by Liz Carlyle
“Xanthia Neville,” he said. “Or Zee, we often call her. Now, of course, she is the Marchioness of Nash.”
There was a wistfulness and an affection in Gabriel’s voice which was unmistakable. “Zee,” she echoed. “It sounds so…so light. So pretty and carefree. Is she?”
“Pretty?” said Gabriel. “Yes, she is very beautiful—in an uncommon way. But carefree? No, Xanthia is all business.”
“She is married now, you said,” she said. “Was that the end of it?”
He scrubbed a hand around his lean jaw, which showed just a hint of shadow. “No, we ended it many years ago,” he said pensively. “Zee was not interested in marriage—not to me, at any rate.”
“Did you ask her?”
“It was understood,” he said a little irritably. “We had…things had…happened. It was assumed by her brother that we would marry. Yes, I offered for her—often enough to humiliate myself.”
“I am sorry,” she said. “Were you in love with her for a long time?”
Antonia was surprised when he hesitated. “I have been thinking about that a great deal of late,” he confessed. “I have been trying to figure out when and how it started.”
“You don’t know?”
“Not precisely,” he confessed. “You see, her eldest brother hired me into the shipping business—as an errand boy, really. It was a small concern then, just three or four ships, if you can imagine. And it was there I met Zee. We were close to the same age, and I just…I just envied her life so much.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wanted what she had,” he said. “I wanted the security of a family. Zee had two elder brothers at that time, Luke, for whom I worked, and Rothewell, who ran the sugar plantations. They loved her unconditionally and protected her fiercely. I just…wanted that. And when I grew older and found myself attracted to her, I believed…I think what I believed, deep down, was that if we married, then…then I would be a part of them. I would be—well, the fourth Neville. They could never turn their backs on me.”
“Oh, Gabriel,” she murmured. “Did you fear they would?”
“I was just the hired help,” he said grimly. “How did I know what they might do? I had learnt to trust no one. I was an orphan they’d taken on charity, without a penny to my name and scarcely a rag to my back. Luke died not too many years after that, so it was just Xanthia, Rothewell, and me. I was afraid of losing them, Antonia.”
“I see,” she answered. “I think I can understand how you might fear that.”
Suddenly, Gabriel laughed and set his fingertips to his temple. “Good God, I cannot believe we are having this discussion,” he said. “I asked you one simple question…and now I feel like I’m telling you the pathetic story of my life.”
“The question you asked me was not simple,” said Antonia quietly. “And I should like…I should like to hear the pathetic story of your life. Indeed, we have been circling round it for days now.”
He looked at her strangely. “I don’t know what you mean.”
She shook her head. “Do not lie to me, Gabriel,” she said. “I know unfailingly when a man is lying to me. It is a skill I learnt in a very hard school.”
When he said nothing but merely set his jaw in that hard line which was becoming so familiar to her, Antonia spoke again. “You hold yourself at a distance from me,” she said. “From everyone, really. I think…I think something very bad happened to you, Gabriel.”
He looked away. “It was a bad life,” he said. “For a time.”
Antonia set her head to one side. “I watch you, you know, with your friend Rothewell. You do the same thing with him—hold yourself at a distance, I mean. And it makes me wonder, Gabriel, if you really have anyone to trust.”
The jaw unclenched a fraction as he seemed to ponder it. “I trust myself,” he finally said. “And in some ways, yes, I trust Rothewell and Xanthia.”
She wished, inexplicably, that he would say he trusted her. But he did not. And why should he? She was not precisely stable or clear-thinking. And never—not even when she’d been well and whole—had she been the sort of capable, cool-headed woman this Xanthia Neville sounded. Antonia felt pathetically wanting in comparison. Perhaps she now understood the meaning of Gareth’s three little words—“just this once.” His heart had already been given.
“What was your life like at Knollwood, Gabriel?” she asked, deliberately changing the subject. “Was it a misery? Was Cyril really so terrible to you?”
