One Ilicit Night Page 7

  When had she ever been truly young? Pregnant at eighteen and a wife before twenty! And now with her twenty-fourth birthday on the horizon she felt old before her time. Stolen kisses would never be for her, the flirtatious dance of the fan in a crowded ballroom only a figment of imagination and fantasy, like some chapter of one of the romantic books she sometimes borrowed from the reading room.

  Beaconsmeade suddenly felt like a trap! A terrible mistake that she was being drawn into. If Cristo Wellingham should be caught in the wiles of her beautiful nieces, what would happen then?

  A lifetime of trying not to touch him or be alone with him or letting the truth of her lost year become public knowledge, for with a single misplaced glance her whole life could fall to pieces. So very, very easily.

  Looking up, she saw Martin watching her in that peculiar way he had of seeing straight through a person.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts.’ She smiled, but he did not answer, the melancholy that was growing in him with each passing week so much more apparent amongst a roomful of sunshine, roses and hopeful expectations.

  The evening fell across the land as Cristo rode down towards the shore, faster than safety might allow him, the breath of his horse caught in mist, white-shadowed warmth amidst all that was cold.

  Home at Falder! Finally. He had come alone and late, the knowledge of an empty castle making it easier to journey here. He intended to return to London in the morning, after looking at the Graveson land.

  Yet the ocean breathed its welcome, the foam of a fading storm caught in the pebbles and on the wind, tumbling into distance and lost. He laughed at the fragility of all that the sea could throw at him, her tendrils lapping at the feet of his mount as on and on he galloped, the bold speed of Demeter eating up the miles. Falder Castle lay far behind, the numerous turrets caught by the last pink rays of dusk, the new quarter moon hiding behind clouds of high cirrus tinged with red.

  The anger in him settled into something more akin to acceptance and the wide-open freedom soothed a fury that had gripped him ever since he had touched Eleanor Westbury’s hand.

  She was not for him!

  Never for him!

  The refrain beat across denial and desire and just plain damned common sense.

  He had come home to become the person that he once had been, a son, a brother, a lord. He had not ventured into England to become a home-wrecker or a heartbreaker or a rake. The memory of Paris must be left there, forgotten, buried amongst the necessity of survival and civility. For too many years he had let the other side rule him; whether for the good of mankind or for the good of himself, he had got to the point where he could no longer tell, his forays into the underbelly of greed and falsity the only thing that let him believe anything mattered. Spying for the British had almost cost him his sanity, the company he had kept for years far away from any fellowship he might have enjoyed otherwise. Yet he saw the sacrifice as a penance and the recklessness in him had been tethered instead into the benefit of England’s protection and sovereignty. He was pleased that it had ended, that the Foreign Office had released him from further duties when his file had been closed.

  Breathing out hard, he stopped and the light on the calmer waters of the peninsula of Return Home Bay was a perfect reflection of the sky. As unreal as he was, only mirroring what was outside, what was expected, the heavy burden of his name and his heritage finally grounding the fury of all that had happened in his life.

  He remembered Nigel’s life-blood ebbing away and his own blood on the deck of the nightmare ship he had taken from London, fleeing from his father’s wrath and banishment! The blood of other souls in Paris was mixed in there, too, politics and persuasion exacting their own biting revenge. Sometimes he had killed innocents and then reasoned the sin gone by patriotic virtue. Sometimes at night he remembered those faces, the last expressions of terror etched for ever into his own regret. He frowned. The retribution of ghosts was surprisingly relentless and his own contrition undeniably growing.

  Dismounting, he stooped to pick up a pebble, skipping it across the surface in the way that he had learnt in his youth. Lord, what mistakes he had made!

