Regency Scandals: High Seas To High Society / Masquerading Mistress

‘You are well?’ She could barely just leave it here.

His eyes flicked to the window where the beams of a new day flooded in.

‘Very well. Now,’ he replied and pushed himself up. Emerald resisted an impulse to help him as he bent over, his hands clamped tightly about his head and holding everything together. She had seen enough hangovers to recognise that this was a bad one.

‘Did you sleep at all last night?’

He shook his head, squinting against the light that caught him squarely from this angle.

A new thought struck her. He never slept. Her mind ran over the times she had found him up, fully dressed, in the small hours just before the dawn.

After the ball. The first night she had searched Falder. This morning. Each time with a glass in his hand and the look of the damned in his eyes.

‘My father had a remedy for too much drink.’ Her resolve to confront him faltered under his vulnerability this morning and his eyebrows arched.

‘A man of many varied talents, then,’ he chided and crossed the room to replace a blanket across his brother that had fallen on to the floor. Taris barely moved as he did so, well wrapped in the arms of Morpheus.

What had they spoken of, Emerald wondered, in the dead of night? What kept them from warmer beds and a more comfortable slumber? Memories? Secrets? Her?

‘Could you concoct this remedy for me?’

She was more than surprised by his request. ‘I’d need herbs and sugar and milk.’

‘We could find those in the kitchen. It’s this way.’

He edged his way around her, careful not to touch, and opened the door. She saw he used the solidness of it to retain his balance.

The kitchen was enormous and extremely well appointed. Ten or so people of all genders, sizes and ages scraped, cleaned, cooked and chopped, the smell of a fine luncheon permeating the air. A woman extracted herself from the others, wiping her hands on her apron as she came forward.

‘Your Grace?’ There was question in her voice. ‘I hope all is well with the food …’

‘Indeed it is, Mrs Tonner. But Lady Emma would like a few ingredients to make a drink.’ He did not say what sort of drink.

‘A drink?’ Amazement overcame the cook’s reserve. ‘You wish to cook, my lady?’

‘I wish to make a potion with eggs, milk and hyssop. And mandrake root, if you have it.’

A smile lit up Mrs Tonner’s face. The secret recipe of Beau’s was not just confined to the wilds of Jamaica, Emerald determined, and followed her to a well-stocked pantry where she quickly found what was needed. A smaller maid produced a bowl and whisk and another a large tumbler embossed with Asher Carisbrook’s initials.

A.W. Not just his initials, either, but the sum of generations before him. Ashton Wellingham. Ashland Wellingham. Ashborne Wellingham.

Thanking the cook, she set to work, flustered when she saw that he meant to stay and watch her. The kitchen was as quiet as the dead, though ten sets of ears were fastened on their every movement and word.

‘Did you make this often?’ he asked as she worked.

Often and often and often.

‘No. Only a very few times when a parishioner was in his cups at church. Apart from that …’ She let the sentence peter out as a vision of Beau downing the concoction in ever-increasing quantities overcame her.

Her father had been a mean drunk and a series of harlots had taken the brunt of his temper.

Mostly.

She was pleased that Asher was not of that ilk. Indeed, drink seemed to mellow him, make him easier to talk with, more vulnerable.

‘Yet you can remember the recipe by heart?’

‘It is a simple one, which you have to drink all at once.’ She handed the tumbler to him as she finished.

He sniffed it and looked up. ‘Is it supposed to smell this way?’

‘Yes.’ She tried to stop laughter as she registered his incredulity but could not quite. ‘Strong liquor requires a strong antidote.’

When he made no move to swallow it she leant across and removed the cup from his hands to take a sip.

‘See. Not poisonous. In fact, quite palatable.’ She repressed a shiver as the aftertaste hit her and hoped that he had not seen it.

‘Palatable?’ He questioned when he had finished. ‘You call that palatable?’ A film of froth coated his upper lip before he licked it away. ‘Come, Emma, and I will show you palatable.’

Once outside, he took a turning that she had not seen before that led to a conservatory almost entirely formed by glass, opening out to a wide and formal garden.

