by Sophia James
The ton with all its rules and propriety seemed shallow and foolish compared to these people. She’d never felt a part of society, but was always adrift and out of step. Here, with Lord Winterton and the Carmichaels, it was like having life breathed into deadness, an energy she had lost hold of returned in all its fervour.
Maria had moved on and she had been left behind, her sister’s marriage taking away some of the closeness that they used to enjoy. Bryson had been her true confidant, but she had never wanted to speak of him with her family as his death had broken all of their hearts, the hole left by his passing unending and black.
But here amongst the flowers and laughter with Winterton and his friends she felt at home, comfortable, able to be herself.
Well not quite herself, she smiled, given the disguise that she wore and the name that she sheltered behind. But no longer hiding her honest thoughts, no longer unable to speak in the way she wanted to, no longer ruled by expectations.
She had not thought it possible to live well outside of such strictures until today where the differences allowed one to flourish and thrive, like the blooms all around them and the flowers in her hands.
She liked it when Lord Winterton came to stand beside her, showing her a book.
‘These are prints of some of the oldest known maps.’ His finger traced the outline of the Americas. ‘They thought you would sail off the edge of the world and into the land of monsters.’
Scaly green serpents hung at each edge of the paper, the ships depicted weathering storms tiny by comparison.
‘When I sailed to America I remembered these illustrations as I stood and watched over the ocean.’ He laughed and, with the sunlight blending the colours in his hair and glinting against the pale clear green of his eyes, Florentia knew she had never seen a man more vibrant. The thought struck her as a blow and she held her breath as she tried to look way.
But she could not.
This truly might be the last day that she ever saw him, the last time she heard his voice or knew his smile. She drank him in even as her throat thickened with sadness and it was Lord Winterton who looked away first, his glance flickering to Rafael Carmichael and his wife watching them from the other side of the room.
‘Monsters of the deep hold a certain wordless eloquence, I always thought.’ There was a quiet anger in his voice that was surprising. ‘An adventure that I wanted.’
‘And which he got, Mr Rutherford.’ Arabella had joined them. ‘Did you know you are in the company of a man who single-handedly saved a whole regiment of British Hussars from the clutches of the French and lived to tell the tale?’
‘Barely.’ This time there was no mistaking the fury.
‘He was decorated for it, too, though I never saw you wear your medals, Winter. You should. If it were me I would wear them on my chest in pride and glory daily.’
‘Old friends have the tiresome habit of telling one how to act and what to do, Mr Rutherford,’ He gestured her to follow him through the wide doors. They came into another smaller garden filled with crocus and hellebores.
‘You don’t like to remember your past?’ Florentia asked this even as she bent to smell one of the Lenten roses, needing to know something of him, something of who he had been. Something to hold on to after he was gone again.
‘War is glorious only to those who have never lived through the middle of one.’
‘But you survived?’
‘But not well and the painting you made for me showed you knew that.’
Such a raw truth kept her silent. The things people did not say were as easily heard as those they did and she was good at listening to the spaces in between. It was where she had lived for years, after all, that awkward half-hidden part of life, an invisible quiet world of little consequence and no real substance.
The paintings had brought her back from the greyness and filled her world with colour again, repairing frayed edges with purpose and delight.
But here in front of her was a man who was also good at hearing the unspoken and who had ghosts of his own. Such a kinship made her falter and hesitate, a danger here that was almost touchable.
‘The room inside and the gardens without are fashioned in a way to compensate sight?’
Clear green eyes blazed. ‘Rafe’s father died last year. He was blind. This was where he lived for his last months.’
‘You were close to him, too?’
‘I was. He was like a father to me.’ He took in breath and carried on. ‘Most people miss all the things you don’t, Mr Rutherford. Did you know that?’
‘Art is made in the carefulness of notice, my lord.’
‘And in the regard of the concealed?’
She looked up at that, expecting accusation. Instead all she saw was a sorrow and when the Carmichaels came out to join them again Florentia was glad for it.
* * *
James felt the rope at his ankles and his wrists and the blood running cold down his back. It was into a pit of sorts that he had been thrown, the freeze of the dirt in the Cantabrian winter crusted with ice and snow and it was raining. He could feel the steady drip of it on his face when he looked up, trying to catch even a bit of the thin moonlight.
He’d been beaten every day since the French had taken him, with a beaded rope and with a musket. Something had been carved into his back in glass and that smarted more than all the other wounds that abounded across his body. His fingers ran across raised scoured skin, trying to read by touch.
Espion.
Spy. There was no clemency in such a word.
He would die here, unheralded and unknown. Just another soldier whose bones would grace the soil of Spain. And when the French Hussars came again he tipped his head and screamed into the night, his throat aching with the sound as he tried to stop all the pain that they inflicted...
