Chapter 4
Four
“Ido wonder about you sometimes,” James said, later that day. “Though it is not my preferred pastime.”
Gabriel glanced up from his goblet. They were seated in an abandoned box at Almack’s assembly rooms now that the party was dying down.
Below them, the dancers moved lazily through a country reel.
Miss Warwick sat off to the side in pale yellow, glowing like a woman recently engaged as she watched the dancing.
“I beg your pardon?” Gabriel said, pulling himself out of his thoughts.
“Your mercurial moods, and that frown. They make me wonder,” James repeated.
Gabriel rubbed his eyebrows. “Could it be that I am frowning at the present company and its unfounded accusations of my moods?”
“You will have to try a great deal harder to insult me tonight.” James looked at his betrothed discreetly. “I have many reasons to be happy.”
Gabriel looked back at his ratafia. It was not the ratafia’s fault—even though it was hideous—nor James’s, nor even entirely his own that he had spent the better part of the day distracted by the memory of a mouth pressed against his in the dark.
He had gone to Winthrop House expecting to unmask a schemer, and had instead found a woman who seemed devastated by what she had done.
You know precisely why you cannot let it lie, said some unhelpful voice in his mind. You cannot abide a mystery, just like your aunt says. And if Miss Winthrop did not intend to kiss you to ensnare you, then why did she?
He pressed his lips together. He had told himself that his curiosity about Miss Rosalie Winthrop was merely the ordinary itch of an unsolved puzzle.
But there was something more to her than he could explain, maybe the fear that she would use the kiss against him when the time was right for her, and the shame that he hadn’t seen her coming in the first place.
“What do you know about the Winthrops?” he asked loudly enough to draw Miss Warwick into the conversation. “I learned recently that my aunt encountered them while in Italy and stopped with them for weeks. Are they... a good breed?”
James and Miss Warwick turned in tandem, and James nodded, reading some invisible cue from his betrothed.
“My parents say they are fine enough people. The baron and his wife are a literary sort, though they are highly sociable. They are not often in London, which makes sense. Some of their connections are dubious and not exactly up to our standards.” She paused, tucking a ringlet behind her ear.
“Has something happened between the Winthrops and Lady Chipping, Your Grace?”
“No...” Gabriel downed the rest of his drink and rose. “But a man should know who he has surrounded himself with, even peripherally.” He paused. “The daughter.”
“Annabelle?”
Gabriel scowled. “Who?”
“The daughter,” Miss Warwick replied. “Unless you meant the youngest, Miss Rosalie.” She looked sleepily back toward the dancers.
“I have not spoken to her directly, Your Grace. She is very quiet, not like her elder sister at all. Annabelle—that was who I thought you meant—married last year. It was a good match. But Miss Rosalie? You never hear much about her.”
A quiet sister, often overlooked. Gabriel wondered whether her reputation factored into her plans.
A desperate woman driven to desperate measures.
She was beautiful in a funny way, so typically beautiful she was almost forgettable, except for her hair.
There was a girlish softness in her face, but her eyes were clear, betraying every thought that crossed her mind.
She didn’t need to resort to trapping gentlemen with looks like that.
“We are for Vauxhall, next Thursday,” James said, breaking into his thoughts.
“Mrs. Warwick insists on it. She says the gardens will be romantic for us and a good source of inspiration for the wedding, though I cannot think why, given how many chaperones will be trailing us like a naval escort. You’ll come. ”
“Will I now?”
“I hope so. It is expected. The whole purpose of dragging you about London is so that everyone may see the Duke of Hartmere endorsing my choice of bride, and I intend to make full use of you before the novelty wears off.” James grinned, entirely without shame.
“Besides, you have been unbearable company all week. The fresh air will do you good.”
Gabriel considered arguing and found, to his own irritation, that he did not particularly want to. Outings were often so useful. For being seen, but also for seeing.
Objectively, Vauxhall on a clear night was not the worst place a gentleman could find himself, especially given the rain of the last few days. But Gabriel felt restless as he walked behind James and Miss Warwick, thinking of his home in Surrey and the other places he would rather have been.
