Society's Beauties

‘Society finds unconventional women…perturbing. And it has been my experience that what they don’t understand they generally also do not like.’ The tone of her voice mimicked that of Elizabeth’s friends, breathless and wavering. He laughed, the sound filling the room around them and the vulnerable and dejected air of a second ago disappeared into plain anger as her eyes flinted.

Hawkhurst swore under his breath. A self-effacing timid demeanour did not suit Aurelia St Harlow at all, this Boadicea of the Victorian drawing rooms who fought for an advantageous alliance for her younger sister despite a reputation that would have kept others as far from any public communion as they could go.

‘I like you better when you do not simper, Mrs St Harlow.’

A half smile crept up on to full rounded lips. One small curl had escaped the confines of her tightly bound hair and fell across her throat on to the generous curve of her bosom. He drew his eyes back to her face, feeling like he had as a green boy, caught in the act of ogling. But she was not yet finished with plying her sister’s case. This time there was no tone of supplication evident at all.

‘Lady Lindsay is more than willing to consider the match and any intervention from you could only harm a relationship which both my sister and Mr Northrup wish to pursue.’

‘The dubious woes of star-crossed lovers are hardly my concern!’ He hated the cynicism he could hear so plainly, but he was a man who did not like the unexplained, and so far everything about Mrs St Harlow confused him.

She worked in a warehouse and lived in one of the most expensive town houses in Mayfair, a residence well furnished and appointed according to Cassie Lindsay; yet her hands were marked with the vestiges of a labour that had nothing at all to do with her confessed design work on light silk.

‘I saw you the other day in the park with your father. The greys were very fine.’

‘The enjoyment of good horseflesh is one of Papa’s passions.’

She took a breath and held it, her fingers laced together in a tight white line. At breaking point, he deduced, the pulse of a vein in her throat denoting tension.

‘Indeed, he looked most amused by the conversation. Almost too amused, were I to place a point upon it.’

‘I do not know what you mean, my lord.’

‘Are the Beauchamp properties entailed?’

The very blood simply went from her face, one moment flushed and the next pale.

‘Did Cousin James send you here?’

He laughed at that. ‘Nothing so prosaic, I am afraid, though I am guessing that this man is the one your father’s title and lands will pass to when he dies or if he is no longer capable of performing his expected duties.’

To that she made no response.

‘Charles was a wealthy man and a generous one by all accounts. Surely, as his wife, you did very well on his death?’

Again she remained quiet.

‘I can hear it from you, Aurelia, or I can instruct my lawyers to look into my cousin’s accounts. I would prefer it if you told me.’

After a few seconds she began to speak, softly at first, but then gaining in volume. ‘My husband’s estate was mortgaged up to the hilt. I have been trying to pay back the creditors I personally took food and services from ever since he died.’

Suddenly he understood. ‘With the money gained from silk?’ Lord, why had he not guessed? She had worn the same serviceable dress nearly every time he had met her and the gifts of jewellery from Charles which Nat had spoken of were never anywhere in sight. Today, even the pendant he had seen about her neck every other time he had met her was gone. Unwillingly, he supposed. Her fingers had crept to her throat on several occasions during the conversation, dropping to her sides when they discovered the loss. Had she pawned the piece for quick cash?

‘There are two mills in Macclesfield and the warehouse here in Park Street. The trade is beginning to be profitable and will continue to stay so if I can only…’ She petered out, the words simply stopping on her tongue.

‘Keep your father’s state of health a secret?’

The shock in her eyes was underlined by fear as she stepped back. He had the feeling that she might have been planning to simply walk out of the door, but had then thought better of it, choosing instead to defend herself with words.

‘A lord contemplating jumping from a cliff to solve the problems of the world that ailed him might be perceived by any business partners as a risk.’

‘Touché!’

He tried to keep his tone light, an airy unconcern visible, but underneath another truth rose into life. She would sacrifice herself for her father and for her family and if anyone got in her way…?

‘You would spread such a lie?’

‘It depends on whether you interpret my father’s sickness as influenza or dementia.’

