Ruined By The Reckless Viscount

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 (#u45dc3348-40f5-5f51-93b9-1e30f835329e)

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.’