Читать книгу The Cinderella Countess - Sophia James - Страница 11

This morning Belle did not take her basket. Instead she brought a book, tied in blue ribbon and inscribed. Rose stayed at home.

The Earl of Thornton was waiting for her in the entrance hall when she arrived at his town house. Today there was no other servant present and he took her coat and hat himself and hung them on the brass pegs to one side of the front door.

A gash across his temple was the first thing she noticed.

‘You have been hurt?’

‘Barely,’ he answered and swiped at his untidy fringe.

‘It looks like more than that to me, your lordship.’

‘Your patient is upstairs, Miss Smith.’

She smiled at the rebuke. ‘And your mother?’

‘Is behaving in her room.’

‘Did your sister eat anything yesterday?’

‘More than she has in weeks. She imagines you to be of the occult. A blooded witch, I think it was she called you.’

‘There is strength in such imagination.’

At that he laughed out loud and dipped into his pocket. A ten-pound note lay in his palm. ‘For you. You have done more in fifteen minutes for my sister than all the other physicians put together.’

‘Oh, I could hardly take that much, your lordship. Ten pounds is a fortune and more than many people in Whitechapel might make in a whole year.’

‘It is not for you, per se. I thought you told me yesterday you use your exorbitant fees for good in your parish.’

‘I would and I do, but...’

He simply leaned forward to extract the velvet purse from the pocket of her coat on the peg and slid it inside before returning it. She could do nothing but concur.

‘Thank you. I shall send you receipts for exactly what I have spent each penny upon. Your lordship.’ She added this after a few seconds.

They had reached his sister’s sitting room now, the place where Rose had waited yesterday, and he stopped.

‘I think you would do better to see my sister alone today.’

Taking a breath, Belle nodded and went in.

This morning Lady Lucy was not hiding from her, but sitting in her bed gazing out of the window. She looked small and thin and pale.

‘I hear you ate both lunch and dinner?’

The girl turned to her, anger in her eyes.

‘As I am not used to being threatened, I deduced it good sense to eat something, Miss Smith. Just in case.’

‘Then you would not mind if I read to you, either?’ Pulling the ribbons from the book, Belle sat unbidden on the seat at the side of the bed and opened the first page.

Mary, the heroine of this fiction, was the daughter of Edward, who married Eliza, a gentle fashionable girl, with a kind of indolence in her temper which might be termed negative good nature...

* * *

Half an hour later she stopped.

‘Who wrote this?’

Belle was heartened by the question. ‘Mary Wollstonecraft. The writer truly believed that feminine imagination could transport women from cruel circumstance.’

Silence abounded, the tick of a clock in the corner all that could be heard in the room.

‘I want to gift this book to you, Miss Staines. I hope we might discuss its possibilities next time I meet with you.’

‘When would that be?’

‘On Wednesday. That should allow you some time to come up with an opinion. An opinion I would value,’ she added, seeing the dark uncertainty in golden eyes.

‘I am not sure.’

‘Eat and read, that is all I ask of you. Food for the body and for the mind.’

‘How do you know my brother, the Earl of Thornton?’

‘I don’t, really.’

‘Where did you meet him?’

‘He came to my house in Whitechapel and asked me to visit you.’

‘He paid you?’

‘Very well. More than I am worth, probably.’

‘Are you always so honest?’

‘I find facing life head on is the best possible way of escaping difficulty.’

‘My mother would not think that way.’

‘Sometimes one needs to find confidence inside without being swayed by the influence of others.’

‘You talk like Thorn. Do you know that? He cajoles everyone to do his bidding and he is so clever he can always find the words. Mama says he is like our father, but I do not think this is true. He is a thousand times better.’

‘You love him?’

‘Everyone does. But he is as unhappy as I am.’

Lord, this conversation was going in ways she had no idea of and Annabelle hoped with all her heart that the Earl of Thornton was not outside listening.

‘Why are you so unhappy?’

The least she could do was to bring the focus back on her patient.

‘I have become a mere nothing.’

The heroine’s words from the book. Lady Lucy had been listening after all.

Belle lowered her voice. ‘Motherhood is the furthest thing from nothing that I know of.’

