Marriage Made in Hope(10)

She rubbed at the bare skin on the third finger of her left hand and prayed to God for an answer.

* * *

Francis spent the next few days going through every file his uncle had kept on the Sherborne family and there were many. He’d had them brought down from the attic, the dusty tomes holding much in the way of background on both Clive Sherborne and his unfaithful wife. There was little information on the child, however, a fact that Francis found surprising.

Anna Sherborne herself was languishing against the stairwell as he walked up to instruct his men which new boxes he wanted brought down. Her hair had been cut, he noticed, bluntly and with little expertise. It hung in ill-shorn lengths about her face.

‘Did Mrs Wilson cut your hair?’

‘No.’ The word was almost spat out. ‘Why would she?’

‘You did it yourself, then?’ His cousin sported tresses a good twelve inches shorter than she had done yesterday and her expression was guarded.

An unprepossessing child, angry and diffident. He sat himself down on the step at her level and looked at her directly, the thought suddenly occurring to him that he might find out a lot more of Clive Sherborne’s life from questioning her than he ever could from the yellowing paper in boxes.

‘Was Clive a good father to you, Anna?’

Uncertainly the girl nodded and without realising it Francis let out his breath.

‘Better than my mother at least. He was there often. At home, I mean, and he took me with him most places.’

‘Did you have other brothers or sisters?’

‘No.’

‘Aunts. Uncles. Grandparents.’

‘No.’

‘Did Clive drink?’

She stiffened and stepped back. ‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Because he died in a warehouse full of brandy.’

One ripe expletive and she was gone, the thin nothingness of her disappearing around the corner of the dim corridor. But Francis had seen something of tragedy in her eyes before she could hide it, a memory he thought, a recollection so terrible it had lightened the already pale colour of her cheeks.

He took me with him most places. God, could the man have taken her there to the warehouse and to his appointment with death? Had she seen his killer? Had she seen the only man she knew as a father die? He shook his head and swore again roundly. At his uncle and at her mother. At the unfairness of the hovel Anna had been brought up in, at the loneliness and the squalor. She was angry, belligerent and difficult because in all her life it seemed no one except the hapless Clive Sherborne had taken the time to get to know her, to look after her. And now she was abandoned again into a place where she felt no belonging, no sense of safety, no security.

She’d cut her hair as a statement. No one can love me. I am uncherished and unwanted. His hands fisted in his lap as he swallowed away fury.

Well, he would see about that. Indeed, he would.





Chapter Five

This outing to Kew had been a mistake, Sephora thought a few days later as she walked with Richard, his second cousin Terence and his wife through the greened pathways of the gardens.

‘Are you quite recovered from your dreadful accident? It was the very talk of the town.’ Sally Cummings asked this in a quiet tone, her eyes full of curiosity.

‘I am, thank you.’ She didn’t particularly want to discuss further what had happened to her at the river as she did not fully understand it yet herself and so was not at all pleased when Richard joined in the conversation.

‘Sephora was left with only a small wound on her leg after all the fuss and that is quite cleared up now.’ He tightened his grip on her arm. ‘We were lucky it was not worse.’

She smiled tightly at this assessment of her health. Richard truly believed in the minimal effects the near drowning had left her with, but her hands still trembled when she held them unsupported and she had not slept properly for a full night since the fall.

Shaking away her irritation, she tried to look nonplussed. Richard had been most attentive on the drive here today, tucking a blanket around her legs and telling her how lovely she looked in her light blue gown. She knew this destination was not one he would have chosen on his own account and for that, too, she was grateful. It was Terence Cummings who had suggested the journey and she had assented readily because plants calmed her, the large expansive swathe of endless greens settling the air around her in a way the city never did.

Sally Cummings was usually quite a silent woman, but today she was chattier. ‘You look happy here, Sephora. I heard Terence say the marquis was hoping that after your wedding in November you might venture to Scotland for a short while. The Highlands are renowned for their wonderful fauna and flora.’

