Chapter Eleven #2
They passed through the great hall, and Louisa wavered.
This was the place where, only that day, she had looked upon the people she cared for going about their daily tasks and had glowed with calm pride to know she had a hand in this.
She had devoted her life to the Benevolence Hospital and its cause.
She could not be the reason for its ruin.
Gabe groaned, and suddenly, he was all that mattered. Lord Vérité with his threats had made it impossible for Louisa to stay here anyway. She would sacrifice her role in this place she loved if it meant she could save Gabe.
The man she loved.
She pushed that thought away. It was too soon to say love. Say rather, she felt responsible. He had engaged himself in her cause, and now he was hurt.
As the boon of her position, the Matron’s set of rooms within the Hospital contained a bedchamber dedicated to her own use.
It was not a large or stylish chamber, nothing befitting a duke, but there was a bed with a feather tick.
Louisa quickly threw a sheet over the quilt and piled up the pillows, then directed the men to lay down their burden.
“I’ll fetch Sister Nan,” Alice whispered. Sister Nan was their best nurse.
Sister Agatha sighed. “I’ll see to hot water from the kitchens, and the healing salve. I’ll expect he’ll need a great deal of it.”
Gabe blinked his eyes open as Louisa was working free the buttons on his coat. He glanced about, his gaze heavy-lidded. One eyelid was swelling shut, and a cut above his eyebrow oozed blood. He focused on Louisa, and something shifted and settled in her belly.
“Are you hurt?” His voice was a low rasp.
“No. Do you know who attacked you?”
“Fenton. I’d wager the dukedom that was him behind the mask.
Brought bigger men this time, and came to see the job done himself.
” He coughed, but no blood appeared on his lips.
Louisa hoped that was a good sign. She helped him struggle his arms free of the coat, beautifully tailored but now sadly damaged.
“We can try to find the men. Someone has to remember seeing them. You must bring charges this time.”
“Of what? I can prove nothing.”
“I was there. I’m a witness.”
“He tried to hurt you.” Gabe grasped Louisa’s wrists as she went to work on his patterned waistcoat. “I don’t need a trial. I’ll kill him.”
“And get yourself hanged.” She wasn’t certain the courts could hang dukes, but of a certain he would lose everything.
And she would lose him. “You must find a way to protect yourself,” she said.
“Take a duchess, produce an heir.” Gabe slid his hands up her arms. She’d stripped off her gloves to unbutton him, and her bare flesh tingled beneath his warm, heavy palms. His knuckles were bruised, split and bloody.
“That is my plan,” he said. “Stay alive long enough to produce several heirs, so many Fenton gives up and goes away to make a nuisance of himself somewhere else.”
“Then you oughtn’t be dallying with older widows.
” Louisa pulled the waistcoat from him, along with the cravat.
Above the loose neckline of his shirt, bruises showed against his throat.
She swallowed hard, her own throat aching with a clutch of emotions she couldn’t untangle.
“You ought to court someone young and fertile.”
“How old are you, Louisa?” he asked, submitting to her loosening his suspenders.
“Five and thirty. Practically old enough to be a grandmother.”
“You are only five years old than I. And I don’t care if we have children or not.”
“You must care. You are the Duke of Barkham.”
“I would rather have you.”
Her hands shook as she pushed back his thick hair to inspect the bruise developing at his temple. “It is foolish to say such things. You did take several blows to the head.” She peered into his eyes, inspecting his pupils.
He gazed back at her steadily, his eyes wide and dark. The emotion in his gaze trapped her breath in her throat and teased up longings better left unheeded.
The longing to be looked at, by him, like this, for always. The longing to be this close to him, always.
She smoothed a hand over his hair and pressed a kiss to his hairline beneath his temple, one stretch of skin not marked with a bruise. Her entire body leaned toward him, falling into his gravity, succumbing to the pull. Of his beauty. Of her own desire.
“Of course, I understand if you do not consider me much of a prize,” he muttered, his gaze falling to his damaged knuckles. “You could have better. You should have better.”
“Gabe.” Her throat burned again, as tight as if the attacker’s fingers were still wrapped around her windpipe. She ached at the bleak expression in his eyes. “There is no one—”
A scratch at the door announced Sister Agatha, bearing an earthenware basin, and Alice behind her with an armload of cloth and bottles of salve. Sister Nan appeared a moment later. Louisa slipped into her role as Matron, not willing to let them see how Gabe affected her.
