by Sophia James
‘Yet there is some truth in what she was saying. Your clothes. Your manners. In society you are a man I barely recognise, but here...?’
The gold of his glance slid away and he turned towards the window.
‘I have lived in the shadows for a long time, Adelaide. Now I find myself wishing for something else entirely.’
‘The shadows?’ She wanted to know what he meant by that word. Brothels? Gambling halls? Drinking parlours?
His eyes lowered and met hers directly. ‘I work for the British Service as an Intelligence Officer and have done so since I was eighteen. My life has not all been indolence.’
Adelaide’s mouth dropped open. This was the very last thing she thought he might tell her and yet it all made perfect sense: a camouflage to disguise the truth.
‘You are allowed to confess to the doing of such a job?’
‘I couldn’t before, but as you are my wife now...’
‘So that was how you were hurt?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Your left hand is scarred on the top. It has the look of a bullet wound?’
He raised the appendage to survey the damage before frowning and looking away. ‘My mission for the British Service was to ferret out information that could be important. Great things that might change the course of history are hard to come by, but tiny clues and small pieces of information glued together can be as valuable.’
His injured hand lay against the window now, fingers splayed out against the glass, parts of his skin almost transparent in the light, though the scars were darker.
‘You were on the Continent with Daniel Wylde? In the war on the Peninsula against Napoleon?’
He shook his head. ‘There were secrets in London that were far simpler to shake out than those on a battlefield or with force. A woman unhappy in her marriage, a letter that was left unfinished, a drawer that could be unlocked to find the telling remnants of anarchy. With my reputation access was always easy...’
‘The persuasive gentle arts?’ she returned. ‘And you are good at them?’
‘Too good,’ he whispered back and in those small words she understood with clarity what the subterfuge had cost him. Living in lies, secrets and deceit had had its own price and Gabriel Hughes had paid heavily for it. The darkness beneath his eyes alluded to such a penalty.
‘I shouldn’t wish for a husband who was...unfaithful even for the cause of King and Country.’ She hated the way her voice shook, but she was shocked by his candour and the way he could confess to these sins with barely a backward glance.
‘Good, for I do not work for the Service in that capacity any more. After the fire...’ He stopped.
‘You were too visible? Less able to hide?’
Another truth flickered in the gold and this time it was one she could not quite fathom.
‘I have not been a saint, Adelaide, or a man who has made all the right choices. But sometimes the information that I uncovered saved innocent men and women and I am at least glad for that.’
* * *
He had not told her the whole story, but for now it was enough.
Mirrors and shadows. Lucy Carrigan’s ruminations had had a deal of truth within them, figuratively at least. He lived through each day seeing a version of himself reflected in the eyes of others that was as unreal as it was precarious. His life. For years.
No one had had the chance to know him before he was gone again, lost in the translation of services to the King and spiralling into a desolation that was all encompassing.
He had thought he would never get back again, never sleep again, never smile or marvel at the world or a woman whose mind he could see working even as she stood across from him.
‘I married you for salvation, Adelaide.’ The words dried in his mouth even as he whispered them.
But she had heard for her eyes widened, bluer than the sea and as clear.
‘So in essence you are telling me that your reputation with women stems from business rather than from pleasure?’
‘Much of it was a smokescreen. A simple kiss, a few well-chosen words and they were happy.’
‘A far more tepid version of the exploits whispered about you in society, my lord?’
Gentle humour crossed into her face as his laughter filled the room, rusty from a lack of use, but there nonetheless. He felt the tension of the last hours begin to unloosen and reform into something else entirely.
He was not the man he had once been, not the man all of London town spoke about as he passed. But the lack of feeling in one part of his body did not exclude his finesse in others and his wife was the most beautiful woman he had ever had the pleasure of knowing.
God, he was stuck in a limbo between want and ability. But he had his hands and head and body still and if he went slowly, following more than just the questionable tenets of lust, who was to know what might happen.
Without his senses trained on jeopardy and deception he could hear the birds singing in the line of trees across the road in the park. He could smell the lemon on Adelaide’s skin as well, a soft and lovely scent that came to him as she moved, small wafts of promise.
Life flowed on, after disaster and deceit, after loneliness and dysfunction, after sorrow and guilt.
Tomorrow they would leave for Ravenshill and for the chance at something more, though the shattered remains of the Manor felt synonymous with his own destruction.
He could rebuild. All of it. A better life. A more honest one with a wife whom he admired. But it was up to him to find the way of doing so.
‘I hope I will be enough for you.’
God, now why the hell had he said that? It was the lack of being able to touch her, he supposed, and the desperate want that accompanied such a prohibition. If he had been braver he might have simply strode forward and taken her in any way that he could. With his hands and his mouth and teeth if his body would not rise, just to assuage the fury that held him bound and trussed like a slave.
He wanted to see her. He wanted to hold her gently on the generous sofa behind them, late-afternoon sunlight on the velvet, warmth in the room. But already the sweat was building on his brow and the blood pumping in his throat, and if he could not clamp down on the fear then she would know. All of it. His lack. His sins. His guilt. His penance.
