Marriage Made In Shame(22)
‘I am inclined to agree with you, for James Stanhope has just returned from Baltimore and he swears he never heard Friar’s name or fortune mentioned even once. Strange, one would think, given the importance he accords himself with his land and business dealings there. But perhaps Friar is more than interested in Miss Ashfield’s wealth because his own circumstances are not as rosy as he makes them out to be?’
Gabriel frowned. People lied because they wanted things hidden in order to show themselves in a better light and he’d been long enough in the business of secrets to understand the danger in that.
Could the man hurt Adelaide? He had already tried once at the Harveys’ ball. Could he do so again? Marriages happened for the flimsiest of reasons and scandal had been the cause for more than a few of the hastily arranged betrothals in the ton.
Gabriel did not want Adelaide Ashfield married off to George Friar under a mistake and dragged off into the wilds of the Americas. He wanted her here, to talk with and laugh with, a woman whose conversation he enjoyed and looked forward to with eagerness. Besides that, Frederick Lovelace’s proposal was also something to be considered now.
The arrival at his side of Lucien’s sister had him turning.
‘I have a good friend who would like to meet you, Gabriel. Miss Smithson is new in from the country and she is most adept at riding.’
Smiling, Gabriel straightened the folds of his high cravat and turned to the short blonde-haired woman behind Christine.
* * *
The carriage ride home was slow and laborious. Uncle Alec was quiet in his place by the window, but Frederick Lovelace had not stopped chattering. About the weather and the ball. About the moon and his understanding of space. About the scent that she wore and how it evoked for him a time when he had been young.
Adelaide hoped her uncle or Imelda Harcourt might eventually have told him to be quiet or at least to have filled up some of the space with their own opinions, but they did not, and the dreadful monologue droned on and on uninterrupted until they finally reached the town house.
She refused to allow her mind to turn back to the ballroom and to the last look she had of Gabriel Hughes. All she did was smile, inanely, the muscles at the corner of her mouth frozen into the eternally jovial.
‘I can’t.’
Everything was wrecked and gone. Hope. Joy. Anticipation. When Frederick Lovelace said goodbye she walked quickly up the stairs.
To her room. At last, where she threw herself upon her bed and cried into her pillow, loud noisy sobs stifled by feathers until the slip was damp and cold.
Then she got up and looked at herself in the mirror, the swollen eyes, the broken dreams, the utter sadness of living.
‘This is the bottom,’ she said to herself in a firm and even voice. ‘This is the worst you will ever feel. I promise. It will never again be this bad.’
Gabriel Hughes did not want her. He could not even rouse himself to touch her.
The quiet sound of her heart breaking into a thousand jagged pieces made her close her eyes and simply stand there. Alone.
* * *
The next morning her uncle summoned her to his study.
‘Frederick Lovelace, the Earl of Berrick, has done you the honour of offering marriage, Adelaide. He came expressly to ask for your hand and I must say that my advice would be to consider his proposal carefully as it is probably the very best you will ever receive.’
Adelaide shook her head and sat down, feeling her legs could not carry her own weight. ‘When I came to London, Uncle, I told you that I did not want to be married off to anyone. Those wishes still stand and nothing you say could persuade me otherwise.’
Her uncle was silent for a moment before he crossed to the desk in his library and pulled out an envelope.
‘Read this, child.’
Taking the missive from him, Adelaide was startled to see that the writing was in fact that of her late father’s.
‘John wrote this six months before he died. Our lawyer had insisted we both redo our wills, you see, and so we sat down together and tried to think of all the things we would want to happen should the unthinkable come to pass. Which it did,’ he added and laid a hand across her shoulder.
‘Your father expected you to marry and have your own family and was adamant that I as your guardian should be the one to help you choose. He was most concerned, you see, for many young women are made unhappy by unsuitable husbands and he did not wish this to happen to you. He wanted a wealthy, sensible, honourable and settled suitor. A man who could keep you in the style you were accustomed. If you look down the page a little further, you will see a list of the families John hoped you to form an alliance with. The Lovelaces are upon it, about the third name down.’
‘My answer is still no.’ Her words echoed in the silence of the room.
