Ruined By The Reckless Viscount

Her mother’s sob was muffled and then there were whispered words of worry, the rustle of silk, the blown-out candle, the door shutting behind them and then silence.

She was in her room in Mayfair, back in her bed, the same bunch of tightly budded pink roses bought yesterday from the markets on the small table beside her. It was dark and late and a fire had been set in the hearth. For heat, she supposed, because all she could feel was a deathly cold. She wiggled her toes and her hands came beneath the sheets to run along the lines of her body. Everything was in place though she could feel the scratches incurred during her flight through the woods.

She breathed in, glad she could now gather more air than she had been able to in the carriage. Her neck throbbed and she swallowed. There was a thick bandage wrapped across her right thumb and tied off at her wrist.

He was dead. All that beauty dead and gone. She remembered the blood on the cobblestones and on her petticoats and in the lighter shades of his hair.

The beat of her heart sounded loud in a room with the quiet slice of moonlight on the bedcovers. A falling moon now, faded and low.

Was she ruined because of him? Ruined for ever?

She could not believe that she wouldn’t be. Her sister had not come to seek her out and extract the story. She imagined Maria had been told to stay away. Her maid, Milly, had gone too, on an extended holiday back to her family in Kent. To recover from the dreadful shock, her father had explained when he first saw her awake, but she could see so very much more in his eyes.

The howls of the dogs came to mind. Her abductor’s voice, too, raw but certain. She remembered his laughter as she’d hit him hard with her books. There was a dimple in his chin.

Where would he be buried? She’d looked back and seen the servant lift him from the ground, carefully, gently, none of the violence of her father, only protection and concern.

She was glad for it. She was. She was also glad that she was here safe and that there was nothing left between them save memory. His pale clear green eyes. The shaved shortness of his hair. The two parallel scars evident on his scalp. The smell of wool and unscented soap in his jacket. She shook away such thoughts. He had ruined her. He had taken her life and changed it into something different. He had taken her from the light and discharged her into shadow.

The deep lacerations on her arms from the trees in the glade stung and she could still smell the peppermint even after her long soak in a hot bath scented with oil of lavender.

The scent clung to her and she recalled his fingers upon her as he had rubbed it in. Gently. Without any threat whatsoever.

He was dead because of his own foolishness. He was gone to face the judgements of the Lord. A deserved punishment. A fitting end. And yet all she could feel was the dreadful waste.

A tap on the door had her turning and her sister was there in her nightgown, face pale.

‘Can I come in, Flora? Papa said you were sleeping and that you were not to be disturbed till the morning. But Milly has been sent home and she was so full of the horror of your abduction it began to seem as if you might never be back again. What a fright you have given us.’

Florentia found her sister’s deluge of words comforting.

‘Mama says that there is the chance we might have to leave London for a while and retire to Albany. Did he hurt you, the one who took you from Mount Street, I mean? It is being whispered that Papa shot him dead somewhere to the north?’

Flora’s stomach turned and she sat up quickly, thinking she might be sick, glad when the nausea settled back into a more far off place.

Warm fingers curled in close as Maria positioned herself next to her and took her hand, tracing the scratches upon each finger and being careful not to bump her thumb. ‘You are safe now and that man will never be able to hurt you again, Papa promised it would be so. At least we can leave London and go home for it’s exhausting here and difficult to fit in.’

The out-of-step sisters, Flora suddenly thought. She had overheard that remark at their first soirée. One of a group of the ton’s beautiful girls had said it and the others had laughed.

They were an oddness perhaps here in London, the two daughters of an impoverished earl who held no true knowledge of society and its expectations.

Heartbreak had honed them and sharpened the edges of trust. But she would not think about that now because she was perilously close to tears.

‘I heard Mama crying and Papa talking with her and she asked if we were cursed?’

‘What did Father say?’ Flora stilled at Maria’s words.

‘He said that only the weak-willed can be so stricken and that the true curse would have been to never find you. He also said while there is life there is hope.’

