Page 70 of A Night of Secret Surrender
Shock ran through Celeste. ‘You are sure?’
‘I am. I have set it down in Alexander’s will. There should be no reason for contesting such a succession as long as you swear you were married to his father. With the losses of war and many civil records being destroyed, we will be able to make it work. It need not be something too onerous.’
Lord, could it work, this scheme of her grandmother’s? She had not laid eyes on her uncle since being here, so presumably Alexander was in worse health than he had been when she had lived at Langley before. Another question from her grandmother took her attention.
‘Will you take Loring with you to London?’
‘No, it is too dangerous. He will need to stay here with a wet nurse and the kindest, most trustworthy servants that you have. I will be back within a week. If anyone turns up at Langley asking for me, tell them that I am dead to you and have been so for a good number of years.’
‘Very well.’
‘Watch my son for me, Grandmère, and make certain that he is safe.’
‘I will employ men from the village as guards. No one will slip in unnoticed. I promise you that.’
When her grandmother stepped forward and wrapped her arms firmly about her body, Celeste rested her head on the top of a bony shoulder and found a peace she had been seeking for so very long.
Lady Faulkner was strong enough to keep Loring safe no matter what happened. Celeste knew this from the very depths of her heart.
Chapter Ten
The English houses of the aristocracy were so well-guarded with their myriad servants and their constant attention to detail. She had been perched across from the town house at Number Eighteen St James’s Square for a good few hours now, waiting for Summer to return home, and the dusk was starting to fall.
She knew he would arrive soon for she had spent the morning speaking with some of the servants from the house after pretending interest in obtaining a job there. She had heard that the Viscount was looking to employ a lad to see to the horses and so had used that opportunity to knock at the back door. From there she had begun to chat to one of the kitchen serving girls as she had waited and luckily the girl seemed to have a running tongue and a good deal of free time.
‘The Viscount is in the city until this evening when he is to come home to pack for a journey he will take on the morrow,’ the girl added, ‘to call on a woman who he is fond of. There’s talk of a wedding soon and all of us are in a tither as to what she will be like. His intended, I mean. Word has it she is a great beauty and very rich.’
Miss Crystal Smithson, presumably, the woman Vivienne Shayborne had also spoken of. She’d left after hearing this piece of news to wait out the hours in a tavern a few hundred yards away and, then, amidst the leaves of a spreading oak in the small park opposite the town house as the day turned to evening.
The Luxford carriage arrived just as she was beginning to think perhaps the information from the kitchen maid had been false, the horses running around the sides of the square in an easy canter and then stopping. Other servants from the house filed out and then Summerley Shayborne stood thirty yards away, dressed in clothes that befitted a titled viscount, his head turned so that she could not get a proper look at his face.
But it was him. The same straight posture, the same walk, though without the limp. His hair was the only thing completely different as now it almost reached his collar in a long wavy mass of blond, his fringe pushed back from his eyes with one hand even as he spoke with the man next to him.
Aurelian de la Tomber.
Stepping back into the greenery, she stood very still. She would have to wait until the Frenchman left for she did not dare to show her face to the one she had mistakenly thrown into danger with her accusations of treachery in Paris. Her fingers wound into the bark of an English oak, feeling its texture, finding a touchstone. Above the city, a small moon began to make its light felt in a sky that threatened rain. Eight o’clock. Her breasts ached with their unaccustomed fullness and the cold of the night settled inside her.
* * *
Two hours later de la Tomber left, using the Shayborne carriage as transport to wherever his home was here in London. The lights downstairs were then doused and another moved in a second-storey room, the French doors that led out to a balcony thrown open.
Celeste could not make out any form, save shadow, but presumed this to be the bedchamber of the Viscount. Below the balcony was a wooden lattice firmly fixed to the wall which was raised right up to the second-floor level.
So very easy to climb. This soft world of the English was laughable when compared with all the hidden defences of Paris. Here people lived without expecting trouble, the social norms observed without war tumbling in. The population here gave the impression that conflict would not follow them home and hence embraced their freedoms in a casual way, though from Major Shayborne she had expected more.
When the few other lights below were extinguished she moved forward, glad for clothes that were dark and ones which allowed ease of movement. The footholds were simple and within a moment she was on the balcony, staying still for a moment with her head tipped for any sound.
‘Come in.’
These soft words startled her, emanating as they were from the semi-dark.
He was sitting on a chair with his long legs stretched out before him. A single candle flickered on the table at his elbow.
‘You knew I was here?’
He ignored her query and formed one of his own. ‘Why are you back in England after all this time?’
He sounded distant, indifferent and cold, though the hand nearest the candle shook in the light as he raised it. His hair was tied back now with a leather thing, the formerly careless spill bridled and tamed. The aristocrat was well on show tonight, the political master, resplendent in surroundings that suited him and so far removed from the dirt and poverty of France.