‘My mother’s contribution to the place,’ he remarked as he saw her astonishment. ‘It is a tradition that the Wellingham wives are always good at something. My grandmother was a horsewoman of great repute and my great-grandmother a musician. It is said at night through the corridors of the west wing that you can still hear the haunting tunes of her pianoforte.’ He smiled. ‘Ghosts are mandatory in a place like this, though I have never seen one.’

‘What was Melanie good at?’ The thought became a voiced question and she cursed as she saw his withdrawal.

‘My wife was also good at music and good at being a wife,’ he said simply and took the head off an orange chrysanthemum at his feet.

‘She was beautiful.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she the reason you do not sleep?’

He stood perfectly still. God, he seldom spoke of Melanie. And never to anyone save Taris. But here in the light of day, after a night when he hadn’t had a moment’s sleep, it was suddenly easy. Emma Seaton made it so.

‘I was not at home when she died. I was not at home for her funeral. I should have been home.’ He was astonished at the well of information he had given her and the depth of his anguish. If he had been by himself, he would have slammed his fist into something hard and finished off another bottle. But he wasn’t alone.

‘My brother also died when I was not with him. He was three.’

Asher looked up and focused. For the first time since he had met her, he felt as if he was actually hearing about someone in her family who had been real.

‘I used to carry him everywhere, you see. I was six when he … went and acted his mother, I suppose. My name was the first one he ever spoke and I taught him songs in the dusk and rocked his hammock. He had a lisp. I remember that more now than his face.’

‘How did he die?’ She did not answer, though her paleness told him it had not been an easy death. He was trying to work out what lesson he could take from her confidence when she began to speak again.

‘How long ago was it that your wife died?’

‘Three years.’

‘People used to say to me “time softens pain.” And I used to think nothing will ever soften this ache. Nothing. But time did. It flattened out the rawness and left only memories. Good memories. Now when I think of James—that was his name—I think of his lisp and his curly blond hair and the thoughts make me smile.’

‘I rarely speak of Melanie to anyone.’

‘But you should, for it helps. A worry shared is a worry halved. Have you not heard the old adage?’

‘Your father again?’

She smiled and in the light of the new day her dimples were as easy to see as the faint holes in her ears. For earrings, he determined, and not just one, either. A whole row of tiny marks pierced both lobes. He imagined jewels sparkling there and was still as a memory shifted and was lost.

Reaching out, he touched the slight indentations and she didn’t stop him. Rather she leaned into his embrace.

She was so damnably responsive, he thought. Any slight caress had her heart beating faster and the flush well upon her cheeks. What would it be like to part the moist lips of her womanhood and slip inside? The thought had him stiffening and he pulled away.

Hell. After yesterday’s débâcle he was back to acting like some green boy straight out of school. He wondered if she would notice the thickening bulge at the front of his trousers. His much-too-tight trousers, he amended, and readjusted them for the second time in two days.

The sound of his mother’s voice made him groan. To be caught in the gardens by a parent with his trousers metaphorically down was something he had not contemplated. It hadn’t happened at seventeen, so he had certainly not expected it to happen at thirty-one. Pulling the front of his long jacket closed he watched as Alice Wellingham, the Dowager Duchess of Carisbrook, was wheeled into the gardens by her maid. A quick look at Emma Seaton disorientated him. She was staring straight at him and trying not to smile. Lord, he thought. He was being given the run around by a Catholic chit, who had fed him a potion of ingredients that were causing his eyes to blur with tiredness.

His mother’s smile was not helping either. He recognised that look, had seen it before every time some eligible woman had come into the sphere of his notice since the death of his wife, but today for the first time he was unreasonably irritated by it.

‘You look terrible, Asher.’

‘Good morning, Mother.’

‘You look terrible and your servants let it slip that you have not slept at all in a week. And you have finished as many bottles of brandy as you do usually in a month.’ Her voice broke. ‘You will kill yourself with this behaviour and I hate to think what might happen to Falder and the dukedom.’

‘Taris would undoubtedly assume the mantle of responsibility were such an unlikely event to occur.’ He was cruel in his response, but he had had this talk before and did not want it in front of Emma Seaton now.

‘Unlikely?’ His mother was about to say more when her eyes rested on the face of Emerald and he introduced her.

‘You are the Countess of Haversham’s niece, are you not?’

