CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Helena bit her thumb nail as she paced in the corner of the coaching yard where the inn connected to the carriage house and paid no attention to all the activity around them.
The late morning was busy, with guests and workers coming and going, men on horseback and others in carriages arriving and leaving, and bar maids carrying out plates of food and tankards of ale to the grooms in the barns.
Horses occasionally snorted and pawed out their irritation at all the commotion, especially whenever a dog barked or a rooster forgot the time and sent up a loud cock-a-doodle-do.
A group of children played with little balls and hoops on a patch of grass near the rear paddock, and Helena’s eyes kept straying to them, even though she knew Alice wasn’t among them.
She couldn’t help it. Then she dropped her hand away and quickened her pacing, only to bite her thumb again after a few dozen strides.
In the corner behind her, Gabe lounged on a pile of grain sacks that had yet to be carried into the barn.
His beaver hat was drawn down over his face, with his left arm tucked behind his head and his right dangling toward the ground as if he were napping, and his chest rose and fell in steady, even breaths.
Yet she knew he was fully awake when he mumbled from beneath his hat, “You’re going to wear a trench into the ground. Stop pacing and come sit by me.”
Wear a trench—ha! Yet she darted a glance at the ground where she’d been walking back and forth for the past half an hour.
She halted and dropped her arms to her sides in exasperation. “How can you be so calm about this?”
“Because there’s nothing else we can do but wait for the mail coach to arrive, and no sense fretting while we do.”
Shaking her head, she began to pace again. “But they might have disembarked at some other inn or crossroads along the route. We might have missed them.” She bit her thumbnail again. Goodness! She’d wear it down to the quick at this rate. “When the coach arrives, they might not even be on it.”
“They will be.”
“We should have ridden back along the roads and looked for it.”
Gabe had insisted they cut cross-country to the inn instead of sticking to the main coach route in order to arrive ahead of the vehicle, so they’d galloped across fields, jumped stone walls, and even forded two streams to arrive at the first stop in the mail route well before the coach, just as Gabe promised.
But now, having nothing to do but wait gave her time to worry.
“And done what, exactly, when we found it?” he mumbled from beneath his hat.
“We would have stopped it.” The man could be so exasperating! “We would have flagged them down and—”
“And I would have become the first duke in English history to be shot for being a highwayman.”
She stopped, crossed her arms, and glared at him. “Not if we explain who we are and why we’ve stopped the coach.”
He lifted the corner of his hat to dart a glance at her with one eye. “You’ve never ridden on a mail coach, have you?”
“Well…no.”
“A mail coach has a royal order not to stop between scheduled stages for any reason.” The hat dropped back over his face. “Not even for dukes and highwaymen.”
“Not even for highwaymen?” she repeated, dumbfounded. “With guns?”
“Not even for those with guns.” As if realizing he would find no peace when she was this anxious, he sat up, placed his hat properly on his head, and squinted up at her in the bright sunlight.
“A royal mail coach will never stop en route. No highwayman is foolish enough to jump in front of one, even with pistols drawn and shouting ‘Stand and deliver!’ The team will simply run him over, guns and all, and not even slow down.”
Her mouth fell open. “Truly?”
He gave a sharp nod. “Trust me, darling. If Nanny Potts is inside that coach, she’s as good as locked into a moving goal cell.”
She found little comfort in that, sighed out a long breath, and began to pace again. “It isn’t Nanny I’m worried about.”
Oh, poor Alice! The little girl must have been so confused.
To be dressed up as boy and whisked out of the nursery in the dead of night, placed into a coach with a bunch of strangers—no, not confused but terrified, even with Nanny at her side.
The woman had surely lied to her, told her the wedding that Alice had been looking forward to so eagerly had been moved to London and that she would have to travel there for it.
A little girl wouldn’t know any differently.
Undoubtedly, Nanny had turned the whole episode into a game, too, as if playing dress-up to convince her to dress like a boy, be addressed as George, and leave her doll behind.
Helena clenched her hands. Oh, that horrible woman! If Alice were hurt because of this, she would—
Gabe stepped in front of her, placed his hands on his shoulders to stop her, and leaned forward to place a kiss to her forehead. As if reading her mind, he said reassuringly, “She would never hurt Alice. Adam was right about that much at least.”
