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‘Oh, it was not the tragedy you might think it,’ Susan Seymour returned, her voice low and husky. ‘As soon as she was married I think she wished she wasn’t. She was always so eminently sensible, but her love affair with Alworthy dissipated all that in a moment and was something I could never understand. Personally, I do not think she can now, either.’
The shocking truth of that statement left him marooned, as did Susan Seymour’s hand resting on his arm. The wine quickly drunk was also doing its bit to make him feel dislocated and all he hoped for was that his sister might come looking for him and interrupt.
‘It was her mistake to say goodbye to you, of course, and God knows why she did so?’ She let that question slide as he failed to answer. ‘Verity has not been happy since, so I can only surmise that being young has its pitfalls and they were ones she just could not have possibly predicted.’ This was said with intensity as her fingers squeezed his arm. Her eyes were full of question.
Jasper refused to be drawn into explanation. ‘Well, now we are all older and much wiser. Thank God.’
‘Older, perhaps, but you’ve created quite a stir here today. I have been hearing your name right across the room.’
‘My sister is one of the sponsors—’ he said, but Susan Seymour interrupted him, eyes alive in interest.
‘I do not think it is your sister the women are interested in. You have built up King Enterprises to be a powerful and well-known company, your influence in all areas of business a common topic of people’s conversation. It is you they wish to know better, Jasper, a man they admire.’
The use of his Christian name and such overt flirtation had him stepping back. ‘When you do see Mrs Alworthy, please tell her that I send my regards, but I am not planning on staying in London for long.’
‘Then that is a shame and I know she will be sorry for it. As will I.’
With a forced smile Jasper took his leave and walked towards the large windows on one side of the room. Here at least there was space to breathe, for the conversation with Susan Seymour had shocked him.
‘God, help me.’ The words escaped unbidden as he stopped and a woman he had failed to see sitting beside him glanced up and stood.
‘My thoughts exactly, but you at least look like you fit in here.’
‘And you don’t?’
She was petite and well formed, her hair a wild bunch of escaping curls and her irises the colour of old whisky. She also had dimples, deep ones in each cheek.
‘I am only here to meet someone, but unfortunately I cannot see him anywhere.’ As she stated this she craned her neck as though having one final look.
‘Who is it? Perhaps I would know of him?’
‘Mr Jasper King. He is the owner of an engineering company that builds railways and bridges all across England.’ A slight blush covered her cheeks.
The jolt of shock as she mentioned his name came unexpectedly. Jasper was seldom surprised by anyone any more and the feeling took him aback.
‘And who are you?’
‘Miss Charlotte Fairclough. My sister Amelia and our mama and I run the Fairclough Foundation for needy women and their children in Howick Place in Westminster.’
Through the haze of the past Jasper remembered seeing a younger version of this woman huddled against an upstairs banister as he had come to pay his regards to her sister after some ball. Charlotte? She had had another name then and he sought to recollect it. As if she had read his thoughts she continued.
‘But people more often call me Lottie.’
‘I think Charlotte suits you better.’ God, what the hell had made him say that to her, such a personal and familiar declaration? But if she was startled by his words she certainly did not show it.
‘I always thought that, too. For a little while I insisted everyone use my full name but old habits soon crept back in and now hardly anyone uses it. Well, Mama does when she is cross at me, which actually is quite often, but otherwise it is Lottie. Plain and simple.’
The babble of her words was somehow comforting. After the surprise of seeing Susan Seymour and all the undercurrents there, this conversation was easy and different. He leaned back against the wall and decided to stay put for a while. What was it Miss Fairclough wanted of him, though? He could not think of any reason why she would seek him out unless it was something to do with her brother. Before he could be honest and tell her his name she had already gone off on another tangent.
‘Are you married, sir?’
‘I am not.’ He tried to keep the relief from his words.
‘But would you want to be? Married, I mean? One day?’
She was observing him as if she were a scientist and he was an undiscovered species. One which might be the answer to an age-old question. One from whom she could obtain useful information about the state of Holy Matrimony.
‘It would depend on the woman.’ He couldn’t remember in his life a more unusual conversation. Was she in the market for a groom or was it for someone else she asked?
‘But you are not averse to the idea of it?’ She blurted this out. ‘If she was the right one?’
Lord, was she proposing to him? Was this some wild joke that would be exposed in the next moment or two? Had the Fairclough family fallen down on their luck and she saw his fortune as some sort of a solution? Thoughts spun quickly, one on top of another and suddenly he’d had enough. ‘Where the hell is your brother, Miss Fairclough?’
She looked at him blankly. ‘Pardon?’
‘Silas. Why is he not here with you and seeing to your needs?’
‘You know my brother?’
