Page 46 of A Proposition for the Comte
‘Yes, my lord.’
He left the man there and, using a heavy vine that twisted and knotted, he was up on the second-floor balcony within a moment.
The door opened even as he stood trying to work out exactly what he might say. Violet was dressed in a nightgown, pale and flowing, her hair in the moonlight far darker than it ever looked in the sun.
‘Aurelian?’
‘I cannot stay.’ Hell, what had made him utter that? Uncertainty, he thought, and the worry that she might begin to understand him just as others did. Distant. Brutal. Savage. Second chances for him were not things easily doled out.
‘Why the hell was Cummings here today?’
He had not meant to ask this so baldly, the demand harsh against the candlelight and the quiet.
‘He came briefly to deliver some papers.’
Her face flamed and the discomfort in her eyes was easy to see. Lies were his stock in trade and he of all people could recognise untruth.
Flavell had said the man had been in the house for a good hour and he would not have lied. Disappointment filled him even as she stepped forward and her hand took his.
‘Come inside for it’s freezing out here.’
Her room was so warm he had to take a deep breath, the fire blazing and more than a few candles burning. There were a number of books on a table beside her bed and he tried to remember the last time he’d had enough hours in his life to read. So many things he no longer did as he’d walked the lonely pathways. A ghost sometimes, a shadow. The living embodiment of emptiness. The end of nobody’s rainbow.
‘Thank you for the guards. They make us feel safer.’
When he didn’t answer, the frown on her face settled, but he felt dislocated and strange, the heart of hope ripped from his body.
He was more distant tonight and larger and taller and darker. The clothes he sported were also different, less fashionable. They were garments that the poorer inhabitants of the east side docklands might have favoured. The chill from outside had come in and the fire flickered in the grate and smoked badly. Aurelian smelt of smoke, too, and she wondered. The man from last night had dissolved into this one.
‘Your assailant from yesterday is dead.’
Shock ran from her head to her feet. ‘How?’
‘He either killed himself or someone else did it for him. I do not know which it is yet. My guess is the second.’
No one else had been truly honest with her in all of her life and she liked the way he never tried to soften unwanted facts. It was one of the things about him that she liked the most. He treated her as an equal. The niggle of her own untruth about Cummings’s visit surfaced as a result.
Lian said, ‘I think that Douglas Cummings may have some hand in this. How long has he been working for Mountford?’
‘For years, I should imagine. Why?’
There were tensions in him that she thought he was trying to hide. He spat out Douglas Cummings’s name as if he hated the very sound of it.
‘A whole lifetime of work and yet he still has no true authority in anything he does. A man like that might seek other avenues of advancement.’
‘Illegal avenues?’
‘Not everyone is inherently honest.’
‘Are you?’
He laughed at that and then sobered. The sound was not kind.
‘My father has been placed under home arrest in Paris. He will stay that way for as long as it takes me to find the lost gold.’
‘And if you cannot?’
‘I very rarely fail in anything I pursue.’