‘I tried to warn you before of some of the things that I wasn’t.’ Breathing in hard, he brought his body into check. ‘But honesty has its shades, Adelaide. The honesty of a saint? The honesty of a sinner? One person’s truth is another’s lies, and who has the wit to tell where the lines get crossed or blurred?’
He could see her mind turning as she reached for an answer.
‘My old aunt Eloise used to say there are three things that cannot be hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth.’
‘Buddha.’
‘Pardon?’
‘It is a teaching from the time of the Magadha Empire. Buddha penned it.’
‘I did not know that.’
He smiled. ‘Perhaps truth is only simple. In the end, there it is. Us. Here. Married.’
* * *
Adelaide breathed out, his stillness confusing, but beneath the mask of indifference she could see vulnerability there, too, crossed with an ever-present danger that was so much a part of him.
His hand came forward and he took hers, the fingers warm and strong. She felt him take in a breath, too, as he waited, the frown above his brow deep. The pulse in his throat was fast and his fingers trembled.
Not quite as indifferent as he might make out, then, as the same shock of knowledge she felt each time they touched shimmered between them.
‘You are warm.’ His words were soft, barely there as his forefinger began to trace a pattern down the side of her right thumb, the circles leading to her palm and then into the hollo
ws at the base of each finger; a slow and calculated message of intent. This is me. This man. Take me if you dare. I am not perfect and I do not pretend to be.
Challenge, too, surfaced beneath the deliberate. Did she feel what he did? This violent jolt of connection?
She felt her own breath catch and then hold with a rush of blood and flesh. Each time he stroked the feeling went deeper, linking with other echoes, as her body answered with a will all of its own.
Meeting his eyes, she understood, too, that he knew exactly what it was he was doing, a lesson in loving from the master of the trade; both eloquent and disturbing.
When his head dipped his grip tightened, the arch of his neck exposed as his teeth and tongue joined his fingers. The wetness was hot and then cold, smooth and then rough, the sharp pain of his teeth against utter gentleness. Playing her.
Adelaide shut her eyes and just felt. Him. There. Against her. Close. He took her thumb into his mouth and sucked, lathing hard against the tug of want and need, the heady clench of surprise rushing through her as his arms brought her in.
And then quiet. Peace. The true relief of her body.
She could not move, but stood, curled into his embrace, spent and formless. Her tears were unexpected, falling against the snowy whiteness of his shirt, darkening the linen.
Unbelieving and astonished. Why had she not heard of this before, this perfect splendid gift? Why had not other wives told her of it, time and time again? They should be shouting it from the rooftops and from the bedrooms all over London town. Another darker thought surfaced.
‘This is what you spoke of. Before? Your job at the British Service?’
Her words were out, said. She could not take them back or rephrase them even as his reply came quick and flat.
‘A woman’s body is a temple, Adelaide. Every worshipper should give his thanks in the very best way he can.’
The very best...
He was known everywhere for his prowess and for his mastery. So many people had told her of it. His flair in the bedroom, his talent with the feminine sex.
Yet he stood there as if what had just happened was a mundane, ordinary, everyday occurrence for him. He was not even breathing fast now and his withdrawal was obvious.
‘Thank you.’ She couldn’t dredge any other thing from the shocking truth of it.
And then he was gone. A quick goodnight and gone, a servant dispatched to show her the way up to her room.
* * *
She thought it a game, then, a pretence. His insides ached from the intimacy. As he reached the gardens to the back of the town house, he sat abruptly on a stone seat so that he did not fall.
He had managed it, just, managed to keep himself safe in the illusion of distance. His hands went to his pocket and he found a cheroot. It took him three times to flint the match and hold it to the end, so badly did his fingers shake.
God. Breathing deeply, he held the smoke inside, the tobacco giving an edge to fear and dulling it into something that was bearable.
He had touched her, with an attempt at the sensual and the promise of what had been in him once. A start.
But the truth had a way of striking back no matter how honestly you phrased it and now Adelaide thought him false, a lover that all of London had some knowledge about and one who used his art like a weapon.
When he felt a little steadier he stood and walked out into the oncoming darkness through the gates to lose himself in the dusk, as he always did when he was lonely or worried or the world had turned on its tail once again and left him reeling for the sense of it.
He had felt the spark as he had touched her, as staggering as the last time even though it was hoped for...expected. Closing his eyes, he tried to drag the feeling back, the smell of her, the satin of her skin and honesty.
Adelaide.
His wife.
Oh, the demons circled still and close, bound by regret and guilt and wrongdoing, but for the first time in years he felt himself being pulled back in the right direction, back into life.
He had been so out of step with it for so very long, the nights of sleeplessness leading into long days of haze. But here at this moment, he thought, he could have laid his head down and slept. Before the dawn. At a proper time. Creeping back into normality.
