The countess’s apartments consisted of two rooms. The first was a large bedchamber, elegantly appointed in soft, slightly faded shades of rose and cream. The walls were hung with cream-colored damask. The hangings and coverlet on the large four-poster were of rose silk with a deep, knotted fringe. The curtains drawn over the two long windows at the front of the apartment were of the same material. A fire—a luxury that had been permitted in the bedrooms at Hawthorne Hall only since her father’s death—burned cozily in the hearth. The second chamber, which Mrs. Bucknell described as her dressing room, was outfitted with a variety of mirrors, a dressing table littered with an interesting assortment of bottles and boxes, and several tall wardrobes. Her as yet unopened trunk already waited before one of them. At the far end of the room, a cream-painted six-panel door with a crystal knob was set into the wall. It was closed.
Mrs. Bucknell must have seen her gaze resting rather thoughtfully upon that door, because she said, “That leads to His Lordship’s apartment. As this chamber was the largest of those suitable for a lady, and required very little in the way of refurbishing, I took it upon myself to put you in here, Miss Gabby, thinking that you wouldn’t mind being next door to your brother. I hope I did right?”
Although Gabby wasn’t entirely certain that she was telling the truth, she reassured Mrs. Bucknell that she had done just as she ought, managed to rid herself of the woman when the promised can of hot water arrived, and with Mary’s help quickly washed her face and hands and tidied her hair before leaving her room again. It was her intention to get downstairs before Beth, so that she might have a few minutes of private conversation with Jem to see where, exactly, the mistake had been made.
Stivers was on the lookout for her. He materialized from the nether regions of the house just as she reached the first floor.
“I have put him in the library, Miss Gabby. If you will follow me,” he replied to her inquiry.
Gabby nodded her thanks, and did as she was bid. Ushered into a tall, paneled room lined with books, she waited until Stivers had withdrawn and the door was firmly shut before advancing on Jem, who stood before the fire, his hands clasped behind his back, a worried frown on his face.
“You have heard that my brother is in residence?” she said in a low voice, her arms crossing over her chest, her hands rubbing her upper arms nervously. Her gaze met his. “Tell me, if you can, how that is possible?”
Jem shook his head. He looked as disturbed as Gabby felt.
“It ain’t possible, Miss Gabby. For certain sure it ain’t possible. His Lordship your brother was shot dead on that island o’ his. I saw it happen with me own two eyes.”
Gabby drew a deep, slightly shaky breath. “Perhaps he was wounded, but did not die.”
“Miss Gabby, he was dead. Begging your pardon, but His Lordship had a hole blowed clean through his heart. I knows dead when I sees it, Miss Gabby. I ain’t such a green one as to be mistaken about that.”
Gabby stared at him. “Jem, you must be mistaken. If you are not, then—then this man who says he is my brother is—is either a ghost, or an imposter.”
Jem looked grim. “I don’t hold with believin’ in ghosts, Miss Gabby.”
“Nor do I.” Despite the warmth of the room, Gabby shivered as she considered the other possibility. “But an imposter—that is so unlikely as to be ludicrous, you know. Besides, he knew our names, mine and Claire’s and Beth’s.” She frowned slightly as she remembered that he had called Beth Elizabeth before her sister had corrected him. He had played with baby Beth all those years ago when he had come to Hawthorne Hall, and called her by the diminutive then. In his letter, he had referred to their youngest sister as Beth. And, too, he had called her Gabriella, when he had known her as Gabby all those years ago. . . .
But by itself, calling his sisters by their full given names meant nothing. Many years had passed, after all, and he was a grown man now, with probably only the vaguest memory of them all.
Just as her memory of him was vague.
“What do he look like, this lordship?” Jem asked slowly.
Of course, Gabby realized, feeling relieved. Jem had lately seen her brother; he could identify him without a doubt.
“He is tall, and well set up, with black hair and blue eyes. Very handsome.”
Jem looked doubtful. “Well, I don’t know about the handsome part. That’s a thing for the ladies to decide, I’m thinking. But as for the rest—aye, it fits close enough, I reckon.”
