The Lady in Red

Viscount Winterton abducts a woman to protect her—but he kidnaps the wrong girl in red! The scandalous carriage dash leads to the ruin of Lady Florentia Hale-Burton’s reputation...and the viscount’s apparent demise.

Years later, Flora discovers her kidnapper is alive and as entrancingly handsome as she remembers! Disguised, she agrees to paint his portrait in an attempt to understand the man who’s haunted her fantasies. Is it revenge that has brought her this close to him again...or something even more reckless?

‘I am sure in your profession you must have some days in less than your petticoats, Miss Kensington.’

‘Miss…Kensington?’ Her voice sounded rusty, her fright evident in every single syllable, and she trembled as she took in breath. ‘I think…you are indeed…mistaken.’

‘Acacia Kensington?’ He heard the horror in his tone. ‘You are Miss Acacia Kensington, the paramour of my cousin Thomas, are you not?’

She shook her head hard, the long blonde hair falling loose now in a swathe across her shoulders and down over her chest.

‘I am not, sir. I am…Lady Florentia Hale-B…Burton…youngest daughter of…of the Earl of Albany.’ Each breath was raw with the effort of talking.

‘Hell.’ He could not believe it. ‘Hell!’ he repeated, and all the clues fell into place. The servant running down the road before the park, screaming. The ring. The priggish dress. Her voice.

He’d kidnapped the wrong woman—rendered her unconscious and subjected her to the sort of danger and terror she’d probably never manage to recover from.

For the first time in his life he was almost speechless.

Author Note

I love characters with secrets from the past—and if that past is intertwined with danger then it is all the better!

James Waverley, Viscount Winterton, is back in England after ruining Lady Florentia Hale-Burton’s chances of marriage.

But the spark that was ignited between them six years ago is about to burst into flames…and this time Florentia has devised an ingenious plan to discover just who ‘Winter’ really is.

Ruined by the Reckless Viscount

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.net.

Books by Sophia James

Mills & Boon Historical Romance

The Penniless Lords

Marriage Made in Money

Marriage Made in Shame

Marriage Made in Rebellion

Marriage Made in Hope

Men of Danger

Mistletoe Magic

Mistress at Midnight

Scars of Betrayal

The Wellingham Brothers

High Seas to High Society

One Unashamed Night

One Illicit Night

The Dissolute Duke

Stand-Alone Novels

Knight of Grace

Lady with the Devil’s Scar

Gift-Wrapped Governesses

‘Christmas at Blackhaven Castle’

Ruined by the Reckless Viscount

Visit the Author Profile page

at millsandboon.co.uk for more titles.

MILLS & BOON

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

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—1810

The door of the approaching carriage opened as it stopped beside her in a sudden and unexpected haste.

‘Get in now.’

‘I beg your pardon.’ Lady Florentia Hale-Burton could not quite believe what she had heard even as the stranger standing above her on the top step of the unliveried coach repeated it again more loudly.

‘I said get in now.’

The man frowned when she did not move and leaned forward so that his face was not far from her own. A beautiful face, like an angel, she thought, though his voice held no notes of the celestial at all.

‘Look, unlike your long-suffering paramour, I am not up to playing this silly game of yours, madam. If you don’t get in this minute I will drag you inside and be done with it. Do you understand?’

‘I will do no such thing, sir. Of course I will not.’ Finding her voice, Florentia looked about wildly for some help from her maid, Milly, but the girl had dropped back, her mouth wide open in alarm as she turned to run. It was like some dream, Flora thought, the horror of it appalling, like a nightmare where no matter how much you wanted to escape you could not. Fright held her simply rigid. The sky was grey and the day was windy. She could smell cut grass and hear birds calling from the park across the road. An ordinary Wednesday on a walk she had done a hundred times before and now this...

As the stranger stepped down from the carriage and took her arm she finally found resistance, swinging her heavy reticule at his face and connecting with a thump. The two books inside the bag were weighty tomes on the history of art, leather bound and substantial. The edge of one cut into the skin above his right eye and blood gushed down his cheek, though instead of looking furious, which might have been expected, he only began to laugh.

‘Hell,’ he said, ‘Thomas damned well owes me for this though he did warn me you might not come easily if he was not present. But enough now. We are beginning to attract some attention and if I am going to be of any help to you we have to leave immediately.’

Grabbing at her, he pulled her hard against his body and she bit into his hand. Swearing, he brought one arm down across her breast when she screamed as loud as she could manage. Then he simply clamped his fingers on the top of her right shoulder and all she knew was darkness.

* * *

James Waverley, Viscount Winterton, couldn’t believe he was doing this, kidnapping his cousin’s whore before Hyde Park and rendering her unconscious. But Tom had insisted, pleaded, cajoled and finally called in any favour James had ever promised. So he had.

‘She’s a feisty one, you will find,’ his second cousin had insisted, ‘and if I was in any position at all to go and get her myself I would, but...’ He’d looked down at his leg cast from the ankle to the thigh. ‘She needs to be out of London, Winter, needs to be safe from those who might hurt her.’ And because one of his own unruly horses was responsible for his cousin’s broken leg, James had consented.

‘What does she look like?’

‘Blonde and sensual. She will be wearing red, no doubt, as she always does and will be waiting on the corner of Mount Street opposite Hyde Park at five o’clock precisely.’

Lord help me, James thought. Tom hadn’t mentioned that she would be the type to scream her head off in fury or whack him with a heavy bag full of books.

She didn’t have the appearance of a whore either, with her demurely cut pink and red day dress and old-fashioned hat, but then what was the look of one? He’d never required the services of a lady of the night before, though he had seen them around Covent Garden and the Haymarket and many of them had appeared...quite ordinary. Perhaps Acacia Kensington was one of those girls, thrown into the game by dire circumstance and the need to survive.

She certainly had good teeth. The bite mark on his hand stung badly having cut the skin to leave it swollen and throbbing.

Laying her down on the seat opposite, he took off his jacket and placed it under her head as a pillow. She’d wake up soon and there would be all hell to pay, the journey north taking a good few hours to complete. With a frown he looked away.

Is this who he was now? A man who would hurt a woman? A man who might take the path of least resistance when quite plainly it was the wrong thing to do?

Swearing, he sat back and glanced out the window. A young maid was running along the pathway and shouting at the top of her lungs, another couple joining her. When the man raised his hand in a fist the first shudder of things not being quite as they ought to be went through him and he was glad when the carriage turned into the main road north, its speed increasing.

The blood from the cut above his right eye had begun to blur his vision and he swiped at it with the sleeve of his jacket, blotting the redness against dark linen.

Thomas could do his own courting next time, broken leg or not, he thought, and if the girl came to as angry as she had been he didn’t quite know what he would do next. Put her out, he imagined, and let her make her own way from London, or not. In truth he didn’t care any longer.

She had a damn expensive ring on the third finger of her right hand, the diamonds winking in the light. No false gold or cut glass either, the patina and shape of the piece telling him this was the real thing. Perhaps a paramour had gifted it to her. Tommy had the funds to procure such a bauble, should he have wished it, so maybe this was his doing. He was a man inclined to the grand gesture.

The anger that had been his constant companion threatened to choke him and he pushed back the familiar fury. Once he would have told his cousin exactly where to go with his hare-brained schemes of procuring women, but now...

The war had knocked the stuffing out of him and he had returned from Europe and the first Peninsular Campaign unsettled. He did not fit in here any more, having neither property nor much in the way of family, save a father who had taken more and more to the drink. He wanted to be away from the London set and its expectations, but most of all he needed to be away from the brutality of war. It had settled into him the aftermath of violence, making him jumpy and uncertain, the ghosts of memory entwined even in the ordinariness of his life here.

* * *

He swore again twenty moments later as sky-blue eyes opened and simply looked at him, the paleness of her cheeks alarming.

‘I think... I am going...to be...sick.’

And she was, all over his boots and on her dress, heaving into the space between them time after time and shaking dreadfully. Her eyes watered, her nose ran and the stench of a tossed-up lunch hung in the air as she simply began to cry. Not quietly either.

Banging his cane against the roof, James was glad as the conveyance drew to a halt, the countryside all around wide and green, the road empty before them and behind. He didn’t stop her hurried exit as he threw water he carried for the journey on to the carriage floor, drying what he could with great bunches of wild grasses pulled from the side of the road.

She was gone when he had finished, disappeared into a tract of bushes behind a stone fence. He caught the hue of her red gown at some distance dashing between the trees of a small grove.

