by Sophia James
‘Then we just need some time to think about it, some quiet time away from the pressures of London. A solution is always available to any problem and this one will be no different.’
‘What if Alderworth comes to find me at Falder and demands my return?’
The silence told her that there was some other thing afoot.
‘We are not going to Falder?’
‘No. We are making for Beaconsfield and then to a house on the south coast. You can live there with a stipend if you cannot stay close to town.’
‘Away from the Duke of Alderworth?’
‘He is a dangerous adversary, Lucy. Until we can formulate a plan to keep you safe, it is better to keep you apart. I think such a man would insist on his marital rights.’
The blood simply drained from her face as she contemplated that truth. Would the Dissolute Duke want to take her to his bed? Again? Her imagination ran wild. If she was already pregnant from her ignominious ruin, how would this change things? The very thought of it had her reaching for her thick night-wrap.
‘I do not want to see him, Emmie. Asher is right. I wish for some distance between us so that I can indeed think.’
Tay sat in his study with the curtains open and a quarter-moon outside in the heavens struggling to find clear sky through banks of high-billowed cloud.
She had left. Lucinda Wellingham had gone with her family from London, running in the early dawn to a place that was not Falder. He had found out this little information from a stable hand he waylaid on the way home from their town house, though the boy had no inkling of their true destination.
His bride had, however, left a note, the words written in his memory like some morbid poem of rebuttal.
I hope that you will allow me a few weeks to recover from the accident and to consider my options.
Please do not come after me. I will not receive you.
If you need to contact me, Cristo will forward any communication and I will answer as I see fit.
The missive was signed formally. Lady Lucinda Wellingham. She had not even used his name.
Lifting a glass of brandy to his lips, he upended it, the quiet tonight a pressing and heavy one. The purse of the Wellinghams sat on the desk in front of him, a considerable sum representing a new life, somewhere far from England, perhaps? The Americas beckoned and so did the East Indies. Here he was struggling to keep ahead of the many and mounting debts his father had left him, every pound he made subtracted twice over by the ones he owed. Another few years at this rate and it would all be gone. Alderworth, the extensive land and buildings around it and the London town house, disappeared into the gloom of history.
A new life summoned—a refurbishment of the soul and one with a beguiling promise. The choice was simple. Stay here and fight the power of the Wellinghams for a wife who did not want him, or leave on a new tide and chance his hand at something different. He had never travelled away from the shores of England before, the duties of being the caretaker of Alderworth taking all his attention. If he left half of the Wellingham money here in an account to be drip-fed into the estate just to keep it afloat, perhaps he could build other possibilities?
Flat blue eyes came to mind, the anger in them directed only at him. Lucinda wanted neither his name nor his title and, as tiredness settled, it took too much will to quarrel.
His parents had frittered away their lives together in acrimonious exchanges and he did not wish to do the same. No, far better to welcome change and simply vanish.
His eyes strayed to the band on the third finger of his left hand. To have and to hold from this day forth, his wife had promised as she had placed it there …
Dragging the gold across his knuckles, he threw it into a drawer in the desk. A relationship that had begun in untruth and blossomed under duress was now ended in deceit. He would journey to a far-off corner of the world which laid no claim to the stifling conventions of a society immured in manners.
And then he would be free.
The journey south was hurried and long and as the carriage swayed against a wind from the sea, Lucinda thought that her life from now on might be exactly like this flight into obscurity.
She could not go back and she could not go forwards, the worry of seeing Taylen Ellesmere again precluding any early return to London. Emerald and Asher both looked as tired as she did, the last weeks resting on their faces, worn down by worry. At least the beginning of her menses had come that morning and there was some relief to know she would not be bound to Alderworth by a child. But even that relief was tempered by sadness as she faced the possibility that she might never ever be a mother.
‘The air here is so much better than in London, Ashe.’ Emerald’s observation was falsely cheerful, just words to fill in the heavy silence.
Lucinda nodded and tried to smile, though she doubted that her brother would be fooled by such a forced joviality. With a cursory glance at the sky, Asher brought the subject back to the problem they were all thinking about.
‘In a month you can come back to Falder, Lucinda. I will employ guards to make certain Alderworth comes nowhere near you and at least it will be a more familiar setting. I doubt, however, that London will be a destination available to you for a good long while yet. Society has a great need to feed off scandal and this one …’ He left the sentence unfinished.
She nodded to please him, but the ache in her breast threatened to explode into an anger she did not recognise. She wished with all her heart that she had not been persuaded to go to a house of such ill repute in the first place, for all that had followed was the result of one injudicious decision.
‘Visiting Alderworth was more than foolish,’ she muttered and Asher looked up, the pity in his eyes almost her undoing.
‘I have left word to have Alderworth followed so any movements that alarm us will be monitored. Let us hope he has the sense to retire to that estate of his and never again leave it.’
‘You think he will stay in England?’ As Emerald asked the question something passed between Asher and her—a warning, were Lucinda to name it. A quiet notice of caution with an undercurrent of intent.
