One Illicit Night Read online

  ‘And what if he lasts for years, Bea? What of the charges that Cristo faces right now?’ Taris’s voice was strained. ‘How can we get him out of there and have the charges gone without needing the help of the Dromornes?’

  A knock at the door made them all start, and the butler came in with a sheath of paper sealed in red wax and ribboned. It was addressed to the Duke of Carisbrook. Ashe took it quickly and began to read.

  ‘The suit against Cristo is to be dropped.’

  Taris shook his head. ‘Who talked, Ashe?’

  ‘Martin Westbury. It is stated here that there had been notes sent that had intimated kidnap. Dromorne also said that he had paid Cristo a substantial sum of money to protect his wife from harm given his own ill health, and that all the subsequent mayhem resulted from that bargain.’

  ‘Let’s hope the fact that he was the only Westbury willing to do anything to save Cristo’s skin might make our brother think twice about his apparent fascination for the fickle-hearted Lady Dromorne.’

  Beatrice stood and joined her husband. ‘I cannot believe that she would simply let Cristo hang for an offence that she knew was not his. There must be something we do not know about in all of this…’

  Taris held up his hand. ‘Right now it’s our brother I am more concerned about, Bea.’ He lifted his watch from his pocket and felt for the time. ‘Ten o’clock. Could we get him out tonight?’

  ‘Damned if they can try to stop us,’ Ashe answered as he called for the carriage.

  The mist seemed to be clearing, widening, the sweet taste of freedom further away now and pain all that was left of any of it.

  She was sick into the bowl held beneath her face, many times, sweat moistening her skin and making her clammy.

  ‘There, there, Lainie. You will be all right now. It is over. You are safe.’

  Martin’s voice. The quiet tones comforting. She held on to the hand he offered. Her lips were dry and the skin in her throat was parched.

  ‘Water?’ A glass was brought to her lips as he tipped her head to taste it and more clouds cleared.

  ‘And your sister?’

  ‘Has gone. I sent her back to Scotland when I realised what was happening. Her husband has promised she will not venture into England again for many years.’

  ‘Cristo Wellingham?’

  ‘Is safe. I made sure of it.’

  ‘And Florencia?’

  ‘Is at this moment doing her lessons in the schoolroom with her governess.’

  When he raised her hand to his lips to kiss it, she saw she was only skin and bone. ‘How long have I been like this?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  The time had her gulping back fear. ‘Fourteen whole days? What happened after…London?’

  ‘Diane took you north to an inn and administered laudanum. The doses were so high it took us some time to wean you off it.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘The Dromorne doctor is in attendance.’

  Eleanor lay her head back on the pillow and tried to take stock of everything. Where was Cristo Wellingham now? She had no way of asking, however, for already she could see in her husband’s eyes a disappointment that laid every other truth bare.

  ‘I did not lie to you, Martin, about Florencia. I just did not tell you the name of her father.’

  He smiled at that. ‘And if I had asked, would you have told me?’

  She considered this. ‘You never did ask.’

  Closing her eyes, she felt tears leak between her lids, the tight ache in her throat making talking harder.

  ‘Nevertheless, I would have appreciated honesty that night you saw Wellingham again at the theatre. Surely then, Eleanor, you might have said something?’

  The gap she had always felt between them widened, lies stretching out what little that had held them together. With only a push everything might break and the circles of tiredness beneath his eyes were dark, worry and illness mixed into deep bruises on his skin.

  A man caught between the truth of expedience and struggling to do the right thing. His sister’s betrayal, his wife’s shame and his own body’s failings. An honourable man who deserved a lot more than the hand he had been dealt. She reached out.

  ‘I am so very sorry.’

  One finger came across the line of her cheek, wiping away the tears, soft as kindness. ‘I should not wish for our name to be bandied about in the way that any confession could easily let it.’

  ‘And neither should I.’