Part of him wanted to simply leave her there and go on, but it was getting late and dusk would soon be upon the land. If she fell into a ditch or in with the company of someone who might really hurt her...

Cursing again, he bade Thomas’s driver to wait for him and went in after her.

* * *

Florentia ran from tree to tree, her breath ragged as the asthma she had had since childhood came upon her with this unexpected exertion.

She was crying and running and trying to draw in breath, sharp branches tearing at her gown and at the exposed skin on her arms and legs.

Would her kidnapper follow? Would he kill her? Would he chase her and trap her here in the woods and the oncoming darkness and so very far from London?

She tripped and went down hard, then got herself up again, the pathway more difficult to discover now, the sound of a stream further on and dogs.

Dogs? Her heart leapt in her throat. Big dogs? The horror of it kept her still, the sound of crashing feet drawing nearer as two enormous black and brown hounds padded out from a break in the undergrowth and came towards her, lips bared and teeth showing.

‘Keep very still.’ His voice. The man from the carriage. Raw. Brutal. Furious. He sounded as though he would like to kill her along with the canines though the hackles of each dog were raised along bony spines, ready to spring.

He’d stooped to pick up a few of the bigger stones around his feet and threw one hard and fast. A direct hit to the flanks had the lead dog crouching down and slinking backwards. Two long scars at the back of her abductor’s head were easily visible in the fading light. She wondered how anyone could have survived such wounds as that.

‘Get back, damn it.’ His words seemed to be having some effect as the second dog followed the other.

‘Walk slowly towards me.’ This was directed at her now. ‘Don’t run. They are hunting dogs trained to protect and defend. Any quick movement will have them upon you and my pistols are still in the carriage.’

‘You...would...shoot them?’

He laughed at that, a harsh and savage sound. ‘In an instant, were I armed and they were attacking. Now do as I say.’

She did because just at that moment the slobbering teeth of the hunting pair were infinitely more worrying than the possibility of this stranger hurting her. Again. She was pleased when he stood before her shielding her from the threat. ‘Now, walk backwards, keeping my body in a direct line with the dogs. Don’t make eye contact with them. Don’t trip. Look as if you are in charge until you get through the green shelter at the edge of the clearing and then turn and run for the carriage as fast as you can go and get straight in. Do you understand me?’

‘And...what...of...you?’

‘I will be fine.’

He picked up another of the big rocks with one hand and a dead branch from the ground as a weapon and planted it before him. One of the dogs growled loudly in response and the noise had her moving back past the shelter of the bushes and away. As she scampered through the scrub at the edge of the clearing she simply turned and ran for the carriage, screaming at the driver about the dogs and the danger and slamming the door shut behind her.

It was wet inside and smelt like hay, though the dress she wore bore the stronger stench of vomit. Taking a flask of water from a shelf at the back of the conveyance, she poured it across the skirts of her gown, the cold seeping through the red-sprigged muslin and making her shiver.

Her breathing was worse. She could barely take in air now and the panic that she knew would not aid her was building. Placing her head back against the seat, she closed her eyes. This sometimes helped, but she needed the expectorant and the anti-spasmodics that her mother procured from Dr Bracewell in Harley Street. She needed calm and peace and serenity.

Would she die here on the side of a country road and alone? Would her family even know what had happened to her? Would her body be left to the dogs to devour after strangers had stolen her jewellery and books and her dress?

Not to mention her virginity.

The dreadful terror of it all had her sweaty and clammy and she began to feel strange and distant from things. It was the air...she couldn’t get enough of it.

Finally, and with only the slightest whimper, she fell again into the gentler folds of darkness.

* * *

Hell, this whole journey was turning into a fiasco, James thought as he rejoined Thomas’s mistress in the carriage. She was on the floor now in a puddle of water, the cold liquid seeping into the red dress and darkening the fabric to scarlet. She was breathing strangely, too, the skin at her throat taut and hollow and a blue tinge around her lips.

Finding his blade, he leaned forward and slit the tight fabric of her gown from bodice to hem, peeling it away from her. Without hesitation he threw the stinking wet dress straight out of the window and tucked his jacket about her before lifting her to sit up on the seat opposite. An erect position would make breathing easier, he thought, for he’d seen a soldier once with the same ailment on the icy roads between Lugos and Betanzos, and the man had insisted his head should be above his lungs or otherwise he would perish.

Reaching over to a net shelf at the back of the carriage, he searched for the tin of peppermint grease he’d bought at an inn from a medicine man on the way down to London. His cousin was prone to a weakness of chest and the vendor had been so insistent on the healing properties of the treatment James had found coin and purchased it.

Now he fingered a large translucent blob into his palm and rubbed at the skin around the girl’s throat, though the fumes of the ointment were strong and his eyes began to water. Surely such potency must have some effect on allowing breath. He wished she would speak to him so that he could see how she fared, but she simply sat there, a tight and angry presence. He knew she was now conscious—years of hard soldiering had taught him that difference—but he did not wish to harry her with the malady of her condition and the skimpiness of her clothing so he left her to herself and willed the miles gone.

Her legs were badly scratched beneath the skirts, he’d seen that as he had lifted her and the shoes she wore were nothing more than thin leather and silk. A woman used to the boudoir and an inside life. Her hair in the fading light was the colour of honey and gold. He had imagined whores to be cheap and brassy somehow, an artificial enhancement on show for the customers they would be trying to attract. Acacia Kensington’s locks looked natural and unfussy.

* * *

Forty minutes later as the carriage slowed to rest the horses at an inn, her eyes opened. When she moved his jacket pulled away from her neck and her cheeks paled again as she registered her extreme lack of outer wear.

Such false theatrics irked him. ‘I am sure in your profession you must have some days in less than your petticoats, Miss Kensington.’

‘Miss...Kensington?’ Her voice sounded rusty, the fright evident in every single syllable for she trembled as she took in breath. ‘I think...you are indeed...mistaken.’

‘Acacia Kensington?’ He heard the horror in his tone. ‘You are Miss Acacia Kensington, the paramour of my cousin Thomas, are you not?’

She shook her head hard, the long blonde hair falling loose now in a swathe across her shoulders and down over her chest.

‘I am not, sir. I am... Lady Florentia Hale-B-Burton...youngest daughter...of the Earl of Albany.’ Each breath was raw with the effort of talking.

‘Hell.’ He could not believe it. ‘Hell,’ he repeated and like the tumblers in a safe all the clues fell into place. The servant running down the road before the park screaming. The ring. The priggish dress. Her voice.

He’d kidnapped the wrong woman, rendered her unconscious, stripped her almost naked and subjected her to the sort of danger and terror she’d probably never ever manage to recover from.

For the first time in his life he was almost speechless.

‘How old are you?’

‘Eighteen. This...was my...first...Season.’

Young. Unprotected. Defenceless.

‘Are you married?’

His eyes searched the fingers on her left hand and saw them bare.

‘I am...not, sir...but I soon...may be. I...have a...suitor...who...likes me and I am...sure that we...will...’

She didn’t finish for shouts filled the courtyard of the inn as another conveyance reeled wildly into view. Several men alighted and came towards them and as the door was snatched open all James felt was pain as a firearm exploded into his face, the smell of gunpowder one of his last and abiding memories.

* * *

He was dead.

Her father had killed him, the blood oozing from his neck and his mouth in a slow dribble of frothed red.

The sound of the shot had deafened her so that all she could see were people with open lips and corded throats and wildly gesticulating hands.

She felt him fall and she went with him, the green-eyed stranger who had taken her. She saw the spurt of his blood and the quick steps of the horses as they danced against the movement. She saw the rough broken face of her father above her, too.

Crying.

That single thing shocked her more than anything else had, his tears against her face as he tried to pull her up.

Everything smelt wrong.

The blood. The gunpowder. The fear of the horses. Her sweat. The last tinge of vomit in the air.

It smelt like the end. For him and for her. A quick and final punishment for something so terrible she could hardly contemplate just what might happen next.

He lay on the ground beneath her, her abductor, young and vulnerable, one arm twisted under himself, a bone sticking out through the linen shirt and blood blooming. She wanted to hold on to him, to feel the lack of pulse, to understand his death, to allow him absolution, but her father was dragging her away, away from the people who had gathered, away from the driver who was shouting and screaming, away from the light of a rising moon.

The smell of peppermint followed her, ingrained and absolute, the heat of it sitting atop her heart which was beating so very fast.

