Chapter Thirteen
From his earliest years, various people had tried to put Gabriel in his place.
A bastard—even a duke’s bastard—was a target for every social climbing, moralistic, or otherwise pompous ass on the planet.
Fortunately, his mother had given him a weapon to deal with such people.
It was, indeed, perhaps the best thing she had ever taught him.
“Choose your priority and your weapon,” she said. “Ignore everything and everyone else.”
Her priority was to be worshipped, and her weapons were her seductive talents. All else—including her own son—was classified as either useful or not depending upon how they served her priority.
It was a valuable lesson for him. It took him a long while to determine his priority. As a boy at Eton, his priority had echoed his mother’s. He demanded respect from the other boys, and he enforced that with his fists or other devious means of punishment if he did not receive his due.
But then there came a girl. She was young by his standards now, but old for him back then.
She was the wife of one of the instructors.
A woman cursed (he later discovered) with an inability to bear children.
But every year, she would pick a few to grace her table, to perform special tasks, and to receive motherly affection that had been so lacking in his life before then.
She did not select him.
He brought her gifts, he cleared her garden for her, he was effusive with compliments.
He did all the things that worked with his mother, but none of it worked with her.
He knew he could not threaten her as he did with the other boys.
No harsh treatment of her or her chosen favorites brought him the attention he craved, and he tried all of it.
Then one day he saw her reading a tale of King Arthur.
The moment she set it down, he grabbed it—Le Morte D’Arthur in the original French—and read it from cover to cover, hiding it beneath his bed for fear that she would discover that he had stolen it.
He cared little for the tragic love story.
His imagination became riveted by the chivalric code which cared nothing for the circumstances of his birth.
Indeed, Sir Galahad was Lancelot’s bastard, and he was the only one pure enough to retrieve the holy grail.
He began reading everything he could about the Knights of the Round Table.
He fashioned his own shield and began to learn the use of a sword.
He memorized the ten commandments of chivalry, but focused most on the one that said, Thou shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil.
That was a bitter pill for him to swallow because by every measure, he had been cruel to those weaker than him. Whenever he tried to cast himself as the hero in a tale, he saw himself acting more as the villain.
It was a cruel thing for a young boy to realize. He wasn’t evil because he was a bastard. He was evil because he’d chosen to act that way. Fortunately, he was intelligent enough—and young enough—to change his behavior.
He never did gain the woman’s attention, but he didn’t need it.
He looked to himself to earn his own respect.
Might for Right became his creed. He defended the weak and lent his strength to the good.
When he reached adulthood, he found his quest in the Peninsular War.
Napoleon was bullying his way across the continent, expanding his empire by conquering weaker nations who could not defend themselves.
So he defended them. And during that time, he met Lord Benedict. Here indeed was his King Arthur, a man who strove tirelessly to repel the invader and to set out laws and alliances such that another bully could never rise again.
He was still serving Arthur in every way he knew how. And if that meant he used his might to make sure that Guinevere—Janelle, in this case—acted as an asset to Lord Benedict, then he would do so without hesitation.
So it was that when he returned to Benedict’s box at the theater and found her hastily scrawled note about returning home, he had two conflicting thoughts.
The first—and what he deemed most likely—was that she had run off to her own amusements.
The second, which could not be completely discounted, was that Lord Benedict’s enemies had taken her for their own evil purposes.
Whatever the case, his duty was clear. He had to find her immediately. What he did once he found her depended entirely upon whether she landed in the good or evil category.
He was nevertheless cognizant that he served as escort to her aunt.
Fortunately, he had enough friends in the ton to find her a fresh companion.
As she had just spent the last fifteen minutes disparaging his manners, his encroaching attitude, and his birth, she gave no objection to his departure.
He did find it laughable when she declared that Janelle was of delicate health and often sought her bed when ill.
Miss Caddick was the epitome of health and willful disobedience.
That her caretakers thought her delicate was proof of their stupidity.
