‘She had much to say to you?’
‘She thinks I am a drunk.’
‘Why the hell would she think that?’
‘Because the other day she saw me lose my footing and my direction. I would guess from what she does not say that her husband used to be a heavy drinker and, putting two and two together, she has come up with five.’
‘You didn’t enlighten her then, I gather?’
‘You know me too well,’ he drawled back. ‘Blindness or a predilection for the bottle? Which one would you pick?’
Jack stopped walking. ‘It’s got a lot worse, then? Your eyesight?’
Taris nodded and made to walk on, irritated when Jack stayed firm.
‘There are doctors who might help you if you went to see them.’
‘Which I won’t be doing.’ Lord, he had done the rounds of the medical fraternity when he had first returned home from Jamaica and not one of them had been hopeful; his denial at what they had told him curled up into a harder anger. He did not wish to be hauled off again to a physician who would only disappoint him and the risk of gossip emanating from such a visit was too high. No. He would fight this creeping blindness on his own terms and in his own way. He swore it.
Another thought surfaced. What would happen should Beatrice determine the truth? Today with the full light of the window upon her he had made out the outline of her face. Not in detail, but not in grey sludge either. A halfway point to knowing what she might look like. He wished he could have used his fingers to fill in the nuances and touch her. Again. Even though he knew the foolhardiness of doing just that.
Taris Wellingham and his carriage arrived at her door almost exactly at two, after sending a note earlier to ask whether this time would be suitable.
Dressed in her bonnet, coat and gloves, Bea found him standing outside next to his coach. Today he wore brown, the colour showing up the darkness of his hair. Surprisingly he also wore a patch of the finest leather across his left eye.
‘My lord,’ she began, hating the tremor in her voice, ‘have you been hurt?’
‘No.’ He did not elaborate or embellish his reply as he held open the door to a carriage emblazoned with a family crest and pulled by four perfect chestnut horses. Two footmen tipped their hats to her when she acknowledged them, both adorned in the livery of gold and blue.
Taris Wellingham followed her in, sitting in the seat opposite hers. Taking a breath, she smiled and tried to initiate some conversation between them.
‘It is a beautiful day for this time of the year, is it not?’
‘It is.’
‘I have heard it said that such weather augurs well for the summer season. Some say that we should expect a very mild May.’
‘A happy thought,’ he returned in a voice that suggested anything but. ‘And I would prefer it if you would call me Taris. With our history…’ He stopped.
Our history? The weight of what had been between them settled like a stone in her stomach and the swelling bruise on his cheek underlined everything about him that was dangerous.
Today the ease of yesterday had gone, replaced by a tension that Beatrice could not understand as he watched her with a disconcerting directness, a small tic on the smooth skin below his one uncovered eye.
Hell! Taris thought. His eye was smarting and the headache that had been threatening all morning bloomed into pain. A familiar headache, the little sight that was left to him disappearing into nothingness. He should never have come, should have noted the heaviness in his temples and the tiredness in his eyes and cried off. But he was here and Beatrice-Maude was opposite with her quick-witted brain that might expose him as the cripple he was should he make even one false step. His fingers tightened on his cane, the silver ball his only connection to the world, his only certainty. All about him now lay the creeping dark of chaos and a discomfort that made him feel sick.
He had given his men instructions to stop at St James’s Park, a place he often walked alone, because with the fences along the pathways on the western side he had a touchstone to know exactly where he was.
‘I have been thinking up ways to try to help you with your…problem and was wondering if you would be averse to answering a few questions?’
She waited for his answer and he nodded.
‘Do you drink often?’
‘No.’
‘But when you do drink, you drink a lot?’
The lies that were piling one on the other were nowhere near as humorous as he had found them yesterday.
I am almost blind and that is why I fell.
He should say it, just spit it out here and now and then that would be the end of it, for the truth would send any woman fleeing.
But he did not say that because, even nauseous and in pain, the words just would not come.
Avoided. Adrift. Lessened.
Turning his face to the window, he pretended to look out, forcing away all the righteous arguments that rang in his head whilst protecting himself in-stinctively from pity.
As the conversation between them again spluttered to a halt, Beatrice tucked her hands into the dark red fabric of her new dress and stayed silent.
He did not want to speak, perhaps? He had asked her for this walk and now he regretted it? Her intent to help had become intrusive and he wished he might have never given her the chance to take the experiment further?
She hardly knew him, hardly understood a thing about him; this morning, with the patch across his eye, he looked not only wildly handsome, but also unbearably distant.
A lord and a man who walked his world in the very highest echelons of society and one who could hardly be relishing her busy-bodying ways and her plain, plain looks.
Her strident lecture on the ills of strong drink suddenly looked inadvisable and naïve. What did she truly know of him, after all, that a whore in one of the establishments off Covent Garden might not? An affair of the flesh and nothing of the heart.
‘If you would prefer to leave our outing to another day, my lord, I would quite understand.’
She did not dare to chance the use of his Christian name, even given his directive of a few moments prior.
As if he suddenly remembered she was there, he turned.
‘No, I should like to walk.’ Again he did not look directly at her, his face guarded today and distant.
‘Your horses are beautiful. I saw you once in Regent Street tooling greys.’
‘Greys?’ He looked puzzled.
‘With a woman. A young woman with light hair.’
‘Lucy. My sister. She insisted that she learn the art of managing a team.’
Relief turned inside Bea. Not a paramour, then, but a sibling. ‘Indeed, she did look competent.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Buying a hat, my lord, and in awe of such a display as everyone else on the street most surely was.’
‘I am sorry I did not see you.’
She could not let him off the hook so easily. ‘Even though your glance brushed directly across mine…?’
He leaned forwards at her reprimand, his movements strangely careful. No clumsiness in them or extra exertion.
‘Were you married long, Beatrice-Maude?’
The question was so personal that Bea wondered if she should have