Her eyes were not quite focused on him, he thought then, and wondered momentarily if she could be using some drug to alter perception. But surely not. The Faircloughs were known near and far for their godly works and charitable ways. It was his own appalling past that was colouring such thoughts.
‘I do know him. I employed him once in my engineering firm.’
‘Oh, my goodness.’ She fumbled then for the bag on the floor in front of her, a decent-sized reticule full of belongings. Finally, she extracted some spectacles. He saw they’d been broken, one arm tied on firmly with a piece of string. When she had them in place her eyes widened in shock.
‘It is you.’
‘I am afraid so.’
‘Hell.’
That sounded neither godly nor saintly and everything he believed of Miss Charlotte Fairclough was again turned upside down.
Chapter Three (#u388d3239-b0ee-5698-8db9-a1a731d03b74)
Jasper King had fallen into her lap, so to speak, and if he had been handsome all those years ago as she’d observed him from her eyrie on the stairs, then now he was breathtaking. No longer a boy but a man, his edges rougher, his eyes darker, the danger that had once been only a slight hint around him now fully formed, hewn into menace. Seasoned. Weathered.
He was beautiful.
Looking around, Lottie could see that almost all the other women in the room had made the same kind of assessment, for eyes everywhere were upon him.
The fluster of her mistake and the splendour of her companion made her blush, a slow rolling redness that would be inescapable against the fairness of her skin. She wished she could have been more urbane, less ruffled. She wished the ground beneath her might have opened and simply swallowed her up, but of course it didn’t and she was forced to cope.
The cough she had been afflicted with suddenly decided at that moment to become unbridled, and one small cough turned into a minute-long hack, sweat beading her body with its growing intensity.
He passed her his own drink, a white wine that was as dry as it was strong. She swallowed the lot, praying to God that her infirmity might cease as tears of exertion ran from the corners of her eyes. Dabbing at them with her fingers, she faced him.
‘I have been ill, but…our family is swiftly running…out of both money and hope…as Silas seems to have vanished…off the very face of the earth.’ These bare bones of stated truth were given succinctly as she laid out her family’s present predicament without embroidering it. She was finding breathing difficult and was struggling to keep another coughing fit at bay. She felt too hot as well…from the blush or from a rising fever? At that particular moment she could not tell which was the culprit. She did not feel up to throwing her sister’s name into the mix, for her confused hope and dread of Jasper falling madly in love with Amelia all over again were at this moment too complex and disjointed to explain properly.
He frowned and pushed dark hair back from his face. His hands were as beautiful as the rest of him. He wore a solid ring of gold on the fourth finger of his right hand with an engraving of sorts etched into it.
‘I had a letter from your brother two months ago. Silas sounded hale and hearty.’
‘Only two months?’ The relief of his words made her feel faint all over again. ‘Then he is not dead. Millie could no longer feel his presence in the world, you see, and as a twin that was a decided worry and even Mama, who is normally so very sensible, had begun to have a haunted look in her eyes and…’ She stopped, taking in breath. ‘I cannot believe it. You are sure it was only two months ago?’
‘I am.’
‘Then why would he have not written to us to let us know where he was, how he was? He must have known our fears?’
‘He sounded busy. He sounded as if he was in the process of finalising a business scheme in Baltimore that he was sure was going to make him a fortune.’
Could it possibly be this easy? Suddenly all Lottie wanted to do was to be the bearer of such good news and send a message promptly to Mama and Millie. They would be as thrilled as she had been and as puzzled probably, too, but Silas’s whole disappearance began to make a certain sense. He’d always struggled with commitment and tying himself down. She imagined him in some far-flung uncivilised colony of the Americas, a long way from anywhere that dealt with post or a port by which mail might have been conveyed.
‘Are you well, Miss Fairclough?’ His words registered amid all her rushing conjectures and she turned back to him.
‘I am indeed, Mr King. Better, in fact, than I have been for a very long while even with the affliction of this cough that has become worse so very quickly. My brother’s disappearance has been weighing on me as if it were a large stone tied on my back, you see, and it’s like that old adage, I expect—the one that says “Worry often gives a small thing a great shadow”.’
This time he laughed out loud and a number of people turned to look at them.
‘I have never heard that before. Where is it from?’
‘It is an ancient Swedish proverb, I think. My Nanny Beth used it.’
‘She is still alive? God, I remember her.’
‘No. She died six years ago. On earth one day and in heaven the next. Silas said it was such a fitting death for one who in life had never wanted a fuss.’
Again he laughed and the darkness in his eyes lifted. That was what was different, Lottie thought, his eyes. Last time she had seen them they had been full only of lightness.
A woman she recognised as Jasper King’s sister was then suddenly at his side and looking at her quizzically.
‘Do I know you? Your face is familiar.’
Lottie held out a hand. ‘I am from the Fairclough Foundation in Howick Place and I knew your brother briefly, once.’
