‘A further rowdy night of fighting, Alderworth?’ Asher’s question was layered with disgust.
‘Someone has to subdue the scum of London. It may as well be me.’
‘No, it isn’t as you think it—’ Lucinda began as she stepped down from the coach, but her husband cut her off.
‘I will see you tomorrow, Duchess. Thank you for the most interesting of evenings.’
A rap with his cane on the roof had the horses moving, the perfectly matched pair of greys gathering speed as they disappeared down the road.
‘His blood has ruined your gown.’ Asher ground the words out as they walked back inside.
‘Halsey did it. Halsey and a group of his cowardly friends. They caught him alone on the terrace at the ball in a planned attack. He had no chance against them.’
A look crossed her brother’s face, dark and unexplainable, and a terrible idea suddenly occurred to Lucinda.
‘You did not pay anyone to do that to him, did you, Ashe?’
‘Halsey is a weak-willed and arrogant sycophant. If I wanted the job done, I would do it properly myself.’
‘Well, don’t.’ She stood to her tallest height in her stained and crumpled gown, the shock of the evening on her face and an anger boiling beneath everything that was dubious. ‘Hurt Alderworth, I mean. I am tired of being the forgotten wife and I want at least the chance to …’ She stopped, not quite able to voice what it was she did want.
‘The chance to what?’ His dark eyes were filled with an urgent question.
‘To … know something of the man I have married.’
With that she swept past, making for the staircase and the privacy of her room.
Tay held a hand close against his chest. He was sure a few of his ribs were broken and knew they would hurt like the devil in the morning. Breathing shallowly, he leaned forwards, finding in the movement a slight relief. The wedding ring he had retrieved that morning from the bottom drawer of his library desk felt solid on his finger.
Lucinda had seen him helpless at the feet of a pack of cowards who had crept up on him as he was lighting a cheroot, the evening with his wife making him less vigilant than he normally was. Usually the ton avoided any contretemps or whiff of scandal, but Lucinda had come forwards with her integrity and her honour, admonishing grown men with words that he could not have bettered.
Like a fierce and urgent angel. Lord, he was the sinner married to a saint and with his past it would be her paying for such loyalty again and again and again. The shock in her eyes, her trembling fingers, her ruined gown and disappointment scrawled in deep lines across her brow. He had seen her stiffen when her oldest brother had come out to meet them. Another mortification. He smiled at the word and then regretted it as the skin on his top lip stung.
Without Lucinda here everything hurt, badly, a cold emptiness closing in about him. He would not meet her tomorrow or the day after that, for he needed time to nurse his wounds and to try to find some idea as to where to go to next.
He could not keep putting his wife into danger or see her compromised by his own lack of regard for the law and there were more of the ilk of Halsey out there than he would have liked to admit.
Remembering Lucinda’s words in the carriage as she had tried to explain to him why he was nothing like Richard Allenby, he smiled. No one had ever been on his side before, not like that and in the face of such damning evidence. The feeling was … warming.
Shaking his head hard, he told himself to put such nonsense aside. Twenty-eight years had taught him a few home truths and one of them was to depend upon nobody.
Treat everyone as an enemy.
His mother and father’s son after all, the words scrawled into his flesh like a tattoo. Ineradicable and permanent.
Lucinda did not see Taylen Ellesmere the next day or the day after. No note of explanation came.
Her brothers had ceased to talk of Alderworth whatsoever, hoping perhaps that by ignoring him he might go away, but she haunted the wide front-window bays like a wraith, glancing out each time a noise caught her attention or the sound of hooves echoed on the street, her breath catching with every newcomer turning into the square, eyes picking out their livery with interest. He might be laying low, but the bargain for an heir that they had struck between them still simmered underneath everything, calling through the silence.
‘You seem jumpy.’ Eleanor sat on the small sofa in the blue room working on a tapestry.
Smiling half-heartedly, Lucinda picked up her own needlework, but the stitches blurred before her, the counting of each one difficult today.
‘I did not sleep well last night or the one before that.’ Goodness, that was an understatement. She had lain awake almost till the dawn, worrying.
‘I could make you one of my tonics if you like. It is bound to help you relax.’
