The Penniless Lords

In want of a wealthy wife

Meet Daniel, Gabriel, Lucien and Francis. Four lords, each down on his fortune and each in need of a wife of means.

From such beginnings, can these marriages of convenience turn into something more treasured than money?

Don’t miss this enthralling new quartet by Sophia James

Read Daniel, Gabriel, Lucien and Francis’s stories in

Marriage Made in Money

Marriage Made in Shame

Marriage Made in Rebellion

Marriage Made in Hope

All available now!

Author Note

I’ve loved writing The Penniless Lords series. Each of the four lords has his own particular set of problems, and Francis St Cartmail, the damaged Earl of Douglas, is no exception.

Hounded by his past, and lonely with it, Francis finds his world turned around when he saves a woman from drowning in the Thames.

Lady Sephora Connaught is suffocating in life even before she falls into the river, and when a stranger pulls her from certain death it’s as if she has crossed a threshold and everything has changed.

Christine, who is Lucien’s sister, is next. I have written her story as a novella for a forthcoming Christmas anthology.

Marriage Made in Hope
Sophia James

www.millsandboon.co.uk

SOPHIA JAMES lives in Chelsea Bay, on Auckland, New Zealand’s North Shore, with her husband, who is an artist. She has a degree in English and History from Auckland University and believes her love of writing was formed by reading Georgette Heyer in the holidays at her grandmother’s house. Sophia enjoys getting feedback at sophiajames.co.

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Contents

Cover

The Penniless Lords

Author Note

Title Page

About the Author

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

London—1815

Lady Sephora Connaught knew that she was going to die. Right then and there as the big black horse bucked on the bridge and simply threw her over the balustrade and down into the fast-running river.

Her sister screamed and so did others, the sounds blocked out by the water as she hit it, fright taking breath and leaving terror. She exhaled from pure instinct, but still the river came in, filling her mouth and throat and lungs as the cloth of her heavy skirt drew her under to the darkness and the gloom. She could not fight it, could not gain purchase or traction or leverage.

Ripping at her riding jacket, she tried to loosen the fastenings, but it was hopeless. There were too many buttons and beneath that too many stays, too much boning and layers and tightness, all clinging and covering and constricting.

This was it.

The moment of her end; already the numbness was coming, the pain in her leg from hitting the balustrade receding into acceptance, the light from above fading as she sank amongst the fish and the mud and the empty blackness. It was over. Her life. Her time. Gone before she had even lived it. Her hands closed over her mouth and nose so that she would not breathe in, but her lungs were screaming for air and she couldn’t deny them further.

A movement above had her tipping her head, the disturbance of the water felt more than seen as a dark shape came towards her. A man fully dressed, his hand reaching out even as he kicked. She simply watched, trying to determine if he could be real, here in the depths of the Thames, here where the light was failing and all warmth was gone.

* * *

God, the girl had simply given up, floating there like a giant jellyfish, skirts billowing, hair streaming upwards, skin pale as moonlight and eyes wide.

Why did the gentlemen of the ton not teach their daughters to swim, for heaven’s sake? If they had, she might have made a fist of her own salvation and tried to strike out for the surface. Anything but this dreadful final acceptance and lack of fight. His mouth came tight across her own as he gave her breath, there in the dark and cold, the last of his air before he kicked upwards, fingers anchored around her arm. At least she did not struggle, but came with him like a sodden dead weight, the emerald hue of a riding jacket the only vivid thing about her.

And then they were up into the sun and the wind and the living, bouncing like corks in the quick-cut current of the river, her legs wound about his like a vice, one hand scratching down the side of his face and drawing blood as she tried to grab him further.

‘Damn it. Keep still.’ His words were rasped out through shattered breath and lost in open space.

But she would not calm, the flailing panic pulling him under, her eyes wide with terror. Swearing again, he jammed her hard in against him and made for the bank whilst keeping with the current, glad when he saw others running down the pathways to reach them in the mire of sludge and slurry.

The mud from Hutton’s Landing came back in memory, falling across him, pulling him down, thick as molasses, heavy as oil, and he began to shiver. Violently. It was everywhere here, too, around his legs, across the stockings on his feet, staining the full skirts of the girl, her body pinned to his own like a well-fitting glove and taking any last remaining warmth.

He needed to be gone, to be home, away from the prying eyes of others and the pity he so definitely did not want. She was retching now violently, water streaming from her mouth as oxygen took the place of the putrid contents of the Thames. She was shaking, too. Shock, he supposed, feeling his own gathering panic. He was glad when a stranger reached out to lift her from him as Gabriel Hughes and Lucien Howard joined him on the bank.

Others were there also, an older woman screaming and a younger girl telling her to be quiet. Men as well, their eyes sharply observing him as he lumbered out, the old scar no doubt in full blaze across his face.

He could not hide anything. The shaking. The anger. The hatred. He was caught only in limbo, in memory and in mud.

‘Come, Francis. We will take you home.’

Gabriel’s voice came through the fury, his hand slipping around the sodden sleeve of his friend’s coat as he led him off. The girl was crying now, but Francis did not look back. Not even once.

* * *

She couldn’t stop the sobbing or quell her fear, even as those around her shouted out orders to fetch a carriage, to find some blankets, to get a doctor and to staunch the flow of blood on her right shin.

She was alive and breathing. She was sitting on the solidness of soil and earth, perched in the thin sun of a late spring afternoon on a pathway near the Thames with all the life she thought she had lost now back in front of her.

‘We will get you home, Sephora, right now. Richard has gone to find a carriage and a runner has been sent to make certain your father is informed of what has happened here.’

Her mother’s voice sounded odd, strained by worry, probably, and abject fright.

Sephora closed her eyes and tried to push things back and away. She could barely contemplate what had happened and she felt removed somehow, from the people, from the river bank, even from the earth upon which she sat.

Shock, perhaps? Or some other malady that came from swallowing too much water? The horror of it all swirled in, taking away the colour of the day, and her skin felt clammy and odd. Then all she knew was darkness.

* * *

She woke during the night in the Aldford town house on Portman Square, the candle next to her bed throwing shadows across the ceiling and a fire blazing in the hearth.

Maria, her sister, sat close on a chair, eyes closed and a shawl pushed away from her nightgown because of the warmth. Asleep. Sephora smiled and stretched. She felt better, more herself. She felt warm and safe and whole. There was a bandage around the bottom of her right leg and it hurt to push against it, but apart from that... She did a quick inventory of her body and found everything else in good working order and painless.

The memory of a mouth across hers in the water came back like a punch to the stomach. Her saviour had given her air when she was without it, ten feet under in the dark, the last of his own store and precious. Her heart began to race violently and she turned, her sister coming awake at the small movement, eyes focusing as she leaned forward.

‘You look better, Sephora.’

‘How did I look before?’ Her voice was raspy and stretched. A surprising sound, that, and she coughed.

‘Half-dead.’

‘The horse...?’

‘He bolted on the bridge and bucked you off. A bee sting, the groom said afterwards, and a bad one. Father has sworn he’ll sell the stallion for much less than he paid for it, too, as he wants nothing more to do with it.’

Privately Sephora was glad that she would never need to see the steed again.

‘Do you remember anything of what happened?’ Her sister’s tone had a new note now, one of interest and speculation.

‘I remember someone saved me?’

‘Not just any someone either. It was the Earl of Douglas, Francis St Cartmail, the black sheep of the ton. It’s been the talk of the town.’

‘Where was Richard?’

‘Right behind where you were on the bridge, frozen solid in fright. I don’t think he can swim. Certainly he did not tear off his boots as the earl did and simply dive in.’

‘St Cartmail did that?’

‘With barely a backward glance. The water was fast flowing there and the bridge is high, but he most assuredly did not look in any way concerned as he vaulted on to the narrow balustrade.’

‘And dived in?’

‘Like a pirate.’ Her sister began to smile. ‘Like a pirate with his face slashed by a scar and his long dark hair loose and flowing down his back.’

Sephora remembered nothing of his countenance, only the touch of warm lips against her own, intimate and forbidden under the murky waters of the Thames.

‘Was he hurt?’

‘He was when he got out of the river because you had scratched his face. There were three vivid lines down his other cheek and they were running with blood.’

‘But someone helped him?’

‘Lords Wesley and Ross. They did not stay around, though, for by the time he had got to the pathway the Earl of Douglas looked even sicker than you did.’

Francis St Cartmail, the fifth Earl of Douglas. Sephora turned the name over in her mind. So many swirling rumours about him in the ton, a lord who lived on the seedier side of rightness and amongst an underworld of danger.

She had only ever seen him once and at a distance in the garden of the Creightons’ ball two months prior. There he had been entwined in the arms of a woman who was known for her questionable morals and loose ways, rouged lips turned to his in supplication. Miss Amelia Bourne, standing with Sephora, had been quick to relay the gossip that surrounded the earl, her eyes full of infatuation and interest.

‘Douglas is beautiful, is he not, even with that scar and though he is seen less and less frequently in social company these days, when he does appear there is always gossip. I, for one, should not listen to any such slander if a man could kiss me like that...?’ Amelia let the rest slide into query as she laughed.

Sephora had returned home after that particular ball and dreamed of what it must feel like to be kissed with such complete abandon, wild beauty and open lustfulness.

Well, now she almost knew in a way.

Shaking away that heated thought, she sat up. ‘Is there something to drink?’

