Page 12 of To Claim the Long-Lost Lover
Winshire looked around as he knocked on the door. The cottage had been kept in good repair, but nevertheless had an air of abandonment. He was trying to nail down what details indicated it was unloved in when the door opened. He turned to ask to be shown to his hostess, or allowed to wait for her inside until she could see him. There she stood, her warm smile the only welcome he needed.
He could feel his own smile growing in response. “Eleanor.”
The Duchess of Haverford stepped back to give him space to enter. “James. Come in!”
He followed her across a small entrance hall to a cosy little parlour, where a fire burned in the hearth and a tray with a tea set waited on a small table between two chairs. Eleanor took the seat closest to the teapot and waved her hand to the other. “Be seated, dear friend. Would you care for tea?”
Tea is not what I hunger for. For ten years after Mahzad’s death, he had thought himself beyond desire, but Eleanor brought it roaring back the first time he saw her on his return to England. Getting to know her again had only increased his longing; she was even lovelier, both within and without, than when they had first met long ago, before her father accepted the Duke of Haverford’s suit for her hand, and rejected that of James, who was only the third son of the Duke of Winshire.
James was forced into exile and Eleanor was made to marry Haverford.
He kept his feelings to himself. If he told her his hopes, and if she shared them, he didn’t trust himself to be alone with her like this without besmirching his honour and insulting hers.
Eleanor was a married woman and virtuous, even if her husband was a monster. Even if the old devil was rotting from within and locked away for his own good and to protect the duchy. James accepted the offered seat and the cup of tea; asked after the duchess’s sons and wards and caught her up to date with his own family; exchanged comments on the war news and the state of the harvest.
“James,” she said at last, “I proposed this meeting for a reason.”
“To see me, I hope. Since Parliament went into recess and we both left London, I have missed our weekly visits to that little bookshop you frequent.”
Eleanor smiled, and James fancied that he saw her heart in her eyes for a moment, and it leapt to match his. But her smile faded and her lashes veiled her eyes. “That, too, my dear friend. I have missed you, too. But there is another matter I need to bring to your attention.”
She grimaced and gave her head a couple of impatient shakes. “It seems I am always muddying our time together with gossip and scandal. I am so sorry, James.”
“One day, I hope we will be able to meet without subterfuge, and for no reason but our pleasure,” James said. The last word was a mistake. He might be old, but at the word ‘pleasure’, his body was reminding him urgently that he was not yet dead.
Eleanor seemed unaffected, focused on whatever bad news she had to give him. “You are aware, I am sure, of the history of your niece Sarah’s ward?”
“Her son?” James queried. He had assumed Eleanor knew. She was a confidante of his sister-in-law.
“Indeed. What you may not know—what I have just found out—is that Society is making that assumption and spreading the story.”
James shook his head. “I guessed the gossips and busybodies would reach that conclusion, but without proof or confirmation, and with the family firmly behind her, the rumours will die.”
“True, if that was all. But James, you may not know—Sarah may not know—that her little boy’s father is back in England and, if my sources are accurate, seeking a bride.”
James stiffened. “The coward has returned?”
“As to that,” Eleanor said, “Grace always suspected that Sutton and Winshire had something to do with his disappearance, and it is being whispered that his father has recently bought him out of the navy, where he had worked his way up to being a surgeon.”
“And your sources are associating Sarah and her child with this man?”
Eleanor shook her head. “Not yet. The two rumours are separate. But if the two of them meet, people may make connections. Especially if the child resembles his father.” She shrugged, even that small elegant movement unusually casual for the duchess. “It is all very manageable, James, but you needed to know.”
“I appreciate it, Eleanor.” He sighed. “English Society is more of a snake pit than the court of the Shah of Shahs or that of the Ottoman Sultan Khan. Tell me, what is going on between my niece Charlotte and your son Aldridge?”
Eleanor’s answer was hasty, but her eyes slid away from his. “Nothing. There can be nothing between Charlotte and Aldridge.”
7
By the second week of the house party, Sarah had discounted all three of her possible suitors, and hadn't added anyone to her list. None of them improved on closer acquaintance. Or perhaps it was just that she couldn't move forward now that Nate had come back into her life. She had to hear him out, as her sister had urged her. Then, when he had told her whatever lies he'd dreamt up to explain his sudden disappearance just when she needed him most, she would be able to put him firmly back in the past, where he belonged.
Elias wasn’t enjoying the party, either. He asked several times when they could go home, and his nursemaid reported the kind of subtle bullying that is hard for adults to counter because every edged remark, every shove or poke, could be explained away as innocent or accidental.
When Sarah received Charlotte’s letter about a missing protégé, she was relieved. "Please make my apologies to Lady de Witt," Charlotte had written. Sarah looked for her hostess and explained that her sister Charlotte was dealing with a small family emergency. "I regret that I will need to return to London immediately," she added.
“In the morning, surely,” Lady de Witt suggested. “You won’t want to travel in the dark, and if you leave at daybreak tomorrow, you will still be back in London for lunch.”
Having once entertained the thought of leaving the party early, Sarah couldn’t bear to delay. Drew agreed with an alacrity that hinted he’d had his own difficulties with the other guests. They would stop at the inn that marked the halfway point, and be on their way again as soon after dawn as they could manage. Sarah, Drew, Elias, and their servants left Lady de Witt’s manor within the hour, Drew riding escort while Sarah and Elias shared the first carriage and the servants took the second.