He came awake suddenly into silence and to the softness of a mattress, the sweat dripping from him on to clean linen and the moon limning the world in silver.
He was in his bedchamber in St James’s. Outside came the noises of a waking city. Only a dream. Again. He had had the same nightmare for years.
Pushing back the counterpane, he sat and held his head in his hands to steady the fury and the beat of blood. The Early Cheer Arabella had sent him home with were in a vase next to his bed. He clung to the smell of them like a man who was drowning, clung to their pureness and their beauty. The first flowers after the snow.
Florentia Hale-Burton was just like the blooms. Unexpected. Impossibly fragile. Today as they sat in the garden room at the Carmichaels’ he had seen things that were particular only to her. The way she used her hands when she spoke, the dimples in her cheeks, the small freckles across her nose and the grace with which she moved.
He’d seen her take in the details, too, of the room, of Arabella and Rafael, of the flowers and the nicks in the wood on all of the railings.
An artist’s eye, seeing the things that other people missed, understanding secrets and accepting them. When she had looked at the rune stones he had thought she might speak of her past then and there, the truth bursting out unbidden.
But she had not. She had simply held the flowers so tightly that the knuckles on each of her fingers were white with the pressure.
As they’d made to leave Arabella had pulled him to one side.
‘Look after her, Winter. She is a treasure.’
‘Her?’ He was wary of Arabella’s accuracy.
‘When I was younger I, too, used disguises. Bring her back whenever you want and make certain that she is safe from what it is she is so very afraid of.’
Him. She was afraid of him.
He was glad Arabella had not asked Florentia’s name or insisted on knowing her story and was relieved to finally depart before more of the truth surfaced. The girl who at the C
armichaels had chatted and laughed was on the ride home much more silent.
‘I’ve hung your portrait in my library, Mr Rutherford. I like looking at it. Perhaps you might bring the Warrendens to see it. I know they enjoy your work and I would be pleased to show them.’
She nodded, but made no effort to pin him down to a time at all. Rather she looked away again and spoke on a different topic.
‘The Carmichaels have the best of it, I think, living out of the centre of town. Kent is the same.’
‘You will go back, then?’
‘I will, my lord, for I have found out all that I needed to know here.’
‘And the commissions?’
‘I’ll draw from what I have around me and be happy with it.’ Her glance dropped away.
‘I have noticed that your cough is much recovered, Mr Rutherford.’
‘It is asthma, Lord Winterton, and it comes and goes.’
‘A difficult affliction.’
‘And one far less prevalent away from the pollution of town.’
‘My cousin Tommy suffered from the same, but he lives in the Americas now with his wife, Acacia, and he says that the weather there suits him far better than it ever did in England.’
The slight start told him she had caught the reference. But she was almost as good at hiding things as he was. For a moment he wondered what would happen should he simply reach out and take her hand and confess everything before they reached the Warrenden town house, but this was neither the time nor the place.
He wanted to see Florentia Hale-Burton’s eyes properly and the colour of her hair. He wanted to see the dimples, too, in her cheeks and run his finger across the freckles on the bridge of her nose.
‘I doubt that I shall see you again, Lord Winterton.’ The words came through his reveries. ‘But I’d like to thank you for your generous payment for the portrait and also for taking me to see the Carmichaels today. They were lovely people.’
* * *
Lovely? Was that the sort of word a man would use? Flora wondered and looked out of the window.
‘You will not return to London?’ His query came quietly.
‘It is a difficult place to fit in.’
‘Yet all I’ve heard of you is salutary.’
She smiled at that and turned towards him. ‘An insincere regard given that they barely know me.’
‘My offer of you painting Atherton Abbey still stands.’
‘I’ve taken enough of your money with the portrait, Lord Winterton. Any more would be a travesty.’
‘It is not because of your agent’s insistence in the accelerating value of an investment that I would like more of your work, but because of the truth I see within it.’
‘Thank you.’ Such a compliment was distracting because it was given so unexpectedly.
‘I am heading west tomorrow to see to the last of the contracts on the Abbey and shall be away for a while.’
‘Julia Heron said it was a beautiful house and expensive.’
‘To me it will only be home,’ he returned and she understood other things about Lord Winterton, things she had not considered at all before.
He had been without roots for years, but underneath the persona he presented to the world lay a vulnerability that was surprising. At least she had had Albany Manor and a family, her life closeted but safe. His had been transitory, hard and uncertain.
She wished she might have placed her fingers over the hand that rested on the seat beside her, the one with the scars across the knuckles, webbed in whiteness, but her sister’s warning came to mind.
‘He is a dangerous man, Florentia, and will be hard to dupe because he is like a flame and you are the moth. If you do not wish for discovery you would be wise to never meet him again.’
