“I hope you know that you can trust me. If you or any member of our family was ever in trouble—”
So he knew, or at least suspected, that the stranger who had come to Gabriel’s aid tonight had been Sebastien. What else did he know? Or was this a bluff?
He slung himself down inside the carriage. “The only trouble I foresee is explaining to my fiancée why I am returning home battered and bleeding when I promised I would behave.”
Chapter Forty-four
Alethea luxuriated in the company of the Boscastle ladies. She had been served watercress soup, sausages, stuffed figs, and French pastry, as well as savory tidbits of town gossip. How she had missed the company of other women, though this was no ordinary group of females. She had never heard such frank conversation from members of her own sex.
Jane, the honey-haired marchioness who had charmed the ton with her inimitable aplomb, had ordered her best champagne to celebrate the addition of an ally against the dearly beloved men of the family. Chloe Boscastle, or rather Lady Stratfield, had generously offered her wedding gown to Alethea, warning that it might be a bit short in the hem.
“I don’t mind,” Alethea said a little too quickly, although fortunately, no one seemed to notice.
She had no desire to explain her reluctance to stand at the altar beside Gabriel wearing the wedding dress that Jeremy had chosen for her from a French fashion magazine. It would have felt more like a shroud than the beautiful baroque pearl-seeded creation it was. She had been tempted to burn it. Now she supposed that donating it to a charity would be a less wasteful gesture, and certainly not as dramatic.
“I don’t expect that any of Gabriel’s brothers will attend the wedding,” Charlotte Boscastle said, glancing up from her notebook.
Jane turned her head. “Gabriel has brothers?”
“Three of them,” Alethea murmured, nibbling another fig.
“Why did no one mention this to me?” Jane frowned in irritation. “How am I to invite them to family affairs and include them in holiday festivities if I am not made aware of their existence? This really is unforgivable of him. Grayson ought to have told me if Gabriel could not be bothered.”
Alethea wriggled in her chair. As Gabriel’s future wife she supposed it came to her to defend—well, she couldn’t defend his brothers.
“They set out into the world at an early age and I do not believe Gabriel has maintained contact with them since then. I understand he does write—if infrequently—to his mother.”
“Heavens above,” Jane said, her eyes flashing with a fire that eclipsed that of the brilliant diamonds upon her neck. “Gabriel has a mother, and she is not to be a guest at his wedding?”
Alethea smiled. She remembered Gabriel’s mother as a vital, half-French young lady whose very essence seemed to enliven village functions. Until she had lost her husband, Joshua Boscastle, she had kept her handsome sons under control. “I believe she lives in France these days.”
“I’ve heard she is to become the wife of a wealthy French duc,” Charlotte said unthinkingly. “All I know of her paramour is that he lost his family in the Terror.”
“I think it’s true,” Alethea said, “although Gabriel has not revealed this in as many words. He never speaks of his family. One can assume from his silence that to him they no longer exist.”
“Well, I do wish someone in my family had thought to inform me,” Jane said in a miffed tone. “Still, I expect that as a mother she will be relieved her son has made such a fortuitous match in Alethea—Where is Gabriel, by the way, Alethea? I have some instructions for the ceremony from the minister.”
Alethea set down her champagne glass with a sharp clink. “That is a question devoutly to be answered. I can only assure you that if he is up to any mischief at this moment, it will be one of his last nights in this pursuit. Helbourne Hall is literally falling down as we speak. His duties as landowner should keep him well occupied for many nights to come.” As would his marital duties. Alethea had a good idea of what would occupy her time with Gabriel during their chilly autumn evenings together.
Jane pursed her lips. “I understand.”
“Let us hope that he does also,” Alethea added, dimly aware that three glasses of champagne and an absent bridegroom did not a good temper make, although it did loosen one’s tongue to an alarming degree. If she did not take herself in hand, she would be confessing more than anyone wished to hear.