‘I am.’

‘Many years ago I had a passing acquaintance with her family. Which branch do you hail from?’

‘A distant one, I am afraid.’

Emma was a master at not answering any question about her past, Asher thought, but his mother failed to note the fact.

‘She had a brother, Beauvedere. Have you ever come across him?’

‘I do not believe so.’

‘Then it is well that you haven’t—I often wonder what happened to him. He was a striking man with the bluest eyes and a way with the women that was legendary. Ashborne always said he would come to no good …’ She began to giggle. ‘I am sorry. It is age, I think, this constant referral to times past. Easy to remember what happened thirty years ago and hard to think what it was one did yesterday. Instead of regaling you with old nonsense, I should be asking if are you being properly looked after here at Falder. Do you like the room you’ve been given? You are in the yellow room are you not? Do you play whist?’

‘Badly.’ Emerald looked startled by the quick changes of topic.

‘Good. Then I shall set you up as my opponent this evening. Would you mind? My sister usually partners me, but she has gone down to London for the week as my nephew has arrived from the Americas. You will have a lot to catch up on, Asher,’ she added, and even as she said the words his heart sank.

Just another person to tell him how he had changed for the worse.

He hoped that his cousin would keep any criticisms to himself and was suddenly as tired by it all as he ever had been.

It was the potency of Emma’s remedy combined with a lack of sleep, he determined, and resolved to knock himself out early tonight with a strong brandy. He hoped belatedly that no maid had woken his brother slumbering on the armchair in front of Melanie’s portrait. Taris must have come back into the room. He frowned. He had not heard him do so, which in turn suggested that some time around the very early dawn he had, after all, nodded off. The notion cheered him considerably. If he could sleep a little, it would follow that he could also sleep a lot. As his mother’s maid wheeled her from the garden, he had another thought.

‘Does the potion you made act as a sort of sleeping draught?’ He could barely keep his eyes open.

‘It does. And quite quickly too.’ The laugh she ended the sentence with worried him.

‘How quickly?’

When the dizzy whorl hit him he had his answer, then he felt only blackness.

He slept twenty hours straight and awakened just as the sun was rising on the dawn of the following day.

Emma Seaton sat next to him, reading Mary Wollstonecraft, the revolutionary tract criticising the restricted educative norms for women. Even her reading matter worried him.

‘You are awake?’ she said softly and put down the book. ‘I know that I should not be here, but it was my potion and I was worried that perhaps I had wrongly remembered the proportions. I came in to see that you still breathed.’

‘Just here?’ he asked back and looked around the room for any signs of shifted possessions.

‘I would not hurt your family. I like them.’

‘But you would hurt me?’ He was suddenly still, for today everything seemed clearer. It was him she had bumped into at Jack’s ball and him she had targeted at the Bishop’s dinner. Talking with George about it the next day, he had discovered that Lady Emma Seaton had intimated to Flora that she was an old friend of his and that she should be pleased to renew the acquaintance.

And when she had fallen against him at the ball he had known her faint to be false.

Lying on his back in bed with almost nothing on, however, he felt it was neither the time nor the place for confrontation. Consequently he turned the subject.

‘You could probably make a fortune curing the plight of London’s insomniacs with your tonic. The ton would take to you like a saviour.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Better.’

‘You do not sound it.’

‘How do I sound?’

‘Annoyed.’

‘And you could not imagine why?’

‘I gave you the gift of sleep.’

‘You knocked me out and God knows what you have been up to in the meantime, making free with the things in my house in your quest for … what?’ Steely eyes swept across her. ‘Is it money? You look as if you might need some.’

Today he was like a bear with a sore head.

‘My clothes may not be the latest vogue in London, but I assure you that it is from lack of desire rather than from lack of funds.’

‘You would not want a new gown?’

‘I know that to you the idea may be a preposterous one, but not all women have the need to garb themselves in the very latest style. Some—like me, for example—would rather buy books.’

He began to laugh. ‘Use my library, then. Feel free to choose something other than Wollstonecraft.’

He looked immeasurably younger with the humour dancing in his eyes and she capitulated. ‘When you feel better later on in the day, perhaps we might enjoy a discussion on the relative merits of women’s rights.’