Her patient started at that and blanched noticeably. ‘Have you told him? My brother?’

‘No.’

‘Please do not. I need to think...’

With care Belle placed her hand across thin fingers. ‘I give you my solemn oath that I shan’t speak of your condition to anyone.’

‘Thank you.’

When she looked away Belle rose, tucking the book into the folds of cloth on the bed so that it would not fall.

‘I will see you on Wednesday.’

Outside she found Lytton Staines where she had left him, a drink in hand.

‘I hope this visit will be as successful as your last.’

‘I shall see your sister again next week, your lordship. There will be no payment required.’

‘Miss Smith,’ he said, a sound of exasperation in the word.

‘Yes, your lordship.’

‘I am an earl. Ten pounds is nothing at all to me and I shall pay you exactly what I think you are worth.’

‘Are you made of money, then?’ For a second he stood so close she could feel the whisper of his breath against her cheek as he replied.

‘Yes.’

She almost liked his certainty and his arrogance at that moment. He was a man who valued honesty just as his sister had said and he was kind. Of all the attributes in people, that, to Annabelle, was the most important.

‘I will also accompany you home.’

‘It is not necessary. I am quite capable of getting myself back to Whitechapel.’

‘I know you are, but I would like to see you safe.’

‘Very well.’

She stepped back and he led the way downstairs, the wound on his left temple beginning to discolour. She would have offered to tend it, but something told her that he would decline such an invitation.

A rich man, a brother, a son, an earl. A man with mistresses and with enemies. A man of generosity and cleverness, too. So many things that she now knew of him as well as so many things she did not. She wondered just what he might think of her?

‘Is my sister going to recover, do you think?’

He asked her this as the carriage slid away from the curb. Today it travelled slowly and she thought the Earl had had some hand in that, for he had been speaking with the driver just before they left.

Instead of answering his question she found one of her own. ‘How did your father die?’

Her words were bare and shock ripped across his face.

‘Why do you wish to know that?’

‘Your sister said something that made me wonder.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said that you were a thousand times better than he was.’

‘Hell and damnation.’

She could not believe that she had heard the Earl swear in front of her and thought he might apologise for it, but instead he turned to look out of the window as he spoke again.

‘He killed himself.’

He had asked her if she was a religious woman once and said that he did not put much stock in prayers. But she could see it did mean something, after all, for shock was etched on his face. He believed his father consigned to hell just as his sister did. A permanent banishment. An unchangeable tragedy.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Two Christmases ago. He gambled, you see, and lost. At least when I sit at the tables, I win.’

‘What did he lose?’

‘Balmain, the Thornton family estate. I got it back for him by the luck of a full flush a week later and he was not thankful.’

‘The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.’

‘Words from the Bible?’

‘And from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.’

‘You are a mine of information, Miss Smith. From witchery or just plain and constant reading?’

‘What do you think?’ She couldn’t add his title, not even if her life had depended on it, for here in the carriage there was a sort of equality that simmered between them and an energy that she had never felt with another.

‘I think you watch people and listen with your heart.’

‘You do that, too, my lord.’

This time he only smiled.

* * *

Belle steeped medicines and pounded tinctures and she charged nothing to a hundred patients who could afford very little. She brought warm clothing and blankets for the babies and she found packs of cards and puzzles for those with time to while away at the very endings of their lives. She paid for shoes that were not scuffed to within an inch of their existence and found oranges and fish fresh from the stalls in the market on Whitechapel Road. She noted down everything, every small and tiny charge, and sent the Earl of Thornton her reckoning two days before she was due to visit next.

Within an hour she had a message back.

That’s the best ten pounds I have ever spent.

She was pleased for such an assurance. His handwriting was strong and flowing, the b’s and p’s were fluted in a way that made her smile. She brought the paper to her nose and breathed in, the scent of ink the only thing discernible.

What had she wanted it to smell like? Him?

Swallowing, she placed the note down carefully on her desk and crossed to the mirror, peering at herself once she was there.

She was not beautiful, nor perhaps even mildly pretty. Her hair was unremarkable and she had a tooth that did not sit at the same angle as the others. Her eyes were also far too blue to be restful.

She spoke well, she read widely and she helped others. These were her attributes. Searching her mind, she probed for the other distant truth that lay hidden well away from sense.

