Читать книгу: «The Complete Regency Bestsellers And One Winters Collection», страница 20
She was a woman who was said to have killed his cousin and got away with it, the whispered gossip of society following her every step. She would be forever ostracized and dismissed. He breathed out with a heavy force of air, for years of being a rolling stone had worn him away, homeless and searching, the shadows now thick harbingers of all he had become. He needed the security of a warm and easy home. He needed goodness and humanity and mercy to heal his demons, crouched now closer than ever. Taylor’s Gap had been a warning of his precarious state of mind and he knew he had to be more careful for with only a little push he might lose the touchstones altogether.
He opened a drawer on a small cabinet beside his bed and took out a box. A golden timepiece lay inside. His brother’s. Stopped at the moment of his death. The claws of grief had him standing and he made his way to the seat by the window to watch the heavens, a distant glimmer of light claiming the darkness to the east as dawn finally broke.
Alone. For so long now. The burden of it all made worse by his need for an heir. He swore as the hallowed legends of the Hawkhurst family wrapped around his chest so tightly he found it hard to move. The scent of violets felt close and his leg ached in the early morning cold.
Chapter Five
‘No, Papa, you have to eat your breakfast.’
Aurelia had had three hours’ sleep last night and she swallowed down irritation as her father refused to open his mouth, her eyes straying to the clock on the mantel. Eight o’clock already. She hoped Mr Rodney Northrup would not come calling until well into the afternoon, although she could already hear Leonora preparing herself for his visit.
‘I want to read, Lia. I want to sit and read.’ His hand came out and she smiled when warm fingers curled into her own. It had been two years since the father they had known had been largely swallowed up by a stranger that they did not, but sometimes like now there were the old glimpses of him.
‘Eat the egg, Papa, and then I will take you into the library.’
When he finally allowed her to feed him she breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Leonora has a beau coming to see her this afternoon. His name is Mr Rodney Northrup and he is a friend of Lord Hawkhurst.’ Aurelia always told him the news of the house each morning just in case he might take something in.
Prudence joined her after a few moments, her youngest sister’s face alight with anticipation, her hair a golden froth of curls.
‘Leonora says Rodney Northrup is the most handsome boy she has ever met, Lia. She says that he danced with her all night and sat close beside her in the carriage on the way home. She also mentioned that you had had a waltz with the menacing Lord Hawkhurst. Could you not have refused him?’
‘Hawkhurst?’ Her father spluttered the name. ‘Charles knew Hawkhurst?’
‘Indeed, Papa, he did.’
Prudence’s eyes widened. ‘Did Papa just understand us, Lia?’
Aurelia waited to see if her father would say more, but silence seemed to have claimed him again as he sat and fiddled with a spoon and a fork.
‘There are glimmers of comprehension still, Pru, although we have to expect that they will become fewer and further between, but enough of all this for now. Tell me, what is Leonora wearing today?’ The topic distracted her sister completely and as she talked excitedly about a silk gown trimmed with lace, Aurelia wandered her own pathway of thoughts.
Would Stephen Hawkhurst accompany Rodney Northrup? She hoped that he would not. Please, God, let him not come, she prayed over and over, jolted from her musings as her sister asked a question.
‘Did the invitation to Lady Lindsay’s country party include Harriet and me?’
‘As you have not even come out yet I should doubt it very much!’
‘But we are almost seventeen, Lia. Could we not at least plan a time when we should be able to accompany you to such things? We could borrow the older gowns Leonora no longer fits. It won’t be expensive.’
The plaintive tone in her voice had Aurelia taking a breath. When would it ever be easy? The silks were beginning to pay, but their debts were still substantial.
She should be at the warehouse now, sorting through fabric, but this visit by Cassandra Lindsay’s brother meant that she needed to be at home today, chaperoning her sisters as there was nobody else to do it.
As she closed her eyes the exhaustion she had felt last night was there again this morning so, after finishing her father’s leftover breakfast, she poured herself a glass of milk. If she became ill then the whole game was lost. One mistake and her father’s second cousin would be in to claim Braeburn House, leaving them homeless and penniless.
