Regency Society. Ann Lethbridge

of chance, after all, the older man had added, and no one needed to be ruined by it.

      Cristo had returned to London that very night to tell his father the true version of events, but Ashborne had refused to believe his side of the story and had banished him to France on the next tide, forbidding him to return to England for a very long time. Faced with his father’s rejection, Nigel’s uncle’s slanderous untruths and a reputation that was hardly salubrious, he had boarded the ship, nearly nineteen but with the cares of the world firmly embedded on his shoulders.

      Cristo swore as he remembered Eleanor’s words.

       ‘Know that you have already taken the full measure of happiness from my family.’

      Another sin. A further damnation!

      Falder spoke to him with the wisdom of generations enfolded in its soil, a prudent and enlightened message that bore the weight of ancestry reaching back into living history, and beyond, his body only a vassal of wardship for the few paltry years that God had allotted to him.

      Eight-and-twenty gone, many frittered away in the quest for a justice that he himself had never gained. A wanderer. A stranger. A lover. A spy. A man with as many faces as he had needed: the list as endless as the sea, and as changing. But for now he wanted permanence. Bending down again, he filtered a handful of sand through his fingers and watched it fall onto a shore that was known, understood and cherished.

      Tears blurred his eyes and he wiped them away with the cloth of his jacket, quickly, shaken by the depth of his love for the place and he knelt on the living and breathing ground, praying aloud to the Lord for deliverance.

      ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned …’

      Eleanor saw Lord Cristo in the park a few days later, his head a good couple of inches above those of the men about him and the material of his jacket straining across the breadth of his back. She was glad he was looking away, for it gave her a chance to seek out another trail that would lead her nowhere near him. The sun in his hair marked it with every shade of pale, the length creeping onto the material of his collar and tousled thick. She turned her gold wedding ring and remembered the feel of him beneath her fingers before hot guilt made her heart beat faster.

      Angling the broad brim on her bonnet, she tipped her head, slicing off the whole end of the pathway.

      She had slept badly in the past few days, dreams and nightmares entwined with shame and forbidden passion and banishing her to church early each dawn to pray for some ease from the sins of the flesh. The image of Jesus stretched on the cross in the stained glass etching was a timely reminder of what might happen to her should her indiscretion ever be known. She smiled at the word ‘indiscretion’ for it intimated such a small mistake, an ill-chosen pathway of moderate consequence. The truth of her ruin and loss was something far more brutal.

      Two shiny brown boots suddenly blocked her path and she knew exactly to whom they belonged even before she looked up.

      ‘Ma’am.’ Cristo Wellingham gave her his greeting, eyes in the sunshine much lighter than she had seen them.

      Beautiful eyes, her daughter’s eyes!

      The very thought chased away fright and replaced it with a channelled resolve. Quietly asking her maid to allow her some space to talk, she walked over to the shelter of a line of elms and stopped there.

      No one was in sight save her servant, and farther off two old men whom she did not know. Five moments at the most, she thought, and took a breath.

      ‘Your sister-in-law sent an invitation for a soirée at Beaconsmeade. Did you know that she had done so?’

      He shook his head.

      ‘You of all people must realise that I cannot possibly come.’ She kept her voice as low as she might manage it and the frown on his brow indicated thought.

      ‘Because it might compromise your carefully constructed public persona?’ He stepped back as her glance raked across his, anger and uncertainty and sheer desperation melded with another growing truth. ‘Are you happily married, Lady Dromorne?’

      The veneer of civilisation that he had affected here in England was suddenly much less obvious. Eleanor tasted fear as she never had before, because in the bare, cold amber she detected something she had seen in her own eyes in the mirror over the past few days.

      Longing.

      Longing that even anger and vigilance and sense had failed to dislodge. She stood wordless, the dreadful chasm of loss between them echoing in every breath that she took.

      Tell him, yes, I am very happily married, she heard her mind say. Tell him that you love your husband and your life and your place in the world and that any interference from him would be most unwelcome and unacceptable. Tell him to go and to never look back and insist that the history between them was so repugnant she needed no more reminding of any of it.

      She opened her mouth and then closed it again, the warm summer wind streaming between them and the silk of her dress touching her skin in the way he had once touched it, inviting passion, igniting lust.

      Even for Florencia she could not say the words.

      ‘Meet me tonight. I have rooms here in London …’ He spoke as she did not.

      Pulled from the past into the present, this harsh truth of seduction was a far easier thing to counter.

      She could not believe he had said such words to her here in the wind and in the sunlight. A man who would throw away her good name on a whim, never even imagining whom else he would hurt. ‘My husband loves me, Lord Cristo, and I am a wife who applauds loyalty.’

      ‘Touch me, then.’

      Shock filled her eyes.

      ‘Touch me and tell me that there is nothing at all left between us.’

      She held her fists tight against her skirt. ‘The pull of flesh is only a fleeting thing, monseigneur.’ The title she gave him was deliberate, a grim reminder of the misunderstanding that trembled beneath anger. ‘Honour and trust and duty are the tenets that a sensible woman lives by.’

      ‘And you are sensible?’

      ‘Very.’ The word was as forceful as she could make it, moulded by her depth of fear.

      Unexpectedly, he took three steps back. ‘Logic and reason run a poor second to the heat of passion, ma chérie. Should you relax your guard for a moment, the truth of all you deny might be a revelation to you.’

      Pursing her lips, Eleanor allowed him no leeway. ‘I do not think you should presume to believe that you know anything of my fidelity. My life has changed completely since Paris and I am a woman who learns well from her mistakes.’

      ‘Mistakes?’ He echoed the word, turning it on his tongue as if trying to understand the very nature of its meaning before finding a retort. ‘I have relegated our night together to neither blunder nor error. Indeed, were I to give it a label, as you seem want to do, I might have chanced something very different.’

      The glint in his eye was so carnal and lascivious that Eleanor knew exactly where he would have placed it. The smile he gave her showed off his gleaming white teeth.

      Biting back impatience, she inclined her head as he gave her his leave without another word, his figure receding into the distance until he was lost altogether when the next corner claimed him.

      It was over between them, the truth of circumstance bitingly clear: just a matter of the flesh, easily duplicated in a room for rent by the hour.

      Turning, she watched the ducks on the lake in their small family groups. Mother. Father. Ducklings. How it should be. How it had been designed and planned. Florencia knew who her parents were and without Martin, Eleanor might never have made it back to England. Dark days and lonely days. Days when she had wondered if it might not have been easier to simply cease to exist at all. Pressing down on her chest in alarm, she tried to breathe, her composure reasserting