by Sophia James
Come and ask me. Come and hold me close.
The thoughts tumbled forth unbidden and shocking, the force of feeling within surprising even to herself. But Gabriel Hughes simply wandered off towards the top of the room, the tallest man here and the most beautiful, collecting a drink as he did so and never looking back once.
‘You look very lovely tonight, my dear.’ Imelda’s words brought her into the moment. ‘I was saying to your uncle how London’s society has suited you, made you glow, but never more so than now. Frederick Lovelace looks well tonight, too, do you not think?’
She nodded because her chaperon seemed to expect it.
‘He is a man whom many of the other young women here would be pleased to walk out with. Look at Miss Carrigan, for example, she is lit up like a beacon in that waltz with him.’
As she spoke Imelda leaned forward and took her hand. ‘The wise choice of a husband is crucial to the certainty of any woman’s future happiness, Adelaide. What seems desirable now is often less so when the rosy glow of attraction has lessened.’ Her fingers gripped harder. ‘And believe me, it will. Pick a man who is rich and biddable would be my advice; one whom you might enjoy the material advantages of, but is happy to allow you to do so. These are two very different things.’
‘A man of wealth and weakness, you mean?’
Imelda laughed. ‘A woman’s strength is all that is needed in a marriage. The position is too crowded should a man expect to have his say, too.’
Adelaide thought her old aunts would have liked Imelda’s sentiments, but for her such an argument spoken out loud was jarring. What of equality and the challenge of each other’s minds? Where would discussion and debate be consigned to should a union be so very one-sided?
‘My Charles and I were wed for thirty years and nary a cross word between us. Lovelace has a resemblance to my dearly departed husband and should I offer you any advice at all it would be to make certain that he understands your more-than-obvious affection for him.’
At that moment the Earl of Berrick caught her glance between the shoulders of others who stood on the dance floor and smiled. A perfectly sweet smile.
‘He has offered for your hand in marriage, you know. Your uncle said I was not to say anything, but these things need to be nurtured in exactly the right setting and, if I might presume to say so, I think that this is it.’
Horror coated humour and then anger cloaked that. This whole evening had been about establishing signposts for the acceptance of a suitable marriage contract. Young women of high-born rank had been tutored extensively in the knowledge of what was owed to the family name and love was not considered an essential element at all. Females here married for security and freedom and wealth and, indeed, who could blame them with the abysmal strictures of manners and formalities attached to innocence.
God, how she suddenly hated the cage she had constructed all of her own making. She should never have agreed to come to London in the first place because the reality of it made her question all she used to believe. Spinsterhood suddenly held as much of a trap as an unhappy union, the length and breadth of aloneness as repulsive as the enforced deceit of an unequal partnership.
Her thoughts fell to Daniel Wylde and his wife, Amethyst. That was what she wanted. The joy of strength in difference and a forged togetherness because of it. Berrick would never give her that.
Her aunt and uncle were plotting a marriage in which she had no say, and Lovelace had already offered his hand. If she did not act now, she might well indeed be married before she knew it and to a most unsuitable groom.
On the pretext of going to speak with Lucy Carrigan, Adelaide left Lady Harcourt and walked further into the room, a vaulted ceiling separating this part of the salon from the next.
She had never thought of herself as particularly brave or desiring of adventure, but tonight everything inside her was different, heightened, alive. Gabriel Hughes stood talking with Lucien Howard, his sister, Christine, next to him, and as Adelaide gave her greeting she was swallowed up into the group with an ease that was both surprising and gratifying.
‘I was just saying to my brother how much I enjoyed our evening of discussion the other night, Miss Ashfield, and how we should do it again. Soon.’
‘I would like that, Lady Christine.’ She did not raise her eyes to Lord Wesley, but felt him there, a solid and startling presence. His shoes were beautifully polished and the cut of his pantaloons a fine one. The damned blush that she seemed cursed with for ever in his presence was beginning to creep into her cheeks.
When Lucien and Christine began to talk to each other of a man they both had just seen, the Earl of Wesley leaned in and spoke quietly.
‘Are you well, Miss Ashfield? You seem out of sorts.’
A smile tugged at her lips and she made herself look at him directly, the gold in his gaze questioning. He held the look of a man who did not want to fight any more, wary and drained, but even this did nothing to deter her.
‘Would you partner me for the next waltz, my lord?’ There it was out, said, blunt and honest.
He was good at hiding things, but still she saw shock on his face and question.
Lost in the consternation of this Adelaide was not cautious with her next words. ‘Lord Berrick wants me to marry him.’
It was as if the world around them no longer existed, the people and the noise relegated to a place far away, lost in the ether of what each of them was saying, words under words and the colour of the room stark in only black and white.
Gabriel Hughes stood very still, a grinding muscle in his jaw the only movement visible. ‘And what do you want?’ he asked finally.
‘A home, though it is only recently I have come to realise that a place to be and live is important. My chaperon has been quick to tell me that when Bertie brings a bride to Northbridge I shall be...in the way.’
