Regency Scandals: High Seas To High Society / Masquerading Mistress

Falder was a revelation. An uninhibited and magnificent hotchpotch of architectural styles, it sat above a river on a hillock completely surrounded by grassland. Part-Scottish baronial, part-Gothic and part-English manor, its many turrets and gables dominated the landscape around it and proclaimed not only great wealth, but a long lineage of generations of Carisbrooks who had all added their mark to it.

As the carriage clattered in across a pebbled drive, she looked up and hoped that there were not too many other guests here this weekend, for she was beginning to feel that she could not brave another round of social niceties.

A bevy of servants were at the front entrance to meet them, their faces stiff with the rigours of servitude; she refrained from meeting their glances, reasoning that such folk might be better at recognising a faux lady should they come across one. The thought made her frown. Circumstance had robbed her of being gently reared, but her birth was hardly dubious. Beau had been a lord before he had become a pirate and the title of Lady was hers to rightly use. She took the arm of her aunt and started up the staircase.

Asher Wellingham was waiting in a small blue salon directly off the portico. Beside him another tall man stood.

‘Was your journey here pleasant?’ The Duke asked the question in a voice that was measured.

‘Thank you, yes, it was.’ Emerald helped Miriam to a chair on one side of the fireplace and arranged a woollen blanket across her lap. Her aunt looked pale and tired and old, a woman whose secrets had leached the lifeblood from her soul. Her father’s sister, her only relative left save for Ruby. In the unfamiliarity of Falder she was suddenly dear. Standing, she draped one arm protectively across Miriam’s frail shoulders as Asher Wellingham apologized for his mother’s absence—she was indisposed—and introduced his brother.

Taris Wellingham wore thick glasses and stood with his hand against the end of a large armoire. The identical sense of danger that cloaked his brother cloaked him and he had exactly the same shade of hair: midnight black. She waited for him to give his greeting, but he did not.

‘Taris had an accident off the coast of the Caribbean. You may need to come closer.’ The Duke’s sentence was offered so flatly that Emerald’s mouth widened at the rudeness.

‘I am sorry—’ she stammered loudly and was cut off.

‘My brother is not deaf.’ A sense of challenge filled the room, unspoken and sharp. Miriam pushed back in her chair, but Emerald took two steps forward and waited as opaque eyes ran across her. She had a feeling he saw more than she wanted him to.

‘Your voice holds the accent of a place very far from here, Lady Emma?’

She stayed silent, loath to lie to a man who had been so badly hurt, the scar across his forehead dissecting his left eye and running down the line of his cheek. The mark of a bullet! No small accident this one. Could he have been another casualty of her father’s? The thought worried her unduly and she was relieved when a maid offered them a drink.

Miriam preferred lemonade, but Emerald chose white wine; taking a sip to calm her nerves, she made herself stand straighter, caring little for her added height.

‘Asher tells us that your cousin Liam saved our sister from ruination.’ The line of Taris’s eyes did not quite meet her own.

‘Well, I would hardly say ruination.’

‘Would you not?’ Asher Wellingham’s question was underlaid with anger. ‘Your cousin is a hero, albeit a reluctant one. What ship did you say he took to the Americas?’

‘The Cristobel,’ she returned without pause, glad that she had taken the time before coming up to Falder to check the shipping schedules, though as she gave the name another thought surfaced. What if he checked the passenger list and found no mention of Liam Kingston and his family? Or worse—what if he discovered that she had been into the shipping office making enquiry as to the departures?

Complicity and subterfuge.

She had a feeling that the Duke of Carisbrook would take badly to them both and she was being increasingly drawn into a web of deceit.

A sennight, she mused. Seven days to find the map and leave. If she were quick, everything would be feasible, but if she were not …?

‘Your house is beautiful,’ she said as her eyes scoured this room and the next one for any sign of what she was after. ‘How many rooms does it have?’

‘One hundred and twenty-seven,’ Lucinda supplied the information. ‘We have two libraries and a ballroom and Asher has just had a new fencing room added to the eastern wing that was built three years ago.’

Filing away the information, Emerald thought she should perhaps start looking over the new wing, although the salons radiating out from this room looked promising. She would start here tonight and then plan a general widening of her search as a grid, so that no room would be forgotten.

