Mistress at Midnight(11)

Then it simply left, gliding through the gates with all the grace of a  completed outing, the horses perfectly in time and undoubtedly barely  stretched.

Would Aurelia St Harlow never stop surprising him and why would she be bent on such a show?

Rodney Northrup chose that moment to saunter over towards him. The lad  looked happier than he had looked for a long while and Hawk guessed his  joyous admiration of Miss Leonora Beauchamp to have some hand in such  newly found cheerfulness.

'Lord Hawkhurst. I have not seen you here before at this hour of the  day. You have just missed Mrs St Harlow and her father. They left not  more than a brace of minutes ago.'

Stephen decided to play along. 'I had heard they frequented the park on a  Monday. I expect you were here to catch sight of the sister … Leonora, is  it not?'

'Oh, Miss Leonora never accompanies them. It is always just Mrs St Harlow and her father.'

'I see,' Stephen returned. And he did.

With only the two of them in the carriage no one would stop to talk.  Curious acquaintances would be a danger to any hidden secret and as  Aurelia so religiously rebuffed anyone who might offer more than a  glance, she and her father stayed safe from closer attention. Was  Braeburn House entailed? No one had seen Richard Beauchamp in any  company save that of his daughter in years. Could Aurelia St Harlow have  kept any intimation of her father being ill a secret to protect the  inheritance of her three unmarried sisters? Such a shield was exactly  the sort of thing he knew she might have held on to, safeguarding any  change detrimental to her siblings' chance of a good marriage. Braeburn  House was a prosperous address and the affluent and moneyed of the ton  would easily be impressed.                       
       
           



       

He wished then that he might have stepped forwards and seen what it was  she would have done. Part of him imagined the driver to be instructed by  her to merely run down anyone who had the effrontery to approach them.  Hawkhurst swallowed back chagrin and listened to Rodney.

'Cassie said that You should be receiving an invitation to her party and  that you were to make sure you come. You have missed many of her  soirées, she said, and she wants you to be at this one.'

Normally he had no interest in such gatherings and avoided them like the  plague, but she had mentioned the same celebration to Mrs St Harlow at  his ball and by her account the invitation had been accepted.

He shrugged and looked away, watching as other carriages pulled up and  down the concourse and wishing he might see the only one that had caught  his attention return.

Aurelia had seen Hawkhurst standing against a gate on the path on the  far side of the park. She knew it was he by his stance and the breadth  of his shoulders and by an awareness that disturbed every part of her no  matter what distance lay between them.

Nerves had made her more animated than she usually was as his eyes had  followed the coach, once, twice, three times around the track. He had  spoken to no one as he had observed them, but his indolence belied a  quieter interest. She made certain that she had turned her head away  from him each time they had come closer, not wanting to see his eyes  shadowed with questions.

Rodney Northrup had approached him right at the end of her time there,  his happy uncomplicated demeanour such a direct contrast to Stephen  Hawkhurst's complexity.

Papa had spoken only occasionally, a man who would loathe such a  spectacle of deception were he to know of it. She was only pleased he  did not close his eyes and sleep as he did now for much of the time at  home-his way, she supposed, of dealing with a world he no longer had any  comprehension of. Or howl at something that frightened him.

The muscles in her cheeks ached from fixing a smile with such an  unrelenting pressure and she bit down upon worry. Every week she hoped  that they would not be waylaid by some well-meaning soul, some  acquaintance with enough curiosity to uncover all that she sought to  hide.

The walk home from the stables in Davies Mews was becoming a more  harried pathway each time they traversed it. She could not be sure that  her father could manage any of it for much longer, his gait more  laboured and slower every Monday afternoon.

Tears pricked the back of her eyes and she willed them away, useless  emotional baggage that she had dispensed with years ago. She was the  only one who might see this family through to a secure future and with  the growing profits she was garnering from the silks it would only be a  matter of months before safety would be gained.

Hawkhurst carried a cane today and he had leant upon it with more than a  gentle force. Had he been wounded recently or was this an older injury?  A great part of her wished that she might have been able to stop and  speak with him and pretend that just for a moment she was a high-born  lady of consequence who would have made him a perfect wife.

Such an illusion was shattered completely when they gained the stables  and the master of the books strode forwards to tell them that as the  cost of an afternoon rental had just been increased he could no longer  keep a carriage free if the payment was not given monthly.

So many pounds, Aurelia thought, adding the sum in her head. She still  had the diamond pendant, though, and the pawnbrokers had offered her a  sum that would see the charade through to at least October. By then she  was certain the new lucrative contracts she had garnered would be  trickling through.

'This way, Papa,' she encouraged her father as he turned in the wrong direction.

Uncoupling her pendant, she held it tightly in her hand, liking the feel  of the warm and familiar shape of the piece against her skin. Her  grandmother had given the necklace to her on her deathbed-it was a  treasured family heirloom.

There was a pawnshop in the city that favoured the older style of jewellery. She would visit it tomorrow.





Chapter Six


Alexander Shavvon was unhappy as he paced up and down the small room.

'France needs to be contained and yet all information suggests  otherwise, for already Louis Napoleon has expanded into IndoChina. If  Lord Palmerston is not careful the Entente Cordiale fashioned under  Guizot will return to bite the hand of the one that feeds it.'

Hawkhurst was not as certain as Shavvon of the direction of Francophile  expansionism and fault. 'If I were determining policy, I would be  keeping an eye on Prussia and the Germanic states, sir. All of my  reading suggests the prospect of a United Germany, which would be a lot  harder to contain than a beaten France.'                       
       
           



       

'Your uncle, of course, might not agree with you, Lord Hawkhurst. He  knew first-hand the might of Napoleon and if we had not defeated the  dictator at Waterloo, England would be a very different place now.'

'Perhaps it is becoming that different place already.'

'Talk to Alfred and see just what it is France is capable of and you  might change your mind. You are too young to remember the fear  engendered by our nearest neighbour in the Peninsular Campaigns, but it  was a hit-and-miss affair as to which way it went and the British would  never again wish for the like.'

Such stilted discourse made Stephen wary and he knew that his days in  the clutches of the British Service were numbered. He had ceased to be a  citizen of the brokered threat Lord Palmerston seemed to endlessly  foster and all he wanted was the chance to head to one of his remote  family estates and live life.

Well and quietly, walking into a future with nothing tied back into the past. Nothing sordid and chancy and dissolute!

He breathed out hard as the face of Aurelia St Harlow came to mind. She  wandered into his dreams at night, too, now, when his mind was least  resistant and the call of her body against his at its most apparent, the  generous heaviness of her bosom well remembered. Swearing under his  breath, he concentrated again on what was being said by Shavvon.

'Frederick Delsarte and his mob have been seen hanging around a  warehouse in Park Street in the Limestone Hole area and they have known  associations in Paris. It seems they may be using the legalised trade of  cloth to send and receive information.' He handed Stephen a sheet of  paper with the details on it. 'Those who are helping him do so probably  have some French connection and imagine themselves hard done by by the  English Government. If we can catch them in the act, we can string them  up, quietly, of course, and with as little public awareness as  possible.'

Hawkhurst nodded. It was always the same, this game of espionage played  out behind the scenes of a virtuous and wholesome society, the dark  secrets of corruption snapped off before they had the chance to taint  it.

His world.

Sometimes he wondered if he would ever truly be able to struggle back up  into the one people like Elizabeth Berkeley inhabited, untouched by any  iniquity.