by Louise Allen
Julia looked at him sharply, but Will was already on the pavement handing up money to the driver. ‘Now, to get ourselves back up to our room without setting the entire place on its ear. If the manager gets sight of me, we will find ourselves and our bags out on the pavement, I have no doubt!’ he added as he tried to cover the worst damage on his face with the linen square.
‘I do not think I look much better,’ Julia confessed as a page, trying hard not to stare, came to take her small valise. Mercifully, although there were hotel staff a-plenty to negotiate, they did not encounter the manager or any guests on their way up to the room.
‘Oh, my lady! My lord. I was that worried, I didn’t know what to do!’ Nancy, started to her feet as they entered their sitting room. She had a basket of mending at her feet, but it did not seem she had been doing much to it.
Julia did her best to calm her down, although for the life of her she could not think of a convincing explanation to offer the maid other than a rather garbled story of family emergency and footpads.
Her head spun with suppositions and hopes and fears, but she allowed Nancy to lead her away to bathe and to change, leaving Will to deal with his own toilette in the minuscule dressing room. She suspected they both needed time before the full meaning of these revelations could be faced and she sensed that her husband did not want wifely fussing over what he was trying to dismiss as minor injuries.
*
‘You are a pearl amongst wives,’ Will said. He laid down his knife and fork after what she supposed was a cross between breakfast and luncheon and lifted his wine glass in a silent toast to her.
‘I am?’
‘You do not prattle and cling when the sensible thing to do is wash and change and eat.’
‘Now I may do more than prattle,’ Julia said. ‘I do not know where to start.’
‘At the beginning,’ Will suggested. ‘We have our lives back, both of us. Do you want to live the remainder of yours with me?’
‘Of course.’ That was the last question she had expected him to ask. ‘I love you—do you not believe me?’
‘I was just getting used to the idea when you ran away from me.’ But he was teasing her, she could see. All the darkness was gone from his eyes and his mouth curved in a smile despite its bruising.
‘I could not let you suffer for what I thought was my crime,’ she said.
‘I know. I am not sure what I have done to deserve that you should put me first, before your own safety, your own life.’
How do I explain to a man why I love him when I cannot even analyse it myself? ‘Will, you do not even seem angry with me after all I have put you through.’
Will stood up, took her hand and led her through to the bedchamber. ‘That must be because I am in love with you,’ he remarked as he closed the door.
‘What?’ Julia spun round so fast she lost her balance and sat down on the end of the bed. ‘Did you say—’
‘I said I was in love with you.’ Will sounded thoughtful. ‘Actually, I should have said I love you because I believe there is a difference. I have never felt like this for any other woman. Nor will I,’ he added. ‘I suspect I have been lamentably slow in realising it, my love.’
‘When did you? Realise it, I mean.’ After he realised I was innocent—or before?
Will turned the key in the lock. ‘The sooner we are back in our own home and our own bed, the better,’ he grumbled as he began to undress. ‘When did I realise? I will tell you in a minute, but let me try to recount this as it happened. None of it was a blinding revelation, more a piecing together of pieces. After I had left you in this room, after I had said those things to you that I hope you have it in you to forgive, I sat and drank brandy and realised that you could never have killed a man in cold blood, or even intended to kill him in hot blood either. I realised that it must have been an accident and once I saw that I could understand how it all followed on—your flight, why you had kept it a secret.’
He trusted her. He had trusted her even when he believed she could bring his world crashing down around his ears. How could she not love him?
‘When I found that note I believed it, at first. You frightened me half to death with that tarradidle about suicide and the Thames.’ He heeled his boots off with scant regard for scratches on their glossy finish and tossed them across the room. ‘Hell, woman, I was on Blackfriars bridge before I started to think straight and remembered what you said about throwing yourself in the lake when we first met. And then I looked at the letter and saw it was so very carefully constructed not to tell any lies.
‘I did not think you would risk trying to hide in London, so the next thing was to see if you had taken a stagecoach out of town. I had men checking every ticket office. They drew a blank so I knew you must still be in town, but I didn’t understand why.’ Will sat on the bed beside her to roll down his stockings.
‘I knew then that if I lost you nothing would ever matter again. Not my own life, not an estate, however much I loved it. Even a block-headed male can put two and two together faced with that realisation. I went to sleep despite the shock of realising that I loved my own wife and woke to the realisation that the Priors knew Dalfield was alive.’
He rubbed one big hand over his face, betraying in that gesture the hours of anxiety, the lack of rest. ‘I still had no idea where you were, but I thought I had best deal with the Priors first, so I told Neil Frazer all about it and enlisted his help as a magistrate in case I needed more than brute force. And there, thank God, you were.’
Julia stroked her hand down his cheek, gently over the bruises, feeling the morning stubble prickling under her palm. He loves me and he would love me even if the worst had been true. She supposed it was possible to feel this happy and for it not to be a dream. ‘You found me. I think you would always find me.’
