Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
He may as well have shot her for the amount his declaration hurt. Rosalie clutched her chest, nails biting into her skin. She could not look away from the receipt on the ground, the books, travel novels about France, scattered all around it.
“Ros...”
“Don’t call me that,” she ordered, shaking. He was still holding her, his breath ghosting against her face. Her lips were swollen from their kiss, her body tight and uncomfortable in a way only Gabriel had ever made her feel.
And yet, just like Mr. Sinclair, he was keeping secrets from me all along.
But was it a secret? Did I not know that he intended to end this courtship with me one day?
Why did I think coming here, declaring myself for him, would change anything, when I knew in the deepest chamber of myself that he could never love anyone, let alone me?
No, she stopped herself. Anna was right. She did have the power to arrange her life the way she saw fit. She could be loved and love in return. She alone had held herself back from living the life she deserved. And if Gabriel could not see the good in her, she did not want to see the good in him.
So, she pushed him away from her gently. “You are leaving. You planned to leave England, and you said nothing to me, not once, in all these weeks... We may not have been lovers... But we were at least friends, and even this you hid from me.”
“It is not what you think.”
“What am I meant to think? Explain it to me honestly, if you can, since honest speech seems to be so unattainable for both the men I have entangled myself with this Season.” She stepped back, out of the circle of his arms, and felt the loss of his warmth like another wound.
“You held me, and you kissed me like you meant it. And all the while there was a receipt for your departure...”
“It was not certain. I had not yet decided, in full, what I intended. Know this--”
“I know nothing.” Her hands were still trembling, and she pressed them flat against her skirts to still them.
“I came here tonight because my father woke up and told me not to marry a man who asks little of me. I thought, foolishly, that I understood what he meant. But perhaps my father was wrong, and it was my mistake for falling in love with a man of whom I have asked too much.”
“You...” His eyes were round with an emotion she could not read.
“You do not know what you are saying. It is late, and you are tired, and Sinclair has abandoned you. In the morning, you will think differently.” When she moved to leave, he spoke again.
“I never asked you to build your future around me. This arrangement was never meant to become what it has become. I did not ask you to fall in love with me.”
“You’re right.”
“So you admit it, then? That you have?”
She could not bring herself to answer. She had already said too much. Let him take what he would from her words.
“You are asking me for more than our arrangement ever called for,” Gabriel said again. “I never promised you permanence, nothing beyond pretense, and you agreed to those terms as readily as I did...”
“Yes, but I did not anticipate feeling what I feel now.” Tears blurred her vision, and she did not bother hiding them as she turned around. “I did not know that I would come to care for you, fool I am. Kissing me was never part of the arrangement either, and yet here we both are.”
“Do you think I planned any of this?” Something in his composure cracked visibly.
“To think of you every morning before I have even woken, to re-stake my garden, to lie awake, picturing you with another man, whom I came to despise? None of this was in the arrangement. None of it. I have been improvising every part of it since the moment you kissed me. Why did you expect I should have all the answers now? That I should remain here and be yours?”
Rosalie turned again to go. He caught her wrist before she reached the door.
He did it gently, the way he always touched her first. She turned back to him without meaning to, and soon she was kissing him again, hard and desperately, her hands snaking under his shirt and into his hair, some traitorous part of her still hoping the kiss alone might undo every cruel thing he had just told her.
He wants me but does not want me, was all she could think.
She stopped herself and stepped back against the closed door, breathing hard, horrified at her own weakness, at how easily her body kept forgetting what her mind had decided.
“It cannot be this way,” she said, mostly to herself. “I will not be ruined for a man who has already bought passage away from me. I have already forgiven one man today for loving someone else more than me. I cannot do it twice.”
Rosalie left him standing in the library and did not look back. She made it as far as the carriage before the tears she had been holding overtook her entirely.
She wept the whole ride home, her forehead pressed against the cold glass of the window, watching London slide past in the rain, gaslight smearing gold across the street.
Two suitors, she thought. I had two suitors not a fortnight ago, and now I have none.
She thought of her father’s voice, thin and certain in the dark of his sickroom. She had thought, kissing Gabriel before the receipt had revealed itself, that she had found exactly that. Beneath the grief, something steadier had begun to take root, something that felt almost like relief.
I deserve better than being loved in secret, or loved by half, or loved like alms given out of charity, if he ever loved me at all.
Lady Winthrop was waiting in the front hall when Rosalie let herself in. Her mother was in her dressing gown, a single candle in her hand that Rosalie recognized from her rooms.
“Anna told me you had gone,” her mother said, not moving from where she sat indecorously at the base of the stairs. “But where did you go, Rosalie? At this hour, in this weather, with no word to anyone...? She would not tell me.”
