The hurt of it stung even more than the bullet hole.
‘I thought today you would wish to have a bath. My maid could wash your hair and you could get dressed and sit outside in the garden in the sunshine. The pink peonies are out and so are the white irises.’
Aurelia thought of her gown ruined by the shooting. With no other clothes save a coat in about the same condition she doubted she would be able to be ‘dressed’ at all.
She was about to decline the opportunity when a maid sailed through into the room carrying a dress of pale cream in one arm and the matching slippers and shawl in the other.
‘My husband is always saying that I have far too many clothes so you would be doing me a great favour if you took a few off my hands. Why, with a little help we will have you looking most presentable again.’
The kindness in her tone was disarming. ‘The doyennes of London society might warn you away should you ask of my character, Mrs Clairmont, and believe me there are many who would feel your assistance to be both unwarranted and unwise.’
Hawkhurst’s friend’s wife merely laughed. ‘Luc taught me to follow my heart and I have quite decided to do just that.’
Thickness obstructed Aurelia’s throat as she looked away. Lillian Clairmont had the same sort of graciousness that Cassandra Lindsay did and both had been more than kind. She wished that they could have been good friends, their lives playing out across the years like the characters in the books she read in her father’s library. For ever linked and loyal. But under the circumstances it was not fiction that she should be fostering.
‘I have a bullet through my arm for a reason and there are things I have done that I should not have.’
‘Well, Alfred likes you.’
‘Pardon?’ Aurelia suddenly couldn’t understand quite where this conversation was leading.
‘Stephen’s uncle. He thinks you are the answer to his prayers and has been extolling your charms to all and sundry. He says that you think of everybody save yourself and that it is high time someone took you in hand and worried for you.’
‘Someone?’
‘Hawk, I am guessing.’ She began to giggle and because the whole thing was just so ridiculous Aurelia did, too.
It felt so good to laugh, to let the worry and fear spill out into something different altogether here in a beautiful room in the early afternoon sunshine with a full vase of roses on her mantel.
Orange roses. The way they clashed with the paler hues of the room was surprising.
Lillian surprised her, too, as she leant over and laid her fingers across the top of her uninjured arm. ‘Stephen needs to be happy again and I think you are just the person to make him so.’
‘He thinks I am a traitor.’
‘And are you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then, make him realise exactly who you are. He has been alone all of his life and seconded to a job that has taken his soul bit by bit. He used to laugh more. It would be so good to find him such again.’
The words sobered Aurelia’s joy because laughter had been as foreign to her across the last eight years as it had been to him. Still, she remembered a time when joy had filled her up with an optimism that Charles had completely negated.
‘Thank you for taking me in and for…’ Her hands shook as she encompassed the room with a gesture, and to her horror, tears gathered and fell. ‘I do not usually cry,’ she managed, as the beautiful Lillian Clairmont sat on the bed beside her and gathered her in, careful not to touch the thick bandage.
‘Then I am glad you feel able to do so with me.’
Her perfume was one of flowers fresh blooming and Aurelia’s more normal reticence was replaced by a want to explain. ‘My mother is in Paris and the man who shot at me was part of a group who had made threats against her safety. I was trying to save her, but now I think I have made everything immeasurably worse.’
‘Sometimes the way forwards is not as straight and easy as you might like it to be, but there are those who can help you if you let them.’
‘If it is Stephen that you speak of, he has left already and I do not know how to tell him any of it.’
‘He has gone to find Delsarte and will be back as soon as he has.’
‘Oh.’ Aurelia sat up in bed and swung her legs across the side, for a clean bath and a new gown suddenly seemed like a very good idea.
Delsarte had slid into a hole like the rat that he was and was nowhere to be found. Hawk hoped he might have left England altogether, though a feeling down his spine told him he hadn’t. But with the rains slanting in from the north the byways had become quagmires and any tracks able to be followed had been swallowed up by mud.
Scanning the heavens above him, he rounded the final hills down into Woodruff Abbey. A storm darkened the sky, a rainbow sliding into the last prisms of daylight. The house in the folds of ash trees was beautiful though he wished it might have been Atherton standing there before him, its gilded cream turrets and thick crenellated walls calling him home as no other place had ever been able to manage.
It had been so long since he had been back, the memories of a family taken from him by sickness leaving him unwilling to return; until now, until this moment, until the vision of Aurelia St Harlow gracing the gardens and the salons and his bedroom cancelled out everything before it.
‘God.’ He whispered the word into the night and urged his mount onwards, the shadows of the Abbey beckoning. Aurelia’s curtains were drawn. He realised that as he counted the windows along the second floor and above the portico. Had her wound worsened? Had the fever returned? Had the doctor’s advice been as sage as he hoped it would be? His fingers tightened on the reins and he frowned at such an unfamiliar anxiety.
It was then that he saw her, walking through the gardens on the western side of the house, the formal box hedges obscuring her before she came through the canopied archways of greenness to wait beside the driveway. She wore a dress of Lilly’s, he thought, cream silk bright through the oncoming darkness. Her hair was almost loose, caught in an untidy knot at the back of her head so that tendrils fell from it, curling Titian against pale. Her left arm was held immobile against her chest by a skilfully fashioned sling, the tie of it made into a bow.
‘You are well, Lord Hawkhurst?’ Her eyes slid across his body, checking as she asked the question.
‘Delsarte eluded me, though I have an idea as to where he will go to next.’ If she felt relief, she did not show it, her face carefully schooled into a smile that gave away nothing.
‘When Lucas Clairmont returned yesterday and you didn’t I thought perhaps…’ For the first time she faltered, stopping as she swallowed before beginning again. ‘I thought you might have gone back to London.’
‘But you watched for my return anyway?’
She looked back at the manor house, hesitation taking her away a step and then bringing her back. ‘I should not wish for you to be hurt because of my actions.’
‘The missives you delivered to Touillon were a decoy to the real work undertaken by Delsarte, the silk samples allowing an easy passage of intelligence. Kerslake has confessed to everything for the chance of a pardon.’ He hoped she did not understand what these words implied. ‘Sometimes it is prudent to sacrifice the freedom of one for the capture of many.’
‘Including me?’
He turned away because he