Then he held open his arms. Expelling a tense breath, Helena stepped forward into the comforting circle of his embrace and gave a jerking nod, willing herself to believe him.
Adam… She had been convinced when they left the inn that he would appear in very little time at all, given his riding skills and the quality of the horses Mr. Brown rented to travelers.
But there had been no sign of him behind them all morning, and now…
“What do you think is taking Adam so long? I thought he would be here by now.”
“He isn’t coming.” Gabe looked away from her questioning gaze and squinted into the sun. “He’s most likely taken Mr. Brown’s horse and is riding as hard as he can in the opposite direction.” He blinked. “He won’t stop until he reaches the coast.”
Nodding her agreement, Helena buried her face in Gabe’s chest. She grieved for him, for the loss of his brother in his life, but shamefully, a not-so-small part of her was glad Adam had left. She hoped he didn’t return to England for a very, very long time.
But she also knew that Adam wasn’t to blame for canceling her wedding.
Pulling in a shuddering breath, she stepped out of Gabe’s arms and once more began to pace.
Gabe stood where he was, making no new move to comfort her. Smart man. The wound in her chest throbbed as if it were raw. If he’d touched her then, she might have screamed.
“Helena,” he said quietly. “We need to talk.”
“Not now.” Dear God, no! Not here. She had to focus on Alice, only on saving Alice.
That was the only way she’d be able to survive this day.
At that very moment, she knew, she should have been at her wedding breakfast in the orangery with the toasts going round the table and her wedding band shining on her left hand.
But if she focused on Alice, she could somehow find the strength to delay the complete shattering of her heart.
The distant rumble of carriage wheels reached them from across the field east of the inn, followed by the sharp blow of a mail coach driver’s trumpet horn to announce their arrival.
The noise sent the inn into a flurry of new activity, with grooms jogging out of the barns to be ready for the fast team change when it arrived and others carrying large sacks and boxes full of mail to replace the ones the coachmen would toss to the ground.
Even two bar maids scurried out of the inn, one balancing a tray of ale tankards and the other a basket filled with wrapped bundles of food to sell to the women passengers who would be scrambling to find the necessary and the men to relieve themselves behind the barns before they had to return to the mail coach or be left behind.
The change would be quick, most likely only a few minutes’ duration while the coach was here before launching off to complete its high-speed route to London.
Helena’s heart pounded so hard that the rush of blood through her ears nearly drowned out the noise as the coach rolled between the gate posts and into the cobblestone inn yard.
“Come on.” Gabe took her arm and hurried her across the courtyard to the coach.
They reached it just as one of the grooms lowered the step and opened the door. An older man and woman disembarked, blinking against the bright sunlight, followed by an elderly man and a university-aged lad whom Helena guessed was his son.
Then out bounced a young boy dressed in rough clothes and worn boots with a large tweed cap pulled down over his head. When his jacket flapped open, Helena saw pink and white ribbons smuggled beneath the coarse waistcoat.
Alice.
Without thinking, Helena rushed forward to sweep the girl up into her arms and raced with her several feet away, heedless of the little girl’s surprised cry. If Nanny Potts had gone mad enough to carry a pistol with her, Helena wanted the little girl out of the fray.
Gabe stepped in front of the carriage door as a plump woman in worsted brown wool stepped to the ground. “Mrs. Potts.”
The nanny looked up and gasped. When she recognized Gabe, she attempted to shove past him and bolt, but he was too big and strong for her to escape, and far too quick. He grabbed her arm and yanked her aside, then pulled her away from the coach and toward the tall stone wall encircling the yard.
“Don’t have me arrested! Please don’t, Your Grace.” She cowered against the wall and raised her arm, as if afraid Gabe might hit her. “I only did it to protect the wee one.”
“You kidnapped my daughter,” he ground out. “How is that protecting her? I swear to God, woman, if you’ve harmed one hair on her head—”
“I haven’t!” Then her round face pinched with anger. “But I certainly wouldn’t leave her at Grangely so you could.”
He jerked up straight. “What do you mean by that?”
“I heard you last night—you and your brother. I heard Lord Adam say he wanted to take away my little Alice, and even if he didn’t, what he said about you was true.
You would send her away to relatives she doesn’t know just because you’ll have a new little wife to spoil, whelps of your own soon filling the nursery.
