The Marquess Who Loved Me

Chapter SEVEN


The next morning, Ellie’s maid rummaged through the pots and boxes atop Ellie’s dressing table. “Perhaps the white lead, my lady,” Lucia said. She held up a small porcelain vessel. “Nothing else will conceal the shadows.”

Ellie sat in front of the mirror, wearing a dark blue dressing gown that only added to her pallor. “There isn’t a potion in England that will make me look like less of a hag. I look wretched if I haven’t slept.”

The fine lines starting to crinkle around her eyes drew attention to the dark circles beneath them. She hadn’t indulged in her annual cry the previous night, but she had barely slept. She couldn’t stop thinking of Nick — both the Nick who touched her like he loved her, and the Nick who intended to take every bit of vengeance he could wring from her flesh.

But the fragile winter sunlight brought unwelcome clarity. The part of her that craved his seduction was thoroughly browbeaten by the part that raged at his villainy. Hadn’t she vowed to stop being obsessed with him? Wasn’t she ready to leave England and all her desperate dreams of him behind?

She was in command of herself again. She knew what Nick wanted now, and she wouldn’t be tricked into betraying what she felt for him. She could manage him until she raised enough money to buy her escape.

Or at least she could lie to herself.

Lucia tapped her on the shoulder. “White lead?” she asked, with all the patience of a nurse talking to an invalid.

“No. We’re going to London for business, not pleasure. I trust my face won’t scare the men at Rundell and Bridge too terribly.”

“They may give you a better price for your jewels if you terrify them,” Lucia mused.

Ellie laughed. “I should have asked you to manage my estate instead of Marcus. You’re ruthless enough for it.”

Lucia didn’t smile. “Mr. Claiborne will regret what he’s done to you, my lady.”

Her words sounded like a vow. The maid’s relationship with Marcus had always been prickly. Lucia had once been a gentleman’s daughter, although Ellie had never asked how she’d fallen from grace and landed on the Theatre Royal stage where Ellie had discovered her. She had been in Ellie’s employ for over two years, since the day Ellie had asked her to sit for a painting and then impulsively asked her to stay on as her lady’s maid.

Lucia’s bold dark hair and dreamy grey eyes made her look enchanted — a Celtic witch, perhaps, rather than a household drudge. She was far too striking to be safe as a servant in most houses. But Lucia knew how to take care of herself. She kept every man, and particularly Marcus, at arm’s length. They still called each other Mrs. Grafton and Mr. Claiborne, although Ellie suspected Marcus wanted more from Lucia than the cool disregard she offered him.

Today, Lucia's voice finally held a thread of emotion toward him. Ellie wanted to grin, but she kept her face solemn. “Leave Marcus ungutted until he explains exactly where the money went. After that, you may have him.”

Lucia made a noncommittal sniff before disappearing into the dressing room. She was usually as quiet as a church mouse, but this morning she slammed through every drawer as she selected Ellie’s attire. She returned with a fresh chemise, stockings, and stays. She had just helped Ellie into her undergarments and fastened the corset when a knock on the door interrupted them.

Ellie glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was a few moments after eight. She nodded at Lucia, who answered the door as Ellie shrugged into her dressing gown again.

“This is the earliest I have ever known you to be out of bed,” Madeleine said as she walked into Ellie’s chamber. “When we were in Scotland last autumn, I swear I never saw you before ten at the earliest.”

Ellie accepted her sister-in-law’s kiss. “Desperate times and all that. I am sorry to have sent for you and Prudence so early.”

Behind them, Miss Prudence Etchingham entered, followed by a servant bearing a tray with tea and chocolate. “This isn’t early by my standards,” Prudence said. “Lady Salford is an early riser, and I am up even earlier so that I may have an hour to myself before attending her. But I will gladly sacrifice that hour if the story you want to share is as delicious as I expect it to be.”

“I don’t have anything delicious to share, unfortunately. You will have to settle for tea.”

Prudence arched an eyebrow at Ellie’s evasion. “That’s not what I would have guessed after last night. Even Lady Salford remarked on how taken Lord Folkestone was with you. If he had accidentally strayed near the chairs where the dowagers and companions sat, they might have flayed him alive with their curiosity.”

Prudence was a companion to Madeleine’s aunt and Alex Staunton’s mother, the widowed Lady Salford. Lady Salford had taken Prudence in several months earlier, an arrangement that had freed Prudence from her overbearing, impoverished mother.

But for all that Prudence was grateful, Ellie saw the tightness around her mouth. A future as an older lady’s companion was not one that any woman with Prudence’s mind would embrace wholeheartedly, even if Lady Salford was easier than most. Ellie had planned to take Prudence with her to Europe for a few months…but Nick’s return had changed all that.

