The Secret Love of a Gentleman

by Jane Lark

  She pressed a hand over his shoulder as she stood beside him, her eyes telling him he ought to take some laudanum to relieve the pain. He did not. He was glad to be free of the drug and its numbness. He was not comfortable with hiding in oblivion. He would face this and he would survive and heal—and have revenge.

  When his father arrived with his uncle later, Rob was still sitting up, leaning back on the pillows. “Your mother says you are feeling a little better.”

  Rob nodded and smiled. “Yes, a little.”

  “Your friends were asking after you. They caught us as I walked out of White’s. I was not sure what to say.”

  Rob had not even thought of them, of how they would take his disappearance.

  “They are concerned about you,” his uncle said. “I had not realised what a sound group of young men you have as friends.”

  “I told them you are well and that you have been staying out of town, fulfilling some duty for me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “They asked if it was to do with the availability of a seat?” His father’s eyebrows lifted.

  Rob did not comment.

  “Mary keeps asking after you in her letters—”

  “Do not tell her.” He gripped his father’s arm.

  “I have not, Robbie, but she is worried by your silence too.”

  The thought of Mary brought forth thoughts of Caro. Rob shut his eyes and shut his father and his uncle out, along with the pain and the past.

  “I only wish Henry would choose his friends as wisely as you have, Robbie.” Robert was merely being kind.

  A chair was moved closer to the bed and someone sat down. Rob opened his eyes to see his father sitting there. His uncle crossed the room and then leant against the windowsill.

  Rob’s father held Rob’s left hand. “We have told the family that your mother and I are here to help Jane. They think she is unwell. We have told the children she is too unwell to cope with a houseful and your cousins are staying at John’s. So you may see what a web of lies you have had us spinning.”

  “I’m sorry.” His father’s grip loosened and Rob pulled his hand free. “What of Drew and Mary?” What of Caro? He’d been dying to ask, but he’d not dared. He did not even know how to speak of her without feeling cut.

  “Mary and Drew have gone home. They left the day we came here and John has not queried our tale, he is too busy.”

  “I’m sorry I have taken you from the others.”

  “Helen and Jenny are there to take care of the younger ones and we have called in on them frequently, twice a day, so they do not feel deserted and of course there is excitement over having their cousins there.”

  “But, nevertheless, I’m sorry. I would not have taken all of your attention by choice.”

  “Rob, you are entitled to it. You are my son too. It does not matter that you are grown. We will always be here when you need us.”

  Rob shook his head a little. The younger ones needed them more. “Did Caro go with Mary and Drew?” How is she?

  His father’s eyebrows lifted as he nodded. “Anyway, I did not come to speak of your brothers and sisters. I came to speak of you. Your uncle and I have a proposal for you. Robert agrees with me about that property. It is the perfect option for you.”

  Rob closed his eyes. Their conversation at Windsor seemed a lifetime ago. He’d been a different man then.

  “Hear us out,” his father said.

  “Do not think that I am offering you charity,” his uncle stated. “I am not. If you take the tenancy you will have to pay the rent from the income you earn from the farms, and keep the property in good condition. Think of it as a business venture. If you manage the estate well, you will be able to make a profit and give your brother back his allowance. I know that will interest you.”

  It did. But. Rob opened his eyes and looked at his uncle. He had denied their help a hundred times, and yet for the past three weeks he’d been completely reliant upon his uncle’s hospitality and kindness. He should be honest and talk of his true plans. If they tried to interfere he would simply ask them not to.

  Uncle Robert smiled.

  “Although I cannot for the life of me understand why you are so bloody stubborn on that point,” Rob’s father said. “I cannot see why you must fight so hard to be equal to your brother and your cousins.”

  “Because I am not equal,” Rob breathed in an impatient voice, looking at his father. I am inferior. But even though inferiority may have been the beginning it was not the end; it had sparked his idealistic notions, which he hoped one day would make a difference to many people in need of a way to change their lives for the better.

  “No. You are a hundred times better than your cousins,” his uncle stated. “I wish Henry had a half of your self-possession and conscience. I have faith one day he will grow out of this wild stage, but you, Edward has never needed to hope because you are a man with morals.” His uncle laughed then, a deep sound from low in his throat. “Like your father.”

  Rob’s father laughed too. “Well, equally, if Henry is like you, you shall be waiting until he is thirty for the moment that he learns the error of his ways.”

  Uncle Robert smiled at Rob’s father. “I cannot see why you do not understand your son. I remember you bristling when I returned from the continent, so damned restless because I’d taken the responsibility away from you.” He looked at Rob. “He was not that much older than you, four and twenty and seething at the prospect of being left adrift with no responsibility unless he answered to me. So, you are not so different from your father. He ought to understand. Fortunately for me, he met your mother then and that was that. He had his own property and the arrival of your sister to occupy his mind.”

  Rob smiled. The moments he looked forward to most here were the hours his father and his uncle sat with him and spoke to each other. He’d never listened to them when they were alone without children to interrupt them. It had given him a new insight into his father.