An ultimatum of protection. There was some damned fine sense of poignancy in such a stance and in his line of business it had been a while since he had met another who might do the same.

She knew she had made a mistake as soon as he drew back, but there was nothing she could do about any of it. He would hate her now, that much at least was obvious, the lighter play between them dissolved in the message of her threat.

Ruin me and I will ruin you!

She loathed herself for even thinking to use such a warning and yet the faces of those she supported came to mind: Papa, Leonora, Harriet and Prudence, and John with his wife Mary.

And in Paris…Aurelia shook her head. No, she would not dwell on this now, a man who seemed to read her very mind standing before her.

Twenty-six and forever adrift from society.

‘If it is money you need…’

She broke into his words even before he had finished them, unwilling to hear the offer. ‘I need only your confidence, Lord Hawkhurst.’ The dog growled at her tone.

‘Then you have it.’ His words were clipped short and he was gone even before she had time to answer. As the door shut behind him, Aurelia closed her eyes. He had looked at her as if she were…unknown, the undercurrents between them disappearing into simple loathing. The ache of it stabbed quick for in the nights after everyone had found their beds and the moon was high she had dreamed there might be something finer, something real and right and true. As she shook her head hard, the betrayal of hope was a timely reminder of why she had not sought out the company of others in the years since Charles’s accident.

The shaped sharp end of the oak branch had pointed upwards, all the intentions of death in its careful placement. The brush before the jump had been so precisely angled, hiding everything, and she had been most vigilant in shielding John from the heavy hand of the law when it was determined he was the last person to be seen in the vicinity. The questions had come, of course, but the true answers had been lost in the interim, clues to the truth gone for ever and only conjecture left.

Sitting at the table, she unlocked a drawer at the very bottom of her desk and drew out a pouch of leather wrapped in silk. She knew that Lord Hawkhurst had not been here for a casual or idle chat; she had seen it in his stance and heard it in all the things he had not said.

‘Ahh, mon Dieu, qu’est-ce que je fais maintenant?’

Oh, my God, what should I do now?

Drawing out the newest missive from Paris, Aurelia understood the need to be even more careful than she usually was when she passed the letter on.

She remembered Sylvienne’s wide and frightened eyes when they had last met in Paris, the furtive looks across her shoulder as her mother had explained she did not feel safe.

Freddy Delsarte had been there, of course, his own brand of cunning gleaming in his eyes, the secrets of the daughter of a well-respected and wealthy English gentleman pointing to a lucrative blackmail.

Another responsibility. A further problem. Aurelia felt as though she was a tightrope walker poised on a thin rope above chaos and despair.

Chapter Eight

Aurelia met Stephen Hawkhurst in the library in Bond Street on Tuesday morning, almost falling over him as she rounded one aisle. His height and strength in the smallness of Hookham’s seemed out of place here, a warrior amidst the formality of Society’s quieter pursuits.

She wished she had worn her light blue dress, as even to her own uncritical eye the black bombazine did her skin little favour. Pushing such ridiculous vanity aside, she waited, for after their conversation at Park Street there could be little he wanted to say to her ever again.

‘I hope your father’s influenza is abating, Mrs St Harlow.’

So that was how he would play it. She felt her cheeks flush red. ‘Indeed it is, my lord.’ Her hands clutched a book of flowers drawn as lithographs on to thin tissue and further afield she noticed a couple of women looking their way.

Nay, his way, she amended, their expressions having the same sort of interest she had perceived on most of the female guests at his ball.

When he beckoned her to follow him towards the end of the room she went uncertainly, pleased that the onlookers were blocked from her view by a tall shelf.

‘I have been giving the…situation with your father some thought.’

Shaking her head, she turned to leave, but he caught her arm and held it, the grip of his fingers allowing her to go nowhere.

‘Could you speak with your cousin and gain his approval in ensuring your family’s living situation is more stable? Surely if such a thing were to leave you destitute the man might consider such an action.’

‘Or he might throw us out tomorrow.’

‘He seems reasonable enough.’