Ellie gestured the ladies into comfortable chairs by the fire. Prudence dismissed the servant and offered to pour. Lucia returned to the dressing room for Ellie’s carriage dress, but Ellie stayed standing. With all her shields in tatters after Nick’s arrival, she needed to feel like she had troops to command — even if those troops were friends who now viewed her as the finest bit of entertainment they’d had in ages.

As Prudence passed around their cups, Ellie considered how to phrase her request. If this were one of their normal meetings, they might have discussed Prudence’s new historical treatise or heard a dramatic reading from Madeleine’s latest play. Madeleine and Prudence had been friends for years, while Ellie had only joined their circle the previous summer. They had invited her to join their secret artistic club, the Muses of Mayfair, when they had discovered that she was a painter during Madeleine and Ferguson’s courtship. The only member missing was Madeleine’s cousin Amelia, the newly married Countess of Carnach, who had stayed in Scotland with her husband rather than attending Ellie’s house party.

But while Ellie usually guided them into talking about themselves instead of her, Lord Folkestone’s return was so momentous that none of them could forget it. Prudence started the inquisition. “I was concerned for your health when Folkestone dragged you from the ballroom last night. Is everything well?“

“I hope it’s well,” Madeleine added. “Thank goodness Ferguson and I retired early. If he had seen what Prue described to me, he might have murdered the man.”

“I don’t need my brother to protect me,” Ellie said.

Her tone was mild, but her feelings weren’t. Ferguson had been missing from her life for years. They were on much better terms now that he had returned from the exile their father had sent him to, but his newfound protectiveness occasionally rankled.

Madeleine smiled. “You know Ferguson. If he decides to protect someone, he will do it whether she wants to be protected or not.”

Ellie tried not to hate the dreamy look in Madeleine’s eyes. “Well, don’t let him decide to protect me. I already have a plan.”

Lucia came out of the dressing room with one of Ellie’s carriage dresses — a gorgeous grey that made her think of a Scottish sky in winter. Prudence’s eyes flickered from the dress to Ellie’s face. “Don’t say you’re leaving us?” she asked.

Ellie set aside her chocolate and removed her robe so that Lucia could help her into the dress. “That’s why I asked you to attend me so early this morning. I have pressing business in London that cannot wait, and I need someone to act as hostess and entertain the ladies until I return. The men can mostly take care of themselves, particularly if Lord Folkestone chooses to play the host…”

“Unlikely,” Prudence said, interrupting her. “Lady Salford’s maid helped me to dress, and she heard that Lord Folkestone had already left for London. Not that I gossiped with the servants, of course — but they can be useful.”

Madeleine grinned. “Planning a rendezvous in the capital? How shocking of you, Lady Folkestone.”

Ellie sucked in a breath that had nothing to do with Lucia's sharp tug on the back of her dress. She hadn’t known that Nick was going to London, but she couldn’t delay her trip just to avoid him. “What that scoundrel does is no concern of mine,” she said sharply.

She knew her mistake immediately — both of her friends went from interested to very interested. “So he’s a scoundrel now?” Madeleine asked. “Was he a scoundrel before or after he moved into the room next to yours?”

“I didn’t put him in the room next to mine,” Ellie said smugly. “The only room left, other than the master’s chamber, was a small bachelor’s room in the old wing of the house. He may freeze to death there, but it would save me the trouble of finding a new residence.”

Prudence and Madeleine both looked into their cups at the same time.

“What are you not telling me?” she asked.

“I must have made a mistake,” Madeleine said, in a voice that didn’t allow for mistakes. “But I saw him leaving this hallway when your maid requested that I join you for tea. Since I knew all the other rooms on this floor were occupied, I assumed he was in the master’s chamber. Unless he was in here with you?”

She sounded so guileless that her innocence somehow wrapped around itself and became an insinuation. “Yes, you made a mistake,” Ellie said firmly. “I’m sure he stayed where I put him. But that is neither here nor there. All I need is for you to keep my guests entertained until dinner so that I may deal with an urgent matter in the City. I’m sorry if you came to my room expecting a grand story of reunited lovers, but there’s no world in which that story is going to happen.”

“Do you really believe that?” Prudence asked. “From the way he watched you in the ballroom, he looked more than a little interested in a reunion.”

“And I do like a reunited lovers story,” Madeleine said. “Almost enough that I wish Ferguson would go away for a bit so that I may have him back.”

Ellie and Prudence exchanged a long-suffering look. Madeleine’s love for her husband was nearly sickening in its perfection. But Ellie caught herself and shrugged. “No reunited lovers. There are enough men in the ton that I don’t need to repeat myself.”