“I should not worry about Gabriel tonight,” Charlotte said in a knowing voice. “Drake and Devon promised they would keep him company until the wedding. By which, I assume, they meant to steer him away from any roguery.”
“He has one black eye already,” Alethea said before she could stop herself. “If he has gotten into some mischief simply to prove he is still capable one final time, then, well, it shall be the final time. That is all I have to say on the subject.”
“You can say more if you wish,” Chloe prompted. “I love scandal.”
Alethea paused. “There are bats in Helbourne Hall.”
Chloe gasped. “Bats? Truly?”
“Yes.” Alethea sighed. “Bats and bad servants.”
Chloe sat up on the sofa. “I married a ghost. Boscastle challenge—you next, Julia.”
Julia’s gray eyes brightened. “I shot Heath before we were married because I thought he was a rabid fox.”
“That’s nothing compared to that cartoon you drew of him,” Chloe murmured in mischief. “You go next, Jane.”
Jane smiled ruefully. “I fell in love with Grayson in the middle of my wedding to another man.”
Chloe gestured to Alethea. “Your turn.”
Alethea hesitated. “I fell in love with Gabriel when he was in the pillory.”
“My goodness,” Jane exclaimed. “I hope you let him out.”
“What about you, Charlotte?” Chloe asked with a teasing grin.
“I’ve never been in love,” Charlotte said, glancing up. “And I’ll probably never get married.”
“Not if you keep your nose in a book all the time and remain the headmistress of a girls’ school,” Chloe said bluntly.
“Her turn will come one day,” Jane said with a forceful nod that even the Fates would not have challenged.
Chloe rose from the sofa. “There’s someone coming in the door now. Probably my devil brothers.”
Alethea turned her head. “And have they my devil bridegroom with them?”
Chloe backed away from the windows with a soft gasp. “Yes, but he’s with—”
Alethea and the other ladies came to their feet. “Another woman?”
Chloe shook her head. “No. He’s with our doctor and I’m afraid he’s been hurt.”
Chapter Forty-five
Alethea was too exhausted to do anything but sit on the edge of her bed when she returned two hours later to her brother’s town house. She had felt ill when she’d seen the blood on Gabriel’s shirt, then angry, and at last relieved when she realized he would survive this latest misfortune.
Yet even after the physician tended him, he’d seemed distracted and not himself. She thought that perhaps he had been in more pain than he would admit.
“I am not in pain,” he insisted. “I am, however, embarrassed by all this bother.”
She fell backward onto the bed, closing her eyes. Confessions. Watercress soup and champagne. An impending marriage. What had happened to Gabriel tonight? Even his cousins could not explain why he’d chosen to walk the streets by himself. Or that saber he’d refused to relinquish for even a moment.
“What happened to you tonight, Gabriel?” she whispered. “I told you my secret.”
His voice startled her. “I’m not sure I understand myself what happened. Perhaps it will make sense in the morning.”
She opened her eyes in disbelief, gazing up into his hard, angular face. “You won’t be alive in the morning if my brother catches you in my room. How did you get in? The servants have locked the doors every night since you burst in
like a barbarian.”
“Your brother invited me into the house.” He stepped back and dropped into the chair beside the bed. “I suspect he thought I would get into less trouble under his scrutiny than left alone.”
“In that case—” She got up from the bed and walked behind his chair, sliding her hands down his shoulders. “You ought to make yourself feel at—you’ve brought that awful sword into my bedroom. I hope there’s not any blood on it.”
“Please. May I leave it here? It doesn’t belong to me.”
“Did you really find it?”
“I was given it by a man who does not wish his identity known.”
She came around the chair to kneel in front of him, her eyes grave. “Espionage?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“But you’re not involved in something dangerous?”
“No.”
Her gaze searched his face. “Is he the one who hurt you?”
“No.” He stroked her cheek, then said abruptly, “I’m going to leave.”
“Why?” she said. “Are you in pain? Are you meeting this man?”
“The only pain I feel is that of wanting you while honoring your brother’s trust in me.”
