A Matter of Indiscretion

by Jackie Barbosa

  And then that man had died.

  His death should not have come as a surprise. He had been in poor health for years, and the collapse of the Coalition after the defeats at Ulm and Austerlitz had worsened his condition rapidly. Sabine was also of the opinion that the large amount of port he drank on a daily basis on the recommendation of his doctor had precisely the opposite of the desired effect. Nonetheless, she had been unable to convince him to limit himself to two glasses a day—as opposed to his typical minimum of two bottles. Still, he had only been forty-six years old, and so it had come as a surprise.

  And all of this explained why she was here on the morning of her father’s state funeral at Westminster Abbey, dithering over whether it would be appropriate for her to attend or not. Because as things stood, she was no one. What possible reason could a single young woman of no political or personal standing with the premiere have for attending his funeral? Perhaps, given the size of the Abbey and the likely size of the crowd, no one would notice her. But if people did notice, would they also spot the uncanny likeness between her and the deceased? If they did, would tongues wag? Would she be responsible for starting a horrible scandal that would tarnish his name in some way?

  She gave Freddie a look of despair. “I still cannot decide what I should do. I feel as though whatever choice I make, I am likely to regret it. And I do not wish for you and your husband to gain notoriety if anyone who sees me realizes I might be related to the Pitts. I have read enough of the Society pages in the Times to know that would not be pretty for you.”

  Freddie shook her head, jostling the dark brown ringlets that framed her face, and laughed. “If you had read enough of the Society pages in the Times, you would know Conrad and I are already notorious. Well, not so much Conrad as me, but he is notorious for putting up with my hoydenish ways. You should have seen what they said about me when I climbed that tree in Hyde Park to rescue a young boy who’d got stuck there. You would think every lady doesn’t occasionally wear men’s clothes beneath a pelisse when the weather is cold. But perhaps they do not realize how much warmer it is!”

  Sabine’s smile was wobbly but real. Her friend truly was incorrigible, but that was why Sabine loved her. She could just imagine the gossip that particular incident must have spurred.

  “In any event,” Freddie went on, waving a hand, “after the stir that caused, you certainly needn’t worry that Conrad and I cannot weather any storm that erupts. You should make the decision purely based on your own feelings. Do you wish to attend, or don’t you? We will support you either way.”

  And just like that, a lump crowded Sabine’s throat and tears collected in the corners of her eyes, gratitude at Freddie’s unwavering loyalty and anguish over her own indecision crowding out any amusement she had felt just moments before. She really wished she could stop careening from emotion to emotion like a Dionysian maenad, but it was impossible to maintain any stability when she was not even sure what she felt about her father’s death.

  In the time since she had arrived in England, she and Pitt had spent no more a handful of days in one another’s company. He was, after all, incredibly busy in London with matters of state, while she had been settling into her new home in the country. How was she supposed to grieve the death of a man she had scarcely known but had imagined she one day might know very well? And which would she regret more: going to the funeral and possibly drawing unwanted attention? Or not going and wondering if she had missed something that might give her more clarity about her own feelings?

  How on earth could she know?

  At least when she and Thomas had parted, she had known how she felt. And wasn’t it ironic that she had spent more time with him in less than two weeks than she had in ten whole months with the man who had fathered her?

  Exasperated with herself, she rolled her eyes up at the decorative moldings that graced the ceiling and sighed. “That is just the problem. I can’t decide.”

  “You should go.”

  At first, Sabine thought the male voice behind her must belong to Conrad, Freddie’s husband and Thomas’s elder brother.

  When she had first met Conrad, she had seen the family resemblance between the two men immediately, even though they did not look particularly alike. Where Thomas had fair coloring and finely etched features, his older brother was darker and rougher, as though God had made them from the same basic plan, but had rushed Conrad through without quite putting on the finishing touches and then over-baked him in the oven. But the first time she had heard Conrad speak, she realized she would have known they were brothers even if they had not shared a single physical feature in common. From the timbre of their voices to the rhythm of their speech—at least in English; Conrad’s French was not nearly as refined as Thomas’s—to certain turns of phrase, they sounded so alike that sometimes, if she closed her eyes when Conrad was talking, she could almost imagine it was Thomas in the room.

