CHAPTER 3
Fortunately, the library was warm, for a fine fire blazed in the grate.
Gabriel laid Clara on the sofa, then stood back, suddenly aware of the impropriety of the situation.
He was alone in his house with an unconscious woman.
An unconscious woman he had history with.
An unconscious woman who was currently dripping mud all over his furniture.
Propriety, he decided, could hang itself.
He needed to get her warm. That meant getting her out of those wet clothes, which meant…
Put the matter from your mind. Her life is in peril; you have a duty to perform.
He started with the boots, which were not only soaked through but also clearly too large for her.
When he pulled them off, he found her feet bloody with blisters, some fresh, and some days old.
It was clear that she had been walking for days, in harsh weather conditions which could claim the life of a healthy person, let alone someone as weakened as herself.
What had happened to her? Where was her aunt, the one she'd gone to live with in Bath? Where was her father? Why was she here, in this condition after eight years of silence?
He stopped questioning as he needed to focus on saving her life.
Gabriel had seen enough death to recognise its approach. The blue tinge to her lips, the shallow breathing, the way her body had stopped shivering were all bad signs. He needed to warm her, and quickly.
He was on his own.
"Brilliant, Ashbourne," he muttered to himself. "Absolutely brilliant. Send everyone away and then have a half-dead woman literally fall into your arms."
There was no choice but to attend to her himself. First, blankets. He ransacked the linen cupboard, returning with an armload of whatever he could find. Then, the wet clothes had to go. At least the outer layers.
He started with her cloak, which was more holes than fabric and smelled distinctly of mildew.
Underneath was a dress that might have once been blue but was now the color of despair.
The buttons were already half undone from her climb over his wall, he realised, seeing the tears that corresponded to branch heights.
She'd climbed his wall amidst a tempest, wearing boots that obviously were far too ill-fitting as to impede her progress, in her desperate attempt to reach him.
Something twisted in his chest, sharp and painful, a feeling he'd he believed he had suppressed years ago.
“Remain with me,” he told her unconscious form as he worked the remaining buttons free.
“I beseech you not to leave this world now, after you have returned…I shall not tolerate you expiring on my sofa, not after all these years.”
Talking helped as it made his process of releasing this woman of her attire more official.
He'd seen worse in the war, hadn't he? Had helped the field surgeons, had held men's intestines in place while they stitched them back together.
This amounts to nothing significant. It is simply a matter of wet cloth and the necessity of the situation.
Except it wasn't nothing, because this was Clara, and every revealed inch of her told a story he had no wish to read.
She was so thin he could count her ribs.
Bruises in various stages of healing marked her arms. Her hands, those clever hands that had once grafted roses were raw and red, nails broken, the hands of someone who'd been doing hard labor.
What had happened to her?
He peeled away the wet dress, leaving her in her chemise and stays, which were thankfully mostly dry.
Any more would be beyond improper, but then again, propriety had fled the moment she'd fallen into his arms. He wrapped her in blankets, layer after layer, until she resembled a bundle of layered cloth.
Then, because he remembered something from the war about body heat being the fastest way to warm someone, he sat on the sofa and pulled her against him, her back to his chest, his arms around her, pulling the blankets around them both.
She made a sound, not quite conscious, but closer than she'd been.
Her head lolled back against his shoulder, and he could see her face properly in the firelight.
Still beautiful, despite everything. Or perhaps beautiful because of everything, the way survivors were beautiful, marked by what they'd endured.
Just as he was.
His scar ached, as it always did in the cold. She hadn't reacted to it, he realised. Hadn't flinched or stared or reacted the way people usually did when faced with his ruined face. But then, she'd been too busy collapsing to be properly horrified.
That would come later, no doubt. When she woke. When she realised where she was, who he'd become. She'd look at him with pity or disgust or that careful politeness that was worse than either, and he'd have to watch the last person who'd known him before turn away.
But for now, she was here. Breathing. Warming slowly in his arms. Alive.
"Clara," he said quietly, not expecting a response. "What happened to you?"