The horror of such a thing happening was not even to be considered and she stood to help her father back to the library. He did not understand what he read any more, but he enjoyed holding the books. She would instruct his maid to keep him there until after the visitors had gone, influenza giving her a good excuse for his absence.
Rodney Northrup was accompanied by his sister and they arrived well into the afternoon.
They were all in the downstairs salon when they heard the sound of a carriage stopping. Prudence ran to the window to be roundly growled at by Leonora who wanted everything to be simply perfect. Harriet rolled her eyes at Aurelia as they all took their seats again and listened to the approaching voices.
He was not with them! Relief flooded into Aurelia’s whole body. Hawkhurst had not come with his golden eyes, night-dark hair and menacing certainty. She unclenched her fists, removed her glasses and found herself smiling as Cassandra Lindsay and Rodney Northrup were shown into the room by John.
‘I hope we did not keep you waiting at all.’
‘You are right on time, Lady Lindsay,’ Aurelia returned, her sentiment not echoed in the face of both Prudence and Harriet.
‘Oh, please call me Cassie. All of my friends do.’
Without waiting for a reply she clasped Leonora’s hands next. ‘Rodney has been most keen to come today, my dear, and with you looking so pretty in pink I can well see why. Your two sisters mirror you in their pastel hues.’ She waited as Aurelia introduced the twins, their curly blond hair catching the light from the window.
‘I did not realise your sisters were almost all of the same age, Mrs St Harlow.’
‘Prudence and Harriet are nearly seventeen. They will come out next Season.’ Aurelia did not quite feel comfortable using Lady Lindsay’s first name and so did not add anything else at all.
‘And your father?’
‘Is indisposed at the moment with the influenza. He is in bed and has been for the past few days.’
‘Then let us hope he makes a good recovery with no lingering bad effects.’
In answer Aurelia smiled, the lies falling bald into the room between them. It had been so long since any stranger had set foot in Braeburn House and the need for lies made everything dangerous. Her eyes strayed to the clock. How long did one of these visits usually last for? She hoped it might be quick.
‘I visited Mrs St Harlow and her sisters yesterday with Rodney, Hawk. Aurelia St Harlow is…unusual.’
Cassie’s statement made both men turn from their seats in the corner of the St Auburn library.
‘She wore the same dress we saw her in at your ball, which was interesting, though she had done away with the glasses. Her eyes are the most surprising of colours. Different shades,’ she continued as neither her husband nor Stephen spoke. ‘I wonder why she hides herself beneath yards and yards of shapeless black bombazine.’
Nat began to smile. ‘What are you trying to tell us, Cassie?’
‘Secrets linger in Mrs St Harlow’s eyes like ghosts and she is careful with every single thing that she says. Charles, of course, was difficult, so that may be part of it. But there are other things, as well. The same servant who greeted us at the carriage after the ball last night took our coats, provided us with tea and showed us out.’
‘You think they are short of money?’ Hawkhurst made the observation.
‘The house is furnished well and is one of the prettiest properties in all of Mayfair, so that possibility seems remote. There was an odd sound whilst we were there, though. A howling if I had to name it. Mrs St Harlow said that they had just taken over the care of a small puppy and were trying to train the animal. Her sisters looked less than comfortable with the explanation, however, and I got the feeling they were relieved to see us go. Not Leonora, of course. Rodney and she existed in a space all of their own and I have never seen my brother so happy.’
‘Is it wise to encourage him, do you think?’ Nat asked the question.
‘You refer to Mrs St Harlow’s past, no doubt, and the unfortunate accident at Medlands.’
‘It was widely known that they were not happy. Charles had apparently said something of his wife expressing her desire for his early demise not long before he died. His friends testified that she harassed and badgered him all of the time, a woman who was never content with all the gifts that he was showering upon her. By all accounts from the London jewellers and suchlike, there were many.’
‘Which friends?’ Stephen joined in the conversation.
‘Freddy Delsarte and his cronies were amongst their number, if I recall.’
‘Delsarte waylaid Mrs St Harlow at the ball. She had bruises on her wrist from his grip.’
