Emerald laughed, though there were tears in her voice when she replied, ‘I thought she was a sensible woman. I thought that she had impeccable manners and for the life of me I cannot understand what just happened.’
‘At a guess I would say she saw I lacked sight.’
Silence confirmed his suspicions. Emerald might be able to see what he could not, but he could hear what others never did.
Fear. Abhorrence. And the need for flight.
He made himself smile, made his face carefully bland, the anger that was building hidden behind indifference even as his left cheek throbbed.
‘Mrs Bassingstoke did not know before?’
‘It was night,’ he returned.
‘And you are good in the darkness!’
‘Precisely.’
‘So good that she could spend the whole time with you and never guess?’
‘It seems that is true.’
‘I think I hate her for this.’ Her voice was small, the anger in it formidable. ‘And everything that happened today is my fault. Ashe told me to leave it alone.’
‘But you didn’t?’
‘And now you despise me.’
‘Hardly.’ His left hand went out to feel along the lintel of the door, the shadows in the room long with darkness. For the first time ever he felt…nearly blind, the infinite gloom pressing down almost as a living thing. Intense and pressured, the foreverness of it just around the corner.
Where was Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke now? How had she got home? Was home far? Would she be safe? The faint smell of flowers lingered in the air beside him and he breathed in hard, trying to keep her close and angry that he should even think to do so.
Beatrice sat on the side of her bed and cried. She did not try to be quiet, she did not wipe her tears away with a dainty handkerchief. She did not care which servant might eavesdrop or which friend calling in the afternoon might overhear her howls of anguish.
She just cried. For everything that had happened. For her appalling manners and her incredible rudeness, for the lack of control in Taris Wellingham’s movements and for the knowing look of complicity on his sister-in-law’s face.
The man she had admired was a drunkard!
Everything that had held her up in the past months was lost. Her confidence. Her belief in herself. Instead she was tossed back to the time when she had been completely at the mercy of the moods of a man whose anger or temperance depended on the amount and strength of the drop he had imbibed.
A few beers and he would drag her to his room. A few more and he would hit her. And a few more than that…
Never again. Never, never again!
Using the sleeves of her gown to wipe both her nose and her cheeks, the quick swipes threw her back to Ipswich and the house there.
Frankwell had been a big man and a bully, though after his apoplexy he had become kinder, his mind not quite remembering who it was she had been.
His wife. The positions changed over only a matter of weeks and the man with no family at all save her was as dependent as a three-year-old. There was no choice in any of it. There was no help to garner, with his finances tied to a lawyer who was living well on the interest of the Bassingstoke money just as long as the main recipient of it was alive.
And the last years had slipped by with all the hardship of twice their number, the factories belching out high-grade iron even with an absentee owner at their helm.
Her life became days and weeks and months disappearing into the drudge of looking after a husband she had hated. Suddenly Beatrice was overcome with everything. With the past and the present and the future and she could not breathe, could not take the proper amount of air without the stinging contracting ache in the back of her throat stopping everything.
‘Mama,’ she whispered and thought of her parents, dead by the time she had reached the tender age of seventeen and thankfully unaware of the type of man that they had chosen for her husband.
The joy of the night in the snow came unbidden, taunting and mocking against the reality of what had happened today.
Today she had understood that the fatuous dreams of an ageing widow were destined to remain ever that, her life divided into before and after one perfect night.
Because now she knew and that was the very worst of it! Now she had had a taste of what it was to be delighted and pleasured and cared for, the impossible hope sending her into new fits of sobbing.
A knock on the door made her stop, as she pressed her lips together and frantically rubbed at her eyes.
‘Yes. Who is it?’
‘It’s Sarah, madam. Might I come in?’
Looking at her face in the mirror as she stood to open the door, Beatrice grimaced, her eyes swollen and her cheeks blushed.
Sarah, her maid, stood at the door with a worried expression. ‘Cook says that we will be having chicken tonight and he will prepare it in just the way you like it.’
‘That will be lovely. Thank you, Sarah.’
‘If there is anything any of us could do to help, ma’am…’
‘I would certainly tell you if there was. Thank you again.’
Shutting the door, Bea felt like a woman who had let everybody down. She had had many servants before, of course, but never ones that had become her friends as these ones had.
Still, today she could not find it in herself to speak of anything, her disappointment in the character of Taris Wellingham such a calamity that she could barely believe it.
Was his over-drinking something that was known in society? It was only mid-afternoon and very early to be so befuddled and yet she had never heard even a whisper of it.
She breathed out and crossed to the window. The park opposite was filled with people, laughing happy people. People with lives that were so different from her own! Placing her palm on the glass, she enjoyed the momentary impression of cold and the frosted outline left when she removed it. Still here! Still attracted to men who could bring her nothing save heartache.
‘Taris.’ She whispered his name into the dusk. Strange that she had not smelt the liquor upon him as he had entered the room, which was something she had become adept at doing when Frankwell had returned home after a night out. No, all she had smelt was the tang of masculinity with an underlying hint of an astringent soap.
She wished she had not accepted Emerald Wellingham’s offer of afternoon tea because then she might have never known…
‘Stupid,’ she chided herself, and, tying back her hair, decided to spend the rest of the evening cataloguing her new books.
She saw Taris Wellingham again in the Book Society Library the very next afternoon, perusing the shelves with another man she did not recognise.
Today his clothes were immaculate and worn in the fashion of one who did not place too much importance on the way a cravat was tied or any other such frippery. The bruise on his cheekbone, however, had darkened and swollen.
It was too late for her to stand and make her way out as he was only a few feet away and coming closer. Consequently she merely sat, pasting what she hoped was an expression on her face that would relate the disappointment she felt in what had happened yesterday.
He passed her by without acknowledgement, and so close that she could hear what it was they were talking about.
Fox hunting and the hounds used at a ‘meet’.
The cut direct!