Chapter Ten #2
The Marchioness of Waringford paused for a word, and Louisa took her hand as if they were old friends. “You must come again when you have time, my lady, and tell us what you think of our gardens,” Louisa said. “The bee orchids are in flower.”
Lady Waringford made promises and gave a small smile to Gabe, who racked his brains to place her.
She was an author, some books on plants, beautiful plates and discoveries that botanists had rather gone on about.
The Marquess of Waringford was an eccentric too, pottering about with old ruins and calling himself an archeologist.
Louisa Bickford, Matron of the Benevolence Hospital, had eccentric and high-ranking friends.
What would those friends think of her being courted by a rackety, barely respectable duke? He had thought he was elevating her by his public attentions, but Louisa moved in circles he’d never guessed. She already had a foothold in the Polite World, far more so than he did.
And she had a stature and influence of her own.
In the elegant papered foyer, as Louisa wrapped in her shawl, another set of women made a beeline toward them.
Louisa introduced the one at their head as Henrietta Bales, wife of Lord Darien Bales, the rogue whom London Society still, with private amusement, called Lord Daring.
As they fell into a discussion of the agenda for the next meeting of the Hospital’s board of patrons, Gabe gathered that Lady Darien Bales was one of those terrifying women who did not merely decorate aristocratic circles but threw her weight into political rings where she could be a force for change.
Louisa would be just such a duchess. She would not be content, after running a charitable institution, to simply plan parties and meals for a ducal household. As a duchess, she too would be a force in London, in all of Britain.
He wanted her at his side. The knowledge shocked him into momentary silence. He’d devised this provisional courtship as a way to draw her close. It had taken a scant few hours in her company to realize she was the woman he wanted in his life.
He stood for a moment trying to take that in. Reorient his life around this solid new knowledge, this fresh goal that offered a root and stability of the like he had never known.
It would be impossible to win her. This beautiful, accomplished woman who was hiding some secret of her own so dark and terrifying that she was being blackmailed for it. She’d never see him as worthy of her.
He had to try.
“Stop doing what?” he asked as their carriage approached, lantern bobbing through the night, and he lifted her to the seat.
“Stop behaving as if you were an interloper. A wolf let into the sheep pen. You belong here as much as anybody.”
But he’d never belonged, and he’d never felt he belonged, until he had Louisa at his side.
“It is simply so different,” he said. “From anything I’ve known.”
He told her, then, as the carriage rattled down Westminster Road to Kennington Lane, to come at Vauxhall from the east. Vauxhall he knew, and he felt no strangeness as he paid their shillings at the coach gate, only the wonder as he ushered Louisa inside and she beheld the Grand Walk lined with its hundreds of lighted glass lamps.
He wanted to show her everything: the Turkish tent, the lavish interior of the Rotunda, the Orchestra that rose like a tiered Moorish crown.
He’d felt that same wonder, arriving in Britain for the first time.
He wanted to show her a life that would fill her with this wonder always.
And he wanted her, of all people, to know him. His past as well as his present.
As a boy growing up in the narrow streets of Alexandria, crawling over monuments to the ancient Egyptian dynasties, the Greeks, and then the Ottomans, Gabe had lived in the shadow of fallen greatness and vanished wealth.
His mother had been reared in a comfortable home, and she had lived in luxury with her first marriage as the lesser wife of a high-ranking Mameluke official.
Had things gone on as planned, Gabe might have been born a true son of Egypt, and stayed there to rule.
“What happened?’ Louisa asked as they strolled past the arcade with the Chinese temples.
What happened was the invasion of Napoleon into Egypt made his mother a widow, and she was briefly, as a matter of survival for herself and her family, the consort of a French general.
Then British forces landed, Thomas Declan saw her, and despite her social fall, despite the loss of her family’s wealth and status, he loved Aysha enough to offer his hand.
And that was the arrangement into which Gabriel was born: the small hut of a soldier’s wife, the wait for his father’s postings to be over, the bread and beans that were the staples of his diet, along with whatever vegetables his mother could grow or trade for.