‘Perhaps he is another of her disenchanted lovers, then. The parties they held at Medlands were notorious.’ Nat used a tone that was unusual. Stephen had heard the same cadence when information was being extracted from a difficult informant, the undercurrents of deception held within.
‘I thought it brave of her to even attend, Hawk.’ Cassie’s voice resonated with a definite query.
‘She has three sisters to marry off. That would make a warrior out of any woman.’ Hawkhurst remembered her antics above Taylor’s Gap.
‘Yet she makes no effort at all to give her side of the story. If she was pardoned by the courts, she must be innocent.’
‘Or she had a good lawyer,’ Nathaniel interjected and Stephen could hear his impatience with the whole thing. ‘Charles was a man who none of us liked and Mrs St Harlow is a woman whom society detests. Perhaps they suited each other entirely.’
‘I don’t think I detest her,’ Cassie interrupted. ‘I think, under other circumstances, we might have been friends. You had a waltz together, Hawk. What do you make of her character?’
She kisses well and goes to pieces on the smallest of caresses.
He wondered what would be said should he voice such things and remained quiet.
‘I barely know her.’ Stephen did not wish to be drawn into Cassandra’s wiles by admitting more and when the conversation meandered on to other topics, he was pleased.
On Monday afternoon, despite willing himself not to, Hawk found himself in the park watching for the conveyance containing Aurelia St Harlow and her father. Why he did not just dismiss the woman from his notice was beyond his understanding but there it was, logic lost beneath a will that had forgotten what was good for him.
He did not have long to wait before they came, Aurelia in her black bombazine with a matching hat and her father tucked in beside her in the open landau. She chatted and laughed, the driver on the front box dressed in the livery of the stables complex in Davies Mews and the horses a well-matched pair of greys.
The senior Beauchamp must be a gifted conversationalist, Stephen thought, as he caught her laughter on the wind, for he had never seen Aurelia St Harlow look so animated. He hated the way his body responded to the sound and bit down in irritation.
Below this thought, however, another one less generous tumbled, born from his years of observing people closely, he supposed, and from a lifetime of finding the wrong in things.
He could not see her father’s lips moving in the spaces when his daughter did not speak and though he craned forward to watch more closely as they returned around the path for a second time, he was beginning to get the feeling that the gaiety of this carriage ride was a sham.
For whom? His eyes took in various lords and ladies gracing the park, the busiest time of the day, and although other conveyances slowed down to speak to those who might hail them, the Beauchamp carriage maintained a steady speed and a one-sided conversation for three whole passes around.
Then it simply left, gliding through the gates with all the grace of a completed outing, the horses perfectly in time and undoubtedly barely stretched.
Would Aurelia St Harlow never stop surprising him and why would she be bent on such a show?
Rodney Northrup chose that moment to saunter over towards him. The lad looked happier than he had looked for a long while and Hawk guessed his joyous admiration of Miss Leonora Beauchamp to have some hand in such newly found cheerfulness.
‘Lord Hawkhurst. I have not seen you here before at this hour of the day. You have just missed Mrs St Harlow and her father. They left not more than a brace of minutes ago.’
Stephen decided to play along. ‘I had heard they frequented the park on a Monday. I expect you were here to catch sight of the sister…Leonora, is it not?’
‘Oh, Miss Leonora never accompanies them. It is always just Mrs St Harlow and her father.’
‘I see,’ Stephen returned. And he did.
With only the two of them in the carriage no one would stop to talk. Curious acquaintances would be a danger to any hidden secret and as Aurelia so religiously rebuffed anyone who might offer more than a glance, she and her father stayed safe from closer attention. Was Braeburn House entailed? No one had seen Richard Beauchamp in any company save that of his daughter in years. Could Aurelia St Harlow have kept any intimation of her father being ill a secret to protect the inheritance of her three unmarried sisters? Such a shield was exactly the sort of thing he knew she might have held on to, safeguarding any change detrimental to her siblings’ chance of a good marriage. Braeburn House was a prosperous address and the affluent and moneyed of the ton would easily be impressed.
