CHAPTER 4 #2
"I pay her to argue back."
"No, you pay her to clean. The arguing is, what did she call it? An unfortunate addition to proximity."
"You're enjoying this far too much," Gabriel observed.
"I haven't enjoyed anything this much since you fell off your horse trying to impress the Weatherby twins."
"That was many years ago."
"And yet, still hilarious."
Clara finished the last of the apple tart and stood. "Gentlemen, as delightful as this has been, I have work to do."
"The library's done for today," Gabriel said.
"The morning room, then."
"Also done."
Clara frowned. She'd cleaned both rooms yesterday. They couldn't possibly need attention already unless…
"Did you go through and deliberately mess them up?"
Gabriel sipped his brandy innocently. “Pray, forgive me, but I do not apprehend your meaning.”
"You did! You went and undid my work!"
"Prove it."
"You're impossible."
"I'm thorough. I wanted to make sure you'd cleaned properly. You hadn't."
"I had!"
"The dust behind the portrait of my great-grandfather would disagree."
"That portrait is eight feet high!"
"And yet, dusty."
Edmund whistled low. "Gabriel, Your conduct is uncommonly coarse, even for your customary behaviour!”
"My standards are exceedingly high."
"Your standards are exceedingly deplorably foolish."
Clara grabbed the empty basket with perhaps more force than necessary. "I'm going to the gardens."
"Your feet aren't healed enough," Gabriel said immediately.
"My feet are fine."
"You were limping this morning."
"You were observing me this morning?"
Gabriel opened his mouth, closed it, and then took a larger sip of brandy.
Edmund's eyes danced between them with undisguised fascination. "Oh, this is better than a play."
Hold your tongue Edmund."
"Make me, Your Grace."
Clara edged toward the door. If she could just escape while they were distracted…
"Where, pray tell, are you going?" Gabriel's voice stopped her.
"The gardens. As I said."
"The ground is frozen."
"I'm not planting, I'm assessing."
"You're escaping."
"Also yes."
He stood abruptly. "I'll come with you."
“I beg your pardon?” Clara and Edmund said in unison.
"To ensure you don't do anything senseless, such as attempting to dig up the frozen ground, or climb over walls. Or any number of other foolish things you're prone to."
"I'm not prone to foolish things."
"You climbed my wall in a snowstorm wearing stolen boots."
"Borrowed boots."
"Stolen."
"Forcibly borrowed."
“There is no such circumstance in being.”
"It is now. I've decided."
Edmund made a choking sound that might have been suppressed laughter. "She does that too?"
"Does what?" Clara asked.
"Decides things are true by declaration. Gabriel does the same thing."
"I do not," Gabriel protested.
"Last week, you decided that Wednesday was cancelled because you didn't like it."
"Wednesday was being particularly offensive."
"You can't cancel a day of the week!"
"I'm a duke. I can cancel whatever I want."
"That's not how time works!"
"Time is a social construct."
"Time is literally measured by the rotation of the earth!"
"Mere details."
Clara slipped out while they were arguing, but she'd barely made it three steps down the hall before Gabriel's voice followed her.
"I know you're escaping!"
"I know you know!" she called back.
"This conversation isn't over!"
"It is now! I've decided!"
She heard Edmund's delighted laughter and Gabriel's curse, but kept walking.
The house was a maze and she'd spent three days trying to memorize it and still found herself opening doors to rooms she'd never seen before.
Some were clearly shut up, sheets over furniture like ghosts of better times.
Others were just empty, as if Gabriel had simply given up on them.
The kitchen was the worst, massive, clearly designed to feed a household of dozens, now echoing and cold with only the bare minimum of supplies. Clara had taken to cooking simple meals there, leaving them outside Gabriel's study when he forgot to eat, which was often.
He never thanked her. But the plates always came back empty.
She found the door to the gardens through what had once been a stunning conservatory, now mostly empty except for the skeletons of dead plants in ornate pots. The glass walls were filthy, filtering the winter sunlight into something gray and hopeless.
"Cheerful," Clara muttered, pushing through the French doors into the garden proper.
The cold hit her immediately, sharp and clean after the musty confines of the house. She pulled her borrowed shawl tighter and surveyed the devastation.
It was worse than she'd thought.
The formal gardens that had once been the pride of Sussex were now a tangle of dead vegetation and overgrown paths. Box hedges had exploded into shapeless masses. Rose bushes were skeletal nightmares of thorns. The fountain, their fountain, was cracked and filled with black leaves.
But there, along the west wall, was their rose.
Clara's breath caught.
It hadn't just survived…it had thrived with the kind of aggressive determination that would have made its gardeners proud.
It covered nearly twenty feet of wall now, an enormous tangle of canes that even in winter showed signs of vigorous life.
She could see the buds already forming, bringing promises of spring in the midst of decay.
"You beautiful thing," she whispered, approaching slowly. "You survived everything, didn't you?"
"Talking to plants is the first sign of madness."
Clara didn't jump, she was getting used to Gabriel's ability to appear silently behind her. "I thought the first sign was accepting employment from reclusive dukes."
"That's the second sign. The third is actually believing you can save them."
"The gardens, you mean."
"Yes. The gardens."
He stood beside her, staring at the rose with an expression she couldn't read. He'd put on a greatcoat but no hat, and the wind ruffled his dark hair in ways that made him look younger, more like the boy she'd known.
"It's magnificent," Clara said.
"It's a menace. It's probably destroyed the wall's integrity."
"It's holding the wall together."
"With what authority do you make that assessment?"
"With the authority of someone who actually looks at things instead of brooding at them from windows."
"I don't brood."
"You're brooding right now."
"This is contemplation."
"This is definitely brooding."
“I cannot abide it,” he said suddenly, viciously.
Clara turned to look at him fully. "The rose?"
"Everything. The gardens. The house. The title. The whole damned estate." He gestured wildly at the devastation around them. "It's all dying, and I'm supposed to care, supposed to fix it, and supposed to be the duke my father wanted. But I can't even keep the gardens alive."
"You dismissed the gardeners."
"They stared."
"At your scar?"
"At everything. My scar. My drinking. My refusal to enter into matrimony with some simpering debutante and produce an heir like a prize breeding stallion."
"So you let it all die out of spite?"
"I let it die out of honesty. Everything I touch dies eventually. Why pretend otherwise?"
Clara wanted to argue, but something in his voice stopped her. This wasn't his usual bitter theatrics. This was real pain, raw and badly healed as his scar.
"Show me," she said instead.
"What?"
"The gardens. All of them. Show me what they used to be."
"Why?"
"Because I need to know what I'm working with. And because you need to remember that things can come back from the world beyond.”
"Very poetic. Also completely untrue."
"Our rose came back."
"It never left."
"It would have, without us."
He was quiet for a long moment, then: "Fine. But if you collapse from your injured feet, I'm leaving you where you fall."
"Understood."