the latter option.’
Cristo breathed out. ‘I thought she was a prostitute brought to my room. With the amount of brandy she had consumed, she could not tell me otherwise and by then I had discovered that she was a virgin.’
‘An inauspicious beginning?’ Dark amber eyes looked straight at him and Cristo began to laugh at the absurdity of a word that only Taris might get away with.
‘Very.’
‘There are rumours you worked for the Foreign Office in Paris?’
‘In the capacity of one who would safeguard the interests of England, you understand, for even in peacetime there are those who might undermine the relationship between the two countries. Smitherton sent trainers down to the château I owned in Paris.’
‘A difficult job, I should imagine.’
‘Sometimes it was.’
‘And is it still?’
‘No. I have left the service.’
‘For retirement into peaceful obscurity?’
When Cristo laughed Taris joined in and for the first time in a long while the ghosts of past misunderstandings faded.
Martin still insisted on her going to the Wellinghams’, a weekend house party at Beaconsmeade that would mean them leaving early on Friday evening and returning on Sunday night.
With the dresses fitted and the girls and Diana excited, Eleanor looked for ways in which she could turn down the invitation without inviting comment.
Consequently she took to her bed on Thursday afternoon with a stomach ailment that had her refusing the night meal. She did not expect Martin’s visit, however, later that evening and was caught reading a book and eating from a box of chocolates that Florencia had bought for her on a trip into town with Diana a few weeks back.
‘For a woman suffering from nausea you look surprisingly well.’ Tonight he looked better than he had in many months.
She stayed silent.
‘Is there some reason that the Beaconsmeade outing is worrying you?’
She decided to brazen it out. ‘Florencia will miss me—’
He didn’t let her finish.
‘I am here and I have already told you that I should like to have a few days with my daughter for company. It is not often that I see her alone.’
Eleanor nodded, at a loss now to keep on with her arguments.
‘You are young, my dear, and it is important that you enjoy these sorts of things. I know Diana will be lost without you if you don’t attend, for she has made the fact known to me. Besides, I thought you admired the Wellingham women!’
‘I do.’
‘Then what keeps you from going? I know the dresses are finished and the girls have said how lovely yours looked.’
Eleanor’s glance went to the wardrobe where her new gowns were shrouded in calico. Shoes and cloaks and bags and hats were in the boxes beneath them. All readied for the carriage ride south into Kent.
She wanted to say that she was afraid. She wanted to shout it out so that he might actually hear her. Afraid of herself and of her reactions! Afraid others might notice or that Cristo Wellingham himself might notice or that the feelings she held deep inside her would never be returned as he made a play for one of the other younger and prettier girls present.
But she could say none of this because to voice even a little of it would be to betray Martin altogether, and he had no idea at all that Cristo Wellingham was the Frenchman who had taken her into his bed in Paris. So she stayed silent, smiling as he took her hand and turned it palm upwards.
‘I want you to go and enjoy this chance, Eleanor. I want you to be happy again.’
That threw her. ‘I am not sad.’
‘Preoccupied, then. Lately you have been different.’
The truth settled around them. His truth and her own at odds, but she could not hurt him with the kindness in his eyes and the history between them.
‘Perhaps we should go away, Martin, far from London, to the hills up north or to the sea on the south coast. The change of air could be good for you after all …’
He stopped her before she went any further. ‘I doubt that I could manage a big shift of circumstance and I enjoy watching the traffic go by from my upstairs bedroom. It always makes me feel a part of the world.’
‘Of course.’ The chance to simply decamp from the city was not an option and so she nodded, knowing that in her capitulation she was risking everything and equally as determined not to.
Beaconsmeade was a large Palladian-style country house situated on rising ground with lawns stretching up to it and parkland as far as the eye could see below.
The party was in full swing when they arrived as a number of other carriages had come at the same time as they had.
With servants and horses and people and luggage the circular drive was awash with movement and Eleanor did not see Beatrice-Maude Wellingham until the very last moment.
‘I am so pleased that you could come,’ the older woman said as she took her hand in her own. Looking about quickly to see if any other Wellinghams were in close proximity, she relaxed when she saw that they were not.
‘I have placed you on the second floor in the blue suite of rooms. The girls are in the larger dark blue room and their mother in the smaller one with an adjoining door. You will have the light blue room a little farther down the corridor. I hope this will be to your liking.’
‘Oh, I am certain it will all be lovely,’ Eleanor replied, wishing as she said it that she might have been allotted a shared room with her sister-in-law as a further safety.
‘The Duke and Duchess of Carisbrook will be coming presently, but Cristo cannot be down until the morning. Lady Lucinda has arrived already with the Henshaws and the Beauchamps.’
‘A full house, then,’ Diana chirped in, standing at Eleanor’s elbow now with glitter-bright excitement in her eyes.
Beatrice-Maude smiled. ‘We will have some of the local families here, too, and their offspring for the evening meal. I am certain your daughters will enjoy their company.’
Sophie and Margaret nodded politely and Eleanor could almost read their thoughts as they did so. It was not the local boys that the girls had set their hearts on at all, but Cristo Wellingham with his silvered hair and secrets. She had been regaled all the way down with his wealth and his prowess at fighting and the château that he was reputed to own in Paris.
Eleanor had longed to ask how