‘You have checked up on him?’ Horror and anger made her voice rise a good few octaves.

‘Mr James Beauchamp has a name for being a fair and equitable man.’

‘No.’

‘He is also a friend of Rodney Northrup’s.’

‘One can be a respected man or a beloved friend and still have a penchant for that which has never been enjoyed.’

‘From where I stand there seems more than enough to share and I am certain your family would be relieved to see you at home a little more often.’

‘No.’ The single word was louder this time as she broke off contact between them, danger sprouting from such intransigence. Did Lord Stephen Hawkhurst really expect just to waltz into her life and change it as if it were a knitting pattern, easy and simple? She knew what would happen next. Of course she did. If Mr James Beauchamp came to the house in the guise of a distant cousin inclined to help, everything would change.

They would all have to be grateful to him and the whims of an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old man might include the wish for a wife. Then Leonora or Prudence or Harriet would be sacrificed for the greater good of the family, and each of them would go without a whimper to protect her. She knew this as truly as she knew the night followed the day because all year the whispers she heard when the others thought she was not listening had been about their worries for her.

Aurelia works too hard. If only we could find a way to help her.

Well, the silks were beginning to pay and the new completed designs were beautiful and different. Another few months and everything would be possible. the only tripping block stood before her in Hookham’s lending library in the large form of the implacable Lord Stephen Hawkhurst and he did not look pleased.

‘How many other sisters do you have?’

‘Two. Prudence and Harriet are twins.’

‘Do they look like you?’

‘No. They are much prettier, for they favour Leonora and—’

A ripe swear word broke off her sentence.

‘Charles was a man who appreciated beauty in women. Surely he let you know of the qualities in yourself that he admired?’

‘Oh, indeed he did.’ She took away the sting in the words by sheer dint of will. He admired women who would do things in the bedroom that even prostitutes in the East End of London might have blushed at and he had simply abandoned her on his estate in the far north when she had refused to take part in any of it. Even the servants he had left her with had been instructed to be of as little help as possible until she came around to understanding what the words ‘I promise to obey’ meant in their hastily completed marriage.

The first few nights alone had been the worst. After that she had thanked the Lord for the distance between her new abode and her new husband and for the independence that naturally followed. Aye, her freedoms had been hard won and she was not about to give them up now to anyone.

‘Such problems are mine to solve, my lord.’ Aurelia could barely get the words out, so desperate was she to escape, and the headache she had had all morning began to play upon her vision. ‘The silk trade is shaping up well and in a few months I am certain I shall be—’

‘Dead and buried by the looks of the dark rings beneath your eyes.’

Glancing down, she resisted the urge to lift her fingers to her face. She had hardly slept for days, the difficulty of everything increased somehow by all the consequences of the Hawkhurst ball. Leonora and Rodney. Cassandra Lindsay and her invitation to a country-house party. The carriage ride home where she had understood for the first time in her life what it was to be attracted to a man.

Not just any man, either, but this one before her, his eyes filled with certainty.

‘What if Lady Lindsay brought your sisters out and I footed the bill?’

Aurelia could not believe what she had just heard and shock made her step back.

‘I could never accept such an offer.’

‘Why not? You were married to my cousin and as the head of the Hawkhurst family I would be most remiss to leave you floundering financially as a widow.’

‘I am hardly a relative you might be expected to nurture, my lord, and people would talk.’

‘They talk now, Aurelia.’

His eyes were softened in the grey light of a gloomy London afternoon and she thought he had never looked more beautiful.

‘I should tell you that Cassandra Lindsay broached the subject with me yesterday. She has met your sisters, apparently, and was most impressed by them.’

‘Oh.’ The wind was taken from her sails as she tried to decide exactly what to do.

Turning away, she looked out of the window, a squally rain shower pushing a stray sheet of paper down the street. Once, she would have accepted such help with barely a backward thought. Once, hopes and dreams had been written in her eyes just as they were now in Leonora’s, and the future had looked bright. She had worn colourful gowns, then, gowns to highlight the shade of her hair and the dashing Mr Charles St Harlow, newly returned from The Americas, had been entranced.