  Time folded back and he was on the front steps of Nigel’s parents’ home, the story of a son’s demise full on his lips. On his lips until the door had been opened and the man who had stood there was the same one who had shot at them unexpectedly from the bridge behind the village cemetery. The recognition had been as fatal as Cristo’s lack of gumption, and though he had thought to run by then it was far, far too late. Nigel’s uncle had told him that he had seen the boys using guns for target practice; when Cristo had argued the point the man had become angry, blaming the alcohol the boys had drunk for skewing his memory. An accident was a thing of chance, after all, the older man had added, and no one needed to be ruined by it.

  Cristo had returned to London that very night to tell his father the true version of events, but Ashborne had refused to believe his side of the story and had banished him to France on the next tide, forbidding him to return to England for a very long time. Faced with his father’s rejection, Nigel’s uncle’s slanderous untruths and a reputation that was hardly salubrious, he had boarded the ship, nearly nineteen but with the cares of the world firmly embedded on his shoulders.

  Cristo swore as he remembered Eleanor’s words.

  ‘Know that you have already taken the full measure of happiness from my family.’

  Another sin. A further damnation!

  Falder spoke to him with the wisdom of generations enfolded in its soil, a prudent and enlightened message that bore the weight of ancestry reaching back into living history, and beyond, his body only a vassal of wardship for the few paltry years that God had allotted to him.

  Eight-and-twenty gone, many frittered away in the quest for a justice that he himself had never gained. A wanderer. A stranger. A lover. A spy. A man with as many faces as he had needed: the list as endless as the sea, and as changing. But for now he wanted permanence. Bending down again, he filtered a handful of sand through his fingers and watched it fall onto a shore that was known, understood and cherished.

  Tears blurred his eyes and he wiped them away with the cloth of his jacket, quickly, shaken by the depth of his love for the place and he knelt on the living and breathing ground, praying aloud to the Lord for deliverance.

  ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned…’

  Eleanor saw Lord Cristo in the park a few days later, his head a good couple of inches above those of the men about him and the material of his jacket straining across the breadth of his back. She was glad he was looking away, for it gave her a chance to seek out another trail that would lead her nowhere near him. The sun in his hair marked it with every shade of pale, the length creeping onto the material of his collar and tousled thick. She turned her gold wedding ring and remembered the feel of him beneath her fingers before hot guilt made her heart beat faster.

  Angling the broad brim on her bonnet, she tipped her head, slicing off the whole end of the pathway.

  She had slept badly in the past few days, dreams and nightmares entwined with shame and forbidden passion and banishing her to church early each dawn to pray for some ease from the sins of the flesh. The image of Jesus stretched on the cross in the stained glass etching was a timely reminder of what might happen to her should her indiscretion ever be known. She smiled at the word ‘indiscretion’ for it intimated such a small mistake, an ill-chosen pathway of moderate consequence. The truth of her ruin and loss was something far more brutal.

  Two shiny brown boots suddenly blocked her path and she knew exactly to whom they belonged even before she looked up.

  ‘Ma’am.’ Cristo Wellingham gave her his greeting, eyes in the sunshine much lighter than she had seen them.

  Beautiful eyes, her daughter’s eyes!

  The very thought chased away fright and replaced it with a channelled resolve. Quietly asking her maid to allow her some space to talk, she walked over to the shelter of
a line of elms and stopped there.

  No one was in sight save her servant, and farther off two old men whom she did not know. Five moments at the most, she thought, and took a breath.

  ‘Your sister-in-law sent an invitation for a soiree at Beaconsmeade. Did you know that she had done so?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You of all people must realise that I cannot possibly come.’ She kept her voice as low as she might manage it and the frown on his brow indicated thought.

  ‘Because it might compromise your carefully constructed public persona?’ He stepped back as her glance raked across his, anger and uncertainty and sheer desperation melded with another growing truth. ‘Are you happily married, Lady Dromorne?’

  The veneer of civilisation that he had affected here in England was suddenly much less obvious. Eleanor tasted fear as she never had before, because in the bare, cold amber she detected something she had seen in her own eyes in the mirror over the past few days.

  Longing.