“Then trust me now as I have had to trust you,” she said, staring at him in challenge. “Who did you meet tonight?”
He shook his head. “A ghost.”
“For heaven’s sake, Gabriel!”
He looked down at her and laughed. “It was my brother Sebastien. He was at Timothy’s party tonight.”
“Sebastien?” She could only conjure the vaguest image of a taller, slightly older Gabriel. “You had three brothers.”
“He was the third son.”
“And you were reunited by coincidence at the party?”
He raised his brow. “We did not exactly meet across the supper table. And I cannot say whether it was coincidence or not. I believe I caught him in the act of breaking into the house.”
“Your brother? Did he confess to you?”
He smiled tiredly. “Under strained circumstances. I had no idea what he was doing or even that he was still alive. So when I referred to him as a ghost, it is how I have come to think of him. Of them all. They have never tried to contact me.”
“Did you try to contact them?” she asked, smoothing a wrinkle from his jacket sleeve.
“Why should I?”
“Honestly, Gabriel. One cannot maintain affection without a modicum of effort. You never came to visit me, despite what you claimed about your dreams.”
He leaned his head toward hers. “Do you know why?”
“No. Tell me.”
“Because even in my dreams I never thought you’d have me.”
She rose higher onto her knees and slipped her arm around his neck. “Are you in too much pain for a shameless seduction—your last as an unmarried man?”
He inhaled deeply. “No.”
She walked her hand down his shoulder to the buttons of his shirt. “Then allow me.”
He caught her hand, his blue eyes kindling. “Not tonight, sweetheart.”
“Are you refusing me?”
“I am showing your brother that I am a man of my word.”
“And what of your lust for me?” she whispered.
His low-pitched voice made her breath quicken. “The longer it smolders, the hotter it burns.” He glanced meaningfully at the door, clearing his throat. “I forgot to mention that Robin is sitting right outside reading a book.”
She surged to her feet. “He isn’t?”
“Yes, he is,” her brother said from the other side of the door. “Let me know, either of you, if you’d care for a cup of chocolate before Gabriel takes his leave.”
Chapter Forty-six
Gabriel and Alethea were married on Michaelmas Day, the Feast of St. Michael, in the private Mayfair Chapel of the Marquess of Sedgecroft. Only the family and their trusted friends attended. Still, the pews were packed to overflowing with the passionate Boscastle clan and a tiny cluster of Alethea’s closest friends from Helbourne. Her brother stood waiting to give her away—and lifted his brow when Lady Pontsby began to sniffle.
Alethea restrained an inappropriate urge to giggle, a condition not helped by the guffaws and jests Gabriel’s cousins made in an attempt to ruffle his demeanor. Wisely, he kept his back to the audience, except once when he glanced around. His gaze searched the chapel—for his brother, or someone else? Was there a person he had invited or hoped would bear witness to this wedding? And if any of his brothers had bothered to show, would they represent themselves as friends or enemies?
She sighed at the realization that he cared more than he would show. For all his claim to have forgotten about his brothers, he hadn’t been quite himself since the night he saw Sebastien. When she caught his gaze wandering a second time, she sent him an understanding smile. He smiled back with a promise in his eyes that left her feeling pleasantly weak.
“The ghost?” she whispered.
He blinked as if he were surprised she had noticed his brief inattention. His reply, however, was more surprising. “I doubt he’ll come.”
“Do you want him to?” she asked in an undertone.
He leaned his face close to her. The spicy fragrance of his shaving soap fair made her swoon. “I’m not sure.”
She stared down at her bouquet of late red roses, white chrysanthemums, and ivy. “I have to admit I hope he doesn’t come. Not if he’s going to dress in a silly costume and swing a saber.”
Gabriel’s face relaxed in a grin. “They say that when the Boscastle family gathers together, scandal is inevitable.”
“Not at a wedding?” she whispered.
“Especially at a wedding,” he retorted. “Well, perhaps not at this wedding. My cousin Emma has warned everyone in the family to behave, under penalty of death.”
