Chapter 11
The heart wants what the heart wants. Gabby wanted to prove himself as an entertainer, to take the next logical step.
Most people in his old job didn’t do the actual work for long, moving on to something else before their bodies gave out, or they caught one or more of the many diseases that inflicted that profession.
Being a courtesan was, unfortunately, work for the young.
Walt had started out like one of the boys too, and he’d used him ambition to create a club, a safe place for boys like all of them.
Gabby kissed Edmund because he had managed to remind Gabby why he’d come to The King’s Book Club, why he was struggling with this new role, and why he needed to find an answer to his struggles. Because it mattered. He was ambitious too.
“How can I help?” But what Gabby was really asking was, could Edmund help him?
“With?”
“Your brother. The roses.”
“I don’t need help. I think I should be helping you. I’m good at patterns and systems and you’ve said that you are not. Let’s make a system that works for you.”
Gabby tried not to shrink away because he had tried every system and none of them worked. If he used lists, he just lost the list, or he forgot to look at it. He’d long ago given up on trying to make his mind cooperate.
“Oh no, your roses are more important.”
Edmund stared at him, with a deep curiosity that made Gabby’s skin itch. “Only to me.”
“Which makes them important to me.” He thought he wanted help but now that it was offered, he wasn’t sure he was ready.
Not yet. “Let’s go and do something.” He needed to move before this tension left him wanting to escape from his own body.
He leaped out of bed, and threw on yesterday’s clothes, the ones he’d worn here, not his performance dress.
“Come on. I have a feeling about this.” It was agitation, a need to do something, anything. His toes tapped as he fumbled pulling on his shoes. The leather laces were slippery in his fingers, but then Edmund rested his palm on Gabby’s back and everything was fine again.
“If that’s what you need.”
“Yes. Show me all your roses.”
Edmund made a strange noise. “Most are in the country, at Galforth House. And I’ve already shown you the Himalayan rose.”
“Are there others at the town house?”
“Yes. Would you like to be introduced?”
Gabby nodded. “Yes.” His heart swelled at the way Edmund spoke of introducing him to his plants, as if they were his friends. He wanted to meet all of Edmund’s friends, he wanted this to be real, and the desire for that made him want to run. Towards or away? He wasn’t sure.
An hour later, they had made their way through London’s traffic in a hackney, all the while Gabby wished they’d walked so he could pace, and finally they arrived and he leaped out, shaking out his body.
He needed to run up and down the street a few times to get rid of this tension inside him, and so he paced in a circle as Edmund paid the driver, then opened a gate in the back fence of his brother’s townhouse.
“Come this way, it leads directly into the gardens.”
“It’s not locked?”
“No. There is usually a footman or gardener around.”
Gabby blinked. He would’ve thought a Duke would secure his premises better than that, but he supposed having plenty of staff always doing things about the place gave the notion of security.
He began to follow Edmund through the gate.
Oomph. He walked right into Edmund’s back, who’d stopped in the gateway.
“What’s the matter?”
“Your Grace.” Edmund’s voice was tight. Strangled. And Gabby slid under Edmund’s arm, pleased that he was skinny and short, only to spy two gardeners destroying the foreign rose with a handsaw.
“I warned you.”
Edmund was shaking and Gabby stood protectively between him and the Duke, even though he was only slight and wouldn’t be much help, but he had to do something.
“You and Bennington behaved inappropriately last night, and so now there is a consequence.” The Duke bent down and grabbed one of the branches that had been tossed in a pile.
“Please be careful. The thorns are sharp.” Even under all this stress, Edmund still wanted to make sure his dreadful brother wasn’t going to be hurt, and it made Gabby heart swell.
It was so typical of him to realise this at the most inappropriate time, but he hadn’t managed to avoid falling in love with Edmund at all.
His chest clenched and he knew. He launched himself at the Duke but something stopped him.
Chaos broke out.
The Duke waved the rose branch like a sword at him, then yelled and dropped it, shaking out his hand. Gabby realised that Edmund had grabbed the back of Gabby’s shirt, keeping him in place. The gardeners stopped their work and stared. The Duke was still yelling.
Edmund went still. “Tom. Please call for the doctor. John, can you please take His Grace inside and wash his hand very carefully. Make sure none of the thorn is left in his hand.”