Will pulled off his shirt and stood to unfasten his breeches. Julia scrambled out of her own clothes, careless of pulled buttons, and looked up from unlacing her stays to find him naked, bruised all over his torso and flagrantly aroused. ‘Those bruises! Will, they must hurt so—’
‘Then take my mind off them and do not try to test your theory that I can always find you by running away again. It ruins my sleep,’ he added as he joined her on the wide bed.
Julia gave a little snort of laughter and kissed his collarbone, the nearest part of him she could reach. Ah, the smell of his skin…
‘That is good—I was wondering if I would ever hear you laugh again.’
‘I like this, having you naked and at a disadvantage,’ she murmured, pursuing the line of the bone to the point of his shoulder and biting gently. ‘Tired and battered, my poor love. I can have my wicked way with you.’
‘Disadvantage?’ He rolled her over with a mock growl and pounced, wrestling with the squirming, laughing, woman and the loose tapes of the corset. ‘It would take more than a few bruises and a disturbed night to weaken me.’
Julia lay back with a contented sigh of agreement as Will began to kiss his way down her body. He paused to twirl his tongue in her navel, which always made her giggle, then raised his head. ‘Talking of disturbed nights, do you feel any more comfortable with the idea of children?’ He spoke lightly, but she could sense his underlying hesitation in case he hurt her.
‘I feel very comfortable with that idea, my lord,’ she said. ‘In fact, I think we may have already begun the process. I am not certain, but I have hopes.’
Will moved so fast she hardly had time to blink. One moment she had been sprawled in sensual abandon, the next she was under the covers in Will’s arms and he was holding her as cautiously as he might a basket of eggs. ‘Will! I am not fragile.’ Julia twisted to try to caress him, show him that she wanted, above everything, to make love.
‘Are you sure you are all right?’ His forehead was furrowed with worry lines she had never seen before. ‘It must have been bad enough, these past days, but to have gone through all you have if you are carrying a child—’
&nb
sp; ‘I am fine,’ Julia said. ‘And I might not be expecting, we need to wait a day or two more in case it is simply stress disrupting my system. But I do not want to wait to make love to my husband.’
Will’s face relaxed. ‘I suppose we could. Just in the interests of securing the succession, you understand, now we cannot rely on Henry.’
The words You know? were on the tip of her tongue. Julia bit them back just in time, but Will smiled. ‘That was another thing that I thought about yesterday. It helped distract me when I was going insane worrying about you. I realised, when I was thinking with my heart, instead of…other parts of my anatomy, that I trusted you. I also thought about Henry dispassionately and not as simply my rather irritating heir and put two and two together. I may have made six, of course.’
‘No, you have not.’ Julia snuggled close against Will’s flank and inched her fingers across his flat stomach. ‘It will not be easy for him, but I have encouraged him to take chambers in London, where the presence of just one close servant would not be remarked upon. Are you shocked? I am sorry if you do not approve.’
‘I am not shocked, so much as anxious for him. But you have given him good advice. And now, having settled Henry’s love life to your satisfaction, might we resume our own?’
‘I thought I was,’ Julia murmured, closing her fingers around the evidence of her husband’s desire.
Will laughed and rolled on to his back, taking her with him. ‘Ravish me, then.’
His eyes were golden, laughing, clear of any shadow. She had never seen them like that, Julia realised as she knelt astride the slim hips and took him into her body with a sigh of pure happiness. ‘I cannot remember when I felt so content, so free of anxiety. So joyous. I love you very much, Will. I thought I would never be able to make love with you again.’
He pulled her down so he could raise his head to meet her lips and smiled up at her. At the look she melted, yielding and as boneless as a swathe of velvet. ‘We’ve been though hell to get here, my love. I think we are owed our little piece of paradise on earth. We will kiss and we will love and then we will sleep and then we will go home and be happy.’
‘For ever?’
‘I am prepared to devote the next eighty years to it,’ Will said. ‘We can review things after that.’
‘Very well, my lord,’ Julia agreed and sank into his arms and his kiss and delicious contentment.
Author’s Note
My grateful thanks go to Dr Joanna Cannon for her explanations of how the symptoms of severe post-viral syndrome would have been interpreted by Regency doctors. With no concept of the condition they would have confused it with Phthisis, the normal term at the time for consumption, or tuberculosis, which was fatal throughout the nineteenth-century. Will’s recovery would have been greatly hastened by the treatment he received—rest in a warm, dry climate, a good diet and skilled medical attention.
Julia was right to fear the consequences of the law if she had killed Jonathan Dalfield, however unintentionally. The reference to the woman hanged, whose body was then handed over to the anatomists in Aylesbury, is to the real case of the sister-in-law of one of my Regency ancestors who appears to have snapped after years of abuse. Society’s horror of such ‘unfeminine’ violence is reflected in the severity of the sentence.
*
ISBN: 9781472043443
FROM RUIN TO RICHES
© Melanie Hilton 2014
First Published in Great Britain in 2014
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