Her sister poured her a full glass of sweetened lemonade with mint and rosemary leaves on top and helped her to sip it.

‘Where is Richard?’

‘He was in the library last evening with Father, trying to smooth down the gossip and contain the rumour that is rife around the ton.’

‘Rumour?’ Sephora could not quite understand what was said. Gesturing to Maria that she had had enough of the lemonade, she lay back.

‘You were wrapped around Douglas like a blanket from head to toe as he came to the bank and it seemed to us as if you did not wish to let go. Richard had to pry open your fingers from St Cartmail’s personage.’

‘I was drowning.’

‘You were wanton. The front of your jacket had been ripped open and the material on your bodice was gaping.’ This summary was accompanied by a hearty laugh. ‘And it suited you. You looked magnificently alive.’

Sephora ignored that nonsense completely. ‘Where is Mama?’

‘In bed after ingesting a stiff toddy. She should be out until the morrow so you shan’t have to deal with her worry. The one thing she did keep saying over and over was that at least you and Richard Allerly had announced your betrothal so you were not entirely ruined.’

‘It was hardly my fault the horse reacted so violently.’

‘Mama would say drowning might have been altogether more circumspect given the intimate clutch your rescuer held you in and your dreadful state of undress.’

Sephora smiled. ‘You have always exaggerated events, Maria, but thank you for staying here with me at least. It is a comfort.’

Her sister took her hand in her own, the soft warmth of her grip familiar. ‘You have lost Richard’s diamond ring in the incident. I do not think he knows this fact yet and will probably not be well pleased.’

‘It was always too big and I saw the exact pattern in Rundell’s when I was in the shop a few weeks ago so it shouldn’t be too difficult to replace.’

Maria laughed. ‘Just like Richard to settle for a cheap stock item, Sephora, when you plainly deserve so much more.’

‘I was happy with it.’

‘I doubt Francis St Cartmail would be so stingy with his newfound money were he to be wed. It is said he returned from the Americas as a wealthy man made rich from the striking of gold. He looked awfully sick after your rescue, though, almost falling over in fact with...a sort of shaking panic. I hope he is recovered.’

Sephora remembered that suddenly, the bone-deep weariness of him as he had struggled the last few yards through the mud. ‘Was he hurt anywhere else?’

‘Apart from your scratches to his face, you mean?’

When she nodded, Maria went on.

‘Not that I could see. I wondered why the earl did not stay to receive the adulation of those who had observed the rescue, though, even given his questionable reputation. It was a fine and daring thing he did and the water is deep there in the middle and cold. Richard was standing next to you, of course, with his thousand-yard stare and his implacable credentials. Perhaps that is what put Francis St Cartmail off?’

‘I don’t even remember Richard being there at all. I know he was on the horse beside me, I recall that, but after...’

‘Douglas and his two friends were walking the other way when you screamed. They had just got to the bridge.’

Dark hair and dark clothes and the feel of knotted skin under her fingers as she had reached for him and held on.

Somehow those few moments seemed more real to Sephora than anything else in her entire life. A reaction, she supposed, to her near drowning and the fright of it, for nothing truly dreadful had ever happened to her before. Maria was watching her carefully, the beginnings of a frown across her brow.

‘Do you ever think, Sephora, that incidents like this might happen for a reason?’

‘A reason?’

‘You have not looked happy of late and you have seemed distracted. Ever since you agreed to become Richard’s bride, come to think of it. He has all the money in the world, a beautiful house and a family who think he is stellar and that is not even taking into account his position in society, but...’ She stopped.

‘You never liked him, Maria. Ever since the start.’

‘He is pompous and self-righteous, always congratulating himself on his next achievement and his latest triumph.’

Despite herself Sephora began to laugh. ‘He does a lot of good for others...’

‘And more than good for himself,’ her sister countered.

‘He is kind to his family...’

‘And kinder to those who can aid him in his steady ascent to power within the ton.’

‘He loves me.’

Maria nodded. ‘Yes, I will give him that, but who does not adore you, Sephora? I have never yet met a soul who says a bad word of you and that includes the numerous suitors you’ve let down gently in their quest for your hand.’

‘You give me too much praise, Maria.’

Sometimes I am not nice. Sometimes I could scream with the boredom of being exactly who it is I have become. Sometimes there is another person in me just under the surface struggling for breath and freedom.

The touch of St Cartmail’s lips to her mouth, the feel of his hand across her neck, firm and forceful. The whispered shared air that he’d given her when she had held no more herself.

Douglas had lifted her into his arms like a child, as though she weighed nothing, as though he might have carried her the length of the river and never felt it. There was a certain security in the strength of a man, she thought, a protection and a magic. Richard would barely be able to lift her with his city body and thinness.

Comparisons.

Why on earth was she making them? St Cartmail was wild and worrying and unknown. She had heard he had killed a man in the Americas and got away with it.

* * *

The following morning she felt as if she had been run over by a heavy piece of machinery, the muscles that had been sore yesterday now making themselves known in a throbbing ache of pain.

Her mother’s quiet knock on the door had her turning. ‘I am so thankful to see you looking well rested, my dear, as you gave us all a terrible fright yesterday. But it is late in the morning now and Richard is here, wondering if he might just have a quick word.’

Elizabeth sat on the chair beside the bed, the heavy frown across her brow very noticeable today. ‘We could get you dressed and looking presentable while he talks with Father. It would be a good thing for you to be up and about for it pays to get back on the horse after such a fright...’ She stopped, suddenly realising just what she had said. ‘Not literally, of course, and certainly not that dreadful stallion. But normality must return and the sooner that it does the better.’

Sephora felt like simply rolling over and pulling the blankets up across herself, keeping everyone at bay. If she said she was not up to seeing Richard, would he go away or would he insist upon seeing her? He was not a man inclined to wait for anything and sometimes under the genial smile she could detect a harder irritation that concerned her.

She knew she could not stay here tucked away in the safety of her bedroom forever after such a difficulty and she also understood that to put their meeting off was only postponing the problem.

Pushing back the bedding, Sephora rose up into the morning and was glad when her maid came in to help her dress.

* * *

As Richard entered the small blue salon Sephora could see her mother hovering on the edges of her vision, just to make certain everything was proper and correct, that propriety was observed and manners obeyed.

‘My dear.’ His hands were warm when he took hers, the brown in his eyes deep today and worried. ‘My dearest, dearest girl. I am so very sorry.’

‘Sorry?’ Sephora could not quite understand his meaning.

‘I should have come after you, of course. I should not have hesitated, but I am a poor swimmer, you see, and the water there is very deep...’ He stopped, as if realising that the more he said the less gallant he appeared. ‘If I had lost you...?’

‘Well, you did not, Richard, and truth be told I am largely unharmed and almost over it.’

‘Your leg?’

‘A small cut from where I hit the stone balustrade, but nothing more. I doubt there will even be a scar.’

‘I sent a note to thank Douglas so that you should have no need for further discourse with him. I am just sorry it was not Wesley or Ross who rescued you, for they would have been much easier to thank.’

‘In what way?’ Disengaging his hands, she sat with hers in her lap. She felt suddenly cold.

‘They are gentlemen. I doubt Douglas has much of a notion of the word at all. Did you see the way he just left without discourse or acknowledgement? A gentleman would have at least tarried to make certain you were alive. At that point you barely looked it.’

Sephora remembered vomiting again and again over Francis St Cartmail as they had waded in from the deep, seawater and tears mixed across the deep brown of his ruined jacket. He wore a ring, she thought, trying to recall the design and failing. It sat on the little finger of his left hand, a substantial gold-and-ruby cabochon.

‘I took you from him at the water’s edge, Sephora. My own riding jacket suffered, of course, but at least you were safe and sound. A groom found a blanket to put around you and I sent for my carriage and marshalled all those about us into some sort of an order. Quite a fracas, really, and a fair bit of organisation to see things in order on my part, but I am glad it has turned out so well in the end.’

Sephora mused over all the things Richard had done for her, all the help and good intentions, the carriage filled with warm woollen blankets, his solicitousness and his worry so very on show.

She began to cry quite suddenly, a feeling that welled from the bottom of her stomach and swelled into her throat, a pounding, horrible unladylike howl that tore at her heart and her sense and her modesty. Unstoppable. Inexplicable. Desperate.

Her mother rushed over and took her in warm arms and Richard left the room with as much haste as he could politely manage. Sephora was glad he was gone.

‘Men never have an inkling of what to say in a time of crisis, my love. Richard was indeed wonderful with his orders and his arrangements and his wisdom. We could not have wished for more.’

‘More?’ Her one-worded question fell into silence.

He had not dived into the water after her, he had not risked his life for her. Instead he had simply watched her fall and sink, down and down into the greying dark coldness of the river without breath or hope.

Richard had done what he thought was enough and he was her betrothed. She had never met the Earl of Douglas and yet Francis St Cartmail had, without thought, jumped in to save her there amongst the frigid green depths.

She had no touchstone any more for what was true and what was not. Her life had been turned upside down by a single unselfish act into question and uncertainty and lost in the confusion of reality—these seconds, these moments, this morning with the sun coming in through wide windows and open sashes.

If Lord Douglas had not come to her, she would have been lying now instead on a cold marble slab in the family mausoleum, drowned by misadventure, the unlucky tragic Lady Sephora Connaught, twenty-two and a half and gone.