For all of a month. The anger in her grew with the shame.

‘Would Lady Elizabeth Berkeley not find such patronage odd, given you are already promised to her in marriage?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Lady Lindsay herself. At your ball.’

A single muscle rippled in his jaw, but he did not speak.

‘I do not wish to make matters difficult for you, but if I agree to such a thing it would only be on the grounds that I would pay you back.’

‘Very well.’

‘When I sell my silk business. I would write out a vowel, of course, though I understand if you would prefer to involve a lawyer…’

‘I wouldn’t.’

Flustered at the clipped tone in his words, she held out her hand. ‘Do we shake on it, then?’

His fingers came across her own, warm and strong, the connection even here in a public library and under the strictest terms of trade still having the capacity to make her…breathless.

‘I shall keep a careful tally of all expenses, Lord Hawkhurst.’

His pupils darkened with shards of gold splintering on the edge. Predatory and watchful, yet Aurelia could not care.

He did not break his grip and she did not loosen hers, either. Rather, here in the quiet corner of a room of knowledge she wished she was standing instead on the top of Taylor’s Gap with no one around for miles and all the reason in the world to thank him properly.

He had shown her what a kiss could feel like, once, and she wanted that again. Her face flushed with the effort of holding back and for the first time she saw a hint of uncertainty cross his brow as he brought her hand upwards and placed his lips upon her skin in the smallest of caresses. His tongue against the juncture of her fingers was soft and real, saying much in the hidden quiet of honesty.

‘I don’t know what burns between us, Mrs St Harlow, but there will come a time when we shall not have the will to stop it, I can promise you that.’

There, the words were said, falling against lies and covering them with a softer edge, like snow across the jagged sharp of rocks.

Only truth. The lump in her throat made her swallow as she tried to find an answer, but what indeed could she say? If she agreed, then only ruin would follow, and if she didn’t…

She could not speak, even with everything held in a balance, and he let her hand go and took a pace backwards.

The heavy fall of feet made them turn as a woman rounded the corner a good twenty feet away and proceeded towards them and Aurelia gained the distinct impression that he had heard her coming well before the lady came into sight.

‘Lord Hawkhurst, what a delight to see you here.’ Her smile was bright until her glance passed over Aurelia’s face, and the sheen of it flattened.

‘Lady Allum.’ Hawkhurst’s detachment was back, easily in place, and Aurelia had to marvel at the way he changed so quickly from one thing to another. She feared her own expression was nowhere near as schooled. ‘Might I introduce Mrs St Harlow to you?’

Caught, the woman finally made eye contact, a furtive quick glance telling Aurelia that she believed all that had been said about her. Today the criticism hurt in a way it seldom had before.

‘Lady Berkeley said that she was hoping to have you over for dinner on Saturday, Lord Hawkhurst. It is a small and select gathering, from all that I hear. Her daughter Elizabeth was particularly looking forward to the event.’

‘I have already sent word that I cannot be present, my lady, as I shall be away from London all week.’

As the woman spoke again of another assembly she wanted Hawkhurst to attend Aurelia used the conversation to simply excuse herself And walk away, the sound of her shoes on the polished parquet flooring marking her retreat. And then she was outside, the façade of the library tall against a dark and rain-washed sky. Hailing a passing hansom cab, she tried to decide exactly what she should do about the enigmatic and menacing Lord Stephen Hawkhurst, the beat of her heart quickening as she remembered his last words to her.

I don’t know what burns between us, Mrs St Harlow…

So he felt it, too, this breathless intensity taking all that was ordinary and commonplace away and replacing it with…what? She stopped, searching for the right word, but it would not come in the way she wanted it and so her mind moved on.

He was due to marry one of the most beautiful debutantes of the Season and she was an outcast, for ever shut away from proper society. Nay, there could be nothing at all between them and to dream otherwise would only lead to the disappointment she had already experienced too much of.

