Mistress at Midnight (23 page)

‘You will live.’ The words were strong and assured, no doubts within them. If he left, she was suddenly certain that she would never survive this.

‘Stay?’

He simply took her uninjured hand into his and brought her fingers to his lips. Feeling the scratchiness of his unshaved face and the warmth of his touch, she closed her eyes.

I love you
. The honesty of the thought brought her peace as a single tear traced its way down the side of her eye and fell into her hair spread across the pillow. Fear subsided, too, her world narrowed to this one room. Pink. Like a young girl’s, the silk in long curtains of the finest quality and the furniture harking back to an older and more generous time.

In the distance she could hear the first dawn call of birds.

‘It will be morning soon,’ Hawk said as he saw her listening, his eyes softer now, threads of relief through tired, worn gold. He did not let go of her hand.

‘Where are we?’ She found it difficult to remember things.

‘Woodruff Abbey. Luc and Lillian’s country home.’ His voice was slow and quiet, and speaking of something other than sickness calmed her. If she was truly dying, would he be so unhurried?

‘Is it safe?’

‘Yes.’ A wealth of trust lay in the word. Delsarte and the implications of espionage and deceit crouched further away in another time and place, a conversation that could keep until she felt stronger. In London her family would be frantic—she knew they would be—but right now she needed to think of herself.

She smiled. No longer all alone. Closing her eyes against hope, she slept.

‘Delsarte should be shot for this.’

‘He will be.’

‘And Aurelia St Harlow? What will happen to her?’

Stephen stood against the balustrade, looking over a garden to one side of the bedroom. ‘The injury is only a small part of Aurelia’s worries, Luc, for if Shavvon has got wind of her involvement with the French
intelligence then I cannot think of a single way to save her.’

No, that was not quite true. Hawkhurst shook his head at the thought, for there was one. If he married her here and now, his name might be enough protection.

Luc seemed to be veering down the same track. ‘Shavvon owes you, Stephen, and if you brought in Delsarte and any of his group still left, surely that could be an end to it.’

‘Perhaps.’ The Atherton title was an old and venerable one and peers of the realm and their families were seldom dragged before the courts. Besides, under law, presumptive legal unity treated husband and wife as one and he could fight far better than Aurelia would ever be able to.

‘Lilly thinks she has had enough hurt in her life and now needs safeguarding.’

Anger solidified. If Woodruff Abbey was beautiful, then Atherton was doubly so and the luxury and ease of the place might soften all the hard edges of the obstacles between them. He could help her, if she would let him, and in return…

She was nothing like Elizabeth Berkeley and all the other young ladies who had set their caps at his wealth or titles. She did not
want baubles and dresses, the newest of carriages or the largest of diamonds. He could not imagine her lolling around the
ton
, collecting gossip or enjoying scandal. Lord, she had been the centre of some of the most damning slander of all and seen first-hand the hurt it caused and the suffering.

She had harboured the father of a girl badly used by Charles and taken the criticism upon her own head for years and years. No, Aurelia was nothing like any other he had ever encountered and for that fact he was grateful. She was her very own person, solid and worthy. Someone like that at his side would be…formidable. He smiled at the thought.

The doctor had indicated she should be well enough to travel by the end of the week and before that he had a job to do. With Delsarte locked up and the sorry saga of the Park Street warehouse finished, he would be in a stronger position to help her entirely.

But first he would employ guards to watch the Abbey while he was away, just in case Delsarte had obtained some knowledge of their movements.

Lillian Clairmont was one of the most beautiful women Aurelia had ever seen, with
her pale eyes, unmarked skin and her remarkable sense of fashion. Today she wore a gown that was a warm peach, a diversion from the paler tones she had worn across the past days and the hue sat against her skin well. Aurelia wondered how the gold silk from the fine looms of Macclesfield might look upon her and decided she would send her a bolt as a thank-you gift as soon as she had returned to London. Hawkhurst had grabbed the documents pertaining to the business before leaving the inn and they were tucked safely away and little worse for wear. She would make certain the deeds were placed in her safe once they were back at Braeburn House.

They? She frowned.

Hawkhurst was no longer here. She knew this because Lillian had said so yesterday in a passing conversation, and it had been four days since he had sat with her in the dark hours before dawn and held her hand. She refrained from asking if he would return, understanding in the ruckus with Delsarte and the letters passed to Touillon that he might never wish to see her again.

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 could see in her eyes exactly what he knew would be reflected in his own.

‘The people you work for are now looking for me?’ She had reasoned it out anyway, the fright on her face escalated to panic.

‘There is another way.’

‘What way?’

‘I can marry you.’ He wished he had put more emotion into the words before he said them. ‘My family name might see you safe.’

‘No.’

‘There is no choice, Aurelia, for treason holds a harsh punishment.’

She shook her head hard. ‘Marriage to a man with no mind to want you is a similar penance, Lord Hawkhurst.’

‘You speak of Charles?’

Caught in stillness the cream of her gown was bathed in a shimmering gold.

Lord Stephen Hawkhurst would marry her because of duty and danger. He would link his name to hers in protection and shelter only, nothing at all mentioned of love.

Treason? They could try her for that? They already had the word of Kerslake, his liberation depending upon the scope of his confession. Henry wouldn’t be kind. She knew it. He would throw her into a light that would not be flattering because in doing so he heightened his own chances of deliverance.

She hated the way her heart was beating, all the dreams she had fostered disappearing in the comprehension of a reality that
held no mind for hope or love. It was worse because of it, this altered understanding—a proclamation given without any of the intended promise.

‘I do not think you understand the gravity of your predicament or the speed with which the British Service might act upon it.’

‘But you will tell me?’