger. A man who has never been apprehended for the heinous deed and one who in all probability is long dead. It’s finished and over. You need to live again and find someone like I have. Roy has been a blessing and a joy to me. He has made me happy again.’

That certain look came across Maria’s face as she spoke about her husband of eighteen months with the true contentment of a woman in love and knowing it.

Placing the paint back in their glass containers, Flora wiped her easel with turpentine. She could not work in a mess and she hated waste. The yellow ochre had dribbled into the cobalt blue to make a dirty brown-green, the swirl of the mix blobbing on the cloth.

For over a year now she had been sending a new portrait every second week to London and to an agent she had acquired through word of mouth from Roy. Mr Albert Ward had been hounding her to come and visit him in the city to meet some of his private clients, many who had expressly asked for her by name to draw their portrait.

By name...? Well, not precisely, she thought, frowning at the mistake.

Mr Frederick Rutherford was making a splash in the realms of the art world with his dark and moody portraits, and his reputation was growing as fast as his list of prospective clients. A young man with a great future before him, if only he would show up at the events planned around his unique style of painting.

A sensation. A mystery. A talent that had burst on to the London scene unexpectedly and with a vivid impression of genius and worth.

The letters from Mr Ward were getting more and more insistent on a meeting face-to-face. The agent needed to understand what sort of a man he was, what had fashioned his sense of design, what had shaped him into a muse who could seemingly interpret the feelings of those he chose as his subject in each painting so brilliantly. Hopelessness. Loss. Grief. Love. Passion. Deceit. All the shades of human emotion scrawled across a canvas and living in the application of pigment.

Ward’s letter had been full of exaggerated prose and superlatives. The agent had seen in her paintings many of the themes that she herself had no knowledge of and yet her silence had seemed to propel him into a fiercer and more loyal promise.

It was worrying this temperament of his and Florentia often doubted if the ruse was even worth going on with, but as a woman bound by her past to never marry she had been somewhat forced into finding a vocation that did not include family and children. And she loved painting. If her life was not to follow the direction she once had thought it might have, she did not wish to be derailed into another that she hated.

It could be worse, for the money she garnered was supplementing her father’s lack of it and as Albany Manor was entailed the promise of a longevity of tenure was gone without a male heir. After her father’s death the Manor and title would pass to her deceased uncle’s oldest son, a fact that Christopher, the heir, reminded them of every time he came to visit.

She’d thought to send her youngest cousin Steven in her place to see Mr Ward in person, instructing him on his conduct and in what to say, but she knew for all his good points he was a tattlemouth. The fact that she had duped one of the prominent art critics in London in her role as Mr Frederick Rutherford would be gossip too salubrious to simply keep quiet about was another consideration altogether and she did not think her parents would be up to a further scandal.

So she was essentially bound to the charade she had thought up. Besides, a new idea had begun to form at the back of her head. She could go herself to London. A young artist who was slight and effeminate would not be much remarked upon and if she gifted him with a cough and a propensity for bad headaches and poor health she might not have to stay around anywhere for very long.

A quick visit might suffice to keep her hand in the game, so to speak, and with her father’s bouts of despondency that took him to bed often and her mother’s insistence in looking after him, she would have much freedom to move around.

Her sister could help her, too, for she had been in on the deception from the very start.

‘If I agreed to come to London, I would not wish to attend any major social events, Maria. If I went anywhere it would have to be something small and select.’

‘An afternoon tea then would be the thing to begin with. A quiet cultural affair at Lady Tessa Goodridge’s, perhaps, and afterwards a play in the Haymarket.’

Flora unbundled her hair and shook it free. She always placed it up when she painted in a messy and oversized bun fastened with two ceramic clips that she had been given by her sister.

Her good-luck charms, she called them, because after receiving them things had improved and she had survived. She smiled to herself. Perhaps that was putting too good an interpretation on it, she ruminated, for in truth she had become the sort of woman who was decidedly eccentric and superstitious. She’d been enclosed in the Hale-Burton country seat of Albany Manor for the last six years and had seldom ventured out, apart from her one sojourn to London, the small world she called her own allowing her much time completely alone.

She used to like people. Once. Now they simply frightened her. She could not understand them or interpret their true meaning. The inspiration for every portrait she had completed and sent to Mr Ward by mail had come from the pages of books of drawings in the extensive library at Albany. Fictional, altered or copied.

Save one, she amended, but then she did not think about that.

So many topics now that were out of bounds to her sense of peace. She wished she were different, but she did not know where to begin to become so.

