by Sophia James
‘Are you suggesting my past might have been a help?’
‘I am. No one truly knows you, knows what would pull you this way or that. It keeps them guessing.’
‘My childhood was not a romantic one, Adelia.’
He’d only occasionally spoken of his past so she had no real idea of how bad it had been. But she did know he’d gained a strength from adversity and used it to his advantage.
‘Neither was mine.’
That small honesty sat for a moment between them.
‘Your sister looked happier than I remember her.’
‘A result of our father’s death, I should imagine. She no longer has to look over her shoulder and dread what is coming.’
‘And you?’
‘I don’t, either. If I ever have children, I shall make sure that they are loved and valued and that no one will ever hurt them.’
The truth of what she’d just said suddenly dawned on her. Children were something they had never discussed and it was poor taste to have blurted that out given the state of their marriage.
He seemed to dismiss the implications completely, though, and continued on in a different vein altogether.
‘I have made arrangements to go out to Richmond tomorrow and I wondered if you and the girls would like to accompany me? I will be leaving here around eleven. You had mentioned a picnic?’
Delight ran through her. ‘Flora and Charlotte would love that. I know they would.’
‘And you?’ The question was softly given. ‘Would you like that, too?’
She felt a blush rising and looked away. ‘I’ve never been to Richmond before, but I hear it is very pretty.’
‘I have someone designing a house for the land I’ve bought. He will be there at two on the site and I would appreciate your opinion on the place.’
He almost sounded as if he meant it and that this house might be important to them both in the future, a house that sat on the river among trees and birdsong.
‘Will you move to Richmond after it is finished?’
‘I think so. I want a change and that is just one part of it.’
‘Will there be a garden there?’ The house rose in her imagination, strong and beautiful.
‘There will, but I don’t want anything to be too formal.’ He looked at her more closely. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I have a vegetable patch at Athelridge, but lately I have been experimenting with flowers…’
Breaking off, she realised her mistake. No woman of means and good birth ever gardened and she had let a lot more slip than simply her love of the soil.
‘You fed your family, didn’t you? To make ends meet and in spite of your father?’
‘Yes.’
‘A fact that explains the trousers you were wearing on my first visit to Athelridge as well as the mud on your socks.’
‘I wondered if you had seen that.’
‘Is my bookkeeper giving you enough to live on?’
‘More than enough.’
‘Your father was a cheat, Adelia. He kept his mistresses in style and yet allowed his family to nearly starve.’
She remained quiet.
‘Athelridge Hall came to me through an investment scheme your father had gambled on that had turned bad. It was part of a portfolio that one of my investors had put up and I only remembered I had the papers when you visited that night.’
‘Believe me, there were many other poor choices, too, because my father had no sense in business.’
‘But his title helped?’
She nodded. ‘I am glad it has gone to someone else. I am glad it is no longer here in my family, a ball and chain of expectation.’
He laughed then, loud and long.
‘You are a constant surprise to me, Adelia. Sometimes I wonder if I know you at all.’
His gold eyes darkened and she sensed a change, no longer distant but much more aware.
‘If you could alter one thing about yourself, what would it be?’
She didn’t even need to think about it. ‘I would like to laugh more. I would like to stop being scared.’
‘Hell.’
Simeon swore a lot, but this time she only felt the warmth in the words as if he was angry with all the world, but not with her.
‘Perhaps that can be arranged, this laughter. Outings with children invariably produce humour and we have two little girls who would suit our purpose admirably,’ he said.
‘Alexander Thompson was a friend I had growing up. He helped me learn things and manage the estate. I was thankful to him, but that was all.’ The words were torn out of her, seemingly from nowhere, as though desperate to be uttered.
He looked startled. ‘You don’t have to explain your past to me, Adelia. It’s what happens from now on that counts.’
‘I thought I loved him once.’ She gave the words with honesty, wanting Simeon to hear them.
‘And now?’ he asked, as though he couldn’t help himself.
‘Now I know that I don’t.’
His smile caught her out, so honest and true. She wanted to tell him more. She wanted to say that the way she knew such a thing was because of him. Once love struck it had made every other emotion in life seem diluted. But she could not say that to him yet.
‘While we are confessing our pasts I should tell you before anyone else does that I was married before, at nineteen, to a woman I thought I loved.’
‘What happened?’ Adelia decided in that moment not to mention that he’d already told her the bare bones of this when he’d been drunk on their wedding night. She was too curious to know more.
‘She died eleven months after we married and then I concentrated on business.’
‘And made an outrageous fortune?’
He laughed again. ‘At twenty-seven the scars of life seem less painful somehow than they did at nineteen. After a distance of several years there must be a softening, for I was a lot angrier back then.’
‘At this wife?’
‘No, not at her because we never loved each other as we should have. More at the injustices of life, at the unfairness of being vulnerable.’