  Almost, but not quite. The differences were subtle, but she could hear them. And this male voice was not Conrad Pearce’s.

  She whirled to face the source of the voice, certain who she would see before her gaze found him. “Thomas!”

  He stood just inside the doorway between the first floor sitting room and the corridor, perhaps eight feet from her. Clad in black breeches, black tailcoat, and a grey velvet waistcoat, he looked breathtakingly elegant yet somber. His hair was much shorter than it had been when she’d left him on the dock at Le Havre, the severity of the cut emphasizing the familiar angles and curves of his handsome face. He looked older to her, not physically, but in some other intangible way. As if, in the time they had been parted, he had truly and irrevocably grown up. But war could do that to a man, even if the man in question never saw action on the front line.

  The expression on his face took her breath away: joy, desire, love and a hint of uncertainty. As though he was not quite certain she would welcome his return.

  How could he doubt that?

  Sabine flew into his embrace, or it felt as if she did. If her feet touched the floor, she was unaware of it. All she knew was that one second, she was standing alone in the middle of the faded carpet, and the next, she was pressed against Thomas’s warm, broad chest.

  His relief was palpable as he closed his arms around her. She twined her arms around his neck and rose up on her toes. When his lips closed over hers—hot and searching—she groaned with satisfaction. She had dreamt of his return a thousand times, conjured this moment in her imagination a thousand more, but this time, he was real and solid and here. She knew, because never—not even in her most vivid fantasies—had she been able to feel that hard heat of his body molded to hers or taste the salty sweetness of his mouth with her tongue or smell the mint and clove and honey scent of him.

  Oh, how she had missed him. Missed this. Nothing mattered but that he had come back to her and was kissing her as if both their lives depended on it. Which they very well might. She was sure now that she had not drawn a full breath in eleven months, that she had been gasping for air all this time without realizing it. The fact that his kisses were making her even more breathless and dizzy was only evidence of how deprived she had been.

  Someone behind Thomas cleared his throat. “This is all very touching,” a basso voice rumbled in sardonic amusement, “but at this rate, Sabine will not have to decide whether to attend the funeral, because we will have already missed it.”

  Conrad.

  Sabine and Thomas sprang apart like guilty children.

  Her cheeks flaming with embarrassment at having put on such a public display of private emotion in front of her best friend and Thomas’s older brother, Sabine strove to gain her composure. As rational thought returned, insight struck and with it, betrayal. She turned and pointed an accusatory finger at Freddie. “Why did you not tell me he was here?”

  Her friend opened her mouth to answer but was cut off by Thomas’s gentle words. “She didn’t know. I got in very late last night, so late that until I saw Conrad in
the hall a few minutes ago, no one but the footman who was up when I arrived knew I was here. And I asked her not to tell you that I was trying to be here in time for the funeral, because I did not want you to be disappointed if I did not make it.”

  Sabine blinked. “Oh. I am sorry, Freddie.”

  Cheery as ever, Freddie grinned. “Happy to see him, are you?”

  Oh, yes. Yes. She had never been happier in her life. Except…what did it mean? “So, you came for the funeral?”

  The direct question, “Are you home for good?” failed to exit her throat, because she feared the answer. If it was no, she might not ever breathe properly again.

  “Yes,” he said, “and to request for a transfer to the London office for the duration of my service with the Foreign Office.”

  Her heart fluttered with hope. “Do you think you will get it?”

