Regency Innocents (28 page)

She was so talented. He ached to tell her so. He pondered how best to word the compliment, savouring the knowledge that it was the very one he could pay her that would please her.

And while they were on the subject he must ask her pardon for forcing her to burn that sketchbook. If she could forgive him that one transgression … His heart-rate picked up dramatically. Had he finally found the key that might unlock his wife's heart?

He could hardly wait for the last of his tedious guests to leave so that he could make his declaration.

‘I am sorry you did not have an easy time of it this evening,' he began, his expression sobering as he recalled
Colonel Masterson's rudeness, and imagined the barbed comments he was sure the spiteful Lady Danvers must have let fly. ‘But I believe most of our guests went away having been tolerably well entertained.'

His words struck at her like a blow from a fist. Though she had very nearly disgraced him, he seemed to be saying, his neighbours had been gracious enough to overlook all her inadequacies.

‘Then may I go to my room, now?'

‘Very well,' he conceded, battening down his eagerness to put his new plan of action in train. He followed her into the hall and watched her ascend the stairs. He would give her a few minutes before following her, and then …

‘A word, if you please, Walton!'

Robert's harsh voice abruptly shattered his fantasies. He turned to see his half-brother emerge from the shadows beneath the bend in the great staircase.

‘Ashamed of me, are you?' Robert began, with no preamble.

‘I beg your pardon?' Why did he have to pick such an inappropriate moment to pick a quarrel? ‘You'd better come into my study.'

Striding past his brother, he flung open the door and went in. He was not going to participate in any kind of a scene in the hall, where angry words would echo up to the rafters.

‘What is it?' he said with impatience, going from habit to the side table on which rested a decanter of fine cognac and several glasses.

‘I want to know why you excluded me tonight,' Robert began, stumping angrily along in his wake. ‘Why the devil drag me down here if all you do is shut me away like some …?'

Abruptly his words petered out as he caught sight of the portrait that hung above Charles' desk.

‘That's my mother!' he exclaimed in indignation. ‘Why have you got a picture of my mother in your study? Why isn't she up in the gallery with all the reputable Waltons?'

‘When have
you
been up in the picture gallery?'

Robert looked a little discomforted, but did not admit that he had bribed Finch to show him round at times when he knew neither Giddings nor Mrs Lanyon nor Charles would discover he had done so.

‘Well, I am glad you have been exploring your home, though had I known you wished to do so I would gladly have been your guide …'

‘Oh, would you?' he sneered. ‘When you hide me away from your neighbours as though you are ashamed of owning such a brother!'

‘I have done no such thing! I had nothing to do with the arrangements. Heloise …' He frowned. She had left the whole thing to Mrs Lanyon. Did the housekeeper have a problem with Robert's presence in the house? Might she even have some lingering loyalties to the Lamptons?

‘Oh, hell,' said Robert, casting himself into a chair and easing the position of his wooden leg with his good hand. ‘My cursed temper! I've upset her. I wondered at the time … though normally when I rip up at her she gives it me back threefold.'

‘Here.' Charles pressed a glass of cognac into his hand and settled behind the desk.

‘I wish you wouldn't be so damned reasonable all the time,' Robert grumbled. ‘If only you would shout back at me just once in a while, instead of being so … icily polite, I shouldn't feel so … so …'

Charles shrugged one shoulder. ‘My guardians did a
sterling job of raising me after the pattern of my own mother's irreproachable forebears. Although …' he swivelled in his chair to gaze at the portrait that hung there ‘… when I gaze upon your mother's face I can remember a time when things were very different here at Wycke. It was only from the day they ousted her it became this cold, inhospitable mausoleum. They told me she had abandoned me.' He took a large gulp of the cognac. ‘I was eight years old. She was the only mother I had ever known. She had always seemed warm and loving, to both me and my father. Suddenly it was as if I had never known her at all. How could a woman turn her back on a child who had just lost his father?'

‘She didn't!' Robert defended her. ‘They sent her back to her family and then threw all their weight into crushing her spirit!'

‘For which crime I shall never be able to forgive them.'

His eyes grew so cold that Robert took a swig of his cognac to counteract the chill that pervaded the whole room.

‘You should have grown up here, with me. We should have climbed trees, fished in the lake, and played at Knights and Saracens in the ruined tower. If your mother had been here she would have made sure I went to school rather than being walled up here with a succession of tutors.'

‘I never appreciated you may have felt like this.' Robert frowned into his glass. ‘I always assumed that the quarrel you started with the Lamptons when you came of age was to do with money …'

‘Money! Oh, no. They were always scrupulously honest when it came to my finances. It was something far more valuable they robbed me of.' His eyes returned to the portrait of the dark-haired woman smiling down at her boys. ‘Something irreplaceable. My childhood.'

After an awkward pause, Robert managed to mumble, ‘Grown up in the habit of hating you, but I have to concede of late you have been very generous to me …'

Charles made a dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘I have done nothing but restore what should always have been yours. How our father managed to make such a botch of his will …'

It was the opening he had longed for since the day he'd discovered he had a brother. As the level in the brandy bottle steadily dropped, the two men managed to discuss, for the most part relatively cordially, the woman they had both called mother, and the events that had led up to her tragic demise.

By the time Charles went upstairs and softly entered his wife's room she was fast asleep.

‘Oh, my darling,' he murmured, bending to kiss her sleep flushed cheek. ‘Thanks to you, my brother has been restored to me.'

