'You look a little tired, Aurelia.' Cassandra laid a hand on her arm, shaking her back to the present. 'Are you sleeping well of late? I think it must be catching, for Hawk has been exhausted, as well. Yesterday Nathaniel found him asleep after the noon hour when he went to call.' Aurelia did not dare to look over at Stephen Hawkhurst to see his reaction to such a statement, but the web of their lies began to tangle. She knew she would need to be careful and yet she only wished it was already midnight.
His chamber was festooned with candles and freshly cut roses when he led her into it three hours later. A well-thought-out tryst: two glasses and a bottle of wine sat on the table before the sofa. Rhenish, she noticed, and expensive. Her father had once enjoyed it.
'You look beautiful tonight, Aurelia.'
'So do you.'
At that he smiled and, pouring them each a glass, raised his own. 'To us, then. To this. To wherever it takes us.'
His eyes showed a clear-cut want. Not knowing quite know how to reply, she stayed silent.
'Cassandra suspects we are sleeping together.'
'She told you of this.' Her horror vied with sheer embarrassment and that chased on the heels of a worry about Leonora. 'She will never allow Rodney to marry my sister now. I have ruined her chances.'
He laughed at that, then swallowed what was left in his glass. 'I think Cassie's world view may be more expansive than you give her credit for. And she is not a gossipmonger.'
'But someone else will be. One day.'
His hand took hers, all humour gone. 'If that happens, I will protect you.'
But not love you? She almost said it, almost blurted it out, this want for more, because she knew in that one particular moment with the smell of candle wax and petals strangely mixed that she loved Stephen Hawkhurst more than life itself. She would risk her family and the reputation of her sisters for him, throwing all caution to the wind and taking what her body craved.
With trepidation Aurelia walked to the window. she knew Hawkhurst made her foolish and imprudent, but when he moved up behind her she simply turned into his arms and accepted warm lips that came down across her own.
The world reformed into only feeling, his hand across her skirts pulling them up, skin touching skin, his thick maleness scalding her soft flesh, asking for entrance.
'I want you.'
Her voice commanding exactly that which her head had tried to refuse, but the urge was too strong and she gave in to reason as he pushed within her, her nails running down his back in runnels of both shame and passion. But elation had begun to play its high notes deep within, too, the answering need, the thin clenching knowledge that made her back arch as he rode her against the wall in the light of the candles and the moon and the silence.
Afterwards her head dropped on to his shoulders, both their heartbeats racing in unison. And then she began to cry, because she knew she could do nothing to stop this enchantment between them and that it could only end in the ruining of her family.
He felt Aurelia's tears soaking into the fabric of his shirt and listened to the racking sobs.
He had not hurt her physically, he knew that, her body wet and ready for acceptance, her hands and teeth keeping him to his task of loving, and the waves of climax flowing strong between them. When he pulled back he even felt resistance as she tried to halt the uncoupling.
Nothing made sense any more and he struggled for equilibrium.
Aurelia knocked him sideways, that was the trouble. She made him question all that he had believed in and understood to be true.
Every single person he had ever loved had been lost, save for Alfred, and the truth had scalded him with grief. He remembered the master at school giving him the news of his parents' death, unfeelingly, as though death was only a small blink in the day-to-day running of a busy schedule. He remembered his brother, too, gone as he had tried to drag him away from the mad Frenchman on the hills above Lyon.
If you do not love, you can never be hurt.
It had been a motto that he recited every time he left another woman and he had not allowed himself the chance to get close.
Until Aurelia had breached the wall, tearing down his isolation like a wave against a sandcastle, and so easily that any opportunity to regroup was gone.
'I do not want this … this … but I cannot stop it.' Her hands gestured to her body, shaking with the angst of all she relayed to him. Like him, caught in a maelstrom.
'Ahh, sweetheart,' he replied, the endearment coming without notice. 'Believe me when I say this is a gift seldom enjoyed by others.'
'You have felt it before?'
'Never.'
Her answering smile was beautiful. 'I think I should go home now. Papa wakes early sometimes.'
'I will take you.'
Leonora was waiting in her room as she carefully opened the door and let herself in.
'Where have you been?'
Aurelia knew the moment her sister realised she had been crying. 'What has happened, Lia? Has Hawkhurst hurt you?'
'You saw the carriage?'
'From The window. He is dangerous, Lia. Dangerous and distant and reckless. Rodney says he is a spy.' The look in her sister's eyes nearly broke her heart. 'You cannot do this. You must not. After Charles … '
'He is nothing like his cousin.'
'Hawkhurst has killed people. Lots of them. It is why he carries that darkness within. Oh, my God. You will be ruined again and this time by a master.'
Leonora's glance took in her tousled hair and the creases in the gown.
'You have slept with him?'
Her sister's chest rose in consternation, her mouth falling wide with the shock of it all, but Aurelia found she could not lie.
'More than once.'
'And you will do so again?'
'Yes.'
At the bareness of her reply Leonora sat down. 'Tell me why?'
A different tack and unexpected. No longer a child, but a young woman who needed a reason. 'For years I have been a ruined widow, isolated and alone.' She held up her hand as her sister began to speak. 'Alone in the worrying about our family, trying to piece it together, trying to make it survive and I have never allowed myself to think of anything other than that. Until now.'
'Until Stephen Hawkhurst?'
As she nodded, the next query came. 'Does he love you?'
'It is not love we have spoken of, Leonora, but need. He is thirty-one and I am twenty-six. We are not in the first flush of youth and neither of us is unrealistic.'
'Love is not so proscribed, Lia. I know this now. If he will not make a commitment after all that is between you-'
Aurelia stopped her. 'Then I still would have known how it can be between a man and a woman. When I am old I will have that magic inside.'
'And if there is a child?'
'There will not be.'
'My God, Lia, I have always believed that you are the strongest woman in the world and now I know it. But even you could be wrong. Please, please be careful.'
When she nodded Leonora hugged her and left, the lamp by her bed flickering in the draught of the door as it closed.
Hawkhurst frightened people. At first he had frightened her, but she had seen beneath the mask he donned in public. A man who thought of flowers and candles to woo her was not as distant as he might profess and the endearments he had whispered as he held her sobbing in the dark after making love were not the actions of an unfeeling and uncaring man.
Neither was the way he worshipped her body.
And if there is a child? Leonora's words came back.
If there was a child she should love it in the same way she loved its father. With all of her body and with all of her heart.
A new beginning.
One hand fell to her stomach, cupping the hope.
Chapter Thirteen
Aurelia took inordinate care with the long lists of numbers before her, balancing this column against that one and rechecking across the rows several times before placing her pen down.
Her bottom lines were being realised, the risks she had taken with fabric lengths and designs, weaves and wefts and colour finally paying off. She could barely believe the profit the company would garner in the next weeks, substantial and open-ended sums of money right down to Christmas. With a flourish she underlined her projected earnings and leaned back.
All the years of work had been worth it. All the doubts and uncertainties and constant gnawing worries had come down to a business that was prosperous and well managed. She allowed herself a quiet glow of pride before laying her pen on the paper and looking out of the window.
The river's presence had encroached on all the buildings around Park Street. Shipbuilders, barge-builders, sailmakers, mast-makers and rope-makers as well as sundry other general shipping-related enterprises had made this area their home.
Sometimes if the wind was right she could smell the Thames, but nearly always she could hear the sounds of it: the horns of passing traders, the shouts of the sailors calling, the flap of canvas and the creak of rope. Her world now, comfortable, known and in its own way exhilarating.
Henry Kerslake returned an hour later and he looked preoccupied and flustered, but the most surprising thing of all was that Frederick Delsarte came in after him.