Regency Rogues: Candlelight Confessions. Marguerite Kaye
and above all lonely. She was used to being lonely. Most of her married life she had been lonely. And lost. And hurt. She would do well to remember how quickly the bride with stardust in her eyes had become the hated wife.
Now she was no longer a victim of her own gullibility. She was not the source of every disappointment, the cause of every misfortune. She need not hide from her friends for fear they discover her unhappiness. She need not pretend to herself that she was anything other than miserable. Guilt and insecurity need no more drive her actions than that most cruel emotion of all, love. Her life might be bland, but it was her own. Safe from feeling, maybe, but it was also safe from pain. She intended always to be safe from now on. Whatever had come over her last night, the person she had been was not the real Deborah. The experience had been a release. Cathartic. An antidote, a dose of danger to counteract the malaise of boredom. That was all, and it was over now.
Resolutely, Deborah picked up her pen. It was past midnight when Bella Donna made her way stealthily out into the night dressed in male attire, on a mission which would scandalise the ton and throw her into the orbit of the most dangerous and devastatingly attractive man in all of England, she wrote.
‘You look tired, Elliot.’ Elizabeth Murray drew her brother a quizzical look.
The resemblance between the siblings was striking enough to make their relationship obvious. The same dark, deep-set eyes, the same black hair, the same clear, penetrating gaze which tended to make its object wonder what secrets they had inadvertently revealed. Though Lizzie’s complexion was olive rather than tanned, and her features softer, she had some of her brother’s intensity and all of his charm, a combination which her friends found fascinating, her husband alluring and her critics intimidating.
‘Burning the candle at both ends?’ she asked with a smile, stripping off her lavender-kid gloves and plonking herself without ceremony down on a comfortably shabby chair by the fire.
Elliot grinned. ‘Lord, yes, you know me. Dancing ‘til four in the morning, paying court to the latest heiress, whose hand I must win if I’m to pay off my gambling debts. Generally acting the gentleman of leisure.’
Lizzie chuckled. ‘I am surprised I did not see you in the throng around Marianne Kilwinning. They say she is worth twenty thousand at least.’
Elliot snapped his fingers. ‘A paltry sum. Why, I could drop that much and more in a single sitting at White’s.’
Lizzie’s smile faded. ‘I heard that your friend Cunningham lost something near that the other night. I know it is considered the height of fashion, but I cannot help thinking these gentlemen could find better things to fritter their money away on.’
‘You’re not alone in thinking that.’
‘Did you speak to Wellington, then?’
‘He granted me an audience all right,’ Elliot said bitterly, ‘but it was the usual story. Other more pressing commitments, a need to invest in the future, resources overstretched, the same platitudes as ever.’ He sighed. ‘Perhaps I’m being a little unfair. He told me in confidence that he was considering taking up politics again. Were he to be given a Cabinet post, he said he would do all he could, but—oh, I don’t know, Lizzie. These men, the same men who have given their health and their youth for their country, they can’t wait for all that. They need help now, to feed themselves and their families, not ephemeral promises that help is coming if only they will wait—we had enough of those when we were at war.’
‘Henry. I know,’ Lizzie said gently, widening her eyes to stop the tears which gathered there from falling as her brother’s face took on a bleak look. She hated to cry, and more importantly Elliot hated to have this deepest of wounds touched.
‘Henry and hundreds—thousands—of others who were brothers, friends, husbands, fathers. It makes me sick.’
‘And Wellington will do nothing?’
‘I’m sorry to say it, but at heart he’s a traditionalist. He is afraid, like Liverpool and the rest of the Tories, that too many years abroad have radicalised our men. He thinks that starving them will bring about deference. I think it will have quite the opposite effect and, more importantly, it’s bloody unjust. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t swear and I didn’t mean to bore you.’
‘Don’t be so damned stupid. You neither bore me nor shock me, and you know it. I have no truck with this modern notion that we women have no minds of our own,’ Lizzie said tersely.
She was rewarded with a crack of laughter. ‘Not something anyone could ever accuse you of,’ Elliot replied.
His sister grinned. ‘That’s what Lady Murray says.’
‘Alex’s mother is in town? I thought she never left that great big barn of a castle of theirs. Won’t she be afeart that the haggis will go to ground and the bagpipes will stop breeding without her,’ Elliot asked in an appalling attempt to mimic Lady Murray’s soft Scottish burr.
‘Very amusing,’ Lizzie said drily.
‘So what momentous event has driven her to visit Sassenach territory, then?’ To his astonishment, his sister blushed. ‘Lizzie?’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said with her usual disregard for polite euphemisms. ‘The news that’s driven her south is the forthcoming arrival of a potential grandson and heir, if you must know.’
‘Elizabeth!’ Elliot hauled his sister from her chair and enveloped her in a bear hug. ‘That’s wonderful news.’
‘You’re squashing me, Elliot.’
He let her go immediately. ‘Did I hurt you? God, I’m sorry, I—’
‘Please! Please, please, please don’t start telling me to rest, and put my feet up, and wrapping me in shawls and feeding me hot milk,’ Lizzie said with a shudder.
‘Alex?’
‘Poor love, he’s over the moon, but when I first told him he started treating me as if I was made of porcelain. Lord, I thought he was going to have me swaddled and coddled to death,’ Lizzie said frankly. ‘You can have no idea what it took for me to persuade him we could still—’ She broke off, colouring a fiery red. ‘Well. Anyway. Alex is fine now, but his mother is a different kettle of fish. Or should I say cauldron of porridge? She wants me to go to Scotland. She says that the fey wife in the village has always delivered the Murray heirs.’
‘You surely don’t intend to go?’
Lizzie’s shrug was exactly like her brother’s. ‘Alex would never say so, but I know it’s what he’d prefer. I’m already beginning to show, too. I have no wish to parade about the town with a swollen belly and I’ve certainly no desire at all to have myself laced into corsets to cover it up, so maybe it’s for the best. It’s not really a ruin, Alex’s castle. Besides, you can’t blame him, wanting the bairn to be born in his homeland.’
‘Bairn!’
Lizzie laughed. ‘Give me a few months up there and I’ll be speaking like a native.’ She picked up her gloves and began to draw them on. ‘I must go, I promised Alex I wouldn’t leave him with his mother for too long.’ She stood on tiptoe to kiss Elliot’s cheek. ‘You do look tired. What have you been up to, I wonder? I know you’ve not been gallivanting, for I’ve lost count of the number of young ladies who’ve enquired after my handsome, charming, eligible and most elusive brother. And don’t tell me it’s because you lack invitations, because I know that’s nonsense. What you need is …’
‘Lizzie, for the last time, I don’t want a wife.’
‘I was about to say that what you need is gainful employment,’ his sister said, in an offended tone. ‘The Marchmont estates aren’t enough to keep you occupied, they never were. You need an outlet for all that energy of yours now that you don’t have your battalions to order around; you need something to stop you from brooding on incompetence and injustice. I’m not underestimating