Mistress at Midnight (5 page)

‘I went today into town with Mama and found a jewellery shop that I had not noticed before.’

Stephen smiled, imagining Elizabeth enjoying the wares.

‘Mama said I should have purchased the blue sapphire necklace because it showed off the colour of my eyes, but I preferred the ruby because it caught the light so beautifully. Do you think I have made a wise choice, my lord?’

His glance passed across the bauble nestled at her neck, the intricate patterns of gold fussy in design.

‘It suits you entirely.’

‘There was a bracelet to match, as well.’ the glance she gave him had a certain entreaty in it. Hawk knew he should enquire as to the name of the shop and the exactness of its location given the unsaid promises shimmering between them, but the words just would not come.

He saw Mrs St Harlow threading her way back into the room from the corner of his eye. She looked neither left nor right, though even from this distance he could see women and men turning away from her in a deliberate cut. Her chin rose and if he had not known of her unease in the social setting he might have thought that she did not care a jot for the good opinion of others. He was glad she had the glasses to shelter behind.

‘Do you not think so, my lord?’

The pale beauty of Elizabeth’s puzzled gaze fell upon him.

‘I do.’ He had no idea at all as to what he had just agreed but his attention was caught by a group of men Aurelia was about to walk past on one side of the room.

Lord Frederick Delsarte caught her arm, tightly, and held it. Stephen could see the others folding in about her, blocking off any means of escape. The smile she wore was
imbued with solid anger, though even from this distance he could detect a certain panic.

‘Would you excuse me for a moment, Miss Berkeley?’

He did not wait for any reply, but strode across to the colonnade shielding the group from the notice of others and walked straight into the contretemps.

‘There you are, Mrs St Harlow,’ he said, placing Aurelia’s hand across the material of his sleeve as he pulled her into his side. ‘Lady Lindsay is most anxious to find you. Something about meeting an old school friend, I think she said.’

Unfortunately Delsarte had had too much to drink and was in no mood to observe the social niceties. ‘We have not finished here,’ he slurred with difficulty, ‘and your cousin’s widow and I have much to talk about.’

‘I sincerely doubt that, Delsarte.’ Hawk hurst’s free hand slipped to the top of the younger man’s arm and pressed, the yowl of pain heartening.

‘It’s Hawkhurst, for God’s sake, Freddy,’ a taller man next to Delsarte whispered in the tone Stephen had become accustomed to people using around him.

‘I would greatly prefer it if you were not
to venture anywhere near Mrs St Harlow again, do you understand?’

Caution finally shone through bloodshot eyes. ‘I didn’t realise you knew her so well, Lord Hawkhurst.’

‘Ahhh, but now you do.’ Hawk let go his hold and stepped back, shepherding Aurelia before him as they moved out from behind the pillars.

Fury raced through him as he saw the paleness of her skin welting already into bruises where the bombazine had ridden above her wrist in the struggle. He also saw she swallowed often as though trying to keep back the tears, but he could not be kind. ‘Why the hell would you go off alone and unprotected when you know the communal feeling in the room is so against you? Surely you understand the dangers inherent in social animosity?’

She took a breath. ‘Hatred is generally less demonstrative,’ she returned, and had the temerity to smile.

Hawkhurst looked as if he wanted to kill her, here in the ballroom twenty yards from the woman it was said he would marry, and the ache in her arm from where Freddy
Delsarte had grabbed her was beginning to throb.

If Hawk had not intervened, she wondered what might have happened. Could they have dragged her from the room kicking and screaming and not a soul willing to lift a hand in aid?

Save for him.

She should not have come. It was too dangerous and too uncertain and Charles’s more carnal predilections were shown within the leer of the younger man’s eyes. She knew Hawk had seen this, too, for his grip upon her had tightened imperceptibly.

‘You incite great emotion in those about you, Mrs St Harlow, even in the dress of a dowager.’

‘Men see what they wish to see, my lord. It is a fault that is universal.’

‘I cannot remember you much in the company of my cousin. It seemed you were never in London at all.’

