Free Mistress at Midnight by Sophia James

to laugh. ‘You are the best agent we have, Hawkhurst. I don’t want you lost.’
    Lost like his brother and all the others he had started with. For a while now Stephen had wished the end would come, quickly, in the shape of a bullet, neither painful nor lingering, just a true clear shot and then nothing. If Shavvon recognised such ennui, he did not say so as he turned to the pile of papers on his desk. Expedience had the look of a careless nonchalance and Hawkhurst was so very tired of it, this lie of his life, foundering in the shallows of evil.
    ‘One day soon I will not be back.’ The words were quietly said as he let himself out.
    Henry Kerslake was late and worry gnawed as Aurelia waited for him. It was cold and what light there was would soonbegin to fade. If he did not come within the half hour she would leave for home, for her father had been ill this morning and she was wanting to see that the fever he had woken with had not worsened.
    Her teeth bit at her nails and she fisted her fingers when she realised what she was doing. Agitation had marked many areas of her body now, she thought—her hands, her stomach with a constant nervous ache and her face, the tension written deeply into lines of ugliness.
    Beautiful . Hawkhurst had called her such, but he was a man who had wanted more when he said it and what male would not use falsity in such a situation?
    She shook her head hard at this errant nonsense for where was such an idea leading? She had been mortified by both her reaction to his kiss at Taylor’s Gap and her heightened sense of Hawkhurst as he had sat with her in the carriage. Charles’s betrayals were stretched thin across the veneer she had so successfully erected and she knew that any break would destroy everything in the same way that it had once before.
    The sweet smell of opium smoke curling from a pipe and Charles’s eyes upon her, glitteringbright and furtive. She had allowed him the right to pull the gown away from her breasts so that flesh spilled out into the air, cold in the autumn evening. She had trusted her husband, relied on his honour and his principles, the band of gold around his finger denoting all that she had promised him.
    Foolish false troths. It had taken her only one night to understand his depravity.
    The noise of feet made her turn and, as the door opened, she saw that Henry Kerslake had finally arrived. He looked distracted and tired, the large bag he carried over his shoulder rubbing a dent into his over-cloak.
    ‘The jacquards took longer than I had imagined they would to sample. Although the punched cards make the patterns more intricate, they are slow to set up.’ Opening the buckles on the bag, he brought out a swathe of cloth, flowers and leaves that owed much to the influence of Japan spilling forth.
    ‘Godwin had his hand in the design, Mrs St Harlow, but I have strengthened the colours myself. What do you think?’
    ‘The stylised motifs are…unusual, though the Oriental taste is gaining in attraction.’ To her eye the shades were too lurid andthe shapes too foreign, but her own Louis schemes garlanded in blossom were falling in demand and she knew that they had to widen their range.
    ‘No one else in Macclesfield is doing anything like it yet, so if we hit the market quickly we will be ahead of them all.’
    His sentiment heartened her. With the mooted reopening of the trade routes to Japan, interest in the East had escalated and the furniture being turned out by eminent manufacturers reflected the change. She had begun to see bamboo used in the new mass-produced chairs and tables, something silk patterns such as these ones would complement exactly and she was enough of a businesswoman to understand the necessity of diversity.
    Renaissance splendour, Gothic arches, gilded rococo boiseries, French roses and now a simpler lightness from a country far from Europe. Her own designs stood alongside those from the more famous houses, but with the limited time she