Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Something was wrong with Gabriel, and Sibyl did not know why he would not tell her what it was.
All she knew was that he kept receiving letters at breakfast, discarded them as quickly as he read them, and shook his head.
“What is wrong?” she had urged, over and over, for a week.
“It is nothing,” he kept telling her. “Do not fret.”
“Is it something to do with Edmund?”
She couldn’t pin down why that was the main concern, or even her first guess. But if Edmund had been involved in shady business, if he had owed people more money than Gabriel realized, if anything from his past reared its head up, why would Gabriel not tell her?
Instead, he would leave her looking at his tight grimace every time he read another letter, and when she asked, he would give a forced smile and tell her all was well.
Until he had announced the day before that they were returning to London and that she was to pack for a few days.
“Why?” Sibyl asked.
But Gabriel merely shook his head, rose from the chair he had been sitting in with her in the library, and went to order his valet to pack his belongings. Sibyl never got the chance even to take a peek at the letters.
Now, she was back in London, with Rosie asleep in her lap, having visited a teahouse with Alicia. She could not help but remember Nicholas’s words. The more they had laughed and debated over tea, the more she could see how Alicia might be the challenge he sought.
Sighing, Sibyl gazed out the window as the London streets blurred past. She passed Wickleby House, her stomach doing that strange dip it did whenever she thought of her parents for too long.
She had thought of speaking to Gabriel about her mother’s pressure and her father’s passiveness, but she had never quite found the words.
How did she even begin to try to say that she had a good upbringing, but her parents were never truly there for her when she needed them? That her mother only cared about her marrying well, yet even when Gabriel offered for her, she was not satisfied?
Nothing would ever satisfy Barbara Dennis, and Sibyl had learned the hard way, like Hermia, like Isabella, that nothing ever would.
She had suggested as much to Alicia, who had spent enough of their tea time complaining about the marriage mart and how her feet ached from the countless dances she had been pushed into.
Those thoughts wound her up so much that she didn’t hear the horses neighing and didn’t feel the carriage jolting. She knew how close Wickleby House and Stonehelm House were, but she was lost.
One moment, she was deep in thought, her bitterness over her parents, over being back in London, over Gabriel’s caginess about the letters he had been receiving, clouding everything; the next, she cried out as she fell to the floor, catching herself just in time to move Rosie from her lap.
As her head slammed into the floor, her heart broke, for she could hear her daughter’s cries as everything slipped into darkness.
She did not know how much time had passed with her there, in a heap on the carriage floor, when she heard the voice she had needed most.
She had not known how badly she needed Gabriel’s voice—her protector, her tether—until he was saying her name.
“Sibyl?”
Her tongue was thick, her mind and body swimming.
“Sibyl?” Gabriel’s voice rose, and with it, his urgency.
I am fine, she tried to say, but her ribs ached.
Something felt bad. Something was wrong. Her head hurt as though she had drunk too much wine the night before.
“Gabriel?”
She thought she said his name, but he spoke her own again with too much panic. It broke his tone, and that, in turn, broke her. Hands found her face, her hands, but she couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t squeeze back.
Everything felt too heavy and too much, and she was helpless.
The darkness came back for her, and she succumbed to it, comforted only by the voice saying, Please take Rosie into the house.
Rosie was safe. That was all Sibyl needed.
She slipped back down into the darkness, where her worries ebbed.
“It has been sabotaged,” Gabriel growled, pacing by the overturned carriage in the middle of the street. “It has been sabotaged.”
“Gabriel.” Nicholas’s voice brought him back a notch, enough that he stopped.
“I—” Gabriel broke off. “I was not here to protect her.”
“You could not have known. She was only having tea with…?”
“Her sister,” Gabriel said. “Her younger sister, Alicia.”
“Where is she now?”
“I do not know nor care, but she is not here. So she is safe, while my wife is not!”
“Gabriel.” Nicholas’s hand clamped down on his shoulder. The touch was both too much and grounding. “Gabriel, breathe. We have gotten Sibyl back into Stonehelm House. She is already being examined by a physician.”
“I do not know if she has regained consciousness.”
Gabriel felt like a caged animal, torn between investigating the accident and running to his wife’s side. But right now, everything inside him fought to stay there, to find out what had happened.
“She is with her other sisters,” Nicholas reminded him, for it was he who had sent a carriage to pick them up.