“Then he must be Marcus.” Gabby felt a stirring of profound relief. With her brother wonderfully, amazingly alive, and in London, and from all indications perfectly willing to provide Claire with a come-out, her troubles were at an end. She would not have to carry through with her scheme after all. The missive that she had already sent to Mr. Challow, with Marcus’s letter enclosed, was no longer a lie. She was not attempting to deceive anyone; Claire need be in no particular hurry to marry. . . .
“Miss Gabby, whoever the gentleman be, who he cannot be is His Lordship. Not unless his corpse has risen and is walking about above ground.”
Jem’s grim words punctured her growing bubble of happiness. Deflated, she met his gaze. Why had she even allowed herself to hope that this would be easy? In her experience, nothing in life ever was.
“You must see him, then,” she said. “That is the only way to be sure.”
“Aye. That’s just what I was thinking meself.”
“He has gone out. It will likely be late before he returns.”
“With your permission, Miss Gabby, I’ll wait in here ’til I hears him come in. Then I’ll nip out into the hall and get a good look at him, with him being none the wiser.”
“I’ll wait with you.”
Jem shook his head. “There’s no need for that, Miss Gabby. You go on up to bed, and I’ll tells you the truth of it in the morning.”
Gabby shook her head. “I couldn’t shut my eyes until I know.”
Just then they heard the sound of voices in the hall as Beth, having come downstairs, inquired as to whether or not her sister had put in an appearance yet.
Gabby sighed. “I must needs join my sister for a while. I’ll have Stivers bring you something to eat in here. After Beth has retired for the night, I’ll be back.”
“No doubt I’d be wasting my breath to argue,” Jem said, frowning at her.
“Yes,” Gabby agreed tranquilly. “You would.”
With that she left the room to join Beth. They partook of a cold supper, and then explored the house. Beth went into transports over everything from the elegant drawing room to the cunning garden to the mews at the back of the house. Gabby, though less vocal, was equally impressed. By the time her sister had at last gone to bed, and Gabby had pretended to retire too so as to rid herself of Mary and Stivers and the rest of the hovering staff, it was past midnight. Accustomed to dressing herself—the sisters had of necessity shared one maid, who had been left behind at Hawthorne Hall—she shed the nightdress into which Mary had tenderly fastened her and without difficulty donned a fresh gown, which at least had the virtue of being clean although it was nearly identical to the one she had earlier discarded. Then she brushed her hair, rewound it into its customary knot at her nape and crept back downstairs to join Jem in the library.
Although not surprised, he was not best pleased to see her, and they spent the first quarter of an hour in a spirited though low-voiced discussion about the advisability of her presence. Defeated, Jem at last gave up. Then they set themselves to wait, one on either side of the fire, and wait was exactly what they did. An hour passed, and then another, and another. The clock on the mantel had just chimed four o’clock, and Gabby was having all she could do not to fall asleep in her high-backed leather chair, when the unmistakable sounds of someone entering the house jolted her fully awake again.
On the opposite side of the fire, Jem, too, sat upright. They exchanged speaking glances as the distant click of a closing door and the muffled tread of heavy
footsteps reached their ears. Then, almost at the same moment, they stood. Gabby was in the lead as they tiptoed toward the library door.
5
The tall, dark figure that was—or, possibly, was not—the Earl of Wickham walked across the shadowy entry hall to pick up a candle that had been left burning for him on the table. His caped greatcoat swirled about his legs, and added even more width to already broad shoulders. Another figure, his dark bulk slightly taller and far broader even than the earl’s, emerged suddenly from the salon to the right, a hand carefully cupped around the flame of a candle that he, too, carried. Wickham checked, as if surprised. Then the figure joined him, and the two began to converse in low tones that Gabby, strain though she might, could not quite overhear.
“That be Barnet, His Lordship’s man. I runned across him in the kitchen earlier,” Jem muttered in Gabby’s ear as they crept along in the dense shadow cast by the stairs. Pressed close against the cool plaster wall, Gabby was conscious of her rapidly increasing pulse rate. Something about the sight of the two very large men talking together so quietly in the dead of the night struck her as sinister. For the first time, she was truly ready to believe that the man who called himself her brother might indeed be an imposter, bent on who knew what nefarious scheme.
