by Sophia James
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.
Little steps, he reiterated to himself. Little tiny steps. And this was the first.
* * *
An hour later after a close game Gabriel extracted a golden guinea from his pocke
t and gave it to her. ‘For your service, Sarah, and for your kindness.’
Bringing the coin between perfectly white teeth, she bit down upon it. Still young enough not to have lost them, still innocent enough to imagine that gold might be a cure for the dissolution of morality. A trade-off that at this point in her life still came down on the black side of credit. God, he muttered to himself as he grabbed his jacket.
Henrietta Clements had been the same once. Hopeful and blindly trusting.
He brought out his card from a pocket and laid it down on the lumpy straw mattress. ‘Can you read?’
She shook her head.
‘If you ever want to escape this place, find someone who can, then, and send word to me for help. I could find you more...respectable work.’
She was off of the bed in a moment, the scent of her skin pungent and sharp as she threaded her arms about his neck.
‘If you lay down, I’d do all the work, sir. Like a gift to you seeing as you have been so nice and everything.’
Full lips closed over his and Gabriel could feel an earnest innocence. The pain of memory lanced over manners as he pushed her back.
‘No.’ A harsher sound than he meant, with things less hidden.
‘You won’t be calling again?’ Sarah made no attempt at hiding her disappointment. ‘Not even for another game of chess?’
‘I’m afraid I won’t.’ The words were stretched and quick, but as manners laced through reason he added others. ‘But thank you. For everything.’
Chapter Three
The stone was cold, rubbed smooth with the echoes of time. He had tried to reach her, through the tapestries of Christ under thorns, but the choking smoke had stopped him, the only sound in his ears the one of a ghastly silence.
His dagger was in his fist, wrapped around anger, the Holy Water knocked from its place on the pulpit and falling on to marble pocked with time. The spectre of death had him, even as he reached for Henrietta, the trickle of red running down his fingers and her eyes lifeless.
* * *
Gabriel woke with the beat of his heart loud in his ears and his hands gripping the sheets beneath him.
The same bloody dream, never in time, never quick enough to save her. He cursed into fingers cradled across his mouth, hard harsh words with more than a trace of bitterness within as his eyes went to the timepiece on the mantel.
Six o’clock. An hour’s sleep at least. Better than some nights, worse than others. Already the first birds were calling and the working city moved into action. The street vendors with their words and their incantations. ‘Milk maids below.’ ‘Four for sixpence, mackerel.’ The heavier sound of a passing carriage drowned them out.
Unexpectedly the image of the water-blue eyes of Miss Adelaide Ashfield came to mind, searing through manners and propriety on the seat at the edge of the Bradfords’ ballroom as she cursed about her ten more weeks.
Where did she reside in London? he wondered. With her uncle in his town house on Grosvenor Square or in the home of Lady Harcourt? Did she frequent many of the ton’s soirées or was she choosy in her outings?
Swearing under his breath, he rose. He had no business to be thinking of her; she would be well counselled to stay away from him and as soon as he had caught those who were helping Clements in his quest for Napoleon’s ascendency he, too, would be gone.
The society mamas were more circumspect with him now, the failing family fortune common knowledge and the burned-out shell of the Wesley seat of Ravenshill Manor unattended. His father had squandered most of what had been left to them after his grandfather’s poor management, and Gabriel had been trying to consolidate the Wesley assets ever since. The bankers no longer courted him, neither did the businessmen wanting the backing of old family money to allow them an easy access to ideas. It would only be a matter of time before society turned its back altogether.
But he’d liked talking with Adelaide Ashfield from Dorset. This truth came from nowhere and he smiled. God, the unusual and prickly débutante was stealing his thoughts and he did not even want to stop and wonder why.
She reminded him of a time in his life when things had been easier, he supposed, when conflict could be settled with the use of his fists and when he had gone to bed at midnight and slept until well past the dawn.
What would happen after the allotted ten weeks? Would her uncle allow her to simply slip back into the country with her fortune intact, unmarried and free?
His eyes rested upon the gold locket draped on the edge of an armoire to one side of the window.
The bauble had been Henrietta’s. She had left it here the last time she had come to see him and he had kept it after her death. For safekeeping or a warning—the reminder of love in lost places and frozen seconds? For the memory of why a close relationship would never again be something that he might consider? He had tried to remember how the fire in the chapel had begun, but every time he did so there was a sense of something missing.