‘We will go to the dressmaker in Bromley, Flora. She will fashion you some clothes and she is as talented as the expensive modistes in Paris. One of her patrons is a friend of mine and every person who ever orders a gown from her is more than delighted with it.’

Listening to Maria’s plans for their sojourn made the enormity of what she had agreed on to become real. Appearance was so important in the city and the old feelings of being not quite good enough resurfaced with a dread.

‘I don’t want anything fancy, Maria, and I shan’t be wearing bright colours at all.’ Last time their mother had insisted on gowns that were so dreadfully noticeable and so very wrong for their colouring. Since her abduction she’d never worn that shade of red again.

‘Roy prefers me in pastel,’ her sister was saying and even that sent a chill of horror down Florentia’s neck. Women in society had so little say in anything. They were mute beautiful things, needy and powerless. Well, the paintings had given her back her power and she knew that she would never willingly relinquish it.

‘I also need to visit Mr Ward in South London.’

Maria was silent, her brows knitted together. ‘He thinks you are a man, Florentia. How can you see him at all?’

‘It will just be quickly and I shall be dressed as Frederick Rutherford.’

‘I hardly think you could do that for it would be...scandalous.’

Flora laughed. ‘Well, I am an expert in that field by all accounts, so I should manage it effortlessly. I’ll wear Bryson’s clothes and his boots. They would fit me well.’

‘What of your hair? Mr Ward would not think that to belong to a boy.’

‘A wig and a hat would be an easy disguise. I can procure a moustache, too, and stuff paper in my cheeks to change the shape of my face. That should make me speak differently.’

‘My God, Florentia.’ Maria simply stared at her. ‘You have been thinking of this for a while? This dupe?’

‘The art of pretence lies in painting just as truly as it ever would in the world of acting. It just requires sure-mindedness, I think.’

‘And you truly imagine you could pull off such a character?’

‘I do.’ She smiled because her sister’s face was stiff with disbelief. ‘I’ve been practising, Maria. The walking. The talking. The sitting. I am sure I could be more than convincing.’

‘And what of the serving staff at the London town house of the Warrendens? I am certain they should notice if one moment you are a girl and the next a boy and goodness knows who they might tell. Your true identity would be all over London before we ever got to our next appointment if the stories of the gossip-mongering between the big houses is to be believed.’

‘Then perhaps I should simply go as Mr Frederick Rutherford right from the beginning. The Warrendens’ staff in London does not know me and it would completely do away with the need for new gowns and shoes. I shan’t have to even take a maid with me. I shall simply arrive as Mr Frederick Rutherford and leave as him with no questions asked.’

‘I don’t believe I am having this conversation with you, Florentia. You cannot possibly be serious.’

‘Oh, but I am, Maria. I have no wish to be out and about in society again, but I do have a need to continue selling my paintings. I could, of course, simply go up to the city alone and in disguise, but...’

‘No. If you are going to do this ridiculous thing I want to be there to help you, to make certain that you are safe.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You have forced my hand, dreadfully, but I do want to state quite forcefully that this is a terrible and dangerous idea.’

‘I know I can do it, Maria. Remember the plays we used to put on as children. You always said I was marvellous at acting my parts.’

‘That was make believe.’

‘As this is, too. It’s exactly the same.’

‘If you get caught—’

Florentia cut her off. ‘But I won’t. I promise.’

‘My God, I can’t believe I should even be considering this. I can’t believe you might talk me into it.’

‘Try, Maria. Try for my sake.’

‘All right. I’ll visit the wigmakers if you fashion a drawing of your wants and I can simply say it is for a play we are putting on at Albany for Christmas. Did you have a preference for a colour?’

‘Black.’ Flora was astonished to hear such certainty coming from her mouth. She could mimic Bryson because she had known him so very well, his habits, his stance, the way he walked and watched. His hair had been golden just like hers, so she needed something distinctly different.

‘And I would require some height inbuilt in the boots. I have seen that done so it should not be difficult.’

Maria groaned. ‘I cannot believe that we could even be contemplating this farce, Florentia. God, if we are discovered.’

‘It will never happen.’

‘Well, Roy needs to know at least. I will not lie to him.’

* * *

Flora walked to the stream late that afternoon through the small bushes and the flowering shrubs, through the birdsong and the rustle of the wind, through air filled with the smell of spring on its edge and the promise of renewed warmth.

She had always come here to think ever since the time she had returned in disgrace from London.

The glade reminded her slightly of the woods she had run through besides the North Road as she had tried to escape the carriage of the man who had abducted her.

Her kidnapper.