He turned towards her, using the pillar as a barrier so that they were cut off from the hearing of those around them, but she knew that it would not be many seconds before the world around them impinged again.
‘You would be bored to death with Freddy Lovelace in a week.’
‘Could we meet privately, then?’ She made herself say the words, hating the desperation so obvious within them.
‘Pardon?’
‘I need to know what it would be like to touch a man who might make my heart beat faster before I settle for one who does not. Your reputation heralds a great proficiency in such matters and I thought perhaps you might...’
‘Hell, Adelaide.’
The horror of everything spiralled in her head. She had asked for something so dreadful that even the most dissolute lover in all of London town could not accommodate her.
‘I...can’t.’
His voice was strangled and rough, the words like darts as she turned on her heels, hoping he did not see the tears that were threatening to fall as she walked briskly from his side.
* * *
Gabriel leaned back against the hardness of cold marble and felt pain pierce his chest. The scent of lemon hung as suspended as his disbelief in her words.
I can’t.
I can’t touch you.
I can’t let you know.
She was going to marry Berrick for a place, for a home, for the desperation of not being tossed out of an estate that had always been her sanctuary.
They would never suit. She was far too clever for Berrick and far too...knowing. Adelaide Ashfield would eat a husband like that up in no time flat and be starving for all the rest of her life, doomed to the ordinary.
She deserved rare and remarkable, astonishing and marvellous. The list of adjectives made him smile, but another feeling twisted, too. Sadness and regret. That he had not met her at another time in his life, earlier, when he was still whole, and good and honourable.
> ‘You look pale, Gabe.’ Lucien took up the space that Adelaide had just left, his sister, Christine, chatting to a girl he did not know on his other side. ‘And Penbury’s niece seems upset.’
‘I’m tired, that’s all.’ He tore his eyes away from following Adelaide’s form across the room. She was with her chaperon now and her uncle and they looked to be preparing to leave.
He was glad for it.
‘For a débutante Miss Ashfield seems to inspire strong feelings in those around her.’ A question lingered in Lucien’s eyes. ‘Selwyn Carrigan was telling me the other day that George Friar was asking after her.’
‘The colonial is a charlatan. I hope she stays well away from him.’
‘I am inclined to agree with you, for James Stanhope has just returned from Baltimore and he swears he never heard Friar’s name or fortune mentioned even once. Strange, one would think, given the importance he accords himself with his land and business dealings there. But perhaps Friar is more than interested in Miss Ashfield’s wealth because his own circumstances are not as rosy as he makes them out to be?’
Gabriel frowned. People lied because they wanted things hidden in order to show themselves in a better light and he’d been long enough in the business of secrets to understand the danger in that.
Could the man hurt Adelaide? He had already tried once at the Harveys’ ball. Could he do so again? Marriages happened for the flimsiest of reasons and scandal had been the cause for more than a few of the hastily arranged betrothals in the ton.
Gabriel did not want Adelaide Ashfield married off to George Friar under a mistake and dragged off into the wilds of the Americas. He wanted her here, to talk with and laugh with, a woman whose conversation he enjoyed and looked forward to with eagerness. Besides that, Frederick Lovelace’s proposal was also something to be considered now.
The arrival at his side of Lucien’s sister had him turning.
‘I have a good friend who would like to meet you, Gabriel. Miss Smithson is new in from the country and she is most adept at riding.’
Smiling, Gabriel straightened the folds of his high cravat and turned to the short blonde-haired woman behind Christine.
* * *
The carriage ride home was slow and laborious. Uncle Alec was quiet in his place by the window, but Frederick Lovelace had not stopped chattering. About the weather and the ball. About the moon and his understanding of space. About the scent that she wore and how it evoked for him a time when he had been young.
Adelaide hoped her uncle or Imelda Harcourt might eventually have told him to be quiet or at least to have filled up some of the space with their own opinions, but they did not, and the dreadful monologue droned on and on uninterrupted until they finally reached the town house.
She refused to allow her mind to turn back to the ballroom and to the last look she had of Gabriel Hughes. All she did was smile, inanely, the muscles at the corner of her mouth frozen into the eternally jovial.
‘I can’t.’
Everything was wrecked and gone. Hope. Joy. Anticipation. When Frederick Lovelace said goodbye she walked quickly up the stairs.
To her room. At last, where she threw herself upon her bed and cried into her pillow, loud noisy sobs stifled by feathers until the slip was damp and cold.
Then she got up and looked at herself in the mirror, the swollen eyes, the broken dreams, the utter sadness of living.
‘This is the bottom,’ she said to herself in a firm and even voice. ‘This is the worst you will ever feel. I promise. It will never again be this bad.’
Gabriel Hughes did not want her. He could not even rouse himself to touch her.
The quiet sound of her heart breaking into a thousand jagged pieces made her close her eyes and simply stand there. Alone.
* * *
The next morning her uncle summoned her to his study.
