by Sophia James
‘They didn’t hurt you...?’ A sense of shock ran up his spine.
‘No. But Heron is afraid of you, Lord Winterton. It was why he let me go and did not make a scene.’
‘Do you often see things in people that others don’t?’
‘All the time, my lord. Ever since I was little.’
‘Leave London then, Mr Rutherford. Go home to Kent and be safe.’
James wanted Rutherford gone, away from temptation and delivered from evil.
‘Sometimes safety doesn’t hold the allure it used to, my lord. There is a certain spice in the elements of risk.’
‘Say those who have never lost to jeopardy and peril.’
‘And you have?’
‘I have killed men in the battlefields, Mr Rutherford, many times, and no man comes from the theatre of war untarnished. I think you drew that in the lines of my face in your painting?’
‘Because I believe that the confrontation of such a truth might make it easier to absorb and accept.’
He laughed. ‘You think it could help? Truly? You think men do not know what lies within them already? The agony of pain and the loss of compassion? If it were so easy...’ He made himself stop because he did not trust what he might say next.
‘“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may.”’ The artist’s voice was soft.
‘Who said that?’
‘Buddha.’
‘You are well read, Mr Rutherford?’
‘I have had lots of time to become so, Lord Winterton.’
The same shock that he had felt before returned with the words and he was astonished to see that the carriage had stopped as they had been speaking and his man was standing outside, waiting for the command to open the door.
Maria Warrenden was there, too, flying down the steps and towards them, her glance going to Frederick Rutherford as the door opened.
‘You are very late...’ James could see Roy’s wife was stopping herself from saying more, a smile plastered across her face that hardly appeared genuine.
Rutherford had ducked his head down and was looking at no one.
‘Thank you, Lord Winterton, for bringing Mr Rutherford back personally. I could not think what had happened to make him so very late and imagined the worst and my husband is not at home at the moment...’
Lady Warrenden wanted him gone. That fact was scrawled plainly on her visage and in her stance.
‘You are welcome, but now I shall bid you good day.’
She nodded at that, the frown across her forehead easing as he tipped his hat and left.
* * *
Maria was most agitated, but as usual with the servants within earshot she was also being careful.
‘Roy would like to see you now in the library.’
‘I thought you said he was not at home.’
‘Now, Mr Rutherford,’ was the only reply, the anger in her tone noticeable and worrying. The fiasco with the Herons had left Florentia agitated and on guard and she felt she might not weather another onslaught of her sister’s concerns.
She wished Winterton had not left. She wished he was walking alongside her, protecting her.
Roy stood as they came into his library and he asked Maria to close the door.
‘Your sister and I have been concerned about the days you are spending in the company of Lord Winterton and we both think it is well past time to call a halt to this deception and return home to Kent. My business here will be concluded in a few days.’
‘And to be so very late today is more than concerning, Flora. Where on earth have you been all that time?’ Her sister’s voice was shrill.
‘I finished the portrait and Miss Julia Heron happened to be going by as I left and insisted I accompany her home to talk about a further commission. Winterton finally rescued me from the Heron town house when he realised that was where I had gone.’
Maria rolled her eyes and looked furious. ‘There is talk that your work is rising most quickly in favour and in worth and this is the result, don’t you see? It is dangerous, this greed, and soon someone will dig around to try and find out things of you, personal things...’
Roy took over where his wife had left off. ‘If your ruse is discovered, there will be a scandal of an even greater proportion than the last one and James Waverley has been trained as a spy.’
‘Which is why hours in his company are such a poor idea, Flora.’ Her sister’s hand fastened on hers.
She knew they were right. She knew with the portrait finished and some of her questions answered they should now cut their losses and move away from town. But still...
‘I want one more short session with the Viscount. I need to sign my work...’
‘Very well. And after that?’ Roy was standing by the window, watching over the street.
‘After that I promise that I will accompany you back to Kent.’
Even as she gave them such a troth she felt the loss of it. The freedom. The power. The ability to go where she wanted to and whenever she wanted alone. A woman was tied to convention and propriety in a way a man was not and the knowledge of such a liberation had been life changing.
London allowed an anonymity that was impossible in the country and she knew bone deep that she could not simply turn her back on such emancipation. She still had Bryson’s clothes and it should not be difficult to travel to London on her own accord.
The small hope of this made her smile.
Chapter Eight
Rafael Carmichael called on him later that evening, James’s butler showing him through to the library.
‘You look like hell, Winter. How is the portrait going?’ His friend asked this after James had poured them each a drink.
‘It is completed.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Like might not be quite the right word. Frederick Rutherford is a talented artist, though he has left me with no bill.’
‘I am sure you will receive the reckoning.’
‘How? How are you sure?’ James was tired of being thrown off centre.
‘The lad needs the money, it is whispered.’
