One Illicit Night Read online

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am.’ A young boy stood before her with a letter in his hand. ‘The man said that I was to give you this.’

  ‘The man. What man?’ For one moment she thought perhaps Cristo Wellingham had sent it and looked around, her cheeks flushing with the thought that he could be close.

  ‘Oh, he has gone already. He paid me a shilling.’ The coin caught the sunlight as he opened his palm.

  ‘Who is he, Mama?’ Florencia had watched them, this unusual occurrence widening her eyes and when Eleanor turned again the boy had rushed off, his back seen between a line of oaks farther off in the park.

  Slitting the envelope with her finger, she opened out the single sheet of paper, her heart contracting in horror as she read the message inside.

  You are the whore from the Chateau Giraudon. If you want to stay safe leave a hundred pounds in this envelope with the boy waiting outside the instrument shop in Regent Street next Monday morning at ten.

  Unsigned, the letter represented everything that she had always feared might happen. Blackmail. Finally. Placing the note in her reticule, she turned the pony for home, ignoring the wails of her irritated daughter.

  Two days after she had paid, another letter came. This time directly to her house, sitting in the salver at the front door, the blue of the envelope familiar. Pouncing on complacency.

  In her room she understood the danger of paying anything in the first place. This time five hundred pounds was demanded, a sum that even her personal pin money could not hope to conceal. She stuffed the note into the fire burning low in the front salon due to an unseasonably cold day, and watched it go up into flames, each word curling into ash and then cinder.

  My God, what on earth should she do? Who could it be writing such things? The paper was expensive and the hand was correct and well formed. A small idea began to crystallise in her brain. Pulling out a sheet of her own stationery, she wrote a plea to the only man who might help her, the only man who would be as implicated as she was in the uncertainty of blackmail.

  She hired a hack and waited at the corner of Beak and Regent Street at exactly the hour she had indicated, fear, excitement and discomposure racing through her in equal measures.

  Cristo Wellingham would be here at any second, her last foolish confession unanswered between them, and already her body was knotting into the memory of his touch. Taking in breath, she held it, tight, as though in the movement she might harness a longing that came just with the thought of him. Her hands shook in her lap.

  And then he was there, dressed today in the finest of his London finery, the white cravat at his throat throwing up the darkness of his skin and eyes. The gloves he removed after he entered the carriage and sat opposite her, his hat joining them on the leather seat.

  ‘Eleanor?’ She had forgotten how tall he was and how the smell of him made her want to just breathe in for ever. His hair was pulled back and damp.

  ‘Thank you for coming.’ Her voice sounded nothing like her own as he told the jarvey to drive on and shut the door.

  ‘I have been away from London, otherwise I should have called on you.’ The note in his answer was puzzling, an undercurrent of emotion she could not fathom. Wariness, perhaps, or even anger? Nothing quite made sense.

  ‘I think your butler may be blackmailing me.’

  ‘Milne?’ The question was choked out.

  ‘I have received two letters in the past week. One demanding one hundred pounds and the next five hundred. The first I paid, but the more recent one…’ She stopped unable to go on and hating the way her voice shook.

  ‘Where are they? The letters?’

  ‘I burnt them both.’

  ‘Unwise. Can you remember the exact words?’

  She did, and parroting the messages made her feel slightly better. If he could help her, there might still be a way…

  ‘How were the envelopes sealed?’

  ‘With red wax.’

  ‘And the slope to the writing?’

  ‘Was unremarkable.’

  ‘Did the footman remember anything of the way the second note had come?’

  ‘I did ask. A child of the street brought that one, too.’

  ‘The same child?’

  Eleanor frowned. ‘I did not bother him for a description.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘And the second drop?’

  ‘Drop?’

  ‘The place you were to leave the money?’

  ‘He said I was to walk down Regent Street this morning and he would come and speak to me. But I did not go.’

  The silence was thick and when he said no more she chanced her own observation. ‘I didn’t know who else to call on for help.’

  He looked her straight in the eyes. ‘You did not think that I could be the culprit?’

  ‘No.’

  When she smiled he swore. In French. She had never heard any of the words he used, but guessed them to be ripe given his tone of delivery. Even that made her feel better, for he was every bit as angry as she was.

  ‘Did you tell your husband?’

  She shook her head. ‘He is ill and would not wish to know…’

  ‘Then don’t. I’ll deal with it all, I promise you. If another letter comes, leave it sealed, but have it delivered straight to my town house.’

  She nodded, the relief of having him shouldering the burden of her secret immense.

  ‘Would they harm my daughter, do you think?’

  ‘No.’ He did not even hesitate, the certainty in his tone an elixir against all the ‘what ifs’ she had been imagining.

  ‘I do not care about my reputation, but if Florencia is hurt because of this…’

  ‘No one will harm her, I promise you, Eleanor.

  No one.’

  ‘I will pay any expenses incurred, of course.’

  He shook his head and placed one hand on his knee, palm up.

  He would help her.

  His eyes were black and undeniably furious. No milk-livered fop or dandy with little notion of the fighting arts, but a man who had survived the baser ways of others by his wits and by his knowledge. The scar across one whole side of his palm was a badge of experience.