“Well, is he Wickham?” she hissed at Jem. The slow prickle of apprehension that crept down her spine when she considered that he might not be was unpleasant. What she craved was for Jem to recognize his mistake, ’fess up, and tell her that he had made an error of monumental proportions and that Marcus really was alive and was, at that very moment in fact, talking to a veritable giant in the entry hall, thus allowing her nerves to settle and them both to retire to a well-earned rest.
“I keep tellin’ ye, Miss Gabby, it can’t be His Lordship.” Jem shook his head at her. “Though I ain’t had a proper look yet, I know what I know: His Lordship’s dead.”
They were still edging forward, protected from view by the sheltering staircase and the darkness at their end of the hall. The only illumination came from the pair of flickering candles. The uncertain light transformed the men’s bodies into solid dark shapes, and played over their faces in an ever-changing symphony of light and shadow. Recognition of any individual feature was going to be difficult at best, Gabby realized, and felt like kicking herself for not divining earlier the impossibility of what they were attempting. Identification of this sort was best left to the bright daytime hours, not the vagaries of night and candlelight.
Right now she could be warm and safe in her bed. . . .
The fall happened so fast that she could do nothing to prevent it. One second she was easing along the wall, a hand pressed flat against it for guidance and her gaze fastened on their target, and the next she had caught her toe on something—a corner of the rug, perhaps, or the leg of the narrow console table she had just passed? She stumbled forward, and in the process came down hard on her weak leg. It collapsed beneath her so that she was catapulted willy-nilly into a headlong dive.
“Who goes there?” The barked question was uttered just as she landed with a smack face down on the cold marble floor. Luckily, since she ended up measuring her length, her hands broke the worst of the fall. Jem let out a hoarse exclamation and, abandoning what was now a futile attempt at concealment, flew to her side. He crouched over her, his gnarled horseman’s hands gentle as they closed on her shoulders, his voice urgent as he besought her to tell him if she was hurt.
Gabby ignored him. Eyes wide with horror, fingers curling nervously against the cold, unyielding surface on which she lay, she turned her head toward the men who, just as she had feared, were even now staring at them.
From her new vantage point, looking up at them from approximately their ankle level, the pair looked terrifyingly huge—and menacing.
Both candles had been lifted high. With Jem beside her, she was caught in a long finger of candlelight. Gabby blinked as she struggled to see past the twin flames to the faces of the men who were holding them. She could discern nothing beyond the glitter of their eyes; then, as her gaze traveled downward, she gasped aloud as she realized that a silver-mouthed pistol was now pointed directly at her, grasped in her supposed brother’s very capable-looking hand.
“Why, ’tis Gabriella,” he said with obvious surprise, employing a far different tone than the harsh bark with which he had demanded to know their identities. Without further ado, the pistol disappeared again into the pocket of his greatcoat. Then Wickham, if indeed it was he, set his candle down on the table and moved unhurriedly toward them. His man followed, candle still held high to better illuminate the scene.
Gabby swallowed convulsively, and ignored stabs and throbs of pain from various parts of her anatomy to struggle into a sitting position. That was as much dignity as she could achieve for the moment, she admitted to herself, quickly twitching her skirts into position to conceal her lower limbs. Standing was, just at present, beyond her. Taking a quick mental inventory of the damage she had suffered, she realized that her hair had been knocked partly loose from its pins, and long chestnut strands straggled witch-straight around her face. Her palms stung from their unexpected contact with the floor. Her knees tingled and throbbed. Her left hipbone and weak left leg ached abominably.
She could only trust that she had not done herself real harm.
Then she glanced up, to find Wickham—for so she could not help but think of him, whatever the merits of the case—and his man looming above her. Suddenly her physical condition became the farthest thing from her mind. Wickham was looking her and Jem over with a frown, his eyes narrowed in a speculative fashion that Gabby misliked. His man openly scowled at them over Wickham’s shoulder. He had the hulking build and squashed-looking features of a pugilist, and on that face, a scowl was as frightening as an openly voiced threat.