Lucia ordered her to hold still as she shoved pins into Ellie’s unruly curls. Prudence looked at Ellie wistfully. “You truly don’t want him? Not even a little?”

Ellie had pondered that question all night, in between snatches of fitful sleep, and she was no closer to an answer than she had been when she had peeled herself off Nick and left the salon. The memory told her what her body wanted — it wanted Nick, as hard and often as possible, until it was sated enough to let him go.

She knew herself well enough to know she would have seduced him eventually. She hadn’t taken a lover in over three years, but she wanted Nick as she wanted no one else. He had merely beaten her to the seduction, albeit with a cruelty that still stunned her. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t enjoy herself.

But the stinging tears that had threatened to overwhelm her as she had lain in the dark told her what her mind wanted.

It wanted to escape before the floodgates crumbled, before everything she had done to rebuild herself into an inviolable fortress collapsed at her feet. Her body didn’t want to let him go, and her heart was torn between the two — but her mind knew she wouldn’t survive losing him again.

“There’s no going back, Prudence,” she said, after a pause that was a bit too long. “Staying now will only make it harder when we part ways again.”

“So you do want him,” Prudence said triumphantly.

Madeleine and Prudence both looked up at her with identical expressions of inquisitive delight. She knew they cared about her. They wanted her to be happy. They wanted to share in her emotion. Their friendship was still new to her, but it was what Ellie had dreamed of as a child, all alone on the country estate where her father had abandoned her. She had been exiled, raised by a series of nursemaids and governesses, for the crime of looking too much like the wife he’d adored and lost. With Ferguson similarly exiled at Eton and her other half-siblings in London, she had dreamed of having friends to play with, to laugh with, to share secrets with…

But she hadn’t realized then that secrets held a dark, dangerous kind of power. What danger had her secrets posed when no one cared about them but her? It was a lesson she’d learned, and learned hard, during her first season in London, when she had finally found other women her own age to talk to.

Suddenly, it wasn’t Madeleine and Prudence in front of her. Annabel and Clarabel Claiborne had been eighteen and seventeen during Ellie’s debut, while Ellie was already nineteen, but they were kind and cheerful — easygoing, charming girls whom Ellie’s father approved of her knowing. She wanted her father’s approval badly enough that she would have been friends with a lamppost if it had possessed the right pedigree and fortune. If the girls’ charm was a bit shallow, it was made up for by how nicely they tittered at her conversational gambits.

And so when they had asked her one night, when they’d all had too much champagne, whether she had found a man to pin her hopes on, Ellie had told the truth. She’d been giddy with the truth, sure of her own heart, confident that once the season was over, her father would let her marry Nick. He’d promised to let them marry, after all; Ellie just had to finish the season without marrying someone else.

So she had shown Annabel and Clarabel her heart. Wasn’t that what friends were supposed to do?

Friends in the ton knew better. Annabel and Clarabel hadn’t intended to hurt her — perhaps they never even knew that a word was enough to change the course of Ellie’s life. But they went off and whispered to their brother that his despised cousin had tricked a duke’s daughter into falling in love with him. And when Charles Claiborne, a marquess rather than a merchant, came asking the duke for Ellie’s hand…

Ellie shook her head. Madeleine and Prudence weren’t Charles’s sisters. She wanted to tell them what Nick had done. She wanted to show them how he’d hurt her, how confused she was, how much she still wanted him.

But when she opened her mouth, the words wouldn’t come out.

“Are you feeling well?” Madeleine asked, suddenly concerned. “Perhaps you should rest rather than going to London today.”

“I shall be fine in London. As for the rest of it…”

Ellie paused again. Prudence finally took pity on her. She stood and linked arms with Madeleine, pulling the duchess out of her chair when Madeleine looked ready to stay and pursue her questioning. “There’s no need to know your feelings today,” Prudence said. “But we are here should you need our help.”

It was a nice gesture. If Ellie were nineteen, perhaps she even would have accepted it — perhaps she would have been grateful for it, rather than immediately dismissing it. But she was thirty now, on a birthday no one other than Nick would acknowledge since she hadn’t told them the date. She knew the limits of her friendships.

And she knew the truth — no one could help her with Nick.

As soon as they left, she let Lucia pin her hat to her hair and took up her swansdown-trimmed grey pelisse before descending to the front hall. A drive to London was hardly relaxing, given the state of the roads and traffic, but at least she would have a few hours to herself. She needed to explore all the options that would buy her freedom, repair her shields before she saw Nick again — and somehow find the courage to leave him a second time.