He looked at her in mute amazement. “Cyril?” he finally said. “Terrible? What a strange thing to say. He was a boy, not much younger than myself. He was too innocent to be thought terrible by anyone.”
Antonia was confused again. “You did not envy him? You did not feel less than him?”
Gabriel shook his head. “I liked Cyril a great deal,” he said. “He was the only playmate I ever really had.”
“Did you play together often?” Antonia was surprised.
Gareth gave a crooked smile. “More than his parents wished, I am sure,” he said. “It was never their intent we should be playmates. But Cyril was lonely, too. He was…just a boy, like me. Mischievous, sometimes. Even a little petty, as all children are.”
“But you were older, were you not?”
“By a few months.”
Antonia considered it for a moment. This was very different than the impression her late husband had given. “And you were not…you were not in the Royal Navy, either, were you?”
His incredulity was obviously growing. “Antonia, what are you talking about?”
She swallowed hard. “When—after—Cyril died, Warneham did not send you into the navy? That, you see, was what he said. That he had taken you to Portsmouth, because he couldn’t bear the sight of you. That you were to become a midshipman.”
“No,” said Gabriel calmly. “No, Antonia. Warneham hauled me down to Portsmouth and gave me to a press gang. There is a vast deal of difference in the two.”
She recoiled in horror. “A press gang? Good God. How old were you?”
“I was twelve,” he said. “And barely that. Even the British Navy won’t stoop so low as to impress a twelve-year-old boy. They aren’t even supposed to take a grown man if he has no experience at sea.”
“So there was no chance of your ever being an officer?…”
His face suddenly blazed with anger. “Damn it, Antonia, listen to me,” he said, carefully enunciating each word. “I don’t know what cock-and-bull story Warneham told people about my disappearance, but the truth is this: He threw my grandmother out of Knollwood, snatched me from her, hauled me down to Portsmouth, and made it damn good and clear to the press gang that no one—no one—was apt ever to come looking for me. He did not place me in officer’s training. He told them to get rid of me, and he gave them a fifty-pound bribe to seal the bargain. He wanted me dead—he just didn’t have the guts to do it himself.”
Antonia pressed her fingertips to her lips. She wanted, suddenly, to cry. “But…but that is unconscionable!”
“Antonia, gently bred boys do not just become midshipmen in the Royal Navy,” he said. “One’s family must petition for an admission. It takes connections. And if you do not have them—if no one of at least some importance will vouch for you—it simply won’t happen. If Warneham let himself believe I somehow landed in that sort of clover, then he was simply assuaging his own guilt.”
“I—I begin to wonder what he did believe,” she said. “So…what happened to you if the navy would not take you?”
“The press gang traded me for a barrel of port.”
“Traded you?”
“Yes, to a turncoat merchant ship out of Marseilles—if you could call it that. In truth, they were but one step removed from plain pirates—and traitorous ones, at that.”
“My God!” Antonia looked stricken. “Do you think Warneham could have known that would happen?”
Gareth was bloody well sure he had known, but he said nothing. In
stead he merely set one boot heel against the stone ledge and bit his tongue.
“What did you do?” asked Antonia. “Were you frightened?”
“Only of the water, at first,” he said. “Just walking along the docks made my stomach churn. But the people? No, I just wanted my grandmother. I was too naïve to be frightened. I kept telling the ship’s captain who I was, who my father had been, that there had just been a misunderstanding. He found it uproarious. My earnest pleadings kept the crew entertained all the way to Guernsey.”
“How…how did you survive?”
“I did whatever I had to do to survive,” he said grimly. “By the time we’d sailed around the tip of Brittany, I had learnt to keep my mouth shut and do whatever I was told. I was twelve years old, and I was terrified.”
“Did…did they hold you captive?”
“In the middle of the ocean?” He looked at her oddly. “I was made to work, Antonia. They were traitors. Algerian corsairs. Sicilian pirates. The dregs of Europe, for the most part—and the lot of them traveling under a forged letter of marque from the British government. They would cheerfully slaughter their own brothers, and I was their slave. A cabin boy. Do you have any idea what that means?”