‘And you were that? Vulnerable?’
‘Once.’
He did not touch her, but she felt the heat of him, the sense of him close and the knowing of him in some way that defied logic. She understood what he said instinctively because she had felt this vulnerability, too, tossed into a family that was weak in every part that mattered and having to find a way to save it.
And here she was on the other side of all of that, in a place of security and safety, a place where she no longer had to struggle and fight and worry. And it was all because of him.
‘I said when I met you that I would offer you anything you wanted of me in our marriage and I meant it. You have, after all, kept your side of the bargain and I mean to keep to my own.’
She saw how he swallowed and how his glance fell across her body, in a manner that told her he had understood her meaning exactly.
‘I should not want only duty from you, Adelia. There are other avenues…’
‘Of course.’
The bubble broke. He was speaking of his mistress, the beautiful woman at their wedding, sultry and sensual, who would give him more than she ever could with her innocence and her uncertainty.
* * *
She was back to being prickly and after such an offer his good will was being sorely tested. For heaven’s sake! What did she want from him? Had she just offered him her body or was he completely mistaken?
His own libido leapt to attention and he was glad that he sat behind a desk. That could not have been her message, a daughter of breeding and blood lines reaching back across the ages.
It was his own needs reacting, erroneously, incorrectly, in desperation and in hopefulness. He need
ed to get a grip on himself before he ruined everything, needed to get back to the innocuous picnic plans and the subject of the girls.
‘I will instruct the staff to pack food baskets for the morrow. I think the day will be a warm one, but there is a cold wind blowing so we will take blankets.’
Simeon could barely believe the stream of words coming from his mouth—mild, bland, inoffensive nothings that cancelled out her offer and left him stranded still, on a shore he had not ventured to much before. The shore of folly and inanity and irresolution.
How did she do this so easily? To him? How did she turn his mind to things she could not possibly have meant, crude things, things she would certainly not welcome from him? He needed to be a gentleman, he needed to make her feel safe. The sensations rushing around his body were not anything like that. No, they were conducive only to chaos.
‘That will be lovely.’
Her words made him frown. What? he thought. What will be lovely? What on earth had they just spoken of? He was all at sea and struggling for comprehension. The idea of her beneath him right there on the carpet with the light of the chandelier on her body and the door locked was paramount in his mind. He imagined her hair down, all the glorious vibrant colours of it flowing through his fingers. He imagined his hands grasping her softness. And his tongue… Swallowing hard, he tried desperately to take stock of what she was saying to him.
‘Goodnight. I hope you sleep well.’
More of her words. Then she was gone, walking out with a quiet grace, a woman who was refined and polished and poised.
All the things that he had tried to be, but was not. He wanted to follow her and ask her exactly what she had meant by her promise to allow him anything, to clarify her meaning, to know she was only speaking in general terms, to fully comprehend that she had not even remotely intended to ask him to make love to her. If he wanted to.
And he did want to.
So desperately his whole body had hardened. He quivered like some sort of a musical string wound as tightly as the tension would allow. He could barely believe the thickness of his desire.
Lust ruled him, simply and crudely, reminding him of the men in his childhood who had let it rule them. Such a thought sickened him, nauseated him, abruptly making him feel repulsive and shocked.
He had tried for so long to be rid of his past, been so careful to make sure that the messages he received from women were exactly as they had meant them. But he could not read his wife at all.
He closed his eyes and ran one hand through his hair, bringing himself back, finding a reassurance in his returning calm.
The sheets of paper with all the calculations were comforting, too. His world was one of commerce and management.
He remembered his first years studying engineering and mathematics as an apprentice in his Uncle Jamie’s workshops. The world of absolutes, the place of exactness where there was no room for even the slightest deviation or mistake.
It was like finding out the truth and returning to a welcomed tranquillity after all the turbulence of his childhood. He loved the control, he welcomed the rules and the constraint and the restrictions. He knew what was expected of him there and he relished the lack of surprises.
Yet now here he was, pounced on from all sides by uncertainty, stalked by disarray and confusion. And confronted at every turn by a woman who was beyond beautiful and yet did not truly know it.
A change. In everything.
He smiled then, because he’d wanted a variance, a difference in his life and he had got the biggest one he could have ever imagined.
Adelia Hermione Josephine Bennett Worthington had walked into his life. An angel, a devil, a saviour, a temptation. He wondered for a moment if he was going mad, if the stress of the past few months had finally got to him and addled his mind.
He thought of his uncle and his words of encouragement, the kindness he had shown and the guidance. Without Jamie he would never have survived. He would never have had the chance to. He turned to the picture behind him and took in the portrait, thanking the man as he had a thousand times before across the years. Missing him, but feeling the sadness and savouring it.