  A new worry surfaced. ‘You would not kill anyone…?’

  ‘…innocent?’ He finished off the sentence and her disquiet heightened.

  ‘England affords harsh punishments to those who take the law into their own hands.’

  ‘You are the second person in the space of two weeks who has reminded me of the differences.’

  ‘The second?’

  ‘My brother Taris warned me off an affair of the heart.’

  ‘Oh.’ She coloured and looked out of the window. The dome of St Paul’s could be seen far in the distance. Did he speak of a mistress perhaps, a kind of warning to make her realise the impossibility of anything intimate ever happening again between them?

  Inside the carriage she could smell the soap he used, the perfume clean and unfussy. His hair caught all the colours of the light. Corn and wheat and pure plain silver. Cristo Wellingham was by far the most handsome man she had ever laid her eyes on and she could understand the fuss he had engendered in all the beating hearts of London’s younger women. For a moment she wished she had been younger, prettier, unencumbered. And more daring. But she wasn’t. She was a twenty-three-year-old married mother with the shame of sin about to be proclaimed to all who might listen.

  Unless she could stop it!

  ‘My husband is dying.’ The words were out before she meant them to be and she blanched at the echo. She had not admitted that even to herself and to hear them said so unbidden was shocking. Still she could not take them back. ‘I need him to go to the grave with a soul that is not troubled.’

  ‘Is Florencia mine, Eleanor?’ He asked the question a second time, and everything stopped. Breath. Blood. Movement.

  They were no longer in a carriage on the road around London town, no longer part of a day scrawled with blue and green and yellow. In
stead they sat in a void of empty loss, the grey whir of deceit pulling them apart, bruising his eyes and twisting his face into something that was not known.

  ‘No,’ she denied again, the word creeping between her lips, bending in question and in fright. One different word and a whole world could change with it. One other word and her daughter was no longer just hers. The regret that marked his face was only some comfort.

  ‘I don’t believe you. Martin was married twice before and there were no offspring from either marriage.’

  ‘Both wives were barren.’

  ‘Or perhaps you were already pregnant from our coupling and England had ceased to be an option to return to?’

  Eleanor remembered the whispers about the Comte de Caviglione. A spy, the women had said in the Chateau Giraudon that night, and one of the cleverest around. She remained silent under the watchfulness of his gaze, the frown on his forehead deeper now as his glance fell to her hand wringing the fabric in her skirt this way and that. The cut-diamond face of her wedding ring sparkled like ice. Mocking everything.

  ‘At Beaconsmeade you said that you loved me.’

  The ache at the back of her throat almost made her cry out and say it again and again, here in the space of the carriage cocooned from society and propriety. Kiss me, she longed to demand, reach out and take away choice and kiss me, but he did not move, and the silence between them grew full with doubt and hesitancy.

  Finally he spoke. ‘I will station a man in your street, Eleanor, to watch for anyone who might contact you again.’ All business and efficiency. She saw how he lifted his knees back so that even inadvertently he might not touch her.

  ‘People will question…’

  ‘This man will be like a breeze that fills only the cracks others miss.’

  ‘A bit like you, then. A hidden man?’

  He laughed, though she thought the sound forced.

  ‘Is your mother still alive?’

  She could never get used to the way he changed subjects. Almost on a whim.

  ‘No. She died a few years before my grandfather did.’

  ‘So when you came to Paris there was no one left?’

  Hurt raced through her bones like the small flying insects that dissected the evenings at her childhood home. The last of the Bracewell-Lowens. Even years of time had not lessened the ache of it.

  ‘There were never many of us in the first place…’

  ‘Lord, Eleanor.’ He held up his fingers as if to stop the words, stop the way she said them, fancy-free and offhand. ‘You need someone…’

  ‘I have Martin.’

  ‘And when you don’t?’

  She pulled down the window and called to the driver to stop. When the carriage did so she unlatched the door and looked away.

  ‘I shall never be a woman who would choose the wrong thing to do above the right one. Do you understand?’ Steel coated her words. ‘And in the light of that if you feel you can now no longer help me…’

  He held up his hand and she faltered.

  ‘“I wasted time and now doth time waste me.”’

  ‘From Richard the Second?’

  ‘You know your quotes, my Eleanor, and I give you my word that from now on I shall not squander another second.’

  ‘Eleanor, have you heard the news? Cristo Wellingham was involved in a fight near Blackfriars Bridge. It is said that he broke one man’s nose and another man’s arm. His family, as you can imagine, is not pleased.’ Diana’s face was full of distaste. ‘A gentleman should not be seen in such circumstances and especially a lord freshly come from France and nearing the age of thirty.’

  Sophie giggled. ‘He is a very fine fighter from all the gossip I have been hearing…’ She stopped as her mother frowned.

  ‘Only reputation separates us from the hoi polloi, my girl, and things of this nature have the result of making those just beneath us in breeding sit up and ask questions. The Wellinghams have a duty to rein such wildness in.’

  ‘Was he hurt?’ Eleanor asked as soon as Diana stopped speaking.