Her nails dug into the skin above her wrists, leaving whitened crescents that stung badly, and she liked the pain. It told her she was alive, but the numbness inside around her heart was spreading and there was nothing at all she could do to stop it.

Chapter Two

After the rescue at the river Francis removed his sodden jacket and lay down on the day bed in his library, closing his eyes against sickness. Everything upon him was wet, but just for this moment he needed to be still.

It always happened like this, suddenly, shockingly, placing him out of kilter with all that was around him and sending him back to other moments, other times, other places that he never wanted to remember.

Even the change of environment did not banish the panic, though it made the waiting easier here amongst his books and his throat stopped feeling quite so blocked and swollen.

‘Have a drink, Francis. Then if you do happen to die on us you will at least have the rancid filthy taste of the Thames gone from your mouth.’ Gabriel handed him a large glass of brandy filled to the rim as he sat up and took two generous sips before placing it down.

‘This has...happened before. It’s not...fatal. It’s...just damn...unpleasant.’ He was still shaking and his voice reflected it, ice in his bones and shards of glass in his head. He was so very tired.

‘Why?’ One word from Lucien, hard and angry. ‘It’s the Hutton’s Landing affair, isn’t it? That damn blunder with Seth Greenwood and somehow his death is your problem forever.’

Francis shook his head.

‘It’s the...mud.’

‘The mud?’

‘The mud that covered us. The memory comes back sometimes...and I can’t fight off the feeling.’

‘God, Francis. You went to America as one man and came back as altogether a different one. Richer, I will agree, but...altered in a way that makes you brittle and you won’t let us in to help you.’

Francis tried to concentrate, to sift through all of the extraneous matter and find out what was important.

‘Who was...she?’

‘The girl you pulled from the Thames? You don’t know?’ Lucien began to smile. ‘That was Lady Sephora Connaught, the uncrowned “angel of the ton”, the woman who every other female aspires to become like...and one who is engaged to Richard Allerly.’

‘The Marquis of Winslow. The duke’s son?’

‘His only son. The golden couple. Both sets of parents are good friends. Bride and groom-to-be have known each other since childhood and the relationship has matured into more. It will be the wedding of the year.’

Gabriel on the other side of the room was less inclined to sugar-coat it. ‘Allerly is an idiot and you know it, too, Luce, as well as being a damned coward.’

For the first time in an hour Francis felt his shivering lessen with this turn of topic. ‘How is he a coward?’

‘Winslow was there, damn it, right behind his would-be bride. He watched as that untrained horse of hers upended her over the balustrade and sent her tumbling down into the river.’

‘And he did...nothing?’

‘Well, he certainly didn’t take a leap from a high bridge into a deep and fast-running river without thinking twice. Cowering against the stonework might be a better description of his reaction. The skin on his knuckles was white from the grip.’

Lucien looked as though he found Gabriel’s description more than amusing. ‘Allerly was there soon enough though when you got her to the bank, Francis, I noticed he tried not to get mud on his new boots as he all but snatched her from you.’

‘Hardly snatched,’ Gabriel countered. ‘It did look as if the girl knew who her saviour was at least and it took the marquis a while to get her to let you go. Her bodice was ripped, too. Her beloved took a good long look at what was on offer beneath before taking off his own jacket to cover her. Sephora Connaught’s mother, Lady Aldford, looked less than pleased with him.’

For the first time in hours Francis relaxed. ‘It seems as if Lady Sephora made quite an impression on you both.’

Gabriel took up the rebuttal. ‘We are happily married men, Francis. It’s you we hope might have noticed her obvious charms.’

‘Well, I didn’t. I was shaking too much.’

He leaned back against the sofa and drew a blanket across himself before finishing the rest of the strong brandy. The name was familiar and he tried to place it.

‘Lady Sephora Connaught. How is it I know of her?’

‘She is Anne-Marie McDowell’s youngest cousin.’

Anne-Marie. He had courted her once a good many years ago, but she had died of some quick sickness before they could take the relationship to the next stage. He’d got drunk when he’d found out, so blindingly drunk he’d never made it to her funeral. Looking back, he thought his reactions had come not so much from the shock of Anne-Marie’s death but from the reminder that the grim reaper took people randomly, with no thought of age or experience or character.

The family had not been pleased by his absence though and he knew now he should have handled things with more aplomb than he had.

His right cheek ached from where Sephora Connaught had scratched him, three dark lines running from eye to chin caught in the reflection of the glass that he held. He hoped they would not fester like the wound had on the other cheek as he closed his eyes.

When he had thrown himself off the bridge today part of him had hoped he might not again surface and that he would be celebrated as a hero when he failed to reappear. Such a legacy of valour might sweeten the nightly howls of the Douglas ancestors whose portraits lined the steep stairwell as he walked to his bedroom late at night and there was some comfort in imagining it such before the truth of his life was torn apart again by gossip and conjecture.

He was alone and running from a past that kept reaching out, even here in a quiet, warm room and in the company of friends. Lifting the glass of brandy to his lips, he finished the lot.

‘You look like a man who needs to unload his demons, Francis.’ Gabriel said this, his voice close and worried. ‘Adelaide thinks you have the same appearance as I did when I first met her, swathed in secrets and regrets.’

‘How did she cure you, then?’

‘Oh, a good wife has her ways, believe me, and mine was never a woman to give up.’

Lucien joined in the conversation now. ‘It’s what you need, a woman with gumption, spirit and humour.’

‘And where do you think I shall find this paragon that you describe?’ The brandy was loosening his tongue and stilling the shakes and with the blanket about his shoulders he was finally feeling warmer and safe.

‘Perhaps you have just done so, but do not know it yet.’

Francis frowned in sheer disbelief. ‘Lady Sephora Connaught is engaged to be married to the only son of a duke. A slight impediment, would you not say, even given the fact I have not yet shared one word with her.’

‘But you will. She will have to thank you for risking your life and I am certain jumping into a dangerous freezing river must have its compensations.’

‘Is it the brandy that is making you both talk nonsense for I am damned sure that the so-called “angel of the ton” would have enough sense to keep well away from me?’

‘You paint yourself too poorly, Francis. Seth Greenwood’s cousin, Adam Stevenage, said that you had tried to save Seth. He said that you held him up out of the mud for all the hours of the day and it was the cold that killed him come the dusk.’ Lucien said this softly, but with conviction.

‘Stop.’ The word came with an anger Francis could not hide and he turned away from the glances of both his friends. ‘You know nothing of what happened at Hutton’s Landing.’

‘Then tell us. Let us help you understand it instead of beating yourself up with the consequences.’

Francis shook his head, but he could not halt the words that came. ‘Stevenage is wrong. I killed Seth with my own stupidity.’

‘How?’

‘It was greed. He wanted to leave after the first lucky strike, but I persuaded him to stay.’

‘For how long?’

‘A month or more.’

‘Thirty days?’ Lucien stood now and walked to the window. ‘Enough time for him to have changed his mind if he had wanted to. How long did you have to think about jumping into that river today?’

Francis frowned, not quite catching his drift, and Lucien went on.

‘Two seconds, five seconds, ten?’

‘Two, probably.’ He gave the answer quietly.

‘Did you think about changing your mind in those seconds?’

‘No.’

‘Well, Seth Greenwood had millions and millions of those same seconds, Francis, and neither did he. Would it have been our fault if you had jumped today and never resurfaced? Should we have languished in guilt forever because of your decision to try and rescue Lady Sephora Connaught? Are one man’s actions another man’s cross to bear for eternity if things don’t quite turn out as they should?’

Gabriel began to laugh and brought the bottle of brandy over to refill their glasses.

‘You should have taken to the law, Luce, and you to the ministry, Francis. Arguments and guilt have their own ways of tangling a man’s mind and no doubt about it. But here’s to friendship. And to all the life that’s left,’ he added as their glasses clicked together in the fading dimness of the library.

‘Thank you.’ Francis felt immeasurably better, lightened by a logic he had long since lost a hold of. He’d been mired in his guilt, it was true, stuck in the darkness like a man who had run out of hope and could not go on.

He had to move forward. He had to live again and believe that all he had lost could be found. Happiness. Joy. The energy to be true to himself.

He’d heard a voice, too, before he had jumped, from above or in his head he knew not which. A voice he knew and loved; a voice instructing him to save the girl in order to save himself and to be whole again.

God, was he going mad? Was this insanity the result of excessive introspection and guilt? Raising his glass, he drank of it deeply and thought that he had only told his friends the good half of a long and damn sordid story because the other part was too painful for anyone to ever have to listen to.

Chapter Three

Five days later his butler came into his library with a heavy frown upon his face.

‘There is a gentleman to see you, Lord Douglas. From Hastings, my lord. He has given me this.’

Walsh passed over a card and Francis looked down. Mr Ignatius Wiggins, Lawyer. ‘Show him in, Walsh.’

The man was small and dressed in unfashionable clothes of brown. He looked nervous as he fidgeted with a catch on the leather case that he held before him like a shield.

‘I am the appointed counsel of Mr Clive Sherborne, my lord, and I have come to tell you that he has been murdered, sir, in Hastings a week ago. It was quick by all accounts, a severed throat and a knife to the kidney.

Good Lord, Francis thought. He stood to digest the brutality of such an ending and thought of the deceased. He had met him only once for he’d come to the Douglas town house with his wife, a garish but handsome-looking woman of low character and poor speech. They had come with the express purpose of informing his uncle about the birth of a baby whom they insisted was his by-blow. Wiggins had accompanied them.

