Ann Lethbridge - Regency Society

Garrard’s, the jewellers? When she opened the case a necklace of turquoise lay in the velvet with matching earrings beside it.

‘It is not my birthday for another month …?’ she began, questioningly.

‘No. But you have seemed preoccupied and I thought a tonic in order. Besides it is almost five years ago that I asked you to marry me and I wanted to remember that.’

Eleanor’s mind went back: Florence in the summer with its plane trees sculptured green and the Arno winding its way in front of the villa he owned beside the Piazza della Signoria. They had been sitting in the gazebo when she had felt nauseous and he had brought her out a warm wet towel scented in lavender to wipe her face and hands.

Luxury after the débâcle in France. A man who might take care of everything, even a daughter conceived out of wedlock on a gaudy velvet bed in the Chateau Giraudon.

Stroking one turquoise stone and then another, the sheer goodness of her husband left her speechless. ‘I have never deserved you, Martin.’

He stopped her words by a touch against her arm, no passion in it. ‘If I had been younger, healthier …’

With a shake of her head she leant down and gave him a kiss on the cheek, wishing just for a moment that she might have wanted passion and found his lips. But she did not wish to spoil everything with a careless gesture and five years of togetherness had never included any sort of lust.

‘Would you wear these today?’ he asked and she bent as he fastened the stones, the gold adjusting quickly to the temperature of her skin.

When he had finished she walked to the mirror and saw a woman of means looking back, the necklace lavish and expensive, the bodice of the gown adorned in Honiton lace and her hair fashioned in a style that might suit … an older woman.

The thought came from nowhere. A woman who was cautious, and careful and proper! Forcing gaiety as she turned back to her husband, she thanked him for her gift.

Cristo noticed Eleanor Westbury the moment she walked into the small salon, her husband in the chair before her. This evening she wore a gown of much the same cut as the older female guests, the bodice high and proper and a heavy turquoise bauble of gold and blue sitting in the lace. Did the Earl of Dromorne choose her clothes as well as her jewellery? He wondered how wealth seemed bent on squandering taste with such dreadful choices.

Close up the man was more ancient than he had imagined him at the theatre, though the grey in his hair was not as pronounced as he had first thought it.

Sixty, he imagined. Or nearly sixty. The image of Eleanor lying in bed with her husband brought a vision he did not wish for and he dismissed it, the lingering memory of their own tryst replacing the illusion.

Satin skin and warmth, the sounds of winter Paris and its Sunday bells, soft mist across the Seine coating the charcoal branches of elms in greyness. She had a presence he had never quite fathomed. Haunting. Calling. A woman who had stirred his blood in a way no other had ever managed to do before or since.

Did Martin Westbury now feel the same pleasure? He noticed how the man placed his fingers across her arm in a singular proclamation of ownership, and noticed too the way her fingers curled about his in return. Anger blossomed, though given his own part in the débâcle in Paris it was guilt that should have surfaced. He was the one, after all, who had left a young lady ruined in a strange and foreign city, a man who should have behaved differently and more honourably. If he could take it back he would. If he could have the moment again he would have kept her safe and unscathed, a tiny incident that would cause only a ripple in the fabric of Eleanor Dromorne’s life.

And instead? He did not like to even think of what had happened after she had disembarked from the carriage that he had sent her away in!

With a sigh he looked up and straight into the eyes of Honour Baxter, the wife of his host.

‘She is beautiful, no?’ Her accent was marked, the French slurring the words into a longer version of the English.

Cristo realised that she spoke of Lady Dromorne and schooled all expression on his face.

‘Indeed.’

‘But sad I think, too. A young flower who has not yet had the chance to open.’

He remained silent.

‘I knew her mother, you know. A melancholic woman who was constantly worried about her health. Eleanor was always different, for she was vibrant and alive in a way few other girls her age were. I often wonder just what happened to douse such … passion?’

Her legs entwined about his own. Her teeth nipping at his throat .

Hardly passionless!

What happened after she had left him and disappeared into a waking day?

Where had she met Dromorne and why had she married a man old enough to be her father?

Necessity! The answer came unbidden and rang with the clearness of an unwanted truth.

Had she rolled the dice and taken her chances? An older man who might not notice a lack of maidenhead and a lie that would suck the living out of anybody. And had.

Passionless.

Now?

Because of him?

The awful verity of such a thought almost brought him to his knees and the first stab of pain in his head made him worry.

Lord help her, Eleanor thought, Cristo Wellingham was here, in this room not five yards away and speaking with the host’s wife, Honour Baxter, a Frenchwoman who had made her home in London for many years.

Her fingers tightened across those of her husband and as he patted her hand she held on, the turquoise stones in her new necklace glinting under a fine chandelier above them, pinning her into the light, like an insect under glass. When Cristo Wellingham’s eyes suddenly found hers she looked away and for the first time in a long while she swore beneath her breath, sheer fury reshaping her more normal carefulness. The skin on her arms rose up into goose-bumps as he came closer and she steeled herself to greet him.

‘Lord Cristo. I don’t believe you have met the Earl of Dromorne and his charming young wife, Lady Dromorne.’ Anthony Baxter gave the introductions as Martin held out his hand. Eleanor merely nodded, her title and sex affording her the ability to remain as glacial as she wished.

‘My wife was delighted with Lord Cristo’s return from Paris as she now has someone to reminisce on the beauty of a city that has long been in her heart. Have you spent much time there, Lady Dromorne?’

Eleanor shook her head. ‘No, I am afraid not.’

‘Then you must entice your husband there, my dear. It is in the spring when the city is at its most beautiful, would you not agree, my lord?’

‘I would beg to differ and say that it is the season of winter that appeals to me the most, sir.’

Dark eyes bored straight into her own and the room tilted and then straightened, a bend in time that had her leaning against Martin’s chair, the faint echo of bells in her mind and a man who wore too many rings upon his fingers. Embellished. Foreign. The weight of years of adventure scrawled into both his clothes and the furnishings of his room!

Surreptitiously she glanced at his hands to see them bare. Just another difference. Stripped of gold and silver in London, but with the same sense of recklessness still upon him, simmering in his height and his stance and in the rough beauty of his face.

‘Did you live in Paris for long?’ Martin’s question was quietly phrased, his lisp giving the city’s name a burnished edge.

‘Too long.’ Cristo Wellingham’s reply held no hint of any such temperance and Eleanor wondered if her husband might have sensed his irony, but it seemed that he had not for his next question was even more to the point.

‘I enjoyed the area around the Louvre the most when I was there last. Where did you reside?’