  “Admittedly,” his father added, laughing again, “I did not like taking your grandfather’s money for your mother either. In fact the first time he offered it, I ripped his cheque up.” Uncle Robert laughed and amusement stirred in Rob’s chest, but it made him cough and the pain from his ribs tore across his chest.

  “Lie back. Do not laugh,” his father stated dryly. “The difference between me and you is that I have common-sense. I knew I had to keep your mother and John, and therefore it would have been foolish pride to refuse his money.” The point was made with a look that said Rob suffered with foolish pride. “You may wish to think harder about the opportunity your uncle is offering you.”

  Rob breathed out, fighting the pain in his chest, but he wished to speak the truth to his father. “There is an opportunity I have wished to pursue for ages. I have not spoken of it because I knew you, and everyone else, would wish to interfere and I wanted to achieve it without help. I think it important—”

  “Robbie—”

  “Let me explain, you will understand. I wish to hold a seat in the House of Commons, and not because I have foolish pride, Papa, but because I want to make a difference for those who are less fortunate in this country. I have joined the Whig party, I have made connections already, I simply need an income to support me in order to throw my hat into the ring to win a seat, and then I will need a living that will enable me to attend the House.”

  His father shook his head, but he was smiling slightly.

  “I cannot speak out for the poor, Papa, if I am living on John and have been helped into my position in government by my rich, aristocratic family. How would that seem to the men and women I want to speak out for?”

  Uncle Robert lifted his weight from the windowsill. “I’ll leave you two in peace. You have weeks to make up your mind about my property, Rob, I will not let the tenancy to anyone until I know if you want it, and as I said before, you have my respect.” His uncle smiled in parting.

  Once his uncle had left, his father s
aid. “That aim is commendable, Robbie.”

  “I am not ruling out Uncle Robert’s property. I had decided to rent a farm anyway. It is a living that would suit my needs. I see no issue with it being on Uncle Robert’s land. But I wish wherever I settle to be in a place where I will be amongst those who I wish to speak for. I would need to find out if there is a seat there I might win.”

  His father looked as though he did not know how to answer, and his eyes glistened in the sunlight as he reached out and held Rob’s hand for a moment. “Then I will cease interfering for now. But perhaps you will allow me to find out from Robert if there are any seats to be won in that area soon.”

  Rob nodded. He was out of breath and the pain from his ribs lanced through his chest, but beneath the pain was relief. He was glad that he’d shared this with his father, even though the whole idea now felt hollow without Caro’s presence in it.

  “I’ve checked on your horses several times and I’ve told the grooms to exercise them regularly. It will be weeks before you can climb up into a curricle.”

  Rob sighed, looking up at the ornate plaster on the ceiling.

  “I also called at your apartment and collected your post. It is mostly letters your friends have put through the door, seeking to contact you, but there are also two letters from Mary.” He withdrew them from an inside pocket and dropped them on the bed, beside Rob’s thigh. “You may read them when you are alone.”

  Rob looked at them, picked them up with his left hand and noted those from Mary, then set them on the chest beside the bed, his heart thumping, in a sharp beat, even at the prospect of hearing news of Caro. Their relationship was not over for him. He doubted it would ever be over. He would always feel a jolt of awareness when he heard her name.

  “What happened, Rob?” Rob looked into his father’s eyes. They were the same as those that faced Rob in a mirror. “Caroline is entirely different and you two had become close, yet she left the day this happened and I presume she is the reason you want no one to know. Why did you walk home that night and not take the carriage? You left without telling anyone you were going.”

  Robert shook his head. He was not prepared to speak of it.

  “I was young once. I can understand. I still remember the turmoil I went through when I fell for your mother.”

  Rob still did not answer.

  “Did you see the faces of the men who attacked you?”

  Rob shook his head. “It was pitch black. They attacked me from behind.”

  His father shifted forward in his chair and leant his elbows on his knees. “Rob, would Kilbride have had reason to hold against you?”

  The gentleman said to tell y’u to leave his possessions alone. Yes.

  His father held Rob’s arm, probably because he saw the look of revulsion that must have passed across Rob’s face.

  “You may speak to me. Tell me honestly. I only wish to understand, I will not even tell your mother if you wish me to keep it private, but my conscience is tearing me apart. You are my son. I cannot stand to see you like this and do nothing.”

  “There is nothing to be done.”

  “Nothing I might do.”

  “No, Papa. If and when there is anything to be done about this, then I shall do it myself. I will not hide behind you.”

  “Rob, I care about you. Your uncles do too. It is not only Robert who respects you. You are highly thought of in the family, more so than half your cousins. I understand why you would not wish for their support in your political cause, but in this… Stop this foolish battle against them. Against us. Your mother and I, and John, want what is best for you, nothing else.”

  Rob said nothing. His family would take this over and everything would become public… He needed to protect Caro from judgement and slander.

  “Was it Kilbride?”

  Yet, if it was only his father who knew.

  Rob shut his eyes. “You must swear to do nothing.”

  “It was, then.”

  “I think so. I think the men were sent by him. They gave me a message which implied it before they left me.”