Lynton St Cartmail had been furious and wanted nothing to do with such a hoax. Blackmail, he’d called it, Francis remembered, as he had ordered them summarily gone.

Clive Sherborne, however, had taken the child they had brought with them in his arms, a crying-reddened baby with dark lank hair and pale skin, even as he promised that he would instruct a lawyer to call on the fourth Earl of Douglas. His voice had been gentle and sad, a man who had not looked like the type to be murdered so heinously years later and Francis wondered what had happened in the interim to make it thus.

‘Mr Sherborne had asked me to inform you of any significant events in his household, my lord, and so I am—informing you, I mean, about his death. A significant event by anyone’s standards.’

‘Indeed it is, Mr Wiggins.’ Francis wondered briefly whether the mother, Sherborne’s wife, was still alive and what had become of the girl child. He wondered why Wiggins had come back, too, given the amount of years that had passed since last being here.

‘The deceased had given me a letter, sir, in better times, you understand, a missive that was to be delivered into your hands only in the circumstances of his death, for he wanted to make certain that Anna Sherborne was...catered for. He was most adamant that I should give you this last correspondence personally, my lord, and that I should allow no other to take my stead...’

Francis remembered Wiggins distinctly, for his physical countenance looked much the same as it had. Last time he had gesticulated wildly at the screaming bundle of the unwanted newly born baby, but this time his hands were clasped tightly together, dark eyes showing an ill-disguised puzzlement mixed with fear.

‘I shall not be a party to the lies any longer, Lord Douglas. Your uncle, the fourth Earl of Douglas, Lynton St Cartmail, paid me well to keep my silence about his illegitimate daughter and I have regretted it ever since.’

‘He paid you?’

‘From his own private funds, my lord, and they were substantial. The receipts are all here.’

The horror of the lie congealed in Francis’s throat. The thought of a child, who was in effect his cousin, lost under his uncle’s profligate womanising, was so shocking he felt the hair rise along his arms. Lynton had laughed off the charade of her birth as an obscene pretension by a misguided harlot to gain money from the coffers of the Douglas estate and at twenty-two Francis had had no cause to think the old earl was being anything but truthful. He could barely believe the dreadful falsehood and struggled to listen as the lawyer went on.

‘This is the end of it, you understand, and I won’t be held responsible for the consequences. I am elderly, my lord, and trying to make my peace with the Almighty and this deception has played heavily upon my conscience for years.’

Opening his bag, he found a thick wad of documents, which he laid down on the desk. ‘This is the missive Mr Sherborne left in my care. It outlines the Douglas monies accorded to him for seeing to the child’s upbringing and also any extra amounts sent. I should like to also say that although gold can buy certain things, sir, happiness is not one of them. Unfortunately. Miss Anna Sherborne is now largely at the mercy of the borough and one who has no idea of the true circumstances of her family connections and elevation.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘It is all there, my lord, all written down in the letter, but...’

‘But?’

‘The child has been brought up without proper rule of law and although Clive Sherborne was born a gentleman he most certainly did not have the actions of one. His wife, God rest her soul, was even less upstanding than her husband. To put it succinctly, the young girl is a hoyden, unbridled and angry, and she may well need a lot more from you than the promise of some sort of temporary and transitory home.’

Francis’s head reeled, though he made an effort to think logically. ‘Then I thank you for your confidentiality and for your service, Mr Wiggins, and sincerely hope you will bring the girl here to London in the next few days for the Douglas birthright should be her own.’ He said the words quietly, the tremble of his hand the only thing belying complete and utter fury at his uncle as he paid the man off for his troubles and watched him depart.

Lynton St Cartmail’s foolish and ongoing lack of responsibility had now landed firmly on his shoulders and the covering letter the lawyer had given him felt heavy as he ripped open the seal and looked down.

Anna Sherborne was almost twelve years old. He stopped, trying to remember himself at the same age. Arrogant. Cocksure. His parents had died together a few years prior in an accident so that could have been a factor in his belligerence, but Anna Sherborne’s life had not been an easy one either and by the accounts of the lawyer she sounded...damaged.

The Damaged Douglas. That echo made him stand and walk to the window. What the hell was he to do with an almost-twelve-year-old girl? How did one handle a female of that particular age with any degree of success? God, no one had done so thus far in her life by all accounts and he did not wish to impair her further by his ignorance of the issues. His uncle must have known what would happen when he had turned his unsuitable lover and their offspring away with a good deal of financial support and an express intention never to see them again.

Well, she was his responsibility now. He’d need a governess, of course, some female relative with a firm and respectable hand to temper out all the knots and bumps expected in a wayward and abandoned child. He’d need patience, too, and honesty. And luck, he added, catching his reflection in the window.

Sephora Connaught’s nail-marks had settled somewhat on his right cheek, though they were still easily seen in the glass, three reddened lashes running from the corner of his eye.

On the other side the scar from the Peninsular Campaign blazed. He saw others looking at it often, of course he did, this mark that cut his face in half, but he’d made the conscious decision years ago not to let it define him. Still there were times... His finger marched along the pathway of injury and he felt the loss of who he had been and what was left now.

He was supposed to be accompanying Gabriel and Adelaide Hughes to a ball tonight given in honour of a friend’s father. Part of him wished he did not have to go out and be seen after the incident by the river the other day, but the more sensible part of him reasoned that if there was speculation directed at him then so be it.

A small bit of him also hoped that Lady Sephora Connaught might also be attending the ball. He wanted to take a look at her and see if what he remembered matched the truth of her countenance.

Perhaps it was Lucien’s words alluding to her as the ‘angel of the ton’ that had coloured his reminiscences, but he had begun to imagine her in a way that could only be called saintly. She’d had light hair, of that he was sure, but her face in the water had been blurred and indistinct. He did know her lips were full and shapely because he had been focused upon them as he had allowed her his breath.

An intimate thing that, he supposed, and the reason for this ridiculous but abiding interest. He had kissed a hundred woman in his life and bedded a good number, but this was the first time he had felt...what? Connected? Haunted? Aroused with such a speed it felt improper?

All of those things and none of them. Walking to his room, he turned when his valet came in to lay out his clothes for the evening and cursed his mindless and maudlin sentimentality.

Sephora Connaught was to be married forthwith to the Marquis of Winslow and he was by all terms a great and worthy catch. Still, he looked forward to seeing the elusive daughter of Lord and Lady Aldford tonight at the ball even if it was just to understand that the power of reminiscence was never as strong as the reality of a cold hard truth.

* * *

Sephora did not wish to go to the Hadleighs’ ball and she told her mother of it firmly.

‘Well, my dear, it is all very well to be nervous and of course after the events of the past week it is only proper that you should be, but you cannot hide forever and five days of being at home is enough. Richard will be there right beside you as will Maria, your father and I and, if anyone has the temerity to comment in any way that is derogatory, I am certain we shall be able to deal with them effectively.’

Her mother’s words made perfect sense, but for the first time in her life Sephora was not certain that anything would ever be all right again. She was either constantly in tears or as tired as she ever had been and the doctor her mother had called had told her ‘it was only by rejoining the heaving mass of humanity and partaking in social intercourse that she would ever get well’.

His words had left her sister in fits of laughter and even she for the first time in days had smiled properly, but when putting on her new lemon gown this evening with its ruched sleeves and silken bodice she felt dislocated and adrift.

Her leg had healed and she hardly noticed the pain of it any more, though the doctor had been adamant that she leave the bandage on for a good few more days yet. Richard had presented her with new earrings and a matching bracelet and she had worn these tonight to try and lift her spirits.

It was not working. She felt heavy and wooden and afraid and the diamonds were like a bribe for his lack of...what?

She could not bear to have him touch her, even gently or inadvertently. She had not caught his eyes properly either lest he see in the depths of them some glint of her own accusations. A coward. An impostor. A man who could not and would not protect her.

So unfair, she knew. He was unable to swim competently, as were a great many men of the ton, and he had done his utmost ever since to make certain that she was healing and happy. Large bunches of roses had arrived each day, and because of it all she would associate their smell with this dreadful time forever and hate the scent of them until her dying day.

Her dying day. That was the crux of it. She had escaped death by the margin of a whisper and could not quite come to terms with the fact. Oh, granted, she was here still, breathing, eating, sleeping, walking.

And yet...she wasn’t.

She was still under that water, trapped in her heavy clothes and in the darkness waiting to die.

Her skin crept with the thought and she shivered. She felt as if she might never truly be warm again even as the maid placed the final touches to her curled hair with a hot iron.

She looked presentable and calm when she glanced at herself in the mirror a few moments later. She looked as she always had done before any ball or social event of note: mannerly, gracious and composed. She had never been criticised for anything at all until this week, until she had clung to Francis St Cartmail in her torn and sodden riding clothes as though her life had depended on it.

Well, indeed it had. She smiled and the flush in her cheeks interested her. She seldom had high colour and just for a moment Sephora thought such vividness actually suited her, made her eyes bluer and her hair more golden. Usually her skin held the sheen of a statue cut from alabaster, like the one of the Three Graces she had seen in an art book at Lackington’s in Finsbury Square. Translucent and composed. Women untouched by high emotion or great duress.

Maria’s noisy entrance into her chamber had her looking away from her reflection.

‘The carriage is here, Mama. Papa and the marquis are waiting downstairs.’

