‘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 know your quotes, my Eleanor, and I give you my word that from now on I shall not squander another second.’
‘Eleanor, have you heard the news? Cristo Wellingham was involved in a fight near Blackfriars Bridge. It is said that he broke one man’s nose and another man’s arm. His family, as you can imagine, is not pleased.’ Diana’s face was full of distaste. ‘A gentleman should not be seen in such circumstances and especially a lord freshly come from France and nearing the age of thirty.’
Sophie giggled. ‘He is a very fine fighter from all the gossip I have been hearing …’ She stopped as her mother frowned.
‘Only reputation separates us from the hoi polloi, my girl, and things of this nature have the result of making those just beneath us in breeding sit up and ask questions. The Wellinghams have a duty to rein such wildness in.’
‘Was he hurt?’ Eleanor asked as soon as Diana stopped speaking.
‘Several cuts around the eyes, apparently! The boy was always trouble, for goodness’ sake, just look at that nasty business with your brother. In his favour I did hear that he went to Bornehaven Grange to try to explain what had happened with Nigel, but your uncle ran him off.’
Eleanor tried to imagine what the eighteen-year-old Cristo Wellingham might have said to her family. Nigel was dead by an accident at his hand according to the gossip and he had left England the following day, a son of Falder who was never to return to it. What forced a man to that kind of disconnection?
Another more worrying thought surfaced as well. What if the fight here in London had something to do with the blackmail letters that she had told him of? Would he be crucified by society for a promise he had made to her? A woman who would lie about the parentage of her own daughter?
Everything that had been simple was no longer, because, although another letter had not come, she found herself watching each and every stranger who came near to them. In the park. In the reading rooms at Hookham’s. In the safety
