banker, Jervis tells me that my shirts are a disgrace and he is ashamed to be known as my valet and I need new boots.’
‘It sounds as though you hardly require me.’ Julia sorted through her own post. Household bills, a letter from a friend in the next village, a note from the vicarage about the Sunday School, an account from an Aylesbury milliner. ‘You will be far too busy on your own account.’ The county newspaper was at the bottom of the pile and she turned to the inside page and the local news.
‘You need a complete new wardrobe—stop putting it off,’ Will said. ‘I promised myself the fun of taking you shopping and you are not going to wriggle out of it, my lady.’
‘But it is August. Nothing will be happening.’
‘We can go back in the winter for parties and the theatre. But now it will be quiet and we can explore. You do not know London, do you?’
‘No. Not at all.’ Julia smiled at him. He was obviously set on going and looking forward to treating her. It was cowardly, and churlish, to refuse. ‘Of course I will come with you: I will enjoy it.’ She ran her eye down the columns of tightly packed type, skimming the stories. An unseasonable storm of hailstones had flattened just one field of hay at Thame. A small boy had been saved from drowning in a village pond. A calf with two heads had been born at a local farm and was being exhibited for a penny and a woman who had killed her husband had been hanged outside Aylesbury town hall and her body given to the surgeons to be dissected.
The room seemed to be full of buzzing, as though a swarm of bees had filled it. The print blurred before her eyes and Julia realised she felt hot and then cold and sickeningly dizzy.
She gripped the edge of the table as Will said, ‘Good. We’ll stay at Grillon’s in Albemarle Street and look for a house to hire for the Season while we’re up there. Is the day after tomorrow all right for you? I’ll send to the hotel today.’
‘Lovely,’ Julia managed as she closed the newspaper and folded it with trembling hands. A woman hanged. Was that where they would hang her if they caught her? In front of the town hall before a mob jeering and shouting and making a holiday of it?
‘Julia? Is anything wrong? You have gone quite pale.’ Will was half out of his seat. She waved him back to it and, from somewhere, found a smile.
I killed a man. For one terrified moment she thought she had said it out loud. ‘Just the most alarming bill from a milliner! What a good thing we have not yet discussed allowances or I am sure I would be asking for an advance already.’
Will chuckled and sat down again. The room stopped swaying. She made herself open her clenched hand. Her mouth was dry, she felt sick with dread and the temptation to tell him was almost overwhelming. But she could not put him in that terrible position. Julia forced herself to calm. It was just the shock of seeing that gruesome report and the way her conscience was troubling her for breaking her promise to Will. She was in no more, or less, danger than she had ever been.
‘I must spend the morning on my accounts,’ she managed.
‘Mmm?’ Will glanced up from his post. ‘Don’t forget to tell Nancy to start packing.’
‘No. Of course not.’ It will be all right. I have nothing to fear after all this time. Forget it and it will just become a bad dream.
* * *
‘You are very pensive, Julia.’ Will took her hand as the chaise pulled up at the King’s Arms in Berkhamsted for the first change of horses.
He had been as good as his word, those few days since their conversation in the stable yard. They had talked—or rather Will had talked and she had forced herself to respond. The housekeeping was agreed, her generous allowance settled. They discussed who would do what with the estate and what Will felt comfortable with letting out of his control.
If she was only able to sleep without nightmares, Julia knew she would be happy. It was as if she had cursed herself with that resolution to make those dreadful memories only dreams. Now her nights were made hideous by images of blood. Never of Jonathan, but always of blood. On her hands, on her body, curling like seaweed into the water in the wash bowl.
She leaned against Will’s wonderfully solid and reassuring shoulder. ‘I am just a little tired with all the preparations.’
‘And I have been keeping you awake at night,’ he teased.
Julia felt herself blushing. Even with the fear gnawing at the back of her mind of what would follow when she slept, their lovemaking was perfect. At least, it seemed so to her. Drowsing in his arms, her body limp and replete, she felt so safe that just for a while she could believe nothing could hurt her. But in the cold light of dawn she knew even Will’s strength and courage could not protect her from the terrors in her own mind.
‘It would have been a saving to have taken the carriage instead of two chaises,’ she said repressively. Across the yard the other vehicle with Nancy and Jervis had just drawn up.
‘I wanted to be alone with you,’ Will said.
‘In the chaise!’
‘What a very wicked mind you have, Lady Dereham.’ He chuckled and dipped his head to give her a fleeting kiss on the lips. ‘I meant so we could talk. There is something I wanted to know and a journey means we can be uninterrupted. You have been remarkably quiet about your life before we met by the lake.’
It was so apposite to her thoughts that his remark almost struck her dumb. ‘What...what do you want to know?’
‘What your home was like, the estate. Tell me about your parents. Did you have a dog, a pony?’
‘Oh.’ The relief was physical and air rushed back into her lungs. ‘You want to know about my childhood.’
‘I was not intending to interrogate you about your lover,’ Will said drily as the chaise left the yard and turned eastwards.
‘Thank you, although I do not mind speaking of him...a little.’ She did not want to leave Will with the impression that she had anything to hide from him. ‘He was a mistake. A terrible mistake.’
‘What is his name?’
‘He was...is...called Jonathan.’ She remembered how Will had not believed her story when he had first come home. Suddenly it was important to tell him as much of the truth as possible. ‘When you first found out about him, you did not believe that I had only been with him a short while—a day and not quite a night. But that was honestly how it was. Before I ran away he had always treated me with respect, courted me with propriety. I truly thought we were eloping, I believed he would take me to Scotland and marry me. We lay together only the once.’
‘I know.’ His voice was firm and definite.
‘How can you know? Or are you simply trusting me?’
‘I would trust you, of course I would.’ Was he trying to convince himself as much as her? She could sense a slight reservation. ‘I know you now, Julia. Before, when I was so disbelieving, it was simply the shock of coming home, of being alive, of hearing about the baby. I was not thinking straight. But when I made love with you, I realised. It was all very new to you, was it not?’ She bit her lip and stared out of the window and tried not to remember. ‘It was not simply that he was too selfish to make it good, it was all unfamiliar because