He wished then that he might have stepped forwards and seen what it was she would have done. Part of him imagined the driver to be instructed by her to merely run down anyone who had the effrontery to approach them. Hawkhurst swallowed back chagrin and listened to Rodney.
‘Cassie said that You should be receiving an invitation to her party and that you were to make sure you come. You have missed many of her soirées, she said, and she wants you to be at this one.’
Normally he had no interest in such gatherings and avoided them like the plague, but she had mentioned the same celebration to Mrs St Harlow at his ball and by her account the invitation had been accepted.
He shrugged and looked away, watching as other carriages pulled up and down the concourse and wishing he might see the only one that had caught his attention return.
Aurelia had seen Hawkhurst standing against a gate on the path on the far side of the park. She knew it was he by his stance and the breadth of his shoulders and by an awareness that disturbed every part of her no matter what distance lay between them.
Nerves had made her more animated than she usually was as his eyes had followed the coach, once, twice, three times around the track. He had spoken to no one as he had observed them, but his indolence belied a quieter interest. She made certain that she had turned her head away from him each time they had come closer, not wanting to see his eyes shadowed with questions.
Rodney Northrup had approached him right at the end of her time there, his happy uncomplicated demeanour such a direct contrast to Stephen Hawkhurst’s complexity.
Papa had spoken only occasionally, a man who would loathe such a spectacle of deception were he to know of it. She was only pleased he did not close his eyes and sleep as he did now for much of the time at home—his way, she supposed, of dealing with a world he no longer had any comprehension of. Or howl at something that frightened him.
The muscles in her cheeks ached from fixing a smile with such an unrelenting pressure and she bit down upon worry. Every week she hoped that they would not be waylaid by some well-meaning soul, some acquaintance with enough curiosity to uncover all that she sought to hide.
The walk home from the stables in Davies Mews was becoming a more harried pathway each time they traversed it. She could not be sure that her father could manage any of it for much longer, his gait more laboured and slower every Monday afternoon.
Tears pricked the back of her eyes and she willed them away, useless emotional baggage that she had dispensed with years ago. She was the only one who might see this family through to a secure future and with the growing profits she was garnering from the silks it would only be a matter of months before safety would be gained.
Hawkhurst carried a cane today and he had leant upon it with more than a gentle force. Had he been wounded recently or was this an older injury? A great part of her wished that she might have been able to stop and speak with him and pretend that just for a moment she was a high-born lady of consequence who would have made him a perfect wife.
Such an illusion was shattered completely when they gained the stables and the master of the books strode forwards to tell them that as the cost of an afternoon rental had just been increased he could no longer keep a carriage free if the payment was not given monthly.
So many pounds, Aurelia thought, adding the sum in her head. She still had the diamond pendant, though, and the pawnbrokers had offered her a sum that would see the charade through to at least October. By then she was certain the new lucrative contracts she had garnered would be trickling through.
‘This way, Papa,’ she encouraged her father as he turned in the wrong direction.
Uncoupling her pendant, she held it tightly in her hand, liking the feel of the warm and familiar shape of the piece against her skin. Her grandmother had given the necklace to her on her deathbed—it was a treasured family heirloom.
There was a pawnshop in the city that favoured the older style of jewellery. She would visit it tomorrow.
Chapter Six
Alexander Shavvon was unhappy as he paced up and down the small room.
‘France needs to be contained and yet all information suggests otherwise, for already Louis Napoleon has expanded into IndoChina. If Lord Palmerston is not careful the Entente Cordiale fashioned under Guizot will return to bite the hand of the one that feeds it.’
Hawkhurst was not as certain as Shavvon of the direction of Francophile expansionism and fault. ‘If I were determining policy, I would be keeping an eye on Prussia and the Germanic states, sir. All of my reading suggests the prospect of a United Germany, which would be a lot harder to contain than a beaten France.’
‘Your uncle, of course, might not agree with you, Lord Hawkhurst. He knew first-hand the might of Napoleon and if we had not defeated the dictator at Waterloo, England would be a very different place now.’
‘Perhaps it is becoming that different place already.’