She shook her head. “You had to…to do their chores?”
And then some, he wanted to say.
But if he had been gently bred, Antonia had been utterly cocooned. She could not begin to comprehend what his life on the Saint-Nazaire had been like—and he did not want her to. Antonia had suffered enough of her own horror. And he could not suffer the utter humiliation of describing his. He could not bear to relive that sickening sense of powerlessness.
Antonia had lost a little of her newly won color. “Gabriel, w-where did they take you?”
“America had just declared war on England,” he said grimly. “It was expected to be a bloodbath—and privateers were prowling the Caribbean like sharks in the water. There was business aplenty for anyone with the stomach for it.”
“How long were you with these…these pirates?” she asked, her voice a little thready. “How did you escape?”
“I sailed with them for well over a year,” he said. “I thought about trying to escape every time we made port, but oftentimes, the places were foreign and frightening to me, and I could not understand the language. I had no money. At least on the Saint-Nazaire I had food and shelter—if one could call it that.” He realized his voice had dropped to a whisper, and he sharply cleared his throat. “When you are held in someone’s power like that—well, after a while you…you get confused as to precisely who your enemy is. Everyone around you looks rough and dangerous. And sometimes…sometimes you just choose the devil you know. Does that make any sense?”
“None of this makes any sense,” Antonia whispered. “None of it. You were twelve years old. I can’t think how you survived.”
“Ultimately, I made a run for it,” he said. “We came into Bridgetown on a brilliant, beautiful day, and I saw that Union Jack snapping in the breeze, and I knew—I just knew it was my chance. Likely the only one I would ever get. And by then, my captors had become a little lax. They knew as well as I did that my options were few. I bolted the first clear chance I got. Unfortunately, someone raised the alarm.”
“They went after you?” she said. “Could they do that on British soil?”
Gareth laughed bitterly. “They didn’t give a damn whose soil it was,” he said. “You’re bloody well right they chased me—and caught me by the shirt collar twice. Then I had the good fortune to run smack into Luke Neville coming out of a back-alley tavern, and that was the end of it. He believed me. He…he saved me. I know it sounds melodramatic, but he literally saved my worthless hide.”
“And then you went to work for him?” she asked. “You were twelve years old, and you had to work for your living. What was that like?”
“I was thirteen by then,” he said.
“Oh, well, that made it perfectly acceptable,” she murmured.
He forced himself to smile. “Antonia, I was glad to work—daylight to dusk, if need be. I learnt everything I know from Luke Neville. Besides, my grandfather had raised me to believe I would go into some sort of profession one day. He never wished me to think of myself as an aristocrat. He felt that the expectation of a gentleman’s life too easily instilled a lack of character—and in hindsight, I feel he was right. He was ruined, you see, by a group of so-called gentlemen who borrowed vast sums from him, then chose to flee the country rather than do the honorable thing. There was nothing honorable about them.”
“Heavens,” Antonia murmured. “That is a little blunt.”
He looked at her sympathetically. “I apologize if it sounded harsh,” he said. “I’m afraid, Antonia, that the—the quiet comfort of having you near entices me to speak more freely than I ought. I am sure you were brought up quite differently.”
Antonia looked still faintly uncomfortable, and pensive, too. Gareth said no more. The conclusions were hers to draw, but from what he had heard so far, both her father and brother sounded spoilt and self-indulgent to him.
Gareth looked up at the easterly sky. Gray-blue clouds were indeed beginning to gather, unthreatening still. But Statton, it appeared, had not been wrong in his predictions. He dropped his boot from the balustrade and picked up his riding gloves. “I daresay we’d best go on up to Knollwood if we are going,” he mused. “I think we might get rain later.”
She set one small, warm hand on his knee. “We need not go,” she said. “Not unless you require my opinion on something. I know how you dislike the place.”
