Читать книгу Seduction in Regency Society - Sophia James - Страница 13

Taris arrived back in London in the early afternoon and he was worried. A report on the carriage accident had come to him a few weeks back and it was not as simple as he may have thought it.

The axle had been cut, sawed through to within an inch of the circumference, the shearing off of the wheel a deliberate and callous action from someone who wanted to create mayhem. Well, he had. One man was dead and the driver’s fingers would never be right again, banishing the man and his family to penury for the rest of his life.

Well, not quite, his thoughts so akin to high drama that they made him smile. He had offered the man both a job and a cottage at Beaconsmeade, the substantial property he had inherited from his uncle three years ago.

Who the hell did the person responsible want to harm? Was it him? He sifted through memory. In his life there had been many things he had done that might invite such an action. Yet why now and why there in the middle of a county he seldom visited? Who else, then, could have been the target? Not the innocuous and timid mother and son, he decided, or the sensible and level-headed Mrs Bassingstoke. Perhaps the perpetrator had achieved his goal, then, with the demise of the snoring gentleman? He ran his fingers across his eyes and felt the beginning of an ache that was familiar around his left temple.

He tried not to remember that night in the snow, tried not to wonder what had happened to Beatrice-Maude. It was better she slipped into the delight of memory, a favoured recollection when everything else had faded.

Lord. He had not had a woman apart from her in over two years, the sheer difficulty of arranging it all and appearing ‘sighted’ too impossible to contemplate. Easier to lie in bed and just remember, he decided, for the number of people who actually knew his vision to be so poor could still be counted upon one hand.

Asher. Emerald. Lucy, Jack and Bates. A profound sense of shame and inadequacy rubbed up against anger. Five people were all that he wanted knowing of it too. Just them. He did not wish to walk into a room and feel that others judged him on what he could not see. He had always been a physical person, a fine shot, a good horseman, a man who had used his world from one wide edge of it to the other.

To be reduced to dependence and vulnerability would be…He could not even find a word for what he thought, could not dredge from the sheer and utter terror of his situation a phrase to encapsulate the horror.

He tried to keep his forays into society at a minimum and he hated the busy rush of cities. Tomorrow, however, he had an appointment with his lawyer and needed to be there early. He preferred Beaconsmeade and the rolling greenness of the Kentish countryside, places he could walk and work and where the air smelt clean and breathable and infinitely less defiled.

Listening to the horses’ hooves on the first paved stones of the town, he counted the corners.

Fifteen.

The Carisbrook town house should almost be in sight now. Securing his cane, he prepared for the carriage to stop. Bates at his side was doing the same.

‘You have no plans at all for this evening, sir. I did not accept the Claridges’ invite as you instructed me to, though your brother wrote to inquire whether you would be there.’

‘He is almost as reclusive as I am and he only wants to know of my absence to make sure of his own.’

‘There is, however, a ball at the Rutledge mansion tomorrow evening at which you are expected to appear.’

Taris frowned, trying to understand why his presence should be in any way necessary.

‘The Earl of Rutledge is a supporter of the Old Soldiers’ Fund, a charity of which you are the principal patron, sir. I did remind you last week of the affair.’

‘I see. Could I not just pledge a great deal of money—?’

‘The Duke of Carisbrook put your name forward to speak, sir.’

Damn, Taris thought. Asher and his efforts to get him out and about! Sometimes he could happily strangle his brother for his meddling, born out of guilt.

‘Very well, then.’ Acquiescence was easier than the alternative of making a fuss and he made himself dwell on other things. It would be good to see Ruby, Ashton and Ianthe, for it had been all of a month since he had seen his nieces and nephew. He hoped Emerald’s man Azziz would also be down from Falder, for he enjoyed a game of chess.

Family. How it wound around isolation with determination and resilience, the irritations of prying a small price to pay for all that was offered.

As the horses prepared to stop he readied himself to alight. There were many things he could still do and the familiarity of the town house made it possible for him to enter it without assistance.

Morton, the family butler, was the first to greet him, taking his hat and cloak at the door.

‘Welcome back, my lord. We heard that the weather in the south has been kind the past month.’

‘Indeed it has, Morton. Perhaps I might persuade you to have a sojourn at Beaconsmeade…’

The servant laughed. This discussion was one they had had for years, the head butler not a man with any love for country air.