There was a tone in Rafael’s voice suggesting he knew more. ‘What else is whispered?’
‘You tell me, Winter. It is more than out of character for you to be open to sitting for a portrait and so very protective of the artist doing it. I’ve also been listening to Heron’s rant about you at White’s this evening. Seems as though he was not happy when you went to rescue the fellow from his clutches today.’
‘I’d promised Roy Warrenden I would keep him safe while in my company and Heron had carted Rutherford off to his house unbidden.’
‘He’s an adult, Winter, and it was only Portland Square he had been relocated to. Hardly hazardous. I doubt Heron would have harmed the lad in the presence of his family.’
‘Heron might have had a part in harming my father.’
‘You met with Perkins?’ Rafael took a decent sip of the drink before him. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Watch him. Try to understand just who he is or was.’
‘And how is Rutherford involved in this? Why was the artist there at the town house?’
‘The Heron daughters want their own portrait and they want it badly. I think it is only that innocent.’
‘Will he do it?’
James shook his head. ‘Rutherford isn’t enamoured by London. I think he wishes to return to Kent. God knows why he wanted to fashion my likeness in the first place.’
‘How closely is he related to the Warrenden family?’
‘There is a link. Why do you ask?’
‘Because Roy Warrenden and his wife seem overly concerned about a lad who by all accounts has gained his majority.’
‘There is something you are not telling me, Rafe?’
‘I had a search carried out after we met Rutherford at your place last week and it seems Mr Frederick Rutherford has never existed in Kent at all. All my sources tell me that there is a sister, Lady Florentia Hale-Burton, who paints, but...’
It was like being stung by a bee or burnt by a flame. At first James could not quite understand the implications of such a small shocking truth and then he did. The pain flicked in without warning, almost bringing him to his knees with the sheer and bloody strength of its force.
For he knew. He knew it all.
It was her, here, in London, standing there before him trying to make some sense of exactly who he was. The portrait with his scar and blood and the bird in a cage whose song was full of raging sorrow.
It was what he had done to her, all those years before, that random chance of Fate bringing Lady Florentia Hale-Burton with her sky-blue eyes and innocence into the orbit of his life.
He’d tried to hold on to her, then, through the pain and the fear, tried to keep her fingers in his own, the warmth of them and the gentleness amidst all that was agonising. The man who had shot him was shouting and he’d heard her cry out as she was pulled away, her guttural loss reverberating into the silence.
Ruined. Both of them. By chance and poor fortune and bloody dreadful luck.
‘Are you ill, Winter? What the hell is wrong with you?’ Rafael’s voice pulled him out of the blackness, but still he had trouble processing what was to come next.
No one else had known the whole of what had happened save for Florentia Burton-Hale and he couldn’t allow the truth of it to filter into a society that would not be forgiving. He had not protected her then, but perhaps he could now, here at this time. Perhaps he could try to remedy some of the hurt.
A deeper thought also ran through his mind in threads of relief for the attraction he had felt for the lad was now explainable.
He wanted to see her. He wanted to say that he was sorry. He wanted to understand just what it was she needed from him. Money, perhaps? The fact that Warrenden or her father might want to wrap their hands about his throat and squeeze him to death in rightful retribution was also there, lingering in his conscience. A meeting at dawn, perhaps, pistols drawn or blades sharpened, in some final resolution of blame?
Rafael was speaking again and he made himself listen. ‘I can help you with Heron if that’s what is troubling you?’ It wasn’t the problem, but James decided to let him think so because it was easier that way.
‘How?’
‘He wants to invest in the things that I choose to place my money in here.’
‘Your Midas touch? He plans to benefit from it?’
‘Perhaps. But you can profit from it, too, for we will have him close, whenever we want him, and in an enemy that is always a good thing.’
‘You are staying in England then, Rafe?’
‘Well, with you around things are never dull.’
‘And Arabella?’
‘Is happy as long as I am.’
‘You were lucky with her.’
‘And don’t I know it, Winter.’
Lucky enough to meet at the right time and the right place and in a way that would not alienate them from each other for ever.
Florentia Hale-Burton must have hated him even as she smiled, hiding behind her lad’s disguise and lifting her brush to show him the truth of himself.
She had asked him if he was a good man. He remembered that. She had asked of Fate, too, and if he could do things over again would he have done anything differently?
And all the while she was garnering enough information about him. A freer style will serve my message better. Wasn’t that what she had told him? It is not a showpiece I shall make for you. It will be only who you are.
Who am I?
God. He held his head in his hands and turned towards the window so that Rafael might not see the dreadful truth in his eyes. Florentia Hale-Burton had communicated her reality in so many ways, in paint, in words and in gesture and he had seen none of it.
Secrets define us, my lord, she had told him.