So it was that he found himself outside her home less than thirty minutes after discovering her note.
He was about to climb the stairs when he saw a young messenger boy dash up the stairs and bang on the door.
He wasn’t sure of the boy’s identity at first, though there was something about the child’s uneven gait that triggered a memory.
But when the boy banged on the knocker then handed a missive to the butler, Gabe quickly became certain. Especially when the child spoke.
“It’s urgent, guv,” the child said. “For Betty.”
“She’s not at home,” the butler said.
“Madame Florina said to come right now.”
The butler nodded. “I’ll tell her as soon as I can, but she is not due home for hours.”
Now he placed the boy. He was a messenger from the Rose Garden, asking for Janelle. And the butler was obviously in on the secret. Now he need only wait for the lady’s return and follow her. Whatever her secret activity, he would have the truth of it tonight.
So he stayed in the shadows and waited. He was cold but not yet numb when she finally returned. But it was the manner in which she was delivered that shocked him to his core.
She arrived in Lord Benedict’s carriage.
He hastily reviewed all that he knew of His Lordship’s activities.
Lord Benedict meant to spend the entire evening entertaining LeFauvre in the crudest manner possible.
He could not possibly have taken time away from that to attend to Miss Caddick.
Neither would he have left the carriage for her use.
Lord Benedict was fussy about that, and Gabriel would have known, were that the case.
Such logistics were under his exclusive purview.
And yet he could not deny the evidence of his eyes.
The coachman was quick to open the carriage door.
It appeared that Miss Caddick was slightly drunk as she needed the man’s help to disembark.
She righted herself quickly as she thanked the man in very polite tones.
Then she walked with great dignity up her front steps.
Her butler opened the door before she was halfway up.
He must have been watching for her. Then he slipped her the missive the moment she crossed the threshold.
If a word was spoken, Gabriel didn’t hear it over the sound of Lord Benedict’s carriage pulling away.
But he did hear her soft curse a moment later. Whatever she was about this night, she was none too pleased with it.
“Five minutes,” he heard her say. “Can you get me a hackney?”
“Yes, miss.”
Gabe had already deduced that the servants were complicit with whatever was going on. Still, it was a bit of a shock to see the otherwise stiffly proper man help with her deception.
Miss Caddick was as good as her word. The butler hailed a hackney and within five minutes, “Betty” rushed out from the servant’s door.
She was covered in a dark cloak, complete with a stoop shouldered, slightly limping gait.
The butler had gone back inside the home, so Gabe waited until the cab began to depart, then jumped onto the back.
He was a good deal heavier than when he’d done this as a boy, but no one seemed to notice the added weight.
They drove for a bit and the cabbie must have been told to go fast because he pushed the horses on streets best taken slow.
Gabe watched in alarm as the neighborhood turned from respectable to dark, from comfortable to wretched.
Not the worst area, he realized as they finally slowed, but the rookeries weren’t far away.
She climbed out of the carriage before it had fully stopped. But then she stood there in confusion. “Where am I going?” she asked the cabbie.
“That one, Oi think,” he answered.
She nodded, then hefted a massive bag. It wasn’t wise to carry such a large thing here.
He scanned the surroundings, noting several people eyeing her with curiosity.
Or perhaps something worse. And then he noticed it.
There was a silence in the air completely uncommon in an area such as this.
A kind of held breath as one waits for a scream or cannon shot.
Miss Caddick noticed it, too. She looked about and firmed her chin.
“Right,” she muttered to herself and then headed off in the direction the cabbie had pointed.
She stopped once to speak to a girl too young to be sitting alone outside.
He couldn’t hear the words, but the child nodded and pointed into the building.
Gabe frowned as he slipped into the thick shadows. What the devil was she doing here? And in an area that she obviously didn’t know. Whatever idiocy this was, he could not let her be harmed. He had to reveal himself, if only to make sure she wasn’t accosted or worse.