As the conversation between them again spluttered to a halt, Beatrice tucked her hands into the dark red fabric of her new dress and stayed silent.
He did not want to speak, perhaps? He had asked her for this walk and now he regretted it? Her intent to help had become intrusive and he wished he might have never given her the chance to take the experiment further?
She hardly knew him, hardly understood a thing about him; this morning, with the patch across his eye, he looked not only wildly handsome, but also unbearably distant.
A lord and a man who walked his world in the very highest echelons of society and one who could hardly be relishing her busy-bodying ways and her plain, plain looks.
Her strident lecture on the ills of strong drink suddenly looked inadvisable and naïve. What did she truly know of him, after all, that a whore in one of the establishments off Covent Garden might not? An affair of the flesh and nothing of the heart.
‘If you would prefer to leave our outing to another day, my lord, I would quite understand.’
She did not dare to chance the use of his Christian name, even given his directive of a few moments prior.
As if he suddenly remembered she was there, he turned.
‘No, I should like to walk.’ Again he did not look directly at her, his face guarded today and distant.
‘Your horses are beautiful. I saw you once in Regent Street tooling greys.’
‘Greys?’ He looked puzzled.
‘With a woman. A young woman with light hair.’
‘Lucy. My sister. She insisted that she learn the art of managing a team.’
Relief turned inside Bea. Not a paramour, then, but a sibling. ‘Indeed, she did look competent.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Buying a hat, my lord, and in awe of such a display as everyone else on the street most surely was.’
‘I am sorry I did not see you.’
She could not let him off the hook so easily. ‘Even though your glance brushed directly across mine…?’
He leaned forwards at her reprimand, his movements strangely careful. No clumsiness in them or extra exertion.
‘Were you married long, Beatrice-Maude?’
The question was so personal that Bea wondered if she should have made certain that Sarah, her maid, had accompanied her. She shook her head, knowing that Taris Wellingham could not be interested in another dalliance three long months after so decidedly ending the first one.
‘I was, my lord.’
‘And he drank?’
Hot shame filled her and confusion. ‘Occasionally.’
Nightly. Daily. Every moment by the end of it.
‘But you showed him the error of his ways and led him into abstinence?’
‘No, my lord, God in his wisdom showed him that.’
A malady to take away any choice.
He nodded, but did not reply. The sweat that had built upon his forehead worried her, the sheen of it mirrored by the heavy lines on his forehead.
Pain!
He was in pain, she thought, and was doing his level best not to let her see it. His knuckles showed white where he clutched on to the silver ball of his cane and the scar that trailed from his hairline into the soft leather of his patch twitched. She wondered how he had received it. A bullet when he had served in the army? Or was it a duelling scar?
The shout of the footman stopped any further thoughts, however, and Beatrice saw that they were now at the park.
On alighting she noticed that the pathway in this particular section of the park was ringed with a fence, markings carved into the railings. Taris Wellingham’s fingers ran across the nicks in the wood. He seldom wore gloves, she noted, as was more customary for gentlemen of the ton, and often ran his open palm along objects. As in the carriage outside Maldon when his touch had run along the line of her cheek. As in the barn where they had ventured further and she had turned into his loving…
Taris felt the directions carved into the railings, something he had had Bates take care of to ensure the continuation of a sense of independence that was being constantly threatened. He always used this place, always walked in exactly the same arc, down to the lake and then back again, the lack of any steps or rough areas a boon when he was alone. Or in company, he amended and smiled.
His headache was lessening in the fresh air, the tightness around his eyes dissipating. Even his sight seemed a little restored. He could now make out the row of trees at the end of the pathway and the rough shape of a bonnet that Beatrice wore. Not quite helpless, then. His black mood lightened.
‘The smell of the trees in St James’s reminds me of my home in Kent, which is why I come here.’
‘You don’t live in London?’
‘I moved out three years ago when I inherited land.’
‘Yet you choose to ride in a public conveyance?’
He nodded. How could he answer her? What could he say?
Sometimes I like to be by myself in the midst of people who know nothing about me, who would not care if I slipped or fell. People who might simply pick me up and go on their way, no labels attached because of the way our paths have crossed…
‘I think I can understand the reason.’ She was talking again, the lilt in her words attractive. ‘I too gained a good living on my husband’s death and old habits are hard to forget. Not that you would have old habits, of course, with your birth and name, but for me it was such.’
‘Was he a good man…your husband? A man of honour?’
‘I was sixteen years old when I married him and twenty-eight when he died. To admit failure over that many years…’ Her voice petered out and he stepped in.
‘So you admit to nothing?’
Her laughter was unexpected and freeing. A woman who would not take umbrage at even the most delicate of questions.
‘I am now in a city that allows me the luxury of being whatever I want to be.’
‘And that is?’
‘Free.’
He remembered back to her questions on their night in the snowstorm and everything began to make more sense. Perhaps they were a pair in more ways than she had realised it? Two people trying to hew a future from the past and survive. Independently.
‘But you still wear his ring.’
‘Because I have chosen to accept what has been and move on.’
Such honesty made him turn away. Not so easy for him, as the scar across his temple burned with fear and loss. Not so easy for him when the darkness was there every morning when he awoke. Still, in such logic there was a gleam of something he detected that might save him.
Not acceptance, but something akin to it; for the first time in three years Taris felt the anger that had dogged him shift and become lighter.
She had said something that unsettled him, and wished she might have taken back her words to replace them with something gentler. But she couldn’t and any time for regrets was long past. Here with the wind in her hair she felt a sort of excitement that challenged restraint and allowed a wilder emotion to rule.
Her whole life had been lived carefully and judiciously. Today she felt neither, the feeling directly related to the man who walked beside her.
Walked fast too, his frame