The two gardeners leaped into action, and the Duke was effectively removed from the scene. Gabby turned to face Edmund, whose face was pale, and jaw clenched.
“What just happened?”
“Every rose breeder knows to avoid rose gardener’s disease from being scratched by thorns.
It’s why I make sure the gardeners always wear heavy gloves when they are pruning, and I am very careful.
My brother, hopefully, only has a scratch from a thorn which is still a risk, but if part of the thorn is stuck in his palm, he’s likely in some trouble. ”
“What causes it?”
Edmund shook his head. “No one knows. Other thorny plants don’t have the same issues. If it doesn’t cause a pustule, he might be lucky.”
“And if it does?”
“Then he will have a slow painful death from blood poisoning.”
“Death?” Gabby whispered. A scratch from a rose thorn could result in death?
No, surely not. But he looked at Edmund’s brown eyes filled with tears and the way Edmund nodded his head slowly as if saddened by this.
Gabby opened his mouth to point out how Edmund’s brother was awful and awful people tended to survive but he kept his voice inside because family was complicated and now wasn’t really the best time.
“I know he’s awful and he’s done some things that I can’t condone, but it’s not a death I’d wish on anyone. I can only hope that he’ll be one of the fortunate ones and maybe he’ll learn from this.”
Gabby swallowed, glad he’d said nothing, and he glanced around them to assert that they were alone before quickly placing his head on Edmund’s chest for a quick moment. “I hope you get the outcome you want.”
“Thank you.” Edmund stroked his hand over Gabby’s skull, threading his fingers through his hair, and then bent to kiss Gabby on the forehead. Gabby’s heart melted. And then Edmund stood up tall, put his hands on his hips, and surveyed the garden.
“How much damage did he do?”
Edmund tilted his head. “None.”
“Excuse me?” Gabby could see that the rose bush, the one Edmund had stared at with such adoration last time they’d been in this garden, was barely there, just a stump with a few branches sticking out of the ground. If it had looked dead when Gabby first saw it, now the thing looked hopelessly dead.
“Tom and John are well trained. They’ve pruned it in the correct manner, just as we discussed last week—” Edmund walked over to the stump and peered closely at it. “Yes, they’ve done an excellent job and given a little bit of care, the Himalayan Musk Rose will thrive in the spring.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Roses need to be pruned in the middle of winter. We usually do it after Christmas, so this is maybe a few weeks too early. A good prune shapes the plants growth for next season, it allows light to come into the core of the plant and prevents disease. You can see that Tom and John have removed all the spindly branches first, and then they’ve removed all the old dead growth.
They’ve made each cut at the correct angle to encourage new growth to spread in the direction we want and to stop rain gathering on the cuts. ”
“But it looks so small?”
“Yes. Normally I would only prune by about a third or at most half, and this is...” Edmund swallowed.
Gabby wanted to hug him. “It’s nearly all gone.”
“Approximately ninety percent, I’d say. Rather severe, but the plant itself will recover. Tomorrow I will spray with lime sulphur to prevent scale, and then we add compost around the base and wait until spring.”
“And your brother?”
Edmund flushed. “I’ve done it again, haven’t I?”
“Done what?”
“Cared more about my roses than about people.”
Gabby barked out a laugh. “His Grace can afford the best doctors. They are probably letting his blood right now and restoring his humours. I wouldn’t worry about him, and I like listening to you.”
“Oh.”
“Are you certain that the rose hasn’t been harmed?”
Edmund sank down, squatting on his heels, as he examined the plant. “No, the plant is fine. The gardeners have done a good job. The best they could in the circumstances, and now all we can do is wait until spring. I will get them to clean up all the branches and burn them.”
“You’ll burn them. Why?”
“The same disease that might have hurt my brother also hurts the rest of the garden. You can’t put rose clippings into the compost, it upsets the balances. I don’t know why roses do this, but the cut branches and stems need to be burned to keep the remaining plants healthy.”
Gabby smiled. “Are you telling me that to create the beauty of the rose flower, you need to almost destroy the plant to allow room for that beauty to thrive. That the plant itself is host to nasty diseases that could destroy everything around it.”