‘I will return later, Winter. It seems that you have a lot on your mind.’ James felt his friend’s hand on his shoulder and was pleased for his going. He did not feel up to any questions or confessions. He felt numb and bewildered and paralysed.
And sad.
For him and for her. For life and for honour and for the lonely places they both had inhabited since last they had met.
Fate was a siren borne on the wings of force and duplicity. He could hear the deity laughing at him all the way from hell.
* * *
She arrived in the morning at the hour of eleven and James had been sitting in his library since well before nine.
To decide what to say, he thought, and shook his head. That was not quite true for he had already made up his mind not to confront her with the truth directly.
He needed to understand more about her first, what her life had been like and what she now believed in. He had placed his portrait on the mantel so that it caught the morning light thrown across the room. It looked good there and solid. Like a talisman or a signpost. To the future. To what might come from the rubble of their past.
No one saves us but ourselves. He wasn’t certain if Buddha had quite the right of it.
He saw her gaze catch the placement as soon as she came into the room, her boy’s clothes this morning so patently a disguise he couldn’t imagine how he had not known of the charade before. The black wig she wore was dull against the sunlight, the moustache oddly poignant over alabaster-smooth skin.
When she coughed he merely smiled and waited till she had stopped, reaching for a purse on his desk and pushing it over towards her.
‘I hope this is the correct amount, Mr Rutherford.’ He frowned when she did not reach out and pocket it and tried another avenue of thought. ‘In your opinion is that the right position for the painting, there in the light?’
For the first time she smiled as she nodded and the dimples in her cheeks were like a punch in the flawed wisdom of his strategies. He had no defence against such beauty and he knew it.
‘I wondered before you left if you might explain the work to me. I have not had much exposure to the art world before this.’
But instead of answering him directly she asked a question of her own. ‘What do you see, Lord Winterton? In the picture?’
‘A man in need of salvation. A man who has lost his faith. A damaged man.’
She stood perfectly still, the sun catching her eyelashes through the glass as she blinked.
‘Is that what I should see?’
She shrugged and coughed again, but he could tell shock lingered beneath the practised nonchalance. ‘There are a hundred ways to read each of my paintings, my lord. Sometimes there is no true answer save for that of the soul.’
‘And the bird?’ He asked that quietly because he knew that it was she there, Lady Florentia Hale-Burton in a gilded cage of shame.
Anger flitted across her face and the quiet blush of it rose upon pale full cheeks.
‘The bird is both fancy, sorrow and fate thrown into a palette of fury. Anyone can see her anger.’
‘Because she is caught?’
‘Chance can come creeping in ways wholly unexpected, my lord, and in a completely random manner.’
He should have told her then of all that he knew, should have simply confessed his mistake and his sorrow for it, but if he did? Would she leave? Would she walk out never to be seen again? Keep her with you, some voice shouted from deep within. Keep her safe.
‘Could I show you something, here in London, something beautiful, Mr Rutherford? Would you come with me tomorrow to look? It would not take long at all.�
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‘Something beautiful?’
‘A garden. The scented garden of a friend.’
Her brow furrowed as she watched him. ‘How would you know I am interested in those particular sort of plants?’
‘I saw you pick the bay tree leaves outside yesterday when first you came. I saw how you stood and smelt them. The garden is one of the best of its kind and it is not far.’
‘I could not stay long.’
‘We shall be quick then. If I collected you at eleven I could have you back by mid-afternoon. Would that suit?’
‘There won’t be a crowd?’
‘I don’t imagine so. If you wish for Lord and Lady Warrenden to come with us I would be agreeable.’
‘No.’ This was said quickly, without a scrap of thought. ‘It is easier alone.’
She didn’t want her sister there, that much was certain. James wondered what Maria Warrenden might think of her dressing as a boy. One thing he did know was that Roy and she had no whiff of his name and his part in the abduction six years ago or otherwise they’d have been on his doorstep like avenging angels. He was suddenly glad for at least that.
She stood then, her eyes fixed on his face, almost as if she was drawing him again in her mind.
He remembered the bag she had slung at him as he had tried to pull her into the carriage on Mount Street and the weighty tomes within it. The small scar above his eye was still visible there. He wondered if she had noticed the mark, but then the whole situation between them was fraught with layers.
He wished he were a better man. He wished all the demons on his shoulders would stop howling and allow him time to think. Other scars drawn into his skin in patterns smarted under the linen of his shirt and he took in a sharp breath of sadness.
* * *
Lord Winterton was different today, she thought, more unreadable. The coins that sat in the burgundy-velvet purse on his table also represented an ending that she did not quite want. The chance of visiting the scented garden with him had been an appealing one and yet she knew she shouldn’t have accepted such an offer.
Every moment in his company was more dangerous than the last and there had been times when she had looked at him across the past few days when he had seemed to be waiting for something, expecting something, his jaw muscles grinding together in a way that was changed.