The sound of voices from the downstairs salon stopped him in his tracks, and as he made his way from the lobby he tilted his head. Not just any voice! He felt the tension in him fist, hard-stroked against disbelief.

Mrs Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke was here! Here. Ten yards away, her honeyed husky voice with the slight soft lisp, speaking with his sister-in-law. His fingers tightened across his cane and he wished he had not left his hat with Morton. Concentrate, he admonished himself, as he counted the steps into the room.

Beatrice lifted the cup of tea to her lips and sipped, refusing the offer of sweet cakes from the maid as she did so.

Emerald Wellingham opposite her was charming, but there was an undercurrent of something she could not quite understand. A slight anxiety, if she had to name it, and a decided watchfulness.

‘Your soirees are gaining the favour of all of society here in London. It seems that we have been bereft of fine debate in our town for far too long.’

‘Debate or controversy, your Grace? There are some who might say such opinions serve to alienate reason.’

‘But I am not one of them, Mrs Bassingstoke. And please do call me Emerald.’

Beatrice nodded. ‘You have a beautiful name. My first name merely makes people grimace. Beatrice-Maude. The names of my two grandmothers lumped together, I am afraid, and hardly charming like your own.’

‘Can they be shortened?’

This was the second Wellingham to ask her such a thing! She felt the sheer weight of it as an ache.

As in Bea-yond. As in Bea-utiful or Bea-witching! She had never said her name since without remembering…

‘Bea?’

The voice from behind made her start. His voice. Here? The tea that she had been holding spilt down the front of her dark burgundy gown as she turned, feeling the Duchess’s gaze on her own.

Taris Wellingham came forward with the movement of a man who had had too much to drink, catching the edge of the partly opened door with his shoulder and jerking back and around to lose his footing and fall heavily against the solid mahogany side cabinet. As he flailed to find a true direction his head tilted as if listening and his eyes looked strangely disorientated.

Swearing, he began to search the floor with his hands and Bea was instantly taken back to the days before her husband’s turn. The days when Frankwell had imbibed too much whisky and had come home in exactly the same fashion.

Hollowness consumed her, and the impact of everything made her shake. The way he held himself against the line of the door to steady his balance, all expression on his face devoid of warmth even as he hoisted himself up, the beginning of a bruise that would show full dark upon his cheek on the morrow matching the tendrils of his hair loosened from the queue at his nape.

Years of living with a difficult man tumbled down on Beatrice-Maude in that one small isolated moment. Long years of anguish and guilt, her unpredictable sham of a marriage wrung into one dreadful feeling.

Panic!

To get away. To run from one who had caught at fancy and hope and imagination, yet was blighted with the same curse her husband had been dammed with.

She needed to escape, to be back again in the world of freedom and ideas that had just opened up to her, her autonomy and lack of restraint so far from the endless dread of hurt inflicted by a brandy-loosened temper.

‘I must go.’ Setting down her cup with a rattle, she hated the sound of alarm so easily heard in her voice.

‘Perhaps you do not remember my brother-in-law…’

‘Of course I do.’

Pushing past them both, Beatrice-Maude did not stop even to retrieve her cloak from the astonished servant at the front door. Outside she took a breath of cold air and simply ran, for the corner, for her home, for the safety of her rooms away from anyone, the hat in her hands unfastened and the gloves in her pocket unworn.

‘Well,’ Taris said as the silence inside the town house lengthened, ‘I presume that means she does not favour the nickname Bea.’

Emerald laughed, though there were tears in her voice when she replied, ‘I thought she was a sensible woman. I thought that she had impeccable manners and for the life of me I cannot understand what just happened.’

‘At a guess I would say she saw I lacked sight.’

Silence confirmed his suspicions. Emerald might be able to see what he could not, but he could hear what others never did.

Fear. Abhorrence. And the need for flight.

He made himself smile, made his face carefully bland, the anger that was building hidden behind indifference even as his left cheek throbbed.

‘Mrs Bassingstoke did not know before?’

‘It was night,’ he returned.

‘And you are good in the darkness!’

‘Precisely.’

‘So good that she could spend the whole time with you and never guess?’

‘It seems that is true.’