“Yes.”
He couldn’t help himself and laughed slowly. “It sounds like your brother. His presence slowly destroys everything around him unless you let him bloom the most.”
Edmund stood, shaking his head. “Don’t be silly. He doesn’t have the beauty of the rose. His charm is superficial. If anything, he’s like the endless winter of 1816, suffocating everything with darkness and rain. I nearly lost all my roses that year to rot.”
Gabby couldn’t do the maths, but surely, “Weren’t you just a child then?”
“I was fourteen, just starting out. I’d spent most of my childhood following the gardeners around every day and I was curious and had my own greenhouse and it was the first season that I’d transferred some of my first hybrids into the main gardens. It was a disaster. All the crops failed.”
“And your brother is like the endless winter?”
Edmund sighed heavily. “It’s hard to remember what I thought about him before I really saw him.
He’s so charming when you agree with him and he’s my big brother.
I looked up to him and admired him, and it wasn’t until recently that I started to see how destructive he is.
And then when you see it, you can’t not see it.
Do you understand? His presence becomes like the dark winter, suffocating growth, unescapable, always there, always demanding attention and adoration without doing anything to earn it. ”
“And now he’s tried to destroy your favourite rose because you did something at a ball?” Gabby didn’t really understand that. The Duke had called Edmund’s behaviour inappropriate.
“It’s not my favourite rose. I don’t have favourites. It’s merely a very challenging one which makes it interesting to me.”
“And the ball?”
“I’m not sure. Bennington hinted that he knew about George.
My brother, His Grace, likes to call me names when things don’t go his way, or if people hear the truth about him.
He twists my actions around so that it’s me who has behaved inappropriately or disgracefully. ” Edmund emphasised those two words.
“I can’t image you being inappropriate.”
Edmund shrugged. “I’m not. But he thinks it’s inappropriate to tell someone the truth of what he’s done.
I’ve seen him do this so many times. He will already believe that George left him first, and so the entire problem is George’s fault, that he had no option to tell his staff that George wasn’t welcome back, and anyway if someone suggests that he’s not the wonderful leader of the family like he tells people he is, then George will get the blame.
Not him, never him. His version, where he had no choice to protect his estate from George’s apparently terrible behaviour, is the only one that should be told. ”
Gabby wanted to hug Edmund and hold him forever. “You know that isn’t true.”
“It is true. He will do anything to ensure that none of this is his fault. If everyone had just taken his advice, then none of this would have happened. If we’d all obeyed him, he wouldn’t have to act like this.
We forced him to do this. And no, Gabriel, I don’t believe that, but he believes it and he has all the power, and so I’m left standing in the garden with a rose bush that has been pruned too much, left hoping that it will survive because Tom and John are well trained and they’ve done the best they can in a difficult situation.
They can’t disobey His Grace without losing their jobs, and they have families who rely on them too. ”
“He’s the dark winter.”
“And you can’t change the sky.” Edmund’s shoulders slumped and there was only one thing Gabby could do.
“Come and see Mama. She’ll know what to do.
” His mother could provide comfort where Gabby couldn’t.
He’d seen a lot of poor behaviour in his old job, although not as much as the women sustained.
A molly club was a careful place because the law threatened everyone.
The women who worked as courtesans and on the streets had no such protection or care, and they saw more depravity than he had.
If the world was fair, it would be the bad customers who suffered under the law, not those seeking a job for survival.
“There’s nothing anyone can do but wait.” Edmund walked to a small shed in the corner of the garden and donned a thick pair of globes. He began picking up the branches and stacking them next to the shed.
“Should I help?”
“No. I don’t have another pair of gloves and I don’t want to see you hurt. It won’t take long to move these out of harm’s way.”
And so Gabby stood there, watching a Duke’s brother work as a gardener, and he slowly smiled as he realised how Edmund had gained his muscles.
It wasn’t heavy work, moving a few branches, but Edmund moved with an efficiency that spoke of years of practice.
He wanted to go out to see all his roses at the estate he mentioned, to see Edmund working where he belonged, and then he gasped.
He couldn’t afford to travel. He couldn’t be with Edmund if he worked with his roses and Gabby worked at The King’s Book Club. Now his heart was going to be broken.