‘Then we shall come immediately. Have you a wrap, Maria? It is cold outside and we do not want a case of the chills. Sephora, make certain you bring your warmest cloak for there is quite a wind tonight and the spring this year has a decided nip to it. After the incident at the bridge we do not wish for you to sicken, for your body’s defences will be lowered by the alarm of your accident.’

And with that they were off, bundled into the carriage full of Maria’s happy chatter and her mother’s answering interjections.

On her side of the conveyance Sephora simply held her breath, squashed as she was between her father and Richard, and wondered how long she could keep doing so before she might faint dead away. She had got to the slow count of fifty in her room before the black spots had begun to dance in front of her eyes. She did not dare to risk the same here. But still she liked the control of it, silent and hidden. A power no one could take away from her, an unbidden and unchallenged authority.

* * *

At least the ballroom was warm, she thought half an hour later, as their party made their way through the crowded rooms, this outing so far holding none of the fear she’d imagined it might.

‘You look beautiful this evening, my dearest love,’ Richard said as they took their places at the top of the room, the orchestra easily observed from where they stood. ‘Lemon and silk suits you entirely.’

‘Thank you.’ There was a tone in her voice that was foreign and displaced.

‘I hope we might have a dance together as soon as the music begins.’

Her heart began to beat a little faster, but she pushed the start of panic down. ‘Of course.’

She was coping and for that she was glad. She was managing to be just the person everybody here thought she was. No one watched her too intently, no conversation had swirled to a stop as she passed a group, no whispered conjectures or raised fans behind which innuendo could be shared. No pity.

Her betrothed’s first finger touched a drop of ornately fashioned white gold at her ear. ‘I knew they would look well on you as soon as I saw them, my love. I was planning on keeping them as a surprise until your birthday, but you looked as if a present might be the very thing needed to cheer you up. I managed to get them at a good price from Rundell’s as they have high hopes of my further ducal patronage in the future.’

‘I imagine that they do.’ She tried to keep sarcasm from the words, but wondered if she had been successful as he turned to look at her sharply. She had not used such a thing before, the poor man’s version of humour, but tonight she could not help it. The chandelier above them gave the blurred appearance of light through water and it momentarily made her take in a deep breath.

All about her was a living, moving feast of life: five hundred people, myriad colours, the scent of fine food and the offer of expensive wine. Without thought her hand lifted to a long-stemmed crystal glass on the silver platter a footman had just presented to the party and if Richard frowned at her choice he had at least the sense not to say anything.

She seldom drank alcohol, but the orgeat lemonade tonight held no allure at all. It looked like the water of the Thames somehow, cloudy, cold and indistinct. She swallowed the wine like a person finding a waterhole in the middle of an endless desiccated African desert and reached out for another. Her mother shook her head even as Richard set his bottom teeth against his top ones and tried to smile. The glint of anger in his eyes was back.

But it was so good, this quiet escape that took the edge off a perpetual panic and made everything more bearable. Even the gaudy new bracelet twinkling in the light started to have more appeal.

The beginnings of the three-point tune of a waltz filled the air around them and when her betrothed took her arm and led her into the dance she allowed him the privilege. His closeness was not the problem it would have been ten minutes earlier and she wondered if perhaps she had been too harsh on a man who after all had always loved her and had failed to learn to swim.

The feel of him was known, his short brown hair well cut and groomed, the smell of an aftershave that held notes of bergamot and musk.

‘You look very pretty, Sephora, and more like yourself.’ This time his smile was genuine and she saw in him for a moment the boy whom she had grown up with and played with, though his next words burst that nostalgic bubble completely. ‘I do think, though, that you should refrain from imbibing any more wine.’

‘Refrain when I have barely begun to feel its effect?’

‘You have had two full glasses already, my dearest heart, and you are now in some danger of flippancy.’

‘Flippancy?’ She rolled the word on her tongue and liked it. She had never been flippant. She had always been serious and composed and polite until she had fallen headlong into that river and discovered things about herself that she could no longer hide.

For just a second she thought she loathed her intended groom with such ferocity she might well indeed have simply hit him. But the moment passed and she was herself again, chastised by the impulse and made impotent by fright.

Who was that inside of her? What crouched below the quiet and ladylike bearing that was her more usual demeanour and appearance, the lemon silk in her gown, the curls in her hair, the dainty bejewelled slippers upon her feet?

She had a headache, she did, a searing terrible headache that made her sick and dizzy. Richard in a rare moment of empathy recognised the fact and led her over to a chair near the wall apart from the others and made her sit down.

‘Stay here whilst I find your mother, Sephora. You do not look well at all.’

She could only nod and watch him go, the slight form of him disappearing amongst the crowd to be replaced by a man she recognised instantly.

‘You.’ Hardly mannerly, desperately said. The sound came from her in a whisper as Francis St Cartmail stood alone in front of her.

‘I am glad to see you much recovered, Lady Sephora. I am sorry I did not stay to see to your welfare after...’ The earl stopped.

‘My drowning?’ She supplied the ending for him and he smiled. It made his face softer somehow, the scar on his left cheek curled into a smaller shape and her three scratches on his right almost disappearing into a deep dimple.

‘Hardly a drowning. More a case of getting wet, I think.’

Simple words that she needed. Words that took away the terror and the hugeness of all that had transpired. He was even looking at her with humour in his eyes. Sephora wanted him to keep on talking, but he didn’t, though the stillness that fell between them was as distinct as any conversation.

‘Thank you,’ she finally managed.

‘You are welcome,’ he returned and then he was gone, Richard in his stead with her mother, her face creased in worry and remorse.

‘I should never have let you come. I shall have a good word with the doctor after this and tell him that it was much too soon and that...’

The words rattled on, but Sephora had ceased to listen. She was safe again, she knew it.

Hardly a drowning. More a case of getting wet, I think.

She suddenly knew that Francis St Cartmail would never have let her drown, not in a million years. He would have jumped in and saved her had the depth of the water been ten feet or twenty. He would have dragged her across a current many times more dangerous or a river fifty times as wide if he had had to.

Because he could.

Because she believed that he could, this enigmatic and unusual earl with his wide shoulders and steel-strong arms.

The relief of it was so startling she could barely breathe. She smiled at the thought. Breath was the one thing she did have now here in the Hadleighs’ ballroom under thirty or more elegant chandeliers and an orchestra of violinists beating out a waltz.

She was alive and well. The spark inside her had not been quenched entirely and was at this very moment bursting into a tiny flaring flame of revival.

She could not believe it.

Francis St Cartmail’s smile was beautiful and the cabochon ring on his finger was exactly as she remembered it. His voice was deep and kind and his eyes were hazel, like the leaves fallen in a forest after a particularly cold autumn, all of the shades of ruin.

And people watched him, carefully, uncertainly, the wave of faces following him holding both fear and awe and another emotion, too. Wonderment, if she might name it as he stalked alone through a sea of colour and wearing only a deep swathe of unbroken black.

She hoped there was someone here he might find a shelter with, some friend who would throw off the ton’s interest with as much nonchalance as he did himself, but he was lost to sight and her mother and Richard observed her closely.

She did not want to go home now. She wished to stay here so that she might catch sight of the Earl of Douglas again and hope that another conversation might eventuate.

He’d smelt like soap and lemon and cleanness, the crisp odour of washed male having the effect of bringing Sephora quickly to her feet.

Her worried mother took her hand.

‘Would you like some supper, my dear? Perhaps if you ate something you might feel better?’

Food was the last thing she truly wanted, but some sort of destination solved the problem of simply standing there dumbstruck, so she nodded.

* * *

After that most unusual exchange Francis went to join Gabriel Hughes leaning against a pillar on one side of the room. ‘Was she what you expected?’

‘You speak of Lady Sephora, I presume?’

‘Cat and mouse does not suit you, Francis. I saw you talking to her. What did you think?’

‘She is smaller than I remember her and paler. She is also frightened.’

‘Of what?’

‘I think she was sure she was going to drown and has suffered since for it. She thanked me for saving her.’

‘And that’s all that she said?’

‘Well, there was some silence, too.’

‘The stunned silence of Perseus falling in love with the drowning Andromeda?’ Gabriel’s tone held a good deal of humour in it that Francis ignored.

‘She fell off a bridge, for God’s sake. She was not chained to a rock waiting to be devoured by sea monsters.’

‘Still, one must feel a certain connection when a soul is saved. I would imagine something along the lines of the life debt in honour-bound cultures, so to speak.’

‘A heavy price, if that’s the case? I did not see such in the eyes of Sephora Connaught, though they are surprisingly blue.’

Gabriel nodded. ‘And young men have written sonnets about those orbs. The number of her suitors is legendary, though she has turned each and every one of them down.’

‘For the marquis?’ He didn’t want to ask the question, but found himself doing so.

‘Winslow fancies himself as something of an example others should be copying in both dress and manner, I think. He is said to be somewhat pompous and arrogant in his dealings with people.’

‘Well, he looks fairly harmless.’ Glancing across the room to where the young lord stood, Francis saw that Sephora Connaught was tucked in beside him.

‘Harmless but controlling. See how he positions himself at her elbow. Adelaide said that if I were to ever constantly hover like the Marquis of Winslow does, she would simply shove me in the ribs.’

‘Perhaps Lady Sephora enjoys it?’

‘I think she allows it because she has never known differently.’

