Regency: Innocents & Intrigues. Helen Dickson

the best of moods when we came upon the rabble. My temper had been well tested earlier, and I stood very near the edge of losing it entirely.’ A slight, crooked smile curved his lips. ‘Am I forgiven?’

      Maria nodded her acceptance of his apology, but the expression on her face remained impassive.

      ‘If you’re thinking of what happened earlier, forget it. It is behind us now.’

      ‘Perhaps my memory is clearer than yours. Perhaps I cannot forget as easily as you. I can still see that fire, imagine those poor people who must have been—’

      ‘Don’t, Maria. Don’t torture yourself this way. Violence is only one aspect of life.’

      ‘I don’t agree.’

      ‘Yes, you do. Violence has always been hidden from you. It has been done by people far from sight. Now you have been made aware of it, and it will not go away.’

      ‘Do you really think the Seigneur, and perhaps his family, perished in the fire?’

      ‘It looks bad, I’ll admit. But in the absence of any conclusive evidence to the contrary, why not believe that at worst the Seigneur and his family may have been hurt, and afterwards managed to escape?’

      ‘That,’ Maria said, ‘is what I want to believe.’ But there was no hope in her voice. ‘I also want to believe things have not changed at Chateau Feroc. I pray my aunt and Constance are all right. When I remember how I laughed on leaving, of the joy I felt because I was going home—to Gravely.’ She looked at Charles, unable to hide the guilt she felt and the self-disgust.

      ‘Why do you look like that?’

      ‘Because I am ashamed of myself. I ran away and left them to face a terrible fate. How could I?’

      ‘You don’t know that anything has happened to them. Besides, it was their choice to stay.’

      ‘I should not have left them. My aunt took me in when my father died. There was no one else, you see. I was under an obligation to stay and help.’

      ‘The way I see it, you had no alternative but to leave. Colonel Winston was most insistent that you left France while it was still possible. And besides, I had travelled a long way to fetch you. I would have been none too pleased to find my journey had been in vain.’

      Realising that he still retained her hand in his, self-consciously Maria withdrew it, and immediately mourned its loss, its strength. Suddenly she was aware of his proximity and what it was doing to her. When she gazed into the pair of penetrating pale blue eyes levelled on her, her heart turned over.

      Charles stood up and looked at the food she had left untouched. ‘I see you have not eaten. You should eat something.’

      ‘I haven’t much of an appetite at the moment.’

      ‘Then a glass of wine.’

      ‘No—I …’

      ‘I insist.’ Charles poured some of the wine from the decanter into two goblets and handed one to Maria. She took it reluctantly and sipped it slowly. He sat opposite, watching her, and he sensed rather than saw her relaxation of tension.

      ‘Feeling better?’

      She nodded. ‘When do you hope to reach Calais?’

      ‘Tomorrow—hopefully before dark, which means an early start. I can only hope we get there without incident. Before I went to Chateau Feroc, I wrote to Colonel Winston informing him of when we hope to reach Dover—providing everything goes to plan. He will make provision for you after that—unless things change.’ She gave him an enquiring look, but he did not enlarge on this, for it was his dearest hope that after taking one look at Winston, she would send him packing. ‘I have made my own arrangements. We shall part company at Dover, but I will not be at ease until I am assured you are taken care of.’

      Charles looked at her now. ‘I suppose you are looking forward to meeting your betrothed again after all these years, Maria.’

      The unexpectedness of his words took her by surprise. ‘I—I am apprehensive—not knowing what to expect. It has been a long time.’

      ‘Are you afraid?’

      Maria met his steady gaze. ‘I suppose I am—in a way. My dread of meeting Henry again actually intensified rather than abated as time went on,’ she confessed quietly. ‘You know as well as I that my father was a man of keen intuitive intellect and he was adamant in his belief that Henry would make me a good husband—and I will do all I can to honour his memory.’

      ‘I know you will, and if you decide you cannot go through with it, I’m sure your father would understand.’

      ‘You needn’t try to assuage my feelings, Charles. I’ve realised for a long time the limited possibility of my marrying Henry. So please spare me your concern. There really is no need. In days from now I may decide to take a different path from what my father intended.’

      ‘It is you that looks concerned, Maria. Will it disappoint you to walk away?’

      ‘In a way. You see, at Chateau Feroc there were times when I was afraid. It seemed that everyone I had been close to had died—my parents, my brother who died in infancy, my maternal grandparents, who drowned when their ship went down in a storm in the English Channel—and there was no one at the chateau I felt really close to. In the early days I pinned all my hopes on Henry.

      ‘When I came to France, knowing that he was waiting for me, my heart and soul longed for the years to pass so he would come and take me home. But as I grew older my feelings changed. He wrote seldom—the content forced—as though he wrote out of duty. I became apprehensive and even afraid of him. Determining his character for myself is vital in making a prudent choice before we speak our vows. Whatever his faults, I am committed to seeing him—whatever may come from it.’

      ‘It could be the end—or the beginning of something.’ Maria looked at him steadily. ‘Yes, it could.’ She was wearing the woollen dress she had worn when she had left Chateau Feroc, which she had unfastened at the neck. Her face glowed in the light of the lamp, and her black hair falling loose about her shoulders gleamed with flickering blue lights. With a rush of emotion Charles thought that she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. At the end of two days, he was captivated by her. She seemed to have taken up occupation in his mind. She was an intoxicating combination of beauty, an exhilarating intelligence and disarming common sense.

      And if she severed all ties with Henry Winston, so much the better.

      Chapter Four

      Stretching his legs out before him, Charles leant his head against the high back of the chair to enjoy more leisurely what had become his favourite pastime since going to Chateau Feroc—watching Maria. She could not guess the depth of torture she put him through, for beneath his calm facade and silken words, he burned with a consuming desire for her. Last night he had sat sleepless in his chair while visions of her in all manner of disarray—laughing, angry as she had been in the coach earlier, sleeping or awake, but always paramount in his imagination—floated teasingly in and out through the shadowed fringes of his mind, enslaving his thoughts like some impish sprite with dark luminous eyes, leading him into fantasies no virginal maid could even imagine. He was ever conscious of her and painfully aware that she was a woman, and he wanted her.

      The silence lengthened and drew out and filled slowly with sounds of the inn, and the monotonous fluttering of a large moth that had found its way in and was battering its wings against the glass of the oil lamp.

      Maria dragged her eyes away from the window and looked at Charles’s relaxed, unguarded face in the flickering light. His mouth was firm and unexpectedly sensitive. She looked at his hand holding the glass—slender and long-fingered, a hand possessed of an unexpected strength and an equally unexpected gentleness. Just being with him was beginning to cause her moments of painful confusion, yet just as often pleasure that lightened her heart and made it soar—and made her forget Henry.

      ‘Why