by Sophia James
She did not look at him as she said this, the words coming easier with the charcoal in hand.
‘I’ve been in Herefordshire at my new home.’
Her fingers stilled with the words and she looked straight at him then, the small scar above his eyebrow in this light much easier to see today and curling into his brow.
‘The mark is from your books,’ he clarified when he noticed such an observation, though when she frowned he carried on. ‘The ones you hit me with on Mount Street. The ones that were in your bag.’
‘I had just bought them at Lackington’s. They were expensive books on art and difficult to find.’
‘Perhaps I could replace them, then. If you gave me the titles, I could ask at the shop in Finsbury Square.’
Florentia swallowed and gathered her courage. ‘I accept such an offer, but would you meet me there tomorrow at midday so I can show you exactly which titles are the ones I lost?’
The caution across his face was easily seen as she tore the picture of Faith from her sketching book. He reached out to take it.
‘A peace offering, Lord Winterton. Between us.’
But when her fingers touched his she felt the sharp shock of that which was not so ordinary, a jolt of recognition that sizzled in every part of her body.
If he saw her reaction he swallowed any comment, his own face allowing no glimpse of emotion.
‘I shall leave you to your drawing, Lady Florentia, but I will see you at Lackington’s tomorrow, at twelve.’
When she nodded he left, the dog pulling at her leash as she gambolled across the long wet grass in front of him, its patterned coat darkening with the moisture.
Patricia, her lady’s maid, had joined her now and looked at her with interest as she bent to collect her things. Packing her brushes into her leather bag, Florentia tried to act as natural as possible. But her heart raced and her breath became shallow and the knowledge that she would meet James Waverley tomorrow alone sung in her mind.
* * *
She dreamed that night of things she never had before. She was in his bed in an estate somewhere, a Gothic splendid house before a lake. The moonlight covered him as he came across her, his hair loose and his eyes pale, hands on places of her body that only she had touched.
‘Love me, Florentia,’ he had whispered, his voice broken with want.
‘I do, Winter,’ she had given back, and then there had been no space at all between them.
She came awake with a jolt in the pink room she always used at Grosvenor Square above the front entrance on the second floor.
She felt hot, disorientated and breathless, the time on the face of the clock on the mantel just past the hour of three.
Where was Winterton now? Did he prowl the night-time reaches of town? Or was he with friends somewhere in a smoke-filled dim bar in a dangerous part near the river? Did he sleep alone? Did he ever think of her? Of their shared past?
Questions. So very many of them. Standing, she walked to the window to look over the square and the rooftops beyond. Her nightdress stuck to her heated skin and so she took it off, letting it drop to the floor around her ankles and enjoying the cool air that flowed across her nakedness.
She was glad the candles were out. Only the light of the moon came into her room, muted and silver, the paleness of her skin reflected in the mirror.
She was thin.
Was that a good thing or a bad one? Before the accident she had been fatter, more robust, but now no matter what she ate she remained the same weight. Thin.
She was also not a young girl any more, her twenty-three years soon to be twenty-four. Once she had imagined she would be a wife by this age and a mother. She had conjured up a house in the country with dogs and chickens and a garden of flowers that she would gather and bring inside in joyful colourful bunches.
And instead...
They had both been shattered by a mistake, their lives changed and turned on different courses, roads that they might not have taken otherwise. Him to the Americas. Her to painting.
Could they find their way back? To each other?
She smiled and saw the movement of it in the glass, blurred and indistinct.
‘Please God, help me.’
To understand and to forgive.
Chapter Thirteen
He had barely slept on his first night back in London. The puppy had been fretful and afraid. He wondered for the twentieth time whether he should have brought the dog back with him as it was proving more than a handful. But when he had opened the sack and the small thin wet thing had fallen out of the folds of hessian he had had an instant recognition of himself as a child, confused, frightened and in desperate need of a proper guardianship. He’d taken the dog in his arms and placed it in his carriage on a blanket and it had sat deathly still beside him for all the hours of the journey back to London.
Once at St James’s Square it had followed him up the stone steps, ungainly but with purpose, the small yelps of despair as he had deposited the dog on a rug by his bed only subsiding when he had dragged it up on to his counterpane. The shaking cold of fear pulled at other older memories and in the darkness he had allowed it under the sheets against his own body where it had settled in a long sigh until the early dawn.
When the bells of the small church a half a mile away had rung the following morning he had been woken by the pensive dark eyes and the scratching tiny paws.
‘Faith. I will call you that,’ and he had laughed when the dog had tipped her head and listened as if the name meant something that she had not yet realised it did.
Permanence. For them both.
Now he was getting used to the small loyal presence and their bedtime routine. He enjoyed feeling the dog there beside him, warm and alive and responsive. Following him. Waiting for him. Constant and adoring.