Two hours later she was ensconced in a bedchamber overlooking the front drive of the house. Miriam was in the room next to her and had used a headache as an excuse to take herself to bed. Emerald hoped that she was not sickening with a cold, or worse; wandering over to wide doors curtained with billowing yards of soft fabric, she opened the latch. Sunlight streamed in unbroken across a balcony draped in ivy. Walking outside, she was perfectly still. The sound of long beaching waves rolling in from the northern seas could be heard and, if she stood on her tiptoes, there in the distance, between the crease of two green hillocks, she saw the ocean, dancing and sparkling in the sun. The ocean. Her ocean, the warm blue of the Caribbean mixed with the wilder grey of Fleetness Point.

A noise had her looking down as Asher Wellingham rounded the corner on a large horse. Moving back into the room, she watched him until he was out of sight, the fluid muscle of his racing stallion reflected in the surface of the lake as he passed it, a dark shadow against a darker line of the trees.

He was a man who did not seem to fit into the strict regimens of London’s manners or its rules, a duke who seemed more dangerous than he had any right to be, and more menacing. She smiled. Now there was a word that described Asher Wellingham exactly.

Menacing.

And she would need to be very, very careful.

He was dressed in black at dinner and his hair was wet. The length of it was intriguing. Too short to be easily tied into a queue, but far longer than most other men of the ton wore theirs.

As they filed in to the dining room, Emerald found herself seated to Asher’s left, his sister acting as hostess, in his mother’s continued absence, at the foot of the table with Taris to her left. An older couple made up the numbers, near neighbours invited for the evening, for Miriam had decided not to come down and had asked to have a tray delivered to her.

‘Is your room satisfactory, Lady Emma?’ Lucy asked as the steaming plates of food were brought to the table. Beef, pork and chicken. When her stomach rumbled she pushed down on it hard and hoped that nobody had heard.

‘It’s very beautiful and I can see the ocean from the balcony,’ she added, frowning as Asher looked up sharply. Tonight he looked tired. She saw that he was drinking heavily, saw too the gesture Lucy made to the servant behind to bring her brother a carafe of water. He didn’t touch it.

‘Emma hails from Jamaica,’ he said as the silence grew.

The man named William Bennett nodded. ‘I was there once, a long time ago. Did you know a family by the name of de la Varis?’

‘No, I don’t believe so. My father was an invalid, so we were quite insular.’ For a second she wondered how it would be best to keep track of all the lies and decided that later she would write out her fabrications in a diary. Relaxing into the role, she picked up her confidence and continued. ‘My aunt and uncle lived close by and I had Liam, of course. My cousin,’ she qualified as the man looked puzzled.

‘And your own mother?’

‘Oh, she was a beautiful woman. Evangeline.’ Emerald enunciated the newness of the name lovingly and just the saying of it conjured up a golden-haired beauty to stand alongside her sick but handsome father. She smiled. She had always filled her world with dream people. When her mother had gone. When her father had returned with yet another woman whom he insisted she call mama.

Dreams had saved them all and made them whole and good and true. It was not so hard here to imagine cousins or a beautiful mother who had not deserted her.

‘Liam is about your age, then?’ Lucy’s query was strongly voiced. Of all the Carisbrooks she was the most inquisitive.

‘No, he is a little older,’ she replied evasively, trying to remember the exact number of offspring she had invented for her fictitious cousin. Would ‘a little older’ render such children possible? Had she said four?

‘And did he like to read, Lady Emma?’ Lucy continued.

‘Like to read?’ Danger spiralled.

‘I think my sister is referring to the books in your aunt’s drawing room.’ When Lucy smiled and nodded, interest sharpened in his eyes. ‘Miriam does not strike me as a scholar of Arabic philosophy.’

‘And you think that I would be?’ She forced a laugh and was rewarded with a frisson of uncertainty. ‘Indeed, your Grace, the books were my father’s.’

‘Ahh, yes of course. The devout and invalided scholar?’

Emerald wondered at the edge of disbelief she could plainly hear and was relieved when Lucinda again garnered her attention.

‘I should like to sketch you while you are here, if I may, Lady Emma.’

Emerald looked up sharply. Was she jesting? Dangerous ground this. She didn’t know quite how to answer. How easy would it be for Lucy to fathom the memory of Liam Kingston in her face? ‘Are there many of your works here at Falder?’

‘That one is mine.’ Her hand pointed to a large watercolour above the fireplace depicting the castle and Emerald caught her breath.

‘You have a considerable talent. Do you sell them?’