‘Perhaps,’ he murmured and pulled a pillow over his head, ending any possibility of conversation.

Chapter Eight

Emerald walked to the sea early before anyone was about, before the night stars had faded from the sky, before the chamber maids had risen from their beds, and before Miriam would have the notion to miss her and comment. She had searched Falder for hours last night, searched Asher’s room and the alcoves off it, searched the kitchens and the salons and the library. Searched the map room that Miriam had spoken of and come away with nothing. Had he thrown the cane away? She shook her head. The jewels on the carved head were too valuable to just get rid of and even the most dull-witted of folk could have determined the worth of the thing. Had he sold it off? Could she ask him somehow of its whereabouts without raising his curiosity and jogging his memory?

The water was cold as she waded into it, but not the freezing cold she had expected and the temperature took her thoughts on to further possibilities.

Looking around, she wondered if she dared to take off her gown and swim out to the first break of the waves. Behind her the land was silent and grey, a row of tall dark pines sheltering the beach from a cottage that lay half a mile in from where she stood, and the cove was bound at both ends by sharp outcrops of rock. No access there, then. No sudden stranger. No peeping Toms or vagrant passers-by.

She made her mind up in a moment and walked to a large bush at the head of the beach, shrugging off her jacket and her gown and boots. She left her silk gloves on. Out of habit. The slight breeze sent goose-bumps across the skin on her forearms and she laughed in sheer and unadulterated joy. Freedom.

Her first true freedom in four months. She rubbed away the tears that started in her eyes and walked straight into the ocean.

Asher saw her from a distance, a lonely Aphrodite with her hair a froth of bright gilt curls upon her head. Nothing was hidden. Nothing. Her long slender legs and arms, her rounded bottom, her waist, her full breasts moving up and down as she turned to look at the shore one last time before diving under. And under. And under …

His heart began to race and he urged his mount on, hitting the beach in a flat-out gallop and pulling off his boots and jacket after he had dismounted. God, where the hell was she?

‘Emma.’ His voice was wild, angry, desperate, furious, the beat of his heart so loud he thought he might fall over with the power of the blood racing through his veins, thought he might explode with the red-hot fear, thought he might …

She came up fifty yards further out from where he had last seen her and it was her laughter that sent him completely over the edge, a laughter that stopped abruptly as she turned and her eyes caught his own.

‘Get out of the water. Now.’ He could do nothing to soften his wrath. All he wanted was for her to be safe.

‘Go back.’ Her voice was breathless, horrified. ‘Go away. I do not need any help.’ Turquoise eyes searched the shore for any sign of others and her cheeks, despite the cold of the sea, were a burning bright hot red.

He was not swayed at all. ‘If you don’t come out this second, I’ll come in and get you.’

Emerald bobbed down in the water and wondered what to do now, for Asher Wellingham stood directly in a line in front of her clothes. From the look on his face she didn’t think he’d be making anything easy for her either.

Already the water had lapped at his trousers and was now just above the point of his knees. Would he keep coming? Would he swim in and drag her out as he threatened?

‘All right, then. Turn around.’ Her placatory tone was hardly won, and when she saw the white of his teeth gleam in a quick smile she was pressed not to call his bluff and see just who was the stronger swimmer. But where could she then come ashore?

‘Turn around.’ She repeated the command when he made no move to do so and her trepidation grew as a movement on the high ground behind Asher formed the shape of another man, far away enough to still be safe, but coming closer with each wasted second. Her distraction had Asher turning.

‘It’s Malcolm Howard, a cottar from the hill.’ His barely concealed laughter made her swear and, swimming in on the first wave, she stood up as late as she could manage it. Asher Carisbrook held his bulky jacket out to her, but not before he had had a good eyeful.

‘Most gentlemen would have at least averted their faces,’ she ground out and pulled her hand away, shrugging into his jacket with the intent of showing as little flesh as possible and pleased when the hem fell below her knees.

‘Most ladies would have worn a shift,’ he returned, looking over his shoulder and whistling. His large black stallion walked from the bushes at the top of the beach, carefully picking his way across the sand. Glancing across his shoulder, Emerald was surprised to see no sign of the stranger in the distance.

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