On one side of him was Miss Warwick’s mother, and on the other was her mother’s friend. They had kept him company most of the afternoon, saying how nice it was for him to have condescended to walk with them that day, knowing there were many better things he could be doing.
The paper lamps strung through the trees cast a golden light on the gravel walkways, and somewhere beyond the tall pillar of supper boxes, an orchestra was playing Clementi.
The air smelled of burnt sugar and faintly of the faraway River Thames.
He could hear the river if he tried hard enough, the boats sailing to harbor under the cover of fast-fading evening light.
At some point, Miss Warwick’s mother turned to him. They had lost James and Tiffany somewhere near the acrobats. It had likely been accidental on their part, Gabriel said, but they should go searching for them immediately.
“I’ll remain here for you,” he said, putting his hands in his trouser pockets. “Hold down the fort so we don’t get split up.”
“How very kind, Your Grace.” The elder woman smiled and, taking her friend by the arm, doubled back to where they had come from.
Gabriel dropped his smile the second they were gone, turning around. He hesitated a moment before continuing without them, torn between his duty to James and his duty to himself.
He had only walked ten minutes from their meeting spot when he saw her.
She was walking with her mother near the colonnade, wearing green this time rather than pink, her auburn hair catching the lamplight in a way that made him think of the crystal bird sitting in his reading room. She had not seen him.
He watched her a moment longer than was necessary before he understood that he had been hoping to see her all evening, though it seemed impossible in hindsight. He had not even known the Winthrops would be there that evening. And yet despite all this, he changed course toward her.
She saw him coming; he watched the moment it happened, her spine straightening and her chin coming up, like a little frocked soldier bracing for battle.
And then, astonishingly, she turned and walked in the opposite direction of him, pulling her mother sharply away before she could notice him approaching.
Gabriel stopped in his tracks, genuinely startled, a laugh catching behind his ribs.
Nobody walked away from him. Not in London, at least. Not at a ball, not at the clubs, and certainly not in public.
He recovered himself and followed, keeping a polite distance, telling himself he only wished for a word and that he was owed one after she had seen him.
But the woman was quicker than he expected. She ducked behind a knot of gentlemen beneath an archway, and then she cut across toward the fireworks lawn. By the time he had extricated himself from the bulk of the crowd that was waiting for the fire show, Miss Rosalie Winthrop had vanished entirely.
“Flighty little thing,” he murmured and went to find her.
It took the better part of fifteen minutes, and an unwelcome conversation with a mother of three unmarried daughters, before he spotted her again, slipping through the doors behind the poor excuse for a bookseller that the Vauxhall folks optimistically called its traveling library—with four shelves of tomes from abroad and a card table—and mostly used by chaperones wanting somewhere quiet to relax a moment.
It was empty when he entered, except for her; everyone else had gone to see the fireworks.
It took him a second to wonder where her mother had run off to.
Miss Winthrop turned at the sound of the door, standing between two shelves of books.
Whatever composure she had gathered for the occasion visibly abandoned her.
She held her hands at her waist, her bonnet trapped between them, and sucked in a harsh breath.
“Your Grace,” she cried, almost accusingly.
He closed the door behind him halfway, letting enough light into the room to see her. “You are remarkably fast for a woman in a frock like that.”
She was stunned into silence for a moment, casting a look over her shoulder like she intended to run away.
But she remained where she was, her head bare, soft auburn curls sticking to the sweat on her neck.
“It is not unusual for people to gain superhuman abilities when they are fighting for their lives—as prey animals do in the wild. All their instincts become heightened. They jump higher, run faster.”
“Prey?” He almost laughed. “You have nothing to fear from me.”
“Your dogged pursuit of me begs otherwise.” She was breathing quickly, color high in her cheeks, and he found he could not entirely regret having caused her distress when it made her look so alive.
“Obviously you noticed how I was attempting to avoid you, and thought I’d been successful, until you entered this room. ”
“And isn’t that so curious? Most young ladies achieve the opposite effect entirely. It is so often me running from them—with success, aye, until they enter the room.”
“If they had any sense, they would promptly leave it,” she said bitterly. “Unless the door was barred.”
“I would never bar a door.”