by Sophia James
‘My parents always believed in the concept of treating everyone as an enemy. Tonight I forgot.’ The words were said concisely, as if he would place a point on each one of them.
‘Advice like that makes me wonder whether such people have the right to offspring. Surely no child deserves to be brought up under such a cruel misconception.’
The sound of his laughter filled the small space, allowing accord to push through shock and anger. ‘Are you usually so forthright, Duchess?’
‘Indeed I am, Duke. My family would tell you that it is one of my greatest faults.’
His head shook as the Wellingham town house came into view, the action shadowed on the wall of the carriage behind him by the light from the portico. His hair had worked free from its leather strap and lay around his shoulders, darker than the darkness.
‘But I would not. Free speech has always been a particular preference of mine. I think it a residue of being raised by parents who never said what they actually thought.’
‘Because they were trying to protect you?’
He laughed again and was about to say something more when a movement on the stairs before them caught his attention. ‘It seems we have a welcoming party.’
Lucinda’s heart sank. With the blood from his nose still smeared across his face, a rapidly darkening eye and a thickened lip, Taylen Ellesmere looked exactly like the reprobate her brothers had good reason to think that he was.
‘I won’t come in. I doubt my body could take another beating.’ The dispassionate and cynical Duke was back, no warmth in his eyes at all as the footman opened the door and the light spilled upon them.
‘A further rowdy night of fighting, Alderworth?’ Asher’s question was layered with disgust.
‘Someone has to subdue the scum of London. It may as well be me.’
‘No, it isn’t as you think it—’ Lucinda began as she stepped down from the coach, but her husband cut her off.
‘I will see you tomorrow, Duchess. Thank you for the most interesting of evenings.’
A rap with his cane on the roof had the horses moving, the perfectly matched pair of greys gathering speed as they disappeared down the road.
‘His blood has ruined your gown.’ Asher ground the words out as they walked back inside.
‘Halsey did it. Halsey and a group of his cowardly friends. They caught him alone on the terrace at the ball in a planned attack. He had no chance against them.’
A look crossed her brother’s face, dark and unexplainable, and a terrible idea suddenly occurred to Lucinda.
‘You did not pay anyone to do that to him, did you, Ashe?’
‘Halsey is a weak-willed and arrogant sycophant. If I wanted the job done, I would do it properly myself.’
‘Well, don’t.’ She stood to her tallest height in her stained and crumpled gown, the shock of the evening on her face and an anger boiling beneath everything that was dubious. ‘Hurt Alderworth, I mean. I am tired of being the forgotten wife and I want at least the chance to …’ She stopped, not quite able to voice what it was she did want.
‘The chance to what?’ His dark eyes were filled with an urgent question.
‘To … know something of the man I have married.’
With that she swept past, making for the staircase and the privacy of her room.
Tay held a hand close against his chest. He was sure a few of his ribs were broken and knew they would hurt like the devil in the morning. Breathing shallowly, he leaned forwards, finding in the movement a slight relief. The wedding ring he had retrieved that morning from the bottom drawer of his library desk felt solid on his finger.
Lucinda had seen him helpless at the feet of a pack of cowards who had crept up on him as he was lighting a cheroot, the evening with his wife making him less vigilant than he normally was. Usually the ton avoided any contretemps or whiff of scandal, but Lucinda had come forwards with her integrity and her honour, admonishing grown men with words that he could not have bettered.
Like a fierce and urgent angel. Lord, he was the sinner married to a saint and with his past it would be her paying for such loyalty again and again and again. The shock in her eyes, her trembling fingers, her ruined gown and disappointment scrawled in deep lines across her brow. He had seen her stiffen when her oldest brother had come out to meet them. Another mortification. He smiled at the word and then regretted it as the skin on his top lip stung.
Without Lucinda here everything hurt, badly, a cold emptiness closing in about him. He would not meet her tomorrow or the day after that, for he needed time to nurse his wounds and to try to find some idea as to where to go to next.
He could not keep putting his wife into danger or see her compromised by his own lack of regard for the law and there were more of the ilk of Halsey out there than he would have liked to admit.
Remembering Lucinda’s words in the carriage as she had tried to explain to him why he was nothing like Richard Allenby, he smiled. No one had ever been on his side before, not like that and in the face of such damning evidence. The feeling was … warming.
Shaking his head hard, he told himself to put such nonsense aside. Twenty-eight years had taught him a few home truths and one of them was to depend upon nobody.
Treat everyone as an enemy.
His mother and father’s son after all, the words scrawled into his flesh like a tattoo. Ineradicable and permanent.
Lucinda did not see Taylen Ellesmere the next day or the day after. No note of explanation came.
Her brothers had ceased to talk of Alderworth whatsoever, hoping perhaps that by ignoring him he might go away, but she haunted the wide front-window bays like a wraith, glancing out each time a noise caught her attention or the sound of hooves echoed on the street, her breath catching with every newcomer turning into the square, eyes picking out their livery with interest. He might be laying low, but the bargain for an heir that they had struck between them still simmered underneath everything, calling through the silence.
