Page 36

RISING FROM THE ASHES

They had just begun walking down the long, wide street that led to their door when a carriage pulled up in a flurry of horses’ hooves and splashy water.

She heard Taz’s voice. ‘Huzza, Miss Gray! Two drowned rats on the highway!’ Eliza looked up into his familiar smiling face, sitting atop the carriage seat dressed in his caped greatcoat, his hat low on his brow.

‘Taz!’ She was so pleased to see him. Then she realised where Taz went, Lord Purfoy was sure to be.

The door of the smart chaise opened and Raven Purfoy drawled, ‘Get in; this weather’s for frogs and ducks, and you are neither.

’ Eliza and Polly bundled themselves in along with their dripping umbrellas.

He looked at the two young women opposite, so wet and bedraggled, an amused smile on his lips.

‘ Mon Dieu , ladies, you’ve brought the flood with you.

’ He flicked some stray raindrops from his immaculate breeches and looked straight at Eliza.

‘At least you didn’t throw yourself under my horses’ hooves like the last time we met on the highway.

’ But then he noticed her pallor and how close she looked to tears and realised his levity was ill-timed.

‘Forgive me, Miss Gray. Is everything well?’

Eliza knew she could not speak of her momentous encounter with Lord Bathwick in front of Polly, so talked of other matters. ‘Indeed sir, but Mrs Wolfe is concerned about baby Emma who has a fever and I think we return to London tomorrow.’

He looked immediately anxious and alert. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll offer her my fast chaise. I have my own teams of horses stabled at the posting inns along the way so the journey is more comfortable and can be done in two days.’

‘That’s very kind of you, sir.’

‘I would do anything for Corinna and Alick. They are the closest I have to family.’ His voice was unusually emotional.

When the coach pulled up outside number ten, Polly climbed out before Taz had opened the door and dashed through the rain up the front steps.

Lord Purfoy put out a hand. ‘Wait a while, Miss Gray. I want to know what’s really troubling you. ’

His dark eyes were intent on her face and she knew she could not prevaricate with him. She took a deep breath and said, ‘I came to Bath to see my long-lost father, the Marquess of Bathwick. However, it seems I am not his daughter but another man’s natural child.’

He nodded sagely. ‘’Tis common enough, but not usually until the first child and heir has been legitimately born.’

Eliza’s emotions were in such turmoil she found it hard not to let the floodgates give way. She said in exasperation, ‘It may be common enough, my lord, but when you are that child it can be destructive of all happiness.’

Lord Purfoy pulled out his linen handkerchief and handed it to her. He leaned forward and murmured, ‘Are these raindrops on your cheeks, or tears?’

His kindness was her undoing. She covered her face with her hands. ‘You would cry too if the family you had longed all your life to find turned out to be a monstrous chimera!’

‘That sounds most hideous indeed. Do you want to tell me more?’

Eliza took a gulp of air and continued. ‘My legal father knew I was the daughter of another man and that my mother loved me, and so to punish her and relieve his own hatred, he paid my nursemaid to lose me in a crowd, here in Bath. I was just seven.’

Usually sardonic and controlled in everything, Lord Purfoy swore. ‘Hell and damnation to him! I’ve never heard of anything more devilish.’ He spontaneously reached for her hands. ‘And you so young, abandoned to a merciless world!’

His sympathy for her plight was too much for her own control.

It seemed a lifetime’s tears were ready to fall and Eliza’s breath came in hiccoughing sobs.

‘My mother never recovered from her grief and died soon after. I’ll never know her, or her love,’ she said.

‘I believed wishing hard enough would make it so. But I was wrong.’

Lord Purfoy’s eyes all the time were on her face. ‘The past can imprison us and petrify our hearts. I have known this too.’ His voice and manner were gentle. ‘These painful truths will free you from the tragedies of what has been.’

Eliza pulled the Bathwick ring out of her pocket and put it into Lord Purfoy’s hand. ‘At the last moment the Marquess gave me this.’ He examined the ancient engraving and read out the latin motto. ‘ Omnia vincit’.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It conquers all.’

Eliza looked at him expectantly. ‘What does that “it” refer to?’

‘It refers to love,’ he said with quiet emphasis.

Eliza’s voice was bleak. ‘It’s not a motto the current marquess appears to live by.’