He had rubbed the ointment there. She remembered that. He had lifted her on to the seat and placed his jacket around her shoulders to cover her lack of clothing, to keep her hidden. He had removed her dress so that she might breathe, protecting her as he done against the threat of the dogs.

The wrong person.

He had said so himself.

The wrong punishment, too. She began to shake violently as her father discarded the jacket she’d clung to before calling to his driver and footman. Then the horses jolted forward as they left the country inn and raced for the safety of Mayfair and London.

A warm woollen blanket was tucked carefully about her and she heard the soft sound of her father praying. Outside it had begun to rain.

* * *

‘Is she ruined, John?’ Her mother’s voice. Tear filled and hesitant.

‘I don’t know, Esther. I swear I don’t.’

‘Did he...?’ Her mama’s voice came to a stop, the words too hard to say out loud.

‘I do not think so, but her petticoats were dishevelled and her dress was disposed of altogether.’

‘And the cuts all over her legs and arms?’

‘She fought him, I think. She fought him until the breathing sickness came and perhaps it saved her. Even a monster must have his limits of depravity.’

‘But he’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who was he?’

‘God knows. Florentia could hardly draw breath and so we left. I don’t want to send anyone back either to the inn to make enquiries in case...’

‘In case our name is recognised?’

‘Milly said the Urquharts saw Florentia in the park a moment before the abduction and that she had spoken to them. They are not people who would keep a secret easily. I doubt Milly is a girl of much discretion, either. But they did not see our daughter as I did. They did not see her so underdressed in the company of a stranger, her gown gone and her hair down. There might be some hope in that.’

Her mother’s sob was muffled and then there were whispered words of worry, the rustle of silk, the blown-out candle, the door shutting behind them and then silence.

She was in her room in Mayfair, back in her bed, the same bunch of tightly budded pink roses bought yesterday from the markets on the small table beside her. It was dark and late and a fire had been set in the hearth. For heat, she supposed, because all she could feel was a deathly cold. She wiggled her toes and her hands came beneath the sheets to run along the lines of her body. Everything was in place though she could feel the scratches incurred during her flight through the woods.

She breathed in, glad she could now gather more air than she had been able to in the carriage. Her neck throbbed and she swallowed. There was a thick bandage wrapped across her right thumb and tied off at her wrist.

He was dead. All that beauty dead and gone. She remembered the blood on the cobblestones and on her petticoats and in the lighter shades of his hair.

The beat of her heart sounded loud in a room with the quiet slice of moonlight on the bedcovers. A falling moon now, faded and low.

Was she ruined because of him? Ruined for ever?

She could not believe that she wouldn’t be. Her sister had not come to seek her out and extract the story. She imagined Maria had been told to stay away. Her maid, Milly, had gone too, on an extended holiday back to her family in Kent. To recover from the dreadful shock, her father had explained when he first saw her awake, but she could see so very much more in his eyes.

The howls of the dogs came to mind. Her abductor’s voice, too, raw but certain. She remembered his laughter as she’d hit him hard with her books. There was a dimple in his chin.

Where would he be buried? She’d looked back and seen the servant lift him from the ground, carefully, gently, none of the violence of her father, only protection and concern.

She was glad for it. She was. She was also glad that she was here safe and that there was nothing left between them save memory. His pale clear green eyes. The shaved shortness of his hair. The two parallel scars evident on his scalp. The smell of wool and unscented soap in his jacket. She shook away such thoughts. He had ruined her. He had taken her life and changed it into something different. He had taken her from the light and discharged her into shadow.

The deep lacerations on her arms from the trees in the glade stung and she could still smell the peppermint even after her long soak in a hot bath scented with oil of lavender.

The scent clung to her and she recalled his fingers upon her as he had rubbed it in. Gently. Without any threat whatsoever.

He was dead because of his own foolishness. He was gone to face the judgements of the Lord. A deserved punishment. A fitting end. And yet all she could feel was the dreadful waste.

A tap on the door had her turning and her sister was there in her nightgown, face pale.

‘Can I come in, Flora? Papa said you were sleeping and that you were not to be disturbed till the morning. But Milly has been sent home and she was so full of the horror of your abduction it began to seem as if you might never be back again. What a fright you have given us.’

Florentia found her sister’s deluge of words comforting.

‘Mama says that there is the chance we might have to leave London for a while and retire to Albany. Did he hurt you, the one who took you from Mount Street, I mean? It is being whispered that Papa shot him dead somewhere to the north?’

Flora’s stomach turned and she sat up quickly, thinking she might be sick, glad when the nausea settled back into a more far off place.

Warm fingers curled in close as Maria positioned herself next to her and took her hand, tracing the scratches upon each finger and being careful not to bump her thumb. ‘You are safe now and that man will never be able to hurt you again, Papa promised it would be so. At least we can leave London and go home for it’s exhausting here and difficult to fit in.’

The out-of-step sisters, Flora suddenly thought. She had overheard that remark at their first soirée. One of a group of the ton’s beautiful girls had said it and the others had laughed.

They were an oddness perhaps here in London, the two daughters of an impoverished earl who held no true knowledge of society and its expectations.

Heartbreak had honed them and sharpened the edges of trust. But she would not think about that now because she was perilously close to tears.

‘I heard Mama crying and Papa talking with her and she asked if we were cursed?’

‘What did Father say?’ Flora stilled at Maria’s words.

‘He said that only the weak-willed can be so stricken and that the true curse would have been to never find you. He also said while there is life there is hope.’

Life. Breath. Warmth. No hope for him though, the stranger with his blood running across the cobbles.

‘Papa also said that perhaps we should not have come to London in the first place, but Mama asked how are we to be married off otherwise. Father replied there was an unkindness here that he found disappointing and I think he’s right for people laugh at us sometimes. Perhaps we are not as fashionable as we should be or as interesting as the others are? Papa’s title is something that holds sway here, but I suppose they also realise there is not much more than that behind our name.’

Flora pulled herself together and spoke up. ‘We are who we are, Maria. We are enough.’

‘Enough,’ her sister repeated and brought her fingers up into a fist.

This was an old tradition between them, joining hands and making a chain. Pulling them together. Keeping them strong. Maria was only a year above her in age and they had always been close. But even as she tried to gather strength Florentia felt that something had been irrevocably broken inside her, wrenched apart and plundered. She wondered truly if she would ever recover from a sadness she could not quite understand.

* * *

Her father called her to his library the next morning and he looked as tired as she was, the night past having been a long and fitful one to get through.

‘I thought we should try to remember something of yesterday between us, my dear. To keep it in memory so to speak, in case we have to think about it again in the future.’

‘In the future?’

‘If he has left you with child—?’

She didn’t let him finish. ‘It was not like that, Papa. He did not...’ She stopped. ‘I think he thought I was someone else entirely. Some woman who needed to be escorted north because she was in trouble. He did not touch me in that way.’

Relief lay in the lines of his face and in the lift of his eyes. ‘But your dress and the scratches?’

‘I had been sick and used water to try to make my gown clean again and he took it off me because it was wet and I was shaking and breathless. I also ran through a forest to try to get away and the branches snagged at my skin.’

‘He is a monster to do what he did.’

‘Is? I thought the man was dead. Are you saying he could still be alive?’

Her father’s hands came up. ‘I am certain he is not, but we shan’t stay in London to find out. I have ordered the town house to be closed and have put in motion the means to remove us once again back to Kent. We shall leave on Friday.’

Albany Manor. Two days away. The bloom of thankfulness made Flora dizzy.

‘There is something else that I think you should know.’

The tone of his words was gentle.

‘The story of your abduction is all over London this morning. There were people near Mount Street who spoke when they should not have and Milly was not...careful with her own words either.’

‘I see.’

‘Well, perhaps you do not see it all. There will not be a gentleman here in London who would now offer his hand in marriage. Quiet ruination is a completely different thing from this utterly public condemnation and I doubt that we can recover from such a spectacle. If I had more capital behind me or the title was not an entailed one...’ He stopped and took another tack. ‘For the moment I think withdrawal might be our best defence. Your mother has the same thought. The Honourable Timothy Calderwood has sent a message to say he shall not be able to call upon you again, but he is sorry for your trials.’

Sadness welled. She had enjoyed Timothy’s company with his laughter and his conversation. When she had danced with him a few days ago at the Rushton ball he’d intimated that he would like to know her much better and she had smiled back at him as if all her world was right. A kind man. A man of integrity. The first man who had made her feel special.

Her father’s eyebrows raised up.

