Mistress at Midnight (17 page)

‘Then don’t. I need you to get closer to the source of these missives and it seems the Park Street warehouse may lead us right to them.’

Again Shavvon noted something on the book before him, a longer observation, this time, and underlined it. ‘Watch her carefully. I don’t trust her. She has come in front of the courts already and public opinion of her is unflattering.’

Something inside Hawk was breaking as fast as Shavvon was speaking. This would be the last time he would work for the British Service. When he returned he would hand in all correspondence pertaining to intelligence, all the weapons and the charts of countries long at strife with England, all the codes and the books of observances made over thirteen years of spying. It would be finished then, this part of his life, this wandering nothingness that had left him stranded in a place he no longer wished to be.

But first he must warn Aurelia St Harlow that she was being watched and that without
due care and diligence she would be dragged in and questioned to within an inch of her life.

Aye, under all the allegiance he felt for the Service another loyalty budded, stronger and more real. He would have liked to have asked what exactly they had on file about her already, but knew that to do so would invite question. So he merely smiled and listened to a diatribe about the inherent dangers of French spies who, according to Shavvon, were crouched like tigers and about to pounce on the very fabric of an unsuspecting British society.

London was as busy as it usually was on a Monday morning just before the luncheon hour. The ruby pin had realised a lot more than Aurelia had thought it would, saving her the task of looking through her father’s library for a few tomes that he might not miss.

She noticed Hawkhurst before he did her, crossing the road at Hyde Park Corner. Tattersalls, she thought. The sales it ran were on a Monday, but it was also the day that gamblers received their winnings or were required to pay their debts. Would Stephen Hawkhurst be like Charles in that way, always looking for the next surefire gamble,
the easy money that never came? Somehow she doubted it.

‘Mrs St Harlow. Are you alone?’ The humour she saw in his eyes was unexpected.

‘I am, my lord.’

‘Then perhaps you might walk with me for a moment. I have something I want to ask of you.’

She stiffened. Was the warehouse in Park Street still being watched? Had Hawkhurst some knowledge of her mother’s condition and the need for money? Would he enquire after the Frenchman who had come yesterday, a connection providing him with another way of imagining her disloyalty to the security of the English homelands?

‘My Uncle Alfred is celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday tomorrow evening. A quiet dinner party with only the very fewest of guests. He has asked if you might attend.’

The relief felt enormous. ‘Of course. I would love to come. Is there some little thing He might want as a present?’

‘A good bottle of wine would suit him exactly. He misplaces almost everything else he is given.’

‘It is said your uncle was hurt in the Napoleonic campaigns.’ She had heard the gossip,
of course, much of society losing patience with a man who failed to observe the strict rules of etiquette.

‘He took a shot to the head in the second Peninsular campaign under Wellington. That is really the last whole memory he has.’

‘It must be difficult to live for so many years without true recall.’

A wobbly cobblestone had her losing her footing and he tucked her hand through his arm.

‘Most people’s lives are touched by some sort of adversity and in the end it makes them stronger.’

She could not let that pass. ‘Sometimes it makes them more afraid.’

‘You speak of Charles?’
Unexpectedly she smiled. ‘I suppose I do.’

‘When did you meet him?’

‘In the first weeks of my first Season. He was a fine dancer and he wore his clothes well.’

‘Ahh, so shallow, Mrs St Harlow?’

She smiled again, liking the playful tone in his voice. ‘You are the only person I have ever admitted such a dreadful nonsense to. In my defence it did not take me long to realise that the cut of a man’s coat was only
a very minor consideration when choosing someone to live the rest of one’s life with.’

‘And your family? Your father? He approved?’

‘Oh, Papa was busy with my stepmother and my sisters and he said my stubbornness reminded him of Mama. It was not a compliment.’

‘So you no longer view the state of holy matrimony warmly?’

‘I do not.’

He laughed at that, loudly. ‘Most women in my company would say the very opposite.’

‘Well, you are safe with me, my lord.’

But when the sunlight caught his eyes, softening green into burnished velvet, she knew that she lied to herself, the memory of kisses he had given her making her heart suddenly hum in her chest and the blood of her cheeks rise.

