Aurelia felt a wash of embarrassment rise up across her face. The bed was in a state and, quickly drawing up the blanket from the base, she tried to hide some of the wreckage.
‘A successful wedding night needs to show some…shambles,’ the sensible and eminently practical Mrs Simpson declared. ‘In my experience if it does not then there is not much hope for a future happiness.’
‘You are married?’
‘For thirty-five years, my lady, and to a man I love as much now as I did when I married him.’
Such chatter calmed Aurelia. ‘Does Lord Hawkhurst come to Atherton often?’ she asked.
‘Not so often. When he was a child he lived here with his parents, but they passed on with a sickness and he has not returned for great lengths of time since.’
The information was horrifying. She imagined the hurt and the loneliness of a young Stephen, his world fallen to pieces.
‘This is why Lord Hawkhurst is a rolling stone, I’d be thinking, though a good marriage might change that.’
‘Thank you for telling me.’
‘But come, my lady, your new husband is waiting for you in the downstairs breakfast room.’
Stephen stood by the window in the blue salon and looked out across the long green lawns. Once he had played here with his brother, laughing and shouting as they ran and fished and climbed. His parents had stayed at Atherton for most of the year, wanting the quiet and the beauty of the place, but it had been the same isolation that had eventually killed them—too far for any doctor to come with a bag of tricks and a cure.
They had been buried together in the small family graveyard and Daniel and he had been brought up from school to observe the solemn and joyless process.
He wiped his hair away from his eyes. Now he was back with a woman who was nothing like the bride he had thought to take, and where did that leave him? Smitten and ensnared in the promise of all that she was, that was where.
To wake up this morning with her lying beside him and watch the trust and peace on her face had been a revelation. He was no longer just beholden to himself and he hated this power she held over him, no will of his own save the need to empty his lust inside her like a green boy in the first flush of adolescence. He abhorred the thought, too, that if anything ever happened to her he might not survive it. Would not survive it.
It had been the same with his parents all those years ago when the news of their deaths had left him breathless and crouched against the side of a cold brick building struggling for the air that he could not take.
If Aurelia left him…He shook his head and put away the thought, but the possibility of pregnancy loomed large and he knew the percentages of healthy women who never made it through labour. Everything was dangerous when a person wriggled through the careful guard of indifference and slid into the heart. It was why he had even considered offering for Elizabeth Berkeley because he knew that there was a part of him that she could never have touched.
Unlike Aurelia.
He swallowed and thought of his mother. Catherine would have liked his new wife, for they had the same sort of independence and cleverness. His father would have liked her, too, with her wide-ranging knowledge of politics and opinions.
A noise at the door made him turn and there she was before him, a shawl that he recognised as one of his mother’s tucked around her shoulders, the softer shade of pink setting off the fiery colour of her hair. She wore it just as his mother had, tucked up in a loose knot at her nape.
The circles of life spun in ways that were fathomless and incomprehensible and perhaps after all it was just as simple as Aurelia had said it was. Signalling to the waiting footman to begin serving breakfast, he helped his bride into a seat at the table.
He was dressed in country clothes this morning, the fabric in his jacket and his trousers fine tweed and beautifully tailored. On her part Aurelia could barely meet his glance as she pondered over their hours in a bedchamber filled with delight. Today in the company of servants tending to them and the formality of a lordly seat overshadowing everything, a sort of hesitant uncertainty hovered.
She could not believe that this distant lord was the very same man who had kissed her into oblivion and given of his body so freely.
‘I would like to show you Atherton today on horseback, if you feel up to it.’
Just the thought of a jaunt outside raised her spirits. ‘My arm is a lot better and even if it tires I am well able to manage onehanded.’
‘Good. Mrs Simpson will find one of my mother’s riding habits for you to wear. It will be of the old style, of course, but I think you would be much The same size. Would eleven o’clock suit you?’
‘That sounds lovely.’ The toast was dry in her mouth as she bit into it. So formal and stilted. She wished he would look at her as he had in the moonlight, passion in his eyes as need for her filled him. Today it was as if she could have been anyone.
‘The people who work on Atherton would no doubt enjoy a word or two with their new mistress if you would not be averse to stopping.’
‘Indeed I would not be averse to such a thing.’
His eyes creased at her answer, puzzlement lurking, and because of it she smiled. Quick wariness took his glance away and he made much of buttering his toast before lifting up a jug of freshly squeezed and sweetened lemon juice to fill a fluted glass—the business of an ordinary breakfast underpinned by a night of high passion and lust.
If she had been braver, she would have reached out and placed her hand over his and asked him If they might again repair to their bedroom to speak in a language that needed no words at all. If she had known that his feelings for her were as strong as the ones she held for him, she would have done just that, but she had no such certainty. And so she stayed quiet, the heavy tick of a clock in the corner eating up the minutes of silence between them.
Finally he seemed to have had enough.
‘Alexander Shavvon will be here tomorrow. He is the head of the British Service and I am hoping he will allow an end to all that has been uncovered in the Park Street warehouse.’
Such a change in topic befuddled her. One moment lost in the hazy glow of sexual innuendo and the next thrown into a social discourse that could change her future for the better or for the worse.
‘Will I meet him?’
‘Of course. I am relying on your charms to sway him completely. When he sees you as my wife he will withdraw the claims Kerslake so definitely insists upon and give you full pardon.’
‘And if these charms do not work?’
‘They will, Aurelia. Believe me, they will.’
At that he stood, scrunching the linen napkin from his lap and throwing it down upon the table. ‘Eleven o’clock at the stables. Have Mrs Simpson ask a lad to show you where they are.’
Then he was gone, striding off down the wide corridors of Atherton, the lord of the manor and the prince of his domain. The room seemed so much emptier without him in it.
Atherton was as beautiful as she thought it would be, the wide open spaces of green leading down to small copses of oak and elm and beech. Medlands had been a large holding, but this ranged as far as the eye could see as Hawkhurst property.
‘When the weather is clearer it is possible to see the ocean from here,’ Hawk said as he pulled his horse to a stop on one of the grassy knolls. ‘We used to swim there in the high summer.’
‘You and your brother?’
‘My father had a boat made for us that resembled a small scow and we would race up and down the beach, pretending to be pirates.’
‘A good childhood, then?’
‘Aye, it was that, but not