‘I think I hate her for this.’ Her voice was small, the anger in it formidable. ‘And everything that happened today is my fault. Ashe told me to leave it alone.’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘And now you despise me.’

‘Hardly.’ His left hand went out to feel along the lintel of the door, the shadows in the room long with darkness. For the first time ever he felt…nearly blind, the infinite gloom pressing down almost as a living thing. Intense and pressured, the foreverness of it just around the corner.

Where was Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke now? How had she got home? Was home far? Would she be safe? The faint smell of flowers lingered in the air beside him and he breathed in hard, trying to keep her close and angry that he should even think to do so.

Beatrice sat on the side of her bed and cried. She did not try to be quiet, she did not wipe her tears away with a dainty handkerchief. She did not care which servant might eavesdrop or which friend calling in the afternoon might overhear her howls of anguish.

She just cried. For everything that had happened. For her appalling manners and her incredible rudeness, for the lack of control in Taris Wellingham’s movements and for the knowing look of complicity on his sister-in-law’s face.

The man she had admired was a drunkard!

Everything that had held her up in the past months was lost. Her confidence. Her belief in herself. Instead she was tossed back to the time when she had been completely at the mercy of the moods of a man whose anger or temperance depended on the amount and strength of the drop he had imbibed.

A few beers and he would drag her to his room. A few more and he would hit her. And a few more than that…

Never again. Never, never again!

Using the sleeves of her gown to wipe both her nose and her cheeks, the quick swipes threw her back to Ipswich and the house there.

Frankwell had been a big man and a bully, though after his apoplexy he had become kinder, his mind not quite remembering who it was she had been.

His wife. The positions changed over only a matter of weeks and the man with no family at all save her was as dependent as a three-year-old. There was no choice in any of it. There was no help to garner, with his finances tied to a lawyer who was living well on the interest of the Bassingstoke money just as long as the main recipient of it was alive.

And the last years had slipped by with all the hardship of twice their number, the factories belching out high-grade iron even with an absentee owner at their helm.

Her life became days and weeks and months disappearing into the drudge of looking after a husband she had hated. Suddenly Beatrice was overcome with everything. With the past and the present and the future and she could not breathe, could not take the proper amount of air without the stinging contracting ache in the back of her throat stopping everything.

‘Mama,’ she whispered and thought of her parents, dead by the time she had reached the tender age of seventeen and thankfully unaware of the type of man that they had chosen for her husband.

The joy of the night in the snow came unbidden, taunting and mocking against the reality of what had happened today.

Today she had understood that the fatuous dreams of an ageing widow were destined to remain ever that, her life divided into before and after one perfect night.

Because now she knew and that was the very worst of it! Now she had had a taste of what it was to be delighted and pleasured and cared for, the impossible hope sending her into new fits of sobbing.

A knock on the door made her stop, as she pressed her lips together and frantically rubbed at her eyes.

‘Yes. Who is it?’

‘It’s Sarah, madam. Might I come in?’

Looking at her face in the mirror as she stood to open the door, Beatrice grimaced, her eyes swollen and her cheeks blushed.

Sarah, her maid, stood at the door with a worried expression. ‘Cook says that we will be having chicken tonight and he will prepare it in just the way you like it.’

‘That will be lovely. Thank you, Sarah.’

‘If there is anything any of us could do to help, ma’am…’

‘I would certainly tell you if there was. Thank you again.’

Shutting the door, Bea felt like a woman who had let everybody down. She had had many servants before, of course, but never ones that had become her friends as these ones had.

Still, today she could not find it in herself to speak of anything, her disappointment in the character of Taris Wellingham such a calamity that she could barely believe it.

Was his over-drinking something that was known in society? It was only mid-afternoon and very early to be so befuddled and yet she had never heard even a whisper of it.

She breathed out and crossed to the window. The park opposite was filled with people, laughing happy people. People with lives that were so different from her own! Placing her palm on the glass, she enjoyed the momentary impression of cold and the frosted outline left when she removed it. Still here! Still attracted to men who could bring her nothing save heartache.

‘Taris.’ She whispered his name into the dusk. Strange that she had not smelt the liquor upon him as he had entered the room, which was something she had become adept at doing when Frankwell had returned home after a night out. No, all she had smelt was the tang of masculinity with an underlying hint of an astringent soap.

