only a push everything might break and the circles of tiredness beneath his eyes were dark, worry and illness mixed into deep bruises on his skin.
A man caught between the truth of expedience and struggling to do the right thing. His sister’s betrayal, his wife’s shame and his own body’s failings. An honourable man who deserved a lot more than the hand he had been dealt. She reached out.
‘I am so very sorry.’
One finger came across the line of her cheek, wiping away the tears, soft as kindness. ‘I should not wish for our name to be bandied about in the way that any confession could easily let it.’
‘And neither should I.’
‘Cristo Wellingham has said nothing at all. To anyone. He holds his tongue for the sake of our daughter.’
This time Eleanor could not even answer, the lump in her throat growing, and she had no idea of what might happen next. Cristo had his own family to consider and he was not a man who courted publicity, but in saying nothing he had in effect let her go. Lord, what must he think of her, then? A woman of so little moral fibre that she could not even rouse herself to write a thank-you note?
‘Did you tell him about Diana … about the laudanum?’
‘Yes, and he has given me his guarantee of confidence on the matter.’ There was a tone in her husband’s voice that she had never heard there before and Eleanor guessed it to be the grief of losing respect for a favoured sister. She swallowed. At least Cristo Wellingham knew why she had not been able to come to London and exonerate him. She did not dare to voice her relief, however, as her husband began to talk again.
‘I have rented a town house in Bath and we shall repair there immediately. The waters warrant much in the way of a cure and my cough has worsened …’
She smiled through her tears. ‘Florencia would like that.’
‘Wellingham has promised he will never set foot in the city so long as we are there. He sends you only his very best wishes for the future.’
‘You have seen him?’
‘A number of times, my dear, and his brothers stood with him on each occasion. Family solidarity is an undervalued commodity to my mind, and the sense of protecting reputation is well understood by every old lineage. He wants his name unsullied.’
Eleanor swallowed, imagining the conversation. Unsullied. For the best. For protection. For Florencia. Bleakness covered all emotion and what had budded began again to wilt, blighted before it had even had time to flourish.
‘Bath will be lovely at this time of year,’ she said, and felt the weight of motherhood hard upon her shoulders even as she wiped away her tears.
Cristo remodelled Graveson Manor using all of the taste he had acquired from years of living in Paris. Simple. Expensive. Chic. He oversaw the laying of the marble floor in the portico entrance and the coloured glass in the atrium that joined the old wing to the new one. No detail was too small to find unimportant. The library, the music room, the ballroom that Beatrice had insisted he include, even the nurseries that graced the third floor of the structure, painted in lemon and green.
He never walked there again after finishing those particular chambers, because he knew that without Eleanor there would not be infants.
One suite on the end of the corridor, however, he did often visit. This room was fashioned in pink and silver, a trail of stuffed animals on numerous shelves waiting for the one little girl in the world who would never play with them.
Florencia. Her name was engraved in his heart like a tattoo, ineradicable and permanent, and the reason for every single thing that he did.
His own room he left plain and barely touched. A single bed, an armoire and a wardrobe. No mirror to fashion his likeness as he prepared for sleep, and no space for another body. Only necessity graced this chamber. A brush. A block of soap next to a pitcher. A bottle of fine French brandy for the nights when sleep would not arrive and the morning seemed a long way off.
Martin Westbury had been most civil when he had come to call on him in London. He had thanked Cristo for the help rendered to his wife and then he had taken breath through the difficulty of a disease that had much worsened and asked for a moment in private.
His brothers had left him to wait outside and as the door closed the mask of the man before him had fallen into grief. A broken man and all at his account!
‘My wife, Eleanor, is a good woman and a brave one. I would like you to know at least that.’
He nodded more out of expectation than of any real feeling because she had neither come nor written and almost two weeks had gone by with every single moment counted.
‘She has told me of your … connection.’ Dromorne held up his hand as Cristo went to speak. ‘I have the energy to say what I want to only once.’ He waited as Cristo nodded and settled back.
‘All I have in the way of possessions, save the entailed buildings and title, will go directly to Eleanor and Florencia and I am a very rich man. But money cannot buy back reputations and at the moment theirs are lying in the balance. Were you to talk, I doubt that even I would have the wherewithal to save them.’ Another tear traced its way across his cheeks, falling on one armrest of his wheelchair and sliding onto legs marked by thinness.
‘You did not disclose your association with my wife in gaol under severe provocation and you did not gossip on your release. I respected that. Eleanor, however, has decided that you are too dangerous to ever be allowed near our daughter again. It is the problem of your past, you understand, and your questionable connections. She has asked me to come to tell you that she will allow nothing to compromise Florencia.’
Silence counted down the moments.
‘So you wish for me to leave England?’
‘No. I have arranged a place for my family in Bath. It shall be that city that is off limits to you if Florencia’s chance of a future is to be secured. I have spoken to Eleanor about this and she has agreed. It was a foolish and ill-thought out flight of fancy for her to have agreed to see you again and one that cannot be repeated. My wife is most explicit on that point.’
‘I see.’ Cristo balled his fists and laid them at his side. He wished the man might just leave with his promises and illness and inherent logic. Eleanor and Florencia were lost to him through the strict rules of propriety and respectability every bit as much as they were through sheer and utter cowardice.
‘If I were younger, I might call you out for this, Welling-ham.’
Cristo held his glance, the fury inside him lending any civility a brittle air. ‘Perhaps such a duel might work to my advantage, my lord.’
Dromorne smiled at the insult and refused to be drawn into the argument further, rapping his cane heavily on the floor. The door opened and he was gone, only the sound of his wheels against the highly polished parquet as they receded into the distance. Asher and Taris came in to stand beside him.
‘It is settled,’ he said, hoping that the catch in his voice was not a permanent disability, as the blood in his heart emptied into ice. Betrayal melded seamlessly with disbelief.
‘Did you tell him your side of the story?’
Cristo