She wanted the Earl to like her. With more than respect. More than esteem. She was enough of a woman to have read the books on filial love, and on lust and on sexual endeavour. She had devoured Fanny Hill by John Cleland and read the compendium of poetry by the Earl of Rochester, clandestinely, under her bed sheets at night. The novel Justine had come into her hands through a bookseller in London for whom she had made medicines and she knew the erotic works of the Greek poets Strato and Sappho. She was no prude even if she was still a virgin.

But she was lonely.

She was also thirty-one, almost destitute, nameless, without family, and inclined to strange dreams at night that made her question her sanity come the morning.

The sum of being abandoned sat on her like a weight, altering worth and condemning certainty. No man had ever come near her in the way of a suitor. Did she repel them or was she simply repellent?

These thoughts of wanting more and wanting it with a man like the Earl of Thornton were witless and unwise.

He had only ever looked at her in the way of an oddity, a woman who did not fit into any of the boxes the men of the ton needed their women to inhabit.

Appearance was not important to her and yet she was drawn to Lord Thornton’s beautiful face with an ache. The wealth of a person was also a factor that had held no real weight. Yet the Earl’s pounds had paid for things she would never have been able to procure otherwise, things that eased the wretched life of those struggling with very survival.

A conundrum and a puzzle.

She should take heed of his mother’s warnings and make certain that she was soon gone from the lives of the Thorntons. Yet she couldn’t. Lady Lucy needed her and, if truth be told, so perhaps did the Earl. To make him happier. To bring a smile across the sadness in his eyes.

They were right, these poets and novelists of long ago. The erotic hopes of a body were hot and heady things. Her hands ran across her breasts, nipples standing hard and proud.

She was not immune after all to the charms of men. No, she shook her head and rephrased. Not men, but one man. The enigmatic and beautiful Earl of Thornton. She knew it was stupid. But there it was. Unarguable.

* * *

Lytton smiled at the letter Annabelle Smith had sent him. Fish and stockings, blankets and coats were not things he usually read of, but each item here had been qualified with the person who had received it and that was what made it fascinating reading.

A young child with a chest complaint that was ongoing, a housewife pregnant for the eighth time in one of the winding and narrow alleys off the Whitechapel Road. An old soldier without a leg who was nearing sixty and needed a pack of cards to fill in the hours of a lonely day.

Numbers had always been simple things for him and if his father had squandered the coffers of the Thorntons’, then he had refilled them ten times over. Easily. But these pounds that he had accrued also lacked depth, no story behind them save that of an investment.

His mother’s voice brought him from his thoughts and he watched as she came into the room, a book in hand.

‘Have you seen what your healer has left Lucy?’

He looked up and shook his head as the small tome with blue ribbons was delivered with force to his desk.

‘Mrs Mary Wollstonecraft writes that men and women need educational equality and is critical of conventional women. If one were to believe in her premises, where would society be? Washed up, I tell you, each wife and mother attending to her own needs and not to those of her husband and her children. Books like this are a disgrace, Thornton, and one you need to be aware of and forbid when the insidious opinion comes beneath your own roof, crawling into your sister’s consciousness.’

For a moment he looked at Cecelia and wondered when it was his mother had changed from a gentle parent into this one? The death of his father, he supposed. It could not have been easy for a woman who would listen so carefully to gossip.

‘Perhaps returning to Balmain would be a good thing for you? Lucy’s sickness has not been easy for any of us.’

‘You cannot think I might leave her? My God, she is still at death’s door.’

‘I think we both know that is not true. She is eating again and her countenance is rosier. Certainly, we have passed the point of no return and Miss Smith has done wonders for her.’

‘Wonders?’ The word was whispered. ‘It is witchcraft she has employed and who knows how long such things truly last?’

‘Being grateful might bolster hope, Mama. Miss Smith is a woman who is an accomplished healer and there is no more to it than that.’

‘She knows things.’

‘Pardon?’ Lytton looked up.

‘Lucy says that she can read her mind and find out exactly what she is thinking. She says it is unsettling.’

‘Yet she still wishes to meet her. She told me so this morning, so it cannot be too uncomfortable.’