She wished she had not accepted Emerald Wellingham’s offer of afternoon tea because then she might have never known…

‘Stupid,’ she chided herself, and, tying back her hair, decided to spend the rest of the evening cataloguing her new books.

She saw Taris Wellingham again in the Book Society Library the very next afternoon, perusing the shelves with another man she did not recognise.

Today his clothes were immaculate and worn in the fashion of one who did not place too much importance on the way a cravat was tied or any other such frippery. The bruise on his cheekbone, however, had darkened and swollen.

It was too late for her to stand and make her way out as he was only a few feet away and coming closer. Consequently she merely sat, pasting what she hoped was an expression on her face that would relate the disappointment she felt in what had happened yesterday.

He passed her by without acknowledgement, and so close that she could hear what it was they were talking about.

Fox hunting and the hounds used at a ‘meet’.

The cut direct! She grimaced. In all honesty there were many after all who might consider the inability to stop heavy drinking as a small thing, and others who might laugh at the notion of a man who would lose himself in the unmindful disregard of drink. But these people could not have lived with someone whose very personality was being eaten away by it, exposing layers beneath that were hardly humorous.

As she had! She decided that to say nothing would be an act of cowardice on her behalf.

‘Excuse me, Lord Wellingham?’

He turned immediately and waited, as did the man with him. ‘Mrs Bassingstoke.’

‘I wondered if I might have a moment alone with you, sir?’

‘ Jack.’ Said with all the authority of a dismissal to the man next to him. Beatrice remained silent until the other was out of hearing range.

‘I would like to apologise for my behaviour yesterday, my lord. I realise that it was most unacceptable to leave a room in such a fashion, but in my own defence I might say that I have had some unfortunate experiences in my life because of heavy drinking.’

A heavy frown marred his forehead. ‘I was not—?’

She didn’t let him finish. ‘Denial is one of the first signs that something is amiss, as I am sure you must be aware.’

‘You think I cannot manage my drink?’

‘The poor effect it has on your balance is certainly a telling symptom especially so very early in the day.’

A smile began to play around his lips and Bea hated the answering heavy thud of her heartbeat when she saw it.

‘The good news is that there are remedies one might attempt.’ Today he barely looked at her, glancing over her head as though something was far more interesting across the room, though his next question was heartening.

‘What is it then that you would suggest?’

‘Some would say exercise to be the most beneficial.’

‘To keep my mind off the thought of another brandy?’

‘Exactly.’ She did not understand the humour that accompanied his question. ‘The most important thing, however, is to admit that you do have a problem; if one holds the notion that this affliction is trifling…’

‘I can assure you, Mrs Bassingstoke, that I do not think my affliction trifling.’

For the first time since she had begun talking to him she felt that they had the same viewpoint. ‘Your measure of honesty is something that should help then, my lord.’

When he remained silent she took her courage in hand. ‘Have you spoken to your family about this?’

‘As little as I possibly can.’

‘Would it help to speak to me of it?’

The silence was deafening.

‘I am a woman who would respect every confidence.’

‘I know you to be that.’

When his smile took on a quality of wickedness she realised exactly what he had said and flushed a bright beetroot red. ‘I did not mean, of course, to allude to the night we spent—’ She stopped as another thought struck her. Perhaps he had not meant that at all. She was too far in, however, to just pull back now. ‘I would never say anything of it—we had both agreed that we should not.’

As she moved to one side he did the same and their hands touched. She felt her heartbeat quicken, to know again that living spark of recognition.

Jerking away, she looked around to see if anyone watched them and was horrified to notice patrons hurriedly averting their eyes. Taris Wellingham was a man who drew the notice of all those around him, with his height and his presence and his bearing. He was a man who looked as though he did not fit into the dusty quietness of this reading room, but should be on a battlefield somewhere, danger imprinted in his eyes.

‘When could we start?’ His question in the light of such thoughts disorientated her.

‘Pardon?’

‘When is it that you would begin helping me?’

‘You are saying that you would like me to try?’

‘Indeed. After such an eloquent persuasion why should I not?’

‘Some men may be…too timid to admit to such a fault.’

‘Not me.’

‘Then you are unusual in such honesty, my lord, and I admire you all the more for it.’