‘Very briefly,’ Jasper added, ‘but our reacquaintance has been most enlightening.’
He did not sound as though he quite believed this and Lottie turned to his sister, trying to cover the awkwardness. Another woman had also joined their small group, a beautiful blonde woman with cornflower-blue eyes and a sweet smile. She looked at Jasper as if she wanted to eat him up and, sensing she was now a little in the way, Lottie smiled.
‘Well, if you will excuse me I shall go and find a drink. I have a cough.’
‘Yes, we all heard.’ The other woman’s words were not kind. ‘I very much hope that you do not spread it around just before Christmas.’
‘And I hold the very same hope.’
Without looking back at the others Lottie threaded her way through the room, making for the door. The news of her brother did not allow even the rudeness of the beautiful woman to penetrate her euphoria and all she wanted to do was to make for home and send word to Mama and Millie about this wonderful new discovery of Silas’s wellbeing.
Alive. Well. Prospering even. Their trials and tribulations would soon be at an end and Amelia would not have to marry the curate after all.
Collecting her hat and heavy cloak, she fastened both upon her person and tilted her head against the growing wind outside. At least it had stopped snowing and a return journey always seemed much quicker.
Digging her hands into her pocket, she felt the long letter that she had written. She had not thought to give it to Jasper King, but at least such an omission gave Amelia the chance to meet him properly at some point and who knew what might come from that.
A cloud made the day darken and she bit at her bottom lip. Amelia was far more beautiful than she was and after this meeting all Jasper King must have comprehended about her was oddness. He was probably laughing with his sister and the beauty right at this moment as he retold the story to the others of her gauche outbursts and of her peculiar manner.
Not her finest hour, Lottie thought with a sadness, and wished with every piece of her heart that she could have started this afternoon all over again.
She was nowhere in the room. She had gone. After looking round the front parlour and failing to find her, Jasper strode to the entrance where an elderly servant was waiting to dispense coats and hats.
‘Did Miss Fairclough leave?’
‘The young lady with the curls?’ The man waited as Jasper nodded. ‘She did indeed, sir, a good ten minutes ago now. But it seems to me that she hailed no carriage, setting out to walk instead.’ His eyes strayed to the window. ‘In this weather the young lady’s journey will be a cold one.’
Anger tightened his chest. Miss Charlotte Fairclough would walk all the way from here to Howick Place on one edge of the Irish Rookery in this weather? It was a decent distance and the journey would take her through many of the less salubrious parts of the city. Asking for his coat and hat, he put them on and walked outside, gesturing to the driver of his waiting carriage. The icy crunch of freezing snow beneath his boots worried him.
Five minutes later he found her walking down St Anne’s Street. She was coughing again, he could see that by the way she was hunched in with her body shaking. Did the younger Fairclough have no sense whatsoever? Leaning out of the window, he instructed his man to pull in just ahead of her, glad to see that she came to a standstill when he got out and was waiting patiently as he approached her.
‘Do you wish to be struck down with pneumonia, Miss Fairclough?’ He looked pointedly up at the sky. The snow had turned into sleeted rain now, driving in from the north with force.
Her head shook, the curls dripping like sodden rat tails where they fell beneath the hat she now wore.
‘I d-do n-not.’
She was shaking so hard she could barely get her words out, and the fury that he had felt when first seeing her trudging homewards doubled.
‘Get into my carriage. I shall take you home.’
She did as he ordered, sitting down primly and folding her cloak tighter in around her, though as he followed her in his damn leg gave way and he almost toppled into her lap, saving himself from doing so at the very last moment.
The talkative Miss Fairclough seemed to have disappeared altogether. This version was a far quieter one, watching him with those whisky eyes of hers in a careful and cautious manner.
‘The forecast is for heavier snow and the temperatures are plummeting. I doubt your brother would be pleased to see you traipsing in this part of London town alone and in such weather.’
The mention of Silas brought her glance to his. ‘You are right, Mr King. It was foolish.’
‘Surely someone should have accompanied you today. A maid? Your mother?’
‘My mother, Lilian, is in the country at a Christmas party of Lady Alexandra Malverly’s and my sister has journeyed with her.’
‘But you were not invited?’
The same slight blush he had noticed when talking with her before resurfaced.
‘I was sick.’
‘Which is even more of a reason to be warm indoors.’
The heat in the conveyance seemed to have aggravated her illness and he waited again for a moment until she stopped coughing, her hands winding into the material of her skirt and bunching it into tight folds. She looked like a small wet angel blown in by the winter chills, her hair all loose and her cheeks weather reddened. As he took in the curves of her body beneath the folds of her cloak, he glanced away. His right leg ached and his meeting with Susan Seymour sat firmly in his mind.