  Longing that even anger and vigilance and sense had failed to dislodge. She stood wordless, the dreadful chasm of loss between them echoing in every breath that she took.

  Tell him, yes, I am very happily married, she heard her mind say. Tell him that you love your husband and your life and your place in the world and that any interference from him would be most unwelcome and unacceptable. Tell him to go and to never look back and insist that the history between them was so repugnant she needed no more reminding of any of it.

  She opened her mouth and then closed it again, the warm summer wind streaming between them and the silk of her dress touching her skin in the way he had once touched it, inviting passion, igniting lust.

  Even for Florencia she could not say the words.

  ‘Meet me tonight. I have rooms here in London…’

  He spoke as she did not.

  Pulled from the past into the present, this harsh truth of seduction was a far easier thing to counter.

  She could not believe he had said such words to her here in the wind and in the sunlight. A man who would throw away her good name on a whim, never even imagining whom else he would hurt. ‘My husband loves me, Lord Cristo, and I am a wife who applauds loyalty.’

  ‘Touch me, then.’

  Shock filled her eyes.

  ‘Touch me and tell me that there is nothing at all left between us.’

  She held her fists tight against her skirt. ‘The pull of flesh is only a fleeting thing, monseigneur.’ The title she gave him was deliberate, a grim reminder of the misunderstanding that trembled beneath anger. ‘Honour and trust and duty are the tenets that a sensible woman lives by.’

  ‘And you are sensible?’

  ‘Very.’ The word was as forceful as she could make it, moulded by her depth of fear.

  Unexpectedly, he took three steps back. ‘Logic and reason run a poor second to the heat of passion, ma cherie. Should you relax your guard for a moment, the truth of all you deny might be a revelation to you.’

  Pursing her lips, Eleanor allowed him no leeway. ‘I do not think you should presume to believe that you know anything of my fidelity. My life has changed completely since Paris and I am a woman who learns well from her mistakes.’

  ‘Mistakes?’ He echoed the word, turning it on his tongue as if trying to understand the very nature of its meaning before finding a retort. ‘I have relegated our night together to neither blunder nor error. Indeed, were I to give it a label, as you seem want to do, I might have chanced something very different.’

  The glint in his eye was so carnal and lascivious that Eleanor knew exactly where he would have placed it. The smile he gave her showed off his gleaming white teeth.

  Biting back impatience, she inclined her head as he gave her his leave without another word, his figure receding into the distance until he was lost altogether when the next corner claimed him.

  It was over between them, the truth of circumstance bitingly clear: just a matter of the flesh, easily duplicated in a room for rent by the hour.

  Turning, she watched the ducks on the lake in their small family groups. Mother. Father. Ducklings. How it should be. How it had been designed and planned. Florencia knew who her parents were and without Martin, Eleanor might never have made it back to England. Dark days and lonely days. Days when she had wondered if it might not have been easier to simply cease to exist at all. Pressing down on her chest in alarm, she tried to breathe, her composure reasserting itself as the tableau before her took shape. The trees, the birds, the pathways, people now further afield and the distant clatter of hooves.

  A good life. Untainted and wholesome. A real life.

  Her life.

  Not thrilling or adventurous or even passionate, but safe and prudent and certain.

  With a wave of her hand she gestured her maid forwards, resolutely ignoring the question in her eyes as she struck down the pathway for home, hating the tears that blurred everything before her. Disappointment lent her gait a tense anger that was almost as unreal as her honour, dissolved under the meaning of Cristo Wellingham’s words.

  Meet me tonight. I have rooms here in London.

  Only that. Only that.

  The words rolled around in the empty corridors of her hope, a bitter pill pointing to the real character of a man of whom she had no true knowledge. It was done between them. Finished. Her nails dug into her palms, causing hurt until she released her grip and opened her fingers to the air.

  Chapter Eight

  The dinner at the Baxters’ was unavoidable, as an invitation had been sent and accepted weeks in advance.