Disengaging her hand, she stepped back. Hawkhurst was a thousand times more dangerous than his cousin had ever been. She just simply wanted to feel what it would be like to wrap her arms around the naked warmth of his skin and allow him…everything.

And there, right in the middle of a crowded
street, with people hurrying by on each side of them, Aurelia understood what it was to truly desire a man. Not any man, but this one: his strength and his goodness, his dangerous solitariness and his secret grief.

Cassandra Lindsay had been right. Elizabeth Berkeley would never understand him as she did, never nurture that part of him that was wild and menacing, never stare into the heart of his solitude and recognise herself in the wasteland.

She looked away.

Something was worrying Aurelia St Harlow, Hawkhurst thought—the talk of marriage, probably, and his roughshod questioning. She had been through hell with his cousin and had made it abundantly clear ever since the first second of meeting at Taylor’s Gap that she was not looking for a replacement. Again, he cursed Charles with a vengeance.

‘I will send a carriage around just before eight tomorrow night to pick you up.’

He knew finances were tight in Braeburn House.

When she nodded in agreement Hawkhurst made certain he did not tarry longer than he
had to in case she thought about the matter and changed her mind.

But as he walked away, the red flame of her hair juxtaposed against the familiar dark of her clothes burnt an image into his brain. And he knew without any doubt that tomorrow night would see an ending to the dance of sensual tension that smouldered between them.

Any thought that it might only be a very small birthday celebration was wiped away as Aurelia started down the hallway behind an austere-looking Hawkhurst servant. Voices of men and women were raised in laughter, though recognising Cassandra Lindsay amongst them she felt a little less worried.

Hawkhurst moved forwards to greet her. ‘You look lovely,’ he said, his glance taking in the hairstyle she had allowed Leonora to fashion. Normally she bound her hair back, tight against her head to hide the vibrant colour. Tonight she wore it in a looser style, her long curls tied at the nape. She had dispensed completely with the glasses. Her gown was scarlet silk.

Alfred had also risen, a broad smile on his
face. Taking the wrapped present from her reticule, Aurelia handed it to him. The thin lengths of silk in the bow trailed down the side of old thin hands.

Hawkhurst’s uncle took his time to look at it, turning it this way and that, the fabric catching the light of a large chandelier above. Finally he loosened the ties and opened the wooden box.

A ring was inside, a ring she had found in a circus years before with her mother, gaudy and substantial, but beautiful, its cut-glass edges showing off all the colours of the rainbow.

‘Nothing as mundane as wine, then?’ Hawkhurst said this with a tenderness in his tone as his uncle drew the circle on to his finger before leaning across.

‘Thank you.’ Delight made his eyes sparkle.

‘You are most welcome.’

The scar on the side of his head drew the skin around his left eye upwards. Aurelia imagined the pain of receiving such a wound so far away from any hospital and in the middle of a war.

She liked the way Alfred stroked her hand, the expectation and restraints of Victorian
society so clearly missing in the uninhibited reaction. She also liked the way Hawkhurst did not hurry him, but waited while his uncle processed what it was he wished to say and do.

The others further away were still chatting as though it was the most normal thing in the world for an elderly gentleman to hold on to her fingers and look deeply into her eyes. Perhaps it was for him, this man lost to time.

‘Rings are my favourite jewellery,’ he finally said and let her go, walking over to show the others his new and wonderful gift.

‘You remembered he liked your pendant?’ Hawkhurst asked the question.

‘Wine seemed too momentary for a man celebrating the length of seventy-five years.’

‘I know he will treasure such a gift. Even the packaging was inspired.’

‘Part of Mama’s heritage, I think. She was never a woman to do things by halves and I always wrap gifts that way.’

Cassandra rose from her place by the fire to join them.

‘Alfred is more than happy, Aurelia. Hawk instructed us to buy wine and we did, but next year we will take your lead and look for something far more original.’

Another woman also walked over, a beautiful, heavily pregnant woman with a white dress embroidered in multicoloured flowers at the neckline. The stitchwork looked like it had been done by a child, the rough sewing out of place against the elegance of the dress.

