Scandal in the Regency Ballroom. Louise Allen

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      Bree shivered. ‘Rosa, you sound positively Gothic!’ Then she recalled his words during the ball. ‘I think he has something on his mind. A secret.’

      ‘Hmm.’ Rosa sat down and poured more tea. ‘Lord Penrith is very attractive—I just hope he doesn’t turn out to be Bluebeard.’

      Max swung up into the driving seat and gathered the reins. So much for option two—we have a stilted conversation full of undertones that makes us both uncomfortable because of what happened at the ball. ‘Walk on.’ The pair moved off sedately and Gregg swung up behind.

      Max tried to sort out how he felt and made the unnerving discovery that his general sense of unease and indecision was worse than before. He wanted Bree, but the thought of marriage was more fraught with discomfort the more he contemplated it. He had dragged the locked trunk out of the attic of his memory and forced himself to open it, look at the hurt and shame and anger and fear that he had pushed away so he could get on with his life again. Only now they were out and he was facing them, all the doubt was back.

      Drusilla had left him within weeks of their marriage. It was his job to make a marriage, to keep his wife, and he had failed. Was it just that one woman, or was there something about him that was unsuited to matrimony? Dare he risk it again? Dare he risk it with this woman? He was not even sure what he felt for her other than liking, admiration and undoubted desire. Always assuming she did not laugh in his face at the mere thought of it. Bree Mallory did not strike him as a woman likely to be dazzled by a title.

      He turned into Bedford Square and then into Tottenham Court Road, heading for the crowded thoroughfare of Oxford Street. ‘Any idea of the time, Gregg?’ It was too busy to drive one-handed and fish out his pocket watch.

      ‘About three, my lord, I’d hazard.’

      Time then to think in peace and quiet at home before Ryder, the man recommended by Lord Lucas, came to discuss his problem.

      My problem, Max thought, jeering at himself. A nice euphemism. I can pretend I have a leak in the roof, or a difficult decision about investments or an unreliable tenant. And a man will come and sort out my problem. Which I should have sorted out years ago.

      He was in no better frame of mind at six o’clock when his butler, Bignell, announced, ‘Mr Ryder, my lord’, and ushered in the investigator.

      ‘Mr Ryder, please, come and sit down.’

      ‘My lord.’ One would take him for a superior clerk in his sober, understated clothes and with his quiet manner. But his voice was that of an gentleman, he moved with a swordsman’s grace and the grey eyes, when they met Max’s, were cool and assessing. From a clerk the scrutiny would have been insolence; from this man it felt like being assessed by a surgeon. It was about as comfortable.

      It was also steadying. Max gathered himself mentally and concentrated, much as he would before a fencing bout. ‘Lord Lucas recommends you highly.’

      ‘I have been able to be of use to him in the past.’ No false modesty or protestations there. ‘His lordship tells me that there is a personal matter requiring the highest discretion that you wish investigated.’

      ‘Yes. Ten years ago, when I was twenty-one—just twenty-one—I met a young woman called Drusilla Cornish. She was twenty, the daughter of an apothecary in Swindon. I fell in love with her, and I married her.’

      There was a notebook in Ryder’s hand—it seemed to have appeared as though by magic. He jotted something and looked up, a faint smile on his lips. ‘I use codes and a shorthand of my own devising, my lord. Your lordship held your present title at this time?’

      ‘Yes. I was the Earl of Penrith, I did marry a tradesman’s daughter and, under the terms of my father’s will, virtually all my money was in trust until I reached the age of twenty-five, or married with the approval of my trustees. It was every bit as ill judged an action as you are most tactfully not saying.’

      ‘Special licence?’ Max nodded. ‘And the marriage took place where?’ He listened as Max recounted how he had recalled the out-of-the way church in Dorset from a visit to a friend’s country estate the year before. ‘And her address in Swindon? Her family?’

      He told it all, the memory of the dusty little shop coming back so clearly as he spoke that he could smell the herbs and medicines, could see the light glinting on the glass vessels where the sun stuck through the lead-paned windows, could see the vision of loveliness that had seemed to swim out of the shadows like a black-haired mermaid at the sound of the tinny little bell.

      ‘I had toothache, of all the damned prosaic reasons for finding myself in this mess now. I wanted to see my own dentist in London, not submit to some rustic tooth-puller, but I needed something to dull the pain for a day or two. And there she was, serving. Her father was in the back, grinding up some nostrum, her small sister was perched on the end of the counter making up lavender bags.

      ‘I walked in feeling as though some demon were drilling holes in my jaw, fell in love and forgot the pain, all in one glance.’ It was surprisingly easy, talking to this dark stranger. Almost he could understand the allure of the confessional. He took a folded paper out of his pocket book. ‘Here. I have written down everything I can recall about names and places.’

      ‘Thank you, my lord.’ Ryder glanced through it, nodded and tucked it into his own notebook. ‘And then?’

      ‘Then I took Drusilla home. I knew my trustees would not approve, but, what the hell—my allowance was a thousand times more than her father earned in a year, we could survive very well for four years. My parents were both dead, my grandmother presided over Longwater. She took one look at Drusilla and told me to say nothing to anyone except the servants.’

      ‘You could rely upon them?’

      ‘Oh, yes, they were old family retainers, every one. They, and my grandmother, set about turning Drusilla into a countess.’

      ‘How well did they succeed?’

      ‘Not at all. She was appalled. She had no idea of what would be expected of her, she was intimidated by the house, by the servants, by my grandmother—by me, once she saw me in my proper setting, as it were.’

      Mr Ryder just waited, silently. It was a technique Max used himself and he was wryly amused to find himself succumbing to it. ‘If she had loved me, I don’t think that would have mattered, but she didn’t. I think she had seen me as the equivalent of a wealthy merchant and that was the height of her ambition. She had not expected to have to work for the title and the wealth and the position. I might have been young, and I might have been besotted, but I knew what a countess’s duties and responsibilities were.

      ‘She realised that this was not a game and we both realised she did not love me. It took three weeks to reach that point.’

      Mr Ryder taped his teeth with the end of his pencil. ‘I suppose that there were not grounds for an annulment?’ he enquired delicately.

      ‘No.’ Max looked back over the years with grim amusement. ‘I think you might say that the one place where we were compatible was in bed.’

      There was a pause while the investigator gazed tactfully out of the study window and Max consigned those particular memories to a deep, safe, dark, mental cupboard.

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