‘Did your abductor say anything at all about who he was?’

‘He didn’t.’ Florentia wondered if she should mention the name of Acacia Kensington and a man called Thomas. She decided against it, though, reasoning if her kidnapper was identified and still alive he’d be badly hurt and unable to fight off any further recriminations against him. ‘I am sure he imagined I was another and had just realised his mistake when you came and shot him.’

‘And mark my words I would do exactly the same again for I am not sure how you might recover from this travesty.’

‘With fortitude, Papa.’

Her reply made him laugh though there was no humour in it. ‘I wish Bryson was here...’ he said and stopped, realising what he had just uttered.

Her brother stood in the empty space between them. Beautiful funny Bryson with his golden hair and blue eyes and his cleverness. The glue in a family that had come unstuck ever since his passing.

The son. The heir to an entailed property. Florentia’s twin.

She sat down on the nearest seat, trying to find breath. It had been so long since his name had been mentioned out loud even though he was silently present in every moment of every day.

‘I no longer think the fault lay with you, Flora, and am sorry that I once implied it such.’ These were words she had heard before and foolish apologies that she had long since ceased to refute. ‘We will get through this. All of it. There will be an ending to the pain, I promise.’

But there wasn’t. There hadn’t been. There never would be.

The nausea she had felt in the carriage returned and she forced it down. She hadn’t been able to eat anything and although she felt hungry she just could not swallow even the smallest morsel of food. A new symptom that. Perhaps she was going mad in truth. The completion of a process that had started as she had sat there with her brother dying in her arms and both their clothes splashed in red.

Her fault. Her dare. Her imprudence. She began to shake in earnest.

‘Shall I fetch Mama, Flora?’

‘No.’ She shook her head hard and the memory shattered.

* * *

The ache was lessened now, the burn and throbbing of it where his neck met the collar bone. Tommy was beside him.

‘Here, take this. It will help.’

Bitter like almonds. James screwed his face up at the taste, but after a few moments he started to feel as if he was floating, as if the land was somehow below him and he was flying through the clouds on a murmur.

He liked the sensation. He liked the freedom though his head still throbbed with each beat of his heart, leaving him squinting his eyes against the light.

‘What happened?’

‘You were shot.’ His cousin lent closer, eyes shadowed. ‘It was the wrong woman, Winter. You got the wrong damn woman.’

The red dress. The dogs. The breathlessness. It all came back in a fractured whirl.

‘Is she safe? The girl I took?’

A curse and the shifting of light was his response, quiet between them until his cousin spoke again. ‘She’s fine. It’s you we are worried about.’

‘I...won’t...die.’ He managed to get the words out one by one.

‘Why the hell do you think you won’t, when you’ve lost so much blood?’

‘Because...need...to say...sorry.’

‘Her father shot you by all accounts, for God’s sake. Point blank and without dialogue.’

‘Deserved...it.’

Then the dark came and he slipped away from the hurting light.

Chapter Two

Albany Manor, Kent—April 1816

‘Come to London with me, Flora. I am tired of you never being there and that ridiculous scandal from years ago is old news now. No one will remember it, I promise. There are far worse wrongdoings in society catching people’s imaginations. Your downfall is barely recalled.’

Her sister, Maria, had always been difficult to say no to, Florentia thought, as she finished the final touches of a painting depicting the faces of three men caught in dark light at a dinner table.

‘Roy will be there, too, and his mother. We will have a number of people all about us at every important social occasion. It won’t be like the last time at all, I promise.’

The last time.

Three years ago when Florentia had finally decided to step again into society the whole thing had been a disaster. No one had wanted to talk to her, though Timothy Calderwood to his credit had made an effort to try and converse before his new wife had pulled him away. The memory of it stung. She had felt like an outcast and even Maria’s marriage to one of the ton’s favourite sons, Lord Warrenden, had not softened her dislike of social occasions.

Shaking away the memories, Flora stood and took off her smock before hanging it across the back of her easel.

‘If I did decide to come, I’d need your promise that I can leave as soon as I want and return to Albany without argument.’

Maria smiled. ‘I’d just like the chance for you to see the worries you harbour are totally unfounded. You cannot possibly let the unlawful actions of one unhinged individual ruin your life for ever. A stranger. A man who has never been apprehended for the heinous deed and one who in all probability is long dead. It’s finished and over. You need to live again and find someone like I have. Roy has been a blessing and a joy to me. He has made me happy again.’

That certain look came across Maria’s face as she spoke about her husband of eighteen months with the true contentment of a woman in love and knowing it.

Placing the paint back in their glass containers, Flora wiped her easel with turpentine. She could not work in a mess and she hated waste. The yellow ochre had dribbled into the cobalt blue to make a dirty brown-green, the swirl of the mix blobbing on the cloth.

For over a year now she had been sending a new portrait every second week to London and to an agent she had acquired through word of mouth from Roy. Mr Albert Ward had been hounding her to come and visit him in the city to meet some of his private clients, many who had expressly asked for her by name to draw their portrait.

By name...? Well, not precisely, she thought, frowning at the mistake.

Mr Frederick Rutherford was making a splash in the realms of the art world with his dark and moody portraits, and his reputation was growing as fast as his list of prospective clients. A young man with a great future before him, if only he would show up at the events planned around his unique style of painting.

A sensation. A mystery. A talent that had burst on to the London scene unexpectedly and with a vivid impression of genius and worth.

The letters from Mr Ward were getting more and more insistent on a meeting face-to-face. The agent needed to understand what sort of a man he was, what had fashioned his sense of design, what had shaped him into a muse who could seemingly interpret the feelings of those he chose as his subject in each painting so brilliantly. Hopelessness. Loss. Grief. Love. Passion. Deceit. All the shades of human emotion scrawled across a canvas and living in the application of pigment.

Ward’s letter had been full of exaggerated prose and superlatives. The agent had seen in her paintings many of the themes that she herself had no knowledge of and yet her silence had seemed to propel him into a fiercer and more loyal promise.

It was worrying this temperament of his and Florentia often doubted if the ruse was even worth going on with, but as a woman bound by her past to never marry she had been somewhat forced into finding a vocation that did not include family and children. And she loved painting. If her life was not to follow the direction she once had thought it might have, she did not wish to be derailed into another that she hated.

It could be worse, for the money she garnered was supplementing her father’s lack of it and as Albany Manor was entailed the promise of a longevity of tenure was gone without a male heir. After her father’s death the Manor and title would pass to her deceased uncle’s oldest son, a fact that Christopher, the heir, reminded them of every time he came to visit.

She’d thought to send her youngest cousin Steven in her place to see Mr Ward in person, instructing him on his conduct and in what to say, but she knew for all his good points he was a tattlemouth. The fact that she had duped one of the prominent art critics in London in her role as Mr Frederick Rutherford would be gossip too salubrious to simply keep quiet about was another consideration altogether and she did not think her parents would be up to a further scandal.

So she was essentially bound to the charade she had thought up. Besides, a new idea had begun to form at the back of her head. She could go herself to London. A young artist who was slight and effeminate would not be much remarked upon and if she gifted him with a cough and a propensity for bad headaches and poor health she might not have to stay around anywhere for very long.

A quick visit might suffice to keep her hand in the game, so to speak, and with her father’s bouts of despondency that took him to bed often and her mother’s insistence in looking after him, she would have much freedom to move around.

Her sister could help her, too, for she had been in on the deception from the very start.

‘If I agreed to come to London, I would not wish to attend any major social events, Maria. If I went anywhere it would have to be something small and select.’

‘An afternoon tea then would be the thing to begin with. A quiet cultural affair at Lady Tessa Goodridge’s, perhaps, and afterwards a play in the Haymarket.’

Flora unbundled her hair and shook it free. She always placed it up when she painted in a messy and oversized bun fastened with two ceramic clips that she had been given by her sister.

Her good-luck charms, she called them, because after receiving them things had improved and she had survived. She smiled to herself. Perhaps that was putting too good an interpretation on it, she ruminated, for in truth she had become the sort of woman who was decidedly eccentric and superstitious. She’d been enclosed in the Hale-Burton country seat of Albany Manor for the last six years and had seldom ventured out, apart from her one sojourn to London, the small world she called her own allowing her much time completely alone.

She used to like people. Once. Now they simply frightened her. She could not understand them or interpret their true meaning. The inspiration for every portrait she had completed and sent to Mr Ward by mail had come from the pages of books of drawings in the extensive library at Albany. Fictional, altered or copied.