Stephen stalked into White’s club in St James’s Street, barely noticing the surroundings of plush leather chairs and numerous chandeliers. All he wanted was a drink to wipe out the desire that coursed through him and the irritation of Catherine Allum’s untimely interruption.

Pure lust had made him admit that which should have been unspoken, but he wished he had kept his mouth shut even whilst imagining Aurelia’s flame-red hair lying across his loins, the heavy abundance of her breasts in his palms and his mouth.

Swearing roundly, he took a seat by the fire, draping his legs with his frock coat so that others might not see the swelling he could feel pushing against superfine.

‘A difficult day?’

He had not thought the seat opposite to be occupied, as it was turned at an angle away from the fire, but with a scrape of wood on parquet flooring Lucas Clairmont swivelled his chair, brandy being warmed by carefully cupped hands.

‘You have the look of a man who has sparred with the opposite sex, Hawk, and lost. My bets are the lady in question is the enigmatic Mrs St Harlow for I doubt the timid Lady Elizabeth Berkeley could raise such a high temper in anyone.’

Despite his dilemma Stephen smiled and accepted a glass of the same drop from a passing waiter, draining the contents before trusting himself enough to speak. ‘I met Mrs St Harlow unexpectedly at Hookham’s library and I offered to bring her youngest sisters out with the help of Cassandra Lindsay. They are twins.’

‘A very generous offer.’

‘And one she wanted to refuse.’

Laughter made Stephen wish that he had said nothing at all. ‘Only a good woman can get under your skin in that way, Hawk. My wife, Lillian, has the same capacity to make me wild with both fury and desire and all at the same time.’

‘I never said that was how I felt.’

‘Not in words, maybe, but there is something about your demeanour since the ball that is different… .’

‘It is provocation and exasperation, Lucas, and it all comes down to the impossible Mrs St Harlow.’

Luc finished his drink in one unbroken swallow. ‘Nay, it is the unexpected comprehension of feelings only few inspire, Hawk. If you listened to what’s left of your heart, you might just hear the music, and if you do it will probably save you.’

‘Lillian has turned you into a romantic, Luc, and your advice is completely without sense.’

But the strong liquor soured at the back of Stephen’s throat. For the first time in his life he did not know exactly what to do with a woman and it worried him. All of Luc’s talk of salvation rankled, too. Only innocence and purity might beat back the demons that consumed him and Aurelia St Harlow was no fresh-faced ingénue. His ruminations were interrupted, however, by Luc’s further rhetoric.

‘I ran into Lady Berkeley an hour or so back. Her daughter is most distressed that she may have offended you in some way at your ball. She has not heard from you since, it seems?’

‘I have been busy.’

Leaning forwards Lucas lowered his voice. ‘There is something else that I think you ought to know about your cousin’s mysterious widow, Hawk. She visits St Bartholomew’s Hospital once a month to speak with a doctor named Giles Touillon.’

‘French?’

‘Indeed.’

The world spun inwards. Lord, Shavvon had sent him to the warehouses in the Limestone Hole to find a French connection and a disenfranchised traitor. Could Aurelia St Harlow be the leak? After a lifetime of spying Stephen had ceased to believe in the benevolent nature of mere coincidence. It was always so much more than that.

‘You look…odd, Hawk. Are you well?’

‘Very.’ Stretching back in the chair, he smiled. Even before Lucas he erected barriers. The thought made him sadder than it ought to. ‘If you see Lady Berkeley in the next day or two, Luc, could you tell her I shall call upon them at the end of the week for I have been summoned away north.’

‘Problems at Atherton?’

‘Life is always demanding its pound of flesh,’ he returned, feeling in the answer that he had not quite lied.

A few hours later Hawk walked through the maze of alleyways between Katherine Street and Drury Lane, the stench of this poorer part of London rising in his nostrils. A woman’s fan brushed his face and he warned her away, the age-old code of the streetwalker’s offer lost in a smile where both gums and teeth had been eaten up by the mercury cure.

He was glad he had come in the guise of a sailor, the homespun of his clothes attracting little attention as he pulled the hat he wore further down upon his forehead.