The allowance for a duke’s son did not stretch as far as Egypt, and neither did regular salary payments for men in the British Army, especially when soldiers were discouraged to cultivate camp followers or hangers-on.
They had survived somehow, Gabe and his mother, on spoils of war sent them by his father through his batman, Powlett.
His mother stretched things as far as she could, every egg and onion, every tunic and shoe.
Gabe earned what he could by scavenging—never stealing, because stealing could be punishable by death, and Gabe knew his mother would not survive without him.
Yet survive they did, until Powlett brought news that this soldier father was dead and then stayed to provide for them, taking his father’s place at table and in his mother’s bed.
Gabe didn’t question his mother or fight the man, for Powlett was not the kind of a man a lad could resent, not when he brought meat to the table, baubles and gowns for his mother, new shoes and tunics for Gabe.
He even provided Gabe with a tutor who taught him to read and write in Arabic, and, in due course of time, he provided sisters and brothers as well.
“How long did you live in Alexandria?”
“Till I was twelve, I think. Perhaps thirteen. We came to England before Waterloo.”
He remembered the long voyage via ship to Powlett’s home in England, then a ceremony in a strange, cold, stone church where Gabe had to wear a coat and trousers and stand for a while beside his mother and Powlett while a priest droned some words and Powlett gave Gabe’s mother a ring, and she cried, and there was a general fuss.
This was followed by a feast full of strange though not altogether unpalatable foods at which he was obliged to continue wearing his uncomfortable clothes, and then there was a new house made of wood and thatch in a town called Wokingham, and a grand family in a place called Barkham House with which they had occasional dealings, and then there was the school at which Gabe was known as Barkham’s Bastard, and that was the beginning of his brawling career.
“They didn’t know you were Thomas’s true son?” Louisa walked with him through the Promenade Room, admiring the rococo carvings and the ceiling shaped like an unfolding fan.
“Oh, they knew,” Gabe said. “There was no denying my face, not if you put me next to a portrait of the man.
What they never believed was that my father had married my mother in a proper church.
My grandmother the Duchess paid for my schooling to put me in debt to the family, and they doled out funds now and again to aid Powlett with his smithing business and keep us out of penury.
But there were no invitations to Barkham House for family dinners.
“Harry was well ahead of me at school, and he took his degree from university well before I got expelled, but we rubbed elbows now and again in London. He was never as condescending as the rest, in fact was a decent bloke altogether. If he’d come home from St. Petersburg as planned, I’d likely be dining in Cavendish Square with him now and again, when the lady of the house was out. ”
“But your cousin died before he could marry and sire an heir,” Louisa said. “We heard the gossip, even at the Hospital. It caused a great deal of excitement when your mother came forward with her marriage lines. The pauper made into a prince.”
“I almost wasn’t,” Gabe said. “I hear the case set up more than one back in the House of Lords, and split the King’s Bench down the middle.
Marriages outside of England aren’t always recognized.
But the army chaplain who married them kept the record, and so did the missionaries who stood witness, and even though my mother was born Egyptian and a Muslim, it was her family connections back in Egypt that decided things.
Her family still has enough clout, and so does the family of her first husband, that it was decided not to anger the local merchants and give them reason to block British ships. ”
“So, to keep Muhammad Ali friendly to British trade and grant access to India, a son of Egypt is made a British duke.” Louisa held his arm as he gently tugged her along the colonnade.
He would take her to the Druid’s Walk, perhaps to the Smuggler’s Cave, and then show her the Dark Walk with its notorious little wildernesses where lovers could get pleasantly and conveniently lost.
“And there are a great many, as I said, who do not think me worthy of the honor.”
She turned to face him. Her cheeks were rosy, pinched by the cool spring air, and in the glow of the lamps gently swinging from the trees, her beauty was nearly haunting. It was enough to bring a man to his knees.
“What do you think?” she asked.
He moved them along so he didn’t fall prey to his lecherous impulses and attempt to ravish her right here.
Debauching a delectable woman in crimson at a masquerade ball was one thing; it was to be expected.
Debauching a woman in Vauxhall Gardens might also be routine, if a man knew his business, but a woman a man wanted to make his duchess deserved gentler wooing.