“What, pray tell, are you doing, creeping about the house in the middle of the night?” The very quietness of Wickham’s voice made it, perversely, scarier than a shout would have been. Meeting his gaze, Gabby felt her mouth go dry.
What was she doing creeping about the house in the middle of the night, indeed?
Before Gabby could come up with a halfway plausible lie, Wickham’s eyes narrowed on her face.
“Spying on me, sister?” he asked in a falsely affable tone that made the hair on the back of Gabby’s neck rise. His gaze stayed fixed on her, eyebrows lifted in what was almost a parody of polite inquiry.
She took a deep and, she hoped, unnoticed, breath.
“Not at all,” she said coldly, prepared to dodge a direct and probably unbelievable lie by informing him that her actions were certainly no concern of his. Before she could finish, however, Jem shot to his feet and placed himself squarely between her and the others, looking for all the world like a small, aged, but admirably valiant lapdog attempting to guard its master from a particularly fierce pair of marauding wolves.
Gabby’s rueful conclusion was that the lapdog was more likely to meet with success.
“She be no more your sister than I be, you blackguard! You are not my lord Wickham, and I for one knows it. My lord Wickham is dead!” Jem’s voice was shrill with indignation.
Gabby’s jaw dropped at that inopportune utterance. She watched, frozen, as the pistol reappeared, so quickly that it might almost have been done by sleight of hand, this time to point with unmistakable menace at Jem.
“No! No!” she gasped, horribly afraid that she was about to witness murder done. To reveal so much, under these circumstances, was quite possibly a fatal error. Dear fool, she thought with an inner groan, what were you thinking? Clutching at Jem’s arm—he automatically clasped her elbow to assist her to rise without ever removing his gaze from the pistol—she surged painfully upright. Gaining her feet, ignoring the ache in her leg and hip, she placed a hand on Jem’s shoulder for balance, and summoned a—she hoped—teasing smile for the man with the gun. “Jem was funning, of course. Really, Marcus, have you no sense of humor?”
There was the smallest of pauses. Beside her, Jem made a restive movement but remained prudently silent, no doubt realizing too late that to issue his challenge in the dead of the night when they were alone with the imposter and his henchman might not have been entirely wise. The pistol continued to point unwaveringly at him. It occurred to Gabby then that if what Jem alleged was true, they just might be in the gravest of danger. Mortal danger.
Too late now. She very much feared that the damage was done. The words could not be unsaid, and she could only hope that she had managed to smooth them over. If not, there was no one around to come charging to the rescue: her sisters and Twindle were deep asleep some two stories above, and the servants were at the very top of the house. They were at his mercy, defenseless.
“That hound won’t hunt, my dear.” Wickham’s silky-sounding drawl made her go cold with fear. “So you might as well abandon the attempt. Permit me to say that you’re a very poor liar. You’ve been looking at me like I was a ghost since you first set eyes on me.” He gave a short, unamused laugh as his gaze held hers. “The question is, now what’s to be done?”
His eyes glinted black in the candlelight. Gabby felt her heart give a great lurch as the pistol was leveled at Jem with, she feared, deadly intent. Jem’s arm shot out, pushing her more fully behind him, and her fingers dug into the groom’s shoulder as she watched a long, bronzed thumb ease back the hammer. . . .
The sound of the gun being cocked seemed as loud as an explosion in the breathless silence.
Then Gabby, even while staring down the mouth of the gun, bethought herself of something, and felt the tension that had stretched her nerves tight as bow strings ease.
“All right, whoever you are, that’s quite enough,” she said tartly, trying again if her injured leg would bear any weight; it seemed that now it would, and, trusting her own two feet to support her once more, she cautiously removed her hand from Jem’s shoulder and slipped around to stand beside him. There was a severe expression on her face as her gaze met the imposter’s. “You might as well quit waving that pistol about. It is quite useless to try to frighten us with it any longer, you know. I am perfectly well aware that Jem and I stand in no danger from it.”
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