Chapter Two
Lord Gabriel Wycliff had arrived at Lady Caithness’s ball not long before the Nicholson party, in the company of his older brother Ambrose, Marquis of Buckland.
Ambrose’s wife of just over a year, Isabel, had not accompanied them as she was at present in the later stages of what Ambrose and Gabriel’s stepmother liked to call ‘a delicate condition,’ the outcome of which everyone hoped would be a boy.
Consequently, she was at home at Wentworth Castle in Dorset under the care of her old nursemaid, a woman who strongly resembled a dragon, who’d come with her on her marriage.
Both Ambrose and Gabriel always stayed well out of the way of this woman, for fear, Gabriel had suggested, of having a spell cast on them.
She looked the sort who knew magic. The black variety.
Ambrose, who, now the short honeymoon period was over, rather felt as though he had been duped into the marriage, had been glad to escape his wife’s constant bad temper and vapors, not to mention her demands for out of season foods, and flee up to Town to join Gabriel.
Tonight, he’d been more than happy to accompany him to Lady Caithness’s ball.
One of the biggest and best of the early Season.
But that might well have been because he was expecting his current mistress to be present, a fact he’d confided to Gabriel on their way over.
To Gabriel’s relief, Ambrose had soon sloped off to join a group of his friends, most of whom were still unmarried and under the same sort of pressure from their families that had led him to marry Isabel last year.
Gabriel could picture him boasting that he’d done his bit and Isabel was about to provide the dukedom with an heir, and the others slapping him on the back as though it were all down to him and Isabel had played no part in it.
But behind their hands they’d be pitying him for having been so easily talked into getting himself leg-shackled.
Last year he’d been amongst the wildest of young rakes about town, and he and Gabriel had been collectively referred to as the Wild Wycliffs.
Not so now, or maybe Ambrose was thinking that now he’d done his bit for the family in producing an heir he could take up his old lifestyle again.
His mistress, Dora Sutcliffe, widow of the old Earl of Matcham, was no doubt most pleased to find him back to his old bachelor ways in Town with no wife in tow.
Standing leaning against one of the overly ornate Greek-style pillars in the large ballroom, Gabriel could see that formidable lady making her way through the crowd towards Ambrose, as though drawn by a magnet.
Heads turned at her passing. Most of the young bucks envied Ambrose his luck in snaring so beautiful and experienced a mistress.
The thought occurred to Gabriel that he should suggest to his brother that taking up with his mistress again so soon after his marriage might not be a good idea but was dismissed.
After all, Ambrose never interfered in anything he did, so why should he bother.
It wasn’t as though he even liked Isabel, a waspish young woman who’d taken an instant dislike to him on their first meeting and not been afraid to show it.
He shrugged. Ambrose’s behavior was nothing to do with him and, if he tried interfering, it would only create bad blood between them.
He didn’t want that. Easier to rest on the side of the brother he loved.
Instead, he let his gaze wander across the crowded ballroom, lingering here and there on one bejewelled lady or another, taking in their beautiful gowns, elaborate hair, and above all the fortunes with which each was festooned.
A show of wealth that was abhorrent to his taste, particularly when he thought of the poverty just outside this well-insulated island of unearned, for the most part, opulence.
For he was well-acquainted with the seedier side of life.
Far more so than any other person in this exalted building.
In fact, he’d be surprised to hear if anyone present had any notion of how the other half of the world, the poor who kept their world in motion, lived.
Did any of the people here even know what went on in the rookeries of St Giles, near Holborn, or Jacob’s Island on the south bank of the Thames a bit further down than the Tower of London, or the Devil’s Acre, that bordered so closely on Westminster itself?
Did they know places existed where people lived in dirty, wet cellars, babies died by the score and crime was rife?
Here in their comfortable, clean, warm ballrooms where nothing sordid was allowed to even be hinted at, they persisted in their ignorance.
An ignorance of all things sordid they refused to acknowledge.
Or, at any rate, nothing worse than a gentleman’s mistress or a gambling debt.