Save one, she amended, but then she did not think about that.

So many topics now that were out of bounds to her sense of peace. She wished she were different, but she did not know where to begin to become so.

‘We will go to the dressmaker in Bromley, Flora. She will fashion you some clothes and she is as talented as the expensive modistes in Paris. One of her patrons is a friend of mine and every person who ever orders a gown from her is more than delighted with it.’

Listening to Maria’s plans for their sojourn made the enormity of what she had agreed on to become real. Appearance was so important in the city and the old feelings of being not quite good enough resurfaced with a dread.

‘I don’t want anything fancy, Maria, and I shan’t be wearing bright colours at all.’ Last time their mother had insisted on gowns that were so dreadfully noticeable and so very wrong for their colouring. Since her abduction she’d never worn that shade of red again.

‘Roy prefers me in pastel,’ her sister was saying and even that sent a chill of horror down Florentia’s neck. Women in society had so little say in anything. They were mute beautiful things, needy and powerless. Well, the paintings had given her back her power and she knew that she would never willingly relinquish it.

‘I also need to visit Mr Ward in South London.’

Maria was silent, her brows knitted together. ‘He thinks you are a man, Florentia. How can you see him at all?’

‘It will just be quickly and I shall be dressed as Frederick Rutherford.’

‘I hardly think you could do that for it would be...scandalous.’

Flora laughed. ‘Well, I am an expert in that field by all accounts, so I should manage it effortlessly. I’ll wear Bryson’s clothes and his boots. They would fit me well.’

‘What of your hair? Mr Ward would not think that to belong to a boy.’

‘A wig and a hat would be an easy disguise. I can procure a moustache, too, and stuff paper in my cheeks to change the shape of my face. That should make me speak differently.’

‘My God, Florentia.’ Maria simply stared at her. ‘You have been thinking of this for a while? This dupe?’

‘The art of pretence lies in painting just as truly as it ever would in the world of acting. It just requires sure-mindedness, I think.’

‘And you truly imagine you could pull off such a character?’

‘I do.’ She smiled because her sister’s face was stiff with disbelief. ‘I’ve been practising, Maria. The walking. The talking. The sitting. I am sure I could be more than convincing.’

‘And what of the serving staff at the London town house of the Warrendens? I am certain they should notice if one moment you are a girl and the next a boy and goodness knows who they might tell. Your true identity would be all over London before we ever got to our next appointment if the stories of the gossip-mongering between the big houses is to be believed.’

‘Then perhaps I should simply go as Mr Frederick Rutherford right from the beginning. The Warrendens’ staff in London does not know me and it would completely do away with the need for new gowns and shoes. I shan’t have to even take a maid with me. I shall simply arrive as Mr Frederick Rutherford and leave as him with no questions asked.’

‘I don’t believe I am having this conversation with you, Florentia. You cannot possibly be serious.’

‘Oh, but I am, Maria. I have no wish to be out and about in society again, but I do have a need to continue selling my paintings. I could, of course, simply go up to the city alone and in disguise, but...’

‘No. If you are going to do this ridiculous thing I want to be there to help you, to make certain that you are safe.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You have forced my hand, dreadfully, but I do want to state quite forcefully that this is a terrible and dangerous idea.’

‘I know I can do it, Maria. Remember the plays we used to put on as children. You always said I was marvellous at acting my parts.’

‘That was make believe.’

‘As this is, too. It’s exactly the same.’

‘If you get caught—’

Florentia cut her off. ‘But I won’t. I promise.’

‘My God, I can’t believe I should even be considering this. I can’t believe you might talk me into it.’

‘Try, Maria. Try for my sake.’

‘All right. I’ll visit the wigmakers if you fashion a drawing of your wants and I can simply say it is for a play we are putting on at Albany for Christmas. Did you have a preference for a colour?’

‘Black.’ Flora was astonished to hear such certainty coming from her mouth. She could mimic Bryson because she had known him so very well, his habits, his stance, the way he walked and watched. His hair had been golden just like hers, so she needed something distinctly different.

‘And I would require some height inbuilt in the boots. I have seen that done so it should not be difficult.’

Maria groaned. ‘I cannot believe that we could even be contemplating this farce, Florentia. God, if we are discovered.’

‘It will never happen.’

‘Well, Roy needs to know at least. I will not lie to him.’

* * *

Flora walked to the stream late that afternoon through the small bushes and the flowering shrubs, through the birdsong and the rustle of the wind, through air filled with the smell of spring on its edge and the promise of renewed warmth.

She had always come here to think ever since the time she had returned in disgrace from London.

The glade reminded her slightly of the woods she had run through besides the North Road as she had tried to escape the carriage of the man who had abducted her.

Her kidnapper.

That was how she named him now and here she allowed him to come into her thoughts just as surely as she had banished him from everywhere else.

His smile was what she remembered most, slightly lopsided and very real. He had a dimple in his chin, too, a detail that she had forgotten about until, when painting from memory, she had rediscovered the small truths of him.

Beautiful. She had thought him such then and she still did now, his short hair marked in browns of all shades from russet to chestnut and threaded in lighter gold and wheat.

She wondered why she still recalled him with such a preciseness, but she knew the answer of course. He had died for a mistake, his own admittedly, but still... He was like a martyr perishing for a cause that was unknown, his blood running on the forecourt of the inn in runnels of red, the dust blending indistinctly at the sides so that it was darker. She had used that colour when she had drawn him, that particular red on the outlines when first she had formed his face and body on canvas and now even when the painting was finished the colour was a part of who he was, both his strength and his weakness.

She’d bundled up the portrait with its power of grace and covered it with a sheet before placing it at the very back of her large wardrobe. Often, though, she looked at him even as she meant not to. Often she lifted the fabric and ran her finger across his cheek, along his nose and around the line of his dimpled chin.

It made her feel better, this care of him, this gentle caress, this attention that she had not allowed him in life even after he saved her from the dogs and wrapped his jacket around her shoulders to deter the chill of spring.

Contrasts. That was the worst of it. The disparity of caring or not.

Her kidnapper had made her into a woman of detail and fear. He had changed her from believing in the hope of life to one who dreaded it. At times like this sitting in her private grove she wondered if perhaps this introspection was exactly the thing that made her take up the brush, for she had never lifted one until she had returned in shame to Albany Manor after her fateful London ruin.

Seeing yellow paint on her nail, she scraped it off with her thumb, the small flakes falling into drops of water caught on a green waxy leaf and turning the colour yellow. With care she tipped it over and the hue ran into the mud and the soil, swallowed up until it ceased to exist at all.

Like him. Perhaps?

Sometimes she imagined he still lived, scarred and angry, as closeted away as she was, afraid to be seen and exposed. Did a wife live with him now? Had he found a woman who might listen with her whole heart to the story of his narrow escape and then stroke his cheek in comfort, just as she tended to the image in the painting? A mistake to forget about, or to laugh over.

Crossroads for them both.

Him in death and her in life. Everyone seemed to have moved on since for good or for bad. Her father to his penchant for sickness, her mother in her willingness to play his nursemaid, Maria in her love of a husband who suited her entirely.

Everybody but her, stuck as she was in this constant state of inertia.

That was the trouble, of course, the puzzling hopelessness of everything that had happened. The scandal she could have coped with easily. It was the grief of it all that had flattened her. Everything for nothing.

Picking up a stick, she began to draw lines in the earth. Six lines for the years. She wanted to add a seventh because this next one would be no different. Then she embellished the lines with twelve circles each representing the months. Seventy-two of them. A quarter of her lifetime.

She wanted to live again. She wanted to smile and laugh and dance. She wanted to wear pretty clothes and jewellery and have long dinners under candlelight. But she couldn’t, couldn’t make herself take that first little step out and about.

It had got worse, her lack of air. In winter now she gasped and wheezed when she walked further than she ought to.

Sometimes she wondered if she were indeed addled by it all. Pushing that thought away, she concentrated on another.

Mr Frederick Rutherford.

With care she raised herself up on to her heels and walked across the clearing with a swagger, her head held high, her shoulders stiff. Then she ambled back, this time with a stick in hand shaped from a branch that she had stripped from a tree.

The accoutrements of a gentleman. Better. It felt more...right. So many parts made up a man, though. Stride. Voice. Arrogance. Certainty. Disdain.

She walked faster as though she was important, as though in the wasting of even the tiniest of seconds there lay a travesty. Men about town knew where they were going. They did not falter. They acted as though everybody might wish to know of them and their opinions. There was a certain freedom in being such a one as that.

