‘Your family,’ she said, not a question, but a statement. She was quick, intuitive. She understood too much. And gossip would reach her eventually. It was only a matter of time. The ton’s censure he could bear, but hers? He turned his mind away from that thought.
‘I will know their whereabouts by the end of the week. Collins is a Bow Street Runner and good at his job,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘There is a charity musical being held in Almack’s Rooms this afternoon. Much of the ton will be there. Gossip will have spread following last night and our appearance in Hyde Park. It will not be easy, Kate. You do not have to accompany me.’ He wanted to give her a way out. This was not her punishment to take.
‘I want to,’ she said.
Their eyes held and too many things stirred between them across that small distance, before she turned and walked away.
He listened to the sound of her footsteps on the hard polished floors.
One week and Collins would have traced his family.
Two weeks and she would be gone.
This was the way it was supposed to be, he thought, and focused his attention on the ledger that lay open on the desk before him.
* * *
Kate wore a dark chocolate-brown dress to the musicale, and forwent the fichu again. Ironically, in facing this London society that was Kit’s enemy and hers, and opposite to everything that she had needed to be Le Voile, her strength lay in her sensuality and confidence as a woman.
Kit had been right in his warning. She slid her arm into his, presenting a united front to those vultures that circled them and felt the warmth of his fingers as they covered hers.
Rows of chairs had been set out within the ballroom of Almack’s. Kate and Kit did not sneak like thieves into the back rows, but took seats right at the front.
She did not fully understand what this homecoming was about for Kit, but knew that, whatever was going on, part of it was a need to face them, to stand before them all and look them in the eyes. And given all he had done for her, it was the least she could do to stand by his side and help him. She did not want to think of the other reasons she was doing this, the complications in her heart.
There was a string quartet that played with a vibrancy and immediacy of emotion and an opera singer who sang with the voice of an angel of love, all of it of love.
Without thinking she toyed with the thin gold band upon her finger, feeling the tug of guilt and longing and the turmoil that struggled within her. Her thoughts moved from the woman who was singing to the man who sat by her side, the man with whom she had stood before a priest and spoken the same words that made a mockery of those she had spoken to another man a lifetime ago.
She glanced up to find Kit’s eyes on her hands, where she touched Wendell’s ring. His gaze, dark and too perceptive, moved to meet her own. He smiled, his cool ironic smile, and, returning his gaze to the musicale, did not look at her again.
* * *
Kit accepted a glass of champagne from the salver the footman offered and passed it to Kate. He did not take one for himself.
‘Mr Northcote, is that really you?’ The voice sounded behind where they stood.
‘Prepare yourself,’ he whispered in Kate’s ear as he turned. ‘One of the ton’s biggest gossipmongers.’ And saw her smile.
Mrs Quigley, a tabby of renown, had not changed in the years he had been away.
‘It is, indeed, Mrs Quigley,’ he said smoothly.
‘How...surprising.’ She smiled a sickly sweet smile. ‘And yet here you are, with your lovely companion.’ She looked at Kate, still smiling, the question burning in her eyes.
‘Here we are,’ said Kate with a naughty twinkle in her eye. He could have sworn she was making her accent deliberately more American.
Mrs Quigley’s eyes widened, the fervour of excitement of this latest discovery practically choking her.
‘May I introduce my wife?’
Mrs Quigley pressed a plump white hand to her breast. ‘Your wife?’ she breathed.
Kate leaned forward, as if to confide a secret to the tabby. ‘It was a love match,’ she said in a voice loud enough for all around to hear.
The room was quiet enough to hear a pin drop. The women were practically straining closer and tucking their hair behind their ears all the better to see and hear what was unfolding in their midst.
‘How—’ Mrs Quigley scrabbled for an acceptable comment and found one ‘—romantic.’
‘I thought so,’ said Kate, and stroked a hand against his arm.
It was all he could do not to laugh at the way the woman’s eyes riveted to the small gesture with a fascinated horror. It was with obvious effort that she managed to draw them away long enough to ask Kate the question, ‘And do my ears deceive me, or are you not of these shores?’
‘You noticed.’ Kate smiled. ‘I’m American.’
Mrs Quigley practically choked on that revelation.
‘How...nice,’ she managed to say.
‘Isn’t it just?’ Kate smiled again.
‘I heard tell you had a boy with you, a boy from the west country.’
‘You heard correctly,’ Kit said.
‘Not America?’
‘Not America,’ said Kate.
The speculation in Mrs Quigley’s eyes was obvious. If the boy was not his wife’s... But even she was not crass enough to ask the question outright. Instead, she changed the subject.
‘We did not expect to see you again.’
‘Evidently not,’ he said.
‘Where have you been hiding all these years?’
‘Here and there.’
‘Such a shame over what happened.’
Kit said nothing. This is what he had come back to face and face it he would.
‘Your family losing the house and moving to a...less fashionable...neighbourhood.’
