first time you have known me.’
‘Only...you...here?’ Her eyes perused the corners of her chamber, searching. When her father nodded Amethyst allowed the heaviness of her lids to close and she slept.
* * *
She knew she was calling his name in the dark and through the night. But Daniel Wylde, the sixth Earl of Montcliffe, would not come because he no longer trusted her, no longer cared.
A cold compress was pressed to her forehead and she touched her father’s hand.
‘Tired.’ She could barely keep her eyes open. ‘I feel so tired.’
‘Then I will stay with you until you sleep and when you wake up again I shall still be beside you.’
His words were quietly spoken, yet were so very genuine. She could not remember a time when her father had let her down or failed her. ‘I love you, Papa. You have always been here.’
‘And I always will be, my jewel. Don’t worry. Everything will turn out just exactly as it should, I swear that it will.’
The dizziness was back, hovering at a distance, but closing in. She needed him to know something, but it was hard to think what it was now.
‘Daniel?’
‘Shush.’
‘He makes me...happy.’
The tears fell of their own accord, welling in her eyes and running warm across her cheeks.
‘And now...I have lost...him.’
‘No.’ All the reassurance in the world in that one simple word and as she fell back into sleep she smiled.
* * *
The next time she awoke it was dark and two candles on the mantelpiece laid a circle of light across the bed, the white of the counterpane so bright it hurt her eyes to look at. Holding up a hand to dim it, she was surprised by a small cut on her wrist, the blood around the wound dried and powdered. Her father was still beside her, in different clothes now and without the book.
‘They bled you. The doctors. I asked them if it was truly necessary but the humours are tricky things, they said, and the melancholy needed to be released from your body.’
Her father looked both exhausted and worried.
‘Lord Montcliffe?’
‘He left as soon as he brought you home from the Herringworth ball and I haven’t heard from him since.’
‘Did he tell you...anything?’
He shook his head. ‘Maisie and Mick were delivered the next morning and I brought you here the day after that.’
‘I see.’ And she did. Charlotte Mackay’s accusations played on her memory as did the speed of the carriage as Daniel had taken her home. She had acted appallingly, but high emotion, guilt, shame, shock and fright had played their parts, too.
‘The doctor administered laudanum to calm you down, my dear, but I do not think it agreed with you. I stopped the dosage the day before yesterday.’
That was why she felt nauseous then and slightly removed from the world. Her mouth was so parched she could barely swallow but all she could think about was the sense of betrayal in Daniel’s pale green eyes.
And the hurt.
The sick feeling in her stomach worsened. He must think her mad and deceitful, a woman who held no regard for honesty or manners; the wife of a man at the centre of a scandal that had rocked all of London. The kiss they had shared came back with full force: a moment in her life she would never forget, a gift of what it might be like to be with a man whom you truly loved.
She turned her face into the pillow and sobbed.
* * *
Daniel knew what the lawyer would say. He knew it before the legal retainer even opened his mouth and began to speak.
‘I am acting on behalf of the Honourable Reginald Goldsmith. He has instructed me to call in the loan your brother took out against your family estate and he would like the sum paid back in full by the end of this month.’
‘I see.’
Smythe shook his head and lifted a yellowing page. ‘I am afraid you do not, my lord. The sum is enormous.’ Turning the document so that it could be read with more ease, Daniel was stunned.
Five thousand pounds. A king’s ransom. So much more than he’d imagined Nigel to have gambled; a fortune that he had no way of getting his hands upon now that Amethyst Cameron had disappeared into the countryside with her father.
‘Is there any way I could stretch out the payments?’
‘Perhaps for a few months if you were lucky.’
‘But no more?’
The lawyer shook his head. ‘My client is taking ship to the Americas in twelve weeks because his only daughter has settled in Boston. He wants a clean break and he is more than hopeful that the debts should be discharged before he goes. Completely discharged,’ he emphasised the words again and wiped his brow. ‘Is there a problem with this, Lord Montcliffe?’
‘No.’ The glint in Smythe’s eyes was full of conjecture.
‘Your marriage to Miss Cameron should help. I have heard that the family is extremely wealthy. Timber, is it not?’
Daniel stood. He did not wish to hear any conjecture on his own personal life from a man for whom the words ‘appropriate’ or ‘confidential’ appeared to mean nothing. Taking his leave, he was glad Smythe did not engage in further conversation.
He walked along the river in a light rain, the water winding along with him, full of the noise and movement of commerce. Perhaps one of the Cameron ships was docking at this moment, ready to be discharged of its heavy cargo.
Amethyst Cameron.
He no longer knew what to make of her, the shifts of emotion exhausting. He had deposited her at home with her father after the ball and left immediately, her behaviour in the carriage so very deranged and Charlotte’s truths still ringing in his ears. The next morning he had sent back the greys. Even to save Montcliffe he could not be for ever tied to a mad and lying wife.
Gerald Whitely, at least, was dead. He had found out that through an investigator he had employed to make sense of it all. But still the whole ending had been maudlin and awkward.
Swearing, he conjured up her face on the night of the ball, her lightened hair showing up the velvet gold in her eyes. Beautiful and crazy. He had not heard a word from the Camerons since and on enquiry found that they had packed up the London town house and headed for their country estate of Dunstan House somewhere up north.
Good riddance, he should have thought, the whole episode so public and brutal. A lucky escape from a woman who was both deceitful and unstable. Yet underneath other thoughts lingered. Amethyst’s thinness. The way she smiled. The dimples that dented her cheeks
