Marriage Made In Shame(4)

‘I should like to call upon you on the morrow if I may, Miss Ashfield.’

He looked as serious as she had ever seen another look. Would he be showing his hand as a suitor? Pray God, she hoped not, but when he squeezed her fingers and looked intently at her she knew that such a wish was false.

‘You are a sensible girl, well endowed with a brain and the ability to use it.’

She smiled, hating her pasted-on joviality with an ache. She could never before remember playing people so false than here in London.

‘My mother, the countess, would like you.’

The music stopped just as she thought she might burst into laughter and Lord Berrick could do nothing but escort her back to her chaperon.

For once the frowns of Lady Harcourt were reassuring and Adelaide took her hand.

‘You are tired, Aunt. Perhaps we might leave?’

The older lady failed to hide the relief that flooded into her eyes as she leant upon her charge and they threaded through the crowded room to the exit.

* * *

Gabriel dreamed that night of colourful dresses and tuneful waltzes, and of a woman in his arms on the dance floor smelling of lemon and hope. Her dark hair was loose and her eyes mirrored the hue of the flowers the greenery around them was bedecked with.

But something was wrong. The ease of the dream turned into worry. He must not kiss her. She would know otherwise. He needed to find some distance from the softness of her touch, a way of leaving without causing question. But she was stuck to him like a spider’s web, clinging and cold, and the only way to be rid of her was to push her down and down until she lay still beneath the marbled font of the destroyed wooden chapel, the smell of sulphur on the glowing fabric of her gown and her feet bare.

Henrietta Clements morphed from Adelaide Ashfield, the blonde of her hair pinked with blood.

He tried to shout, but no words came, tried to run, too, but his feet could not move and the burning ache on his upper right thigh pulled him from sleep into the cold and grey light of dawn.

He could barely breathe, his whole body stiffened in fright and the anger that hung quiet in the daytime now full blooded and red.

Henrietta had come to him out of fear, he knew that. Her husband was purportedly involved in helping to fund Napoleon’s push into Europe and Gabriel had been tailing Randolph Clements for a month or so in an effort to find out more. The Service had had word of the man’s close connections with others in London who held radical views and they wanted to see just whom he associated with.

A simple target. An easy mark. But the small notice he had allowed Henrietta Clements had changed into something else, something he should have recognised as dangerous from the very start.

He laughed, but the sound held no humour whatsoever. Since the fire Randolph Clements had gone to ground, hiding in the wilds of the northern borders, he supposed, or perhaps he had taken ship to France. It didn’t matter much any more. If Clements wanted to exact revenge for the death of his wife, Gabriel would have almost welcomed it, an ending to the sorry saga that his life had now become.

The fire at Ravenshill had ruined him, completely, any intimacy and want for feminine company crouched now amongst pain and fury and sacrifice.

He’d broken hearts and promises for years whilst cutting a swathe through the capricious wants of unhappily married wives. Information to protect a country at war could be gathered in more ways than one might imagine and he done his patriotic duty without complaint.

The rumours that circled around about him had helped as he gathered intelligence whilst a sated paramour lay asleep. It was easy to sift his way through the contents of a husband’s desk or safe or sabretache without prying eyes, and the danger of stepping into the lair of the enemy had been a great part of the enjoyment.

Until Henrietta Clements.

As he perceived his hand stroking the damaged skin on his right thigh he stopped and touched the silver-and-gold ring he had bought three months ago from the jewellers, Rundell and Bridges, in Ludgate Hill.

‘The symbol engraved upon the circle is Christian, my lord, and of course the word engraved is Latin. Fortuna. Lady luck, and who cannot do with a piece of that.’

The salesman was an earnest young man Gabriel had not seen in the shop before and seemed to have a bent for explaining the spiritual. ‘Luck is, of course, received from the faith a believer entrusts in it, for a talisman is only strong when there is that sense of conviction. We have other clients who swear by the advantages they have received. The safe birth of a babe. The curing of a badly broken arm. A cough that is finally cured after months of sleepless nights.’

