One Ilicit Night

by Sophia James

  He held her afterwards this time, against his chest, stroking her back with his fingers as the noises of the traffic outside became louder. His shirt of the finest linen was damp in sweat and she wondered why he had not discarded it, the smell of musk and man embedded in the fabric. Perhaps it was because of the scars she had felt raised upon his back when her fingers had lingered there?

  Caught in a world with no one else near, she became braver and leant over to trace her tongue around the shape of his ear exactly as he had done to hers.

  His breath simply stopped and the scent between them was pungent and insistent, another binding that held them, another sense fuelled by wonderment.

  Cristo let her take him this time, his control slipping into an unfamiliar acquiescence. He liked the way she held him tentatively, with the palm of one hand splayed against his chest and the hard length of his manhood pressing deep into her stomach.

  When the other fingers curled around his shaft he tensed and she pulled away, until his fingers again found hers and returned them, the pure uncertainty leaving him breathless.

  He wanted to move, wanted to topple her beneath him, but she held him with her fingers, her breasts grazing his chest and the length of her false hair tying him to immobility.

  ‘God, help me.’ His voice sounded nothing like it usually did and this time he spoke in English, a sure sign of just how far his restraint had slipped. Turning, his body covered hers, heavy and true, as he drove in hard because there was no moderation left in him, no restraint or inhibition. The shuddering finality of his release brought him a liberation he had long thought of as past.

  ‘God.’ His voice was not kind as he slipped from her a good twenty minutes later and crossed the room to the privacy of his bath chamber, the oath repeated again as he comprended the full enormity of what had just happened. Beraud’s purchased whore was making him care again, feel again, hope again.

  Laying his forehead against the cool silver mirror, he closed his eyes. The girl was dangerous with her alabaster skin and her elemental sensuality. In his world, anything of value was a way of losing control, the weakness of concern an easy weapon for those who would want to harm him. And there were so many who did!

  He needed to have her gone before others sensed an attachment and used her innocence as a pawn, needed to protect her in the only way that he still could.

  Pulling on his breeches and finding another shirt, he walked back into the room, the anger marking his movements with haste.

  Chapter Three

  Eleanor could barely understand all that had just happened.

  Now he looked angry, unemotional, a different shirt buttoned full around his neck. No longer biddable. His hair was tied tightly into a queue and slid down the silk on his shoulders, an overlord of the dark underbelly of Paris, the four fingers still left on his right hand all bejewelled.

  A stranger, only that, no vestige left of the lost hours shared between them. No remnant of a softer man who might truly cherish her. Just danger and hazard and difference, and a choice of life that showed in the hard lines of his body and face.

  Eighteen and set apart from everything now, a fallen woman, a stupid woman, a woman who would never again quite fit in to the strictly governed world of her upbringing. Spoiled goods. What husband should want her?

  Her breath came quick and shallow as she fought back the pooling tears!

  She was going to cry now, he could see that in the way she tipped her head down and dropped her shoulders. A girl who had made a choice she regretted, her deep red lipstick smudged across her mouth like a wound.

  ‘Where are your clothes?’ He made no effort at all to moderate his voice.

  ‘Downstairs in a b-b-blue chamber, but my gown was badly torn.’ Fright had made her shake, the cover she was draped in shivering with some force. Excusing himself for a moment he unfastened the slats on the door and asked a servant to find her attire.

  Then, moving to his wardrobe, he found a woollen jacket and a satin skirt that some woman had left here a few months back. ‘Put these on for now.’

  She reached out for them and he added a scarf of fine wool from the many lined up at the back of his closet, noticing the feminine way she fashioned it around her neck. Her long wig was caught up in the heaviness of the layers and he saw darker locks below. All a ruse?

  Interest sharpened. ‘How well do you know Beraud?’

  ‘He is one of my aunt’s clients.’

  ‘Then if you know what is good for you, ma cherie, you will stay away from him. His tastes run to the more eclectic…’ He tapered off, tired of trying to warn her, tired of taking responsibility for a whore who knew exactly what it was she was doing.

  He could not save them all. He had learned that truth years ago when the first woman to plead for assistance had spent his gold on a bottle of the finest cognac and thrown herself off the bridge of the Pont d’Alma. Her body had been dragged up with his engraved watch in her hands and the weight of the law had descended, demanding answers that brought him notice he was far from wanting. Since then he had been much more careful.

  He looked away as she stood and dressed, the slight reflection of her outline all that was left to him in the window. Even that he eschewed for the view outside, the first stirrings of the carriages and people in the vicinity of the Rue Pigalle.

  Dislocated. One word rent from all that he so usually kept hidden, the sheer and utter waste of life and goodness and innocence slapped against a harder, more selfish world.

  His world! Falder Castle glimmered like a golden promise on the edge of memory, the endless waves of Return Home Bay calling out in a hollow chant, ‘Come back, come back, come back.’

  But he couldn’t, not ever, the consequences of sins binding him to the necessity of distance.

  Shaking his head, he refused to think about the past and as he caught Jeanne’s measured glance he made himself relax.