‘Frederick Lovelace, the Earl of Berrick, has done you the honour of offering marriage, Adelaide. He came expressly to ask for your hand and I must say that my advice would be to consider his proposal carefully as it is probably the very best you will ever receive.’
Adelaide shook her head and sat down, feeling her legs could not carry her own weight. ‘When I came to London, Uncle, I told you that I did not want to be married off to anyone. Those wishes still stand and nothing you say could persuade me otherwise.’
Her uncle was silent for a moment before he crossed to the desk in his library and pulled out an envelope.
‘Read this, child.’
Taking the missive from him, Adelaide was startled to see that the writing was in fact that of her late father’s.
‘John wrote this six months before he died. Our lawyer had insisted we both redo our wills, you see, and so we sat down together and tried to think of all the things we would want to happen should the unthinkable come to pass. Which it did,’ he added and laid a hand across her shoulder.
‘Your father expected you to marry and have your own family and was adamant that I as your guardian should be the one to help you choose. He was most concerned, you see, for many young women are made unhappy by unsuitable husbands and he did not wish this to happen to you. He wanted a wealthy, sensible, honourable and settled suitor. A man who could keep you in the style you were accustomed. If you look down the page a little further, you will see a list of the families John hoped you to form an alliance with. The Lovelaces are upon it, about the third name down.’
‘My answer is still no.’ Her words echoed in the silence of the room.
‘Are there others there, then, that could take your fancy?’
‘There are not.’
‘You haven’t come across one suitor in all the weeks of the Season with whom you might imagine a future with?’
She stayed silent.
‘Then if that is the case, Adelaide, I have failed your father completely. His line shall be pruned into nothingness and lost into the folds of history, for a family tree depends upon regeneration to flourish. If there had been other siblings your choice might have been less important, but there are not. It is only you.’ He poured himself a drink and took a hefty swig of it. ‘I take this lack as my failure and know that my brother will be looking down upon me and thinking that I could have done more for you, should have done more for you.’
She shook her head. ‘You have been a good and loving man, Uncle Alec, and I have felt at home at Northbridge.’
‘Well, I thank you for that, my dear, but such sentiments will not solve this tricky situation. Lord Berrick will be arriving back here after luncheon and I had hoped to have been able to give him the Ashfield family blessing, but I cannot force you into sense. Know at least that I tried to deter you from your poor choice of turning away Frederick Lovelace’s most kind proposal.’
The words her father had written swam before her eyes. Her parents had loved her and tried to protect her, guiding her from the grave to see her settled in the way they desired. And with George Friar’s malevolence simmering unanswered she knew she was walking on dangerous ground.
‘I...just...cannot.’ Her reply was bare and quiet, and, standing, she placed her father’s letter on the table and let herself out of the silent study, hating the deep lines of hurt on her uncle’s brow.
Chapter Eleven
Daniel Wylde came again to visit Gabriel in the early hours of the evening.
‘I saw Frederick Lovelace this morning. He hopes to have some news of a wonderful new development in his life, I think was how he phrased it. He then asked me if I knew Miss Adelaide Ashfield from Sherborne.’
Hell. Hell. Hell.
The anger in Gabriel twisted into regret and then reformed again into fury. Would she do it? Would she marry him just for a place in the world?
‘Lucien said Miss Ashfield looked more than upset after talking with
you at the McWilliamses’ ball, Gabriel? Is there some problem between you?’
He shook his head. ‘The fault was completely my own. She is blameless.’
‘Of what?’
I cannot touch a woman without feeling sick.
He actually imagined he might have said the words out loud and his heart began to pound so violently he thought he would fall.
‘God, what is wrong with you, Gabriel? Are you ill?’
Everywhere. All over. Sick to my very soul.
‘It’s the damned Service, isn’t it? Is Adelaide Ashfield involved somehow in an investigation?’
You never loved me in this life, Gabriel, not like I loved you...
Henrietta’s last words before the fire, plaintive, shaking. He still felt her fingers on the pulse at his neck, nails scraping over the bloodline that flowed there, and the world began to fade somehow into a further-away place. It was coming back, his memory, slowly and by small degrees, little pieces of the past fitting into a whole.
‘Sit down before you fall down.’ Daniel manhandled him into the chair by the window, the moonlight silver across his lap. ‘For the life of me, Gabe, I need to understand what the hell is going on with you.
Sitting, he felt better, more able to breathe and think. Betrayal was all mixed up together suddenly, in Henrietta’s neediness and Cressida’s revenge at the ball. Even the British Service’s insistence on a certain persona to confound those in society held the scourge of it. To him as a person, to his life, to his honesty, to the hope of something better and finer and good.
‘After the fire...I lost my way.’
‘The fire in the Ravenshill chapel? The one that killed Henrietta Clements?’
‘I think she wanted to die.’
‘God.’
‘I can’t remember properly, but...’ He could not finish.
‘Rumour has it you were burned. Badly.’
Looking up, Gabriel tried to find the energy to hide all he had been so very careful with. ‘I was. It isn’t pretty.’
