Regency Scandals: High Seas To High Society / Masquerading Mistress

‘Unlikely?’ His mother was about to say more when her eyes rested on the face of Emerald and he introduced her.

‘You are the Countess of Haversham’s niece, are you not?’

‘I am.’

‘Many years ago I had a passing acquaintance with her family. Which branch do you hail from?’

‘A distant one, I am afraid.’

Emma was a master at not answering any question about her past, Asher thought, but his mother failed to note the fact.

‘She had a brother, Beauvedere. Have you ever come across him?’

‘I do not believe so.’

‘Then it is well that you haven’t—I often wonder what happened to him. He was a striking man with the bluest eyes and a way with the women that was legendary. Ashborne always said he would come to no good …’ She began to giggle. ‘I am sorry. It is age, I think, this constant referral to times past. Easy to remember what happened thirty years ago and hard to think what it was one did yesterday. Instead of regaling you with old nonsense, I should be asking if are you being properly looked after here at Falder. Do you like the room you’ve been given? You are in the yellow room are you not? Do you play whist?’

‘Badly.’ Emerald looked startled by the quick changes of topic.

‘Good. Then I shall set you up as my opponent this evening. Would you mind? My sister usually partners me, but she has gone down to London for the week as my nephew has arrived from the Americas. You will have a lot to catch up on, Asher,’ she added, and even as she said the words his heart sank.

Just another person to tell him how he had changed for the worse.

He hoped that his cousin would keep any criticisms to himself and was suddenly as tired by it all as he ever had been.

It was the potency of Emma’s remedy combined with a lack of sleep, he determined, and resolved to knock himself out early tonight with a strong brandy. He hoped belatedly that no maid had woken his brother slumbering on the armchair in front of Melanie’s portrait. Taris must have come back into the room. He frowned. He had not heard him do so, which in turn suggested that some time around the very early dawn he had, after all, nodded off. The notion cheered him considerably. If he could sleep a little, it would follow that he could also sleep a lot. As his mother’s maid wheeled her from the garden, he had another thought.

‘Does the potion you made act as a sort of sleeping draught?’ He could barely keep his eyes open.

‘It does. And quite quickly too.’ The laugh she ended the sentence with worried him.

‘How quickly?’

When the dizzy whorl hit him he had his answer, then he felt only blackness.

He slept twenty hours straight and awakened just as the sun was rising on the dawn of the following day.

Emma Seaton sat next to him, reading Mary Wollstonecraft, the revolutionary tract criticising the restricted educative norms for women. Even her reading matter worried him.

‘You are awake?’ she said softly and put down the book. ‘I know that I should not be here, but it was my potion and I was worried that perhaps I had wrongly remembered the proportions. I came in to see that you still breathed.’

‘Just here?’ he asked back and looked around the room for any signs of shifted possessions.

‘I would not hurt your family. I like them.’

‘But you would hurt me?’ He was suddenly still, for today everything seemed clearer. It was him she had bumped into at Jack’s ball and him she had targeted at the Bishop’s dinner. Talking with George about it the next day, he had discovered that Lady Emma Seaton had intimated to Flora that she was an old friend of his and that she should be pleased to renew the acquaintance.

And when she had fallen against him at the ball he had known her faint to be false.

Lying on his back in bed with almost nothing on, however, he felt it was neither the time nor the place for confrontation. Consequently he turned the subject.

‘You could probably make a fortune curing the plight of London’s insomniacs with your tonic. The ton would take to you like a saviour.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Better.’

‘You do not sound it.’

‘How do I sound?’

‘Annoyed.’

‘And you could not imagine why?’

‘I gave you the gift of sleep.’

‘You knocked me out and God knows what you have been up to in the meantime, making free with the things in my house in your quest for … what?’ Steely eyes swept across her. ‘Is it money? You look as if you might need some.’

Today he was like a bear with a sore head.

‘My clothes may not be the latest vogue in London, but I assure you that it is from lack of desire rather than from lack of funds.’

‘You would not want a new gown?’

‘I know that to you the idea may be a preposterous one, but not all women have the need to garb themselves in the very latest style. Some—like me, for example—would rather buy books.’

He began to laugh. ‘Use my library, then. Feel free to choose something other than Wollstonecraft.’

He looked immeasurably younger with the humour dancing in his eyes and she capitulated. ‘When you feel better later on in the day, perhaps we might enjoy a discussion on the relative merits of women’s rights.’

‘Perhaps,’ he murmured and pulled a pillow over his head, ending any possibility of conversation.

Chapter Eight

Emerald walked to the sea early before anyone was about, before the night stars had faded from the sky, before the chamber maids had risen from their beds, and before Miriam would have the notion to miss her and comment. She had searched Falder for hours last night, searched Asher’s room and the alcoves off it, searched the kitchens and the salons and the library. Searched the map room that Miriam had spoken of and come away with nothing. Had he thrown the cane away? She shook her head. The jewels on the carved head were too valuable to just get rid of and even the most dull-witted of folk could have determined the worth of the thing. Had he sold it off? Could she ask him somehow of its whereabouts without raising his curiosity and jogging his memory?

The water was cold as she waded into it, but not the freezing cold she had expected and the temperature took her thoughts on to further possibilities.

Looking around, she wondered if she dared to take off her gown and swim out to the first break of the waves. Behind her the land was silent and grey, a row of tall dark pines sheltering the beach from a cottage that lay half a mile in from where she stood, and the cove was bound at both ends by sharp outcrops of rock. No access there, then. No sudden stranger. No peeping Toms or vagrant passers-by.

She made her mind up in a moment and walked to a large bush at the head of the beach, shrugging off her jacket and her gown and boots. She left her silk gloves on. Out of habit. The slight breeze sent goose-bumps across the skin on her forearms and she laughed in sheer and unadulterated joy. Freedom.

Her first true freedom in four months. She rubbed away the tears that started in her eyes and walked straight into the ocean.

Asher saw her from a distance, a lonely Aphrodite with her hair a froth of bright gilt curls upon her head. Nothing was hidden. Nothing. Her long slender legs and arms, her rounded bottom, her waist, her full breasts moving up and down as she turned to look at the shore one last time before diving under. And under. And under …

His heart began to race and he urged his mount on, hitting the beach in a flat-out gallop and pulling off his boots and jacket after he had dismounted. God, where the hell was she?