Maria had given her this advice as she had left this morning on the trip to the scented gardens and she had laughed off such concerns. But Winterton was harder to read today, although far more open, and when he had told her about his cousin Tommy she had felt a shock that she knew he must have seen.
Was he playing a double game? Did he know who she was? The horror of that thought made her sit forward, her heart beginning to thump and her mouth dry.
Another minute to Grosvenor Square and safety. The anger in her warred with sorrow and that in turn was followed by a pure and quiet grief. This was the end of everything between them and all she wanted to do was to go home.
Please God, do not let him smile or murmur words that were conciliatory and impartial and final. She did not wish to stay his friend. She did not want platitudes or recriminations or even kindness.
These grey little feelings were nothing at all compared to the burning raw-red inferno that was consuming her now, her breath shaky and her throat tight with tears. She wanted things he would never be able to offer her and as she could not have those then she wanted nothing at all.
Her father would simply expire should they come face-to-face. He sometimes talked to her as he recalled what had happened at the inn and his memory was surprisingly sharp and uncompromisingly bitter.
The number of people who’d seen the Viscount and who would be able to identify him as the perpetrator of a terrible crime was also worrying. Her maid Milly was no longer in her employ, but Florentia had heard that she’d come to London to work in one of the houses here. The Urquharts, too, were a couple who might recognise him should they see them together and their tale would not be flattering. Her father’s driver and the two footmen who had accompanied Papa north could also offer information should they be asked.
The truth was like a stone flung into a still pond, the ripples widening as time passed until no tranquillity was left. If Winterton was thrown into such a scandal, she did not know what might happen to him. Would the law be involved? Would he be thrown into jail and left to rot there or sent to the colonies as an indentured felon?
It was all dangerous suddenly, this secret between them, for she had no certainty that he would be safe.
When the carriage stopped she was pleased as his man opened the door to help her down. She did not tarry, but made her way inside with the utmost speed. Looking back, she was glad he had not followed and even more glad as the conveyance readied itself for departure and the horses stepped on.
It was over and finished. She would never need to see him again. Roy greeted her as he came from his library and looked down the corridor behind her.
‘Is Winter here?’
‘No. He had an appointment and needed to be gone. The painting is signed and paid for so there is no contract left that binds us.’
‘I am glad to hear it for these matters are never without their messiness. Once I thought I knew Winter well, but now...’ He shrugged. ‘He is harder and more aloof. There is something in his character that wasn’t there when I knew him at school.’
She was about to answer when Maria walked in and asked them both to join her in the front parlour.
‘The Duke of Northbury has sent an invitation asking for our company and that of Mr Frederick Rutherford to a ball he is having in a week. Inside there is a handwritten note to the effect that he would be most disappointed should we be unable to go. Your name is specifically mentioned, Flora. Well, Frederick’s is, I mean.’
Roy looked horrified. ‘The Duke was a particular friend of my father’s. I can’t see how we might decline this.’
Maria handed him the gilt-edged paper, the red-wax seal broken and beribboned in blue. ‘I knew something bad would come of all this. I knew we should have left London sooner and now to be stuck with another charade. It is all just too, too much and you cannot possibly attend in those old clothes of Bryson’s.’
‘I think clothes are the least of our worries, Maria. The very least.’
Her brother-in-law’s eyes ran across her face, the br
own full of concern. ‘What of you, Flora? Do you wish to do this or would you rather...’?
She did not let him finish. ‘I have got this far, Roy, and no one could be more discerning than Lord Winterton.’ Even as she said this, however, she felt vaguely sick. ‘I am sure I can be convincing for one last outing if you feel it necessary to stay.’
‘We will call my tailor in to measure you for a set of clothes befitting the occasion. We will also make it known that we will be leaving the day after the Northbury ball which will effectively stop any more invitations coming, no matter how important the sender.’
Maria tucked her hand through Florentia’s arm. ‘We will be there this time which will allow some sort of a barrier between you and the other guests and we won’t need to tarry long. An appearance is all that is required. Still, it would be better if we tried not to engage others in conversation for there is only so much luck in the world after all.’
She stopped and the unspoken lay between them. And ours could very easily be running out.
Chapter Nine
It was a whirlwind week of fittings and bustling activity. The Warrenden tailor had come and measured her up for the clothes and, on a generous retainer from her brother-in-law’s coffers, had been the very soul of discretion and confidence. If he guessed her figure was not one pertaining to a youth he made no mention of it whatsoever, fashioning the clothes around her form and fitting them with barely a word uttered.
Standing in front of the mirror an hour before they were all to leave, Flora looked at her reflection and was shocked.
This was what Bryson would have looked like had he lived. She could see the lines of him in her face and the blue of his eyes gazing back at her. The wig and the moustache blurred the resemblance a little, but at that second all she could feel was the unexpected closeness of her twin.
‘I wish you were here,’ she whispered. ‘I wish you could help me.’