Tomorrow they would all go on a picnic to Richmond, to the river and the trees and the sunshine. He would see the children laugh and he would look at Adelia and be only thankful, all the darker thoughts gone, disappeared into the daylight. He would show her the drawings of the house and the fall of the land. They might make daisy chains or sail leaf boats and the food would be delicious and bountiful.
A proper day. A suitable outing.
He remembered his uncle finding him finally at fourteen in Angel Meadow, after months of searching for the lost child of his niece. Jamie had simply taken him home to his substantial house in the north of Manchester and showed him a life that he had no notion of. A gentle life with enough to eat and any danger held at arm’s length. His uncle had never been married and they had become family to each other, his quiet teachings helping Simeon to make sense of what had happened to him and to want a new beginning.
He was different now and better because of Jamie’s kindness and integrity. There was no longer hatred in his heart. Adelia would see only the man he had invented, the man his uncle had fostered, the man the world had allowed to be reborn, one with luck on his side and strength in his vision.
Simeon liked this version of himself, but in order to keep it intact he would need to be very careful around his most singular wife.
* * *
Adelia had never seen such a beautiful place. The land that would hold the house her husband had drawn up was a large elevated slice of trees, grass and wild flowers, the Thames River lapping at its feet. The wind was quieter here, blocked off by a hill a few hundred yards away and the sunlight spilled down over it, warming both the earth and her heart.
Flora and Charlotte were chasing each other around the boughs of substantial oaks and elms. Everywhere there was peace and light, the loop of the river wide here and the water slow.
She loved Athelridge Hall, but this place was even more beautiful. History clothed the surrounds and a sense of the future here rather than the past made her stop and just enjoy the moment. She wanted to know this place with all of her heart.
Simeon had been distant this morning. Oh, granted he had been unfailingly polite and courteous to them all, but he was holding something back, the man she had spoken with last night now far more formal and stiff. His meeting with the architect had been a quick one and as she walked across to him after the man left she saw how carefully he watched the girls.
‘They are happy here, Simeon. It is a good place. I can see why anyone would buy this piece of land. It’s only a wonder the vendor sold it.’
He smiled, the first real humour she had seen all morning. ‘Elijah Greene was an old man and the house he had built here burned down in a fire ten years ago. When I told him I was interested in buying the property he asked me many questions until he was satisfied I would be the right one.’
‘Questions?’
‘He wanted a house on it that would sit on the land with ease. He wanted a family here, too.’
‘But you did not have one?’
‘Strange, then, how things work out. He would have loved seeing the children running around the trees he had planted all those years ago.’
‘A sense of history?’
‘Exactly.’
He turned then to look at the river again, its surface glinting grey green in the light.
‘Elijah asked if I might fashion a loggia under that elm by the river as a place of memory for him and I agreed. See the large piece of stone in the shadows? The loggia will sit there, its floor above the water so the sounds of the Thames can be heard.’
‘That was an unusual request.’
‘He was born here. It seemed fitting somehow to do as he asked.’
‘A sense of place, you mean?’
‘And one I never had myself.’
It was the most personal thing he had ever said to her and after the distance he’d put between them that day she was surprised.
‘We will start the construction of it in the next few weeks. The house will be built of cream stone and will be long and low. A solid house that will last for a thousand years and beyond. Safe and constant.’
‘A fortress like the Tower of London?’ She smiled as she said it.
‘No,’ he returned, ‘only a home.’
Flora had come to them now, her hands full of cornflowers, buttercups and daisies.
‘There are so many flowers here. I am going to pick some and bring them back to London. Charlotte is finding a bunch, too.’
Adelia bent down to smell them, the buttercup grazing her chin, and Flora smiled as she wiped the pollen away. It was so good to see Catherine Rountree’s child happy, her cheeks flushed and her hands full of flowers.
‘Put them on the blanket here in the shade, Flora, and go and tell Charlotte that I am about to lay out the food for afternoon tea.’
Adelia was pleased that no maid or governess accompanied them today, the freedom of being here like this undeniably relaxing. The driver and footman were with the carriage by the roadside, tending to the horses and having a rest themselves.
Leaning down, she plucked a blue cornflower from the bunch and handed it to Simeon.
‘For friendship,’ she said, ‘and for fortune and prosperity. An apt plant for today, I think.’
He took it and tucked it into a buttonhole on his jacket so that the spindly stem showed underneath and she laughed, because with the sun on his dark hair and a flower above his heart Simeon was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
‘There is a language around flowers?’ His question was puzzled.
‘There is and it is extensive and symbolic.’ She plucked a buttercup from Flora’s posy. ‘This represents humility and neatness. And a daisy is new beginnings.’
She did not add fertility or love because those words seemed out of place here today and she needed to understand just what he wanted of her first.
‘You are a mine of information, Lia.’