‘Please,’ he whispered, ‘let that be.’ He did not know if it was to God himself or to Adelaide that he addressed his entreaty and as a growing wind caught him up into its coldness he struggled for all that had been lost inside him and all that he hoped to find again.
* * *
She had slept badly, though the room she had been allotted was beautiful. Shelves of books graced one whole end of the chamber and the titles had amazed her.
Eclectic was the word that came to mind. The playwrights Félix Lope de Vega and Miguel de Cervantes sat beside lesser-known poets from the same land. Did Gabriel Hughes speak Spanish, Adelaide wondered, given he had the ownership of a great number of books in that language? Looking down to the next shelf, she lifted up a weighty tome containing many maps of France. His initials were penned inside. Under the writing a date was scrawled: 1794.
Sixteen years ago. Her husband had said he was thirty-four years old on one of the first occasions she had met him and this evening he had confessed to being eighteen when he joined the British Service.
Was this book from that time, the dog-eared pages attesting to a good use? Had he travelled there to get to know the lay of the land, the contours of an enemy?
Other books about distant wars lined a further shelf. Below that The Canterbury Tales and old medieval stories were stacked and in the next shelf down every book was in French.
His initials were inside these ones, too, and passages were underlined neatly as though a ruler had been used to hold them there. Thin tomes of poetry sat beside more ornate manuscripts depicting the flora and fauna of both France and England. Two or three grimoires of witchcraft and sorcery stood next to them.
Gabriel Hughes was a man of wide tastes, then, and an eclectic general knowledge. No wonder his conversation was as interesting and broad.
His honesty tonight had shocked her, but it was her reaction to his mouth across her fingers that had unsettled her more.
She had wanted him to find other places on her body to caress, too, her mind knowing one thing and her body another. She imagined all the women who had spilled their secrets in the ecstasy of his ministrations, betraying family and spouses for the simple need of touch. My God, she would have done so herself. She would have told him everything had he asked. Her past. Her hopes. Her opinion of their marriage. She had no defence against such expertise and he had not even kissed her or taken her to bed. A blush of desire filled her cheeks and she walked to the mirror to see a woman there she did not recognise, eyes wide with the promise, cheeks flushed in hope.
Honesty.
What had he said of it?
‘I think the truth is only simple. Us. Here. Married.’
So simple she could let go of every single truth she believed? Gabriel Hughes had played women false for years now and if the question was whether he’d done so for a greater good or for a lesser one she had no way of knowing.
From the very first second of seeing him she had felt a connection, solid, hard and surprising. It had shocked her with its intensity then and it had grown ever since. Unable to be fought. Absolutely undeniable.
It was why nothing else had felt right ever since: her suitors, her home at Northbridge, her vocation of healing and her acceptance of spinsterhood. She had been thrown into a reality unlike anything she had ever expected, bright against dull, heat against cold, and the truth of it all had led her here. Gasping for breath.
She wiped away the tears that fell across her cheeks in an angry motion. Crying was not a part of it. She needed to understand Gabriel Hu
ghes and allow him to understand her. He had tried to be truthful and she had thrown it back in his face. A lover of repute who could bring any woman he chose to climax, the deceit of it all excused by the intelligence he gathered. Understandable. Even lauded. She knew wars were not always fought on a level playing field and that the compilation of secrets was never going to be tidy, the currency of duplicity having its own payments.
He had not come to her door last night after they had spoken. Neither had he sent word this morning to ask if she would join him for breakfast. Perhaps he, too, was licking his wounds and trying to find a pathway, back to togetherness.
* * *
When she finally got down to the dining room he had eaten and gone. To make the arrangements for the trip up to Ravenshill Manor, his butler had assured her and turned away. She had seen the look of consternation that had crossed his brow, though, and wondered at it.
Servants knew everything. She had discovered that fact years ago when her aunt Josephine had lost yet another baby and the silence of grief filled Northbridge. A stillbirth this one and a boy. With hair the colour of moonbeams and perfectly formed despite his early coming and his lordship sobbing inconsolably, behind his desk in the library. Adelaide had overheard her maid talking to another of the upstairs girls and was surprised by the extent and breadth of their knowledge of events. Like a grapevine entwined on to itself as its runners lengthened and thickened.
The Wesley staff would know that Gabriel and she had slept separately and that they had not sat together for a first breakfast, either. Even Milly, who had come with her from Northbridge, had looked tense as she pulled Adelaide’s hair into a chignon with draping curls around her face.
‘His lordship went out early, mistress, before the sun even rose and I have heard it said he was not in bed either till late. The maid who does the fire grates said he often did not even come home.’
‘Perhaps he has commitments, Milly?’
‘Commitments, my lady?’ Her eyebrows had shot up into her hairline. ‘I would have hoped you were the commitment he honoured.’ Laying down the brush, her maid caught her glance in the mirror. ‘I am sorry, ma’am. I should ha’ held my tongue. He is good to his horses if that is any consolation. Tom, the stable boy, told that to me yesterday.’