The Secret Love of a Gentleman

by Jane Lark

  There was a simple circular knocker on the door. She rapped it thrice, then took a step back. There was no answer. She knocked again. The street was busy, there were shops either side of his apartment and across the street, and carts passed through, as well as the carriages transporting those visiting the shops. There was no answer.

  She turned to see a teashop across the road. She would go there. She could take a table in the window and then see when he came home.

  Yet an hour later she was still seated at the table looking out. She sighed, two more hours and the mail coach she had a ticket for would leave.

  “May I get you anything else, ma’am?”

  Caro looked up at the woman who was serving her and nodded. “Another pot.” She could not sit here with nothing.

  Yet as the woman set the second pot down, Rob walked around the corner at the end of the street. His stride was uneven as he limped a little, and he looked so much paler than he had done, even when she had seen him last in September.

  “Forgive me, I forgot an appointment, and I think my friend has let me down,” Caro took the money she owed from her purse and a ha’penny for the waitress and left them on the table. Then she went out, the café’s doorbell ringing above her head.

  ~

  Rob walked along the street trying to make his bad leg take the same stride as his good one. He was forcing his body to return to normality as fast as he could. But the damn thing still hurt as his right hand did. Yet he was already fencing again with his friends and they had been to the shooting gallery this morning and tested out his grip on a pistol too. It had not influenced his skill to any major degree.

  He’d had the deepest conversation he’d ever had with his friends on the first night he’d returned to their club. They had all patted him on the back and then chided him for not merely writing to them and telling them he’d been unwell.

  To which he’d replied, “I broke my writing hand.”

  They had laughed, but still complained that he could have asked someone to do it for him.

  Yet then he’d admitted to them that they had been correct about a woman in his life, and that the woman he’d become involved with had refused an offer from him, and he’d not been in any mood to see a soul.

  He had then, instead of teasing, received sympathy and understanding and been asked for Caro’s name. He’d not given it. Nor had he told them the truth of his injuries: only his father knew that. Yet it had felt good to speak of her to them, to release some of the pressure in his head and his heart that still cried out for the woman, even though she had cut him dead.

  The street was busy. It was probably almost two in the afternoon, a little early for London high society to be about, but the perfect time for those who did not live an elitist life.

  He’d come to pack up the last of his things in his rooms, so that John’s footmen could collect his trunks tomorrow. He was to travel at the weekend. He was to go up to Yorkshire with his uncle in their carriage since it would be too far for him to drive with his aching hand.

  A groom was to drive his curricle up behind them, and his luggage would travel with his uncle’s.

  Rob turned the corner into the street where his apartment was. It was a long while since he’d been here. The man who’d lived here seemed like another person to him.

  He continued walking briskly, though his leg could not easily dodge out of the way of those walking towards him.

  He glanced up as a dray passed, loaded with barrels. “Oy! Watch where y’u walking!”

  When it rolled on there was a woman on the far side of it who was so close she must have been lucky not to lose a foot beneath the heavy iron-rimmed wheels. She wore a navy bonnet, with a broad rim, and a navy cloak, which was dragging its hem in the dirt on the street as she hurried across it.

  Foolish woman.

  He looked at his door, searching out the key from his pocket. His heart pumped a little harder as an image of the day he’d brought Caro here filled his mind.

  “Rob.” Delicate fingers touched his shoulder as he leant to unlock the door.

  “Bloody hell.” He turned and dropped the damned key.

  “Sorry.” She stepped back.

  “Caro.” She had been the woman crossing the street. “Good God! You scared the hell out of me…” He looked at her. Why was she here?

  Her face was pale, although her cheeks and the tip of her nose were pink, perhaps from the cold.

  He gripped both her hands in his and merely stared for a moment as the world continued past them.

  “I need to speak with you.” Her voice was quiet.

  He let her hands go and nodded, then looked down at the key. It might as well be miles away. He would make a fool of himself if he tried to bend and pick it up. His leg did not bend so easily. He looked at her, “Could you pick up the key? I have an injury—”

  “Drew told me.” She squatted down delicately to collect it. “I have been worried about you since he said.” The last words she spoke as she rose up again, and then she placed the key in his open hand.

  He swallowed, his throat had become dry. Was that why she’d come, to offer pity? He did not wish for it. He turned and put the key into the lock, then twisted it and turned the handle. It was the last time he would open this door. In a few days he would open another, a door into his new life in Yorkshire.

  He held the door for her so she could enter first, followed her upstairs and opened the door to let her pass into his rooms. The scent of lavender hung in the air.

  He’d forgotten just how humble his rooms were. “You are lucky to have caught me here. I have not been staying here. I’ve been staying at John’s because of my injured leg. I only came to pack up my things.”

  The back of her bonnet had been moving as though her gaze had been flying about his room, but now she turned and looked at him. “Drew said you have a property in Yorkshire.”