Breathe
, Aurelia instructed herself when she realised she had simply stopped doing so, the beat of her heart racing through the thickness of black wool.

‘There was always much to do at Medlands. Gardening was one of my particular
favourites and Charles enjoyed the colours.’ She tried to imbue the sort of gladness that she imagined a lady of leisure might feel for such a hobby, her mind scrambling around for the names of common plants just in case he took the conversation further.

‘Then you must have been saddened to see the house sold on his death?’

Worry turned. As Charles’s only cousin he did not know? She could scarcely believe that he would not, although the fact that Lord Hawkhurst was rumoured to have barely been in England for many years made it seem more than possible. Perhaps no one save her lawyers knew of the financial collapse that her husband had left her in, a hundred chits from the merchants of Medlands village presented and little money to honour them. She had been so careful to pay them back, after all.

Medlands sheltered another family now and Aurelia had not been sorry to pack up the few belongings that were her own and leave the place for ever.

‘I have many memories left to remind me, Lord Hawkhurst.’
Shame. Anger. Disappointment. Murder
.

He watched her carefully, the shadows in
his eyes pulled back into puzzlement. With him at her side she felt completely safe, the stares of those around her muted in his company. She wished he would ask her to dance again as the music of a waltz was struck but, of course, he did not as they came into the little group she had left a good fifty minutes earlier. The young and beautiful Elizabeth Berkeley was again quick to take his arm. Aurelia thought she would have liked to have done the same, simply laid her fingers across such security and held on.

She remembered Freddy Delsarte at the parties at Medlands come Christmas, where the girls from London were brought up to satisfy the wants of married men who had long become bored of their wives.

As Charles had with her.

Closing her eyes, a dizziness that had become more frequent of late made her world spin.

‘Are you quite well, Mrs St Harlow? You suddenly seem very pale.’ Cassandra Lindsay’s tone was worried.

‘Just tiredness, I think,’ Aurelia returned, looking at Leonora and Cassandra’s brother on the dance floor enjoying each other’s company.

‘I could bring your sister back, if you would like, and Stephen could organise a carriage to take you home immediately. We will not be late ourselves and I promise you I would chaperon her as if she were my own daughter.’

The offer was tempting with Charles’s friends watching her from one corner and the rest of the
ton
scowling from the others.

‘If it would not be too much trouble…?’

Cassandra Lindsay’s smile was bright as she bid Aurelia goodnight. Then she drew Elizabeth Berkeley away from her grip on Lord Hawkhurst’s person with talk of the colour and cut of the gowns that were her very favourite in the room tonight.

Aurelia gained the distinct impression that in doing so the woman was helping her.

Chapter Four

‘I
most certainly did not expect you to accompany me home, Lord Hawkhurst.’

He smiled, his teeth white in the dark of the carriage and his thighs less than an inch from her own. ‘But I wanted to, Mrs St Harlow, because it will give us the chance to talk about how it is you know Lord Frederick Delsarte and his lackeys.’

‘They were acquaintances of my husband.’

‘But not of yours?’ No humour lingered now, his voice cold, cut glass.

She shook her head. ‘My disapproval of their antics was more than obvious, I should imagine.’

‘Did Charles ever hurt you?’
The very intimacy of the question made
her turn away. ‘No. He was a wonderful husband.’ The words were exactly those she had used in the courts when the law had tried to lay the blame at her feet for his unexplained death.

‘Why is it that I think you lie?’
she turned back. ‘I have no idea, my lord.’

The air all around them contained something that she had never felt before. The pure and utter longing for a man, this man, their unfinished kiss from a week before shimmering on the edge of a lust so foreign it made her feel light headed.

‘Charles enjoyed a wide interpretation of the word “fairness” and when he died at Medlands there were probably a number of people both in London and further afield who breathed a sigh of relief to hear of his passing. As his wife you must have known this.’