‘Scotland?’ Sephora had not heard this mentioned before and turned to her husband-to-be. ‘You thought to go there?’

Richard shrugged. ‘Well, we cannot travel to Paris with all the problems in France at the moment and Italy is just too far away. I doubt I could spare so much time either, for there are things here I need to keep my fingers on, so to speak.’

‘Of course.’ The words were ripped from her disappointment. Just another plan that differed from what they had once discussed.

The older woman took her arm and tucked it into hers. ‘Terence changes his mind all the time, yet if I do so even once he is most unhappy with me. It is the way of all men, I suppose, their need to be in charge of a relationship and the leader in the home. My father and uncle were both the same. At least you have known Winslow forever and that must be most comforting. A shared history, so to speak.’

Sephora was not sure comforting was the correct word to use at all as the number of years they had known each other wound around inside.

Richard was two years and three days older than she was. For much of that time they had celebrated their birthdays together, their parents making a point of adding two candles on the cake after she had blown hers out, so that he could have his own special occasion. A family joke with all the small traditions observed to consolidate a union   and protect the considerable property of two important families whose land marched along shared borders.

She saw the tiny scar under Richard’s chin where he had fallen from a tree when he was ten and the larger one on his small finger when glass had almost cut through the tendon at sixteen as he’d run from her in a game of hide-and-seek.

Memories. Once she had cherished them. How had that changed? Now when he was with her Richard often seemed like a man who had forgotten others had opinions that were also valuable and worthy. Sometimes, she thought, he barely even bothered any more with the pretence of listening to what she had to say.

Sally’s voice came again through her musings. ‘You are not wearing that beautiful ring Winslow gave you, I had noticed. Is it being cleaned?’

‘She lost it in the river.’ Richard answered, this time surprising Sephora, for she did not think he had noticed at all. ‘That actually was the worst loss of the whole fiasco at the Thames. It was an expensive ring and now the fish are swimming with it.’

He laughed at his joke and so did the others, yet all Sephora could think of were his words.

‘That actually was the worst loss of the whole fiasco...’

If they had been alone she might have said something, might have tried to make him understand how hurtful a comment like that was to her. But with Terence and Sally standing next to them there was no opportunity to question him and so she left it altogether, gathering her breath and looking around at the beauty of the trees in the gardens.

Shouting from behind had them all turning and a moment later a group of men came into view.

‘Isn’t that the Earl of Douglas?’ Terence Cummings queried. ‘What the hell is he up to?’

As he said this a punch was thrown. It was so far away Sephora could not see whether it was Francis St Cartmail who threw the first punch or one of the others, but then without warning the whole situation escalated into a full-blown fight, one man being laid into by the others.

‘Should you help him, do you think?’ Sally Cummings asked this of both men, but Richard shook his head.

‘Douglas no doubt has had a lot of practice in such things. Let’s see how he does.’

Terence Cummings nodded his agreement.

Sephora could now see Francis St Cartmail more plainly and although he was one against three it didn’t take long for the others to begin to fall back.

Cummings was giving some sort of a running commentary, but she did not really listen. All she could comprehend was the hard knock of fists against faces, the sound of bone against bone and the shattering of flesh. It was not a fight as she had imagined them to be, not a boxing match or a ruled combat. No, this was more ferocious and untamed, the civilised world of the ton slipping back into a savagery of primitive masculinity. She could never in a million years have imagined Richard letting his emotions rule him in the way these men were.

Finally after a few moments those in the larger group broke away and turned to disappear into the trees from where they had come, leaving Francis St Cartmail alone to pick up his hat and sling his jacket across his shoulders. When he turned suddenly she saw the slick darkness of blood around his lips. With his long hair loose and the white linen of his shirt straining against the sinew and muscle beneath he looked...unmatched. His stance caught at her, his stillness magnified by a gathering wind and the moving leaves behind him, a man caught in time and danger, the white clouds scudding across a cerulean sky.