‘Was he a good man…your husband? A man of honour?’
‘I was sixteen years old when I married him and twenty-eight when he died. To admit failure over that many years…’ Her voice petered out and he stepped in.
‘So you admit to nothing?’
Her laughter was unexpected and freeing. A woman who would not take umbrage at even the most delicate of questions.
‘I am now in a city that allows me the luxury of being whatever I want to be.’
‘And that is?’
‘Free.’
He remembered back to her questions on their night in the snowstorm and everything began to make more sense. Perhaps they were a pair in more ways than she had realised it? Two people trying to hew a future from the past and survive. Independently.
‘But you still wear his ring.’
‘Because I have chosen to accept what has been and move on.’
Such honesty made him turn away. Not so easy for him, as the scar across his temple burned with fear and loss. Not so easy for him when the darkness was there every morning when he awoke. Still, in such logic there was a gleam of something he detected that might save him.
Not acceptance, but something akin to it; for the first time in three years Taris felt the anger that had dogged him shift and become lighter.
She had said something that unsettled him, and wished she might have taken back her words to replace them with something gentler. But she couldn’t and any time for regrets was long past. Here with the wind in her hair she felt a sort of excitement that challenged restraint and allowed a wilder emotion to rule.
Her whole life had been lived carefully and judiciously. Today she felt neither, the feeling directly related to the man who walked beside her.
Walked fast too, his frame suggesting a man who was seldom indolent and her scheme of exercise in the light of that looked…questionable.
‘I think perhaps you have not been quite honest with me, sir,’ she began and he turned quickly, guilt seen and then gone, the intensity of it leaving her to wonder what he thought she might say. ‘At a guess I would say that you are far more industrious in the art of exertion than I have given you credit for.’
‘Honesty has its drawbacks,’ he returned. ‘With it, for example, I would not be enjoying this walk in the park.’
‘You think I might pass you off as one who has no hope of resurrection?’ She began to laugh. ‘You do not strike me as a man who would have any need at all to lose himself in drink, my lord.’
‘You might be surprised at the demons that sit on my shoulders, Mrs Bassingstoke.’
‘Name one.’
‘Your inability to treat me with the reverence I deserve.’
She laughed again. ‘A paltry excuse, that. And if you do not have another better reason for taking to the bottle then I might abandon you altogether!’
‘Would an inability to see anything properly at all be enough of an exoneration?’
Bea turned towards him. The tone of his voice had changed, no longer as light as it had been or as nonchalant.
And then she suddenly knew!
The patch. The cane. His fall at his brother’s and the scar that ran full across his left eye. Like skittles, the clues fell into place one by one by one. No kind way to say it. No preparation. No easy laughter or words to qualify exactly how much he could see. Only the amber in his one undamaged eye burning brittle golden bright! Challenging and defiant.
The wind off the lake blew cold between them, his cloak spreading in its grip and his hand on the fence with its notched wooden carvings. Sight through touch. In that one second everything Bea had ever wondered about made a perfect and dreadful sense.
Blind?
‘So you do not have a problem with drinking?’ Her voice was quiet, laced with a truth that had not quite yet settled.
He shook his head. ‘I do not.’
‘Yet I have never heard anyone mention—’
‘Because I have never told,’ he shot back, defence in his posture and tight protection in the lines of his face.
‘Anyone?’
‘Asher, Emerald, Lucy, Jack Henshaw and Bates,’ he murmured, the list as short as five.
Six now with her. Nobody really, for such a secret. ‘And that is why you fell?’
He nodded. ‘When you suggested a fondness of the bottle, it was easier than this.’ His free hand gestured to his face, the silver-topped cane swinging in an arc as he did so, his anchor in a world of darkness.
Need. His need. Sliding in unbidden. Need of help and succour and support. She could not help the dread that crept into her voice, a thousand days of care for her husband reflected in such an unexpected truth.
‘I promise you that I will be sworn to silence on this news, my lord,’ she began, hating the withdrawal she could see, his head tilted against the wind as though listening to all that was further away. ‘I would give you my word.’