‘Your father would not have allowed it. Such a one in the house. He would have told her to leave the moment she tried to inveigle herself in to our family affairs and sent her packing back to Whitechapel where she belongs.’

‘He is dead, Mama. And has been for a good year and a half.’

‘Someone shot him. Someone broke into Balmain and shot him. I know it.’

For a second horror slid down the back of his neck. His mother was going mad and he had not noticed. How long had she been like this? He had been so busy trying to save the estate he had given his mother’s mental state little thought but Lucy must have known as well as David and Prudence. No wonder his oldest sister had disappeared off abroad and his brother was playing up at school.

A tumbling house of cards, he ruminated, and walked across to Cecelia, taking her hand as he led her to a seat by the window.

‘I want you to go back to the country. I will bring Lucy up in a week or two and spend some weeks there as well. You need to rest, for this has all been more than trying for you.’

Unexpectedly his mother nodded. ‘Perhaps you are right. I could garden and tend to my flowers and walk a little. The glade is always beautiful at this time of the year. When Lucy returns we can follow quiet pursuits.’

Patting her hand, he was glad as she calmed. ‘The carriage will be readied in the early afternoon and the family physician will accompany you just to be certain. Everything will be arranged so that you will not have to worry again and your great friend Isabel will be thrilled to have you back.’

After his mother had gone Lytton did another hour’s work to see to all the details of her journey before picking up the book and wandering into Lucy’s room. He found her up in an armchair that was slanted towards the sun. She wore a thick nightdress tied at the waist and her feet were bare.

‘It is fine to see you up again.’

Her smile brightened when she noticed him and brightened further when she glanced at the book he was carrying. ‘Mama took it away.’

He handed it back to her. ‘The stuff of treason, she thinks.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I have not read it, but there are movements afoot to cast more light on the inequalities of women. A lot of it makes sense.’

She undid the blue ribbons and found a dog ear on the top of one page.

‘Listen to this.’

With exaggerated care she read a few pages to him, her voice trembling with the tale of the woman she spoke of. When she had finished she placed the opened book on her breast and looked over at him.

‘It is saying that women need to have their own opinions and they are just as valuable as any a man might have. The story is a sad one and one of deceit and lies as the heroine and her friend try to come to terms with their life in a madhouse. Miss Smith says she wants to hear my opinion on the trials of women when I see her next.’

‘Well, it seems that you certainly hold one. Do you like Miss Smith?’

‘I think at first she frightened me. But she is strong. She does not take nonsense easily.’

‘Nonsense like witchcraft?’

‘You have been speaking with Mama? I made the mistake of telling her that perhaps Miss Smith was a witch when I first saw her and she took up this thought and would not stop speaking of it. I didn’t realise how much anger she suddenly seems to be full of, though Prudence had warned me of it before she left.’ She hesitated for a moment and then continued. ‘I was wondering if I could ask Miss Smith to stay for morning tea when she comes. I know how busy she is, but the cook could make her famous scones and we have the raspberry jam from last year’s crop at Balmain.’

‘Of course. I won’t need the carriage so she can be taken home in it afterwards.’

‘Will you be here to join us?’

Lytton shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have a meeting in the city which is important.’

‘But if you can be here, would you?’

‘I will try.’

* * *

In the afternoon Lytton visited the Thornton family banker and was reassured by the state of the finances. He knew the numbers himself, of course, but since attaining the Earldom he had been very careful to check every detail of his investments. He did not trust anyone.

He had a family to look after, thousands of acres of land to tend, servants and workers to provide for. The days of being careless were over, he had accepted that on the death of his father.

The keeping of a mistress was a lot less persuasive than it had once been as well. Susan Castleton had sent him copious notes trying to win back his favours, but he had replied to none of them.

He had heard from Edward how his name had been slandered by her in society, but that was the least of his worries. After the weeks of his sister being so sick, to have a glimmer of light in the future was gratifying and he did owe it to the unusual Miss Annabelle Smith.

Her vibrant blue eyes watched him in memory and for just a second he wondered what it would be like to have her beneath him tumbling into his bed.

The shock of that brought him to a standstill. There was no way in the world that he could enjoy her like that. The next woman he bedded would have to be his wife and she would need credentials and breeding that were incomparable to become a countess.