His gaze fell to her hand. “Antonia, I—” Gareth stopped and measured his words. “I just want it to be perfect for you. I just want—”
But he could say no more, for he scarcely knew what he wanted. He wanted her—yes. And on some level, Antonia wanted him. But there had been so much water under the bridge for both of them. So many old hurts and slights. His snide remark about aristocrats, for example, showed his own prejudices in very stark relief. Doubtless her fine old aristocratic family had a few prejudices of their own. They would not welcome the grandson of a Jewish money lender into their blue-blooded dynasty—particularly if they knew what the rest of his life had been like—even if Antonia wanted him.
And was Antonia even capable of making clear-thought choices just now? She had spent the whole of her adult life, since the age of seventeen, in either an unhappy marriage or the moral equivalent of Bedlam. She had been allowed not even the slightest measure of independence, nor any opportunity to make her own decisions. If she was free to live her own life—if this horrid gossip about her dead husband was laid to rest—and she had the wherewithal and the confidence to travel, to socialize, to do whatever she pleased wherever and however she pleased, well, why on earth would she still want him? Other than for the sex, of course. When he was good for nothing else, there was always sex.
Abruptly, he rose and offered down his hand. “They are running the water pipes from the new spring box up to the kitchen,” he said. “Perhaps they can pipe some water upstairs as well. We should go and have a look, don’t you think?”
Her gaze had grown distant. She put her hand in his. “Yes, thank you,” she said mechanically. “Let us go, by all means.”
Chapter Thirteen
T he Red Indians sat cross-legged inside the folly, sharpening their arrows and awaiting the American onslaught. Tall Feather notched the ends of his sapling branch, bowed it, and looked at it in satisfaction. “That’s a good one,” he said. “Hey, Cyril, give me the twine.”
Cyril scowled up from his whittling. “You’re supposed to say Growling Bear,” he reminded Gabriel, “or it doesn’t count.”
“Just give me the twine,” said Gabriel a little irritably. “I’m going to string my bow.”
Cyril bent forward with the twine, then winced. “Wait,” he said, springing up. “I’ve got to piss.”
“Me, too,” said Gabriel, following him to the edge
of the folly. “But Mr. Needles says you should say ‘make water’ instead of piss.”
“Poo, that’s for children!” said Cyril derisively, hitching loose his trousers. “I’ve got to piss.”
“Here, let’s aim for that tree,” Gabriel suggested. Together, they gave it a royal drenching.
“I won,” said Cyril, shaking himself off.
“Did not!” said Gabriel. “If anything, we tied.”
“Wait,” said Cyril, peering down at Gabriel’s trousers. “Take it back out.”
Gabriel looked at him strangely. “Take what back out?”
“Your penis, ijit,” said Cyril, whipping his from his drawers. “Here, I’ll show you mine.”
“Well, all right, then.” Reluctantly, Gabriel obliged him.
Cyril bent down as if to study it. “It looks just like mine,” he said, frowning. “Maybe longer.”
“Well, of course it looks like yours,” said Gabriel. “Cyril, you’re the ijit. All penises are the very same.”
“No, they aren’t.” Cyril straightened up and tucked himself back inside his drawers. “I heard the housemaids talking. Maisie said if you’re a Jew, you have to cut it off.”
“Eeewww!” said Gabriel. “Cyril, that’s horrid!”
Cyril grinned and slapped him in the back of the head. “Well, you’re all right—probably ’cause you’re a halfbreed,” he teased. “Hey—I know—maybe we should change your Red Indian name from Tall Feather to Tall Cock!”
Coggins greeted Gareth on Selsdon’s top step immediately upon his return from Knollwood. The dark clouds seemed to have intensified, both on the horizon and over the house itself, it seemed, for the butler’s face was a little fretful, and his hands were laid neatly over one another, as if he was resisting the urge to wring them.
Curious, Gareth passed his reins over to Statton, who had returned for the horses, then lifted Antonia from the saddle.
“The post came early,” said the butler as they ascended the stairs.
Gareth glanced at Antonia. “Not bad news, I hope?”
The butler made an equivocal gesture with his hand. “Well, I think not,” he said. “But Mr. Kemble seemed to have a great many letters from London. He opened one of them in some haste, then said he must go at once to West Widding.”
