Chapter 6
Six
Alittle while later, Gabriel found his aunt in the small parlor overlooking the garden just off the plant room, seated in the chair that had been his mother’s and staring into space.
His heart dropped at the sight of her as he lingered at the threshold between rooms, clearing his throat before entering.
“May I join you?”
Elisabeth did not startle. She rarely did anymore. It was one of the quiet symptoms of whatever plagued her. She turned her head toward him slowly and smiled.
“Gabriel.” A faint smile, more habit than feeling. “I did not hear you come into the house. How was Lord Beaumont and his beloved?”
“Well, on the whole.” He crossed to her and knelt beside the chair, taking her cold hand in both of his. Her rings sat loose on her fingers now. She had lost weight since Italy. He was sure of that now.
“You have not touched your correspondence. When I came in, Morland told me the conservatory beds have gone unplanted for days, though you spoke of nothing else the week you returned. He is waiting for your next instructions.”
“I have not felt... equal to the task, or up to very much of anything, if I am honest with you. I only want to rest, as you asked me to.” She looked toward the window and the gray garden beyond it. “It comes and goes. You know this. It will pass. It always passes.”
“Hm.”
“Perhaps I should go abroad again,” Elisabeth said, so quietly he almost missed it. “The activity did me good, and the company. Here I have only this house and my own thoughts.”
“No.” The word came out quicker than he intended.
“No. I... I do not want you to travel again so soon, alone and with no one to—” He stopped himself from saying the rest: With no one to notice if something happens to you.
“Stay the Season at least with me. I would rather have you here where I can be near you.”
“You cannot keep me forever in this house simply to watch me, Gabriel, like a caged old bird.” She said it gently, but her fingers tightened briefly around his.
He smiled. “What else would you have me do?”
“Come now. There are so many things you could do.” Elisabeth said, with the ghost of her old dryness returning to her voice.
“That is precisely the trouble. You are unmarried, without real occupation beyond the title. If you wish to keep me from feeling I must go traveling for want of purpose, you might consider finding some purpose of your own closer to home.”
Her eyes, tired as they were, found his.
“There is a dinner next week. I had thought to send my regrets, but perhaps I shall go after all, if you will escort me. They are old friends, good friends. And perhaps you might look about the room while you are there, and take a real look, a good look, to see what is there.”
Though Gabriel felt he knew the answer, he asked her what she meant anyway.
“You know precisely what,” his aunt replied.
“And I will not embarrass either of us by saying it aloud. Think only about the Marquess of Beaumont and what he has achieved. He is like a brother to you, I know. Would it be the worst thing to model yourself after him, when he is so happy? You have always done that. Why stop now?”
By London standards, Lady Peachey’s dinner was a modest affair.
There were perhaps thirty guests in total, and the lamplight outside softened every approaching face into an indecipherable canvas of flesh.
Gabriel had barely handed his aunt from the carriage before he saw her face, and it came into focus when nobody else’s would.
Miss Rosalie Winthrop stood near the front doors in ivory silk, her auburn hair coiffed simply, her hand resting briefly on the arm of Mr. Edmund Sinclair as they spoke with her mother and father and waited to head indoors.
Something went tight in Gabriel’s chest, sharp enough that he nearly missed his aunt’s murmured request to take her indoors quickly because she was cold.
He told himself it was nothing—the usual friction of seeing a woman he’d spent too much time thinking about, now standing comfortably attached to another man’s arm.
It was as though the terrace, Vauxhall, none of it had happened at all.
They entered before him and Elisabeth. Inside, Lord and Lady Peachey greeted them and sent them into the drawing room where the rest of the guests were mingling. He dragged his aunt to one of the windows where she could sit on the bench, folding their invitation and slipping it into his pocket.
“Is that you, Your Grace?” Beatrice Levant materialized at his elbow as if she had been watching for his arrival. Her husband was with her, a seemingly genial silver-haired gentleman who walked a half step behind her.
“How good to see you out in company. I had begun to think you had taken a vow of solitude or something equally morbid. Though, of course, we attended your birthday masquerade. But a man such as you must celebrate his birthday. That was a requirement. This is... a choice.”