Goodness, had her brothers shanghaied her husband already and thrown him on to a ship sailing far from Britain before disgorging him on to some unknown foreign shore? Her mind ran all the possible injuries that Taylen Ellesmere might sustain.
‘If you have hurt him …’ she began and stopped, dread making her question what it was she was going to say. Ellesmere should mean nothing to her. She should be glad that he would disappear for ever, yet concern lingered.
‘He is at liberty to go where he wants. There was no duress in it.’
‘You paid him?’ Suddenly she understood. ‘You bribed him to leave?’
When he nodded, she looked away. Ruined and humiliated. She vowed that there would never be another time when she allowed a man to hurt her.
Tay watched the coast of England receding into only mist. The sea birds called around him as the canvas of the sails caught the wind, turning the ship east, and an excitement he had not felt before quickened his breath and made him lift his face to the heavens.
Free.
For the first time in his life the debt of Alderworth did not weigh him down with its constant demands and a new horizon beckoned.
A place to make a different mark, a land where no one knew him. The mantle of the past slipped away into the gathering breeze and his fingers curled around the guard rail, holding on to the rusted steel as though his very life depended on it.
‘You look as though you could do with a drink.’ A tall red-haired man stood next to him, the collar of his coat raised against the weather. ‘Where are you headed?’
‘Anywhere a fortune is to be made,’ Tay answered, a plan formulating as he spoke. He needed money to come back. He needed good hard cash to retrieve his life and make it work in the way he wanted it to. His glance took in the bare third finger on his left hand as the stranger spoke again.
‘I am
bound for North Georgia. They say that the gold there is easy to retrieve and the veins are rich. Two years I have given myself to find it and my wife, Elizabeth, is already counting down the days.’
‘You have experience of mining, then?’ A small worm of an idea began to creep up into possibility.
The other nodded. ‘With farming as it is I have needed to supplement my income from the family estate by other means. I could do with a partner if you are interested. A flat fee for the tools we will need and that will be it, save for lots of hard work and a good dollop of persistence. A sense of humour might help, too.’
The screech of a gull above had them looking up, the big bird wheeling out of the sky towards them, its wings outstretched as it landed on a point at the top of the ship. Hitching a ride or having a rest?
Choices.
They came from the most unexpected places and from the most unexpected people. Putting out his hand, he felt the firm grasp of the other.
‘Tay Ellesmere.’ No title. Nothing to tie him to the England he was leaving. A different man with another life.
‘Lance Montcrieff. From Ridings Hall in Devon.’
Lucinda walked along the cliffs of Foulness Point and watched the ocean waves break across the beaches below, never-ending tides, washing the land clean of all that it had left there the day before. A constantly refreshed canvas, the flotsam of life taken away to another headland in a different place, redefined and transformed.
As she was not. Two years of isolated country living had left her struggling with her identity, Falder and its environs beautiful, but never changing. Her physical strength had returned finally, though her memory had never followed. Oh, granted, she still had headaches sometimes and when she was tired her vision became a little blurred, but the bone-wearying fatigue had dissipated and in its place a haunting curiosity had risen.
She wondered where in the world the Duke of Alderworth might now be. Cristo had given her a letter a good year ago and she had opened it with shaking fingers.
His description of a town in the North Georgia mountains in the Americas had been interesting, but had left her hollow. He had written nothing of his feelings or of his intentions or of any new relationships he might have formed. A half-page long, and wholly factual, the message could have been written for anyone.
He had signed it Tay Ellesmere. No title. Just the diminutive of Taylen. Tay. She had run the word a thousand times off her tongue ever since reading it and hated herself for doing so.
She wanted him back. She did, out here in the wind and with the sound of the ocean all around her. She wanted to feel his skin against her own in that particular way he had of heightening her senses and making her feel alive.
Dead. She had been dead since he had left, on an early morning ship out of St Katherine’s Dock, Asher had said. Sailing for the Americas and a new life without any of the burdensome encumbrances that he had been tied to in England and so unwillingly.
Paid to take ship from London and never return? She had heard that, too, when she had listened in to a conversation between Taris and Asher. All she had picked up in their tones was relief that Alderworth was gone and so she had tried to forget him, banishing all thoughts of a husband from her mind.
And failing.
She hated this limbo she was in, caught between marriage and widowhood, and never a chance of moving on. Sometimes she hated Taylen Ellesmere so much that her skin shook with the loathing.
A voice calling took her thoughts away and she saw Lord Edmund Coleridge, a friend of Cristo’s, walking towards her.
‘Cris told me that you would be here,’ he said as he came close. ‘He also said that I was to ask you for a dance tonight at Graveson.’
‘Florencia’s party?’ The house had been awash with busy hands since it had been decided to throw a birthday party for Cristo and Eleanor’s oldest daughter.
‘Seven is an important number. She has asked her father if she might invite Bram Crowley to help her celebrate.’
‘Young love.’ Lucinda smiled and shook her head. Brampton’s father owned the property bordering Cristo and Asher’s holdings and, although the family were not titled, they were by all accounts very rich. Florencia had liked him from the very first moment she had arrived with her mother, and the boy had done much to bring a frightened and retiring child out of her shell.