The ability to make love again?

Did he believe? Gabriel thought. Could he afford not to? Once he would have laughed at such nonsense, but for now he was catching at rainbows and hope with all the fervour of the newly converted. He had paid a fortune for the questionable assistance and had worn it ever since. He wondered momentarily if he should not just snatch the trinket from his finger and throw it into the Thames, for twelve weeks with no sign at all of any inherent powers was probably a fairly conclusive sign of its lack of potency.

Yet hope held him to the wearing of it, even though his own condition had not changed one whit for the better.

* * *

It was a week later, despite all his attempts at desiring otherwise, that Gabriel Hughes finally accepted the fact that he was impotent.

He looked down at his flagging member in the darkened room off Grey Street and thought that this was where life had brought him. An ironic twist. An unwanted mockery of fate.

The woman in the bed was beautiful, bountiful and sweet—a country girl with the combination of dewy sensibleness and a sultry sensuality burning to be ignited. She sat there watching him, a clean and embroidered chemise the only thing covering her, a quiet smile on unpainted lips.

‘I thought my first customer might be old and ugly, sir. I had wondered if I should even be able to do what my aunt has bidden me to, but I can see that this job is likely to be a lot less difficult than my old one. I worked in a weaving mill, you see, but it closed down. It was me and a hundred other girls and the light hurt my eyes and we were never allowed to just stop. Not like this, sir. Never like this. Never on our backs in the warmth and with a glass of good wine for the drinking.’

‘You are a virgin, then?’ His heart sank at all such a state would imply.

She shook her head. ‘Mary said I was to say I was ’cos the coinage is better that way, but I go to church on Sundays, sir, and could not abide by the lie.’

Gabriel was glad for this fact at least. The first time should be special for every woman. He believed that absolutely.

‘My Jack went and died on me before we were married. He got sick one day and was taken the next. It was just lucky that I did not catch the worst of it though I was ill for a good many weeks after.’

The barrage of information ran into the room with an ease that held him still and listening. For the first time in a long while Gabriel did not wish to be away from the company of a half-naked woman with such desperation. Even the roiling nausea seemed to settle with her words, the information comforting somehow.

‘Mam said I should come to London to her sister, who was doing more than well.’ She shook her brown curls and laughed. ‘I don’t think she realises exactly what it is Aunt Mary is up to, but, with little other in the way of paying work back home, I agreed to come in and try it. We haven’t yet though, have we?’ And, with colourful language, she went on to say just what it was they hadn’t yet done.

Gabriel turned towards the window. The phrases she used were coarse, but the talk was relaxing him. Perhaps such candour was what kept the blood from his ears and his breath even. Small steps in the right direction. Tiny increments back to a healing. If he could only stop thinking and do the deed once...

Reality brought his attention to the problem before him as he looked down. Flaccid. Unmoving. The scar tissue on his right thigh and groin in the light from the window was brutal and he pulled his breeches up.

But she was off the bed in a flash, one warm hand clutching his arm. ‘Can you stay for a while, sir? Only a little while so that...’ She stopped as though trying to formulate what she wanted to say next.

‘So your aunt will think you at least earned your keep?’

‘Exactly that, sir, and it is nice here talking with you. You smell good, too.’

He laughed at this and removed her hand. Sitting here was not the agony he had imagined after the fiasco in the Temple of Aphrodite and he gestured to her to pour more wine, which she did, handing it to him with a smile. His beaker was chipped on one side so he turned it around.

‘Jack used to say we would be married with a dozen children before we knew it and look what happened to him. Life is like a game of chess, I’d be thinking. One moment you are winning everything and the next you are wiped off the board.’

‘You play chess?’

‘I do, sir. My father taught me when I were little. He was a mill worker, too, you understand, but a gent once taught him the rudiments of the game in a tavern out of Styal in Cheshire and he never forgot it. I have my board and pieces with me. We could play if you like? To waste a bit of time?’

The wine was cheap, but the room was warm and as the girl brought her robe off of a hook and wrapped it around herself, Gabriel breathed out.