Still, she was certain her feelings bled through her mask, showing in the way she clung to his hand as Sister Nan inspected his ribs and prodded the tender areas. She sucked in air when he winced as Sister Agatha daubed at the cuts on his face crusted with dried blood.
By unspoken consent the others let Louisa twist the bandage around his body that would bind his cracked ribs, and though he was correct in his speech and as dignified as it was possible to be on a sickbed, he learned toward her as she worked, and his heat, his nearness, made a puddle of her insides.
She tried to be brisk and not let her hands linger against his warm skin, not let her arms remain wrapped around him for longer than it took to unroll the length of linen.
But his scent made her hunger for him, earth and iron and man, and her mind moved heavy and slow through a fog of pleasure and alarm.
The others finished their work and withdrew, Sister Nan leaving instructions about movement and medicines, how to apply more salve to his cuts, when to give the next dose of laudanum if His Grace wished something to dull the pain.
“You,” Gabe said when the others had left, leaving Louisa with her patient and a pair of candles and the reckoning she knew must come. “You dull my pain.”
“You are being foolish again. You must rest.”
“So must you. Come here.” He held out an arm, inviting her onto the bed beside him.
Louisa held herself stiffly, clenching her fingers into the sarcenet overlay on her skirt, torn and ruined beyond repair. She felt the same way about her life, suddenly—as if something had broken that could never be mended.
She was broken.
“Gabe,” she said softly. “I could never be your duchess.”
“You could,” he said stubbornly. “If we both wished it.”
Louisa shook her head, trying to free herself from the seductive spell of him, the low pull of his voice, the heat in his shadowed gaze, the wanton, deceptive voice in her own head that whispered, Why not?
The mere shape of him in her bed was a magnetizing force.
She wanted to curl up against his strength, his heat, and let herself be lost there.
“What I’ve done,” she said. “What I am. It’s impossible.”
“Come here,” he said again, his voice softening, “and tell me about it.”
She gave in to the spell then, his gentleness summoning her as no command could have done.
He patted the quilt at his hip, and Louisa curled up beside him like a cat.
His arm came around her, warm and heavy and strong and safe, and she wanted to whimper.
She had not felt this relief in fifteen years—the sense that she could finally lay her burden down.
That she could allow herself to be seen, at last, by another.
“I’m an Egyptian street rat who became a duke.” He nuzzled his face against her hair, which was a tumbled wreck after the events of the evening. “So why can a respectable Hospital Matron not become a duchess?”
“Because I am not respectable. Not in the least. This Lord Vérité found me out somehow, and what he knows— It would ruin me. And it could ruin you by association.”
“I’m already ruined,” Gabe said.
“Oh? Have you committed a crime for which you could be hanged, or transported?” She felt a hot, unreasoning rush of anger at his obstinacy. She had to make him see that what he asked—what he wanted of her—was impossible, because of who she was. “Have you committed murder?”
The words hung in the air for long, slow moments, heavy as the lamps lighting the trees in Vauxhall. “Tell me,” Gabe said quietly.
Louisa shut her eyes. In the darkness of memory she saw, not the small chamber that encased them, but the grand frontage of her childhood home. An elegant facade for the desperation and decay that lurked beneath.
“My name, when I was born, was Eloisa Maria Thérèse d’Estreaux.
My family was noble, but during the Revolution my father managed to keep his head, and his land, by changing his allegiance as he saw fit.
To improve his fortunes, he decided to make an alliance with Auguste Grenay, one of Napoleon’s generals, who had massively enriched himself during the Emperor’s wars.
“I heard the rumors that he was cruel,” Louisa said quietly, pulling the ribbon at her waist through her fingers.
“He was also twenty-four years older than I was. My family ignored me, of course. The d’Estreaux clung to the ancien régime, and Auguste was their means to navigate the new world. So off I went into marriage.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
He held silent a moment, and his voice was tight with anger when he spoke. The arm curled around her was tight also. “That is too young.”
“It was. I had no way to defend myself. I knew only what my mother and governesses had taught me. How to dance and embroider and make conversation, how to set a table and supervise servants. I had no idea men like my husband existed.”
Gabe’s voice was heavy, miserable. “He was—cruel to you?”