An Unnatural Daughter: A Dark Regency Mystery Read Free Page B

regretted the question. For the first time in what must have been years, the deep line between Father’s brows smoothed and disappeared.
    ‘I’ll manage, Fleur.’

CHAPTER 3
    Vulnerable, Beautiful Tristan
     
     
     
     
     
    Tristan and I sat in silence for a long while, and I leaned back in the bath chair, staring at the clouds that passed slowly overhead and the changing shapes and shadows cast by the trees. I tried not to look at what Tristan was painting – it seemed almost akin to reading someone’s correspondence over their shoulder, and Father had always hated that. I tried not to look at him at all, although his face drew me like a magnet, with its high cheek bones, white, white skin and pouting, pink lips.
    ‘It must be strange,’ he said at length, startling me out of my reverie. ‘To lose one’s past. That’s what’s happened to you. Strange but, in a way, exciting. You have the opportunity to start again with no ties or boundaries. You could be anything. Anyone you wanted. Is that not wonderful?’
    ‘I…’ I stuttered and struggled for words. ‘I hadn’t thought of it. I suppose it would - well, it would depend on what I had forgotten.’ I fiddled with the fringe on my shawl, rolling it between my fingers and looking at it intently. ‘It wouldn’t be just me who lost my past. It would be the past who lost me, too. Don’t you think?’
    ‘That’s true.’ Tristan paused in his drawing and stared at his paper. ‘I shouldn’t like to leave Mother. But everyone has things they would rather forget.’
    ‘I suppose they do.’
    He threw down his brush and paper and lay back on the blanket, staring up at the sky. He was perfectly placed for me to look at him. The long column of his neck was stretched out, almost as pale as his linen shirt, open just enough to reveal a hint of the fine bones at the top of his chest. I caught myself looking and blushed furiously. What had happened to me that I had become so voyeuristic? I wondered if it was part and parcel of becoming a married woman, and having one’s eyes opened. But more likely, I feared, it was part of my transformation into a being of vice and evil. I couldn’t stop myself from looking at him again, his long legs stretched out over the blanket, his delicate wrists and long, artist’s fingers. He cleared his throat and I worried he’d caught me staring, but he began to speak.
    ‘There was a girl, you know.’
    ‘Oh. You don’t have to tell me anything.’
    He smiled weakly.
    ‘It seems only fair – I’m trying to find out things about you.’
    A shot of heat suffused my belly, and I felt myself blush again.
    ‘She was a friend of mine – our families were friends, all my life. My first love, if you like.’
    Jealousy. It shot through me, burning my throat and clenching my stomach. It was as though I had regained consciousness as a different person. I had been jealous before, but never so powerfully it shocked me. Never about a man.
    ‘We were engaged. The happiest people alive. Do you know that feeling? Sorry – you probably don’t remember. But I wanted to see the world, and I ended up in the army. Didn’t even see any action. Too late for the war, and when I returned it seemed I was too late in that as well.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    A muscle in his throat contracted, and he raised a pale hand to cover his eyes as he turned his face away from me.
    ‘She had married someone else while I was away. I was only gone a year but… She’d promised she would wait for me.’
    I was surprised again by the pang of hatred I suddenly felt for this girl. I stopped looking at vulnerable, beautiful Tristan and lay back in my chair.
    ‘How awful,’ I whispered.
    ‘Yes. But maybe it was for the best. I tell myself that. That we probably wouldn’t have suited. That we would never have been happy, that we would have fallen out of love and made one another thoroughly miserable. But that’s the thing – I’ll never know how it could