Life. Breath. Warmth. No hope for him though, the stranger with his blood running across the cobbles.

‘Papa also said that perhaps we should not have come to London in the first place, but Mama asked how are we to be married off otherwise. Father replied there was an unkindness here that he found disappointing and I think he’s right for people laugh at us sometimes. Perhaps we are not as fashionable as we should be or as interesting as the others are? Papa’s title is something that holds sway here, but I suppose they also realise there is not much more than that behind our name.’

Flora pulled herself together and spoke up. ‘We are who we are, Maria. We are enough.’

‘Enough,’ her sister repeated and brought her fingers up into a fist.

This was an old tradition between them, joining hands and making a chain. Pulling them together. Keeping them strong. Maria was only a year above her in age and they had always been close. But even as she tried to gather strength Florentia felt that something had been irrevocably broken inside her, wrenched apart and plundered. She wondered truly if she would ever recover from a sadness she could not quite understand.

* * *

Her father called her to his library the next morning and he looked as tired as she was, the night past having been a long and fitful one to get through.

‘I thought we should try to remember something of yesterday between us, my dear. To keep it in memory so to speak, in case we have to think about it again in the future.’

‘In the future?’

‘If he has left you with child—?’

She didn’t let him finish. ‘It was not like that, Papa. He did not...’ She stopped. ‘I think he thought I was someone else entirely. Some woman who needed to be escorted north because she was in trouble. He did not touch me in that way.’

Relief lay in the lines of his face and in the lift of his eyes. ‘But your dress and the scratches?’

‘I had been sick and used water to try to make my gown clean again and he took it off me because it was wet and I was shaking and breathless. I also ran through a forest to try to get away and the branches snagged at my skin.’

‘He is a monster to do what he did.’

‘Is? I thought the man was dead. Are you saying he could still be alive?’

Her father’s hands came up. ‘I am certain he is not, but we shan’t stay in London to find out. I have ordered the town house to be closed and have put in motion the means to remove us once again back to Kent. We shall leave on Friday.’

Albany Manor. Two days away. The bloom of thankfulness made Flora dizzy.

‘There is something else that I think you should know.’

The tone of his words was gentle.

‘The story of your abduction is all over London this morning. There were people near Mount Street who spoke when they should not have and Milly was not...careful with her own words either.’

‘I see.’

‘Well, perhaps you do not see it all. There will not be a gentleman here in London who would now offer his hand in marriage. Quiet ruination is a completely different thing from this utterly public condemnation and I doubt that we can recover from such a spectacle. If I had more capital behind me or the title was not an entailed one...’ He stopped and took another tack. ‘For the moment I think withdrawal might be our best defence. Your mother has the same thought. The Honourable Timothy Calderwood has sent a message to say he shall not be able to call upon you again, but he is sorry for your trials.’

Sadness welled. She had enjoyed Timothy’s company with his laughter and his conversation. When she had danced with him a few days ago at the Rushton ball he’d intimated that he would like to know her much better and she had smiled back at him as if all her world was right. A kind man. A man of integrity. The first man who had made her feel special.

Her father’s eyebrows raised up.

‘Did your abductor say anything at all about who he was?’

‘He didn’t.’ Florentia wondered if she should mention the name of Acacia Kensington and a man called Thomas. She decided against it, though, reasoning if her kidnapper was identified and still alive he’d be badly hurt and unable to fight off any further recriminations against him. ‘I am sure he imagined I was another and had just realised his mistake when you came and shot him.’

‘And mark my words I would do exactly the same again for I am not sure how you might recover from this travesty.’

‘With fortitude, Papa.’

Her reply made him laugh though there was no humour in it. ‘I wish Bryson was here...’ he said and stopped, realising what he had just uttered.

Her brother stood in the empty space between them. Beautiful funny Bryson with his golden hair and blue eyes and his cleverness. The glue in a family that had come unstuck ever since his passing.

