Family. How it wound around isolation with determination and resilience, the irritations of prying a small price to pay for all that was offered.
As the horses prepared to stop he readied himself to alight. There were many things he could still do and the familiarity of the town house made it possible for him to enter it without assistance.
Morton, the family butler, was the first to greet him, taking his hat and cloak at the door.
‘Welcome back, my lord. We heard that the weather in the south has been kind the past month.’
‘Indeed it has, Morton. Perhaps I might persuade you to have a sojourn at Beaconsmeade…’
The servant laughed. This discussion was one they had had for years, the head butler not a man with any love for country air.
The sound of voices from the downstairs salon stopped him in his tracks, and as he made his way from the lobby he tilted his head. Not just any voice! He felt the tension in him fist, hard-stroked against disbelief.
Mrs Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke was here! Here. Ten yards away, her honeyed husky voice with the slight soft lisp, speaking with his sister-in-law. His fingers tightened across his cane and he wished he had not left his hat with Morton. Concentrate, he admonished himself, as he counted the steps into the room.
Beatrice lifted the cup of tea to her lips and sipped, refusing the offer of sweet cakes from the maid as she did so.
Emerald Wellingham opposite her was charming, but there was an undercurrent of something she could not quite understand. A slight anxiety, if she had to name it, and a decided watchfulness.
‘Your soirees are gaining the favour of all of society here in London. It seems that we have been bereft of fine debate in our town for far too long.’
‘Debate or controversy, your Grace? There are some who might say such opinions serve to alienate reason.’
‘But I am not one of them, Mrs Bassingstoke. And please do call me Emerald.’
Beatrice nodded. ‘You have a beautiful name. My first name merely makes people grimace. Beatrice-Maude. The names of my two grandmothers lumped together, I am afraid, and hardly charming like your own.’
‘Can they be shortened?’
This was the second Wellingham to ask her such a thing! She felt the sheer weight of it as an ache.
As in Bea-yond. As in Bea-utiful or Bea-witching! She had never said her name since without remembering…
‘Bea?’
The voice from behind made her start. His voice. Here? The tea that she had been holding spilt down the front of her dark burgundy gown as she turned, feeling the Duchess’s gaze on her own.
Taris Wellingham came forward with the movement of a man who had had too much to drink, catching the edge of the partly opened door with his shoulder and jerking back and around to lose his footing and fall heavily against the solid mahogany side cabinet. As he flailed to find a true direction his head tilted as if listening and his eyes looked strangely disorientated.
Swearing, he began to search the floor with his hands and Bea was instantly taken back to the days before her husband’s turn. The days when Frankwell had imbibed too much whisky and had come home in exactly the same fashion.
Hollowness consumed her, and the impact of everything made her shake. The way he held himself against the line of the door to steady his balance, all expression on his face devoid of warmth even as he hoisted himself up, the beginning of a bruise that would show full dark upon his cheek on the morrow matching the tendrils of his hair loosened from the queue at his nape.
Years of living with a difficult man tumbled down on Beatrice-Maude in that one small isolated moment. Long years of anguish and guilt, her unpredictable sham of a marriage wrung into one dreadful feeling.
Panic!
To get away. To run from one who had caught at fancy and hope and imagination, yet was blighted with the same curse her husband had been dammed with.
She needed to escape, to be back again in the world of freedom and ideas that had just opened up to her, her autonomy and lack of restraint so far from the endless dread of hurt inflicted by a brandy-loosened temper.
‘I must go.’ Setting down her cup with a rattle, she hated the sound of alarm so easily heard in her voice.
‘Perhaps you do not remember my brother-in-law…’
‘Of course I do.’
Pushing past them both, Beatrice-Maude did not stop even to retrieve her cloak from the astonished servant at the front door. Outside she took a breath of cold air and simply ran, for the corner, for her home, for the safety of her rooms away from anyone, the hat in her hands unfastened and the gloves in her pocket unworn.
‘Well,’ Taris said as the silence inside the town house lengthened, ‘I presume that means she does not favour the nickname Bea.’