His lopsided frown concerned her.

‘If you are free tomorrow, perhaps a walk in the park might be a good beginning.’

‘I am sometimes a little uncertain of my footing in wide-open spaces. The vestiges, I suppose, of the drink wearing down my balance.’

‘Then I shall, of course, help you.’

‘How would you do that?’

‘Would it be frowned upon if I threaded my arm through your own, my lord?’

He shook his head firmly.

‘Perfect,’ she answered, feeling for the first time in two days a little more in control of everything. She had let Frankwell get worse and worse without doing anything. Could his own redemption have been as easy as Taris Wellingham’s? My God. Why had she not tried such a remedy for him?

She knew the answer even as she asked the question. Because she had hated him, hated her husband and everything he stood for and in the late-night drunken ramblings he took by the river she always hoped he might just trip and sink unbeknown into the murky depths of the water. Guilt rose in force, as did contrition, though when the companion she had first seen with Taris Wellingham reappeared in the background she could tell that he was waiting for them to finish.

‘I do hope to hear from you, my lord, regarding a time and a place for this exercise.’

‘Oh, you will, Mrs Bassingstoke.’

‘And I shall not say a word about anything we have discussed today…’

‘A sensitivity that I should ever be grateful for.’

‘There is one other thing that I would suggest, if I may.’

‘Yes?’

‘Throw out all the strong liquor in your house and replace it with water. That way temptation is never close at hand.’

His laugh reverberated around the space they stood in as she gave him her goodbye and hurried for the door.

Temptation?

Lord, it was not the drink he was tempted by, but the sound of her voice and the feel of her skin against his when he had moved and touched her by mistake.

Too damn tempted! He forced down desire as Jack Henshaw spoke.

‘Who is she?’

‘Mrs Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke from Ipswich. She was one of the occupants of the carriage accident I was involved in.’

‘She had much to say to you?’

‘She thinks I am a drunk.’

‘Why the hell would she think that?’

‘Because the other day she saw me lose my footing and my direction. I would guess from what she does not say that her husband used to be a heavy drinker and, putting two and two together, she has come up with five.’

‘You didn’t enlighten her then, I gather?’

‘You know me too well,’ he drawled back. ‘Blindness or a predilection for the bottle? Which one would you pick?’

Jack stopped walking. ‘It’s got a lot worse, then? Your eyesight?’

Taris nodded and made to walk on, irritated when Jack stayed firm.

‘There are doctors who might help you if you went to see them.’

‘Which I won’t be doing.’ Lord, he had done the rounds of the medical fraternity when he had first returned home from Jamaica and not one of them had been hopeful; his denial at what they had told him curled up into a harder anger. He did not wish to be hauled off again to a physician who would only disappoint him and the risk of gossip emanating from such a visit was too high. No. He would fight this creeping blindness on his own terms and in his own way. He swore it.

Another thought surfaced. What would happen should Beatrice determine the truth? Today with the full light of the window upon her he had made out the outline of her face. Not in detail, but not in grey sludge either. A halfway point to knowing what she might look like. He wished he could have used his fingers to fill in the nuances and touch her. Again. Even though he knew the foolhardiness of doing just that.

Taris Wellingham and his carriage arrived at her door almost exactly at two, after sending a note earlier to ask whether this time would be suitable.

Dressed in her bonnet, coat and gloves, Bea found him standing outside next to his coach. Today he wore brown, the colour showing up the darkness of his hair. Surprisingly he also wore a patch of the finest leather across his left eye.

‘My lord,’ she began, hating the tremor in her voice, ‘have you been hurt?’

‘No.’ He did not elaborate or embellish his reply as he held open the door to a carriage emblazoned with a family crest and pulled by four perfect chestnut horses. Two footmen tipped their hats to her when she acknowledged them, both adorned in the livery of gold and blue.

Taris Wellingham followed her in, sitting in the seat opposite hers. Taking a breath, she smiled and tried to initiate some conversation between them.

‘It is a beautiful day for this time of the year, is it not?’

‘It is.’

‘I have heard it said that such weather augurs well for the summer season. Some say that we should expect a very mild May.’

‘A happy thought,’ he returned in a voice that suggested anything but. ‘And I would prefer it if you would call me Taris. With our history…’ He stopped.