  A layer of tragedy coated her seducer’s night-dark eyes. Eleanor saw it even as he smiled and the core of her anger melted just a fraction. He was beautiful. She doubted she had ever seen a more beautiful man, even with his overlong hair and clothes that would not be out of place in a theatrical production in the West End of London. As she looked around, the room gave the impression of a faded glory, the strips of silk and velvet on his bed mirrored in the heavy curtains and ornate corded ties at the double-sashed windows. A piano of considerable proportion stood against the farthest wall, sheet music draped across the top. Books stacked in piles on the floor completed the tableau, the titles in an equal measure of both French and English.

  With clothes on she felt braver, standing to run her fingers across the spines. Not lightweight reading, either. Moving then to the piano, she pressed down on a note of ivory, the sound echoing around the room in perfect pitch.

  A well-used and well-maintained piano by Stein. She read the make in the words above the keyboard. The frothy, vivid orange skirt she wore swung out from her legs as she turned, surprising her with its easy movement—the sort of garment a dancer might use or a courtesan? With no undergarments the satin was cold against her bottom.

  A short rap on the door took all her attention and with surprise she saw the man who entered was dressed exactly as her own grandfather’s butler might have been at the turn of the century.

  ‘Milord.’ His accent was pure Northern England! ‘The carriage is readied.’

  Carriage? She could go? Now? Le Comte de Caviglione would keep his promise free of question and all consequence? Or was she to be taken somewhere else?

  ‘I would thank you for keeping your word, sir…’

  She broke off when a bejewelled hand was raised, as if her appreciation was of absolutely no interest to him.

  ‘Are these items yours?’ He gestured towards a serving girl who had walked in behind the old man carrying her cape, boots, hat and purse.

  A great wave of redness surged into Eleanor’s face as all attention settled upon her, for, with the tumble
d bed linen and the scent of brandy and sex, the room held no mystery as to what had happened there. Servants talked with as much fervour and detail as did any daily broadsheet and the contents of her bag would give extra clues again.

  Could she even begin to hope that the letter was still inside? That the promise she had given to her grandfather might still be honoured?

  The older servant stepped forwards with her possessions. ‘These items were left in the blue salon, mademoiselle.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Reaching up, Eleanor fastened her hat. With no mirror the task was more difficult than she had anticipated and the wig made it harder again. Still, with a bonnet in place and the warm cape around her shoulders, hiding the mismatched assortment of articles beneath, Eleanor felt…braver. She pulled on her boots in less than a moment and, pretending to pick up something off the floor, extracted the letter as the Comte conversed with his man.

  ‘Milne will see you into a carriage. The driver has been instructed to take you where you would wish to be set down.’

  Hardly daring to believe that the promise of freedom was so very close, she followed the old man out even as the Comte de Caviglione turned towards the window, dismissing her in the way of a man who, after using a whore for a night, is pleased to see the back of her come the morning.

  Tucking her grandfather’s sealed envelope into the folds of the tumbled sheets as she passed the bed, she saw that the dawning sun had bathed the Comte’s hair in silver.

  Cristo watched as the carriage pulled away on the driveway below, the white pebbles caught in the eddy of the wheels reminding him of another place, another home and far from here.

  His hands fisted at his sides and emptiness was a taste in his mouth, sour and lonely. He longed for a greener land and a house that sat in the cleft of a hill with oaks at its back and roses in the gardens.

  Falder.

  The name echoed in the corners of regret; shaking his head, he turned to the hearth, leaning down for the kindling in a box near the fire. The simple task of catching sparks calmed him, made the fear he could feel rolling in his stomach more distant.

  When he had finished he reached for the leather pouch in the hidden drawer of his armoire and sent the previous week by The Committee.

  Secrets helped. Codes demanded single-mindedness and logic, searching for a pattern amongst the random lines of alphabet and numbers. Conradus’s book and Scovell’s principles made it easy and his interest quickened. His cipher wheel sat on the desk at hand.

  Hours lay before him to be used up in concentration and attention. No sleep. No dreams. No lying in the grey of morning and wondering how the hell he had come to such a pass.

  The bold scent of the girl lingered though, distracting him. Making him hungry. Again. For her warmth and the feel of flesh. Unspoiled.

  He picked up his pen and dipped the quill into ink, blotting it before setting the nib onto paper. Her locket lay on the table before him, the chain of gold thin and delicate. He remembered the look of it around her neck, fragile and pale, the skin almost translucent.

  He traced the certain shape of it in his mind. There had been a time when he had not known anything of dying and killing, a time when the sound of death had been impossible to describe. He could not lie to himself that those who had met their Maker because of him all had perished for the greater good or for the Golden Rule. Intelligence was a game that changed as the seasons did, and greed had as much sway as loyalty. To king or to country.

  Not to family. He had long since been cured of that.

  The columns on his desk refocused. Page seventy-five, column C, the fourth word down. A message began to form in the mass of chaos, though a capital letter threw him. The calibration had been changed and then changed again, the common combinations no longer locked into pattern. Transposing always had a point, though, and he looked for a letter that appeared the most frequently.