Still, the vision of Annabelle Smith naked with her dark curtain of hair falling around them was hard to shake off. Was she a virgin? Had she any experience with the pleasures of the flesh? God, even that thought had him hardening, here in the street with the daylight of London all about him and myriad shoppers walking past.

He could teach her everything he knew, every nuance of desire.

‘Thorn.’ The voice came through a haze and he turned to find Summerley Shayborne crossing the street to reach him.

‘You look preoccupied.’

He smiled. ‘I’ve just come from the bank.’

‘Good news?’ Shay knew of the trouble he’d been in last year with the estate when things had been turned upside down.

‘Everything is fine and long may it stay that way.’

‘You’re the new and shining light of the financial world, I hear. An earl who seems to be able to pinpoint a lucrative investment without comparison? Most peers are holding on to the family plot by their fingernails, but it seems your latest project has just come through with flying colours.’

‘The canning factory outside London? People need to eat and preserved fruit and vegetables are within the budget of most. Every large town in England by the end of the year will sport such a factory. Come in with me as a partner. I’ll get Lian and Edward on board as well.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘I am.’

‘When can we draw up the contracts?’ Shay looked excited.

‘Next week. But keep it quiet for I don’t want someone else beating me to the post.’

‘Have a drink with us now, then. Celeste is at the town house and we would love your company.’

‘Very well.’ He hailed his carriage and they both piled in.

Lytton had always admired Shay’s wife. She was tough in a way that intrigued him and beautiful enough to take his breath away every time he saw her.

She also was nothing like the bride that the ton had thought the lauded Summerley Shayborne, Viscount Luxford, would choose for himself.

* * *

‘You said you would come to Luxford in the early summer, Thorn, but you didn’t.’ Celeste looked puzzled.

‘I’ve been at Balmain for quite a few weeks because my sister has been sick. We have only just returned to town.’

‘I’ve heard that just lately she is making some sort of a recovery?’

‘I hope so. I have engaged a healer to try to coax her out of bed where she has been languishing. Miss Annabelle Smith from Whitechapel is her name and she seems to be making quite a difference.’

‘The herbalist? She is the woman my lady’s maid was speaking of so highly the other day, Summer. I should very much like to meet her. Is she at your town house this week seeing your sister?’

‘Tomorrow she is, but only very early. At nine. She keeps unusual hours.’

‘Could we call in? It might be my only chance to talk with the woman and she sounds more than fascinating.’

‘Well, I don’t see why not.’

Lytton had organised a meeting for the morning, but he supposed he could cancel it. His thoughts from earlier on had not left him and he felt...anxious. He could not quite imagine Annabelle Smith chatting about things with his sister and Celeste over jam scones and a cup of tea. He wondered, too, if Celeste had read any of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft?

* * *

It was her birthday.

Well, her birthday as Tante Alicia had deemed it given she was four when she had turned up in the French village without any past whatsoever.

The third of July. A hot morning in the village of Moret-sur-Loing when a nun had delivered a sick child to the house of the local healer and pleaded for the girl to be taken in.

This much she did know for Alicia had retold this story over and over and never a mention of the people who had abandoned her.

Annabelle had celebrated today with a new pair of stockings and a fresh orange. She had also fashioned her hair a little differently this morning, doing away with the heavy scarf and pinning it about her face. The curls escaped, of course, but rather than detracting from the whole picture she thought that they added to it. For some reason today she felt lighter and happier than she had in months and the sun above was a part of that, too.

She hoped Lady Lucy had read the book she had given her. She hoped she had kept eating, too. If she had, then the change in her from last week to this one should be more than noticeable.

A carriage standing before the Thornton town house had Belle frowning. She did not recognise it and hoped that there were not visitors who would take away time she would have with the Earl’s sister. The horses were most handsome and the liveried driver on the box seat tipped his hat at her.

‘Morning, miss. It’s a fine day outside, to be sure.’

She smiled back at him and made her way up the steps, the door opened by a servant she had not met before.

‘The master is expecting you, miss. He is in the blue salon. I will take you through.’