Lengthening her stride, she tried again and again, all the while adjusting things slightly so that it felt more real, this person whom she was becoming.

She could do it. With spectacles to hide her eyes and a moustache to disguise her lips. A neckcloth tied in the high manner would see to the rest. The cane her grandfather had owned sat unused in the attic, just another prop to draw the eye away from her with its silver dimpled ball and dark walnut wood.

Everything was beginning to fall into bands of colour. Her wig. The clothes she would sport. The heightened leather Hessians that would easily come to her knees.

Like a painting established layer by layer, of substance and structure. Drawing the eyes. Finding the essence. Creating the illusion.

Chapter Three

‘I think you are a veritable tease, Lord Winterton, and if half the things that are said of you are true I should imagine you find us very dull.’

James glanced down at Miss Julia Heron, soft blonde ringlets falling around her face and smiling brown eyes. One of the beauties of the Season, it was said, though there was a wide ring of other young ladies around her who looked every bit as charming. He wished they would not look at him as if he was the answer to all their heartfelt dreams. He wished he could have simply crossed the floor and left, to feel the rain on his face and puddles beneath his feet, and smell the green of London in the spring.

How he had missed it.

His neck ached as it always did at about this time of the night and he breathed through the pain with a measured practice.

Lady Florentia Hale-Burton was not here, he was sure of it, and from what he had managed to find out about the family in the last few weeks he could well imagine why. His actions on the road across from Hyde Park had ruined the youngest daughter of the Earl of Albany. For marriage. For the hope of a family. For life. For ever.

Her sister was present, though. He had met Lady Maria Warrenden, once Hale-Burton, on the arm of one of his oldest friends as he had alighted from his coach. Roy Warrenden had introduced his wife with pride, giving him her unmarried name to place her in a context and James prayed his surprise and shock had not been noticeable.

She’d showed no recognition of him or his name at all which was a comforting thing leaving him with a decided uncertainty as to what he wanted to do about the whole sordid affair. An apology to the Hale-Burtons would be a good start, but by all accounts the father had taken to bed with a broken spirit and he could well see that his very presence would be a nightmare for the entire family; a memory of a time they would have no want to recall or relive.

Lady Florentia Hale-Burton would be twenty-three now or twenty-four, he thought, and gossip had it she resided in Kent and only occasionally visited town.

James looked around, wishing he could simply leave and figure out his choices in peace, but as it had been only an hour since his arrival he thought any withdrawal would incite comment. Better to have not come at all, he thought, as he swallowed his drink.

Miss Heron before him was weaving her fan this way and that, a dance of wonder he found himself mesmerised with and repelled by, the female tool of flirtation and provocation holding no interest for him.

He had come home to England half the man who had left it, but with twenty times the fortune. There was a certain irony to be found in all he had lost when weighed against that which he had gained, here in a place where money mattered most.

‘You promised me this dance, my lord.’ There was a note of supplication in Julia Heron’s eyes. He could not remember making such a promise and frowned slightly.

It was the way of the London set, he supposed, a world of chimera and delusion underpinned by a steely determination to marry well.

‘I’ve written it in, Lord Winterton,’ Miss Heron insisted, showing him the name placed in small and precise letters upon her dance card.

With a nod, he acquiesced. He’d never particularly liked dancing, but as the orchestra began into a quadrille he was at least grateful that it was not a waltz.

Moving on to the dance floor, James saw that many patrons watched them, smiling in that particular way of those who imagined an oncoming union. The jaded anger inside him rose with the thought and he pressed it down. A crowded ballroom was not the place for excessive introspection or regret.

As he fished about for a subject that might interest the young woman beside him came up with a topic of her own.

‘Papa is having us all drawn by Mr Frederick Rutherford, the artist, my lord. He hopes the portraits will be begun as soon as possible.’

The words were filled with a delight tinged in trepidation.

‘Have you seen anything at all of his work, Lord Winterton?’

James shook his head, the heady world of art a long way from anything he’d ever been interested in. ‘But I am sure he will capture your likeness with alacrity.’

The girl’s face fell. ‘Well, in truth he tends to embellish things with his own interpretation, though Papa says he cannot imagine the man wanting to do so with us.’

‘Because perfection cannot be improved upon?’ He heard the tone of irony quite plainly in his voice, but Julia Heron simply trilled and blushed, her hand tightening around his as her glance came fully upon him.

His heart sank further. He would need to be careful if he were to escape the gossip so often associated with these soirées and emanating from even the simplest of familiarities.

His fortune had singled him out now as highly sought after husband material and if beneath his clothes there lay deeper shades of tragedy no one else here knew of it.

The older Herons were watching them closely, another younger daughter of the same ilk beside them glowering at her sister. When the dance brought them together again Julia had a further question waiting.

‘Are you here in London long, my lord?’

‘Just for the next few weeks, I think, Miss Heron. I am hoping to move west.’

‘To Atherton Abbey?’

‘I see you have heard the rumour.’

‘Who has not, Lord Winterton, for the Abbey is said to be one of the loveliest homes in all of Herefordshire as well as one of the most expensive.’

James gritted his teeth and smiled, glad as the complexity of the quadrille pushed them apart again, though the other woman on one point of the square was unexpected and he tensed as he saw her visage.

Lady Maria Hale-Burton, now the new Lady Warrenden, smiled at him politely. She was taller than her sister and much more rounded. Her hair was darker, too. He waited to see if in private she might mention the plight of her sibling in connection with him, but she did not, chancing instead on a mundane and social propriety.

‘I hope you are enjoying your return to London after so long away, my lord.’ Her voice was soft and carried a slight lisp.

‘I am, thank you. It was good to see your husband again. We were at school together.’

She was about to answer, but the change in the figure took him back to Julia Heron who claimed his arm in the final flurry of the dance, her colour high and her smile wide with enjoyment.

Accompanying the girl back to her parents he gave her his thanks and went to find Roy Warrenden, grateful to see the Baron sitting at a table with a bottle of wine before him and a number of empty glasses, though he was in full conversation with another James had no knowledge of. Maria Warrenden now joined them, brought back to her husband on the arm of an older man whom she promptly thanked. As her dancing partner left she sat down and made her own observations.

‘Roy said you led him astray more than once, Lord Winterton, but your presence here has made his night. He is usually desperate to get home early.’ She laughed heartily, a joyous natural sound that was nothing at all like Julia Heron’s practised society giggle.

‘Are your parents here tonight, Lady Warrenden?’ He’d looked around the room before just in case the visage of Florentia Hale-Burton’s father should be peering back at him, his face full of violent memory, and had been relieved to see no sign of the man.

‘No, I am afraid they seldom venture far from Albany Manor in Kent any more. Papa suffers from bad health, you see, and Mama feels it her duty to be there to wipe his brow.’

‘A woman of responsibility, then?’

‘Or one who enjoys playing the martyr?’ Close up the resemblance between Maria Warrenden and her sister was more noticeable and he found himself observing her with interest even as Roy Warrenden stood and clapped him on the back.

‘It’s good to have you in England, Winter. I saw that my wife managed to find you in the quadrille. She said she was going to try.’ His glance went further afield. ‘I should probably warn you that the Misses Heron are fairly overwhelming and are not ones to take no for an answer lightly either.’

Glancing over, James was concerned to see them all looking his way, eyes full of the hope of more than he had offered them.

Maria laughed at their interest. ‘The Heron girls are handsome, granted, but if I was a man I should not wish to wake up to only beauty each morning.’

Her husband concurred. ‘No, indeed not, my love. Beauty and brains is what you are after, Winter, and the ability to be entertained for every moment of your life. Miss Heron looked particularly chatty in your company?’

‘She was telling me of a portrait she is having done by Mr Frederick Rutherford. Seems the artist holds a reputation here that is more than salutary and he has been commissioned to paint the three sisters.’

Lady Warrenden choked on the drink she had just taken a sip of, but it was the look of consternation in her eyes that was the most arresting.

‘The man is indeed talented.’ Roy had now taken up the conversation and James had the idea it was to give his wife time to recover her equilibrium. ‘But I doubt the Herons will entice the fellow to London, for from my knowledge Rutherford does not do sittings in person.’

‘No, he certainly does not.’ Maria Warrenden was shaking. James could see the tremble of her hands as she placed the glass down on the table, though she immediately dropped them into the thick fabric of her skirt and out of sight. ‘He would be appalled at such an idea, believe me, Viscount Winterton, and I cannot understand how they could think such a thing might happen.’