Rosalie saw no point in lying a moment longer. “I went to see the Duke of Hartmere.”
Her mother’s face twisted with alarm, confusion, and finally something that settled into disappointment.
“You know I cannot approve of that... Whatever has happened between you tonight, you must know how it looks: a young woman calling unchaperoned on a bachelor’s house after dark. If anyone saw your carriage...”
“I know full well how it looks.” Rosalie’s voice was raw.
She went to rip off her cloak. But she had left without it.
“When has that ever mattered, how things look? I am three-and-twenty. I have spent this entire Season pretending to be the sort of woman other people needed me to be. And I am tired. I am so tired of being careful. I have been careful my whole life, and it has brought me where I am, here, regardless. Alone.”
Lady Winthrop studied her daughter for a long moment, and whatever she saw in her daughter’s face made her set the candle down and rise. She opened her arms instead of continuing the scolding.
“Let’s go inside,” she said. “Sit with me and tell me everything. You need not protect me from the truth.”
Rosalie stepped into her mother’s embrace just as Anna appeared at the top of the stairs.
She joined them, and together they went into the nearest drawing room and huddled by the fire.
Rosalie told them everything from the beginning: the terrace, the mistaken kiss, the false courtship proposed to ease Elisabeth’s grief and unsettle Sinclair, every lie she had told, all the way through to the receipt on the library floor and the kiss she had not been able to stop herself from giving him even after.
When it was done, Rosalie was spent but unable to cry. She lay her head in Anna’s lap while her sister stroked her hair, quiet for the first time in her life. The quiet stretched on until it was broken by a weary sigh from their mother, who came to kneel beside Rosalie.
“You must see that he loves you,” Lady Winthrop said. “Whatever else is untrue, that much is real.”
Rosalie buried her face in the folds of Anna’s skirts. “He is leaving England. A man who loved me would not leave.”
“Men do foolish things when they are frightened of what they want.” Her mother took her hand and drew her into a sitting position.
“Your father nearly sailed to India once, you know, the month before he proposed to me. He booked the passage and paid for it... I only learned of it years later, when you were born, when he told me he was tired of praying in secret for my forgiveness.”
Rosalie smiled sadly. She could picture her father doing that, and yet it did not console her as much as it should have. Her father and Gabriel were not the same man.
“Fear makes fools of the best of them,” Lady Winthrop continued. “I am not defending the duke. I could not defend a man for lying to me, to my face, and for steering my daughter towards disgrace. I am only telling you what I see, and what I have seen in men before. They are not like us.”
Anna was considerably less generous. “I do not care what he feels... I care what he has done, which is to toy with my sister’s heart and then plan his escape without so much as a word of warning.”
Lady Winthrop widened her eyes. “Now, Anna...”
“Whatever his reasons or his feelings, Rosalie does not owe him the patience to sort them out.”
“But she must be happy,” Lady Winthrop said.
“Yes, she must.” Anna rose and walked over to the bell to call for more tea. “That is precisely my point.”
They sat together a while longer, the three of them, until the fire had burned low. Lady Winthrop finally rose, kissing each daughter’s head before she went up to bed, murmuring something about checking on their father before she slept.
“His recovery will be slow but steady now,” she said at the door.
“Doctor Brown is cautiously hopeful, though he has said plainly that the baron will likely need a gentler pace of living for whatever years remain to him... a life smaller than the one he’d led before...
fewer late nights and indulgences... and no travel...
But I think we can manage. Good night, my doves. I will see you in the morning.”
When their mother had gone, Anna turned to Rosalie in the quiet. She leaned forward and looked deeply into Rosalie’s eyes.
“Do you think the Duke of Hartmere could ever love you the way our mother loves our father?” she asked, without any of her earlier sharpness.
“Do you think he could love you truly, completely, past all sense and reason, sacrificing parts of himself in exchange for parts of you? Do you think that he could care for you like that?”
“I do not know,” she said honestly. “I thought I did... an hour ago. Now I am not certain of anything.”
Anna nodded solemnly. “In that case, you should come to Scotland with me,” she said finally.
“Not forever, of course, but only for a while. Let London and all its complications fall away for a time and give yourself somewhere quiet to decide what you actually want. And I should like you there, too. I know William would be glad for the company. Consider it. That is all I ask for tonight.”
Rosalie looked at her sister, and thought of Dumfries, and William, and the child not yet born—and of the sad possibility of a life entirely apart from Gabriel and everything he had said to her that night.
“I will consider it,” Rosalie replied. “I have a great deal to consider.”
“You do,” Anna agreed. “But chief of all, you must consider your own good heart.”