Mistress at Midnight(7)

'Do you not think so, my lord?'

The pale beauty of Elizabeth's puzzled gaze fell upon him.

'I do.' He had no idea at all as to what he had just agreed but his  attention was caught by a group of men Aurelia was about to walk past on  one side of the room.

Lord Frederick Delsarte caught her arm, tightly, and held it. Stephen  could see the others folding in about her, blocking off any means of  escape. The smile she wore was imbued with solid anger, though even from  this distance he could detect a certain panic.

'Would you excuse me for a moment, Miss Berkeley?'

He did not wait for any reply, but strode across to the colonnade  shielding the group from the notice of others and walked straight into  the contretemps.

'There you are, Mrs St Harlow,' he said, placing Aurelia's hand across  the material of his sleeve as he pulled her into his side. 'Lady Lindsay  is most anxious to find you. Something about meeting an old school  friend, I think she said.'

Unfortunately Delsarte had had too much to drink and was in no mood to  observe the social niceties. 'We have not finished here,' he slurred  with difficulty, 'and your cousin's widow and I have much to talk  about.'

'I sincerely doubt that, Delsarte.' Hawk hurst's free hand slipped to  the top of the younger man's arm and pressed, the yowl of pain  heartening.

'It's Hawkhurst, for God's sake, Freddy,' a taller man next to Delsarte  whispered in the tone Stephen had become accustomed to people using  around him.

'I would greatly prefer it if you were not to venture anywhere near Mrs St Harlow again, do you understand?'

Caution finally shone through bloodshot eyes. 'I didn't realise you knew her so well, Lord Hawkhurst.'

'Ahhh, but now you do.' Hawk let go his hold and stepped back,  shepherding Aurelia before him as they moved out from behind the  pillars.

Fury raced through him as he saw the paleness of her skin welting  already into bruises where the bombazine had ridden above her wrist in  the struggle. He also saw she swallowed often as though trying to keep  back the tears, but he could not be kind. 'Why the hell would you go off  alone and unprotected when you know the communal feeling in the room is  so against you? Surely you understand the dangers inherent in social  animosity?'

She took a breath. 'Hatred is generally less demonstrative,' she returned, and had the temerity to smile.

Hawkhurst looked as if he wanted to kill her, here in the ballroom  twenty yards from the woman it was said he would marry, and the ache in  her arm from where Freddy Delsarte had grabbed her was beginning to  throb.

If Hawk had not intervened, she wondered what might have happened. Could  they have dragged her from the room kicking and screaming and not a  soul willing to lift a hand in aid?

Save for him.

She should not have come. It was too dangerous and too uncertain and  Charles's more carnal predilections were shown within the leer of the  younger man's eyes. She knew Hawk had seen this, too, for his grip upon  her had tightened imperceptibly.

'You incite great emotion in those about you, Mrs St Harlow, even in the dress of a dowager.'

'Men see what they wish to see, my lord. It is a fault that is universal.'

'I cannot remember you much in the company of my cousin. It seemed you were never in London at all.'

Breathe, Aurelia instructed herself when she realised she had simply  stopped doing so, the beat of her heart racing through the thickness of  black wool.

'There was always much to do at Medlands. Gardening was one of my  particular favourites and Charles enjoyed the colours.' She tried to  imbue the sort of gladness that she imagined a lady of leisure might  feel for such a hobby, her mind scrambling around for the names of  common plants just in case he took the conversation further.                       
       
           



       

'Then you must have been saddened to see the house sold on his death?'

Worry turned. As Charles's only cousin he did not know? She could  scarcely believe that he would not, although the fact that Lord  Hawkhurst was rumoured to have barely been in England for many years  made it seem more than possible. Perhaps no one save her lawyers knew of  the financial collapse that her husband had left her in, a hundred  chits from the merchants of Medlands village presented and little money  to honour them. She had been so careful to pay them back, after all.