She stirred slightly, burrowing deeper into the warmth he offered. Her fingers, poking out from the blankets, twitched toward his hand. Without thinking, he took them, wrapping her small, cold fingers in his larger, warmer ones.
They stayed like that as the fire burned lower, as the storm raged outside, as eight years of silence stretched between them like scar tissue.
Gabriel held her and tried not to think about how familiar this felt, how fitting it was and how absolutely catastrophic for his carefully maintained isolation.
She'd come back. After everything ,after his letters had grown cold, after he'd ignored her, after he'd allowed is father to convince him she was beneath him, after he'd gone to war and come back less than whole…she'd come back.
The first, unavoidable question was simply, why? Then a weightier question followed… what course of action was he to pursue?
It was not proper that she should remain under his roof.
He was not fit company for anyone, let alone someone he'd once.
.. cared for. He was scarred, bitter, and half-mad with guilt and nightmares.
The boy she'd known was long gone, killed somewhere between Eton and Waterloo, and all that was left was this shadow that bore his name and title.
Clara's consciousness returned in pieces, like fragments of a broken mirror reflecting increasingly unpleasant truths.
First, warmth, blessed and unexpected after so many nights of cold.
Then there was pain, everywhere, a symphony of aches from her frozen feet to her empty stomach.
Finally, the deeply unsettling realization that she was being held by someone who smelled of brandy and bitter herbs and…
"Finally awake, or are you going to continue pretending?"
The voice cut through her foggy mind like ice water. Cold. Harsh. Unmistakably Gabriel, but not the Gabriel she remembered. This voice had edges that could draw blood.
Clara kept her eyes closed, needing a moment to gather herself before facing whatever he'd become.
She could feel him behind her, around her as they were wrapped together in blankets, his arms encircling her with a possessiveness that would have been tender if not for the rigidity of his body, it was as if he was holding a venomous snake he couldn't quite bring himself to drop.
"I know you're conscious," he continued, his breath against her ear making her shiver despite herself. "Your breathing changed. Rather dramatically, actually. Never could lie properly, could you?"
She opened her eyes, finding herself in what appeared to be a library, firelight flickering over leather spines. "Gabriel?"
"Your Grace," he corrected sharply. "We're not children anymore, Miss Whitfield. Or is it Mrs. Something-or-other now? Wedded some merchant in Bath to save yourself from governessing?"
The cruelty of it stung more than the cold had. Clara tried to turn to face him, but his arms tightened, holding her in place.
"Don't," he said. "Unless you want to discover just how thoroughly your dignity has already been compromised. Your dress, what remained of it, is currently drying by the fire. You've been pressed against me for hours wearing nothing but your undergarments and my apparent lack of judgment."
Heat flooded her face. "You…"
“Divested you of your garments? Yes. Fascinating how circumstances force one to abandon propriety. You were on the brink of expiring. I was the only one here to attend to you.” His tone was conversational, almost bored, but she could feel the tension in his body, wound tight as a clock spring.
"Though I suppose I should thank you for the entertainment.
It's been rather dull here. Nothing quite like a poor, undone creature falling through one's door to liven up an evening. "
"The door was locked," Clara managed through gritted teeth. "As was the gate. One might almost believe you didn't want visitors."
"One would be correct. Yet here you are, like a particularly persistent weed that refuses to wither no matter how many times it's plucked out.”
She flinched, and she felt him notice, a slight shift in his breathing, a fractional loosening of his grip.
"Why?" he asked, and for a moment, just a moment, she heard something else beneath the cruelty. "Eight years of silence, and you appear on my doorstep looking like death's rejected mistress. Why?"
Clara closed her eyes. She'd known this would be humiliating. She hadn't expected it to hurt quite so much. "Because I had nowhere else to go."
"Ah." The word was soft, satisfied, like a cat finding a wounded bird. "How the mighty have fallen. The physician's educated daughter, reduced to begging at the door of someone she couldn't be bothered to…" He stopped abruptly.
"To what?" Clara asked quietly. "To write to? You ceased writing first, if you recall. Your letters grew shorter and shorter until they were nothing but your initials on paper. Then nothing at all."