‘Are there others there, then, that could take your fancy?’
‘There are not.’
‘You haven’t come across one suitor in all the weeks of the Season with whom you might imagine a future with?’
She stayed silent.
‘Then if that is the case, Adelaide, I have failed your father completely. His line shall be pruned into nothingness and lost into the folds of history, for a family tree depends upon regeneration to flourish. If there had been other siblings your choice might have been less important, but there are not. It is only you.’ He poured himself a drink and took a hefty swig of it. ‘I take this lack as my failure and know that my brother will be looking down upon me and thinking that I could have done more for you, should have done more for you.’
She shook her head. ‘You have been a good and loving man, Uncle Alec, and I have felt at home at Northbridge.’
‘Well, I thank you for that, my dear, but such sentiments will not solve this tricky situation. Lord Berrick will be arriving back here after luncheon and I had hoped to have been able to give him the Ashfield family blessing, but I cannot force you into sense. Know at least that I tried to deter you from your poor choice of turning away Frederick Lovelace’s most kind proposal.’
The words her father had written swam before her eyes. Her parents had loved her and tried to protect her, guiding her from the grave to see her settled in the way they desired. And with George Friar’s malevolence simmering unanswered she knew she was walking on dangerous ground.
‘I...just...cannot.’ Her reply was bare and quiet, and, standing, she placed her father’s letter on the table and let herself out of the silent study, hating the deep lines of hurt on her uncle’s brow.
Chapter Eleven
Daniel Wylde came again to visit Gabriel in the early hours of the evening.
‘I saw Frederick Lovelace this morning. He hopes to have some news of a wonderful new development in his life, I think was how he phrased it. He then asked me if I knew Miss Adelaide Ashfield from Sherborne.’
Hell. Hell. Hell.
The anger in Gabriel twisted into regret and then reformed again into fury. Would she do it? Would she marry him just for a place in the world?
‘Lucien said Miss Ashfield looked more than upset after talking with you at the McWilliamses’ ball, Gabriel? Is there some problem between you?’
He shook his head. ‘The fault was completely my own. She is blameless.’
‘Of what?’
I cannot touch a woman without feeling sick.
He actually imagined he might have said the words out loud and his heart began to pound so violently he thought he would fall.
‘God, what is wrong with you, Gabriel? Are you ill?’
Everywhere. All over. Sick to my very soul.
‘It’s the damned Service, isn’t it? Is Adelaide Ashfield involved somehow in an investigation?’
You never loved me in this life, Gabriel, not like I loved you...
Henrietta’s last words before the fire, plaintive, shaking. He still felt her fingers on the pulse at his neck, nails scraping over the bloodline that flowed there, and the world began to fade somehow into a further-away place. It was coming back, his memory, slowly and by small degrees, little pieces of the past fitting into a whole.
‘Sit down before you fall down.’ Daniel manhandled him into the chair by the window, the moonlight silver across his lap. ‘For the life of me, Gabe, I need to understand what the hell is going on with you.
Sitting, he felt better, more able to breathe and think. Betrayal was all mixed up together suddenly, in Henrietta’s neediness and Cressida’s revenge at the ball. Even the British Service’s insistence on a certain persona to confound those in society held the scourge of it. To him as a person, to his life, to his honesty, to the hope of something better and finer and good.
‘After the fire...I lost my way.’
‘The fire in the Ravenshill chapel? The one that killed Henrietta Clements?’
‘I think she wanted to die.’
‘God.’
‘I can’t remember properly, but...’ He could not finish.
‘Rumour has it you were burned. Badly.’
Looking up, Gabriel tried to find the energy to hide all he had been so very careful with. ‘I was. It isn’t pretty.’
‘That’s why you went to the brothels, then, because of the scarring. You didn’t want anyone save the prostitutes to see you like that? Barnsley said you’d been at the Temple of Aphrodite and he wondered if you had said anything of it to me. I told him he must be mistaken because you never used to...’ He stopped momentarily before going on, a new comprehension in his glance. ‘So the body-and-mind discussion of Miss Ashfield’s the other night was more personal than you let on?’