Our history? The weight of what had been between them settled like a stone in her stomach and the swelling bruise on his cheek underlined everything about him that was dangerous.

Today the ease of yesterday had gone, replaced by a tension that Beatrice could not understand as he watched her with a disconcerting directness, a small tic on the smooth skin below his one uncovered eye.

Hell! Taris thought. His eye was smarting and the headache that had been threatening all morning bloomed into pain. A familiar headache, the little sight that was left to him disappearing into nothingness. He should never have come, should have noted the heaviness in his temples and the tiredness in his eyes and cried off. But he was here and Beatrice-Maude was opposite with her quick-witted brain that might expose him as the cripple he was should he make even one false step. His fingers tightened on his cane, the silver ball his only connection to the world, his only certainty. All about him now lay the creeping dark of chaos and a discomfort that made him feel sick.

He had given his men instructions to stop at St James’s Park, a place he often walked alone, because with the fences along the pathways on the western side he had a touchstone to know exactly where he was.

‘I have been thinking up ways to try to help you with your…problem and was wondering if you would be averse to answering a few questions?’

She waited for his answer and he nodded.

‘Do you drink often?’

‘No.’

‘But when you do drink, you drink a lot?’

The lies that were piling one on the other were nowhere near as humorous as he had found them yesterday.

I am almost blind and that is why I fell.

He should say it, just spit it out here and now and then that would be the end of it, for the truth would send any woman fleeing.

But he did not say that because, even nauseous and in pain, the words just would not come.

Avoided. Adrift. Lessened.

Turning his face to the window, he pretended to look out, forcing away all the righteous arguments that rang in his head whilst protecting himself in-stinctively from pity.

As the conversation between them again spluttered to a halt, Beatrice tucked her hands into the dark red fabric of her new dress and stayed silent.

He did not want to speak, perhaps? He had asked her for this walk and now he regretted it? Her intent to help had become intrusive and he wished he might have never given her the chance to take the experiment further?

She hardly knew him, hardly understood a thing about him; this morning, with the patch across his eye, he looked not only wildly handsome, but also unbearably distant.

A lord and a man who walked his world in the very highest echelons of society and one who could hardly be relishing her busy-bodying ways and her plain, plain looks.

Her strident lecture on the ills of strong drink suddenly looked inadvisable and naïve. What did she truly know of him, after all, that a whore in one of the establishments off Covent Garden might not? An affair of the flesh and nothing of the heart.

‘If you would prefer to leave our outing to another day, my lord, I would quite understand.’

She did not dare to chance the use of his Christian name, even given his directive of a few moments prior.

As if he suddenly remembered she was there, he turned.

‘No, I should like to walk.’ Again he did not look directly at her, his face guarded today and distant.

‘Your horses are beautiful. I saw you once in Regent Street tooling greys.’

‘Greys?’ He looked puzzled.

‘With a woman. A young woman with light hair.’

‘Lucy. My sister. She insisted that she learn the art of managing a team.’

Relief turned inside Bea. Not a paramour, then, but a sibling. ‘Indeed, she did look competent.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Buying a hat, my lord, and in awe of such a display as everyone else on the street most surely was.’

‘I am sorry I did not see you.’

She could not let him off the hook so easily. ‘Even though your glance brushed directly across mine…?’

He leaned forwards at her reprimand, his movements strangely careful. No clumsiness in them or extra exertion.

‘Were you married long, Beatrice-Maude?’

The question was so personal that Bea wondered if she should have made certain that Sarah, her maid, had accompanied her. She shook her head, knowing that Taris Wellingham could not be interested in another dalliance three long months after so decidedly ending the first one.

‘I was, my lord.’

‘And he drank?’

Hot shame filled her and confusion. ‘Occasionally.’

Nightly. Daily. Every moment by the end of it.

‘But you showed him the error of his ways and led him into abstinence?’

‘No, my lord, God in his wisdom showed him that.’

A malady to take away any choice.

He nodded, but did not reply. The sweat that had built upon his forehead worried her, the sheen of it mirrored by the heavy lines on his forehead.

Pain!