‘Talk to Alfred and see just what it is France is capable of and you might change your mind. You are too young to remember the fear engendered by our nearest neighbour in the Peninsular Campaigns, but it was a hit-and-miss affair as to which way it went and the British would never again wish for the like.’
Such stilted discourse made Stephen wary and he knew that his days in the clutches of the British Service were numbered. He had ceased to be a citizen of the brokered threat Lord Palmerston seemed to endlessly foster and all he wanted was the chance to head to one of his remote family estates and live life.
Well and quietly, walking into a future with nothing tied back into the past. Nothing sordid and chancy and dissolute!
He breathed out hard as the face of Aurelia St Harlow came to mind. She wandered into his dreams at night, too, now, when his mind was least resistant and the call of her body against his at its most apparent, the generous heaviness of her bosom well remembered. Swearing under his breath, he concentrated again on what was being said by Shavvon.
‘Frederick Delsarte and his mob have been seen hanging around a warehouse in Park Street in the Limestone Hole area and they have known associations in Paris. It seems they may be using the legalised trade of cloth to send and receive information.’ He handed Stephen a sheet of paper with the details on it. ‘Those who are helping him do so probably have some French connection and imagine themselves hard done by by the English Government. If we can catch them in the act, we can string them up, quietly, of course, and with as little public awareness as possible.’
Hawkhurst nodded. It was always the same, this game of espionage played out behind the scenes of a virtuous and wholesome society, the dark secrets of corruption snapped off before they had the chance to taint it.
His world.
Sometimes he wondered if he would ever truly be able to struggle back up into the one people like Elizabeth Berkeley inhabited, untouched by any iniquity.
‘If you can manage to get into the channel of communication, let me know before you shut it down.’
‘So you have time to turn the other cheek?’
Shavvon began to laugh. ‘You are the best agent we have, Hawkhurst. I don’t want you lost.’
Lost like his brother and all the others he had started with. For a while now Stephen had wished the end would come, quickly, in the shape of a bullet, neither painful nor lingering, just a true clear shot and then nothing. If Shavvon recognised such ennui, he did not say so as he turned to the pile of papers on his desk. Expedience had the look of a careless nonchalance and Hawkhurst was so very tired of it, this lie of his life, foundering in the shallows of evil.
‘One day soon I will not be back.’ The words were quietly said as he let himself out.
Henry Kerslake was late and worry gnawed as Aurelia waited for him. It was cold and what light there was would soon begin to fade. If he did not come within the half hour she would leave for home, for her father had been ill this morning and she was wanting to see that the fever he had woken with had not worsened.
Her teeth bit at her nails and she fisted her fingers when she realised what she was doing. Agitation had marked many areas of her body now, she thought—her hands, her stomach with a constant nervous ache and her face, the tension written deeply into lines of ugliness.
Beautiful. Hawkhurst had called her such, but he was a man who had wanted more when he said it and what male would not use falsity in such a situation?
She shook her head hard at this errant nonsense for where was such an idea leading? She had been mortified by both her reaction to his kiss at Taylor’s Gap and her heightened sense of Hawkhurst as he had sat with her in the carriage. Charles’s betrayals were stretched thin across the veneer she had so successfully erected and she knew that any break would destroy everything in the same way that it had once before.
The sweet smell of opium smoke curling from a pipe and Charles’s eyes upon her, glittering bright and furtive. She had allowed him the right to pull the gown away from her breasts so that flesh spilled out into the air, cold in the autumn evening. She had trusted her husband, relied on his honour and his principles, the band of gold around his finger denoting all that she had promised him.
Foolish false troths. It had taken her only one night to understand his depravity.
The noise of feet made her turn and, as the door opened, she saw that Henry Kerslake had finally arrived. He looked distracted and tired, the large bag he carried over his shoulder rubbing a dent into his over-cloak.
‘The jacquards took longer than I had imagined they would to sample. Although the punched cards make the patterns more intricate, they are slow to set up.’ Opening the buckles on the bag, he brought out a swathe of cloth, flowers and leaves that owed much to the influence of Japan spilling forth.
‘Godwin had his hand in the design, Mrs St Harlow, but I have strengthened the colours myself. What do you think?’