Gently, he brushed one stray lock of hair from her forehead, before retreating to his own room. If she did not come down for breakfast in the morning he would send a note, requesting she join him in his study as soon as she was awake. He had learned a valuable lesson from his long, and painful interview with Robert. His brother had attributed nefarious motives to all his actions. It was not until he had spelled out exactly why he had taken what steps he had that Robert had finally managed to let go of years of resentment.

He needed to have just such a conversation with his wife.

Heloise stared at the curt little note she held in her hand with a sinking heart. Charles requested her presence in his study as soon as she woke. Pushing her breakfast tray to one side,
she swung her legs out of bed. He must be so angry with her for flouting his wishes the night before. She did not wish to make him any angrier by keeping him waiting. She went straight to her washroom, pulling off her nightgown and tossing it aside in her haste to begin her toilette.

‘Please to lay out my clothes while I wash,' Heloise said, when Sukey gaped at the sight of her mistress pouring water into the basin for herself. ‘My green cambric walking dress.'

She was halfway down the stairs before she wondered what on earth she was doing. She could well imagine what he wanted to say to her. He was ready to go back to London. And, since she had let him down so badly, he had no intention of taking her with him. She had lived in dread of this moment ever since they had got here.

She stood, clutching the banister for support, as tears began to roll down her cheeks.

Stifling a sob, she hitched up her skirts and, instead of meekly going to the study, she ran down the passage that led to the back of the house and fled into the gardens.

And she kept on running. From her pain, from her loneliness, from her sense of utter failure. Across the lawns, through the shrubbery, down the bank and across the meadow. Only when she reached the lake did she veer from her course, following the shoreline until her strength gave out and she crumpled to the ground, giving way to the misery she had bottled up for so long.

She had no idea how long she lay there, curled up like a wounded animal, her utter misery cloaking her in a dense shroud of darkness.

It was only when the first great fat drops of rain began to strike her back that she sat up, suddenly aware that the darkness was not only inside her. The storm which had been hanging over Wycke for days had finally broken. She
gasped as rain struck the ground around her like a hail of bullets, spattering her dress with sandy ricochets.

Her first instinct was to seek shelter. But she could not bear to go back to the house. She could see herself standing before Charles' desk, her hem dripping water onto his polished floor, her hair hanging in rats' tails round her face, while he informed her, his lip curling with disdain, that he never wished to set eyes on her again.

She pushed herself to her feet and made her way back to a wooden footbridge she remembered running past. It led across a narrow strip of water to the island on which stood the ruined tower. She would wait there until the storm had passed.

Maybe by then Charles would already have left Wycke, so that at least she would be spared the ordeal of suffering his dismissal in person.

Stumbling over a large piece of masonry half hidden by nettles alerted her to the fact she was nearing her goal. She lifted her head, brushing back the streamers of wet hair clinging to her face. The tower stood defiantly amidst the mounds of crumbling stones, all that remained of what might once have been an impressive set of fortifications. It still possessed a door, though it was almost completely obscured with a tangled growth of ivy. Grabbing the iron ring that served as a latch, Heloise turned it and pushed with all her strength.

The door yielded by perhaps two feet, grating over the stone-flagged floor within. She squeezed inside, grateful to have found shelter so quickly. It was dry inside, though almost pitch-black. Only the faintest glimmer of light filtered in from a source far above her head. It originated from the head of a wooden staircase, set into the outer wall of the tower.

She wrinkled her nose at the smell of decay that hung in the air. What was she doing in this dark, dirty ruin, when she could be sitting before a nice warm fire in her pretty sitting room, sipping hot chocolate? She could at least be comfortable, even if she would not feel any less miserable.

She wrapped her arms round her waist as a shiver racked her body. The rain had soaked right through her dress and flimsy indoor shoes in a matter of seconds. Charles would think she was an idiot for running in here instead of returning to the house.

Well, she
was
an idiot! She had been told as much for as long as she could remember. She sniffed. But the most foolish thing she had ever done was fall in love with a man that even a child could see should never have married so far beneath him!

And the worst of it was she had no right to admit she was miserable because he did not love her. Love was never supposed to have been part of the bargain they had made.

She wiped her hand across her face, not sure if it was rain or tears that were running down her cheeks, as a gust of wind blew in through the partially open door. She retreated from the storm, deeper into the gloom, and felt a sharp stab of pain in her shin as she stumbled over a broken chair which was lying on its side next to a battered wooden trunk.

Perhaps she would be better off up on the next floor, where it was a bit lighter. And there might not be so much rubbish lying about, she thought, making for the stairs. There was a metal railing fixed into the wall, onto which she clung as she tentatively began to climb. After only a few steps the air began to feel fresher, and as her head came onto a level with the upper floor, she saw that the room was indeed a great improvement on the rubbish tip the ground
floor had become. Though the floor was a bit dusty, there were several pieces of quite sturdy-looking furniture, arranged to face a floor-to-ceiling window which, though grimy, was fully glazed.

She was just congratulating herself for making the decision to explore, when without warning the step upon which she had just placed her foot gave way with a sharp crack. Her foot went straight through, and if she had not been clinging to the handrail she would have fallen. Shaking with shock, she pulled her leg carefully up through the splintered tread.

Then realised, with horror, that it was not just her body that was shaking. The whole staircase was quivering under her weight.

And then, with a sound that reminded her of the ship's timbers creaking as the craft had plunged its way across the Channel, the whole structure parted company from the wall.