‘You sound as though you know him well?’

The woman shook her head. ‘Only a little,’ she returned and changed the subject entirely. ‘We will be walking in Hyde Park tomorrow, my lord. Perhaps you might wish to accompany us for the foliage of the trees there this spring is particularly beautiful.’

The past seemed to collide with the present and James shook his head. ‘I am out of town tomorrow, I am afraid.’

‘Of course.’ Maria Warrenden looked uncertain. He would have liked to have asked her of the health of her sister, but could find no way to broach the subject. Perhaps if he met Roy alone one day he could bring her up in a roundabout sort of way. He had no mandate to be truly interested and besides Florentia Hale-Burton could have no wish ever to meet up with him again if the scale of the scandal that had ensued at their last meeting was anything to go by.

He wondered if the youngest Hale-Burton daughter was married and had a family now. He wondered if she was happy...

* * *

Her sister came to her room late that evening, having returned from the Allans’ ball full of a bustling gossip.

‘Lord Winterton graced the ball this evening, Florentia, and the Heron girls were all over him, though in truth I did not see him complaining. I think he had danced with each of them by the end of the evening.’

‘Winterton is the Viscount newly home from the Americas?’ Flora had heard of the man, of course. He was the newest and most interesting addition to the ton, a soldier who had made his fortune in the acquisition of timbers from the east coast and transported them back to London.

‘That’s the one and he is every bit as beautiful as they all say him to be. It’s his eyes, I think, a true clear and pale green. You would love to paint him, Flora, but that’s not my only news. No, indeed, my greatest morsel is that the oldest Heron girl, Miss Julia, apparently told Winterton that Mr Frederick Rutherford would be painting all three daughters at their town house in Portland Square across the next few weeks.’

Florentia put down her book. A true clear and pale green and every bit as beautiful as they say he is. The world tilted slightly and went out of focus, so much so that one of her hands twisted around the base of the chair on which she sat in an attempt to keep herself anchored.

‘Are you all right, Flora? You suddenly look awfully pale.’ Her sister moved closer as Flora made an attempt to smile.

‘I am tired, I suppose, for London is a busy and frantic place when you have been away from it as long as I have.’ Her heart was racing, the clammy sheen of sweat sliding between her breasts. Could it be him? Could her kidnapper have survived? Was he here now in London, living somewhere only a handful of miles from the Warrenden town house? She made an effort to focus.

‘Mr Alfred Ward did ask me to consider the Heron commission in a letter he sent after we met him on Monday, but I declined.’

‘Well, it seems he has not relayed your answer to the prospective clients.’ Maria removed her hat and shook out her hair. ‘I knew something would go wrong with this scheme of yours, Flora. I knew that we could not trust Mr Ward with one meeting. He is a schemer and he wants more and more of you for I could tell from his demeanour and by all the words he did not say. Goodness, if he keeps this up you will be unmasked summarily and then what?’

‘He is a greedy man, Maria, but also an astute one. I told him if I am pressured too much I am inclined to bouts of severe melancholy. I inferred I was...brittle, I suppose, a highly sensitive artist who is not of this world so to speak. The cough helped, I think, though it has left me with a sore throat and a hoarse voice from having to do it so much.’

Maria looked aghast. ‘We should leave London then and just go home.’

Florentia frowned for suddenly she did not want to desert the city with such haste.

A true clear and pale green.

The words kept repeating over and over.

‘Is Lord Winterton married?’

Her sister’s mouth simply dropped open. ‘No. At least I do not think so. He is an old friend of Roy’s, so I could ask him of it. Why would you possibly be interested?’

Ignoring that query, she asked another of her own. ‘But he will be staying here? In London, I mean.’

‘He’s rumoured to be acquiring a substantial home somewhere to the west. He is also rumoured to be dangerous.’

‘In what ways?’

‘In every possible way, I should imagine. He is neither for the faint hearted nor for the timid. He looks as though he could eat the whole world up should he want to and everyone there at the Allans’ ball was a little afraid of him. It’s his wealth, I suppose, and the fact that he is said to have a scar upon his neck that makes it appear as though his head was almost torn completely off from his shoulders at some point long ago. He wears his neckcloth high to hide it.’

‘I see.’ Florentia stood and turned towards the mirror on one wall of her room.

For she did see. Everything. Too much. All of it.

It was him. She knew it. Knew it from the bottom of her racing heart.

She could ruin him in an instant as surely as he had ruined her. She could give her truth out loud and watch him suffer as she had, this lord of the ton with all his wealth and his connections and his beautifulness.

She felt sick and scared and elated and horrified. Every emotion melded into shock and then shattered again into coldness and fear.

But she could not just go home and leave it. To fester and burn and hurt her. Not again. She could not weather another six years like the last ones. The drawing she’d done in the dust of her grove came into recall. Seventy-two months. So very many lines.

‘Did you speak to him, Maria? To Lord Winterton?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he knew your name? Your unmarried one, I mean?’

‘I suppose so. Yes, I remember Roy introduced me by using it. Why? Why should that matter, Florentia? What is it that you are not telling me?’

But Florentia had ceased to listen altogether, lost as she was in her own desperate worry. Did Lord Winterton remember her? Had he recognised the Hale-Burton name? Had the world already tilted in a way that could not be stopped or altered?

The smallness of the room here in the Warrenden town house on Grosvenor Square suddenly felt like a trap and she longed to be out of it, walking and thinking.

She wanted her grove of trees and the soil of Albany Manor, but she wanted the truth even more.

Six years of hiding. It was enough. She just could not do it any more. Not for a day or a moment or a second. She needed to see Winterton, to look upon his face and understand what it was that lay between them, what it was she needed to do.

She could confront him personally or amongst a selected company and yet even that thought made her blanch. Her protections were no longer in place. Her father was ill and Maria’s husband was an old friend. If she told her sister Winterton was the one who had kidnapped her, Roy would imagine it his duty to issue him a challenge and gain a penance.

Winterton was a soldier and from all she had heard he was not timid. Roy wouldn’t stand a chance against him and if he died Maria would be miserable for all the rest of her life. Her parents would suffer, too, and the news would kill her papa. Had not the doctor said he needed to be kept in a calm and safe state of mind if he was to ever have a hope of recovery? Lately he had seemed happier, more himself, and she did not want to compromise that. Everything for nothing, but how could she meet him without being completely exposed in the company of society?

The higgledy-piggledy of it all whirled in her brain around and around until finally one perfect solution presented itself. She turned to her sister and her voice was certain.

‘I should like to draw him, this Lord Winterton. If he is as beautiful as they all say he would be the ideal subject for a sitting. It also sounds as though he could afford to pay. Well.’

Maria’s mouth dropped wide open.

‘You would draw him while you are dressed as a youth? Winterton is no milksop lord who would be easily duped, Florentia.’

‘If he is so very beautiful, I am sure that he would be flattered by the chance to sit for the first and only portrait I am ever likely to do in person. There is also the added advantage that if I complete this commission Mr Ward may leave me alone for a while. Perhaps this portrait is the answer we have been looking for.’

‘You sound strange, Flora, unlike yourself. You have never drawn anyone before in this way, right in front of you—’

Florentia interrupted her. ‘Then perhaps it is well past time that I did, Maria. A new direction, so to speak, a different turning.’

‘And the Herons?’

‘I shall leave London for good after completing the portrait of Viscount Winterton. After that it will all be finished. I can do other paintings to augment our income, but the requirements of Mr Ward will no longer concern me. I will be free of it and you won’t need to worry about anything at all going wrong.’

When her sister had left Flora stood at the window and looked out. There had been so many times in the past six years when she had thought to try to find out about her kidnapper’s family, the cousin Thomas and the woman Acacia Kensington that he had mentioned. But where did she even start to look without attracting attention? Quietly she had trawled through the books of the peerage at Lackington’s because the man she had met was obviously from the aristocracy, but she had never managed to identify anybody, the small information she had more frustrating than none at all. Besides, if she had managed to find out his name what could she have truly gained from it?

Catching her eye in the glass she saw her lips move in the reflection.

‘Please God, just let me understand him.’

* * *

James upended the brandy Roy Warrenden had handed him at Whites and called to the waiter to bring them another.

The night was warm for this time of the year and the windows along the whole east side were open. It had been three days since the Allans’ ball and the most surprising of correspondences had come to his home in St James’s Square yesterday morning.