  R. He had it. Substituted for an E. Now he just had to find the system.

  He had been eighteen when he had started out on the dangerous road of espionage. A boy disenchanted with his family and alone at Cambridge. Easy pickings for Sir Roderick Smitherton, a professor who had been supplying the cream of the latest crop of undergraduates for years to the Foreign Office; Cristo had topped the new intake in every subject, his skill at languages sealing the bargain.

  When he started it had been like a game, the Power Politics of Europe under the fear-spell of the memory of Napoleon, a man who had won an empire by his skill of manoeuvre.

  Cristo had arrived in Paris the son of a Frenchwoman and the bequest of her chateau had given him a place to live. His father’s liaison and his mother’s shame had had a few points to recommend it, at least, and he had set up a spy ring that worked inside a restless Paris where priests and prostitutes had become the mainstay of his intelligence.

  He liked the hunt, those few hours that came between months of blinding boredom, for in them he found forgetfulness of everything, his life held in a reckless balance that was only the responsibility of others.

  Pull the trigger and end it all.

  He wondered at the resilience of the human condition every time his hands reached their own conclusion and reacted, the whirr of a bullet or the sharp, quick pull of a knife. Often in the moonlight and in the hidden corners of this city in spaces where people held secrets that might bring down a nation by a whisper of breath or a clink of coinage. Always counting. Not the lives that might fall on the toss of a dice or the shake of a head. Not that. Counting only the cost of what it took to stay in the game and one step ahead. And alive!

  He pulled out a cheroot from the silver tin he kept in his top drawer and tapped the end against the fine mahogany of his desk. Wrong and right depended on one’s point of view, though he suspected that his own moral compass had long since been tarnished by expediency, and the misguided idea that he might have once made a difference was only a distant memory in the dark labyrinth that was his life.

  The code before him blurred into nothingness and he stood and crossed to the window.

  His carriage had not yet returned and he wondered where it was that ‘Jeanne’ had wanted to be taken. He should have gone, of course, just to make certain that she arrived safely and that the destination was noted.

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ The words were loud against the silence and his breath frosted the glass. With an unusual sense of poignancy he wrote a J in the mist and rubbed it out just as quickly, the regret in him surfacing.

  He could find her again. Or he could lose her for ever, in the wilderness of mirrors and shadows where nothing was fixed.

  Only grand deception and infinite loneliness—and if prostitution was the oldest profession in the world then surely the business of spying must have come in a close second.

  Too close for comfort were he to reconnect with a woman who might mean something!

  He watched as a few of the prostitutes walked from his house to be swallowed up by the traffic in the street, their gaudy nightdresses as out of place as a peacock in a farmyard barn. He hoped that one of them was Jeanne’s aunt and that something she had told him was true. Perhaps then they would laugh together about the night over a cup of tea and plan the evening’s frivolity.

  The thought annoyed him, but he had no dominion over his little whore’s body and to demand so would only be foolish. Still, the anger would not dissipate.

  Nor the want. His eyes strayed to the bed trussed up into disarray, the cover that had warmed her tangled into many folds, the tail of it sweeping the floor. Empty.

  Only the smell of her perfume remained, heavy in the air with the tang of alcohol! He drew in a breath to keep her closer and then stopped.

  No. Jeanne’s association with Beraud could only be dangerous for them both. Reaching for the tumbled sheets, he tossed them into the blazing fire at his hearth and watched as linen caught flame. Better to leave her in memory. Delightful. Innocent. Always young. He only wished that he had known her name.

  Dropping the
medallion into a box of oddments in the bottom drawer of his desk, he had resolved to put her from his mind when his glance was caught by parchment flaring brighter than fabric.

  A letter. He could see the scrawled writing on the burning envelope was addressed to him. Quickly he reached for the brass poker and extracted the remnants, stamping on the flames as they refused to die.

  Only a few words remained on the sheet inside but they made his heart slow. Nigel. Murdered. Blame.

  No coincidence at all then, but the beginning of blackmail. Turning to the wall beside him, he punched his fist hard against it until every knuckle bled.

  Chapter Four

  London—June 1830

  Martin Westbury, the Earl of Dromorne, laid his newspaper down and looked across at his wife.

  ‘Now here is an interesting snippet, Eleanor. It seems the youngest Wellingham brother has returned from the Continent bearing both fortune and a foreign title to reside in London. They say he is looking for a home in the country. Perhaps he might find The Hall in Woburn to his liking? That is a property that might well suit such a man.’

  Eleanor considered her husband’s query. ‘I know only a little about the Wellinghams. Is the family seat near there?’

  ‘No, indeed not, for Falder Castle lies in Essex. I am surprised he would not acquire property around those parts instead. He runs bloodstock, according to the paper, and is quite an expert on the choosing of prime horse flesh.’

  The sounds of laughter interrupted their conversation as Martin’s nieces Margaret and Sophie came into the room. At seventeen and eighteen respectively they presented a picture of understated beauty, their gowns of matching yellow sprigged muslin floating in the breezy warmth of a new summer’s day. Their month-long sojourn in London with their mother, Diana, had made them full of energy.

  ‘We had a wonderful time last night at the Brownes’ ball.’ Sophie’s voice held such an edge of excitement that Eleanor was instantly curious. Looking across at her husband, she smiled.