The sketch from yesterday in the park was up on the wall beside the fireplace, two pins stuck into the top of the paper, Faith staring out from charcoal with all her rambunctious and impossible energy. The gift Florentia had of rendering the inside to be seen without was remarkable. She had done the same on his portrait, the one he kept in his library, the one he had shown to nobody save for Arabella and Rafe.
Such truth unsettled him, he supposed, and made him realise the extent he had withdrawn from the world.
Everything was turning upside down with an ever-increasing motion, like the points on a compass rose drawing him in. He wondered suddenly if he were like those cardinal directions and their ordinal intersects with their degrees of separation and interpretation of space. Scattered to the four winds but now drawing back, facing home and finding hope.
Was Florentia like some true north and he the filings lured in by a magnet no matter how hard he tried to escape her? For her own happiness, he said to himself, but he could barely believe it any longer.
He would meet her today at Lackington’s and say what? I know I should stay well away from you, but I can’t help myself? I can only hurt you again with all the things you do not know of me? The Spanish pit. His appalling childhood. His dislocation. The want to tell her all these things sat on his tongue like sharp points of the truth. Not once in years and years had he managed to sleep through a night.
‘God,’ he swore into the silence and Faith whimpered.
‘Not you,’ he said and held her as close and as tightly as he possibly could.
* * *
Standing in front of Lackington’s waiting, all James could feel was dread. When the Warrenden carriage stopped before him he took in breath and watched as Florentia Hale-Burton alighted.
‘I hope I am not late, my lord.’
‘No. I am early.’ He tried to alter his tone into one of light inconsequence, but failed.
‘London and its demands makes things difficult,’ she told h
im. ‘The clothes. The hair. The shoes. The rules. There is hardly ever a stop to think about what one should do and what one should not. In the end it eats up all of your time and inclination.’
‘What is it you would rather do?’
‘Paint. Read. Think. Anything at all except look at myself again in a mirror.’
He laughed and was surprised by it, the sound so unfamiliar.
‘Men do much better than women in the time-consuming business of appearance, Lord Winterton. For example, how long does it take you to get ready?’
‘Today?’ He thought about it for a few seconds and then answered. ‘A half an hour, perhaps. Less if I could have found one half of the pair of shoes Faith had run away with.’
She groaned. ‘Make a guess as to the time of my toilette.’
He looked at the pink-sprigged day dress and the light green pelisse she wore above it. Her hair this afternoon was less fussy, the thick gold of it entwined in a smooth chignon beneath a small and jaunty hat.
‘I do not dare. Too little and you will think I don’t give you enough credit. Too much and you will imagine I perceive you as vain.’
‘Of course, you are a diplomat with that particular knack of discretion.’
‘No longer. I gave in my resignation last year before coming back to England.’
‘Why?’
‘Honesty has its degrees just as treachery does. Sometimes at the end I could not see much difference between them. “I am myself indifferent honest.”’
‘Hamlet?’
‘Impressive.’ His energy felt watered down and lost today, a weariness covering everything. ‘The truth of espionage is that it makes you less trusting. After a while you only see the blackness in people and life becomes skewered.’
‘So you are fighting your way back to the light?’
‘Isn’t that what you tried to show me in your painting?’
The blue eyes widened. ‘Most people never understand such nuances.’
* * *
There was a certain sadness in him that was heavier this afternoon. He looked as if he had not slept well, dark bruising beneath his eyes.
‘Have you ever drawn yourself, Florentia?’ His query was surprising.
‘Once. A long time ago.’
‘I’d like to see it.’
Her arms around him, her nails digging runnels of blood into his skin. The flesh between them joined at the hip. She had drawn it a month after her accident when she believed him most likely dead. A violent depiction of a sexual encounter which even now made her blush.
‘I doubt I will ever show you.’
‘Do you always say exactly what you feel?’
‘I used to once. Before...’
He took her gloved hand and held it, his fingers tight about her own and it was as if the world about disappeared into a swirl of greyness, the colour between them bold and true.
‘Before I hurt you. Before I took you from one life and discharged you into another.’
‘I was always out of step, Lord Winterton. You allow yourself too much blame for my fall from grace as it may have happened anyway.’
At that he let her go. ‘People here admire you, Florentia, and they should. Because you are rare and honest and good.’
Surprise kept her silent, for the deep frown on his brow was at direct odds with the lovely compliment he had just given her.
* * *
Inside the bookshop was busier than she had known it and almost every patron looked their way. The Viscount did that to people, she thought, with his height and his bearing. He was a man who incited strong opinions, a man who would never be invisible or anonymous. Preferring such states herself, she hurried him through the lobby, pleased when they gained the stairs at the back of the room.