Sephora Connaught’s profile was caught against the light—a small turned-up nose, sculptured brow and cheekbones that were high. Her pallor was almost white.

‘From all accounts Winslow congratulated himself quite heartily on his organisation at the riverside, but his bride-to-be does not look quite herself tonight. Perhaps she does not concur to the same opinion. Perhaps she wishes he had thrown caution to the wind and made the more solid gesture of self-sacrifice by jumping in after her.’

‘Stop teasing, Gabe.’ Adelaide swiped her husband’s arm. ‘It was a scary and dangerous situation and I am certain everyone tried to do their best. Even the marquis for all his pedantic and fussy ways.’

But Francis was not so sure. ‘No, I think Gabe has the gist of him. Winslow sent me a card the next day. While he made an art form of thanking me for my help, he also implied that further correspondence with Lady Sephora would be most unwelcome. He did not want her bothered by any maudlin recount of the incident, he stated, and hoped I had put the whole nonsense behind me because he certainly had.’

‘So you are now to be an inconsequential saviour? A man to be barely thanked?’ Gabriel looked like he wanted to go over and knock Allerly’s head off his shoulders.

‘Winslow’s father is ill so perhaps that is weighing heavily upon him.’ Adelaide frowned as she added this to the conversation. ‘It is, however, hard to imagine what a woman like Sephora Connaught might see in such a man.’

‘She grew up with him,’ Gabriel said. ‘Both families are friends with strong ties and all adhere to the expectations of old tradition, so I am sure the parents are more than pleased with their daughter’s choice of husband.’

As they watched, Sephora’s well-endowed mother, Lady Aldford, towed her away and he observed those around giving their greetings. What was it in the young woman that intrigued him? She was the ton’s favourite daughter, a woman who had managed to snag one of the loftiest catches of the Season without even a hint of criticism from anybody. People admired her. She was everything that was good and true and honest and she was beautiful along with it. Cursing, Francis turned away and was pleased when a passing footman offered around a new tray of drinks.

Chapter Four

An hour later Francis was standing by one of the tall and opened windows at the less crowded end of the room. He wished he could have gone outside to enjoy a cheroot, but oft-times at other balls he had been waylaid in the gardens by women wanting to share more than a word with him. Tonight he did not wish to chance it.

A hand on his arm had him turning and Sephora Connaught stood beside him, a look of pleading on her face and her voice low.

‘I am glad to have this small fortune of finding you alone, Lord Douglas. I have written you a letter, you see, which I should have given you before when we spoke. The marquis let me know he had sent a card with our thanks, but I wanted the same chance myself.’

She bent to extract a paper from her reticule and handed it over. ‘Don’t read it until you are home. Promise me.’

With that she was gone, tagging on the back of a group of giggling women walking past, her mother to the other side of the procession.

The older lady caught his glance at that moment and held it, steely anger overlying puzzlement. Tipping his head at her, Francis turned, the letter from her daughter held tightly in his hand.

* * *

Sephora hoped she had done the right thing by giving him her missive. Please God, do not let him show it to his friends so that they might all laugh at her, she prayed, as her mother’s arm came through hers and Richard joined them.

She had not been able to leave Francis St Cartmail’s bravery to the ministration of Richard’s thanks. She owed him some sort of personal expression of her gratitude and her relief.

The fact that she hoped he might reply, however, made her squeeze her jaw together and grimace. It was the look in his eyes, she thought, that had convinced her to approach him, that and the blazing scar upon his cheek. He’d been hurt badly and she did not wish that for him. Even the scratches she had placed there herself were still visible.

Unfortunately she knew her mother had seen her speaking with the earl, but Elizabeth would say nothing of it within Richard’s hearing distance. Maria was chattering away and laughing and Sephora was so very glad for her sister’s joy in life. She wondered where her own joy had gone, but did not at that particular moment wish to dissect such a notion.

Over against the pillars on the other side of the room the number of beautiful women around Francis St Cartmail seemed to have multiplied. She recognised Alice Bailey and Cate Haysom-Browne, two of the most fêted debutantes of this Season, and both were using their fans with the practised coquetry of females who knew their worth.

‘Have you enjoyed the night, Sephy?’ Her father was beside them now and his pet name for her made her smile.

‘I have, Papa.’

‘Then it is good to see you happy after your awful fright.’

Just a fright now? She frowned at his terminology, thinking her parents had no idea of the true state of her mind.

‘The marquis has decided to stay on for a while, but we thought to head for home. Richard has people to connect with, I suppose, now that his father is sick.’

‘You saw the duke a few days ago. How does he fare?’

‘Not so well, I am afraid. He and your Aunt Josephine are retiring to the country. I hope that he will at least get to experience the occasion of his only son’s wedding in November before...’

He stopped at that and a constricting guilt of worry tightened about Sephora’s throat. Uncle Jeffrey was a good man and he had only ever been kind to her, but she did not wish to shift her nuptials to Richard forward six months so that his father might live to see it. The very thought made her feel ill.

It was as if she stood on a threshold of change and to cross over it meant that she would never ever be able to come back. She was also unreasonably pleased that Richard would not be accompanying them homewards in the carriage this evening. Such a thought gave her cause to hesitate, but she could not explore the relief here in the glittering ballrooms of the ton.

Her mother was watching her closely and further afield she saw the wife of Lord Wesley, Adelaide Hughes, looking across at her with interest.

The cards of her life were changing, all stacked up in random piles, the joker here, the king of hearts there. A twist of fate and her hand might be completely different from the one that she had held on to so tightly and for so very many years.

The water beneath the Thames had set her free perhaps, with its sudden danger and its instant jeopardy. Always before this her life had flowed on a gentle certain course, barely a ripple, hardly a wave.

She was glad she had given Francis St Cartmail her letter, glad that she had mustered up the courage and seized the chance to do something so very out of character.

The Connaught wraps were found by the footman in the elegant entrance hall of the Hadleigh town house and moments later they were on their way home.

* * *

Francis poured himself a drink and opened the windows to one side of his library. Breathing in, he shut the door and reached for the pocket inside his jacket before sitting down behind his wide oaken desk.

The parchment was unmarked and sealed with a dab of red wax. There was no design embossed into it and no ribbons either. He brought the paper to his nose. The faint smell of some flower was there, but Sephora Connaught had not perfumed her letter in any way. It was as if the sheet of paper had simply caught the fragrance she wore and bore it to him.

He smiled at such fancy and at his deliberate slowness in opening it. Breaking the seal, he let the sheet of crisp paper unfold before him.

Francis St Cartmail...

Her written hand was small and neat, but she had made her ‘s’ longer in the tail than was normal so that they sat in long curls of elegance upon the page.

His entire name, too, without any title. A choice between too formal and too informal, he imagined, and read on.

I should like to thank you most sincerely for rescuing me from the river water. It was deep and cold and my clothes were very heavy. I should have learned to swim, I think, and then I could have at least tried to rescue myself. As it was, I was trapped by fear and panic.

This is mostly why I have written. I scratched you badly, I was told, on your cheek. My sister, Maria, made a point of relating to me the damage I had inflicted upon your person and I am certain the Marquis of Winslow would not have made it his duty to apologise for such a harm.

It is my guilt.

I think that this rescue was not easy for you either, for Maria said you looked most ill on exiting the water. I hope you have recovered. I hope it was not because I took the very last of your breath.

I also hope I might meet you again to give you this letter and that you will see in every word my sincere and utter gratitude.

Yours very thankfully,

Sephora Frances Connaught

Francis smiled at the inclusion of their shared name in the signature as he laid his finger over the word. He could not remember ever receiving a thank-you letter from anyone before and he liked to imagine her penning this note, each letter carefully placed on the page. Precise and feminine.

Did she know anything at all about him? Did she understand what others said of him with the persistent rumours of a past he could not be proud of?

Leaning forward, he smoothed out the sheet and read it again before folding it up and putting it back in his pocket, careful to anchor it in with the flap of the fabric’s opening. A commotion outside the room had him listening. It was late, past midnight and he could not understand who might arrive at his doorstep at this hour.

When the door flew open and a dishevelled and very angry young girl stood on the other side of it he knew exactly who she was.

‘Let me go.’ She pulled her arm away from the aged lawyer and stood there, breathing loudly.

‘Miss Anna Sherborne, I presume.’

Eyes the exact colour of his own flashed angrily, reminding Francis so forcibly of the Douglas mannerisms and temper he was speechless. Ignatius Wiggins stepped out from behind her.

‘I am sorry to be calling on you so late, my lord, but our carriage threw a wheel and it took an age to have it repaired. This is my final duty to Mr Clive Sherborne, Lord Douglas. On the morrow I leave for the north of England and my own kin in York and I will not be back to London. Miss Sherborne needs a home and a hearth. I hope you shall give her one as she has been summarily tossed out from her last abode with the parish minister.’

With that he left.

Francis gestured to the child to come further into the room and as she did so the light found her. She was small and very dark. He had not expected that, for both the mother and his uncle were fair.

She did not speak. She merely watched him, anger on her thin face and something else he could not quite determine. Shock, perhaps, at being so abandoned.

‘I am the Earl of Douglas.’

‘I know who you are. He told me, sir.’ Her voice was strangely inflected, a lilt across the last word.

Removing the signet ring from his finger, he placed it on the table between them. ‘Do you know this crest, Miss Sherborne?’

He saw her glance take in the bauble.