Lord Purfoy took her hand and unfurled her fingers to place the ring in her palm. ‘You will find love and live again. Believe me, for this has happened to me.’

In the maelstrom of grief, Eliza knew he was telling her of his salvation through love and with plunging spirits, she recalled her sight of him that morning.

She knew now it must have been him, and blurted out, ‘I saw you at The Pump Room. I thought you were at your estate and it couldn’t be you.

But here you are.’ She looked up, hoping for a reassuring explanation she knew she had no right to expect.

Lord Purfoy withdrew his hands from hers and gazed out at the pouring rain. ‘Yes, here I am. I came to Bath at the request of a friend.’ His voice was matter-of-fact.

It was clear to Eliza now, this ‘friend’ was the new love that had saved him from his past. It should be no concern of hers and would only bring her pain, yet she had to know for sure. ‘Is that friend the lady I saw on your arm this morning?’

His eyes met her gaze but all sympathy had fled. ‘It’s really no business of yours, Miss Gray,’ he said coldly, but his irritation was with himself.

‘Of course it isn’t. But I can’t help being disappointed.’ Eliza was shocked she had said the words, and how revealing they were of her own presumptuous hopes.

The stricken expression on her face was just as eloquent of her feelings, and her words and forlorn mien wounded Lord Purfoy’s heroic idea of himself.

The fact that anyone he cared for considered him less than admirable punctured his pride.

Anger flared and with it, a mortifying guilt that he had not lived up to some impossible vision she seemed to have of him.

His words were stinging. ‘You show an astonishing lack of understanding of the world, Miss Gray. I apologise if I do not conform to the ideals of a romantic miss as to how an unmarried man in his late twenties should conduct himself. Would you have me be a monk?’

Eliza’s nerves were already frayed to breaking and she wished to get away from the tension between them.

She gathered her skirts, held her mother’s box tight against her chest, and grasping her umbrella said stiffly, ‘Thank you for bringing us home.’ In her haste she struggled to open the door but Taz was there and helped her out.

His dark eyes missed nothing. ‘Don’t upset yerself, miss.

There’s always the ’orses. They don’t let ye down. ’

Lord Purfoy’s voice was once more languid and drawling as he called after her retreating figure, ‘Tell Mrs Wolfe that I’d be happy for her to have use of my coach and horses, and Taz too, should she wish to return more speedily to Town. She can send me a note at The White Hart.’

Eliza found Corinna in the small sitting room with Emma, bundled in a blanket, drowsy on her lap, her cheeks cherry-red. ‘How is she?’ She knelt by her side.

‘She seems to be stable but I still think we should return to London as soon as we can. I’m sorry to draw your visit to such a precipitous close.’

‘I’m keen to leave myself,’ Eliza said.

Corinna looked at her sharply. ‘I haven’t asked you the most important question. How was the meeting with your father?’

Eliza knew she could not burden Corinna with her own woes when she was so taken up with the dangers to her daughter’s health, so merely said, ‘He was not what I had hoped. And in fact is not my father after all. But he gave me his ancestral ring and my mother’s jewellery box, and for that I am grateful.

’ She indicated the box still clutched in her lap.

Standing up abruptly, she said, ‘I must go and change out of these wet, muddy clothes. Oh, and Lord Purfoy is in town and offered you his fast chaise with Taz driving. With his own horses at the posting inns, he says the journey should only last two days. Should you wish to take advantage of his offer, he can be contacted at The White Hart.’

She left and ran up the stairs. The box in her hands was weighted with significance and she could not wait to open it and have something at last that her mother had touched.

She stripped off her damp clothes, slipped on a dressing gown and sank onto the bed.

The box revealed a tangle of glass and bone necklaces.

She carefully separated them and held each close to her cheek, hoping to catch a whisper of her mother’s scent.

There was a strand of fair hair caught in the clasp of a blue stone rivière and for a moment her heart stopped.

This was as close as she could come to her.

Removing a cameo brooch of Persephone and a gold ring, Eliza found a small sheet of paper with a list in a neat fine hand.

2 yds Venetian Ribbon, same pink cording, 20 bugle beads, 1 yd silk tassels, celadon plume, 2 linen fichus.

Eliza smoothed the paper with her trembling fingers. This was her mother’s handwriting, a meaningless list for the haberdasher but so full of meaning for the daughter who would never know her, except through these tiny personal scraps.