‘The art history section is up here.’ She tried to keep her voice neutral though every part of her was aware of the fact that once he followed her up they would probably be alone. Few others seemed to browse this section of the Temple and this was one of the reasons she’d always liked it so much.
‘I’ve bought books here for years,’ she began as they walked along the shelves towards a window at the other end of the aisle. ‘They seem to have copies of things that one seldom finds anywhere else, you see, and so each time I visit London I invariably come to this place to browse. Mostly I buy, but sometimes I simply look. I can always find something that interests me even when I think I may not.’
‘You talk more when you are nervous. Did you know that? You did it as Frederick Rutherford, too.’
‘Oh.’ The strangled sound escaped from her throat as she wrung her hands together.
‘But you seldom speak about yourself. Almost everything I know of you comes from others.’
‘I am not really that interesting,’ she began, but he stopped her.
‘Tell me about your childhood. What was it like?’
‘The same as everyone’s, I suppose, until my brother died in my arms.’ She had not meant to say as much, but then she found she could not stop herself. ‘For a long time I thought his death was my fault because I dared him to jump a fence, you see, on his horse. I made him do it even though he did not truly wish to.’
‘Did he dare you to do things before his fall?’
‘Often and often.’
‘Then you both dared each other. It is the way of most siblings, I have heard, the way children grow and risk and learn. Surely you know that?’
And she did. Suddenly. It had been like a game to them. This fence. That gate. This ditch. That hedge. All of their lives they had egged the other on to new heights and further distances, to harder jumps and more difficult feats.
‘Papa said I was the most undisciplined of his children. He said if it wasn’t for me Bryson may still be alive.’
‘Did you ever give consideration to the fact that had it have been your brother who lived your father might have said exactly the same to him?’
Truth. It came in shades from white to black and all the hues in between, like a spiderweb stretched across different facts and opinions and gathering them in. Piecing them together. Making sense of the little bits.
‘If your brother was here now perhaps he’d be urging you to get on with living?’
We need to live a hundred per cent. Another catch phrase Bryson, Maria and she had often used. Perhaps her brother’s death was not her fault. Perhaps Winter was right and her father was wrong. It could have been any of them who had come to grief at a high fence on a lonely road. She’d jumped that same hedge a few moments before and her horse’s hooves had also clipped the tangled canes of wood. Relief filled her.
‘Has anything so terrible ever happened to you that you have thought you might never recover from it, Lord Winterton?’
He nodded.
‘Well, Bryson’s death was like that for me. Before it I was someone else and after... I could not find my way back.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I can see a pathway.’
* * *
When she smiled at him joy lit up her eyes, a new warmth radiating in that dusty room ringed with books. Such joy held him spellbound, the lightness so foreign.
‘As payment I will draw the house in the country you have bought for no fee whatsoever, my lord. Such a grand place would undoubtedly look well in a frame.’
‘A discount that is generous.’
‘A discount to thank you for always being kind to me.’
He could no longer simply ignore the harm he had done her. ‘Especially after I did such a fine job of ruining you on the North Road?’
‘Looking back, I think perhaps you did me a favour. If I had stayed in society I would probably be married to the Honourable Timothy Calderwood by now and wondering where my life had gone so badly w
rong.’
‘Words not entirely strong enough to compensate for my brutal kidnapping?’
She smiled. ‘You tore my dress off and discarded it.’
‘I did save you from the dogs.’
‘After rendering me unconscious.’
He frowned. ‘Yes, that was unconscionable and I even thought so at the time.’
‘Why did you ask me to marry you?’
This question came right out of the blue and he decided to give her back the honesty she had given him, for he was tired of lies and pretence and caution.
‘Because I wanted you, wanted you more than I have ever wanted anyone.’
Not quite the truth either, but he liked the way her eyes widened and the dimples on her cheeks were deep against the light. He did not say that she was his salvation, his last chance to find a link back to a world he had become disenchanted with. He did not tell her that every woman he looked at was only a pale reflection of everything she was. To him.
* * *
She hated the way he made her breathless and uncertain, lust burning across his face.
‘My sister, Maria, says that you are like fire and that I shall be burned by you if I am not careful.’
‘Careful?’
‘Careful to remain distant, I expect she meant.’
‘And is that what you would want?’
She did not look away at that, but stared straight into his perplexity. ‘No, it is not. I am twenty-three years old, Lord Winterton, and what I want is for you to kiss me again.’
The run of confusion across his face almost made her turn, but she held to her course and did not flinch.
‘I offered marriage and you refused twice? A kiss would have undoubtedly resulted from that.’
‘It is not marriage I am angling for. It’s the knowledge of the delight of passion that I require before I return once and for all to my life in the country. And in all the whispers that I have heard you are the master of such things.’ She swallowed. ‘I would, of course, require confidentiality, but then with the scandals that are known between us, I think...’