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 red wax.’
‘And the slope to the writing?’
‘Was unremarkable.’
‘Did the footman remember anything 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