His lip curled in scorn.
He had his late mother, Camilla, Duchess of Sherborne, to thank for first opening his eyes regarding the rookeries.
When he was only seven, and she was dying from some kind of malignant tumor, she’d admitted to him how she’d saved him from a life of poverty when a young Frenchwoman from the rookeries had thrust him, as a small baby, into her arms and fled.
It had been fate, she said, that had given him to her.
He’d been meant to become her son, and, as an impressionable seven-year-old, he’d believed her, despite the shock of discovering she wasn’t really his mother.
Perhaps that had been why he’d so fiercely clung onto that belief and never shared the fact that he knew his origin with anyone.
That shock had been softened by the fact that for all of the seven years before she died, she’d been as loving to him as she’d been to her true-born son, Ambrose.
Knowing she was dying, and wanting him to know the truth, she’d assured him he was old enough and sensible enough to understand the story of his origin.
And to illustrate that, despite the pain she was suffering, she’d shown him the sort of life from which he’d been saved.
This had produced a profound impact on an impressionable child.
“I never want you to forget that others are not so lucky as you are, little Gabriel,” Mama had said, holding his hand tightly as they observed the amorphous boundary of the St Giles Rookery from the safety of their carriage.
He’d gazed wide-eyed at the crowds of ragged, dirty people, the filthy roads, and the tumbledown buildings Mama has said were their homes.
And above all, at the barefoot, starving children.
Mama had held his small hand tightly. “Most of these people are not here through any fault of their own. This is where the destitute come, the hopeful from Ireland, refugees from the Continent, the poor from the countryside seeking work, and with them they bring their blameless children. You were just such a one, but providence put you in my path, and I was able to save you. Would that I could save more children such as you, but my time on this earth is running short.” And she’d kissed the top of his head, which then had boasted abundant blond curls.
“I was so very lucky that day. God put you in my arms, and that is why I named you for one of his angels.” She turned over his left hand to expose the birthmark on his wrist. “When you were born, you were kissed by an angel and that led you to becoming my special son.”
She’d been the wisest, kindest woman Gabriel had ever known, and also the most beautiful.
When she’d been taken from them at scarcely forty years of age, the whole family had been devastated.
Grief-stricken, Papa had shut himself away in his study leaving Ambrose, who’d been away at Eton, to suffer alone, and Gabriel himself to seek solace with his beloved nurse, Primpy.
Some of this, he acknowledged, explained why he was convinced no other lady could ever live up to his memories of his mother.
He’d had dalliances, of course, and a mistress some time ago, but never ones that had engaged his heart.
The women of the ton seemed so trivial and uninteresting compared to such a woman.
Unfortunately, Papa had chosen to marry again, to Lady Dorothea Beaumont, his and Ambrose’s current stepmother, and she’d seen to it that Gabriel had soon joined his brother at boarding school.
He smiled to himself as he thought of the present duchess.
He and Ambrose were well aware how jealous their stepmother was of the loving memory Papa still nurtured for Mama, and how much the fact that none of her children would ever be the heir irked her beyond words.
Not only that, but try as she might she’d not succeeded in producing a son of her own for Papa, only three daughters.
Luckily these girls were much nicer than their mother, mainly because she had little to do with them, disgusted as she was by their gender.
Gabriel was particularly fond on the oldest, Cecilia, who was now fifteen and quite the most sensible and intelligent young lady he’d ever met.
Difficult to believe Dorothea had managed to produce such a lovely girl.
No doubt Stepmama was already planning her daughter’s debut in a few years’ time as a highly sought after duke’s daughter and making lists of unsuspecting young men to entrap.
Gabriel slipped back into the present, pushing thoughts of his family aside. He was here for a purpose and needed to remember that.
The crowd parted as the dance came to an end and Gabriel’s gaze moved past the dancers towards the far side of the room.
He made it his business to know as much about his fellow members of the ton as possible.
And he had the sort of memory that never forgot a face or a fact about a person. Very useful.