He was in pain, she thought, and was doing his level best not to let her see it. His knuckles showed white where he clutched on to the silver ball of his cane and the scar that trailed from his hairline into the soft leather of his patch twitched. She wondered how he had received it. A bullet when he had served in the army? Or was it a duelling scar?

The shout of the footman stopped any further thoughts, however, and Beatrice saw that they were now at the park.

On alighting she noticed that the pathway in this particular section of the park was ringed with a fence, markings carved into the railings. Taris Wellingham’s fingers ran across the nicks in the wood. He seldom wore gloves, she noted, as was more customary for gentlemen of the ton, and often ran his open palm along objects. As in the carriage outside Maldon when his touch had run along the line of her cheek. As in the barn where they had ventured further and she had turned into his loving…

Taris felt the directions carved into the railings, something he had had Bates take care of to ensure the continuation of a sense of independence that was being constantly threatened. He always used this place, always walked in exactly the same arc, down to the lake and then back again, the lack of any steps or rough areas a boon when he was alone. Or in company, he amended and smiled.

His headache was lessening in the fresh air, the tightness around his eyes dissipating. Even his sight seemed a little restored. He could now make out the row of trees at the end of the pathway and the rough shape of a bonnet that Beatrice wore. Not quite helpless, then. His black mood lightened.

‘The smell of the trees in St James’s reminds me of my home in Kent, which is why I come here.’

‘You don’t live in London?’

‘I moved out three years ago when I inherited land.’

‘Yet you choose to ride in a public conveyance?’

He nodded. How could he answer her? What could he say?

Sometimes I like to be by myself in the midst of people who know nothing about me, who would not care if I slipped or fell. People who might simply pick me up and go on their way, no labels attached because of the way our paths have crossed…

‘I think I can understand the reason.’ She was talking again, the lilt in her words attractive. ‘I too gained a good living on my husband’s death and old habits are hard to forget. Not that you would have old habits, of course, with your birth and name, but for me it was such.’

‘Was he a good man…your husband? A man of honour?’

‘I was sixteen years old when I married him and twenty-eight when he died. To admit failure over that many years…’ Her voice petered out and he stepped in.

‘So you admit to nothing?’

Her laughter was unexpected and freeing. A woman who would not take umbrage at even the most delicate of questions.

‘I am now in a city that allows me the luxury of being whatever I want to be.’

‘And that is?’

‘Free.’

He remembered back to her questions on their night in the snowstorm and everything began to make more sense. Perhaps they were a pair in more ways than she had realised it? Two people trying to hew a future from the past and survive. Independently.

‘But you still wear his ring.’

‘Because I have chosen to accept what has been and move on.’

Such honesty made him turn away. Not so easy for him, as the scar across his temple burned with fear and loss. Not so easy for him when the darkness was there every morning when he awoke. Still, in such logic there was a gleam of something he detected that might save him.

Not acceptance, but something akin to it; for the first time in three years Taris felt the anger that had dogged him shift and become lighter.

She had said something that unsettled him, and wished she might have taken back her words to replace them with something gentler. But she couldn’t and any time for regrets was long past. Here with the wind in her hair she felt a sort of excitement that challenged restraint and allowed a wilder emotion to rule.

Her whole life had been lived carefully and judiciously. Today she felt neither, the feeling directly related to the man who walked beside her.

Walked fast too, his frame suggesting a man who was seldom indolent and her scheme of exercise in the light of that looked…questionable.

‘I think perhaps you have not been quite honest with me, sir,’ she began and he turned quickly, guilt seen and then gone, the intensity of it leaving her to wonder what he thought she might say. ‘At a guess I would say that you are far more industrious in the art of exertion than I have given you credit for.’

‘Honesty has its drawbacks,’ he returned. ‘With it, for example, I would not be enjoying this walk in the park.’

‘You think I might pass you off as one who has no hope of resurrection?’ She began to laugh. ‘You do not strike me as a man who would have any need at all to lose himself in drink, my lord.’

‘You might be surprised at the demons that sit on my shoulders, Mrs Bassingstoke.’

‘Name one.’

‘Your inability to treat me with the reverence I deserve.’

She laughed again. ‘A paltry excuse, that. And if you do not have another better reason for taking to the bottle then I might abandon you altogether!’

‘Would an inability to see anything properly at all be enough of an exoneration?’