A choice he was regretting more with each second that passed. “I hope you have been getting on well.”
“Why, yes. Yes, absolutely. This past year has been a whirlwind, but are not all the best things in life sudden and breathtaking?” She introduced her husband. “Mr. Levant, my husband. I am pleased to introduce you to His Grace, the Duke of Hartmere.”
“A pleasure,” the man said in a soft American accent. “Beatrice tells me we are neighbors.”
He nodded, glancing down at his aunt, who was smiling at something in the doorway behind them. He followed the line of her eyes. Miss Winthrop entered with her mother, moving toward her father and Mr. Sinclair.
Mrs. Levant laughed softly. “I know, what a rare sight. Are you acquainted with my cousin, Your Grace? It is much too early in the evening to gossip, I’ll admit.
But evidently he is not attempting to hide his latest infatuation.
It took us all by surprise when he called yesterday with the news.
He has taken quite a fancy to Miss Winthrop.
He does like to play the rescuer, just like his poor late wife.
She was a wallflower too, you know. But at least they were closer in age when he saved her from the shelf. ”
Gabriel scowled. “I hardly think Miss Winthrop is in need of rescuing.”
“Do you know well enough to make such assumptions?” Mrs. Levant asked.
“Only what I have heard from Lady Chipping.”
Elisabeth glanced up. “We traveled together recently. She is a lovely young creature, so very knowledgeable and kind. Is Mr. Sinclair deserving of her?”
Beatrice gave an expression of uncertainty.
“Only time will tell. Miss Winthrop is a fair enough girl, I agree, but there is a particular sort of woman who simply cannot secure what she wants, however many Seasons she is given to try. I have watched it happen to that family before, and I daresay I shall watch it happen again. Even if Edmund is so determined to marry once more as a knight in shining armor, I predict Miss Winthrop will find a way to lose his interest.”
Gabriel said nothing, but the words burrowed into him like a splinter working its way beneath his skin. He thought of Miss Winthrop’s chin lifting in her drawing room, her voice steady as she’d told him to leave; he thought, less willingly, of the terrace.
How could she be used to men not wanting her?
How could she lose his interest, he thought, and he did not like how easily the knowledge of her and Mr. Sinclair slotted into place beside everything Miss Winthrop had told him about the gentleman she had hoped to entice.
Something like that could drive a woman to take extreme measures to secure a husband. It must have been Sinclair all along.
“You are very free with your opinions of her,” Gabriel said, returning his attention to Mrs. Levant while her husband was speaking with his aunt. “Especially for a woman who claims only a passing acquaintance.”
“I have known the Winthrops a great deal longer than in passing, Your Grace. Longer, I think, than is comfortable for us to discuss at a dinner party.” Her smile did not waver, though something colder moved behind it.
“But I shall leave you to your evening. I only thought you ought to know what you are looking at, if you meant to look.”
She drifted away on her husband’s arm before he could press her further.
He did not manage a word alone with the Winthrops before dinner was called.
Once the company began filing toward the dining room, he realized his Aunt Elisabeth had disappeared before him on the way in.
It was only after place cards had been found, murmured introductions had been made, and chairs scraped as people sought their places, that he discovered that he had been seated directly beside her by their Peachey hosts.
“Your Grace.” She said the honorific carefully, and settled into her chair slowly without really looking at him. The ivory fabric of her gown caught the light, making her hair look even warmer than usual and her skin look paler against it.
“Miss Winthrop,” he returned in kind. “I confess I did not arrange this, though I shall happily take the credit if our proximity at dinner improves your evening even marginally.”
“It remains to be seen whether it will—even marginally.”
He unfolded his napkin, glancing sideways at her. In the candlelight she looked less armored than she had in her mother’s drawing room. “I saw you arrive with Mr. Sinclair,” he said after a minute, because he could think of nothing else that he wanted to say more.
She started, but quickly checked her expression. “Yes, I did. We drove with him here from our home. He called on my father before we arrived.”
