Page 75 of A Proposition for the Comte
She could not even imagine leaving a house like this to go anywhere. The gardens were fully formed and the manor sat on a rise looking across a lake and down a long vista of trees and water features stretching into the far distance. The furniture held a French influence, the light lines and elegance of everything so un-English. The colours were different from most of the London town houses she had been in. There were light creams and yellows and a startling blue in the hallway, the more usual wintery mustiness of English interiors nowhere in evidence here.
Aurelian introduced her to the servants and they bobbed down before her, and then finally they were alone in a smaller room at the back of the house.
‘Mrs Hutchinson will show you to your chamber.’
‘Will you be somewhere close by?’
‘My room is next to yours. There is a connecting entrance.’
‘And it is safe here?’
‘Very. Come, I will show you.’
But the door flew open even as he gave his reply and a woman stood there. A beautiful woman with chestnut hair. Deep dimples graced both her cheeks and her hair roughly pulled back was escaping in untidy tendrils. She was also pregnant.
‘Celeste?’
Aurelian began to smile.
‘Summer is behind me.’ She turned to look for him, the light catching the colour of her eyes.
‘Violet, may I introduce Celeste Shayborne to you? She is Summerley Shayborne’s wife and also a good friend of mine. Celeste, this is Violet Addington—’
‘Oh, we’re old friends already,’ Celeste interrupted.
When Celeste smiled Violet was entranced.
‘We heard you had been seen coming south. Summer felt you might be in danger so we brought a few of the tougher-looking servants with us.’
Her English was tinged with an accent and when she removed her gloves, Violet saw stripes of white scarring on one wrist that she’d not noticed the other times she had met Celeste. Her eyes then fastened on Violet’s cheek.
‘Someone has hit you?’
‘Who has hit her?’
Summerley Shayborne now stood in the space behind his wife, his glance taking in the bruises on Violet’s face.
‘Violet was kidnapped and Douglas Cummings is involved somehow.’ Aurelian answered the question.
‘Where is Cummings now?’
‘In London probably and trying to make a case against me for sending all his plans awry. I think he is being blackmailed by the woman behind all this.’
‘A woman? Complicated?’ Shay said this.
‘Very.’
‘Being French is not an easy thing in a country fixated on the danger of Napoleon Bonaparte.’ Celeste joined in now and Violet saw in her logic a new peril.
‘I can vouch for Aurelian’s actions. He was with me.’
Even as she said this she understood another truth. Both she and Aurelian were in danger. She could see that everyone else in the room had understood this before she had.
Usually she was not so slow but she was exhausted and aching and the house here had folded its strength about her and made her falter.
‘We have Charles Mountford on our side,’ Aurelian said. ‘I have discovered nothing that says he is in on it.’
‘What of Violet, though?’ Shayborne’s query was sharp. ‘If we know that she is here then others undoubtedly will. It could ruin her.’
