Emerald did not let him finish. ‘Because he is a partner in a number of the country banks.’
‘A vested interest, then?’ Beatrice continued, her tone full of a feigned rebuke. ‘Making it harder to be impartial?’
‘Two against one is a difficult way to win any argument,’ Ashe parried, ‘though if you had supported me, Taris, we might have managed it.’
‘After my last public drubbing at the hands of Mrs Bassingstoke, I dare not risk another one.’
‘Public drubbing?’ Lucinda had joined the fray. ‘Oh, do tell us of it, Beatrice.’
‘The argument that your brother refers to was hardly a good example, as I always felt that he lost it on purpose.’
‘On purpose?’ Her suspicion was so evident that Taris began to laugh, though his mother was nowhere near as amused.
‘In my day well-bred young ladies went to all lengths to stay out of any argument not pertaining to the running of the marital home.’
‘We have come a long way since the 1770s, Mama,’ Lucinda managed.
‘Thank goodness!’ Emerald interjected. ‘Besides, women these days are encouraged to have an opinion on whatever they fancy, Mama, and it would be most unwise not to take up such opportunity.’
Taris felt Asher move beside him. ‘A Wellingham man would not swap a feisty wife for all her weight in gold.’
‘Or all the money still left in the besieged country banks.’ Emerald laughed.
Bea watched as the Duchess of Carisbrook smiled down the table at her husband. A woman who was happy in her world and cherished. For her opinions and her debate, for her originality and her arguments.
And right then, at that very moment, something thawed inside Beatrice. Some icy guilt that had insisted her husband’s intractability was somehow her fault. That she deserved punishment for not being pretty enough or interesting enough or barren.
For twelve years she had laboured under a false premise and a dreadful error. For twelve long years she had obeyed and submitted and conformed.
Tears filled her eyes and she stood, excusing herself from the table under the pretence of feeling ill. If she stayed, she would embarrass everyone, for her long held-in tension was finally demanding release.
Taris heard her sobbing as he opened the unlocked door. Crossing the room, he felt her shoulders shaking and the tears on her cheeks as he held her close.
‘Shh, it may not be as bad as you think.’
‘I…am…sorry,’ she said, when the tempest seemed past. ‘Rudeness is something that should never be excused and your mother will not be thanking me for my strong opinion at the table.’
‘You think you were being rude to offer an opinion? My God, Beatrice, if you cannot say what you think, how could you live?’
When she burst into tears again Taris knew that he had said the wrong thing.
‘I did…didn’t live,’ she whispered after a few more moments. ‘I was always…scared…of him.’
‘Your husband?’
She nodded and her whole body shook. ‘He would hit me if I did not say the right thing.’
‘God.’ He pulled her closer.
‘He would hit me and hit me and hit me.’
Her heart raced at twice the normal pace and made Taris want to find the dead man and strangle him anew.
‘I have never told anyone that. Not anyone,’ she repeated.
‘Then I thank you for telling me,’ he replied, liking the way her fingers buried themselves beneath his jacket as though his warmth was her sanctuary.
‘But I won’t be that way again,’ she vowed a few moments later when she had collected herself. ‘If I think something is wrong, I will always say it.’
‘Good for you.’
A teary half-laugh ensued. ‘And I will read books in bed till after midnight should I wish to.’
‘Would you read them to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘In bed, you say?’
She laughed again. ‘Thank you for bringing me to your family home.’
‘Falder has a legend that insists those who love the place will always return.’
Return!
Bea smiled into the superfine of his well-cut jacket. Taris’s voice was soft and his hands were gentle, the firelight on his hair showing up the darkness.
A good man. A strong man. A man who walked his world with the certainty of one who was both moral and ethical.
She loved him. She did. She loved Taris Wellingham with an ache. The realisation hit her like a lightning strike.
My Lord, she had fallen in love. Hopelessly! Desperately! Completely! And she dared not tell him any of it.
Tell him and risk the end of a friendship.
Tell him and see pity where respect now stood.
Tell him and know that he would never love her back.
Her stomach heaved in a new bout of rising nausea and she swallowed heavily.
She needed time to regroup, to understand the implications of what was happening between them and to protect herself.
‘I would like to rest now…’ She left the ending unfinished and saw the flick of uncertainty as he realised she wanted him gone.
But he went. Without anger or shouted words or recriminations. A different man completely to Frankwell.
Taris walked around the gardens, not trusting himself on a steed at this time of night. He would have liked to have saddled up Thunder and run across Falder with the wind in his face and the stars at his back just like he used to. He would have liked to gallop to the highest hill above Fleetness Point and shout at the sky. Shout with anger and pain and agony, not for himself but for Bea. For a younger Bea. Trapped. Fearful. Silent.
But tonight he could only walk fast around his mother’s garden, the fence along the edge keeping him to a pathway, coriander, rosemary and thyme pungent when his cane brushed the heads of the cuttings his mother had nurtured.
Behind him he heard footsteps.
‘You look like a man who is wrestling with demons.’
Ashe’s voice.
Taris shook his head. ‘Not demons, but truth.’
‘An even trickier adversary.’
The wind in the elm trees on the ridges wailed across silence.
‘Emerald thinks that Mrs Bassingstoke might be with child. Could it be yours?’
Taris looked up, trying in the greyness to see anything of his brother’s face and failing. He remained silent as Ashe kept talking. ‘Beatrice reminds me of Emerald. She has the same steely determination and the same vulnerability.’
‘Her husband hurt her badly.’ Taris hadn’t meant to say it but the secret was too new and too raw to keep in.
‘Hell.’ His brother’s shock underlined his own, making him feel better.
‘She spent twelve years married to a bully. Now all she wants is independence.’
‘A difficult ask.’
‘I know.’
‘Tread carefully, then, for I like her and Emerald is determined she wants to keep her.’
Taris