Medlands sheltered another family now and Aurelia had not been sorry to  pack up the few belongings that were her own and leave the place for  ever.

'I have many memories left to remind me, Lord Hawkhurst.' Shame. Anger. Disappointment. Murder.

He watched her carefully, the shadows in his eyes pulled back into  puzzlement. With him at her side she felt completely safe, the stares of  those around her muted in his company. She wished he would ask her to  dance again as the music of a waltz was struck but, of course, he did  not as they came into the little group she had left a good fifty minutes  earlier. The young and beautiful Elizabeth Berkeley was again quick to  take his arm. Aurelia thought she would have liked to have done the  same, simply laid her fingers across such security and held on.

She remembered Freddy Delsarte at the parties at Medlands come  Christmas, where the girls from London were brought up to satisfy the  wants of married men who had long become bored of their wives.

As Charles had with her.

Closing her eyes, a dizziness that had become more frequent of late made her world spin.

'Are you quite well, Mrs St Harlow? You suddenly seem very pale.' Cassandra Lindsay's tone was worried.

'Just tiredness, I think,' Aurelia returned, looking at Leonora and  Cassandra's brother on the dance floor enjoying each other's company.

'I could bring your sister back, if you would like, and Stephen could  organise a carriage to take you home immediately. We will not be late  ourselves and I promise you I would chaperon her as if she were my own  daughter.'

The offer was tempting with Charles's friends watching her from one corner and the rest of the ton scowling from the others.

'If it would not be too much trouble … ?'

Cassandra Lindsay's smile was bright as she bid Aurelia goodnight. Then  she drew Elizabeth Berkeley away from her grip on Lord Hawkhurst's  person with talk of the colour and cut of the gowns that were her very  favourite in the room tonight.

Aurelia gained the distinct impression that in doing so the woman was helping her.





Chapter Four


'I most certainly did not expect you to accompany me home, Lord Hawkhurst.'

He smiled, his teeth white in the dark of the carriage and his thighs  less than an inch from her own. 'But I wanted to, Mrs St Harlow, because  it will give us the chance to talk about how it is you know Lord  Frederick Delsarte and his lackeys.'

'They were acquaintances of my husband.'

'But not of yours?' No humour lingered now, his voice cold, cut glass.

She shook her head. 'My disapproval of their antics was more than obvious, I should imagine.'

'Did Charles ever hurt you?'

The very intimacy of the question made her turn away. 'No. He was a  wonderful husband.' The words were exactly those she had used in the  courts when the law had tried to lay the blame at her feet for his  unexplained death.

'Why is it that I think you lie?'

she turned back. 'I have no idea, my lord.'

The air all around them contained something that she had never felt  before. The pure and utter longing for a man, this man, their unfinished  kiss from a week before shimmering on the edge of a lust so foreign it  made her feel light headed.

'Charles enjoyed a wide interpretation of the word "fairness" and when  he died at Medlands there were probably a number of people both in  London and further afield who breathed a sigh of relief to hear of his  passing. As his wife you must have known this.'

Such criticism hung in the darkness, a living and breathing thing,  defining all that Charles had been. Given that what he said held a great  dollop of truth Aurelia found it hard to argue. 'There were also a  number who may have mourned him.' She stated this with as much certainty  as she could feign. Those who came up for the party weekends at a  country mansion who held strict morals in little worth probably rued his  passing, but she doubted there were many others. The Medlands estate  had buried him with a smile upon its collective face, their lord and  master a man who held little regard for the feelings and needs of others  more lowly born than he was.                       
       
           



       

When Lord Hawkhurst caught her hand and held it tight, she could feel  tremors within the strength-a surprising thing, that, given his easy  confidence. The night of London was black and endless, a quarter-moon  lost behind banks of cloud, leaving only them in the dark and empty  space of the world.

The warmth of his skin comforted her though, a solid contact amidst all  that was strange and she felt her fingers curl around his. He did  nothing to resist.