Regency Society. Ann LethbridgeЧитать онлайн книгу.
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. Instead 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 Château 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, fancyfree 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