‘It has come to my notice that you have a locket wrought in gold with the same design embellished upon it. It was sent to you after you left the house of your father as a baby according to the papers I have been given.’

Now all he saw was confusion and the want to run and with care he replaced the signet ring on his finger and took in a breath.

‘You are the illegitimate daughter of the fourth Earl of Douglas, who was my uncle. Your mother was his...mistress for a brief time and you were the result.’ Francis wondered if he should have been so explicit, but surely a girl brought up in the sort of household the lawyer had taken pains in describing would not be prudish. Besides, it had all been written in black and white.

‘My mother did not stay around much. She had other friends and I was often just a nuisance. She never spoke of any earl.’

An arm came to rest upon a high-backed wing chair. Every nail was bitten and dirty and there was a healing injury on her middle finger.

‘Well, I promise here you will be well cared for. You have my word of honour as your cousin upon it. I will never ask you to leave.’

The shock that crossed her face told him she hadn’t had many moments of such faith in her young life and she was reeling hard in panic.

‘A word of honour don’t mean much where I come from, sir. Anyone can say anything and they do.’

‘Well, Anna, in this house one’s word means something. Remember that.’

When Mrs Wilson bustled into the room on his instructions a few moments later he asked that the girl be fed, bathed and put to bed, for even as he spoke he saw that Anna Sherborne was about to fall over with tiredness. If his housekeeper looked surprised by the turn of events she did not show it, merely taking the unexpected and bedraggled guest by the arm and leading her off towards the kitchens.

‘Come, dearie, we will find you something to eat for you have the look of the starved about you, mark my words, and in this house we cannot have that.’

When they were gone Francis’s hands moved to the tightening stock about his throat as he walked to stand beside the windows. He needed air and open spaces for already his breath was shortening.

In the matter of a few days his whole life seemed to be changing and reforming into something barely recognisable.

First, he seemed to have won the eternal gratitude of the ‘angel of the ton’ and now he was guardian to a child who gave all the impression of being ‘the spawn of the devil’.

Tomorrow he would need to find out more of Anna Sherborne’s story and try to piece together the truth about Clive Sherborne’s death.

But for now he finished his large glass of brandy and his fingers reached into the bottom pocket to feel for his letter. Pulling it out and straightening the paper, he began to read it yet again.

* * *

Sephora knew Francis St Cartmail would not write back. It had been days since the Hadleighs’ ball and she understood the difficulties in receiving a letter as an unmarried woman. Still, part of her hoped the earl might have done so clandestinely via a maid. But nothing had come.

Maria had insisted that they walk after lunch and although Sephora hadn’t wanted to come this way she found herself on a path by the Thames, her sister’s arm firmly entwined in her own.

‘You look peaky, Sephora, and Mama is worried that you might never be right again. She has asked me to talk to you about the Earl of Douglas, for she thinks you might hold a penchant for him. She is certain that you gave him something the other night at the ball and I tried to tell her of course she is mistaken, but...’

‘I did.’

Maria’s words ground to a halt. ‘Oh.’

‘It was a letter. I wrote to him to say thank you...for saving me...for giving me breath...and to also say sorry for scratching his cheek so badly. The marks were inflamed and it was all my fault.’ Stopping the babble, she simply took in a breath. ‘I am glad I wrote.’

‘And Douglas has replied?’

Sephora shook her head hard and hated the tears that pooled at the back of her eyes. ‘No. I had been hoping he might, but, no.’

‘Does Richard know about any of this?’

‘That I sent a letter? Certainly not. He is...’ She stopped.

‘Possessive.’

‘Yes.’

‘How would Mama have known of it, then?’

‘She saw me speaking with him at the ball.’

‘You conversed with the Earl of Douglas? What did he say?’

‘He implied that he would not have let me drown and that it was only a small accident. I believed him.’

‘My God. He is...a hero. Like Orpheus trying to lead his beloved Eurydice back from death. The Underworld is exactly the same metaphor for the water and both rescues were completed with such risk...’

‘Stop it, Maria, and anyway Orpheus failed in his quest.’

Her sister’s laughter was worrying. ‘When Richard holds your hand do you hear music, Sephora? Do you feel warmth or lust or desire?’

‘To do what?’

‘You don’t?’ Her whisper held a tone of sheer horror. ‘And yet still you would consider marrying him? My God. You would throw your life away on nothing? Well, I shall not, Sephy. When I marry it shall be only for love. I swear it.’

Lust. Desire. Love. What pathway had Maria taken that she herself had missed? Where had her younger sister found these ideas that were so very...evocative?

‘I shall marry a man who would risk his life for me, a man who is brave and good and true. Money shall be nothing to me, or reputation. I shall make up my own mind without anybody telling me otherwise.’

‘There are stories about St Cartmail that are hardly salubrious, Maria.’ Sephora hated the censure she could hear in her words, but made herself carry on. ‘A good marriage needs a solid basis of friendship and trust. Like Mama and Papa.’

‘They barely talk to each other any more. Surely you have noticed that.’

‘Well, perhaps not lately, but...’ She made herself stop. Further along the river three men were walking towards them, three handsome men and one taller than the rest.

Lords Douglas, Montcliffe and Wesley, Francis St Cartmail’s hair jet black against the light of day. He had not seen them yet standing against the sun and she debated whether to stay or to flee.

All Sephora felt was sick, caught here between truth and falsity, skewered in the teeth of both hope and horror. She did not want this suddenness. She liked things orderly and controlled. This was all so wildly unexpected and so very worrying, but it was too late now to do anything other than brave out the encounter.

He hadn’t written back. Would she see the distaste he felt for her upon his face?

‘Smile, for God’s sake.’ Her sister’s hard whisper broke through fright and she did, pinning a ludicrous grin across her grinding teeth and beating heart.

‘Ladies.’ It was the Earl of Wesley who spoke first, the urbane smoothness of his words propping up all the pieces that were scattering. Sephora regathered her logic and straightened.

‘Lord Wesley.’ Her voice. Normal. She did not look at the Earl of Douglas. Not even once, but she felt him there, strong and solid.

‘It is only by good chance that we wandered this way.’ Gabriel Hughes looked smug as he said this. ‘Montcliffe wished to have a view of the river.’

Aunt Susan, her father’s sister, had caught them up by now, arriving from a good ten yards back with her maid and a severe countenance. She gave the impression of a mother goose about to do battle, but also sensing the high standing of its opponents.

Daniel Wylde, the Earl of Montcliffe, unexpectedly took her aunt’s hand into his own and led her off to the side a little. Wesley seemed most intent on asking her sister questions about the weather of late, a topic she was certain he held no abiding interest in, which left her alone with Francis St Cartmail.

‘I must compliment you on your letter, Lady Sephora. I have seldom been thanked with such profuse gratitude.’

His patronage made her prickly given he had not written back. ‘Well, my lord, I have never been rescued with such valour and gallantry.’

‘A stellar state of affairs then for us both, such a mutual admiration.’ He smiled and the mirth touched the hazel in his eyes, lightening the darkness.

At his jesting, Sephora blushed a bright red, the colour sweeping into her cheeks and down onto her neck where no doubt it clashed violently with the pastel pink of her day dress.

She had always been so certain in every social situation, so very good at small talk and mindless repartee. For the four years since her arrival in society she had been measured and polite and self-effacing. She had never uttered a wrong word or a hurtful reply to anyone before. She had been careful and godly and good. But not today. Today some other part of her long hidden surfaced.

‘Are you teasing me, my lord? Because if you are I should like to say the incident for me was beyond frightening. I thought I should not survive it, you see, and although I waited and hoped for a reply you failed to send one.’

Oh, my goodness, why had she blurted that out? She could even hear a note of pleading in her tone.

‘I am certain your mother would not approve of any correspondence or indeed the—’

He stopped and she imagined it was Richard’s name he was about to utter, but the conversation of the others came back to encroach upon theirs. Aunt Susan was giving her goodbyes and, seeing such intent, St Cartmail did the same, walking on amongst the greenery without looking back.

‘Well, I have to say that was a lovely surprise, would you not agree, girls. I knew Lord Montcliffe as a young boy, you understand, as his mother and I were good friends, God bless her soul. I thought he may not have remembered me, but...well.’ She smiled. ‘He certainly seemed to.’

Maria squeezed Sephora’s hand and they dropped back from the company of their aunt and her maid as soon as they were able.

‘St Cartmail made you blush in a spectacular way...’

‘Shh. Do not say a thing to Mama about this, Maria, or about my talking to the Earl of Douglas.’

‘A bit late for that I think, sister dear. Aunt Susan will probably self-combust with the news the moment we reach home.’

‘But if Mama asks you...’

‘I will say we met their party purely by chance and enjoyed a quick and formal greeting.’ Her eyes glanced down. ‘Richard has not replaced your lost ring?’

Sephora shook her head and closed her hand across the lack of it, glad that her intended had not as yet noticed it missing. Something stopped her from simply marching into Rundell’s and seeking a replacement herself for she had a good deal of personal money at her own disposal. But she hadn’t. She had not wanted to feel the ring there with its physical promise of forever winding about her finger. The troth of being bound to a man whose anger seemed to be rising monthly and who seemed more and more demanding of setting an earlier date for their wedding was also disturbing. The only true emotions she felt now for her big day were harried and scrambled. She was glad it was still so far away.