For a while he imagined it might have been he who had started it, but subsequently he had the impression of other hands busy with that very purpose. Hers? Her husband’s? The men they associated with? The only thing Gabriel was certain of was the hurt and the stab of betrayal that had never left him.
But perhaps he and Miss Adelaide Ashfield were more alike than he thought? Perhaps she had been hurt, too, by someone, by falsity, by promise. It was not often, after all, that a young and beautiful girl held such an aversion to marriage and stated it so absolutely.
He would like to meet her again just to understand what it was that she wanted. The Harveys were holding a ball this very evening and perhaps the Penbury party had the intention of going? He had heard that Randolph Clements’s cousin George Friar might be in attendance and wanted to get a measure of the man. Wealthy in his own right, the American had been staying with the Clements for a good while now, but some said he was a man who held his own concealments and darkness.
The inlaid gold on his ring glinted in the light and Gabriel frowned as he recited the Anglican prayer of resurrection beneath his breath. Turning the circle of gold and silver against his skin, he positioned it so that the inlaid cross faced upwards.
Fortuna.
He suddenly felt that he had lost the hope of such a thing a very long time ago.
* * *
Arriving at the Harveys’ ball later than he meant to, the first person Gabriel met was his friend Daniel Wylde, the Earl of Montcliffe, with Lucien Howard, the Earl of Ross, at his side.
‘I am only down from Montcliffe for a few days, Gabe, trying to complete a deal on the progeny of a particularly fine pair of greys I own.’
Gabriel’s interest was piqued. ‘The Arabian beauties that were standing at Tattersall’s a year or so back? The ones that caused a stir before they were pulled from auction.’
‘The very same. Perhaps you might be interested in a foal for the Ravenshill stables?’ Lucien Howard’s voice was threaded with an undercurrent of question.
‘My means are about as shaky as your own are rumoured to be, Luce. I doubt I could afford to feed another horse, let alone buy one.’
Daniel Wylde laughed heartily before any more could be said. ‘Find a wife, then, who is both beautiful and rich. That’s your answer.’
‘Like you did?’
‘Well, in all truth, she found me...’
The small and round Miss Greene and her younger sister chose that moment to walk past and gaze in Gabriel’s direction. He had stood up with her in a dance earlier in the Season as a favour to their bountifully blessed aunt and the girls had seemed to search him out at each ensuing function.
A plethora of other ladies milled around behind them, each one seemingly younger than the next. And then to one corner he noticed Miss Adelaide Ashfield. Tonight she was adorned in gold silk, the rich shade making her h
air look darker and her skin lighter.
She was laughing at something the girl beside her had said though at that very moment she looked up and caught Gabriel’s glance. From this distance he could see something in her eyes that drew out much more in his expression than he wanted to show. With shock he broke the contact, his heart hammering.
Not sexual, but an emotion far more risky. He almost swore, but a footman chose that exact moment to pass by with an assortment of drinks on a silver tray.
The liquor slid across panic and soothed it. He saw the question that passed between Montcliffe and Ross, but he turned away, the card room as good a place as any to drown his sorrows.
‘If you will excuse me, I might try my hand at a game of whist.’
‘But a waltz is about to begin, Gabe, and the girl in gold in that corner looks as though she would welcome a dance.’
He left saying nothing though the sound of their laughter followed him for a good many yards.
George Friar was not yet here. He’d hoped to have a word with him, not to warn him off exactly, but to allow the colonial to understand the danger of becoming involved in political intrigues against England. Still, Gabriel was prepared to wait, and it was early.
* * *
A hundred pounds later Gabriel acknowledged his mind was not on the game and cashed in his chips.
‘Thank you, gentlemen, but that is me out for the evening.’
Francis St Cartmail pulled his substantial winnings over in front of him. ‘Are you sure you will not stay, Gabriel? I could do with as much as you can lose.’
For the first time that evening Gabriel smiled as if he meant it. ‘Daniel and Luce are out there somewhere. Get them to sit down with you.’
The other shook his head. ‘Ross is skint and Montcliffe is a responsible married man. He spends his extra on the horses he sees with potential and, by God, he is doing well with it, too.’