Around them, people paused, looking and whispering. The gossip about Sibyl and Gabriel had begun to die down, the last Gabriel had heard, but now all eyes were on him.
Heavens, he wanted to tear every one of them apart.
His wife’s accident was not some spectacle to gawk at. No, it had risked her life. It had put her in danger, and he… he could not keep his composure.
“Gabriel.”
“What?” he snapped.
“I need you to focus,” Nicholas insisted. “You have not been at the King’s Hound for a couple of weeks now, and while I think that is a good thing, for it means you have not felt distressed enough to punch it out on some poor soul, I can sense how tense you are. What has been going on?”
“Nothing.” Gabriel whirled around to face his friend, his face tight with anger, with every tangled emotion he couldn’t work through. Not right now, not with the tear in his conscience.
“Do not insult me like that.” Nicholas raised an eyebrow. “Tell me.”
“It is Preston,” Gabriel snarled. “He keeps insisting on meeting Sibyl properly, personally, and it has been grating on me. I have not told Sibyl because she does not know what a—” He struggled to find the right words.
“A money-grabbing fool he is. She will simply consider it an opportunity to learn more about me, but I want to keep her away from him, so I keep telling her that all is well.”
Nicholas sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. A few agonizing seconds before he finally said, “Let us investigate the damage further.”
Finally, Gabriel returned to Stonehelm House after finding a loose bolt in the carriage’s wheel spoke, as if it had just been waiting to come undone and cause the carriage to collapse, and in turn injure his wife.
He felt almost awkward to enter the chamber Sibyl was in, surrounded by her two older sisters. When the floorboards creaked, both Duchesses looked up at him.
Isabella was glaring at him, while Hermia’s face was pale with worry.
“Did you find out anything about the accident?” Hermia asked, letting go of Sibyl’s hand.
His wife was still unconscious, courtesy of a sleeping draught the physician had prescribed until he could assess the full extent of her injuries.
He nodded. “I will speak with you both out here. I do not want to disturb my wife.”
Hermia nodded, but he could have sworn he heard Isabella scoff. His jaw clenched as they joined him in the hallway.
“First of all,” he began, “is Rosie all right?”
Isabella nodded. “Her nursemaid is with her in the nursery. She is uninjured but cannot stop crying. It is as if she knows her mother is not well.”
Gabriel’s heart broke at that, but he forced himself to nod. “Second, I want you both to know that I care for Sibyl a great deal. This will never, ever happen again.”
“Gabriel—” Hermia tried.
“No, I swear it. Your sister will never be harmed again under my care. I cannot—I could not live with myself if she were. And I promise you both that I’ll find out who did this, and they will be put in prison.”
Isabella frowned, her pale face and fair hair reminding him so much of Sibyl that he ached to go to her. “So it was a sabotage?”
“I am fairly certain.”
“How?” Isabella pressed.
“Because a wheel’s bolts do not simply unscrew themselves,” he said plainly, angrily, drily.
“Then what is your theory?” Isabella demanded.
Gabriel paused, seeing her in a new light.
“I—” He paused, unwilling to reveal too much about how his past and Sibyl’s were entwined. “I… I am worried it has to do with Sibyl’s late husband, Edmund.”
Hermia cursed under her breath, a word that should not have come from a lady, let alone a duchess, but Gabriel said nothing.
“I cannot stand that she is… that she is just lying there, unconscious,” she said, her voice cracking a little. “I hate seeing my little sister so helpless.”
“She is not helpless,” Gabriel insisted quietly. “Sibyl is stronger than anybody has given her credit for—and I mean no disrespect by that, even if I understand what you mean. I am worried to death, but she will be all right. She has to be all right. What did the physician say while I was outside?”
“She has a concussion,” Isabella replied matter-of-factly. “She also broke a few ribs, but those will heal. However, movement can hinder her recovery, which is why the physician gave her a sleeping draught.”
Gabriel nodded slowly.
“Do you have any family that wants to visit her?” Hermia asked hopefully.
Gabriel shook his head. “I have no family left—” He stopped to think, his mind flashing to Preston and his incessant requests to dine with Sibyl. “Well, I do have one family member who might want to visit her.”
“I think she needs all the company and support she can get right now,” Hermia told him gently.
Gabriel’s jaw clenched as he nodded. “I understand.”