Dispensing with her coat and hat, she followed him and heard the conversation between a group of people getting louder by the moment.

She stopped and the servant looked around.

‘I think there has been a mistake. I am here to see Miss Staines only. I have been attending to her medical needs.’

‘You are Miss Smith, are you not?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then, you are to come right this way.’

Belle straightened down her skirts as she went, a sort of dawning horror rising in her stomach. She did not wish to meet other guests of this house. She would not be accepted by anyone in society and surely the Earl of Thornton would know this.

The door opened. The Earl stood by the mantel with two strangers, a beautiful woman and a tall and handsome man. When the Earl saw her he excused himself and came to her side.

‘I thought before you went upstairs to see my sister you may like to meet Lord and Lady Luxton.’

Belle took in a breath. This was a situation she had not come across before and she was silent as she watched for cues.

‘Miss Smith.’ The woman spoke first. ‘I am Celeste Shayborne and I have heard much about your ministry in Whitechapel. My husband is most interested in hearing about it, too.’

As if to underline this as a truth the man beside her nodded.

‘It seems your fame proceeds you, Miss Smith.’ Lord Luxford spoke now for the first time, though Belle wondered at his tone. He did not sound quite as pleased as his wife. The social conventions worried her.

Should she curtsy before this lord as she spoke or was that unnecessary?

‘Mine is a small clinic but in an area where there are many supplicants. I am quite perplexed that you have even heard of it.’

* * *

She used her voice like a weapon, Lytton thought, the low and husky tone surprising, but not as surprising as the King’s English that she now spoke. Her voice had never held tones of the East End, though, and had always sounded quite refined.

If he had closed his eyes just then, it could have been any one of the titled and well-brought-up ladies of the ton talking. He saw the interest in Celeste’s eyes and the curiosity in Shay’s.

‘Who are your parents, Miss Smith?’ Celeste was never one to refrain from trying to decipher a puzzle and she asked the question baldly.

But Miss Annabelle Smith failed to answer, turning to him instead and finding a query all her own.

‘I do hope your sister has recovered a little in the days since I have seen her, your lordship?

Now this was interesting, Lytton thought. There were secrets here and he could tell that Celeste had determined it exactly the same.

‘Miss Smith gave Lucy a copy of the Mary Wollstonecraft book, Celeste, and my sister has been most taken by the things the author wrote of.’

‘Oh, I, too, have read her books and most heartily agree with the sentiments in them.’

* * *

Belle did not feel quite up to arguing for the rights of all women no matter what their station in life so she stayed quiet. She was feeling her way here and the truth of her being from Whitechapel’s mean streets felt like an enormous stumbling block. She had not recognised this in the company of the Earl or even of his sister. But when society came crashing down upon her in a refined drawing room as it had here there was no getting away from it.

She did not fit.

A headache had begun to form behind her eyes and she prayed to God that the jagged lines of a worse malady did not reappear. Not until she could get home at least. She felt sweat run between her breasts and the fine beading of it on her top lip.

The Earl saved the day by asking her if she wanted a drink, leading her across to a cabinet where an array of bottles stood on top of a polished mahogany counter.

She had never tasted true liquor in all of her life and searched for something non-alcoholic.

‘The white wine is very good.’ The Earl lent down and said this quietly.

‘Only a small glass, please.’

He poured it with the sort of ease people used to heavy drinking must be wont to do. She did not really know, for her aunt was a teetotaller and any alcohol in the house was reserved for medicines. The devil’s brew, her aunt had often said, and there was enough evidence around Whitechapel for them to believe in such a truth.

A cup of tea would have been welcome, but she felt she could not ask. The smile she sported hurt her cheeks and she wondered how much longer she could manage to keep it up. She wished she might excuse herself and go upstairs to see her patient.

‘Celeste and Shay are friends of mine.’

‘I see, your lordship.’

‘Very good friends.’

She looked up and caught his glance. What did he wish her to say? And what was he telling her?

The tumble of the unexpected was confusing, terrifying even, and she measured her breaths with a rigid count. These people knew of her and her clinic, they understood she was from poorer stock and they were still attempting to be friendly. She took a sip of the wine and then another, surprised by the strength of its taste.

Still, it was wet and it gave her something to do. In a moment she had finished the lot.

