‘Then you must have been saddened to see the house sold on his death?’
Worry turned. As Charles’s only cousin he did not know? She could scarcely believe that he would not, although the fact that Lord Hawkhurst was rumoured to have barely been in England for many years made it seem more than possible. Perhaps no one save her lawyers knew of the financial collapse that her husband had left her in, a hundred chits from the merchants of Medlands village presented and little money to honour them. She had been so careful to pay them back, after all.
Medlands sheltered another family now and Aurelia had not been sorry to pack up the few belongings that were her own and leave the place for ever.
‘I have many memories left to remind me, Lord Hawkhurst.’ Shame. Anger. Disappointment. Murder.
He watched her carefully, the shadows in his eyes pulled back into puzzlement. With him at her side she felt completely safe, the stares of those around her muted in his company. She wished he would ask her to dance again as the music of a waltz was struck but, of course, he did not as they came into the little group she had left a good fifty minutes earlier. The young and beautiful Elizabeth Berkeley was again quick to take his arm. Aurelia thought she would have liked to have done the same, simply laid her fingers across such security and held on.
She remembered Freddy Delsarte at the parties at Medlands come Christmas, where the girls from London were brought up to satisfy the wants of married men who had long become bored of their wives.
As Charles had with her.
Closing her eyes, a dizziness that had become more frequent of late made her world spin.
‘Are you quite well, Mrs St Harlow? You suddenly seem very pale.’ Cassandra Lindsay’s tone was worried.
‘Just tiredness, I think,’ Aurelia returned, looking at Leonora and Cassandra’s brother on the dance floor enjoying each other’s company.
‘I could bring your sister back, if you would like, and Stephen could organise a carriage to take you home immediately. We will not be late ourselves and I promise you I would chaperon her as if she were my own daughter.’
The offer was tempting with Charles’s friends watching her from one corner and the rest of the ton scowling from the others.
‘If it would not be too much trouble…?’
Cassandra Lindsay’s smile was bright as she bid Aurelia goodnight. Then she drew Elizabeth Berkeley away from her grip on Lord Hawkhurst’s person with talk of the colour and cut of the gowns that were her very favourite in the room tonight.
Aurelia gained the distinct impression that in doing so the woman was helping her.
‘I most certainly did not expect you to accompany me home, Lord Hawkhurst.’
He smiled, his teeth white in the dark of the carriage and his thighs less than an inch from her own. ‘But I wanted to, Mrs St Harlow, because it will give us the chance to talk about how it is you know Lord Frederick Delsarte and his lackeys.’
‘They were acquaintances of my husband.’
‘But not of yours?’ No humour lingered now, his voice cold, cut glass.
She shook her head. ‘My disapproval of their antics was more than obvious, I should imagine.’
‘Did Charles ever hurt you?’
The very intimacy of the question made her turn away. ‘No. He was a wonderful husband.’ The words were exactly those she had used in the courts when the law had tried to lay the blame at her feet for his unexplained death.
‘Why is it that I think you lie?’
she turned back. ‘I have no idea, my lord.’
The air all around them contained something that she had never felt before. The pure and utter longing for a man, this man, their unfinished kiss from a week before shimmering on the edge of a lust so foreign it made her feel light headed.
‘Charles enjoyed a wide interpretation of the word “fairness” and when he died at Medlands there were probably a number of people both in London and further afield who breathed a sigh of relief to hear of his passing. As his wife you must have known this.’
Such criticism hung in the darkness, a living and breathing thing, defining all that Charles had been. Given that what he said held a great dollop of truth Aurelia found it hard to argue. ‘There were also a number who may have mourned him.’ She stated this with as much certainty as she could feign. Those who came up for the party weekends at a country mansion who held strict morals in little worth probably rued his passing, but she doubted there were many others. The Medlands estate had buried him with a smile upon its collective face, their lord and master a man who held little regard for the feelings and needs of others more lowly born than he was.
When Lord Hawkhurst caught her hand and held it tight, she could feel tremors within the strength—a surprising thing, that, given his easy confidence. The night of London was black and endless, a quarter-moon lost behind banks of cloud, leaving only them in the dark and empty space of the world.
The warmth of his skin comforted her though, a solid contact amidst all that was strange and she felt her fingers curl around his. He did nothing to resist.
‘I would have asked you to dance again if I knew a scandal wouldn’t have ensued because of it.’
She could not believe he would admit this, to her, a stranger. ‘Lady Elizabeth Berkeley may not have been pleased about that,’ she retorted, hating the bait she threw at him. It was beneath her to involve such an innocent young beauty for her own means, but there it was and she did not take it back. Rather, she waited.
‘A title like mine, and the possessions accompanying it, have a way of garnering interest. It is a known fact.’
‘Such is the ease of being wealthy.’
‘Charles was rich, too. Perhaps you are more like Elizabeth Berkeley than you think.’
She did laugh at that, the sound lost into a mirth that was humourless. ‘I cannot determine one trait that we might share, my lord.’
‘What of beauty?’ he replied.
Was this a joke he played upon her? ‘I am hardly that, my lord.’
‘A woman who does not know her true worth is a rare and valuable thing.’ His voice allowed no tremor of falsity and when she turned towards him the breath left her body, his expression exactly the one she had seen at Taylor’s Gap: lust and want beaten back by will.
Breaking the contact, he fisted his palm against his thighs so that every knuckle stretched white. the scars on his knuckles stood out as raised edges of knotted flesh.
He swore soundly, the frustration expressed coursing between them. She should have bidden him to let her make the rest of the journey alone, should have replaced her gloves with a stern reprimand and ordered him from the carriage. But she could not. Instead she sat there, too, the silence growing as an ache, her hands bare in her lap and cold, her head heavy against the cushioned velour of the seat. For twenty-six long years she had imagined exactly this, a man who might transport her from the tight restraint of her life and deliver her into temptation.
His eyes glinted in the dark when she chanced to take a look, the bleakness in them shivering through green.
‘Your husband had questionable friends, Aurelia. Take care that they do not become your own.’
He would warn her even given the public perception of her part in Charles’s murder. Gratitude rose unbidden.
‘I live a simple and quiet life with my father and sisters.