‘You seem jumpy.’ Eleanor sat on the small sofa in the blue room working on a tapestry.
Smiling half-heartedly, Lucinda picked up her own needlework, but the stitches blurred before her, the counting of each one difficult today.
‘I did not sleep well last night or the one before that.’ Goodness, that was an understatement. She had lain awake almost till the dawn, worrying.
‘I could make you one of my tonics if you like. It is bound to help you relax.’
As Lucinda shook her head to decline the offer, the needle pierced her finger, drawing blood, yet instead of wiping it away she watched as the red of the wound spread into white cotton. Other blood came to mind. The injuries Taylen Ellesmere had sustained were substantial and damaging and she wondered how he fared now. Who would tend to him and make certain he was not becoming worse? His breathing had been laboured, after all, and she was sure his nose had been broken.
Standing again, she walked to the window, unconcerned as to what Eleanor might make of her distractedness. Outside drizzle coated the world in grey, a few leaves falling on the gardens with their ragged yellow edges brittle. Like her. She felt the tension in all of the corners of her body, scraping away contentment, panic close to the skin. Tears pooled at the back of her eyes. One step forwards and then two steps back. She was tired of the uncertainty and the confusion.
‘Is the contretemps at the Chesterfield ball worrying you?’ Eleanor came to stand beside Lucinda, the palm of her hand making contact.
A nod brought the hand fully around Lucinda’s shoulders.
‘Cristo thinks Alderworth may have been the one to deal with Halsey three years ago, which would explain the attack upon him in Mayfair after the carriage accident. He said that he may have misjudged him.’
‘Alderworth would not thank him for the compliment were he to hear of it, Eleanor.’
‘Because he is prickly and distant and completely unmindful of a reputation that is hardly salutary? Or because he likes to hide behind
an image that is not entirely the truth?’ The tone in her words was a worried one. ‘His grandmother used to hit him, you know. Hard. She thought such training would make a man of her grandchild because her own daughter had become such a biting disappointment with her many lovers and her drinking.’
Bile rose in Lucinda’s throat as she turned to her sister-in-law. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Rosemary Jones, my maid’s older sister. She works at Falder now, but as a young girl she was employed by Lady Shields at her home in Essex.’
‘Many children are punished, Eleanor.’
‘Not in the way he was. According to Rosemary, he spent months away from the family in a hospital in Rouen after one particular incident. Then his uncle took him away.’
‘An uncle? Which uncle?’
‘Hugo Shields, Lord Sutton, I think was the name mentioned. His mother’s brother. Rosemary did not see any of the family again because she was asked to leave. The old lady had some inkling of her disapproval, I suppose, and did not wish to be reminded of an unsavoury period in her life.’
Goodness. The whole horror of everything began to mount inside Lucinda. Between a heavy-handed grandmother and a brutal uncle, the small Taylen Ellesmere never had a chance, just as he did not now with the building censure of a society that barely knew him.
‘I think I will take the carriage out, Eleanor. I need to see my milliner about a hat.’
‘I will tell your brothers that you have a few errands to do, Lucy. I know there are a pile of library books well overdue from Hookham’s Lending Library if you would not mind dropping them off for me.’
‘Certainly.’ She smiled as Eleanor did. Both knew that the Ellesmere town house was only a few hundred yards from the mentioned establishment, a distance easy to walk.
The door of Alderworth House opened almost instantly after her maid rang the bell, a tall man ushering them into a room which was light and airy, the windows looking out on to a garden filled with greenery. A mismatched set of a sofa and two chairs were arranged before the fireplace and there were faded areas on the walls where pictures had been removed and never replaced. Lucinda wondered why the Duke had not had the place refurbished after his windfall in the Americas.
‘I’ll tell his Grace you are here, your Grace.’ Ellesmere’s butler’s face flushed at the recognition of her name and he seemed to hesitate for a moment as if he could not quite decide what to do. ‘It might take a few moments,’ he managed finally. ‘A maid will bring tea and cakes into you while you wait.’
‘Thank you.’
Claire, her maid, stood by the door, her face a careful blank canvas. She was probably balancing the luxury of the Carisbrook houses against the frugality here, a topic that would be faithfully reported back to the downstairs staff at the Wellingham town house to mull over and discuss. Lucinda wished she might have asked her to wait with the carriage, but to do so would have invited questions.
She heard a cat howling outside somewhere close. Further afield the faint trip-trop of a carriage wending its way was audible above the ticking of an ancient ornate clock in the corner, its glass face shattered on one side and the time running a good half an hour slow.
The piece had already boomed out twice before the door opened again and Tay Ellesmere stood there, formally dressed and his gait stiff. His hair was wet, giving the impression he had just bathed, and it was pulled back into a tight tail falling to his shoulders. One eye was ringed in black whilst the white of the other had changed into a violent red, deeper marks of the same colour snaking into his hair at the temple. He smelled of soap and of lemon, a combination that was appealing, but all she could think of were Rosemary the scullery-maid’s words: a small battered child lost behind hard green eyes.