‘Would you like more?’ A frown dashed into golden eyes as she nodded.

‘Thank you.’

This time she drank more slowly as he led her back into the room. It was relaxing her now, this white wine. For the first time in ten minutes she felt as if she might be coping.

‘Where did you learn your healing skills, Miss Smith?’

Celeste Shayborne’s voice had the lilt of another country in the words. French, perhaps. She recognised the cadence.

‘My aunt is a herbalist. She taught me.’

‘It must take a long time to learn?’

‘Years and years. I am still learning now and Tante Alicia is sixty-three and she says she does not know it all yet either. She has tried her hardest to teach me, though, in the hope that such knowledge will not be lost and I could be the one to hand it down to the next generation.’

Goodness. Had she said too much? She tried to remember every word she had uttered and found that she couldn’t, a barrier between her and the world.

It was the wine. Placing her near-empty glass down on a table, she wished again that she could have asked for tea or coffee, anything to neutralise the rising warmth that was worrying.

Control was slipping and with it reserve.

‘Your aunt is French?’ Celeste Shayborne clapped her hands. ‘Do you speak the language?’

‘A little,’ she said before she thought, for Lytton Staines had heard her using it on that very first day they had met after Stanley had torn his waistcoat. He would know that what she said was a lie, but she did not want the next questions that might rise with such an honesty.

The Earl’s voice broke her panic and she was pleased for his words.

‘I think something non-alcoholic might be useful.’ He poured a large glass of lemonade and handed it over.

Relief flooded into panic. She would be all right now. She would manage.

Exhaustion swamped gratitude and then sadness overcame that. So many emotions in so very few seconds she could hardly keep up. If she were at home she would lie down with a pillow across her head to keep out the daylight and she would sleep until the headache left her. Sometimes she took sulphate of quinine if it were severe, or cinchona bark or valerian. But there was nothing here that was remotely like anything she needed. She could see Celeste Shayborne looking at her with a frown in her eyes and even the Earl gave the impression of worry.

‘I am quite all right. It’s only a headache and I have them all the time. The wine was strong, too, and it’s still early in the morning...’

A further glance from Thornton told her that her admission had been unexpected, inappropriate even, and her words tailed off. Shaking her head, she tried hard to find a balance.

‘Perhaps on reflection I might be wise to leave. It seems that today is not a good day and I think I may need to go home and sleep.’

Another faux pas and had she just spoken completely in French?

‘I think my headache is worsening and when that happens I am never good company.’

Goodness, now she was switching languages, the words blurring into each other, skipping over tenses and trailing into gibberish. She could not be quite sure she had pronounced any of them properly.

‘So I bid you au revoir.’ She had not seen Lady Lucy as she had promised, but did not feel at all up to it. She would come back tomorrow when she felt she might manage.

The Earl’s arm was around her waist now and she allowed him to lead her to the door. Once in the entrance hall he found her hat and coat and then took her out to the carriage that he had asked to be brought around. Inside the conveyance, cocooned in silence and the comfort of the squashy leather seats, she breathed out.

‘I am sorry.’

‘For what.’

‘For creating a spectacle. For being vulgar.’

‘I hardly think you were that, Miss Smith. Entertaining is more the word that comes to mind.’

‘You are kind.’

‘Often in life I am not.’

She ignored that. ‘Your friends were kind, too.’

‘Have you ever drunk wine before?’

‘No.’

‘God.’ His laughter was not quite what she expected.

‘I hope as a consequence you don’t want your ten pounds back now for I have spent it already.’

‘I know of that. You sent me a note, remember. I did not realise that small sum of money could purchase so much. I commend you, Miss Smith.’

‘Belle.’

‘Pardon.’

‘Belle. You can call me that. Everyone else does. It means beautiful in French, but I do not think she should have named me such for I am not.’

‘Hell.’

‘You are swearing again, my lord Earl. I’m not sure you should. It is more than rude and, while I am not a high-born lady, I am still a woman.’

He knocked on the window and the conveyance stopped. ‘Take the long road around London for at least an hour, Barnes, and stop at the next shop that sells lemonade.’

‘Lemonade, my lord?’

‘In a very large bottle.’