‘I was just telling Hawk, Lilly, that we shall be taking no notice of his suggestions for presents ever again.’ There was a soft tone in Cassandra Lindsay’s rebuke.

‘Absolutely, Mrs St Harlow, for yours has eclipsed our offerings entirely. I am Lillian Clairmont, and my husband is the one trying at this moment to wrestle the ring from Alfred’s hand. Lucas’s taste in material goods is more than questionable, you see.’ She coloured as she realised her criticism. ‘But I do not mean to imply that I think your present is…tasteless…’ She stopped and shook her head and her hair under the light showed up myriad hues. ‘I am expecting our third child very soon and the good manners that used to be the hallmark of my character seem to have all but deserted me.’

As the others laughed, Hawkhurst then made a proper introduction. ‘Lillian and Lucas Clairmont are down in London only for a few nights. They have a property in
the north and children waiting at home for them.’

‘Lucas is the Luc of the dancing lessons at Eton?’ Aurelia had suddenly placed him.

‘Indeed.’ When Clairmont walked to stand beside his wife, Aurelia saw how he wove their fingers together.

‘We met at Stephen’s ball, Mrs St Harlow. I thought your entrance was one of the grander ones I have seen so far in London, though my first introduction to court may have even eclipsed your own.’

‘He arrived brawling with my cousin, blood on his lip and a sneer in his eyes,’ Lillian explained with a smile. ‘Americans like to…turn up with aplomb, you see.’

‘I shall take such information to heart then, Mr Clairmont,’ Aurelia returned, ‘if I should ever find myself in your homeland.’

‘Hawk could bring you. We are due to go back on a holiday next May and I would deem it a pleasure to show you Virginia.’

Surprised by the wash of yearning that was inspired by such an invitation, Aurelia glanced at Stephen Hawkhurst. What would months in each other’s company on a boat out of London feel like? Such freedom would be impossible, unless…She shook
away the qualifier as all her responsibilities came crashing back in.

This was what her life could have been like had she married wisely. Family, good friends, a man who even in a roomful of others had her heart beating faster, the small flutter at the back of her throat making her swallow.

She wanted Hawkhurst to take her hand and hold it as Lucas Clairmont held his wife’s, safety and strength imbued in the very action.

Nathaniel Lindsay broke into her thoughts as he hailed a serving man near and offered up thin glasses of white wine to them all.

‘Let’s toast to birthdays and friendship,’ he said, looking over at Aurelia directly. ‘And to marriage,’ he added, this time observing Hawkhurst.

Hawkhurst knew what they were trying to do, each one of them, with their hopeful invitations and their clumsy innuendos. After all, he had spent the weeks since his ball fending off questions about Aurelia St Harlow, both Nat and Luc offering advice about his long-term future.

Tonight Aurelia fitted in like a lost glove.
She was not cowed by their teasing—no, far from it, her natural intelligence rising to the jibes with a lively humour and one he had not seen in her before. She fascinated him. She worried him.

This morning a Frenchman had been apprehended outside her warehouse by one of Shavvon’s men after he had picked up a package she had given him. Money and silk and a letter to her mother that alluded to more of the same coming the following week.

God. He pushed his hair back and watched her from the old leather wingchair. A deliberate distance. A difficult reminder of all that he had tried to withdraw from.

Deceit. On mismatched eyes and a face that looked as though it belonged to an angel.

He had argued with Shavvon that the contents of the package were nothing like those found in the heavier silk cargo. As a result he had been charged with the task of being Mrs St Harlow’s personal minder—a grim and startling assignment given all that he was thinking.

He had hoped his ball could have been the beginning of a new and more innocent life after the fright he had given himself at
Taylor’s Gap. And instead, here he was pining for a woman who had more secrets in her eyes than any other he had ever known.

But she fitted here, laughing between Lilly and Cassie and allowing his uncle to hold her hand for an inordinate amount of time after she had given him the present of a ring: a colourful glass ring with the engraving of a dragon through the amber and another on the metal in the band.