The minister looked up from his psalter. All of a sudden Alethea felt a niggling sensation of being stared at. Turning her head to the right, she found herself under the scrutiny of Gabriel’s cousin Emma, the Duchess of Scarfield. She smiled. The duchess smiled back. Silence fell over the chapel, but to Alethea’s disconcertment, her mind was not content to remain obedient to the moment.
In the village where she and Gabriel had grown up, in the public square where he had been punished, a celebration would be in progress. A strong village lad, usually a lord’s son, would be dressed up like St. Michael in order to slay the dragon—a chain of other boys wearing a costume of pieces of billowing green cloth stitched together.
The best celebration in Helbourne history, it was generally agreed, had been the autumn when the high-spirited Boscastle boys had first played the role of dragon and made St. Michael—in this case Lord Jeremy Hazlett—chase them across the common and into the hills until he gave up the pursuit in embarrassed anger.
Until that year St. Michael had always won. He might have lost the following year, too, had tragedy not struck the Boscastle family when Joshua Boscastle died and the lives of his widow and sons disintegrated.
It seemed strange, therefore, to Alethea to be marrying the village dragon when she was supposed to belong to his saintly, if unsuccessful, slayer, the hero of her parents’ dreams for her.
Only now she understood that a false hero could hide a cruel heart behind his valiant deeds.
And that a man who had sinned as second nature could be the strongest hero of all when given the chance to prove himself.
His voice was so self-assured when he exchanged his vows that his cousins Drake and Devon made a few catcalls. Chloe’s husband, Dominic, grinned openly. A pair of cavalry officers who knew Gabriel stomped their feet, and just as general anarchy threatened to ensue, the Dainty Dictator, the Duchess of Scarfield, rose from her pew and swept the congregants a quelling scowl. After that, throughout the breakfast of prawns, roast turkey, and crab croquettes, during the first dance, the champagne toasts, and the cutting of the cake, everyone behaved.
Put on guard by
the persuasive glint in her husband’s eyes as they traveled the bumpy roads back to Helbourne Hall, Alethea decided it had been wise of her to insist upon returning Chloe’s wedding dress to her before leaving London. Gabriel had refused to stop at the two respectable inns along the way. He stated in a convincing tone that having been away from home this long, they might as well make the sacrifice to journey into the night.
Alethea knew his true motive to hasten home. It was also hers. He could not wait until they were together in their bridal bed.
“Home,” she said, smiling wistfully. “I do hope the servants remember we are to arrive.”
“I hope they’ve gone.”
When the carriage reached the old Norman church that faced the village square, he asked to stop for a few moments so that the two of them could walk among the ghosts.
“It still looks the same,” he said. “I don’t know why I thought it would be different.”
Nothing had changed since he’d been punished years ago. The ancient cage swung in the breeze behind the pillory and the parish whipping post.
There hadn’t been any miscreants disciplined here since Gabriel had come back. No rebel boys who looked so forlorn that a highborn lady would insist her father halt his carriage.
“I don’t know what lesson I was meant to learn from it,” he said, his tall, black-cloaked figure overshadowing the place of his humiliation.
“Do you remember what you were punished for?”
“Yes.”
And he remembered the soft brush of a girl’s gloved hand on his cheek, the rustle of her dress as she knelt to regard him, and that when she’d risen, she’d had a stain on her gloves.
“Incorrigible,” his wife said, wrapping her arms around him.
He gathered her into the heat of his body, his heart. “Are you speaking of me or yourself?”
“Both of us, I suppose. But…I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
As distracted as Gabriel was by his desire for his incorrigible bride, he managed to restrain himself until they reached Helbourne Hall. He was relieved that the servants had made an effort to set the house in order for their new mistress, having sent a message ahead days ago that there would be hell to pay otherwise. Young Gabriel, his namesake groom, was waiting up in the stable to attend his master, eager to prove his worth.
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