‘The stylised motifs are…unusual, though the Oriental taste is gaining in attraction.’ To her eye the shades were too lurid and the shapes too foreign, but her own Louis schemes garlanded in blossom were falling in demand and she knew that they had to widen their range.
‘No one else in Macclesfield is doing anything like it yet, so if we hit the market quickly we will be ahead of them all.’
His sentiment heartened her. With the mooted reopening of the trade routes to Japan, interest in the East had escalated and the furniture being turned out by eminent manufacturers reflected the change. She had begun to see bamboo used in the new mass-produced chairs and tables, something silk patterns such as these ones would complement exactly and she was enough of a businesswoman to understand the necessity of diversity.
Renaissance splendour, Gothic arches, gilded rococo boiseries, French roses and now a simpler lightness from a country far from Europe. Her own designs stood alongside those from the more famous houses, but with the limited time she had to produce them she was beginning to depend on Henry and his ‘fashionable finds’ more and more. The thought concerned her, for if she lost control, everything would be forfeited.
There was nothing to be done, however, and as a woman she was bound to use a man as a front-person no matter how liberal-minded those she was doing business with purported to be. Victorian sensibilities could not be changed in a moment, even though the rumblings of emancipation were beginning to be heard more plainly.
Not for her, though, the luxury of free hours to pursue a lofty cause all in the name of womanhood. Time was her enemy and had been for a long while, though she was becoming most adept at using it more effectively.
‘Put the Little Street Mill into the production of the Japanese-patterned silks and keep the Chester Street Mill producing the French-styled roses.’
Henry Kerslake did not look pleased. ‘You might regret not moving more quickly upon this matter, Mrs St Harlow.’
Irritation bloomed at his criticism, but the relationship between her and Henry Kerslake had been foundering just as certainly as their profits had been increasing. Another few months and she could sell the business at a good advantage. Aurelia was more and more desperate for that time to come.
‘I met a man on the way in who was asking questions about the sort of cargo we bring in here each month. I told him what I knew and he went on his way.’
‘Did he talk to others around here as well?’
‘I don’t know.’
Aurelia felt rattled by the news. A few of her designs had gone missing lately as had a book of invoices detailing payments pending, the new contracts secured detailed in pounds and pence. Could this person have had something to do with that? Perhaps another mill was on the prowl to see what it was they were to produce next. They had been lucky in their choices of design so far and mayhap this had been noticed by a less successful venture.
Some mills had failed even in the four years she had been in business, their warehouses empty and still, the slumps and booms that were so much a part of the English silk industry taking their toll. She wished there could have been someone to talk over these problems with, someone to give her guidance and advice, but her father’s mind had long since dwelt in a place where no one could reach him and her three sisters’ world encompassed none of this. Realising she was again biting her nails, Aurelia stopped. She would place sturdier locks on all of the doors and pray that such measures would be sufficient deterrent.
Henry Kerslake was not quite finished, however. ‘The stranger had that unmistakable air of wealth about him, if you ask me, Mrs St Harlow.’
Shock reverberated through her. ‘What did he look like?’
‘Tall with dark hair and he moved in the way of a man who knows exactly where he is going.’
Lord Hawkhurst? Could it possibly be him? Had he been making enquiries about her that had led him back here? Danger made her breath shallow, although underneath some other small feeling blossomed quietly. She might see him again. He could be here right now, outside somewhere watching. Her glance went to the window, but there was only stillness, the grounds around the warehouse empty.
Fingering the silk on the table before her, she tried to settle back into some sort of work, but the colours and patterns swam into nothingness and all she could see were the golden eyes of a man who had begun to invade her night-time thoughts.
She was therefore pleased when Henry looked at his timepiece and packed up his things, in preparation for a meeting in town with one of the suppliers of buttons.
‘I have left orders in the box for you to sort through, Mrs St Harlow. Dickens & Jones want extras of the fine, blue, handmade shawls for their shop in Regent Street. Perhaps we might need to employ more staff at Chester Street to cope?’
Aurelia winced. Another problem that she would have to deal with quickly. Was there no end to her worries today? She was pleased when Kerslake left and a rare silence enfolded her.