‘Quite,’ he said as if he already knew and indeed, in a way, he did.
‘And your mother’s death—my heartfelt condolences on that.’
The world seemed to stop. His blood ran cold. A knife cut through the wall of his chest, exposing the scars of his heart for all to see. He schooled his face to show nothing.
‘Such kindness, Mrs Quigley.’ He knew he should move away. He knew he had to mingle, to face them all down. But he could not move. He just stood there. Frozen. Exposed.
His mother was dead. The words did not seem real. None of this scene seemed real. Except he knew it was. He deserved this, all of it. But his mother...she had deserved none of it.
‘Kit,’ Kate’s voice sounded. He felt her hand thread through his arm, catching hold of him, pulling him up from the dark waters closing over him. Her eyes met his as she threw him the life line. ‘I am feeling a little...hot. Would you be so kind as to escort me home?’ And in them was strength and understanding.
‘As you wish.’ He turned to the tabby who was watching every nuance of their interaction with avaricious eyes. ‘Excuse us, Mrs Quigley.’
He led her across the room, out into the fresh air and space of the street. Their carriage drew up, the footman jumping down and opening the door.
They climbed inside.
He was in control again, closing it all over, knowing this was just a part of it, telling himself he should have been prepared for such an eventuality.
The door slammed shut and they were on their way to Grosvenor Street.
He stared out at the passing streets, streets he knew so well, streets that were a part of his life, a part of his childhood.
‘Thank you,’ he said without taking his gaze from the houses and shops and carriages, from the horses and the men and women.
‘I am so sorry about your mother, Kit.’ Her words were as gentle as her hand that t
ook his.
‘So am I.’ His voice was hard.
He withdrew his hand from hers because he feared what he would do if he did not. He feared what he would tell her. He feared what he would reveal. He feared he would break every damn vow he had ever made.
He thought of those vows he had sworn. This was just a part of what must be faced, all of it by him alone. Kit Northcote was dead. It was Kit North who had come back. And Kit North who would do what must be done.
* * *
Now that they were alone again he was shutting her out as ever he did. Kate knew that. But this time it was different. This time he was hurting, really hurting. For all his cool hard veneer she had seen the truth in that unguarded moment in Almack’s Rooms when he had learned so cruelly of his mother’s death. He was hurting, but the hurt seemed only to harden his resolve, to make him harsher and more determined to do whatever it was he had come here for, facing down London’s society, running the gauntlet of their censure.
The rest of the journey was conducted in silence but when the carriage stopped outside the house on Grosvenor Street he took her hand in his and helped her down from the carriage, his fingers entwining with hers as if he would never let them go. She held to him, and he to her, proclaiming their union to the world.
She glanced up into his eyes and he did not look away, just held her gaze and, stopping still, touched his mouth to hers. He kissed her with an excruciating sweetness that belied all of his coolness. And she slid her arms around him and kissed him, too, her lips offering the comfort her words could not. She kissed him in the middle of that respectable street, oblivious to all else except the need to reach him. She kissed him. And when the kiss ended, their eyes just held, clinging to that moment they both knew would end when they stepped out of the public eye into the privacy of their home.
He raised their still-entwined fingers to his mouth, brushed a kiss to her knuckles and led her inside.
Tom came running down the staircase, abandoning whatever tasks Kit had set him to, as soon as the front door closed.
‘Captain North, Mrs Medhurst.’ He smiled, oblivious of the mistaken name.
Kit said nothing, but she saw the tiny tightening of his jaw before he spoke to the boy. ‘As part of your duties it is necessary that you learn to ride. It is a most useful skill in life. How about we start the lessons this afternoon, in Hyde Park?’
‘Yes please, Captain, sir!’ Tom looked delighted as he stared up at his hero with admiration, belatedly remembering her. ‘If that’s all right with you, ma’am?’ The boy glanced over at her.
‘It’s all right with me,’ she said, but she wondered if Kit was not doing this in part to avoid her.
‘If you will excuse me,’ Kit said to her with a stiff bow.
She said nothing, just watched him walk away pretending that he had not just learned that his mother was dead and that his family had been forced to move due to reduced circumstances; pretending that everything was all right.
* * *
It was the same when they returned later that afternoon. Tom was there then and at dinner so that she could say nothing of it. Kit behaved as if nothing at all different had happened today, but he made his excuses and left before it was time for the boy to retire for the night.
She heard the front door close and knew he had gone out. From the window she watched his dark figure descend the stone steps. There was no waiting carriage or horse. He walked off along the street to merge with the darkness.
* * *
Kit was not going anywhere. He walked, just walked, because he needed to be alone. And he did not know what else to do. He walked every damn street in London, trying to straighten the thoughts in his head. He walked until his steps had returned him to the house in Grosvenor Street and the woman who waited inside.
There was no light behind the curtains of her bedchamber. She slept. At least one of them would.
