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They were coming.
People were coming.
Binding his hair into a tight queue, he stood with his face against the sky and waited, the hat that he had borrowed from the younger man in the carriage pulled down across his forehead, shading his eyes from other prying ones.
‘A rescue party will be here in five minutes,’ he warned, his voice distant. He could not help it. This was a place he had no knowledge of and the daylight was upon them. If he walked towards her, he might trip on a misplaced object and his brother had described to him in detail the opaque clouds in his left eye.
He did not wish for Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke to see that. He did not want her to know that he was a man who functioned best only in the darkness, a man who depended on his trusted servants and the familiar shorelines of his home. Risk free and easy.
‘You can hear them?’ she asked and he merely nodded. ‘Well, I can make out nothing at all and I always thought myself rather accomplished on hearing things that others could not.’
She sounded nervous and a little desperate, the higher tones of a frantic embarrassment clearly audible.
Why?
She was a widow after all and far from her first flush of youth and the night they had spent together had been completely consensual.
Perhaps it was the sheer worry of having others come to judge her in the predicament she now found herself in, for co-habiting overnight with a man would be considered racy even in his circle of friends and Mrs Bassingstoke sounded more like someone at home in the country.
His fist beat against his thigh as he pondered options. ‘I will disclose our sleeping arrangements to no one, Mrs Bassingstoke. Perhaps that will put your mind at rest.’
‘Indeed, Mr Wellingham.’ He was bothered by the worry in her words. Hardly above a whisper.
‘And if you could be so good as to fashion a nest in the hay that would only leave room for one person, then that should help this charade further.’
He listened as she did as he had suggested before sliding down to sit against the wall. Two people sheltering at either end of the barn and fully clothed! He hated the small catch he could hear in her voice as she began to talk again.
‘Are you based in London, sir?’
He shook his head. ‘More often than not I am away from it,’ he returned.
‘I see.’ He heard the deep intake of breath as she contemplated his answer. ‘So if by chance I should catch sight of you in the streets…?’
‘Your reputation would stay safer should you ignore me altogether.’
‘Ignore you altogether.’
Echoed. Lonely. Taris wished he might take his words back and replace them with other, softer words, words that did not decimate any contact with such a final thrust. But there was nothing he could do, not here, caught at the mercy of everyone, a man who was not able to even find his way to the edge of a small barn without falling.
His rejoinder cut into the quick of Bea’s self-esteem. Of course he would not wish for a plain woman of little attraction to be vying for his attention. Questions would be asked, after all, and she was hardly the sort who would be able to shrug them off with an inconsequential ease.
Ever since waking this morning he had barely glanced her way. Once had been enough, probably, to determine her mousy-coloured hair and her unremarkable eyes, let alone anose that was hardly retroussé and a chin that was much more defiant than was deemed fashionable.
Plain!
She had never felt the condition with such an agony and the ache of rejection was wretched. Taking a breath, she tried to exhale in a calm and dignified manner. Frankwell might have robbed her of youth, but a will that had been long bent was again firming, and the gift of independence was something that she could cling to. She had both gold and land and the means to be beholden to no one. Ever again! It was at least a start.
Swallowing, she stood, the group of people coming on horseback now visible, the men they had spoken to last night joined by a good many others, society folk, their dress rich and ornate.
When they finally came within ten yards of the barn the most beautiful woman Beatrice had ever seen in her life slid from her steed and ran.
Taris. Taris. Oh, thank God.’ Her eyes were flooded with tears and the chignon in its net had slipped, allowing a halo of blonde silken curls to fall in riotous abandon down to her shoulders as she flung herself into his opened arms.
‘My God, we thought we…had lost you…we thought you had been swept away in the storm or buried beneath the pile of snow and the hailstones…have you ever seen such hailstones…?’
The tirade stopped only as turquoise eyes came level with Bea’s, interest stamped across uncertainty.
Taris Wellingham turned finally in her direction, his amber gaze running quickly over her as though only just remembering that she was indeed still here. ‘Emerald Wellingham, meet Mrs Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke.’
Emerald Wellingham?
He was married? My God, he had lied to her, lied about everything…
‘She is my sister-in-law.’