  ‘Cristo Wellingham has said nothing at all. To anyone. He holds his tongue for the sake of our daughter.’

  This time Eleanor could not even answer, the lump in her throat growing, and she had no idea of what might happen next. Cristo had his own family to consider and he was not a man who courted publicity, but in saying nothing he had in effect let her go. Lord, what must he think of her, then? A woman of so little moral fibre that she could not even rouse herself to write a thank-you note?

  ‘Did you tell him about Diana…about the laudanum?’

  ‘Yes, and he has given me his guarantee of confidence on the matter.’ There was a tone in her husband’s voice that she had never heard there before and Eleanor guessed it to be the grief of losing respect for a favoured sister. She swallowed. At least Cristo Wellingham knew why she had not been able to come to London and exonerate him. She did not dare to voice her relief, however, as her husband began to talk again.

  ‘I have rented a town house in Bath and we shall repair there immediately. The waters warrant much in the way of a cure and my cough has worsened…’

  She smiled through her tears. ‘Florencia would like that.’

  ‘Wellingham has promised he will never set foot in the city so long as we are there. He sends you only his very best wishes for the future.’

  ‘You have seen him?’

  ‘A number of times, my dear, and his brothers stood with him on each occasion. Family solidarity is an undervalued commodity to my mind, and the sense of protecting reputation is well understood by every old lineage. He wants his name unsullied.’

  Eleanor swallowed, imagining the conversation. Unsullied. For the best. For protection. For Florencia. Bleakness covered all emotion and what had budded began again to wilt, blighted before it had even had time to flourish.

  ‘Bath will be lovely at this time of year,’ she said, and felt the weight of motherhood hard upon her shoulders even as she wiped away her tears.

  Cristo remodelled Graveson Manor using all of the taste he had acquired from years of living in Paris. Simple. Expensive. Chic. He oversaw the laying of the marble floor in the portico entrance and the coloured glass in the atrium that joined the old wing to the new one. No detail was too small to find unimportant. The library, the music room, the ballroom that Beatrice had insisted he include, even the nurseries that graced the third floor of the structure, painted in lemon and green.

  He never walked there again after finishing those particular chambers, because he knew that without Eleanor there would not be infants.

  One suite on the end of the corridor, however, he did often visit. This room was fashioned in pink and silver, a trail of stuffed animals on numerous shelves waiting for the one little girl in the world who would never play with them.

  Florencia. Her name was engraved in his heart like a tattoo, ineradicable and permanent, and the reason for every single thing that he did.

  His own room he left plain and barely touched. A single bed, an armoire and a wardrobe. No mirror to fashion his likeness as he prepared for sleep, and no space for another body. Only necessity graced this chamber. A brush. A block of soap next to a pitcher. A bottle of fine French brandy for the nights when sleep would not arrive and the morning seemed a long way off.

  Martin Westbury had been most civil when he had come to call on him in London. He had thanked Cristo for the help rendered to his wife and then he had taken breath through the difficulty of a disease that had much worsened and asked for a moment in private.

&nbs
p; His brothers had left him to wait outside and as the door closed the mask of the man before him had fallen into grief. A broken man and all at his account!

  ‘My wife, Eleanor, is a good woman and a brave one. I would like you to know at least that.’

  He nodded more out of expectation than of any real feeling because she had neither come nor written and almost two weeks had gone by with every single moment counted.

  ‘She has told me of your…connection.’ Dromorne held up his hand as Cristo went to speak. ‘I have the energy to say what I want to only once.’ He waited as Cristo nodded and settled back.

  ‘All I have in the way of possessions, save the entailed buildings and title, will go directly to Eleanor and Florencia and I am a very rich man. But money cannot buy back reputations and at the moment theirs are lying in the balance. Were you to talk, I doubt that even I would have the wherewithal to save them.’ Another tear traced its way across his cheeks, falling on one armrest of his wheelchair and sliding onto legs marked by thinness.