Bea turned towards him. The tone of his voice had changed, no longer as light as it had been or as nonchalant.

And then she suddenly knew!

The patch. The cane. His fall at his brother’s and the scar that ran full across his left eye. Like skittles, the clues fell into place one by one by one. No kind way to say it. No preparation. No easy laughter or words to qualify exactly how much he could see. Only the amber in his one undamaged eye burning brittle golden bright! Challenging and defiant.

The wind off the lake blew cold between them, his cloak spreading in its grip and his hand on the fence with its notched wooden carvings. Sight through touch. In that one second everything Bea had ever wondered about made a perfect and dreadful sense.

Blind?

‘So you do not have a problem with drinking?’ Her voice was quiet, laced with a truth that had not quite yet settled.

He shook his head. ‘I do not.’

‘Yet I have never heard anyone mention—’

‘Because I have never told,’ he shot back, defence in his posture and tight protection in the lines of his face.

‘Anyone?’

‘Asher, Emerald, Lucy, Jack Henshaw and Bates,’ he murmured, the list as short as five.

Six now with her. Nobody really, for such a secret. ‘And that is why you fell?’

He nodded. ‘When you suggested a fondness of the bottle, it was easier than this.’ His free hand gestured to his face, the silver-topped cane swinging in an arc as he did so, his anchor in a world of darkness.

Need. His need. Sliding in unbidden. Need of help and succour and support. She could not help the dread that crept into her voice, a thousand days of care for her husband reflected in such an unexpected truth.

‘I promise you that I will be sworn to silence on this news, my lord,’ she began, hating the withdrawal she could see, his head tilted against the wind as though listening to all that was further away. ‘I would give you my word.’

‘And I would thank you for it.’

Honourable even in hurt, fatigue written plainly on his face.

She no longer knew how to respond.

Blind! Such a small word for everything that it implied. Dependent. Reliant. Like Frankwell had been?

‘Perhaps we should walk back to the coach. It is getting late and cold…’

His suggestion was formal and polite, the choice of escape given under the illusion of time and weather. He did not wait for any answer, but surged ahead, his lack of sight pulling at her as he made his way up the path using the rail to guide him and his stick to monitor the lay of the ground.

The patch across his left eye was a banner of the shame that she felt when she failed to call him back to say that it did not matter, that it made no difference, and for the second time in two days a man, who had never been exactly as he seemed, threw her equilibrium into chaos.

Taris felt the ache around his temple tighten, constricting the blood that flowed into his last fading sight and band around a building pain.

God. What had made him tell her? What mistaken and stupid idea had crept into his head and made him blurt it out?

Take it back…take it back…take it back…

The voice of his anger was thickly strangled, bewildered by his admission and lost in fatigue.

All he wanted was to be home, away from her promises and the whisper of pity in her reply, the shocked honesty in her words underlain by another truth.

‘I promise you that I will be sworn to silence on this news, my lord.’

Sworn to the silence of one who would distance herself from needing to be beleaguered by it? Sworn to the silence of one who would make a hurried escape from his person and count herself lucky? That sort of silence? In Beatrice-Maude’s restraint he had a sudden feeling of breakage.

Spirit. Heart. And pride.

Tell anyone and open yourself up to the shame. Tell anyone and hear the shallow offer of charity.

When his hand clasped the rail on the carriage steps he hauled himself in and laid his cane across his knee. A fragile barrier against all that he wasn’t any more and would never be again.

A lessened man. A needy man. A man who could barely get to the front steps of his own house without help. His unwise confession burnt humiliation into his anger at everything.

Bea did not cry when she was finally home. Did not rant and rail as she had when she had thought an inability to limit strong drink was his only problem.

Today she merely sat on the window-seat with the rain on the glass behind blurring the vista and the small clock beating out the minutes and the hours of silence.

The same sound she had measured her life against for ever!

Reaching across to the table, she picked it up and threw it hard against the ground, the glass shattering as the workings inside disintegrated. Springs and metal and the face of numbers spinning around, time flown into chaos and the beginning of a quiet that she could finally think in!

Exhaling, she stood and crossed to the mantelpiece, extracting a card from a small china plate and holding it close.

The Rutledge Ball would begin at ten and Taris Wellingham was one of the patrons.

Her heart beat faster as she formulated a plan.