That was how she named him now and here she allowed him to come into her thoughts just as surely as she had banished him from everywhere else.

His smile was what she remembered most, slightly lopsided and very real. He had a dimple in his chin, too, a detail that she had forgotten about until, when painting from memory, she had rediscovered the small truths of him.

Beautiful. She had thought him such then and she still did now, his short hair marked in browns of all shades from russet to chestnut and threaded in lighter gold and wheat.

She wondered why she still recalled him with such a preciseness, but she knew the answer of course. He had died for a mistake, his own admittedly, but still... He was like a martyr perishing for a cause that was unknown, his blood running on the forecourt of the inn in runnels of red, the dust blending indistinctly at the sides so that it was darker. She had used that colour when she had drawn him, that particular red on the outlines when first she had formed his face and body on canvas and now even when the painting was finished the colour was a part of who he was, both his strength and his weakness.

She’d bundled up the portrait with its power of grace and covered it with a sheet before placing it at the very back of her large wardrobe. Often, though, she looked at him even as she meant not to. Often she lifted the fabric and ran her finger across his cheek, along his nose and around the line of his dimpled chin.

It made her feel better, this care of him, this gentle caress, this attention that she had not allowed him in life even after he saved her from the dogs and wrapped his jacket around her shoulders to deter the chill of spring.

Contrasts. That was the worst of it. The disparity of caring or not.

Her kidnapper had made her into a woman of detail and fear. He had changed her from believing in the hope of life to one who dreaded it. At times like this sitting in her private grove she wondered if perhaps this introspection was exactly the thing that made her take up the brush, for she had never lifted one until she had returned in shame to Albany Manor after her fateful London ruin.

Seeing yellow paint on her nail, she scraped it off with her thumb, the small flakes falling into drops of water caught on a green waxy leaf and turning the colour yellow. With care she tipped it over and the hue ran into the mud and the soil, swallowed up until it ceased to exist at all.

Like him. Perhaps?

Sometimes she imagined he still lived, scarred and angry, as closeted away as she was, afraid to be seen and exposed. Did a wife live with him now? Had he found a woman who might listen with her whole heart to the story of his narrow escape and then stroke his cheek in comfort, just as she tended to the image in the painting? A mistake to forget about, or to laugh over.

Crossroads for them both.

Him in death and her in life. Everyone seemed to have moved on since for good or for bad. Her father to his penchant for sickness, her mother in her willingness to play his nursemaid, Maria in her love of a husband who suited her entirely.

Everybody but her, stuck as she was in this constant state of inertia.

That was the trouble, of course, the puzzling hopelessness of everything that had happened. The scandal she could have coped with easily. It was the grief of it all that had flattened her. Everything for nothing.

Picking up a stick, she began to draw lines in the earth. Six lines for the years. She wanted to add a seventh because this next one would be no different. Then she embellished the lines with twelve circles each representing the months. Seventy-two of them. A quarter of her lifetime.

She wanted to live again. She wanted to smile and laugh and dance. She wanted to wear pretty clothes and jewellery and have long dinners under candlelight. But she couldn’t, couldn’t make herself take that first little step out and about.

It had got worse, her lack of air. In winter now she gasped and wheezed when she walked further than she ought to.

Sometimes she wondered if she were indeed addled by it all. Pushing that thought away, she concentrated on another.

Mr Frederick Rutherford.

With care she raised herself up on to her heels and walked across the clearing with a swagger, her head held high, her shoulders stiff. Then she ambled back, this time with a stick in hand shaped from a branch that she had stripped from a tree.

The accoutrements of a gentleman. Better. It felt more...right. So many parts made up a man, though. Stride. Voice. Arrogance. Certainty. Disdain.

She walked faster as though she was important, as though in the wasting of even the tiniest of seconds there lay a travesty. Men about town knew where they were going. They did not falter. They acted as though everybody might wish to know of them and their opinions. There was a certain freedom in being such a one as that.

Lengthening her stride, she tried again and again, all the while adjusting things slightly so that it felt more real, this person whom she was becoming.

She could do it. With spectacles to hide her eyes and a moustache to disguise her lips. A neckcloth tied in the high manner would see to the rest. The cane her grandfather had owned sat unused in the attic, just another prop to draw the eye away from her with its silver dimpled ball and dark walnut wood.

Everything was beginning to fall into bands of colour. Her wig. The clothes she would sport. The heightened leather Hessians that would easily come to her knees.

Like a painting established layer by layer, of substance and structure. Drawing the eyes. Finding the essence. Creating the illusion.