‘I hope you might save a waltz for me, Lady Lucinda.’ Edmund took her hand, surprising her. ‘I would dearly like to get to know you better.’
‘I am married, my lord,’ she returned quickly. ‘There can be no gain in aiming your sights at me.’
His laughter floated on the wind around them, a happy, free sound that made her relax.
‘Your brother told me that you were forthright and now I believe him. I will swap you one waltz for the chance to tool my greys around the Falder course on the morrow.’
‘A difficult thing to refuse. Did Cris also tell you of my passion for horses?’
‘He did indeed. He said I was to expound on my expertise in archery as well.’ His eyes lost their humour as he continued. ‘It is just a dance I beseech, Lady Lucinda, and the chance of friendship.’
For the first time in a long while Lucinda allowed a man to hold her fingers for more than a second without pulling away. There was none of the magic there that she had felt with Alderworth, but it was not unpleasant, either. With blond hair blowing in the wind and his dark eyes soulful, Edmund Coleridge had his own sort of appeal. Lord knew she had heard he was popular with all the young ladies of society and she could see how that could be so.
But he did not smell of wood-smoke and lemon and his eyes were not the colour of the wet forests at Falder. Nor were they underlaid with a thrilling lust that made her whole body sing.
Lucinda wore a new gown that evening, a red silk that was edged in gold. Such a combination might have been showy, but the dressmaker had played up the underlights in the silk and matched them exactly with the trim.
‘You look beautiful tonight, Lucy.’ Emerald was the first to see her as she came downstairs, and indeed as she caught a reflection in the large mirror at Graveson she did look … different.
Sorrow had stalked her for so long since the fiasco in London that Lucinda had almost got used to its sombre presence. Tonight, however, her spirit was lifted. Perhaps it was because of something as uncomplicated as the beautiful gown or the fact that Eleanor’s maid had fashioned her hair in a new style. Or perhaps it was just the fact of a family celebration and the excitement of Florencia, Cristo and Eleanor.
Edmund Coleridge was the next one to compliment her and he did so with a raft of words.
‘I could compare your hair to moonbeams or sunlight or to the sparkling fall of water over rocks, my lady.’
Despite the flowery rhetoric, Lucinda laughed. ‘Please do not, my lord.’
She liked the warmth of his hand and the smooth feel of his skin. His hair tonight was Macassared and it suited him; made him look more dangerous. She shook away the thought. Safety was what she was after. The consequences of following reckless paths had ruined everything, after all, and she had promised herself to walk a discreet and scatheless way in future.
‘Your niece has been asking after you. I think she wants to give you something.’
As if on cue Florencia appeared before them, a beautiful gardenia in hand. ‘Everyone has to wear one tonight, Aunty Lucy, because they are my very favourite flower.’
Lucinda noticed the bottom of the stalk had been wrapped in brown paper, a pin secured in the folds.
‘Is this your handiwork, my love?’ she asked as she took the bloom and smelt it.
‘Mine and Mama’s.’ Her dark eyes crossed to Edmund. ‘But you are wearing yours upside down.’ A wide smile lit up her face as Coleridge knelt and fashioned his flower exactly as she wanted it.
‘Is this better?’
‘Much. Now I just have to find Uncle Taris. I think he is hiding from me because he thinks flowers are for gi
rls.’
With a whirl she was gone, with her little basket of gifts and a jaunty lilt to her step. Lucinda remembered back to when she had first met Cristo’s daughter. The change in her demeanour was heartening and it seemed Coleridge was thinking exactly the same thing.
‘Cris is lucky with his family and is happier than I have ever seen him.’ The flower had wet the fabric of his coat where water seeped through the paper, but he only wiped it away.
Edmund Coleridge was a kind man, a good man with high principles and moral worthiness. She caught Eleanor watching them with a smile on her face and thought briefly how easy it might have been had she chosen a man like this one. Her family liked him, society lauded his goodness and he observed her as though he was inclined to know her better.
When a waiter passed with a tray of drinks in tall and fluted glasses she picked one up and drank it quickly before returning for a second.
‘My brother knows his wine. French, I should imagine, and very smooth.’
The first flutter of warmth stirred in her stomach, the drink relaxing a tension that was ever-present in her life. More usually she stayed away from anything that might not allow her control, after her last débâcle, but tonight she felt able to risk it.
She nodded as Edmund Coleridge took her hand and asked her to dance. A waltz, she realised, as he led her to the floor, the slow languid three-beat music swirling across her senses.
He was thinner than his clothes suggested, but as her fingers came across the superfine of his jacket a sense of masculine strength made her breath come faster. It had been so long since she had touched a man like this.
Taylen.
Swallowing, she made herself stop. Alderworth was not here and would never be so. He had gladly gone to the Americas, paid handsomely by her brothers to abandon any husbandly duty. The ache in her chest made her breathe faster.
‘We can sit this out if you would wish to?’
Concerned dark eyes washed across her own.
‘No. I would like to dance.’