One Unashamed Night. Sophia James

very rich. And then dismissed.

      Nothing left of breath and touch and the whispered delights shared in a barn outside Maldon. Nothing left of holding the centre of him within her, deep and safe, the snow outside erasing everything that could lead others to them, time skewered only by feelings and trust and the hard burn of an endless want.

      Gone! Finished!

      She turned her head away and marched into the first shop with an open door, the stocked shelves of a milliner’s wares blurring before her eyes as she pretended an exaggerated and determined interest in procuring a hat.

      There was no sense in any of this, of course. Had Taris Wellingham not already told her that she should ignore him should she see him in London, that the tryst they had shared was nothing more to him than an interlude in one moment of need? The wedding ring on the third finger of her left hand glinted in the refracted light of a lamp set beside the counter.

      Frankwell laughing from the place his soul had been consigned to. Not heaven, she hoped, the religious icon on the wall above the milliner making her start. Would her own actions outside Maldon banish her soul from any hope of an everlasting happiness? Given that she had in all of her twenty-eight years seldom experienced the emotion, the thought made her maudlin, the enticing promise of a better place after such sacrifice the one constant hope in her unending subservience in Ipswich.

      Perhaps she was being punished for that very acquiescence, a woman who had been given a brain to think with and who had rarely used it. Was still not using it, was not taking the chances that were suddenly hers to seize, but was hiding away in the shadow of a fear that made everything seem dangerous.

      ‘Is there anything in particular you wish to look at, madam?’ the shopkeeper asked, as Bea still did not speak. The silence in the street registered in the back of her mind, any possibility of a further re-encounter diminishing with each passing second.

      She made herself look at a hat she had admired on the nearest shelf, touching the soft fabric carefully. The bright green felt was a colour that she had seldom worn, Frankwell’s distaste of anything ’showy’ in the early years of her marriage mirrored across all of the last.

      The very thought of her unquestioned obedience made her try it on, and for the first time ever in her life she actually liked the face of the woman reflected in the mirror. The colour matched her eyes and the tone of her skin, the sallowness of her often-favoured beige or brown lightened by the tint of green.

      ‘I think this colour suits you very well, madam, as would this one.’