” Her face grew red, and anger engulfed her to the point that she shook from it.
“You think I haven’t been watching you closely these past few years, seen with my own eyes how much you hate that child and want nothing to do with her? ”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. Until she arrived,” she sneered out, glancing past his shoulder at Helena who still held Alice safely in her arms, “you didn’t care what my little Alice did or didn’t, as long as she left you alone.
You never visited her in the nursery or listened to her lessons, never so much as paid one whit of attention to her except to chastise her.
But then Miss Sinfell came to Grangely, and you put on such a grand show of being a doting father just to worm your way into her good graces.
Last night proved it was all nothing but a lie. ”
He ground out between clenched teeth, “I think you’ve said enough.”
“I love that little girl like she was my own,” she continued, ignoring Gabe’s ire and jabbing her knobby chin into the air.
“That’s why I took her. We were going to my sister’s in London, where my little Alice would be loved and never sent away.
I couldn’t stand by and let her be tossed away like a piece of garbage! ”
His back remained as ramrod straight as before, but Helena saw the faint lowering of his shoulders at that rebuke. No one else would have seen that small change in him, but Helena did—no, she felt it, just as she felt his own self-recrimination.
Nanny Potts scolded in a seething hiss of anger, “You don’t deserve her!”
Gabe let the nanny’s harsh words fade, for a long moment saying nothing. Then, quietly, “You’re right. I don’t deserve her.”
Helena caught her breath. A world of meaning filled his quiet sentence. Then he glanced over his shoulder at Alice, and the tension visibly melted from him, the anger and worry evaporating like a morning fog.
He pulled in a deep breath and admitted, “I don’t deserve to have a daughter as wonderful as she is, and I have treated her badly. The least I can do now is spend the rest of my life attempting to make it up to her, at home at Grangely where she belongs, now and always.”
A tear slid down Helena’s cheek, and hope flooded through her. Gabe had changed. It had taken the terrible fear of nearly losing Alice to prove it to both of them, but at that moment, she saw in him the man he had once been and all the love he was capable of giving.
Alice broke free from Helena’s hold and ran forward. “Papa!” She flung her arms around his legs and clung to him. “Papa, you came for me!”
“Of course, I did, poppet. I will always protect you.” He scooped her into his embrace, and she wrapped her slender arms tightly around his neck. “And I am never letting you go.” He whispered as he placed a kiss to the top of her head, “I’ll never part with you. Never. I promise.”
“I love you, Papa,” she told him, resting her cheek against his.
Helena saw the glistening in his eyes as he hoarsely rasped out, “I love you, too, Alice.” His arms tightened around her. “I never realized how much until you left. Your absence put a hole in my heart, and I couldn’t bear it.”
Helena came forward slowly and rested her hand on Alice’s back. She silently met Gabe’s gaze.
“Don’t put another hole in my heart, Helena,” he said quietly.
She choked back a sob. “I don’t—”
Nanny Potts bolted. Seizing her moment to dash for freedom, she hitched up her heavy skirts and ran as fast as she could toward the road. Gabe lowered Alice quickly to the ground to start after—
“No,” Helena grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Let her go.”
“She kidnapped our daughter. She deserves to be arrested.”
Our daughter. His words warmed her down to her soul. Yet she shook her head. “Let her go. We have Alice back, and that’s all that matters.” She squeezed his bicep. “And I don’t want her arrest and trial to cast any more shadow on our wedding.”
He searched her face. “You mean you’ve changed your mind—you still want to marry me, despite everything?”
“Because of everything,” she assured him and placed her hand on Alice’s shoulder.
“I never realized how much you and Alice mean to me until I nearly lost you both.” He slipped his left arm around her waist and drew her against him.
“I love you, Helena, so much that it frightens me, and I can’t bear the thought of losing you again.
I want to marry you, just as soon as I can, and I promise that you and our children—all our children,” he emphasized as he lifted Alice with his right arm and balanced her against his hip, “will never be apart from me again, for as long as we both shall live.” He caressed his gloved fingers across her cheek.
“Do we have a deal, then, my beautiful duchess?”
“Yes,” she tearfully choked out as she rose up onto tiptoes to kiss him, with Alice held safe and protected between them, exactly where she belonged.