Relief made the world bend in a strange way and Bea placed her hand against the wall to steady herself. Taris Wellingham neither came forwards nor commented on her instability and the callous indifference in his eyes confirmed her deductions. She meant nothing to him. She was just a warm and docile body with whom a freezing night had been passed more quickly. But at least he was not married!
She felt the turquoise gaze of the newcomer take in her dishevelled clothes and the hay that was stuck to them, summing up her character in the clues that lay all around.
A plain woman who would take the chance of an unexpected night with a man who looked as beautiful as this one did.
Shame battled with anger and both were over-taken by surprise as another man with a look of menacing danger joined them. Beatrice noticed he had a rather pronounced limp.
‘We travelled up from London at first light when you failed to come to Park Avenue. Emerald had a feeling about it all and would not be fobbed off with any excuse.’
‘It was the storms that made me uneasy, Taris, though Asher said I should not be concerned…’
Asher and Taris Wellingham? The names were suddenly horrifyingly familiar to Beatrice, for she had read of them across the years, two brothers who had ruled the ton with their wealth and escapades.
Falder Castle was their seat and they were the direct descendants of the first Duke of Carisbrook and if memory served her well Taris Wellingham had recently acquired extensive properties in Kent. Her cheeks burned with the growing realisation of how far she had trespassed into a world she knew nothing of and all she wanted was to be gone from this place, removed to one of the carriages that she could see now pulling up to the barn, further faces turned towards her, questions in their eyes.
‘The weather will be upon us in the next few moments, my lord, if we do not hurry from here.’ A tall thin man had come to the side of Taris Wellingham and she was bemused by the way he threaded his arm through that of his master.
The woman Emerald seemed as protective, her hand coming into his on the other side as they turned for the coach. She was amazed that Taris Wellingham allowed them to shepherd him in such a manner and was about to say something when his brother gave an order to the servant next to her.
‘See to the woman, Forbes.’ The young servant nodded even as the Wellinghams disappeared from view.
She could not believe it. He would not even tarry to say goodbye after all that they had shared?
The sound of a door shutting and a call to the horses answered her query. Then the beat of hooves and a quickening pace, the contraption lost to the whiteness of the landscape and the newly falling snow.
Gone.
Finished.
‘If you would come this way, miss, the others are in the coach…’
‘Others?’
There was a shout of recognition from the old woman and her son she had met the night before as she scrambled up the steps and into the shelter of the vehicle. She was pleased to find no sign of the one who had been killed in the accident. Or the driver.
‘Mr Brown was taken on to London an hour or so ago and the other went to Brentwood to the church, I would guess, until his family have been notified to collect him.’ The younger man was full of chatter, his mother less talkative after such a long and harrowing night.
‘We spent the night at a farmhouse further north and were picked up just a little time ago. He’s brother to a Duke, you know, the man we all rode with, and he has a wealth of land in Kent.’
Bea nodded, pleased when the carriage was spurred on, the droning sound of miles being eaten up as they travelled south sending the others to sleep.
Lord Taris Wellingham, brother to the Duke of Carisbrook.
She turned the names on her tongue, grand names, names that were known in all the four corners of this country, the lineage of the dukedom reaching down through a thousand years of privilege and entitlement.
Taris Wellingham.
She remembered his profile turned against the snow, strong and proud, a man who might not understand how easily he intimidated others with his effortless leadership and control.
Control over the reactions of her body too, every bit as persuasive yet infinitely gentle.
‘Enough,’ she whispered into the gathering greyness of the morning and, pulling the collar of her cloak around her eyes, she was glad to hide her tears from a world that she no longer understood.
Taris felt his sister-in-law’s gaze on him even as he turned to the window, looking out.
Lord, he was a coward and a faint-heart and as the miles between them grew he understood something he had never in his life before experienced.
A woman had bettered him, had made him feel a cad of the very first order, a man who would not own up to either circumstance or reality, but hid in a world that was only deception.
‘So if by chance I should catch sight of you in the streets…?’
‘Your reputation would stay safer should you ignore me altogether.’
He took in a breath and held it, hating the tightness he could feel in his throat, loathing the way he still did not say anything.
Turn around. Turn around and go back.
He should say it, should shout it, but with the world only a grey sludge he found that he just could not.
Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke had seen him at his best. The best that he used to be, before…before he had become dependent on everyone! He wanted her to remember him like that, a man in charge of his life and his actions.