  ‘Several cuts around the eyes, apparently! The boy was always trouble, for goodness’ sake, just look at that nasty business with your brother. In his favour I did hear that he went to Bornehaven Grange to try to explain what had happened with Nigel, but your uncle ran him off.’

  Eleanor tried to imagine what the eighteen-year-old Cristo Wellingham might have said to her family. Nigel was dead by an accident at his hand according to the gossip and he had left England the following day, a son of Falder who was never to return to it. What forced a man to that kind of disconnection?

  Another more worrying thought surfaced as well. What if the fight here in London had something to do with the blackmail letters that she had told him of? Would he be crucified by society for a promise he had made to her? A woman who would lie about the parentage of her own daughter?

  Everything that had been simple was no longer, because, although another letter had not come, she found herself watching each and every stranger who came near to them. In the park. In the reading rooms at Hookham’s. In the safety of shops she had once enjoyed wandering in.

  Watching and fearing.

  ‘I think we should have a walk after lunch for the day is lovely and I don’t wish to miss it. Would you come too, Eleanor? Martin is having a sleep after all and you have not been anywhere in days.’

  Feeling the sun slanting into the room and Florencia tugging at her sleeve, Eleanor relented. With Diana, Sophie and Margaret and a multitude of other servants accompanying them, surely nothing could go wrong and Hyde Park on a Saturday was a busy and safe place.

  Shaking away her nervousness, she took a breath. She wouldn’t let the past trap her for ever and Cristo Wellingham had promised her that he would deal with any problems should they arise.

  Still, to make certain that Florencia was safe, she would instruct her daughter to stay by her side.

  An hour later Eleanor was becoming less and less sure of the wisdom of agreeing to such an outing as the clouds rolled in and the park emptied. Still, Diana seemed unperturbed by any oncoming weather.

  ‘I tell you that it will not rain, Sophie, and a bit of wind and drizzle does wonders for any young girl’s countenance. Keep up, Margaret, and you, too, Lainie. Florencia, hold your mother’s hand as she has asked you to or I will instruct Molly to take you home immediately.’

  Florencia conceded, even as Eleanor promised herself that this would indeed be the last walk she took with Martin’s very bossy younger sister.

  Already the first spits of rain worried her gown and she drew her daughter in closer.

  ‘Up ahead there are some trees. We will shelter there until Harold returns with the coach.’ Even Diana had her limits of enduring a storm.

  A line of oaks looked very isolated and forlorn in the wet. Still, she could do nothing except follow the group as they dashed towards them.

  It was then that she saw them. Two men walking at an angle, cutting across the grass and looking straight at her. The tallest of them seemed vaguely familiar, though she could not for the life of her think how she could know him.

  Grabbing Florencia’s hand, she pulled her towards her family, shouting out for Diana to stop, but already the strangers were on her, the first one leaning down and calmly picking up her daughter. Florencia screamed even as Eleanor did not allow her fingers to break contact.

  ‘I would advise you to let the girl go, madame. Any histrionics will make it difficult for both of you.’ In French!

  The carousel of her mind spun backwards and stopped. This was the man who had burnt her thigh at the Chateau Giraudon with the red-hot tip of his smouldering cheroot. Shaking his words away, she reached for Florencia, fear making her movements heavy and slow.

  ‘Let go of her, right now.’ She could barely recognise the sound of her own voice.

  But he did not listen, turning his back and taking the path away from the others. Hurrying to follow, she saw Diana behind them, shouting
and gesturing. Too far away. Another man she had not seen suddenly reached out, his arm about her waist, lifting her off her feet as he jammed a heavy sack over her head. A sick plunge of nausea made her stomach lurch and she stumbled, the movement taking all breath from her body and making her see points of dancing black.

  ‘Florencia.’ The word hurt to say, but she tried again. A short curse in French stopped her as a hard object connected with her head. Then there was only darkness.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cristo crouched against one of the piles under the warehouse, quiet against the river water. The sun slanted against the glass of a dirty window above him, smears of age and grease and dust. The only sunbeam for miles, he thought, his eyes scanning the alleyway winding up around the corner, the dark press of buildings sending shadowed danger into everything.

  He was here because Etienne Beraud was in London. The Foreign Office had told him when Cristo had contacted them about the blackmail notes Eleanor had received, but he had disappeared, a known French spy who could only be up to no good.

  Today, however, Cristo had intercepted a note with the name of his old rival upon it and written in a code that had been easily broken, a note that told of a safe house they were using by the docks.

  Swearing softly, he rubbed at his left eye, aching from a punch he had failed to escape the evening before last when the piece of information had fallen into his hands.

  Paris seemed to reach out and consume him again, the subterfuge of ten lonely years lying heavily across the last weeks in England when his body had begun to uncoil into something approaching a normal life. With a hat pulled down over his eyes he was the man he had once been, the knife strapped to his ankle sharp and honed and another one hidden beneath the folds of his shirt equally as keen. He made his breathing slower by sheer dint of will, a trick he had learned from endless nights of marking time.

  Finally, just as the sun had gone and the moon had taken its place, there was movement and the sound of footsteps on the wooden decking.