“You seem to be getting on well with him.”
“Well enough, I think.” She said it without artifice, but her tone indicated it pleased her that Gabriel knew she was settled. “He does not make a game of every conversation for one thing, which is different from what I am used to with some other gentlemen. He is forthright and very considerate.”
He allowed a beat to pass, watching the rest of the guests seat themselves and take up their own conversations before he said, “How dull that must be for you.”
“Why dull? It is a relief to be in the company of such a gentleman, Your Grace, whatever you may believe.”
He turned his wine glass by its stem, and then, because Beatrice’s words haunted him, he leaned a fraction closer than the conversation required.
The scent of her perfume reached him over the candles, and his skin tingled at the nape of his neck.
His eyes flitted over her skin, which was dappled like gooseflesh.
“Tell me something, Miss Winthrop, just between us.” His voice dropped, low enough to be private amid the general clatter of the table.
He served himself wine, and then filled her glass without resistance.
“Does he know about the terrace yet? Was he witness to our tryst? He must have been, for your story to make sense.”
Miss Winthrop’s glass of sparkling wine, halfway to her mouth, froze in midair. She pursed her lips. “That is a wicked question to ask a woman before dinner has even begun,” she managed, color climbing up her neck.
“I ask many wicked questions.”
“Are they not supposed to teach boys that wickedness is a sin?”
“There were many things I was not taught. More’s the pity for you.”
She turned to face him then, her eyes sharp and trained on him with sudden confidence. “Were you raised in the wild, Your Grace?”
He laughed privately, not wanting to alert the attention of the dinner guests around them.
“Something like that; why not?” He watched her as she brought a grape to her mouth, watched the fruit push past the lips that had once been locked with his.
In a low voice, he asked, “Have you kissed him yet?”
She seemed like she wanted to respond. But whatever she meant to say was lost because, in that same instant, she inhaled sharply, whether from the question or bad luck, and her eyes started bulging.
He wondered what was happening, until she reached for her water, brought it to her mouth, and promptly put it back down again.
“Miss Winthrop?” he asked, heart racing.
She was choking.
The table around them dissolved into confusion as she grabbed her throat and stood. Someone’s chair scraped back. A woman’s voice rose in alarm at the other end of the table.
Gabriel did not think. He was on his feet and behind Rosalie’s chair before he had fully registered himself moving.
One arm locked hard beneath her ribs as he pulled her against him, securing her there.
He pulled once sharply, the length of the table watching in a silence broken only by Rosalie’s ragged, gasping breath as the grape finally came free and fell onto the floor.
For a moment, neither of them moved. His arm was still around her body, her back pressed against his chest. Her breath came in shaking gulps beneath his hand, and the whole dining room had gone silent, thirty pairs of eyes fixed on the Duke of Hartmere with his arms wrapped around Miss Winthrop in front of God, her parents—and Mr. Sinclair.
He did not release her immediately, and he wasn’t sure why.
Her body slotted against his so perfectly it almost killed him.
She was cold from shock. He could feel it through the fabric of her gown.
He released the breath he had been holding and looked down at her, his eyes traveling the length of her neck, the slope of her shoulders.
She had almost died in his arms—a second time, if he counted the fall from the terrace steps.
Except this time, he had not kissed her.
Though he wanted to, very badly, the thought made him sick with hatred for himself and his wickedness.
“I... I am...” Miss Winthrop pulled away the instant breath allowed her, turning in his arms and prying herself out of his hold. Her eyes were bright with tears she was visibly fighting not to shed. “I am all right now. Thank you, Your Grace. I am ... Please, everyone, just...”
“Rosalie...” Lady Winthrop was already storming toward her.
“I must step outside for a moment,” Miss Winthrop said to no one and everyone. She fled the dining room without waiting for permission, her napkin still crumpled in one shaking hand.
Gabriel stood by her empty chair amid the wreckage, acutely aware of Beatrice Levant watching him from across the candles, and he understood with a sinking certainty that whatever was between him and Miss Winthrop was only just beginning.