  ‘You did not disclose your association with my wife in gaol under severe provocation and you did not gossip on your release. I respected that. Eleanor, however, has decided that you are too dangerous to ever be allowed near our daughter again. It is the problem of your past, you understand, and your questionable connections. She has asked me to come to tell you that she will allow nothing to compromise Florencia.’

  Silence counted down the moments.

  ‘So you wish for me to leave England?’

  ‘No. I have arranged a place for my family in Bath. It shall be that city that is off limits to you if Florencia’s chance of a future is to be secured. I have spoken to Eleanor about this and she has agreed. It was a foolish and ill-thought out flight of fancy for her to have agreed to see you again and one that cannot be repeated. My wife is most explicit on that point.’

  ‘I see.’ Cristo balled his fists and laid them at his side. He wished the man might just leave with his promises and illness and inherent logic. Eleanor and Florencia were lost to him through the strict rules of propriety and respectability every bit as much as they were through sheer and utter cowardice.

  ‘If I were younger, I might call you out for this, Wellingham.’

  Cristo held his glance, the fury inside him lending any civility a brittle air. ‘Perhaps such a duel might work to my advantage, my lord.’

  Dromorne smiled at the insult and refused to be drawn into the argument further, rapping his cane heavily on the floor. The door opened and he was gone, only the sound of his wheels against the highly polished parquet as they receded into the distance. Asher and Taris came in to stand beside him.

  ‘It is settled,’ he said, hoping that the catch in his voice was not a permanent disability, as the blood in his heart emptied into ice. Betrayal melded seamlessly with disbelief.

  ‘Did you tell him your side of the story?’

  Cristo nodded at Asher’s question, knowing full well that he had not, but the wish for his siblings to think kindly of Eleanor Westbury made him lie as he spoke again.

  ‘Eleanor sends me her best wishes and her sincere thanks, but she has a daughter to protect.’

  Taris’s curse had been ripe.

  Turning to the window, Cristo was glad for the space and for the first time since he had left Paris he missed his old life in the Chateau Giraudon, missed its danger and its clarity, the sides of wrong and right so easily defined. Here he felt he had wandered into a land of choices or a hall of mirrors, every direction cursed by circumstance and conduct.

  Eleanor was married and she was a loyal wife. Nothing could change that save the death of Dromorne. She was also a mother who loved her daughter.

  A tumbler of brandy came from nowhere and he swallowed the lot, liking the way it coated anger with its own particular brand of acceptance.

  Martin Westbury had spent the following hours in St Paul’s Cathedral having a dialogue with his maker.

  ‘I lied to protect us all, Lord.’ He thought of his sister and her ill-guided actions and how she had been bundled back to Edinburgh where her husband’s family held a seat.

  He thought of his parents and his ancestors and the goodness that had always imbued the Dromorne name since time immemorial. He thought of Florencia and her silver hair and eyes that were exactly those of Cristo Wellingham and for the first time in his life he swore in a house of God because he knew that Eleanor Bracewell-Lowen had never truly been his.

  A wife in name only. A woman he had never touched. Her illness had precluded it at first and in the later years his infirmity had robbed him of any feeling in that region of his being.

  But he could change. They could change, and, if God could give him the chance of a second destiny, then who would know what might follow? He smiled, making the sign of the cross above his heart in respect to a wiser deity who had given him direction. Tonight he would show Eleanor that he had forgiven her lies by coming to her room and allowing her the opportunity of sexual expression that a twenty-three-year-old must crave.

  It was, after all, the very least that he could do.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Eleanor went to bed early and left the curtains wide, wide open, so that the moon shone on the bed and lightened her room with silver. The colour of Cristo Wellingham’s hair. She stroked the beam on her sheets with her little finger so that the shadow did not blot out the light and whispered his name against the silence.