‘I am sorry. I did not realise we had arranged a meeting.’
‘We had not, your Grace. It is just the last time I saw you it looked as though your injuries were worse than you let on and I thought to check to see if you were … well?’
‘I am. Entirely.’ The puffy edge of his right eye had made it close at one end. Lucinda wondered if it blurred his vision because he squinted as he watched her, the tick in his swollen eyelid clearly visible.
‘I see.’
She wished with all her heart that they might have a moment in private. He seemed to understand her reticence as his glance took in the servants. ‘Bingham, would you take the Duchess’s maid to the kitchen and find her something to drink.’
‘Very well, your Grace.’ It took only a moment for the room to be cleared and the door to be shut behind them.
‘A walk in the park would be out of the question, I suppose?’ She kept her tone light as she broke the awkward silence.
‘Unless you want me to scare small children.’ His smile went nowhere near his eyes. ‘Why are you here?’ Tiredness draped the query.
‘I have waited for you for the past two days and when you did not come I wondered if you had the medical help that you needed …’
‘I do.’
He did not even look at her now.
‘What was the reason for your attack on Halsey all those years ago?’
That brought his attention back. ‘Allenby broke one of the most important rules of my house.’
‘Which was?’
‘What goes on at Alderworth stays there.’
Disappointment welled. So it wasn’t solely because he had been trying to protect her, after all.
‘It seems to me enforcing such a rule would require much effort?’ The sharpness in her voice was not becoming, but she could no longer hide it. ‘Why seek more battles when you had enough of your own to fight?’
‘Usually I am more handy with my fists than you saw me to be at the Chesterfields’, and making certain scandal does not follow each of my guests home has not been unduly onerous before.’
Today Taylen Ellesmere was exactly the Duke his title proclaimed him to be, the solemn answers at odds with his damaged face and eyes. He stood strangely, too, straight-backed and erect, the pose making her wonder what other injuries he had sustained under the ministration of Halsey and his cronies.
‘But scandal follows you regardless, your Grace. Your own reputation has been the talk of the town for years.’
He moved towards her and reached out his hand, one finger tracing its way down her cheek.
‘Every opinion should be allowed to be given freely, I believe, but it is wise to remember that what is said is not always the truth.’
The warmth and the strength of him flooded into her being, a touchstone in the scattered uncertainty of her life, drawing her home.
Hold me closer, she longed to say, as if their history together melded only into the bright promise of this moment, but his hand fell back instead.
‘If you don’t wish to be in my company for a while, I would quite understand. I cannot promise that there will not be another contretemps, you see, and if you were to be hurt because of it …’
He stopped.
‘I am no weak-willed girl, your Grace. Were I to be pitted against your own skills with a bow and arrow I may well win the competition.’ She held her palms face up. ‘I have the calluses to prove it.’
For the first time that day true humour crept into his face. ‘My Diana.’ The words were whispered and then regretted. She could see the wariness in his eyes.
‘Do you have any other family at all, your Grace?’
His brow creased at the subject change. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘You seem so alone sometimes. I only wondered if there were others you might rely on.’
He shook his head and crossed to pour himself a drink, lifting a brandy decanter to offer her one as well. Declining, she waited until he began to speak.
‘I have an aunt, but I lost any contact with her years ago.’
‘A fading line, then?’
His smile was wicked. ‘Which brings us back to our agreement.’
The heir. With a thick cloak on, servants just outside th
e door and her maid presumably returning at any moment Lucinda also smiled. ‘A broken nose and cracked ribs have probably put paid to any designs you might have on me at the moment.’
His laughter filled the room, deep and resonant. ‘Injuries such as these have not stopped me before.’
‘I read of you once. A story in a newspaper when you had first struck gold.’
‘Where did you get it from?’
‘An old school friend’s brother sent it to me. The author of the piece made certain that the readers understood that the women you were partying with were …” She could not quite find the word.
‘Fallen?’ He provided it for her. ‘The difference between the ton and those who ply their bodies for money on the street corners of hopelessness is smaller than you might imagine. Believe me, I know it to be true.’
Was he speaking of his childhood? she wondered and braved a question. ‘How did your uncle hurt you?’
‘Badly.’
A truth, without an embroidered qualifying word attached? Lucinda could barely believe his honesty.
‘He should have been shot.’
‘He was.’
‘Oh.’
The words were on her tongue to ask by whom, but the gleam in his green eyes stopped the question. She wanted amiability and agreement to be between them, even if only for this meeting.
‘Would you ride with me tomorrow, your Grace? In the park. I usually go early before the crowds arrive.’
‘Yes.’
She could hear the voices of her maid and one of the Ellesmere servants in the hallway coming closer. ‘Shall we say nine o’clock?’
He reached over and rang the bell, the same man she had seen before hurrying back in. Claire also rejoined them, standing behind the sofa, a heavy frown upon her brow.
‘Thank you for taking the time to see that I was regaining in strength, Duchess, and please do give my regards to your family.’