  “Then, what is between you and Caroline?”

  Rob sighed, pain gripping like a fist grasping about his heart. It was stronger than the pain clasping at his broken leg. Rob opened his eyes and looked at his father. “I asked her to marry me. She refused the night of the Newcomb’s ball. We became close in the summer. She came to town because I asked her to. But since the night she danced with Kilbride she changed her demeanour towards me. I think she is still in love with him.”

  “In love with him!” His father’s expression was horror and disgust.

  Yes, he supposed that was why Caro had never spoken of her feelings. “She told me in the summer that she loved him even at the point she left him. Love does not play by any rules, Papa.”

  His father gave him a skewed, bitter smile. “No, and I should know that more than anyone, and yet I must be told by my son not to judge. See what I mean? You earn people’s respect, Robbie. But Caroline did not say no to you because of Kilbride. The night you were injured, I presume after you’d gone, she danced with him only to leave him in the middle of the floor, in the middle of the dance, and moments later she asked Drew if they might leave the ball. They left town early the next morning.”

  Rob said nothing.

  “You are young to think of marriage, Robbie.”

  “That is what Caro said, and yet she had said she loved me. I thought she felt the same as I. I could do nothing else. I wanted to be with her. When she danced with Kilbride the first time, it hurt. I wanted to be able to keep her safe. The only way I could achieve it was to be engaged, and it may have been a long engagement, but then at least I would have been able to treat her as my own in public.”

  His father’s fingers squeezed his arm. “Your mother and I had a rocky start. She refused to marry me and I desperately wished to be able to protect her. I did not leave her. I could not walk away. She changed her mind.”

  “Caro will not. She said that I think myself inferior, and she was right. I see now that it is that which has made me wish to help those less fortunate than others, and so I do not regret that I have felt it. Yet she said that I should have time to grow up and discover who I am. Her rejection was condescending.”

  “Or wise… Or kind… Those things are true in a way.”

  Emotion clasped Rob’s throat. He swallowed. “Yet not what I want. I had begun to see myself as a tenant farmer, pursuing a career in politics, with Caro. But without her… Yet it would not be equal to the life she’d lived as Kilbride’s wife. She had wealth and luxury, as Kate does, perhaps that is what she wishes to go back to.” In the hours he’d spent lying here, he’d considered everything which might have persuaded her to turn back to Kilbride, even conclusions like this that seemed so unlike Caro. He could not understand it—yet her father said she had gone back home to Drew’s.

  “And you think that is what would motivate her. She walked away from that.” His father’s eyebrows lifted in a mark of disbelief.

  “Because he was cruel to her and she had to, not because she wished to. That is why she has been so unhappy all these years, because she has felt lacking. She felt forced to leave. She has mourned for everything she left behind, including him.”

  “Still, I do not believe Caroline would place her priority on physical things. She has battled with fear for years, yet she came to town to see you, and even endured being in a room with the man she had run from.”

  Rob sighed. That was all true, and these were just the circling arguments he’d spun in his own head.

  “Rob, when she left Kilbride, she went into hiding. Had it not been for John’s help she would have stayed hidden for the rest of her life, by choice, and lived a life far below middle-class. I do not think she would be swayed by money, and she is not indifferent to you. You may say what you like, the evidence speaks differently.”

  “She refused me.”

  “What she refused was you be
moaning a need to rely on your family. She must have seen that you would have to do so if you married her now. If she knew you wished to make something of yourself, then most likely she said no to allow you a chance to do it.”

  “I told her we would live on John’s allowance if we must…”

  “On your allowance. Rob, you have a right to it. John’s inheritance came from his grandfather. He was your grandfather too. Why should you not benefit?”

  Rob had never thought of it like that. “I told her she was more important than my feelings about accepting help.”

  “And yet when I proposed an idea the afternoon at Windsor, you expressed your discomfort. She must have doubted your words.”

  Rob held his father’s gaze, a melee of doubt, desire, and despair, warring in his head.

  “Perhaps she was afraid that if she married you your desire for independence would resurface at some point; that later you might regret giving up your dreams and blame her.”

  Rob longed to get up and go and ask her. But if she was afraid of that, it would change nothing. He would not persuade her with words that she was wrong. His better option was to plan his future without her, and later… ask her to marry him again.

  “The surgeon has said you must lie here for six weeks, and not move that leg, and you must keep it up and put no weight through it for three months. Then you may go and see her and tell her how you feel. She will have had a chance to understand the consequences of her answer. Ask her her reasons for refusing you; suggest waiting for a while. There is no need to rush. Then if you take the opportunity your uncle is offering you, you could agree to speak of an engagement again in a year, you will have made your mark by then and you will know if your feelings are lasting. You have mine and your mother’s blessing.”

  “What if I married her now?”

  “I would support you.” His father leaned back. “Your life is yours, Rob. I will give advice, but I will try not to lead your life for you; it sounds as though you have it planned out well enough without any help from me. I’ll let you rest now and read your letters. Your mother will be here later. If you wish to reply to any of them, let her know. One of us can write whatever it is you wish to say.”