Emerald laughed, though there were tears in her voice when she replied, ‘I thought she was a sensible woman. I thought that she had impeccable manners and for the life of me I cannot understand what just happened.’
‘At a guess I would say she saw I lacked sight.’
Silence confirmed his suspicions. Emerald might be able to see what he could not, but he could hear what others never did.
Fear. Abhorrence. And the need for flight.
He made himself smile, made his face carefully bland, the anger that was building hidden behind indifference even as his left cheek throbbed.
‘Mrs Bassingstoke did not know before?’
‘It was night,’ he returned.
‘And you are good in the darkness!’
‘Precisely.’
‘So good that she could spend the whole time with you and never guess?’
‘It seems that is true.’
‘I think I hate her for this.’ Her voice was small, the anger in it formidable. ‘And everything that happened today is my fault. Ashe told me to leave it alone.’
‘But you didn’t?’
‘And now you despise me.’
‘Hardly.’ His left hand went out to feel along the lintel of the door, the shadows in the room long with darkness. For the first time ever he felt…nearly blind, the infinite gloom pressing down almost as a living thing. Intense and pressured, the foreverness of it just around the corner.
Where was Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke now? How had she got home? Was home far? Would she be safe? The faint smell of flowers lingered in the air beside him and he breathed in hard, trying to keep her close and angry that he should even think to do so.
Beatrice sat on the side of her bed and cried. She did not try to be quiet, she did not wipe her tears away with a dainty handkerchief. She did not care which servant might eavesdrop or which friend calling in the afternoon might overhear her howls of anguish.
She just cried. For everything that had happened. For her appalling manners and her incredible rudeness, for the lack of control in Taris Wellingham’s movements and for the knowing look of complicity on his sister-in-law’s face.
The man she had admired was a drunkard!
Everything that had held her up in the past months was lost. Her confidence. Her belief in herself. Instead she was tossed back to the time when she had been completely at the mercy of the moods of a man whose anger or temperance depended on the amount and strength of the drop he had imbibed.
A few beers and he would drag her to his room. A few more and he would hit her. And a few more than that…
Never again. Never, never again!
Using the sleeves of her gown to wipe both her nose and her cheeks, the quick swipes threw her back to Ipswich and the house there.
Frankwell had been a big man and a bully, though after his apoplexy he had become kinder, his mind not quite remembering who it was she had been.
His wife. The positions changed over only a matter of weeks and the man with no family at all save her was as dependent as a three-year-old. There was no choice in any of it. There was no help to garner, with his finances tied to a lawyer who was living well on the interest of the Bassingstoke money just as long as the main recipient of it was alive.
And the last years had slipped by with all the hardship of twice their number, the factories belching out high-grade iron even with an absentee owner at their helm.
Her life became days and weeks and months disappearing into the drudge of looking after a husband she had hated. Suddenly Beatrice was overcome with everything. With the past and the present and the future and she could not breathe, could not take the proper amount of air without the stinging contracting ache in the back of her throat stopping everything.
‘Mama,’ she whispered and thought of her parents, dead by the time she had reached the tender age of seventeen and thankfully unaware of the type of man that they had chosen for her husband.
The joy of the night in the snow came unbidden, taunting and mocking against the reality of what had happened today.
Today she had understood that the fatuous dreams of an ageing widow were destined to remain ever that, her life divided into before and after one perfect night.
Because now she knew and that was the very worst of it! Now she had had a taste of what it was to be delighted and pleasured and cared for, the impossible hope sending her into new fits of sobbing.
A knock on the door made her stop, as she pressed her lips together and frantically rubbed at her eyes.
‘Yes. Who is it?’
‘It’s Sarah, madam. Might I come in?’
Looking at her face in the mirror as she stood to open the door, Beatrice grimaced, her eyes swollen and her cheeks blushed.
Sarah, her maid, stood at the door with a worried expression. ‘Cook says that we will be having chicken tonight and he will prepare it in just the way you like it.’