* * *

Richard was waiting for her when they arrived home, his smile giving Sephora more than a frisson of guilt. He looked tired today, heavy shadows beneath both eyes and the lines on each side of his mouth marked.

‘I had hoped to walk with you, my angel, but was held up.’ The endearment she had once liked now only sounded foolish and feeble and she had to stop herself pulling away as he took her hand in his and brought it to his lips. ‘But I must say the exercise seems to have brought colour to your cheeks and you are looking even more beautiful than you usually do. I hardly deserve such fairness.’

Maria’s laugh was not kind and Sephora was glad when her sister excused herself and disappeared upstairs.

Richard observed her departure. ‘Maria is often morose, I fear, and I am glad you hold none of her countenance. I cannot even imagine how she will find a husband who could abide such dourness.’

The laughing, teasing truth of her sister came fully to mind as Sephora pulled away. Dour and morose were the very last words she would have used to describe Maria.

She was also aware of some dull and nagging pain that had settled in her chest, a heaviness that held her frozen. Even with a glance Francis St Cartmail could bring the blood to her skin, an energy bolt of feeling and frightening possibility that infused every piece of her body with a response. Richard had kissed her hand and all she had wished to do was to be free of him, to follow her sister upstairs and think about her meeting today with the Earl of Douglas in all its minute detail.

But the wedding preparations for their November celebration were going ahead. She even had the first fitting for her gown scheduled in at the end of the following month.

Trapped and breathless. The thought did come that she could simply run away and not have to face it. She was almost twenty-three, hardly a young girl, and wealthy in her own right, for her grandmother had bequeathed her a prosperous estate in the north as well as leaving her a generous cash settlement. The thought of just disappearing held a beguiling promise, but Richard was speaking again and she made herself listen.

‘My father has asked that I bring you to visit him. He has stayed in town for a few days seeing a doctor. If it suited you, we could go now for I have a meeting in the mid-afternoon that I need to attend.’

She could hardly refuse to visit a man who had expressly asked for her company and so gesturing to her aunt that they would again be going out, she followed Richard to the waiting carriage, glad when Susan made no argument about accompanying them as chaperone.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later she sat with the Duke of Winbury in the sunny downstairs chamber of the ducal town house. He looked a little worse than last time she had seen him, more lethargic and less comfortable. There was a tinge to his skin, too, that worried Sephora and she was glad that her aunt and Richard had repaired to the other end of the sitting room, leaving them a little time alone. She had always liked Richard’s father and perhaps in truth that was a small part of why she had agreed to marry his son in the first place.

He took her hand and his skin was cold.

‘You look sad, my dear, and you have been so for a while now. Is everything all right in your world?’

‘It is, Uncle Jeffrey.’ She had called him such ever since she could remember, her parents and Richard’s the very best of friends. ‘I had a walk in the early afternoon with Maria and then arrived back home to find Richard at our doorstep delivering your message.’

‘He is a busy man, is he not, with his politics and his desire to make a difference? Too busy to walk with you in the sunshine, perhaps? Too busy to smell the flowers and look up into the sky?’ He smiled at her surprise. ‘When illness strikes and you are suddenly confronted with the notion that the years you thought you had are no longer quite so lengthy, there is a propensity to look back and wonder.’

‘Wonder?’

‘Wonder if you should have lived more fully, made braver choices, taken risks.’

His voice was weakening with the effort of such dialogue and he stopped for a moment to simply breathe. ‘Once I used to think the right path lay in work and social endeavour, too, just as Richard does. But now I wish I had seen the Americas and sailed the oceans. I would have liked to have stood on the bow of a sailing ship, the breeze of foreign lands blowing in my face, heard other languages, eaten different foods.’

Sephora’s fingers tightened around Jeffrey’s. It was as if this conversation lay on two levels, the spoken edge of truth hiding beneath each particular word. She did not want to be one day wishing her life had been other than what it was and yet here already she was considering other pathways, different turnings.

Could Richard’s father feel this? Was he warning her? Uncle Jeffrey had asked for a moment alone and this was something he had not done before.

‘You are a good girl, Sephora, a girl of honour, a girl any man would be proud to call his daughter. But...’ At this he leaned forward and she did, too. ‘Make certain you get what you need in life. Goodness should not mean missing out on the passion of it all.’

A coughing fit took him then and a servant on the far side of the room hurried forward to deal with his panic. Richard also came towards them, pulling back a little as if he did not wish for the reminder of sickness or for the messiness of it. He did not venture further forward, but waited for her to rise and come to him.

‘I think we should go, Sephora.’ He made a point of drawing his fob watch out and looking at the time. A busy man and important.

‘Of course.’

Going back to Jeffrey, she explained their need to depart whilst Richard stayed at the doorway impatient to be gone. Her husband-to-be took her hand as she came up to him and placed her fingers firmly across his arm.

Mine.

The word came hollow and cold, an echo of uncertainty blooming even as she acquiesced and allowed him to lead her out.

* * *

Sephora dreamed that night of the water. She felt it around her face, the coldness and the dark, sinking and letting go.

In this dream, though, she did not panic. In this dream she could breathe in liquids like a fish and simply watch the beauty of the below, the colours, the shapes, the silence and the escape. Her hands did not close over her face and Francis St Cartmail did not dive in from above and give her the air of life, his tightly bound lips across her own.

No, in this dream she simply was. Dying, being, living, it was all the same. She felt the shift of caring like a scorching iron running across bare skin, changing all that was before to what it was now. And Uncle Jeffrey was there, too, beside her, sinking, smiling as he lifted his face to a breeze inside the water. Foreign lands and different shores.

Nothing made sense and yet all of it did. Permission to live did not only come from another saving your life, it also came from within, from a place that was hope and hers.

She woke with tears on her face and got out of bed to stand by the window and watch a waning moon. Once a long time ago she had often sat observing the stars and the heavens, but that was just another thing that had fallen by the wayside.

Once she had written a lot, too, poems, stories and plays, and it was only as she got older and Richard had laughed at her paltry attempts that she had stopped. She had not only stopped, but she had thrown them all away, those early heartfelt lines, and here at this moment she felt the loss keenly.

When had life begun to frighten her? When had she become the woman she was? The one who allowed Richard to make all the decisions and bided by all his wants and needs? He was a marquis now, but his father was ill. How much worse would it be when he became the Duke of Winbury?

She wiped away the tears that fell down across her cheeks because the thought of being his duchess made her only want to cry.

She felt vulnerable with such a loss of identity and at a quandary as to how to change it. If she talked to him of her feelings, what would she say? Even to get the words making sense would be difficult and he was so very good at laughing at the insecurities of others.

She was also more frightened of him than she had ever been, frightened of his overbearingness and his lack of compassion. Even with his father today he had been distracted, impatient even, and she had seen a look of complete indifference as Jeffrey had coughed and struggled for breath.

Her touchstones were moving, becoming fragmented. She no longer believed in herself or in Richard and the thought of marrying him no longer held the sense of wonder it once had. But still, was it her near-drowning that had brought things so dreadfully into focus, the want for a perfection that was as unreal as it was impossible?

She rubbed at the bare skin on the third finger of her left hand and prayed to God for an answer.

* * *

Francis spent the next few days going through every file his uncle had kept on the Sherborne family and there were many. He’d had them brought down from the attic, the dusty tomes holding much in the way of background on both Clive Sherborne and his unfaithful wife. There was little information on the child, however, a fact that Francis found surprising.

Anna Sherborne herself was languishing against the stairwell as he walked up to instruct his men which new boxes he wanted brought down. Her hair had been cut, he noticed, bluntly and with little expertise. It hung in ill-shorn lengths about her face.

‘Did Mrs Wilson cut your hair?’

‘No.’ The word was almost spat out. ‘Why would she?’

‘You did it yourself, then?’ His cousin sported tresses a good twelve inches shorter than she had done yesterday and her expression was guarded.

An unprepossessing child, angry and diffident. He sat himself down on the step at her level and looked at her directly, the thought suddenly occurring to him that he might find out a lot more of Clive Sherborne’s life from questioning her than he ever could from the yellowing paper in boxes.

‘Was Clive a good father to you, Anna?’

Uncertainly the girl nodded and without realising it Francis let out his breath.

‘Better than my mother at least. He was there often. At home, I mean, and he took me with him most places.’

‘Did you have other brothers or sisters?’

‘No.’

‘Aunts. Uncles. Grandparents.’

‘No.’

‘Did Clive drink?’

She stiffened and stepped back. ‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Because he died in a warehouse full of brandy.’

One ripe expletive and she was gone, the thin nothingness of her disappearing around the corner of the dim corridor. But Francis had seen something of tragedy in her eyes before she could hide it, a memory he thought, a recollection so terrible it had lightened the already pale colour of her cheeks.

He took me with him most places. God, could the man have taken her there to the warehouse and to his appointment with death? Had she seen his killer? Had she seen the only man she knew as a father die? He shook his head and swore again roundly. At his uncle and at her mother. At the unfairness of the hovel Anna had been brought up in, at the loneliness and the squalor. She was angry, belligerent and difficult because in all her life it seemed no one except the hapless Clive Sherborne had taken the time to get to know her, to look after her. And now she was abandoned again into a place where she felt no belonging, no sense of safety, no security.

She’d cut her hair as a statement. No one can love me. I am uncherished and unwanted. His hands fisted in his lap as he swallowed away fury.

Well, he would see about that. Indeed, he would.

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