  Martin had arrived home late and she had smelt strong liquor on his breath, but even that had not been the most unusual thing that had happened this evening. When she had spoken her goodnight he had beckoned her down to him and taken her face in his hands, looking at her in a way she had not seen him do before. Almost sensual! Distaste surfaced, followed by a bolt of fear. Did he think she would want that from him now? Did he imagine the knowledge of her transgressions allowed him a right he had not as before taken?

  She sat up, lighting the candle and watching the wick take to flicker yellow into all the shadowy corners. Outside she heard her husband’s chair whirring by just as it did every evening.

  But tonight it stopped.

  Her breath froze in her throat as the handle began to turn and the door was pushed inwards. Slowly, as if he should not wish to wake her should she be asleep. She cursed the flame at her side, but it was too late to blow it out; when his face came around the portal she made herself smile.

  ‘Martin?’ She hoped there was just enough question in it to be short of rudeness.

  ‘Eleanor. I am glad you are still awake.’

  The door closed behind him and her heartbeat quickened.

  ‘You wish to talk?’ she said and drew the blanket up.

  He stopped next to her and reached across for one hand, taking it into his own in the way of a husband who did not suppose anything other than acquiescence.

  ‘I spent a number of hours at St Paul’s Cathedral today, my dear, asking the Lord for a way forwards from all of this.’

  ‘I see.’ His thumb nudged the material on her sleeve aside so that her neck was exposed and before she could stop him his hand dug into the silk in her bodice, her left breast fitting into coldness. Only shocking.

  ‘I think the lack of any physical contact between us should be at an end, my love.’

  ‘You do?’ She tried to pull away, but his grip tightened.

  ‘We are husband and wife, although consummation for me is somewhat of a problem, there are things that I am still able to manage that could bring you pleasure.’

  He rolled the material back and let go of her breast, exposing the ample flesh to his glance and to the light before he bent down. Suckling, like a child, the bald spot in the back of his head easily visible.

  Her husband. His right. Her duty. She sat as still as she could whilst moonlight faded into cloud. When he had finished she tried to smile at him, glancing down again as he repositioned the fabric in her nightgown and placed the sheet back.

  ‘It is a beginning
, Lainie, and a good one. I shall worship your body as a shrine and hope with all that I am able that my ministrations bring you some portion of pleasure and some allotment of ease.’

  Nodding, she watched as he departed, the door shutting behind him and the quiet settling yet again.

  A shrine. A duty. Pleasure? Ease? One hand went to her mouth to stop the aching sobs she knew would come, whilst the other gathered the fabric on her breast and wiped the wetness dry.

  Nowhere to go and no one to help her. Shocked, she turned into the down of her pillow and cried until sleep overtook her, and in her dreams there was a different man whose lips wove all the magic that her husband’s had failed to do.

  Martin met her in the blue parlour the next morning with a particular smile and a wink. Today he looked healthier than he had in a long while, and another layer of guilt was added to those already present. Florencia sat between them, chatting about a puppy she had seen in the park and about a drawing she had completed of him on her return home.

  ‘He was black and white, Mama, with long ears. When he walked he wobbled and Miss Walsh bade me not to laugh too loud. When will Aunty Diana be back, Mama? I want to tell her about him.’

  ‘She has much to do in Scotland, Florencia. I doubt that she will be back for a while.’ Martin’s voice held a note of censure she hoped her daughter would not notice.

  ‘But Margaret and Sophie are missing out on the balls. Some of their dresses are still in the cupboards.’

  ‘We will send them on, Florencia.’ Eleanor placed her daughter’s napkin so that the crumbs of the cake a maid had brought in did not stain her skirt. She did not even bother to unravel her own because she felt no hunger whatsoever.

  Ten hours before she would retire again for the evening. Ten hours before the next ‘pleasure and ease’ might begin yet again. The clock ticked on at an alarming speed and the spots of age on the back of her husband’s hands were plainly visible in the light. The vision of slender fingers wreathed in gold replaced it.

  The pile of cards on the sideboard suddenly offered a sanctuary.