Ann Lethbridge - Regency Society

She hired a hack and waited at the corner of Beak and Regent Street at exactly the hour she had indicated, fear, excitement and discomposure racing through her in equal measures.

Cristo Wellingham would be here at any second, her last foolish confession unanswered between them, and already her body was knotting into the memory of his touch. Taking in breath, she held it, tight, as though in the movement she might harness a longing that came just with the thought of him. Her hands shook in her lap.

And then he was there, dressed today in the finest of his London finery, the white cravat at his throat throwing up the darkness of his skin and eyes. The gloves he removed after he entered the carriage and sat opposite her, his hat joining them on the leather seat.

‘Eleanor?’ She had forgotten how tall he was and how the smell of him made her want to just breathe in for ever. His hair was pulled back and damp.

‘Thank you for coming.’ Her voice sounded nothing like her own as he told the jarvey to drive on and shut the door.

‘I have been away from London, otherwise I should have called on you.’ The note in his answer was puzzling, an undercurrent of emotion she could not fathom. Wariness, perhaps, or even anger? Nothing quite made sense.

‘I think your butler may be blackmailing me.’

‘Milne?’ The question was choked out.

‘I have received two letters in the past week. One demanding one hundred pounds and the next five hundred. The first I paid, but the more recent one …’ She stopped unable to go on and hating the way her voice shook.

‘Where are they? The letters?’

‘I burnt them both.’

‘Unwise. Can you remember the exact words?’

She did, and parroting the messages made her feel slightly better. If he could help her, there might still be a way …

‘How were the envelopes sealed?’

‘With red wax.’

‘And the slope to the writing?’

‘Was unremarkable.’

‘Did the footman remember anything of the way the second note had come?’

‘I did ask. A child of the street brought that one, too.’

‘The same child?’

Eleanor frowned. ‘I did not bother him for a description.’

‘Damn.’

‘And the second drop?’

‘Drop?’

‘The place you were to leave the money?’

‘He said I was to walk down Regent Street this morning and he would come and speak to me. But I did not go.’

The silence was thick and when he said no more she chanced her own observation. ‘I didn’t know who else to call on for help.’

He looked her straight in the eyes. ‘You did not think that I could be the culprit?’

‘No.’

When she smiled he swore. In French. She had never heard any of the words he used, but guessed them to be ripe given his tone of delivery. Even that made her feel better, for he was every bit as angry as she was.

‘Did you tell your husband?’

She shook her head. ‘He is ill and would not wish to know …’

‘Then don’t. I’ll deal with it all, I promise you. If another letter comes, leave it sealed, but have it delivered straight to my town house.’

She nodded, the relief of having him shouldering the burden of her secret immense.

‘Would they harm my daughter, do you think?’

‘No.’ He did not even hesitate, the certainty in his tone an elixir against all the ‘what ifs’ she had been imagining.

‘I do not care about my reputation, but if Florencia is hurt because of this …’

‘No one will harm her, I promise you, Eleanor. No one.’

‘I will pay any expenses incurred, of course.’

He shook his head and placed one hand on his knee, palm up.

He would help her.

His eyes were black and undeniably furious. No milk-livered fop or dandy with little notion of the fighting arts, but a man who had survived the baser ways of others by his wits and by his knowledge. The scar across one whole side of his palm was a badge of experience.

A new worry surfaced. ‘You would not kill anyone …?’

‘… innocent?’ He finished off the sentence and her disquiet heightened.

‘England affords harsh punishments to those who take the law into their own hands.’

‘You are the second person in the space of two weeks who has reminded me of the differences.’

‘The second?’

‘My brother Taris warned me off an affair of the heart.’

‘Oh.’ She coloured and looked out of the window. The dome of St Paul’s could be seen far in the distance. Did he speak of a mistress perhaps, a kind of warning to make her realise the impossibility of anything intimate ever happening again between them?

Inside the carriage she could smell the soap he used, the perfume clean and unfussy. His hair caught all the colours of the light. Corn and wheat and pure plain silver. Cristo Wellingham was by far the most handsome man she had ever laid her eyes on and she could understand the fuss he had engendered in all the beating hearts of London’s younger women. For a moment she wished she had been younger, prettier, unencumbered. And more daring. But she wasn’t. She was a twenty-three-year-old married mother with the shame of sin about to be proclaimed to all who might listen.

Unless she could stop it!

‘My husband is dying.’ The words were out before she meant them to be and she blanched at the echo. She had not admitted that even to herself and to hear them said so unbidden was shocking. Still she could not take them back. ‘I need him to go to the grave with a soul that is not troubled.’

‘Is Florencia mine, Eleanor?’ He asked the question a second time, and everything stopped. Breath. Blood. Movement.

They were no longer in a carriage on the road around London town, no longer part of a day scrawled with blue and green and yellow. Instead they sat in a void of empty loss, the grey whir of deceit pulling them apart, bruising his eyes and twisting his face into something that was not known.

‘No,’ she denied again, the word creeping between her lips, bending in question and in fright. One different word and a whole world could change with it. One other word and her daughter was no longer just hers. The regret that marked his face was only some comfort.

‘I don’t believe you. Martin was married twice before and there were no offspring from either marriage.’

‘Both wives were barren.’

‘Or perhaps you were already pregnant from our coupling and England had ceased to be an option to return to?’

Eleanor remembered the whispers about the Comte de Caviglione. A spy, the women had said in the Château Giraudon that night, and one of the cleverest around. She remained silent under the watchfulness of his gaze, the frown on his forehead deeper now as his glance fell to her hand wringing the fabric in her skirt this way and that. The cut-diamond face of her wedding ring sparkled like ice. Mocking everything.

‘At Beaconsmeade you said that you loved me.’

The ache at the back of her throat almost made her cry out and say it again and again, here in the space of the carriage cocooned from society and propriety. Kiss me, she longed to demand, reach out and take away choice and kiss me, but he did not move, and the silence between them grew full with doubt and hesitancy.

Finally he spoke. ‘I will station a man in your street, Eleanor, to watch for anyone who might contact you again.’ All business and efficiency. She saw how he lifted his knees back so that even inadvertently he might not touch her.

‘People will question …’

‘This man will be like a breeze that fills only the cracks others miss.’

‘A bit like you, then. A hidden man?’

He laughed, though she thought the sound forced.

‘Is your mother still alive?’