is a girl of much discretion, either. But they did not see our daughter as I did. They did not see her so underdressed in the company of a stranger, her gown gone and her hair down. There might be some hope in that.’
Her mother’s sob was muffled and then there were whispered words of worry, the rustle of silk, the blown-out candle, the door shutting behind them and then silence.
She was in her room in Mayfair, back in her bed, the same bunch of tightly budded pink roses bought yesterday from the markets on the small table beside her. It was dark and late and a fire had been set in the hearth. For heat, she supposed, because all she could feel was a deathly cold. She wiggled her toes and her hands came beneath the sheets to run along the lines of her body. Everything was in place though she could feel the scratches incurred during her flight through the woods.
She breathed in, glad she could now gather more air than she had been able to in the carriage. Her neck throbbed and she swallowed. There was a thick bandage wrapped across her right thumb and tied off at her wrist.
He was dead. All that beauty dead and gone. She remembered the blood on the cobblestones and on her petticoats and in the lighter shades of his hair.
The beat of her heart sounded loud in a room with the quiet slice of moonlight on the bedcovers. A falling moon now, faded and low.
Was she ruined because of him? Ruined for ever?
She could not believe that she wouldn’t be. Her sister had not come to seek her out and extract the story. She imagined Maria had been told to stay away. Her maid, Milly, had gone too, on an extended holiday back to her family in Kent. To recover from the dreadful shock, her father had explained when he first saw her awake, but she could see so very much more in his eyes.
The howls of the dogs came to mind. Her abductor’s voice, too, raw but certain. She remembered his laughter as she’d hit him hard with her books. There was a dimple in his chin.
Where would he be buried? She’d looked back and seen the servant lift him from the ground, carefully, gently, none of the violence of her father, only protection and concern.
She was glad for it. She was. She was also glad that she was here safe and that there was nothing left between them save memory. His pale clear green eyes. The shaved shortness of his hair. The two parallel scars evident on his scalp. The smell of wool and unscented soap in his jacket. She shook away such thoughts. He had ruined her. He had taken her life and changed it into something different. He had taken her from the light and discharged her into shadow.
The deep lacerations on her arms from the trees in the glade stung and she could still smell the peppermint even after her long soak in a hot bath scented with oil of lavender.
The scent clung to her and she recalled his fingers upon her as he had rubbed it in. Gently. Without any threat whatsoever.
He was dead because of his own foolishness. He was gone to face the judgements of the Lord. A deserved punishment. A fitting end. And yet all she could feel was the dreadful waste.
A tap on the door had her turning and her sister was there in her nightgown, face pale.
‘Can I come in, Flora? Papa said you were sleeping and that you were not to be disturbed till the morning. But Milly has been sent home and she was so full of the horror of your abduction it began to seem as if you might never be back again. What a fright you have given us.’
Florentia found her sister’s deluge of words comforting.
‘Mama says that there is the chance we might have to leave London for a while and retire to Albany. Did he hurt you, the one who took you from Mount Street, I mean? It is being whispered that Papa shot him dead somewhere to the north?’
Flora’s stomach turned and she sat up quickly, thinking she might be sick, glad when the nausea settled back into a more far off place.
Warm fingers curled in close as Maria positioned herself next to her and took her hand, tracing the scratches upon each finger and being careful not to bump her thumb. ‘You are safe now and that man will never be able to hurt you again, Papa promised it would be so. At least we can leave London and go home for it’s exhausting here and difficult to fit in.’
The out-of-step sisters, Flora suddenly thought. She had overheard that remark at their first soirée. One of a group of the ton’s beautiful girls had said it and the others had laughed.
They were an oddness perhaps here in London, the two daughters of an impoverished earl who held no true knowledge of society and its expectations.
Heartbreak had honed them and sharpened the edges of trust. But she would not think about that now because she was perilously close to tears.
‘I heard Mama crying and Papa talking with her and she asked if we were cursed?’
‘What did Father say?’ Flora stilled at Maria’s words.
‘He said that only the weak-willed can be so stricken and that the true curse would have been to never find you. He also said while there is life there is hope.’
Life. Breath. Warmth. No hope for him though, the stranger with his blood running across the cobbles.
‘Papa also said that perhaps we should not have come to London in the first place, but Mama asked how are we to be married off otherwise. Father replied there was an unkindness here that he found disappointing and I think he’s right for people laugh at us sometimes. Perhaps we are not as fashionable as we should be or as interesting as the others are? Papa’s title is something that holds sway here, but I suppose they also realise there is not much more than that behind our name.’
Flora pulled herself together and spoke up. ‘We are who we are, Maria. We are enough.’
‘Enough,’ her sister repeated and brought her fingers up into a fist.
This was an old tradition between them, joining hands and making a chain. Pulling them together. Keeping them strong. Maria was only a year above her in age and they had always been close. But even as she tried to gather strength Florentia felt that something had been irrevocably broken inside her, wrenched apart and plundered. She wondered truly if she would ever recover from a sadness she could not quite understand.
* * *
Her father called her to his library the next morning and he looked as tired as she was, the night past having been a long and fitful one to get through.
‘I thought we should try to remember something of yesterday between us, my dear. To keep it in memory so to speak, in case we have to think about it again in the future.’
‘In the future?’
‘If he has left you with child—?’
She didn’t let him finish. ‘It was not like that, Papa. He did not...’ She stopped. ‘I think he thought I was someone else entirely. Some woman who needed to be escorted north because she was in trouble. He did not touch me in that way.’
Relief lay in the lines of his face and in the lift of his eyes. ‘But your dress and the scratches?’
‘I had been sick and used water to try to make my gown clean again and he took it off me because it was wet and I was shaking and breathless. I also ran through a forest to try to get away and the branches snagged