Such criticism hung in the darkness, a living and breathing thing, defining all that Charles had been. Given that what he said held a great dollop of truth Aurelia found it hard to argue. ‘There were also a number who may have mourned him.’ She stated this with as much certainty as she could feign. Those who came up for the party weekends
at a country mansion who held strict morals in little worth probably rued his passing, but she doubted there were many others. The Medlands estate had buried him with a smile upon its collective face, their lord and master a man who held little regard for the feelings and needs of others more lowly born than he was.

When Lord Hawkhurst caught her hand and held it tight, she could feel tremors within the strength—a surprising thing, that, given his easy confidence. The night of London was black and endless, a quarter-moon lost behind banks of cloud, leaving only them in the dark and empty space of the world.

The warmth of his skin comforted her though, a solid contact amidst all that was strange and she felt her fingers curl around his. He did nothing to resist.

‘I would have asked you to dance again if I knew a scandal wouldn’t have ensued because of it.’

She could not believe he would admit this, to her, a stranger. ‘Lady Elizabeth Berkeley may not have been pleased about that,’ she retorted, hating the bait she threw at him. It was beneath her to involve such an innocent
young beauty for her own means, but there it was and she did not take it back. Rather, she waited.

‘A title like mine, and the possessions accompanying it, have a way of garnering interest. It is a known fact.’

‘Such is the ease of being wealthy.’

‘Charles was rich, too. Perhaps you are more like Elizabeth Berkeley than you think.’

She did laugh at that, the sound lost into a mirth that was humourless. ‘I cannot determine one trait that we might share, my lord.’

‘What of beauty?’ he replied.

Was this a joke he played upon her? ‘I am hardly that, my lord.’

‘A woman who does not know her true worth is a rare and valuable thing.’ His voice allowed no tremor of falsity and when she turned towards him the breath left her body, his expression exactly the one she had seen at Taylor’s Gap: lust and want beaten back by will.

Breaking the contact, he fisted his palm against his thighs so that every knuckle stretched white. the scars on his knuckles stood out as raised edges of knotted flesh.

He swore soundly, the frustration expressed
coursing between them. She should have bidden him to let her make the rest of the journey alone, should have replaced her gloves with a stern reprimand and ordered him from the carriage. But she could not. Instead she sat there, too, the silence growing as an ache, her hands bare in her lap and cold, her head heavy against the cushioned velour of the seat. For twenty-six long years she had imagined exactly this, a man who might transport her from the tight restraint of her life and deliver her into temptation.

His eyes glinted in the dark when she chanced to take a look, the bleakness in them shivering through green.

‘Your husband had questionable friends, Aurelia. Take care that they do not become your own.’

He would warn her even given the public perception of her part in Charles’s murder. Gratitude rose unbidden.

‘I live a simple and quiet life with my father and sisters. There is little in me that could be of interest to anyone.’

His laugh was menacing. ‘Somehow I doubt that entirely.’ The residual feeling existing between them since their kiss thickened.
What on earth was happening to her? Hope drove into a veiled anger.

He would never be hers
. It was written in exactly who she was. As she moved away carefully, the space between them became bathed in a pool of light reaching in from outside and when she saw that they were back in Upper Brook Street the relief was indescribable.

Braeburn House. The horses slowed to an amble and then stopped as Aurelia stretched the fabric of her unworn gloves out whilst deciding exactly what it was she would say. There were so many things that she might have told him, but in the end she settled on the one that would keep her family safe.

‘I relinquish you from any bargain that stands between us, my lord, and I realise that my insistence on an invitation to your ball was both forward and foolish.’ she enunciated the words very carefully and hoped that the need in her was not as visible as she thought it might be.

‘Your sister and Rodney Northrup may not say the same, Mrs St Harlow.’

The words were cold and stilted, none of the delight of the evening held within them, and as if to underline his desire to have her
gone he simply leaned across to the door and flipped the handle, gesturing to one of his servants to help her alight.

He should not have been alone with her, jammed into the small space with the warmth of her skin and the rapid beat of her heart searing into all his good intentions. Aurelia St Harlow was his cousin’s widow and he was all but promised to Elizabeth Berkeley.