Willa took in a breath, understanding what this was about. The Arrogant Earl had been his nickname here in Society before he had gone to America. The Distant Earl was another name she had heard and they both made sense. It was protection he was trying to offer, protection from himself.
‘Everyone has their skeletons and secrets. I know that I have mine. I told you once that Lionel had died by falling off the balcony onto the paving below. But what I did not say is that I had pushed him to stop him ripping out the pages of my diary, which he had grabbed. He went over the edge shouting to the world around him that it was my fault. And it was in a way, in the same way of you shooting your brother. Not by design but by chance.’
When he did not reply she kept going. Better for him to know the truth than to learn a lesser version of it from someone else.
‘Lionel’s shoe caught on the jutting edge of the stones and that was all it took. And when he fell I rushed to the edge and looked down and I did not feel guilty or sad. I felt relief. I felt freedom. I felt the weight of all my life lifted off my shoulders even as the servants came rushing to help and his blood was spreading dark beneath him on the grey of the pavers.’
She began to shake with the coldness of the room on her naked body and he lifted a blanket from the bed and tucked it around her, bringing her into him.
‘I think it wasn’t your fault.’ His words were whispered into her hair.
‘And I think that it was not yours, either.’
Sanctuary coupled with absolution was a potent thing as she wrapped herself further around him and held on until her tears stopped and there was nothing left save for relief.
‘We were both married to people who could never be happy and suffered because of it.’ He held her tight before speaking again. ‘But here with you in my arms, all I can think of is how right it is and how I never want it to end.’
For the next few weeks they met every night, either at her place or his, quietly and in secret, two people who needed the other to make them whole, clinging to delight with every fibre of themselves.
Willa could not remember a time when she had been so happy, and the nights turned into daylight assignations as well. Phillip had sent most of his staff to Elmsworth Manor in Hampshire to help out there for a month, so the town house on St James Square was theirs, except for an elderly cook and her husband whose living quarters were off the kitchen, and whom they seldom saw.
It was a perfect arrangement.
This afternoon they lay on a bed in the bedroom upstairs in the front of the house, the sun from the large windows slanting in across them.
‘In America I thought I might never be happy again. I could never have imagined this.’ Phillip’s finger trailed up the curve of one breast and then to her throat. ‘You have the softest skin, Willa, and in the sun here it glows golden.’
She laughed.
‘My mother had the same skin because her ancestors hailed from northern France.’
‘Did you have other family with you in Hampshire when you were growing up?’
‘No, there was none. Both my parents were only children whose parents had died a long time before I was born. I think that was why they clung to each other so desperately and why they could never understand what my needs as a child were. You were lucky to have a brother.’
‘I didn’t feel that way for a long time but now, with Esther and the children, we are growing closer and it feels right.’
‘This feels right, too,’ she returned as his fingers trailed down her stomach and rested in the space between her legs.
And then they spoke to each other in different ways, the body having a language all of its own.
Chapter Eleven
Lionel’s cousin Simon St Claire came to visit Willa the next afternoon in Russell Square. He was a large man whom she had never liked and today he looked angrier than she had ever seen him. After barely giving her a greeting he got straight to the point.
‘I have had word from my lawyer to say that the sale of Belton Park is going ahead. I warned you not to try to sell it until I had all the family papers in order and I am here today to repeat my warning. Lionel did not wish for his house and land to go to you. He wanted it to go to a continuation of the St Claire line after you supplied my cousin with neither progeny nor happiness.’
His face was puffy and red and he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief pulled from his pocket. ‘I will fight this sale until the last breath I take and I won’t be kind.’
‘Are you threatening me, Mr St Claire?’
‘I am, madam. I am threatening you because you are a whore and a murderer. It is said that you pushed my cousin from the balcony with intent and then you slept with the lawyer who came to the Park a few days later to give you the details of your dead husband’s will.’
Dread filled her. This was everything she had always feared, laid out with such vitriol and threat. She could disprove noneof it either, for she was certain Simon St Claire would have gathered credible witnesses to add to his accusations.
Shame washed in, a huge wave of it, for her stupidity, for Lionel’s lack of care and for Mr Elliott MacDonald, who had taken her hand in his with care and tried to explain the workings of the law. The first soft touch she had had in years. Another mistake on top of all the ones she had made. She waited to see what Lionel’s cousin would say next.
‘We can do this in two ways. I can bring forth all my evidence to a judge in a court of law or you can simply walk away with five thousand pounds and the chance to start anew somewhere else, far from London, somewhere away from any reminders of your former life, somewhere so distant that we should never have to see each other again.’
