the track. He had spoken to no one as he had observed them, but his indolence belied a quieter interest. She made certain that she had turned her head away from him each time they had come closer, not wanting to see his eyes shadowed with questions.
Rodney Northrup had approached him right at the end of her time there, his happy uncomplicated demeanour such a direct contrast to Stephen Hawkhurst’s complexity.
Papa had spoken only occasionally, a man who would loathe such a spectacle of deception were he to know of it. She was only pleased he did not close his eyes and sleep as he did now for much of the time at home—his way, she supposed, of dealing with a world he no longer had any comprehension of. Or howl at something that frightened him.
The muscles in her cheeks ached from fixing a smile with such an unrelenting pressure and she bit down upon worry. Every week she hoped that they would not be waylaid by some well-meaning soul, some acquaintance with enough curiosity to uncover all that she sought to hide.
The walk home from the stables in Davies Mews was becoming a more harried pathway each time they traversed it. She could not be sure that her father could manage any of it for much longer, his gait more laboured and slower every Monday afternoon.
Tears pricked the back of her eyes and she willed them away, useless emotional baggage that she had dispensed with years ago. She was the only one who might see this family through to a secure future and with the growing profits she was garnering from the silks it would only be a matter of months before safety would be gained.
Hawkhurst carried a cane today and he had leant upon it with more than a gentle force. Had he been wounded recently or was this an older injury? A great part of her wished that she might have been able to stop and speak with him and pretend that just for a moment she was a high-born lady of consequence who would have made him a perfect wife.
Such an illusion was shattered completely when they gained the stables and the master of the books strode forwards to tell them that as the cost of an afternoon rental had just been increased he could no longer keep a carriage free if the payment was not given monthly.
So many pounds, Aurelia thought, adding the sum in her head. She still had the diamond pendant, though, and the pawnbrokers had offered her a sum that would see the charade through to at least October. By then she was certain the new lucrative contracts she had garnered would be trickling through.
‘This way, Papa,’ she encouraged her father as he turned in the wrong direction.
Uncoupling her pendant, she held it tightly in her hand, liking the feel of the warm and familiar shape of the piece against her skin. Her grandmother had given the necklace to her on her deathbed—it was a treasured family heirloom.
There was a pawnshop in the city that favoured the older style of jewellery. She would visit it tomorrow.
Alexander Shavvon was unhappy as he paced up and down the small room.
‘France needs to be contained and yet all information suggests otherwise, for already Louis Napoleon has expanded into IndoChina. If Lord Palmerston is not careful the Entente Cordiale fashioned under Guizot will return to bite the hand of the one that feeds it.’
Hawkhurst was not as certain as Shavvon of the direction of Francophile expansionism and fault. ‘If I were determining policy, I would be keeping an eye on Prussia and the Germanic states, sir. All of my reading suggests the prospect of a United Germany, which would be a lot harder to contain than a beaten France.’
‘Your uncle, of course, might not agree with you, Lord Hawkhurst. He knew first-hand the might of Napoleon and if we had not defeated the dictator at Waterloo, England would be a very different place now.’
‘Perhaps it is becoming that different place already.’
‘Talk to Alfred and see just what it is France is capable of and you might change your mind. You are too young to remember the fear engendered by our nearest neighbour in the Peninsular Campaigns, but it was a hit-and-miss affair as to which way it went and the British would never again wish for the like.’
Such stilted discourse made Stephen wary and he knew that his days in the clutches of the British Service were numbered. He had ceased to be a citizen of the brokered threat Lord Palmerston seemed to endlessly foster and all he wanted was the chance to head to one of his remote family estates and live life.
Well and quietly, walking into a future with nothing tied back into the past. Nothing sordid and chancy and dissolute!
He breathed out hard as the face of Aurelia St Harlow came to mind. She wandered into his dreams at night, too, now, when his mind was least resistant and the call of her body against his at its most apparent, the generous heaviness of her bosom well remembered. Swearing under his breath, he concentrated again on what was being said by Shavvon.
‘Frederick Delsarte and his mob have been seen hanging around a warehouse in Park Street in the Limestone Hole area and they have known associations in Paris. It seems they may be using the legalised trade of cloth to send and receive information.’ He handed Stephen a sheet of paper with the details on it. ‘Those who are helping him do so probably have some French connection and imagine themselves hard done by by the English Government. If we can catch them in the act, we can string them up, quietly, of course, and with as little public awareness as possible.’
Hawkhurst nodded. It was always the same, this game of espionage played out behind the scenes of a virtuous and wholesome society, the dark secrets of corruption snapped off before they had the chance to taint it.
His world.
Sometimes he wondered if he would ever truly be able to struggle back up into the one people like Elizabeth Berkeley inhabited, untouched by any iniquity.
‘If you can manage to get into the channel of communication, let me know before you shut it down.’
‘So you have time to turn the other cheek?’
Shavvon began to laugh. ‘You are the best agent we have, Hawkhurst. I don’t want you lost.’
Lost like his brother and all the others he had started with. For a while now Stephen had wished the end would come, quickly, in the shape of a bullet, neither painful nor lingering, just a true clear shot and then nothing. If Shavvon recognised such ennui, he did not say so as he turned to the pile of papers on his desk. Expedience had the look of a careless nonchalance and Hawkhurst was so very tired of it, this lie of his life, foundering in the shallows of evil.
‘One day soon I will not be back.’ The words were quietly said as he let himself out.
Henry Kerslake was late and worry gnawed as Aurelia waited for him. It was cold and what light there was would soon begin to fade. If he did not come within the half hour she would leave for home, for her father had been ill this morning and she was wanting to see that the fever he had woken with had not worsened.
Her teeth bit at her nails and she fisted her fingers when she realised what she was doing. Agitation had marked many areas of her body now, she thought—her hands, her stomach with a constant nervous ache and her face, the tension written deeply into lines of ugliness.
Beautiful. Hawkhurst had called her such, but he was a man who had wanted more when he said it and what male would not use falsity in such a situation?
She shook her head hard at this errant nonsense for where was such an idea leading? She had been mortified by both her reaction to his kiss at Taylor’s Gap and her heightened sense of Hawkhurst as he had sat with her in the carriage. Charles’s betrayals were stretched thin across the veneer she had so successfully erected and she knew that any break would destroy everything in the same way that it had once before.
The sweet smell of opium smoke curling from a pipe and Charles’s eyes upon her, glittering bright and furtive. She had allowed him the right to pull the gown