  He dragged her back into his arms again and brushed her lips across his forehead. “I can’t make any promises, but I believe the odds are good. My superior in Lisbon wrote a letter to the Foreign Secretary indicating that he felt my talents were wasted in a posting where I only had to speak one foreign language every day, and that I would be of more use to the crown if I were in a position that required me to exercise the full range of my abilities. And there is the little matter of securing your safety now that your father can no longer do so.”

  Sabine raised her eyebrows at that. “But…why would my safety be at issue now?”

  “Because the very fact that you escaped France before you could be arrested suggests that you were cooperating with the British spies and the French resistance, just as your uncle alleged. If Bonaparte or, more likely, Fouchet, thinks he can get his hands on you to wring information from you, he might be motivated to try.”

  “And you hope to be assigned to protect me?”

  Thomas huffed a wry laugh and shook his head. “No. I hope to convince the Foreign Secretary that if we are married, he will not have to assign anyone to protect you, as I will be doing it at no charge to the government. Lord Harrowby is a practical man when it comes to the crown’s purse.”

  If we are married.

  Her heart stuttered to a hard, clutching stop before resuming its rhythm. Rapidly. “Are you asking me to marry you?”

  “Do I have to ask?”

  “No,” she admitted. “You know my answer.”

  He leaned in close and whispered in her ear so neither his brother nor sister-in-law could hear him. “I love you, and I will find a way to be with you. One way or another.” Then he lifted his head and said, “Now, I believe we have a funeral to attend.”

  Epilogue

  Sabine Marie Rousseau and Thomas Chadwick Pearce were married by special license three weeks later in St. Mark's Church in Swindon. The groom's childhood friend and current vicar of Grange-Over-Sands, Walter Langston, officiated the ceremony, which was attended by the groom's brother and sister-in-law, the vicar's wife, the Foreign Secretary, the bride’s paid companion, and a brooding gentleman by the name of George Brunell. There was not a dry eye in the house.

  After the ceremony, the party repaired to the bride's country home, Elmsley House, for the wedding breakfast. There they were joined by a few families from several neighboring properties, as well as by the bride's head groomsman—of the equine variety, not the husbandly variety—Monsieur Fabron, who had arrived from La Perche in the company of Mr. Brunell just three days earlier.

  As the festivities dragged on from midmorning into midafternoon, with none of the guests showing any particular signs of flagging, Thomas drew his wife into one corner of the noisy dining room for a moment of privacy.

  His wife. Oh, how he liked the sound of that!

  “Do you think they will ever leave?” he asked a little plaintively.

  “Most of them are not leaving at all,” she pointed out with a laugh. “Everyone but my neighbors either lives here or is staying the night.”

  Thomas groaned. “I have scarcely seen you in the past three weeks, and when I have seen you, between Freddie and Conrad and that infernal Mrs. Poole, we are never alone. I thought getting married was going to change that, but I see I have been sold a bill of goods.”

  “Do you want an annulment?” she teased, her bright blue eyes sparkling with amusement.

  “I want,” he growled near her ear, “to take my wife to bed.”

  “La, sir, are you mad?” She tapped him lightly on the shoulder by way of playful remonstration. “It is the middle of the day.”

  Heedless of anyone who might be watching them, he caught her around the waist and hauled her close until the ridge of his erection pressed tightly against her abdomen. “I am mad,” he said, nuzzling her neck. “For you.”

  Sabine melted into him with a sigh. “I know. But we can hardly just disappear on everyone. What will they think?”

  “At this point, I do not care. We are married. They can think what they like. It probably won’t be half as much as we get up to.”

  Her cheeks turned pink, but she didn’t try to pull away. Instead, she turned her head and whispered in his ear, “Our room is at the end of the hall on the left. Give me a few minutes to slip away and meet me there. If anyone asks, say you are going in search of me. It will have the benefit of being true.” Then, with a brush of her lips on his, she slid from his arms and floated away in a whisper of pale blue silk that sounded like a secret.