From best to worst, Bates’s hand threaded through his own and Emerald’s on the other side, leading him out through the space to his carriage. He hoped she had not seen the coat of arms emblazoned on the side or heard Bates calling him ‘my lord’. He hoped she might have thought him ill or cold or disorientated. Certainly he hoped that she had not seen him trip as they had rounded the wall of the barn, his feet catching a ditch that he had had no notion was there.
Anger consumed him. And regret. For three years this blindness had been taking his sight day by day and piece by piece. At first it had been just his central vision, but now it was all the light on the periphery too; a creeping silent thief with total blackness as the end point of a journey he had no wish to be making.
A sadness that had been a constant companion of his recent months gathered with biting force, pushing him back in his seat so that his fists almost shook with the sheer and utter wrath of it all.
He had never accepted it, never come to the place where acquiescence might have softened anguish and allowed a healing.
No, he had never come to that!
‘Why the hell you insist on these public carriage excursions eludes me, Taris, when you have a bevy of your own conveyances ready and willing to take you anywhere?’ Asher’s voice sounded wearied and the truth of the query added to Taris’s own frustration. This was the first time alone on the road that he had indeed felt sightless, the struggle of coping more overwhelming than it had ever seemed before. He was pleased when his brother took his criticism no further and Emerald spoke instead.
‘Your companion sounds interesting?’
‘She was.’
‘She looked worried, though. I wondered if you had noticed?’
‘Yes.’
‘I also saw she wore a wedding ring?’
‘He’s tired, Emmie. Leave him to rest.’ Asher’s voice wound its way around protection with its particular undercurrent of guilt. Suddenly Taris had had enough.
‘Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke is a widow from Brampton. She is turned twenty-eight. She appreciates honesty and she hates her name.’
‘A comprehensive list.’ Emerald’s voice faltered as Asher began to laugh, and the quick thud of his leg against the side of the coach told Taris of a well-directed kick.
‘I thought she seemed…strong.’
‘Indeed, she was that.’
‘Any woman bold enough to leave the safety of a carriage and venture into a snow-whitened night would win my favour.’
‘What does she look like?’ Taris had not meant to ask this, so baldly, so very unmindful, and the silence in the carriage was complete until Emerald began to speak again.
‘Her hair is the colour of chestnuts ripe in autumn and her eyes hold the hue of wet leaves in the shadows beside a forest stream.’
He stayed silent, hoping that she might carry on, liking the way that she brought Beatrice-Maude to life for him in that peculiar way she had of using words.
‘She isn’t very tall, but she is very thin. Between her eyes is the line of a woman who has worried a lot. The dimples in her cheeks are the prettiest I have ever seen on anyone.’
Taris nodded, remembering the contours of them, remembering how she had taken his fingers into her mouth, licking them in the way of one versed in the sensual arts. Remembering other things too. Her smell. Her softness. The whisper of his name against his ear before she had turned into his arms and pressed the swollen flesh of her breasts against him.
‘God!’ Said without thought.
‘What?’ Asher’s voice was loud, near, edged with perplexity.
Searching around for an excuse, he found one in the missing timepiece at his waist. ‘I think I left my watch back under the hay. It was poking against me in the night.’
‘Grandpa’s fob? You still wear that even though you can’t read the numbers?’ Asher swore as he registered what it was he had implied.
’Sound measures time as well, brother, and when you stop feeling guilty for my poor eyesight then both of us may sleep all the easier.’
Closing his eyes, Taris liked the ease of not having to try to decipher shapes, though a vision rose in his memory of chestnut curls, leaf-green eyes and smiling dimpled cheeks. And bravery despite heavily chattering teeth!
Beatrice saw Taris Wellingham the following week in Regent Street where she had gone to do some shopping. He was in the passenger seat of an impressive-looking phaeton, a young woman beside him tooling the horses with a confidence that was daunting.
Drawing back against the shop window, she hoped that the overhanging roof might shelter her from his glance should he happen to look her way and her heartbeat was so violent she saw the material in the bodice of her gown rise up and down.
Goodness, would she faint? Already dizziness made her world spin and the maid at her side carrying an assortment of other parcels she had procured looked at her in alarm.