The son. The heir to an entailed property. Florentia’s twin.

She sat down on the nearest seat, trying to find breath. It had been so long since his name had been mentioned out loud even though he was silently present in every moment of every day.

‘I no longer think the fault lay with you, Flora, and am sorry that I once implied it such.’ These were words she had heard before and foolish apologies that she had long since ceased to refute. ‘We will get through this. All of it. There will be an ending to the pain, I promise.’

But there wasn’t. There hadn’t been. There never would be.

The nausea she had felt in the carriage returned and she forced it down. She hadn’t been able to eat anything and although she felt hungry she just could not swallow even the smallest morsel of food. A new symptom that. Perhaps she was going mad in truth. The completion of a process that had started as she had sat there with her brother dying in her arms and both their clothes splashed in red.

Her fault. Her dare. Her imprudence. She began to shake in earnest.

‘Shall I fetch Mama, Flora?’

‘No.’ She shook her head hard and the memory shattered.

* * *

The ache was lessened now, the burn and throbbing of it where his neck met the collar bone. Tommy was beside him.

‘Here, take this. It will help.’

Bitter like almonds. James screwed his face up at the taste, but after a few moments he started to feel as if he was floating, as if the land was somehow below him and he was flying through the clouds on a murmur.

He liked the sensation. He liked the freedom though his head still throbbed with each beat of his heart, leaving him squinting his eyes against the light.

‘What happened?’

‘You were shot.’ His cousin lent closer, eyes shadowed. ‘It was the wrong woman, Winter. You got the wrong damn woman.’

The red dress. The dogs. The breathlessness. It all came back in a fractured whirl.

‘Is she safe? The girl I took?’

A curse and the shifting of light was his response, quiet between them until his cousin spoke again. ‘She’s fine. It’s you we are worried about.’

‘I...won’t...die.’ He managed to get the words out one by one.

‘Why the hell do you think you won’t, when you’ve lost so much blood?’

‘Because...need...to say...sorry.’

‘Her father shot you by all accounts, for God’s sake. Point blank and without dialogue.’

‘Deserved...it.’

Then the dark came and he slipped away from the hurting light.

Chapter Two

Albany Manor, Kent—April 1816

‘Come to London with me, Flora. I am tired of you never being there and that ridiculous scandal from years ago is old news now. No one will remember it, I promise. There are far worse wrongdoings in society catching people’s imaginations. Your downfall is barely recalled.’

Her sister, Maria, had always been difficult to say no to, Florentia thought, as she finished the final touches of a painting depicting the faces of three men caught in dark light at a dinner table.

‘Roy will be there, too, and his mother. We will have a number of people all about us at every important social occasion. It won’t be like the last time at all, I promise.’

The last time.

Three years ago when Florentia had finally decided to step again into society the whole thing had been a disaster. No one had wanted to talk to her, though Timothy Calderwood to his credit had made an effort to try and converse before his new wife had pulled him away. The memory of it stung. She had felt like an outcast and even Maria’s marriage to one of the ton’s favourite sons, Lord Warrenden, had not softened her dislike of social occasions.

Shaking away the memories, Flora stood and took off her smock before hanging it across the back of her easel.

‘If I did decide to come, I’d need your promise that I can leave as soon as I want and return to Albany without argument.’

Maria smiled. ‘I’d just like the chance for you to see the worries you harbour are totally unfounded. You cannot possibly let the unlawful actions of one unhinged individual ruin your life for ever. A stranger. A man who has never been apprehended for the heinous deed and one who in all probability is long dead. It’s finished and over. You need to live again and find someone like I have. Roy has been a blessing and a joy to me. He has made me happy again.’

That certain look came across Maria’s face as she spoke about her husband of eighteen months with the true contentment of a woman in love and knowing it.

Placing the paint back in their glass containers, Flora wiped her easel with turpentine. She could not work in a mess and she hated waste. The yellow ochre had dribbled into the cobalt blue to make a dirty brown-green, the swirl of the mix blobbing on the cloth.

