The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер
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‘They bled you. The doctors. I asked them if it was truly necessary but the humours are tricky things, they said, and the melancholy needed to be released from your body.’
Her father looked both exhausted and worried.
‘Lord Montcliffe?’
‘He left as soon as he brought you home from the Herringworth ball and I haven’t heard from him since.’
‘Did he tell you...anything?’
He shook his head. ‘Maisie and Mick were delivered the next morning and I brought you here the day after that.’
‘I see.’ And she did. Charlotte Mackay’s accusations played on her memory as did the speed of the carriage as Daniel had taken her home. She had acted appallingly, but high emotion, guilt, shame, shock and fright had played their parts, too.
‘The doctor administered laudanum to calm you down, my dear, but I do not think it agreed with you. I stopped the dosage the day before yesterday.’
That was why she felt nauseous then and slightly removed from the world. Her mouth was so parched she could barely swallow but all she could think about was the sense of betrayal in Daniel’s pale green eyes.
And the hurt.
The sick feeling in her stomach worsened. He must think her mad and deceitful, a woman who held no regard for honesty or manners; the wife of a man at the centre of a scandal that had rocked all of London. The kiss they had shared came back with full force: a moment in her life she would never forget, a gift of what it might be like to be with a man whom you truly loved.
She turned her face into the pillow and sobbed.
* * *
Daniel knew what the lawyer would say. He knew it before the legal retainer even opened his mouth and began to speak.
‘I am acting on behalf of the Honourable Reginald Goldsmith. He has instructed me to call in the loan your brother took out against your family estate and he would like the sum paid back in full by the end of this month.’
‘I see.’
Smythe shook his head and lifted a yellowing page. ‘I am afraid you do not, my lord. The sum is enormous.’ Turning the document so that it could be read with more ease, Daniel was stunned.
Five thousand pounds. A king’s ransom. So much more than he’d imagined Nigel to have gambled; a fortune that he had no way of getting his hands upon now that Amethyst Cameron had disappeared into the countryside with her father.
‘Is there any way I could stretch out the payments?’
‘Perhaps for a few months if you were lucky.’
‘But no more?’
The lawyer shook his head. ‘My client is taking ship to the Americas in twelve weeks because his only daughter has settled in Boston. He wants a clean break and he is more than hopeful that the debts should be discharged before he goes. Completely discharged,’ he emphasised the words again and wiped his brow. ‘Is there a problem with this, Lord Montcliffe?’
‘No.’ The glint in Smythe’s eyes was full of conjecture.
‘Your marriage to Miss Cameron should help. I have heard that the family is extremely wealthy. Timber, is it not?’
Daniel stood. He did not wish to hear any conjecture on his own personal life from a man for whom the words ‘appropriate’ or ‘confidential’ appeared to mean nothing. Taking his leave, he was glad Smythe did not engage in further conversation.
He walked along the river in a light rain, the water winding along with him, full of the noise and movement of commerce. Perhaps one of the Cameron ships was docking at this moment, ready to be discharged of its heavy cargo.
Amethyst Cameron.
He no longer knew what to make of her, the shifts of emotion exhausting. He had deposited her at home with her father after the ball and left immediately, her behaviour in the carriage so very deranged and Charlotte’s truths still ringing in his ears. The next morning he had sent back the greys. Even to save Montcliffe he could not be for ever tied to a mad and lying wife.
Gerald Whitely, at least, was dead. He had found out that through an investigator he had employed to make sense of it all. But still the whole ending had been maudlin and awkward.
Swearing, he conjured up her face on the night of the ball, her lightened hair showing up the velvet gold in her eyes. Beautiful and crazy. He had not heard a word from the Camerons since and on enquiry found that they had packed up the London town house and headed for their country estate of Dunstan House somewhere up north.
Good riddance, he should have thought, the whole episode so public and brutal. A lucky escape from a woman who was both deceitful and unstable. Yet underneath other thoughts lingered. Amethyst’s thinness. The way she smiled. The dimples that dented her cheeks and the careful diction of her words.
He had not made a public statement about anything though the ton was, of course, abuzz with the happenings. His mother had caught him in the breakfast room that very morning and made her opinions quite clear.
‘From what I have heard you are well shot of Mrs Whitely, Daniel, and you can now concentrate on the search for a far more suitable match. The Earl of Denbeigh’s wife, Lady Denbeigh, has been most direct with her wishes for her daughter’s future. From all accounts the young lady appears to be a well brought-up, softly spoken girl with an admirable fashion sense. Trade needs to marry trade and those from the ton should find a partner within the same ranks. It is these unwritten laws of society that keeps it all working, you see, and if you seek to change it for whatever reason there are always complications and sordid ones at that.’
She twirled the end of a light-brown curl around her finger. ‘Your man said you no longer have the greys stabled here in London. Are they at Montcliffe?’
‘No. I sent them back to the Camerons. They were part of the wedding settlement.’
‘But I had heard that they were worth a fortune.’
‘They are.’
‘Then I should have kept them if I were you. It would have been some payment for all the humiliation we have suffered since.’
The loud shout of a street pedlar brought Daniel back into the moment, an unkempt fellow playing a wooden flute and touting for a few pennies as he finished. Digging into his pocket, he dropped in an offering.
How the hell could he rescue Montcliffe? The edges of his world were flattening out and he was in danger of falling off the end of it unless he could come up with something.
A pawnshop sign opposite caught his attention and, checking to see that no conveyance was bearing down upon him, he walked across the road towards it, pulling off the heavy gold signet ring from his little finger as he went.
* * *
‘I think you should send back the greys, Papa. Lord Montcliffe can’t wish for the agreements to continue as they were, not after...what has happened, but we do need to ensure his discretion.’
Amethyst finally felt better today and had dressed to come down to the dinner table with her father, who watched her with a growing frown upon his face.
‘You won’t fight for your reputation, then, or for Lord Montcliffe?’
‘He was never mine to fight for, Papa. Surely you can see that?’
‘The first man who has made you live again and smile again and you give him up on a sigh? Your mother would have been disappointed in you.’
‘Why? Because I can understand that in the distaste of the ton lies a way to complete devastation? Daniel Wylde wanted me as little as Whitely did. The pair of greys arrived from him before a new day had dawned properly. Even Gerald gave me a few months.’
‘A few months