Page 14 of To Claim the Long-Lost Lover
“Dismiss your carriage, Bentham,” Lady Charlotte suggested. “We’ll see that you get home.”
Over a lavish breakfast, Lady Charlotte quizzed Nate about Tony’s condition. It soon became clear that she didn’t want to leave him at the clinic. “Not if he can be safely moved, Lord Bentham.”
“The kidnapper will try again,” the Marquis of Aldridge warned, and Lady Charlotte’s foreign-looking guard captain agreed. “He is in danger, and so are all at the clinic. Lady Ruth would not be pleased.”
“Who is Lady Ruth?” Nate wondered aloud.
“My cousin Ruth is Lady Ashbury, the founder of the clinic,” Lady Charlotte explained. Blythe had been full of stories about the foreign-trained female doctor who headed the establishment, but he’d never mentioned a title. Nate pulled his attention back to Lady Charlotte, who was asking a question. “Can Tony be moved, Lord Bentham?”
“I would prefer not, but it can be done if you are serious about the danger.”
For a few minutes, they discussed logistics, and soon Nate was committed to going back to the clinic and escorting Tony home, making sure the boy was settled before seeking his own pillow.
“You can leave us to fetch the boy,” Aldridge told Lady Charlotte. “You should rest, my lady.”
Nate wondered what was between Lady Charlotte and Aldridge. The Merry Marquis, Society called him. Libby had appeared more enthralled than scandalised by the relatively mild anecdotes she’d shared, but Nate assumed the reality was far more unfit for a lady’s ears, and Lady Charlotte did not appear to him to be a woman who would ignore those darker truths.
Nonetheless, the pair of them bickered for the rest of the meal like old adversaries—or lovers. Aldridge insisted the lady would not be safe travelling to and from the clinic escorted only by Nate and three of the fearsome warriors. Lady Charlotte told him he was being ridiculous. Which was true, and had Nate wondering all the more about their relationship.
Aldridge continued to urge that she stay home. “You must be tired,” he pointed out. “You have been up all night.”
“We have all been up all night,” she responded. “And you have had a more active night than I, Lord Aldridge, and started earlier.”
Aldridge opened his mouth to respond, looked at Nate, and swallowed whatever he was going to say. After a moment, he changed tack. “I have a family interest in the boy,” he argued.
Nate thought that was the leveller, but he was wrong. Lady Charlotte didn’t answer for several minutes, and then she adopted the appeal to authority tactic. “Of course, as the boy’s uncle or father or brother, you must meet with Tony and ask your questions, but you will hardly be able to do so while he is in great pain, or unconscious. It shall be up to Lord Bentham, as his physician, to decide when he is well enough for visitors.”
* * *
The inn was pleasant, and the beds comfortable in the suite given over to Sarah, Elias, her maid, and his nurse. Nonetheless, Sarah had been awake for hours, thinking about Elias and his question. He had accepted her response—that she would tell him about his mother and father when he was older. The task would have been easier if Nathaniel Beauclair had stayed away, no more than an unhealing wound in her memory.
Where on earth had he been? And why? At least he is alive!She should be relieved, but all the grief she had buried over the past seven years had turned to anger that he’d deliberately left her. Or, if not chosen to leave her—and he said not—he had deliberately stayed away.
Every time she began to drift off, her mind began to replay memories of the summer she turned sixteen; the summer she spent falling in love with Nate. And she would jerk herself back to full wakefulness, forcing her thoughts into a different channel.
It was worse when her tiredness finally submerged her into a disturbed sleep, when she relived in dreams the loss of her beloved, the duke’s attempt to marry her to one of her father’s friends, the discovery of her pregnancy and all that followed.
It was not full light when Elias woke before his nurse and came looking for her, waking her from a horrifying replay of her second loss, the theft of her son, by shaping her face with a curious finger.
Her heart still pounding, Sarah cupped his hand and held it against her face. “Elias, darling.”
“Good morning, Mama. Mama, why are you crying?”
Was she? Ah, yes. Tears were running down her cheeks. “I was having a bad dream, Elias. I am so glad you woke me.”
She sat up, and invited Elias to sit beside her, taking his hands to help him up onto the bed. The nurse found them chatting when she stumbled through half an hour later, full of apologies to Sarah and scolds for Elias. “You know you are not to go to Lady Sarah unless she sends for you.”
“Not at all, Morris.” Sarah squeezed the hand she had around Elias’s shoulders, hugging him to her. “Elias must not wander around Winshire House, or any other big mansion, without you or some other adult with him. But at home in Oxfordshire, where the house is much smaller, and at times like this, when we are both in the same suite, he can reach my bedchamber safely. He may come to his mama at any time, but here, he does not need someone to bring him.”
She dropped a kiss on his hair. When he had first come to live with her, he had stiffened at every touch, flinched even, and withdrawn from caresses as quickly as he could. Now, six months later, he leaned into her trustingly. She had lost six years of his life. Before long, by all she’d heard, he would consider himself too old for physical expressions of affection. She would make the most of the remainder of his childhood.
It was full light outside now, with enough light creeping in to see that Sarah’s maid was awake, sitting up on the pallet near the door. “It seems we will be ready for an early start,” Sarah commented, smiling at her across the room.
“I shall get dressed and fetch your washing water, my lady.”
“Thank you. And see if Lord Andrew’s manservant is up, will you? Ask him to let Drew know we are awake and eager for our breakfast.” Drew was generally up with the dawn, even when he had been out all night doing whatever it was he did. Somehow, she couldn’t see him wasting his time gambling and whoring. Although he was no older than she and Charlotte, he seemed much more mature than the young cubs of the same age who were dragged reluctantly by their mothers to the Season’s more respectable events.
Sure enough, he was awake, and had already secured a private parlour for their breakfast. Within an hour, they were on their way, a fresh team of horses eating up the miles between them and London.