  “Yes, my uncle’s.”

  She nodded. He could see in her eyes that she wished to know more and yet she did not ask. “Sit down, Rob.”

  He did, because the tone of her voice said she had something to say that he would not like to hear. Had she come to tell him she was to marry Phillip? Had she thought, out of courtesy, that she should give him some warning?

  She came across the room and sat down in the other armchair before his small hearth. Her hands clasped together on her lap, over her cloak. She had not even undone the ribbons of her bonnet.

  “Rob, there is something I have not told you, and you will think it bad of me, and yet you must understand that I have lost children…”

  Children… The word echoed in his head.

  “I have never carried beyond four months. I had no expectation that it would progress.”

  Carried….

  “I am with child. I am carrying your child. I fell the day we came here. I am beyond four months, and I… I have felt it moving, and seen a doctor who says its heart is strong. I must think now, I must hope, that the child will survive.”

  Child… His… “Lord.” He was paralysed. It was not the news he’d expected. “Mary said you have been walking out with Phillip.”

  She shook her head. “He asked if he might court me. I said no. Then he asked if he might call on me as a friend and I agreed, but he called with an expectation that it might become something more. It was never that for me. I have now asked him not to call again. I have thought you angry with me, because you did not write to Mary.”

  “I did not write because I had no idea what to say. I could not say the things I wished and so it was easier to be silent.”

  “What did you wish to say?”

  “That I hated you, for rejecting me, for deeming me too young to know my own mind. But that I love you still. I came to visit the other week, to see you. I intended repeating my offer. But then Mary said you were with Phillip.”

  “Mary was wrong.”

  “And you are with child…” The words echoed through his head. “Do they know?”<
br />
  “No.”

  “Who does?”

  “The doctor, who I gave a false name to, and my housekeeper, who I asked to let out my clothes.”

  He was to be a father with his own small infant—like Iris. Good Lord! His fingers lifted to his forehead, then he realised he still wore his hat. He took it off and leaned forward in his seat, gripping its brim, looking at her hazel eyes. They were a dark amber, in the shade of her bonnet, and the shadows of his room. “Have you been afraid?”

  “No. I have not believed the child would live. I have been enjoying every minute of the feel of it within me. But now, now I think it might live. Now I am afraid.”

  Her eyes glistened with tears.

  He set his hat on the floor and then reached out and held her hand.

  “You should have written to me.”

  “And ruined your life for a child that would never be born. No, it would have been wrong and cruel of me.”

  “It might have made my life, not ruined it. It might make my life.”

  She shook her head. “No, Drew was right, it was unfair of me to become attached to you.”

  “Drew, what has Drew to do with anything between us? You have spoken to him about us?” Rob slid forward in his chair.

  “He guessed the first night Albert danced with me. You were being too attentive.”

  He looked down at the small, gloved hand gripped in his. “What did he say?”

  “That I must end it.”

  Rob looked up. “Why?”

  “Because you have only just begun your life. You ought to have been left to find the path you wished without the need to think of me.”

  “Perhaps that would have been better for me, but it was not how things occurred. I was happy, Caro. I was happy to feel responsible for you. I was frustrated by not being able to be responsible for you in public. The night you rejected me I had already decided to take on a property like my uncle’s. I wished to provide a home for us, somewhere we could create our own haven away from town and where I could begin my cause in politics.” He sighed. “My uncle’s property will be our haven now.”

  She nodded.

  They had no choice. She could not reject him. Discomfort crept over Rob. He did not like the idea of their relationship becoming a necessity.

  Her gaze held his, her eyes asking him questions she should not need to ask. Yet he would ask them because he was uncertain of her. “Did you love me? Do you now? We must marry anyway, but I would feel better if I thought it something real.”

  Her hand closed about his, offering reassurance. “Of course I do. I did as Drew asked and yet I hoped you would not forget me. I hoped that perhaps in three years you might come back to me. I did not speak of that because if I let you think it, I knew you would still let your hope of me affect your choices.”

  “Why would that have been a bad thing?”

  She swallowed. She still thought him too young. He could see it in her eyes.

  “You say that now, and yet what if in a year or two you realise you made the wrong choice. I’m sorry, I am taking choice from you.”

  “Do not be foolish. I am sorry, because things should not have gone as far as they did between us. It has affected both our options.”

  “It was I who took things too far in the hut.”

  “And it was I who brought you here in September, had I not done so…”

  “I do not regret it. Not at all. Because I love you, but also because I may have a child. I had no hope of that. I did not think it possible.”

  “And yet it is, by the looks of it, even though I withdrew.”

  “Yes,” she laughed. “Oh, Rob.” Her fingers held his tighter, hurting his right hand and making him flinch a little. “I am full of hope, and there is excitement, but then there is fear.”

