Regency Collection 2013 Part 1. Louise Allen

the door behind her. Max remained where he was, behind her line of sight, and she gave no sign of noticing there was anyone else in the room. Her gown was a drab merino with a modest line of braid around the hem, worn under a dark green pelisse. She was wearing a bonnet with a small poke, entirely covered by a thick black veil of the kind worn for deepest mourning. It covered her face and hung down below the level of her chin.

      ‘Good afternoon,’ Bree said, trying not to show how disconcerting the blank screen of the veil was. ‘I am Miss Mallory. How may I assist you?’

      ‘I hope I may assist you,’ the woman said, raising her gloved hands to the hem of the veil. ‘I hope I may be in time to prevent you marrying Lord Penrith.’

      She lifted the veil and for a moment Bree could not quite realise what she was looking at. Then she saw a pair of wide green eyes under arched black brows, a sweetly curved mouth and a face that was completely destroyed by the most hideous scarring she had ever seen. There was not a part of the skin untouched by the ghastly pits and craters. Bree knew what it was, she had seen smallpox scars before, but never anything so dreadful as this.

      ‘You …’

      ‘I am Lady Penrith.’ The soft voice with its hint of West Country burr seemed to echo in Bree’s head. ‘I am Max’s wife.’ She was aware of Max moving, as though released from a trance; she saw the woman turn and see him and heard her say, ‘Oh, Max! Darling, why did you not come for me when I wrote? Why did you abandon me?’ And then the echo in her head turned into the sound of a rushing wind, the room went dark and she slipped to the floor in a dead faint.

      Bree came to herself in her bedchamber, Rosa by her side. ‘Rosa, what on earth happened? I have had the most dreadful nightmare.’

      ‘No, you have not,’ her companion said bluntly. ‘Bree, there is no easy way to say this. That woman downstairs maintains that she is Lady Penrith. Max appears to accept it.’

      ‘But Drusilla is dead. Max went to her grave, he is having a headstone made.’

      ‘Apparently there has been some mistake.’

      ‘And they are both still here?’ It was a nightmare, a waking one. It was so frightful that Bree simply could not comprehend it.

      ‘She will not go until she has spoken to you. She will not go with Max, she says she does not trust him. Piers and I discussed it and decided we can hardly have her bundled out of the house onto the street.’

      She doesn’t trust him. The woman’s words echoed in Bree’s head. Why did you abandon me? Bree sat up. ‘I will go down and speak to her.’

      ‘Max wants to come to you. He asked to be told the moment you regained consciousness.’

      ‘I will see her first.’ Bree went to the washstand to splash cold water on her face.

      ‘But, Bree—’

      ‘I will go downstairs. It would not be proper for him to come up here. He is a married man.’ The room seemed to tip a little as she said it, but she gripped the edge of the washstand with wet fingers until she had herself under command again. ‘How is Piers taking it?’

      ‘He is stunned, we both are. Bree—Max cannot have known she was alive. He seems as shaken as the rest of us.’

      ‘Whether he knew or not, the fact remains that she is. At least we found out now and not after the wedding.’

      ‘How can you be so calm?’ Rosa was staring at her.

      ‘What is the alternative?’ Bree enquired baldly. ‘Hysterics?’

      In the hallway Piers was pacing back and forth, his fists clenched. ‘Bree.’ He ran to the foot of the stairs and put his arms around her. ‘Bree, if he knowingly deceived you, I shall call him out.’

      ‘Oh, bless you.’ She allowed herself the weakness of resting her head against his shoulder for a moment. ‘That won’t mend matters, my love. Stay here with Rosa.’

      She tapped on the drawing-room door and went in.

      Bree had not known quite what to expect on the other side of the door. What she found was Drusilla seated on the chaise, her bonnet, veil and gloves discarded, and Max standing on the other side of the room. If they had been speaking, they had stopped at her knock, but Bree felt instinctively that they were two people who had rapidly found themselves unable to communicate.

      Max looked at her, the pain in his eyes so acute that for the first time the realisation of what she had lost hit her. It was as though she had been in shock and someone had slapped her face to bring her out of it.

      Hastily she averted her gaze, covering up her reaction by making rather a business of finding a chair and sitting down. ‘Have you rung for refreshments? A cup of tea, perhaps?’ The English answer to any disaster, she mocked herself.

      ‘Thank you, tea would be very nice.’ Drusilla smiled faintly, her wonderful green eyes wide and guileless.

      How does she manage it? She is confronting her husband after ten years and a terrible tragedy and yet she seems as composed as though they had parted an hour ago. Bree began to wonder if Drusilla was perhaps not very intelligent, or that she had so little imagination or empathy that she simply did not comprehend the havoc her reappearance was causing.

      ‘Would you be so good as to ring the bell for Peters, Ma … Lord Penrith.’ Rather desperately she turned to Drusilla. ‘Have you had a long journey to get here?’

      ‘It took me all day yesterday. I have been living in Portsmouth. I stayed at the Bull and Mouth last night, then I went to find Lord Penrith. I stood in the square, watching, not daring to go in. But I knew I had to see you—I had read the gossip columns all about the marriage. Then he came out and I followed in a hackney. I enquired of the girl delivering milk and she told me who lived here, so I knocked.’

      She told the tale as though reciting from a book. Bree was left with the impression of a young girl, forced to perform her poetry lesson in front of adults, not a woman of almost thirty. Nerves, poor thing, she reproved herself. How would I manage?

      ‘Your arrival is timely,’ she said, seeing the involuntary grimace on Max’s face as she said it. ‘We would have sent out the invitations tomorrow.’

      ‘Indeed.’ He moved forward and sat, taking a chair so the three of them formed the points of a triangle. Bree was visited by the fancy that he had been waiting for someone to come in before he was willing to move any closer to his wife.

      ‘So, what have you decided?’ she asked briskly. If she let herself weaken, think of anything other than the practicalities of this hideous situation, she was going to fall apart.

      ‘Nothing,’ Max said. ‘We have been rehearsing the circumstances of our … parting, and what has occurred since.’

      ‘Might I know these circumstances?’ Bree enquired. ‘I feel I have some legitimate interest.’ I am sounding hard and brittle. She could hear her own tone and hated it, but it was the best she could manage. It was better than hysterics and reproaches.

      ‘You know the start of it. Bree, I would spare you this, but it is better that you hear it all, ask whatever questions you have. As I told you, Drusilla met a man, shortly after our marriage, and ran away with him. I organised funds for her and after some years they stopped being drawn upon. I heard nothing more.’

      ‘I wrote to you!’ Drusilla burst out. ‘I wrote to the town house and to Longwater. I wrote and told you I had left Simeon, that he was cruel to me and I couldn’t bear it. I told you I was ashamed to take your money any longer and that I wanted to come home, to beg your forgiveness. And you ignored me.’

      Her hands twisted together in her lap as she spoke, then, in a gesture of despair, she held them up and let them drop back, palms down. They were white, smooth, perfectly untouched by the frightful scarring which had wrecked her face. Bree glanced down at her own hands. She kept them carefully,