He had spent three years getting back here. Three years for a chance to make it right. Except he was too late. It would never be right for his mother. She was dead and gone, never knowing how sorry he was, never learning how much he regretted it all.
He made his way quietly up the stairs and into his bedchamber. A bottle of brandy and a single crystal tumbler still sat on his bedside cabinet. He kept it there, the same set as in his study, to tempt him, to know the strength of his resistance. Now standing there in that moonlit room, for the first time he lifted the bottle, held it in his hand and stared at the neatly printed label, seriously contemplating breaking the wax seal and prising the cork from the slender glass neck.
He missed the rich sweet taste of brandy. He missed the burn on his tongue and in his throat and stomach. He missed the oblivion it could bring, the numbing of the senses, the escape that he had lost himself in so many times after he had realised the magnitude of what he had done on that terrible night three years ago. The pain bit all the deeper for knowing there was now a part of it that he could never undo. His mother had deserved better, so much better.
He sat the bottle back down in its rightful place and walked to stand by the window, staring down on to those streets he knew so well. He deserved the pain. Every damn bit of it. And God help him, he would take it like a man and keep his mouth shut from whining.
* * *
Kate sat in the chair in the darkness of her bedchamber.
She knew Kit was in there alone. She knew he was shutting her out. And she knew why, at least in part.
Beneath the push and pull of her thumb and forefinger Wendell’s wedding band slid this way and that around her finger, the habit so engrained in her across the years. Normally it soothed her. Tonight it did not. There was a tightness in her throat, an ache in her chest.
The scene from Almack’s Rooms was there in her mind, just as it had been there all night. Every time she shut her eyes she saw that moment again, when Kit had stood there and heard that his mother was dead from the lips of a gossip; stood there with his face a mask of cool dispassion hiding the truth beneath. She felt his pain as sorely as if it were her own. And she knew he needed her for all he refused to admit it. But if she went to him this night...if she offered him comfort, she knew what would happen between them. And if they made love, there could be no annulment. And if she went to him knowing that, what did it say about how she felt about Wendell?
Betrayal. The word taunted her and it was true because she could feel his presence fading. And she had loved him, with all her heart. She still did. He was Ben and Bea’s father. And she missed him. And she missed her children. She missed them so much that there was a hollow of aching deep inside her. But Kit was on the other side of that door.
He was such a strong man. She had never seen him weaken, not in all that he had endured. He pretended he did not feel, but she knew that he did.
In a fortnight Gunner would be here to take her home, leaving Kit here alone.
The barrier between them seemed higher than ever. But there was a way she might reach him. And after everything they had been through, he deserved to know.
She toyed with Wendell’s wedding band upon her finger and rose from her chair.
* * *
A light knock sounded from the connecting door from Kate’s bedchamber.
She did not wait for an answer, just opened it and came to stand there.
He knew from the fact she was wearing not her night robe, but the black dress that mourned the passing of her real husband, that she had been waiting for him to return.
‘You should go to bed,’ he said, his voice unnecessarily cool. He did not want her to see him like this.
‘So you can shut me out?’ she said.
‘What is it that you want, Kate?’
‘To talk.’
‘About what? My dead mother? The things I have done? Your journey home to Louisiana?’ He shook
his head. ‘If so, you are wasting your time.’ He made to turn away from her.
‘None of those things,’ she said, stilling him. ‘I came to talk about Wendell.’
He stood where he was and watched her walk right up to him. ‘I think I already know all I need to about Wendell.’
‘No, Kit, you do not,’ she said, and looked up into his face.
He knew he should turn away from her. He knew he should insist she go back to her room. But he did neither of those things. He just stood there and waited for what it was she had come to say.
‘I loved him. I still do.’
‘As I said—nothing I do not already know.’
‘When he died, I swore a vow that I would stay true to him and him alone, that there would never be another man for me. It is the main reason I became Le Voile. Because I had sworn that I would never marry again. I needed to support myself and my children financially.’
He swallowed, only now fully realising the position he had put her in by bringing her here, by marrying her, even if it had been with the best of intentions.
‘I have never told anyone of my vow,’ she said.
In the same way he had never spoken of his. Vows were private things. They were sworn in blood and kept in secret. No one understood that more than Kit.
‘I know some folks would not deem such a vow binding. They would say it was made in a moment of grief and offer all sorts of excuses to get me out of it. But a vow is a vow.’ She stopped, and met his eyes, facing him squarely while she told him this most private of truths. ‘If I break it...’
‘If you break it, you would not be the person you are. It would turn you into someone else altogether,’ he said. ‘Someone you do not want to be.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded, her eyes caressing his face.
‘I understand. I have sworn a vow or two myself.’
The silence hissed with his chance to tell her, but he could not. Because he could not bear to see the look on her face if he did.
‘Thank you for telling me,’ he said.
‘There is more, Kit.’
He waited, not hurrying her, giving her the space she needed, even if he was not sure he wanted to hear the rest of it.
[GOD08] The Lost Gentleman Page 21