  He lifted her gloved fingers to his lips and kissed the back of them. “Come, we ought to go.”

  “I have a ticket for the mail coach in an hour.”

  “Is that how you came here?”

  “Yes, I boarded it in Maidstone. That is where I live now.”

  “Well, you will not return that way. I will take you to Pembroke House. You may sleep there, and then tomorrow I will take you home, and you may show me your cottage.”

  “Rob—”

  “No, not a word against it. We are engaged now, like it or not, Caro. I have the say of things.”

  She sighed, letting a sound of frustration slip from her throat.

  He did not care if she disliked it. He was a little angry with her still. She had rejected him, and then kept this from him, and she still did not believe him trustworthy.

  He stood, her hand still in his, so she must rise too.

  “Do you not wish to pack, as you came to do?”

  “No, I will hardly be going to Yorkshire at the end of the week. We will be getting married in four weeks. I need to be here.”

  “Would you not rather I travelled to Yorkshire after you. We may be married there.”

  “You wish me to hide you away? I will not. We will be married in St George’s before my family and I will publish the announcement in the papers, before your family. I will be proud to marry you and I’ll not have anyone think otherwise.”

  A tear escaped one of her eyes, but it did not appear to be an unhappy tear. Her forehead would have rested against his shoulder, except that she still wore her bonnet and instead its brim bumped against him. She laughed as her head lifted.

  He wiped the tear away with a thumb. “This will be a good thing, I promise. We made each other happy in the summer. We will make each other happy again.”

  “Simply having a child will make me happy.”

  He smiled at that. He had learned in the summer, when there had been the news about Kilbride’s son, how deep the longing for a child had been within her. Yet she had lost five children.

  His fingers touched beneath her chin as her eyes looked into his. “It will be our child, Caro, and it will make me happy too. But having you will make me happy as well. I wish to make you happy also.”

  “I have always been happy when I am with you.”

  He looked away, emotion catching in his throat. Things had shifted between them. They could not simply step back into the hours they’d spent together in the summer. “Would you pick up my hat? I forgot to collect it from the floor before I stood up.”

  She squatted down to collect it and then he brushed off the top of it.

  “What did you do to your leg?”

  He met her gaze. “I broke the upper bone. It is healed. I need to merely get my leg moving again, and my strength back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Chapter 39

  They walked to Pembroke House and it took half an hour, as Rob had said when she visited in September. He did not offer his arm, but walked beside her, his arms at his sides and hands clenched as though he fought against his limp.

  She longed to hold his arm. But she thought it might make it harder for him to walk.

  Love swelled within her as they talked. But when she asked him about his accident, his answers became evasive. He asked her not to tell anyone his leg had been broken because he did not like to be fussed over.

  He was still stalwart and idealistic. That was what his desire to be married in St George’s was about, because he would not do anything less than he ought to.

  She did not mind that he was, though. They were good qualities and his determination had helped her break the glass prison she’d created for herself.

  She would be proud of him, and their child would be proud of its father.

  Her fingers pressed over her stomach, over the slight bump hidden beneath her cloak as she felt a flutter of movement within her.

  “You know, they are going to make a fuss,” Rob stated when they reached the Duke’s property. “All my family are still here. Because of my accident they did not return home at the end of the autumn season, as they normally would. We will not tell them about the child, though. You
do not obviously show. We will keep it our secret.”

  She nodded. It would probably embarrass him. Yet would they not think her presence in London, and the two of them suddenly arriving, odd?

  The butler, Finch, opened the door. “Mr Marlow and Lady Caroline.” He bowed, as though it was not at all odd that she’d turned up unexpectedly.

  Rob nodded at him and walked past, heading towards the stairs.

  Caro longed for Rob to take her hand, but when he reached the stairs he gripped the banister and his limp became more pronounced. He must have been severely hurt. She wished she had been told.

  He took her hand at last as they walked along the landing. The sound of conversation called them forward.

  A tremor ran through her.

  “You need not worry,” he said in a low voice.

  He seemed different. There was something new in the tone of his voice. More confident.

  “Ready?” he asked as they stood outside the drawing room.

  “Yes.” No.

  He lifted her fingers to his lips and kissed the back of her glove. Then he led her in, walking straighter, as though he tried to hide his limp.

  “I have a visitor,” he stated, lifting her hand.

  She bobbed a curtsey to the room in general, relieved to see that it was only his close family, his mother and father, and his sisters, and the Duke and Duchess. His mother stood, the look on her face expressing shock.

  “You did not say you were travelling today… and you did not take your curricle,” his father stated as he stood.

  “I did not travel, Caro did.”

  His father threw Rob an odd look. There was a question in his eyes as he smiled.

  Rob let her hand go and took off his hat, then set it aside. A footman immediately appeared to pick it up.

  His father walked forward.

  “Caro and I are engaged to be married,” Rob said to the room.