  It took Thomas longer than he expected to escape the dining room. People—some he knew and a few he didn’t—kept intercepting him to shake his hand, to congratulate him, and in one case, to ask him when he could be expected to return to work in the London office. Lord Harrowby being his boss, Thomas could hardly demur and escape, so he gave the man a detailed accounting of his plans for the next few weeks. When he finally managed to break free, he overheard Freddie and Walter’s wife, Artemisia, remarking on Sabine’s prolonged absence. If he didn’t break free before they caught up with him, he would have no choice but to find her and bring her back down. Freddie was not to be gainsaid.

  Fortunately, he was near enough to the foyer that he managed to duck out before the women could waylay him in the crowd. Grateful that the modest proportions of the home Sabine had bought for herself meant any gathering of more than a dozen or so people made the space difficult to navigate, he darted up the stairs before anyone could follow him. When he finally opened the door she had indicated belonged to her—now their—bedchamber, he found her sitting in a window seat, gazing out at the rolling green landscape.

  Still clad in the blue silk gown she’d worn to the wedding, she turned to look at him as he entered. “I was beginning wonder if you got lost,” she teased, “but it is not that a large house.”

  Closing the door, he reached up and tugged to loosen his cravat. “It is harder than you would think to escape from a small room when it is full of people. Especially when one of them is your boss.” He unwrapped the length of white fabric from around his neck and frowned at her. “Why are you still wearing that dress?”

  Not that he objected to the gown, in and of itself. It was, in fact, quite beautiful. Or, more accurately, she was beautiful and the dress wore her well. Simple and elegant, with a scooped bodice that cupped her breasts in a manner he rather envied, the gown definitely benefitted from the generous curves of her body and the luminous color of her skin.

  And he wanted her out of it.

  She rose from the window seat in a fluid motion. “Once I was ready to leave for the church, I gave Finchley the rest of the day off.” Then she turned so her back was to him, displaying the long row of small pearly buttons running down along her spine. “But as you can see, I cannot get out of this on my own.”

  Thomas glared at the fiddly-looking buttons, which he would have had trouble with even if he weren’t burning to have her. A year. It had been almost a year since that last night in Rouen, and it would take another year to unhook those damned buttons. “I could just rip it off you,” he suggested helpfully.

>   She snorted. “You absolutely will not. This is not even my dress. It is Freddie’s. She lent it to me after reviewing my wardrobe and declaring I had absolutely nothing appropriate to get married in.”

  That sounded like Freddie. She might prefer wearing breeches under her pelisse—Thomas had had that particular story from her own lips the day it had happened—but she had a surprisingly good eye for which pelisses were most fashionable and appropriate for any occasion, and that eye extended to clothing for other occasions. And she would most definitely not be pleased if he left one of her best gowns in ruins. “I would have married you if you’d been wearing a burlap sack,” he groused and then sighed with resignation. He was just going to have to undo the buttons himself. He tossed his cravat onto the window seat. “Come here.”

  The smile that lit her face was half apologetic, half sultry. “I really did not consider the problem of the buttons until I got here,” she admitted.

  “I don’t mind,” he lied, but it was only a small lie. He minded the delay, not the task itself. Although, to be truthful, his eagerness to have her made his fingers clumsier than they ought to have been, and the buttons were slipperier than he anticipated. At one point, about midway down, he gave serious thought to risking the wrath of Freddie and simply yanking the two halves apart, but managed to restrain himself.

  When the dress finally fell away from her torso, she stepped out of it, revealing her short stays and chemise. Still too much clothing, but a considerable improvement. She stooped to retrieve the gown from the floor, giving him a tantalizing view of the plump curve of her arse before she straightened and crossed to the wardrobe to return the garment to a hanger propped over the open door. Thomas spied several dresses he recognized, including the plain woolen frocks she wore when caring for her horses and the dark green traveling dress she had worn several times on the way to Paris.

  Once she had hung the gown to her satisfaction, she turned back to him and said, “Now I believe it is you who is wearing far too many clothes.”