  It was the first time she had been out in society since the fiasco at the Haymarket Theatre and Eleanor was pleased that the gathering was a small one.

  Cristo Wellingham would not be there.

  He frequented the more racy events by all the news she was given through her nieces’ fascination with the man. The age of all those present tonight promised to be well over fifty and the host was a devout man who countenanced no form of rudeness or vulgarity. The very thought made her swallow, for if Anthony Baxter had an inkling of her past she would not get a foot in the doorway.

  Anger welled. The headstrong exuberance of her youth was hardly a fault that should lead to such consequences and had she not made up for her mistakes ever since with a pious and selfless existence? Hiding everything.

  She jolted as Martin came into the room, for she had not heard the whirr of the wheels on the chair.

  ‘You are so jumpy these days, Eleanor, and in one so young it is rather worrying. You need to get out more, for Florencia is well able to cope without your presence in the house for a few hours.’

  In the light of her thoughts from a few moments prior, the criticism stung more than it might have otherwise. ‘I am quite happy as I am,’ she returned, hearing in her retort an anger that was not becoming, but today, with her carefully constructed world in danger of falling apart, any censure rankled.

  ‘If I could venture on a word, “distracted” might be the one to describe you of late, and it doesn’t suit you.’ He held his cravat out to her and she took it. ‘Would you help me with this?’

  She had always tied his cravat, though today she felt irritation as she finished off the last of the intricate folds. She was distracted. Distracted to the point of bewilderment. She pushed down on the feeling as he lifted a box she had not noticed from his lap and gave it to her.

  Garrard’s, the jewellers? When she opened the case a necklace of turquoise lay in the velvet with matching earrings beside it.

  ‘It is not my birthday for another month…?’ she began, questioningly.

  ‘No. But you have seemed preoccupied and I thought a tonic in order. Besides it is almost five years ago that I asked you to marry me and I wanted to remember that.’

  Eleanor’s mind went back: Florence in the summer with its plane trees sculptured green and the Arno winding its way in front of the villa he owned beside the Piazza della Signoria. The
y had been sitting in the gazebo when she had felt nauseous and he had brought her out a warm wet towel scented in lavender to wipe her face and hands.

  Luxury after the debacle in France. A man who might take care of everything, even a daughter conceived out of wedlock on a gaudy velvet bed in the Chateau Giraudon.

  Stroking one turquoise stone and then another, the sheer goodness of her husband left her speechless. ‘I have never deserved you, Martin.’

  He stopped her words by a touch against her arm, no passion in it. ‘If I had been younger, healthier…’

  With a shake of her head she leant down and gave him a kiss on the cheek, wishing just for a moment that she might have wanted passion and found his lips. But she did not wish to spoil everything with a careless gesture and five years of togetherness had never included any sort of lust.

  ‘Would you wear these today?’ he asked and she bent as he fastened the stones, the gold adjusting quickly to the temperature of her skin.

  When he had finished she walked to the mirror and saw a woman of means looking back, the necklace lavish and expensive, the bodice of the gown adorned in Honiton lace and her hair fashioned in a style that might suit…an older woman.

  The thought came from nowhere. A woman who was cautious, and careful and proper! Forcing gaiety as she turned back to her husband, she thanked him for her gift.

  Cristo noticed Eleanor Westbury the moment she walked into the small salon, her husband in the chair before her. This evening she wore a gown of much the same cut as the older female guests, the bodice high and proper and a heavy turquoise bauble of gold and blue sitting in the lace. Did the Earl of Dromorne choose her clothes as well as her jewellery? He wondered how wealth seemed bent on squandering taste with such dreadful choices.

  Close up the man was more ancient than he had imagined him at the theatre, though the grey in his hair was not as pronounced as he had first thought it.

  Sixty, he imagined. Or nearly sixty. The image of Eleanor lying in bed with her husband brought a vision he did not wish for and he dismissed it, the lingering memory of their own tryst replacing the illusion.