For over a year now she had been sending a new portrait every second week to London and to an agent she had acquired through word of mouth from Roy. Mr Albert Ward had been hounding her to come and visit him in the city to meet some of his private clients, many who had expressly asked for her by name to draw their portrait.

By name...? Well, not precisely, she thought, frowning at the mistake.

Mr Frederick Rutherford was making a splash in the realms of the art world with his dark and moody portraits, and his reputation was growing as fast as his list of prospective clients. A young man with a great future before him, if only he would show up at the events planned around his unique style of painting.

A sensation. A mystery. A talent that had burst on to the London scene unexpectedly and with a vivid impression of genius and worth.

The letters from Mr Ward were getting more and more insistent on a meeting face-to-face. The agent needed to understand what sort of a man he was, what had fashioned his sense of design, what had shaped him into a muse who could seemingly interpret the feelings of those he chose as his subject in each painting so brilliantly. Hopelessness. Loss. Grief. Love. Passion. Deceit. All the shades of human emotion scrawled across a canvas and living in the application of pigment.

Ward’s letter had been full of exaggerated prose and superlatives. The agent had seen in her paintings many of the themes that she herself had no knowledge of and yet her silence had seemed to propel him into a fiercer and more loyal promise.

It was worrying this temperament of his and Florentia often doubted if the ruse was even worth going on with, but as a woman bound by her past to never marry she had been somewhat forced into finding a vocation that did not include family and children. And she loved painting. If her life was not to follow the direction she once had thought it might have, she did not wish to be derailed into another that she hated.

It could be worse, for the money she garnered was supplementing her father’s lack of it and as Albany Manor was entailed the promise of a longevity of tenure was gone without a male heir. After her father’s death the Manor and title would pass to her deceased uncle’s oldest son, a fact that Christopher, the heir, reminded them of every time he came to visit.

She’d thought to send her youngest cousin Steven in her place to see Mr Ward in person, instructing him on his conduct and in what to say, but she knew for all his good points he was a tattlemouth. The fact that she had duped one of the prominent art critics in London in her role as Mr Frederick Rutherford would be gossip too salubrious to simply keep quiet about was another consideration altogether and she did not think her parents would be up to a further scandal.

So she was essentially bound to the charade she had thought up. Besides, a new idea had begun to form at the back of her head. She could go herself to London. A young artist who was slight and effeminate would not be much remarked upon and if she gifted him with a cough and a propensity for bad headaches and poor health she might not have to stay around anywhere for very long.

A quick visit might suffice to keep her hand in the game, so to speak, and with her father’s bouts of despondency that took him to bed often and her mother’s insistence in looking after him, she would have much freedom to move around.

Her sister could help her, too, for she had been in on the deception from the very start.

‘If I agreed to come to London, I would not wish to attend any major social events, Maria. If I went anywhere it would have to be something small and select.’

‘An afternoon tea then would be the thing to begin with. A quiet cultural affair at Lady Tessa Goodridge’s, perhaps, and afterwards a play in the Haymarket.’

Flora unbundled her hair and shook it free. She always placed it up when she painted in a messy and oversized bun fastened with two ceramic clips that she had been given by her sister.

Her good-luck charms, she called them, because after receiving them things had improved and she had survived. She smiled to herself. Perhaps that was putting too good an interpretation on it, she ruminated, for in truth she had become the sort of woman who was decidedly eccentric and superstitious. She’d been enclosed in the Hale-Burton country seat of Albany Manor for the last six years and had seldom ventured out, apart from her one sojourn to London, the small world she called her own allowing her much time completely alone.

She used to like people. Once. Now they simply frightened her. She could not understand them or interpret their true meaning. The inspiration for every portrait she had completed and sent to Mr Ward by mail had come from the pages of books of drawings in the extensive library at Albany. Fictional, altered or copied.

Save one, she amended, but then she did not think about that.

