Regency Society. Ann LethbridgeЧитать онлайн книгу.
thought she could be pregnant? She shook her head vigorously, and her sister-in-law retreated a little.
‘It was just after you fainted at the theatre and I thought … But of course not! Martin hardly has enough energy for the daytime, let alone the night. Besides, another child with his problems …’ She let her words tail off.
Another child?
The whitewashed hospital walls with the small effigy of the Mother Mary built into a shelf filled with dried rosemary. Bile rose in her mouth. She had hated the smell of rosemary ever since. Cloying. Smothering. The doctor had been a man of high principle and he had known she was unmarried. As such, he had not even attempted to hide his condemnation when she had delivered a child who had failed to take a breath. Even his words had been ones of blame.
‘Every babe needs a father and this is the Lord’s way of making certain of it. Be thankful for your reprieve.’
Be thankful for your reprieve. The words still had the propensity to make her feel sick. He had smiled as he said it before placing her baby into a basin on the floor and leaving it there. Cold. Untended.
No cuddles or gentleness. No prayer for an innocent soul as it went into Heaven. Eleanor had tried to say the communion herself, but the incantation had been muddled, and the red wash of her own blood had left her mute and terrified.
Paris. Lost in guilt and censure and fear.
‘Lainie? Are you quite all right? I shouldn’t pry, of course, and you have the perfect right to tell me to mind my own business.’
Shaking her head, the anger twisted back into some workable thing. She had had much practice in tethering it, after all, though her ill-advised confession to Cristo in the forest had changed things somewhat and all for the worse.
‘I love you.’
What if she had stayed with Cristo in Paris as his mistress, would her son have lived? If she had gone to him and told him and pleaded her case? Their case. An eighteen-year-old girl in limbo in a land that was not home.
Choices, good and bad, and now other decisions, the stakes rising again because of her daughter!
‘Ever since Beaconsmeade you have been distracted. I should never have left you alone in the woods, of course, and I kick myself for following my daughters.’
‘No. The fault was mine. Exploring the pathway was such a silly idea.’
‘Indeed, it was one I could not for the life of me understand. You are usually such a cautious girl, Lainie, which is probably a characteristic my brother saw in you that appealed the most for, God bless him, he is exactly the same.’
Eleanor led Florencia around the park on her daughter’s tiny pony enjoying the summer day. She had not heard a word from Cristo Wellingham in well over a week and for that she was glad, the respite from the constant fear of seeing him lessening her worry.
‘When I am bigger, Mama, I will buy the very best, best horse and race it around the park.’
Her father’s daughter, for all had heard the rumours that Cristo Wellingham was in town to select prime horseflesh.
‘Not too fast, darling, for there are always people in these places.’ Lord, Eleanor thought grimly. Already I am clipping her wings just as my mother clipped mine.
‘All I want is a pet, Mama. Even just a kitten …’ There was a tone in her voice that was sullen, a tone she had heard more often of late when Florencia addressed her—almost five and needing the boundaries only a strong father might offer.
‘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 Château 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