As Lucinda shook her head to decline the offer, the needle pierced her finger, drawing blood, yet instead of wiping it away she watched as the red of the wound spread into white cotton. Other blood came to mind. The injuries Taylen Ellesmere had sustained were substantial and damaging and she wondered how he fared now. Who would tend to him and make certain he was not becoming worse? His breathing had been laboured, after all, and she was sure his nose had been broken.
Standing again, she walked to the window, unconcerned as to what Eleanor might make of her distractedness. Outside drizzle coated the world in grey, a few leaves falling on the gardens with their ragged yellow edges brittle. Like her. She felt the tension in all of the corners of her body, scraping away contentment, panic close to the skin. Tears pooled at the back of her eyes. One step forwards and then two steps back. She was tired of the uncertainty and the confusion.
‘Is the contretemps at the Chesterfield ball worrying you?’ Eleanor came to stand beside Lucinda, the palm of her hand making contact.
A nod brought the hand fully around Lucinda’s shoulders.
‘Cristo thinks Alderworth may have been the one to deal with Halsey three years ago, which would explain the attack upon him in Mayfair after the carriage accident. He said that he may have misjudged him.’
‘Alderworth would not thank him for the compliment were he to hear of it, Eleanor.’
‘Because he is prickly and distant and completely unmindful of a reputation that is hardly salutary? Or because he likes to hide behind an image that is not entirely the truth?’ The tone in her words was a worried one. ‘His grandmother used to hit him, you know. Hard. She thought such training would make a man of her grandchild because her own daughter had become such a biting disappointment with her many lovers and her drinking.’
Bile rose in Lucinda’s throat as she turned to her sister-in-law. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Rosemary Jones, my maid’s older sister. She works at Falder now, but as a young girl she was employed by Lady Shields at her home in Essex.’
‘Many children are punished, Eleanor.’
‘Not in the way he was. According to Rosemary, he spent months away from the family in a hospital in Rouen after one particular incident. Then his uncle took him away.’
‘An uncle? Which uncle?’
‘Hugo Shields, Lord Sutton, I think was the name mentioned. His mother’s brother. Rosemary did not see any of the family again because she was asked to leave. The old lady had some inkling of her disapproval, I suppose, and did not wish to be reminded of an unsavoury period in her life.’
Goodness. The whole horror of everything began to mount inside Lucinda. Between a heavy-handed grandmother and a brutal uncle, the small Taylen Ellesmere never had a chance, just as he did not now with the building censure of a society that barely knew him.
‘I think I will take the carriage out, Eleanor. I need to see my milliner about a hat.’
‘I will tell your brothers that you have a few errands to do, Lucy. I know there are a pile of library books well overdue from Hookham’s Lending Library if you would not mind dropping them off for me.’
‘Certainly.’ She smiled as Eleanor did. Both knew that the Ellesmere town house was only a few hundred yards from the mentioned establishment, a distance easy to walk.
The door of Alderworth House opened almost instantly after her maid rang the bell, a tall man ushering them into a room which was light and airy, the windows looking out on to a garden filled with greenery. A mismatched set of a sofa and two chairs were arranged before the fireplace and there were faded areas on the walls where pictures had been removed and never replaced. Lucinda wondered why the Duke had not had the place refurbished after his windfall in the Americas.
‘I’ll tell his Grace you are here, your Grace.’ Ellesmere’s butler’s face flushed at the recognition of her name and he seemed to hesitate for a moment as if he could not quite decide what to do. ‘It might take a few moments,’ he managed finally. ‘A maid will bring tea and cakes into you while you wait.’
‘Thank you.’
Claire, her maid, stood by the door, her face a careful blank canvas. She was probably balancing the luxury of the Carisbrook houses against the frugality here, a topic that would be faithfully reported back to the downstairs staff at the Wellingham town house to mull over and discuss. Lucinda wished she might have asked her to wait with the carriage, but to do so would have invited questions.
She heard a cat howling outside somewhere close. Further afield the faint trip-trop of a carriage wending its way was audible above the ticking of an ancient ornate clock in the corner, its glass face shattered on one side and the time running a good half an hour slow.