The image of two rosy-tipped breasts came to mind as the bells of Westminster rang out the hour of one across the slumbering city, and he smiled into the darkness as his horses slowed at the corner between Pall Mall and St James’s Square.
Opening Lucy’s letter on her return home, Emerald found the missive to be full of the adolescent adulation Asher Wellingham had spoken of. After memorising the note for future reference and consigning it to the fire, she walked across to the window to watch the sky.
Tonight the heavens were clear, a half-formed moon low in the eastern horizon and climbing. It would rain tomorrow, she suspected, for a cloud of mist encircled the glowing crescent and the air had a tang of moisture in it.
She wondered where the Duke of Carisbrook was now. Entwined in the arms of the green-eyed woman, she guessed, and wondered why she found the thought so irritating.
Asher Wellingham was nothing to her.
She would be in and out of Falder in a matter of days, hours even, if her searching went to plan. And then she would be gone. Away from here. Away from him.
Her mind wandered to the feel of his arms around her waist as they had danced tonight, the soft music between them. She had leant her head against the superfine of his jacket and breathed in.
‘Lord,’ she said aloud and swore roundly. Is this what England was making her? Soft? Needy? Dependent?
She was her father’s daughter with years of fighting imbued in her blood and drawn upon her skin. Her finger went to the mark that intersected her right eyebrow and travelled beneath her fringe into her scalp. Black Jack Porrit and his men off the coast of Barranquilla in the winter of 1819. She would never fit in here and before the first whisper of her parentage surfaced in London town she would need to be gone.
With resolve she stripped off the gown and arranged her blankets beside the window overlooking the street.
Across the city the bells peeled in the night. Two o’clock. Burrowing down, she whispered the name of her sister into the darkness.
‘Soon, Ruby. I will be home soon. I promise.’
Miriam and Emerald arrived at Falder just as a rain shower departed and the sun tinged the clouds off the wild coast of Fleetness Point.
Falder.
To Emerald it was the most beautiful land she had ever seen, soft green hills with glades of trees colouring the lay of the fields. Everything about it was appealing. The isolation. The strength. The way the valleys dipped to a sea that was cold and free and deep. She could smell the sharp taste of salt on the wind and hear the lonely voices of the gulls.
Home. Home. Home.
Falder beckoned to her in a doleful wailing chant. Breathing in, she caught her reflection in the window of the coach and screwed up her nose. Would she ever get used to the shortness of her hair?
‘If the master of Falder discovers any more about us we will be tossed out in a minute.’ Miriam fidgeted with the thin silk strap of the little reticule she carried. ‘And if you think to dress in your lad’s clothes and scour the house at night, I should warn you of the dangers in it.’
Taking a deep breath, Emerald rubbed her palms against the rough wool of her cape. ‘Would you rather I took a knife to his throat, Aunt?’ Today, in the light of what she had to pretend, she could not find it in herself to be kind.
‘You would kill him?’
‘No, of course not,’ she answered back and swallowed down chagrin. Lord, did Miriam truly think that she was capable of slitting the jugular of an unarmed man?
‘Beau made some stupid mistakes, Emerald. And I would say his biggest one was not dispatching you to England the moment your mother left.’
‘I think sometimes you are too hard on my father—’ she began, but Miriam would have none of it.
‘You were six and he was away as often as he was not.’
‘I had Azziz and St Clair.’
‘Pah! That huge house and a boy who barely spoke the English language. You think that was a suitable home?’
‘It was my home.’ How often before had they had this very same conversation?
‘Your home? With a bevy of Beau’s good-time girls and barely a night without some drunken orgy?’
‘He missed my mother.’
‘Missed her money more like.’
Emerald frowned. This was a tangent she had not heard before. ‘Money. My mother had money?’
Miriam paled. ‘I promised my brother that I would never talk of that time. He wanted you to be free of the restraints and vagaries of society and I promised him my silence.’ Shifting in her seat, she crossed herself and Emerald saw the glimpse of a tear. ‘He was a man who demanded too much sometimes. Even of me.’
‘I do not even have a name to remember her by, Miriam. Can you not give me just that?’
‘Evangeline.’
When the dark eyes of her aunt met her own she felt a heady dizzy sense of shock.
‘Evangeline.’ She whispered it, turning the word on her tongue. Savouring it. At last a name. ‘Like an angel?’
Miriam’s deep frown was not quite what she had expected. ‘Your mother found life away from England difficult, and my brother would not have been the easiest of husbands. But he was your father and my brother and one should never speak ill of the dead, God bless them all.’
As the silence lengthened Emerald knew that she would hear no more.
Falder was a revelation. An uninhibited and magnificent hotchpotch of architectural styles, it sat above a river on a hillock completely surrounded by grassland. Part-Scottish baronial, part-Gothic and part-English manor, its many turrets and gables dominated the landscape around it and proclaimed not only great wealth, but a long lineage of generations of Carisbrooks who had all added their mark to it.
As the carriage clattered in across a pebbled drive, she looked up and hoped that there were not too many other guests here this weekend, for she was beginning to feel that she could not brave another round of social niceties.
A bevy of servants were at the front entrance to meet them, their faces stiff with the rigours of servitude; she refrained from meeting their glances, reasoning that such folk might be better at recognising a faux lady should they come across one. The thought made her frown. Circumstance had robbed her of being gently reared, but her birth was hardly dubious. Beau had been a lord before he had become a pirate and the title of Lady was hers to rightly use. She took the arm of her aunt and started up the staircase.
Asher Wellingham was waiting in a small blue salon directly off the portico. Beside him another tall man stood.
‘Was your journey here pleasant?’ The Duke asked the question in a voice that was measured.
‘Thank you, yes, it was.’ Emerald helped Miriam to a chair on one side of the fireplace and arranged a woollen blanket across her lap. Her aunt looked pale and tired and old, a woman whose secrets had leached the lifeblood from her soul. Her father’s sister, her only relative left save for Ruby. In the unfamiliarity of Falder she was suddenly dear. Standing, she draped one arm protectively across Miriam’s frail shoulders as Asher Wellingham apologized for his mother’s absence—she was indisposed—and introduced his brother.
Taris Wellingham wore thick glasses and stood with his hand against the end of a large armoire. The identical sense of danger that cloaked his brother cloaked him and he had exactly the same shade of hair: midnight black. She waited for him to give