‘The artist Mr Frederick Rutherford has sent word that he wants to draw me. His agent, a Mr Ward, came to see me late yesterday afternoon.’

For a moment James saw complicity on Roy’s face but dismissed the idea as ludicrous. Maria Warrenden had said they barely knew the fellow and Winter could not see what an ailing reclusive country artist might have in common with a wealthy baron and his wife.

‘The agent intimated this commission would be the first and the last painting done in this manner, the fellow being a very private soul.’

‘I see.’ Roy watched him carefully. ‘And you are agreeable, Winter?’

‘I am not altogether certain, though the fact that he has sought me out personally does interest me.’

‘Perhaps he is intrigued by the way society flocks to your side in admiration, particularly the women?’

James shook his head. ‘I think there is more to it than the fleeting consideration of appearance. Your wife said she knew him slightly. How slightly is that?’

‘Mr Frederick Rutherford made our acquaintance most recently so I should not like to give you any advice as to his sincerity or otherwise based on my knowing his character well.’

‘Your wife has a sister, does she not, a Lady Florentia Hale-Burton if I am not mistaken?’

Horror crossed Roy’s face as he asked it, giving James the impression of something being awfully wrong with the girl. His heartbeat quickened because he did not want to be told her shortcomings were his fault or that her abduction on Mount Street had led to some sort of a mind disorder that had never been resolved.

‘Why do you mention her in conjunction with Frederick Rutherford, Winter?’

‘Pardon?’ The conversation had seemed to have got away from him and he waited for the other to explain the query.

‘Florentia, my sister-in-law, is somewhat timid. She does not enjoy London at all but prefers the quiet of her parents’ home of Albany Manor in Kent. But as to the other matter of the portrait—perhaps it is not to me that you should be addressing your queries. The agent you spoke of would hold a far better understanding of these things.’

With care James swallowed his brandy, liking the way it brought warmth into the coldness.

Secrets and lies. His own and Roy Warrenden’s. There was a sense of wrongness here that he could not quite put his finger on, something held back and concealed and the mystery had to do with the artist Frederick Rutherford, he thought.

‘I think I shall agree to the commission of the portrait, though the price is extremely high.’

‘Well, look at it as a painting for posterity, Winter. A foothold into history.’

‘But I won’t take up the offer of using the agent’s gallery in South London as the place of sitting. I want it done at my place in St James’s.’

‘The lad may find it difficult to get there with all the accoutrements needed for such a task. I doubt any artist is all that flush.’

‘Then I shall send a carriage to pick him up. Where does he reside in London? No one I ask seems to know.’

‘Here, there and everywhere, I expect. Rutherford is like a gypsy in his constant changing of addresses. My wife accompanied him on the first visit to see Alfred Ward, actually, so he spent the night at our town house.’

‘Yes, I had heard of that.’

Warrenden smiled. ‘I thought perhaps that you might have. Rutherford is a chameleon, Winter. You might be wise to get the sittings completed as quickly as you are able and without asking the fellow too many questions.’

‘You think he might abscond otherwise.’

‘I sincerely hope not for I’d like to see him settle,’ Roy replied, ‘and you could be just the one to do it.’

‘You think it might be the beginning of a more lucrative career for him? Already he is a painter with many admirers. Does he wish for more?’

Roy’s laugh was harsh as he stood. ‘I leave you to make your own assessment of his ambition, Winter, when you meet him, but for now I’m off home. I am, however, more than interested in seeing exactly how this romp of yours turns out.’ He stopped for a second as if debating if he should say more. ‘Frank Reading intimated you had returned to England to try and understand something of your father’s untimely demise.’

‘He’s right. I never believed William committed suicide and am looking for the truth of it.’ The words came out with a strained anger that he could no longer bother hiding. He liked Roy Warrenden as he was not a man inclined to gossip.

‘Reading also said he had word you were asking around in the more unsavoury parts of town. Sometimes there are consequences in uncovering secrets, Winter.’

‘And I should welcome them if they allow me to understand more about the nature of my father’s death.’

Roy nodded. ‘Well then, I hope you find some answers that might make more sense to you. If you need any help...?’

James was quick to shake his head. ‘I am better alone, but thank you.’

He watched as Warrenden threaded his way through the last of the patrons of White’s and lifted the bottle of brandy up to pour himself another glass when he could no longer see him.

Roy was not quite telling him the truth about Rutherford, that much was certain. There was some faulty connection, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

He knew the Warrendens were better acquainted with the artist than they let on. The lad had returned to their town house on Grosvenor Square for all the nights he’d been in London and once passing by late on an afternoon in his carriage James had noted Maria Warrenden holding the fellow’s hand with more than a little delight.

God, was the sister cuckolding her husband right under his nose? And where the hell did the reclusive Lady Florentia Hale-Burton fit into any of this picture?

* * *

The blow came from behind as he was walking to the corner to hail a hackney cab, a sharp blinding pain that had him on his knees and clambering for consciousness, and all James could think of was that the danger Roy had spoken of had suddenly come to pass.

A boot came next to his face, the edge of the tread connecting with his lip, but the shock was kicking in now and with it came the strength.

Grabbing his assailant by the leg, James brought him down and within a moment he was on top of him, a punch to the side of the head having the effect of keeping the other still.

‘Who the hell are you and what do you want of me?’

‘Perkins sent me, from the Red Fox Inn at the docks. You have been prying around and he don’t like it. It’s him who sends us on to see who is asking too many questions.’

James realised this man was only a messenger boy, all brawn and muscle and no idea at all as to what this was all about. Letting him go, he stood back, watching the fellow collect his hat and move away.

‘Can I speak with Mr Perkins? I’d pay well for a few moments of his time.’

The other nodded. ‘If he wants to talk, you will hear from us.’

With that the stranger turned and disappeared into the night, leaving James to wipe the blood from his lip and find his own hat spilled into the gutter by the unexpected retribution.

His father’s death had rocked him and he had been trying to track down some of William’s gambling partners to get some answers. Suicide was a shameful thing and he could not believe that his father had killed himself. Two parents lost to suicide painted a worrying family weakness, though in his mother the failing was almost to be expected.

He swore again and looked up into the sky. A small rising moon tonight. It had been much the same sort of moon when he had kidnapped Florentia Hale-Burton. Clenching his fists, he lent back against a stone wall and felt in his pocket for both light and a cigar in order to steady himself. He wanted to see her again, to tell her that it had all been a mistake and that he was sorry for it. He wanted to take her hand in his own and let her know that he had not thought her abduction a small thing and that it had changed his life as much as it had ruined her own.

Like a pack of cards, one fell and then the next and the next until finally in the remains of what was left was the realisation that there was nothing at all of value or of honour.

His neck ached and he drew on the cigar, liking the way the red end of it flared in the night and his heartbeat slowed.

Florentia Hale-Burton had had asthma. He wondered if she still had it. She’d had a suitor, too, and a bag full of books. He’d heard her name mentioned in the card room at some ball. It was said that she had always been odd, but that if the Earl of Albany’s girls had made a bit of effort with their appearances they would probably have outshone every other woman in the room.

Perhaps it might be true, though the girl in the carriage had been either unconscious, furious or sick so he had no honest picture by which to measure this.

He did remember her face after her father’s gun had gone off, though, for she had reached out for him, her hands around his neck, trying to contain the damage, his blood between her fingers and her blue eyes sharp with pain.

They had both fallen then, out of the door on to the road, her body wound about his own, like a blanket or a cushion. He had felt the softness of her and the honesty, her hair falling around them in shelter until she had been torn away.

‘God.’ He spoke that out loud. ‘God, help me,’ he added as if in that second and under the darkness of a spring London night he had understood exactly what he should have always known.

Florentia Hale-Burton had tried to help him even after everything he had done to her. After all the hurt and the dogs and the chill and the fear. She had reached out and tried to stem the damage of the shot, placing her own body between him and his assailants and the promise of another assault.

The realisation was staggering.

Roy Warrenden had said she was timid and seldom left Kent so how could he meet her? To thank her. To make certain that she was...recovered?

His life seemed to be going into a vortex swirling around truth. The artist. Roy’s wariness. His wife’s fear. The sister banished to Kent after he had ruined her by his own stupidity.

But first he had to deal with Perkins from the inn at St Katharine Dock, for the ghost of his dead father demanded at least some attention.

Spitting out the pooling blood in his mouth, he stood, waiting for a moment as the dizziness lessened. He was on the right track at least if he was being threatened.

It was a start.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.