‘And I would thank you for it.’
Honourable even in hurt, fatigue written plainly on his face.
She no longer knew how to respond.
Blind! Such a small word for everything that it implied. Dependent. Reliant. Like Frankwell had been?
‘Perhaps we should walk back to the coach. It is getting late and cold…’
His suggestion was formal and polite, the choice of escape given under the illusion of time and weather. He did not wait for any answer, but surged ahead, his lack of sight pulling at her as he made his way up the path using the rail to guide him and his stick to monitor the lay of the ground.
The patch across his left eye was a banner of the shame that she felt when she failed to call him back to say that it did not matter, that it made no difference, and for the second time in two days a man, who had never been exactly as he seemed, threw her equilibrium into chaos.
Taris felt the ache around his temple tighten, constricting the blood that flowed into his last fading sight and band around a building pain.
God. What had made him tell her? What mistaken and stupid idea had crept into his head and made him blurt it out?
Take it back…take it back…take it back…
The voice of his anger was thickly strangled, bewildered by his admission and lost in fatigue.
All he wanted was to be home, away from her promises and the whisper of pity in her reply, the shocked honesty in her words underlain by another truth.
‘I promise you that I will be sworn to silence on this news, my lord.’
Sworn to the silence of one who would distance herself from needing to be beleaguered by it? Sworn to the silence of one who would make a hurried escape from his person and count herself lucky? That sort of silence? In Beatrice-Maude’s restraint he had a sudden feeling of breakage.
Spirit. Heart. And pride.
Tell anyone and open yourself up to the shame. Tell anyone and hear the shallow offer of charity.
When his hand clasped the rail on the carriage steps he hauled himself in and laid his cane across his knee. A fragile barrier against all that he wasn’t any more and would never be again.
A lessened man. A needy man. A man who could barely get to the front steps of his own house without help. His unwise confession burnt humiliation into his anger at everything.
Bea did not cry when she was finally home. Did not rant and rail as she had when she had thought an inability to limit strong drink was his only problem.
Today she merely sat on the window-seat with the rain on the glass behind blurring the vista and the small clock beating out the minutes and the hours of silence.
The same sound she had measured her life against for ever!
Reaching across to the table, she picked it up and threw it hard against the ground, the glass shattering as the workings inside disintegrated. Springs and metal and the face of numbers spinning around, time flown into chaos and the beginning of a quiet that she could finally think in!
Exhaling, she stood and crossed to the mantelpiece, extracting a card from a small china plate and holding it close.
The Rutledge Ball would begin at ten and Taris Wellingham was one of the patrons.
Her heart beat faster as she formulated a plan.
Chapter Six
Taris Wellingham stood with his brother and Lord Jack Henshaw at the top of the room. Tonight he was in black and was ‘much dressed’, the cut of his coat and trousers impeccable, his hair slicked back in a fashionable manner and his boots of the finest leather. But it was the glasses that he wore tonight which drew Beatrice’s attention.
She took a breath, hating the fact that he was by far the most handsome man in the room and she was by far the least beautiful woman. Still, she was not one to do things by halves and, starting forwards, she hoped that he would at least hear her out.
The arrival of the Countess of Griffin’s daughter, Lady Arabella Fisher, a woman of whom Beatrice-Maude had heard much, thwarted her intentions as she rushed through the burgeoning crowd to the side of Taris Wellingham. Her smile told Bea that she was more than enamoured by him, though his answering expression seemed tight.
Others joined them, laughing at the things he said, though Bea was too far away to make sense of any words.
What she did make sense of was the sheer and utter number of women in this room who threw him hooded glances before making their way to his side.
She swallowed. Those around him were the very pick of this Season’s debutantes, the cream of a society priding itself on lineage and ancestry. She recognised the Wilford sisters and the Wellsworth heiress, along with Lady Arabella, and was about to withdraw when a voice beside her made her jump.