So many topics now that were out of bounds to her sense of peace. She wished she were different, but she did not know where to begin to become so.

‘We will go to the dressmaker in Bromley, Flora. She will fashion you some clothes and she is as talented as the expensive modistes in Paris. One of her patrons is a friend of mine and every person who ever orders a gown from her is more than delighted with it.’

Listening to Maria’s plans for their sojourn made the enormity of what she had agreed on to become real. Appearance was so important in the city and the old feelings of being not quite good enough resurfaced with a dread.

‘I don’t want anything fancy, Maria, and I shan’t be wearing bright colours at all.’ Last time their mother had insisted on gowns that were so dreadfully noticeable and so very wrong for their colouring. Since her abduction she’d never worn that shade of red again.

‘Roy prefers me in pastel,’ her sister was saying and even that sent a chill of horror down Florentia’s neck. Women in society had so little say in anything. They were mute beautiful things, needy and powerless. Well, the paintings had given her back her power and she knew that she would never willingly relinquish it.

‘I also need to visit Mr Ward in South London.’

Maria was silent, her brows knitted together. ‘He thinks you are a man, Florentia. How can you see him at all?’

‘It will just be quickly and I shall be dressed as Frederick Rutherford.’

‘I hardly think you could do that for it would be...scandalous.’

Flora laughed. ‘Well, I am an expert in that field by all accounts, so I should manage it effortlessly. I’ll wear Bryson’s clothes and his boots. They would fit me well.’

‘What of your hair? Mr Ward would not think that to belong to a boy.’

‘A wig and a hat would be an easy disguise. I can procure a moustache, too, and stuff paper in my cheeks to change the shape of my face. That should make me speak differently.’

‘My God, Florentia.’ Maria simply stared at her. ‘You have been thinking of this for a while? This dupe?’

‘The art of pretence lies in painting just as truly as it ever would in the world of acting. It just requires sure-mindedness, I think.’

‘And you truly imagine you could pull off such a character?’

‘I do.’ She smiled because her sister’s face was stiff with disbelief. ‘I’ve been practising, Maria. The walking. The talking. The sitting. I am sure I could be more than convincing.’

‘And what of the serving staff at the London town house of the Warrendens? I am certain they should notice if one moment you are a girl and the next a boy and goodness knows who they might tell. Your true identity would be all over London before we ever got to our next appointment if the stories of the gossip-mongering between the big houses is to be believed.’

‘Then perhaps I should simply go as Mr Frederick Rutherford right from the beginning. The Warrendens’ staff in London does not know me and it would completely do away with the need for new gowns and shoes. I shan’t have to even take a maid with me. I shall simply arrive as Mr Frederick Rutherford and leave as him with no questions asked.’

‘I don’t believe I am having this conversation with you, Florentia. You cannot possibly be serious.’

‘Oh, but I am, Maria. I have no wish to be out and about in society again, but I do have a need to continue selling my paintings. I could, of course, simply go up to the city alone and in disguise, but...’

‘No. If you are going to do this ridiculous thing I want to be there to help you, to make certain that you are safe.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You have forced my hand, dreadfully, but I do want to state quite forcefully that this is a terrible and dangerous idea.’

‘I know I can do it, Maria. Remember the plays we used to put on as children. You always said I was marvellous at acting my parts.’

‘That was make believe.’

‘As this is, too. It’s exactly the same.’

‘If you get caught—’

Florentia cut her off. ‘But I won’t. I promise.’

‘My God, I can’t believe I should even be considering this. I can’t believe you might talk me into it.’

‘Try, Maria. Try for my sake.’

‘All right. I’ll visit the wigmakers if you fashion a drawing of your wants and I can simply say it is for a play we are putting on at Albany for Christmas. Did you have a preference for a colour?’

‘Black.’ Flora was astonished to hear such certainty coming from her mouth. She could mimic Bryson because she had known him so very well, his habits, his stance, the way he walked and watched. His hair had been golden just like hers, so she needed something distinctly different.