The Unexpected Marriage of Gabriel Stone (Lords of Disgrace) (19 page)

Harriet was down the beachside steps before her when they finally jolted to a halt. She ran over the shingle to where Gabriel waited, his face once more his impassive card-player’s mask. Caroline, hobbling down the steps with the assistance of Mrs Huggins, could hear her talking.

‘...broken toe, my lord...doctor...’

Gabriel came striding down the beach and scooped her up from the bottom step with a curt nod to the dipper. ‘Harriet, find a coin in your mistress’s reticule for this good woman.’

He took the steps up to the bathing house without pausing, passing an interested group of ladies at the top. ‘My wife has a slight injury to her foot, that is all. Thank you for your concern, Lady Oxenford. Mrs Hughes, too kind, I am sure it is nothing serious. If there is a retiring room where she can rest while we wait for a doctor to come—’

Through sore eyes Caroline could see that no one was looking censorious as the manager ushered them through to a small room with a
chaise longue
and assured them a doctor would be with them directly. Her
hoydonish
prank had not been observed.

‘No one saw me,’ she said the moment the door was closed.

‘What did you do to your foot?’ Gabriel was stripping off her stocking, ignoring her words.

‘I stubbed my toe on the steps.’

‘It is beginning to bruise. It might be broken.’ He looked up. ‘Your eyes are red.’ It sounded like an accusation.

‘They were watering with the pain. I rubbed them too hard, that is all. Gabriel—’ The knock on the door silenced her.

‘Lady Edenbridge? My lord. I am Dr Foster, I was with one of my patients using the warm baths, so I am most conveniently on hand, am I not? Now, ma’am, what seems to be the trouble?’

‘The trouble
seems
to be a severely stubbed toe and possibly a broken bone,’ Gabriel said. He set an upright chair by the head of the
chaise
and took Caroline’s hand in his.

It should have been an affectionate gesture but, glancing up at his set jaw, Caroline wondered if it was simply to prevent her babbling out any more indiscretions. She was glad of it for support when the doctor, keeping up a constant flow of inane chatter presumably intended to soothe her, manipulated the toe, announced that it was not broken and bandaged it.

Gabriel thanked him punctiliously, handed him his card and invited him to send in his account to the London address. He walked out with him and came back with the information that he had a sedan chair for her. ‘Should I carry you to it? There is a throng of interested ladies outside.’

‘Then I see no reason to give them any more opportunity to gawp at you displaying your muscles,’ Caroline snapped. She had no wish to find herself carried, to lie back and revel in the romantic thrill of being carried by her strong husband. Not now, with him so angry at her.

Chapter Nineteen

G
abriel escorted her back to the house on the Steine, striding beside the chair in total silence. He gave her his arm to hobble into the hall and up the stairs and instructed Harriet curtly to look after her mistress.

‘Where are you going, my lord?’ Caroline enquired as he turned to the door.

‘Out.’

‘Harriet, please leave us.’ She waited until the maid had gone, then got up from the chair where Gabriel had deposited her. ‘You are not running away from me until you tell me what you are so angry about. And do not tell me it was because I approached the men’s part of the beach. No one saw me and they would have had a hard time recognising me if they had.’

‘Madam, I do not require your permission to come and go in my own house.’ But he stayed where he was.

Caroline drew in a silent breath of relief for that small mercy at least. ‘You were never a common soldier. You were never a criminal. And if you have a desire for pain along with your sexual pleasure, then you are hiding the fact exceedingly well. Therefore those scars on your back were put there by your father when you were under his control. And that means he was a vicious man who should have been ashamed of himself. It does not explain why you feel you have to hide them from
me
.’

‘Marriage does not mean I have to confide every detail of my past to my wife.’

‘
Detail?
You call receiving savage whippings a
detail
, Gabriel?’

‘I call it the past and I have avoided this because I knew it would end up with you becoming ridiculously over-emotional about it.’

‘I am not over-emotional,’ she snapped.

‘Then what are you crying about?’

‘You, you idiot.’ She threw up her hands in frustration, wising she could pace up and down the room, or thump the man to get some reaction from him. ‘The boy you were, because those scars are not recent. And you now, because it is plain they still hurt as much as they ever did.’

‘My father was subject to uncontrollable rages and the conviction that his word was law. He demanded perfection. That made him demanding and difficult to live with. You can no doubt understand that from your own experience. I did not want to remind you of what you had suffered, that is all.’ As though realising that his very rigidity betrayed his feelings Gabriel moved away from the door with his habitual relaxed prowl. Anyone who did not know him well—
anyone who does not love him—
would have seen nothing amiss.

‘My father is a deeply selfish man with a number of eccentricities who loses his temper when he is thwarted. He lashed out at me and that was very wrong of him.’ She paused while she got her breathing back under control. ‘But he had never done it before and, although I know he has chastised Lucas and Anthony, just as every schoolboy in the country must have been punished, it was never the kind of systematic whipping that produces scars like those. And you were the eldest. What on earth did he do to your three younger brothers?’ She thought of Ben, big and bluff, George, scholarly and ambitious, and Louis. Earnest, studious Louis.

‘Very little. He rarely found them at fault,’ Gabriel said with his mocking smile. ‘I was the flawed one, the wicked, provoking one.’ When she opened her mouth to protest he said, ‘You wanted to know where I was going? To Edenvale. You may come, too, if you wish, provided I am not subjected to any more maudlin tears about the past.’

‘You can be quite hateful when you choose, Gabriel Stone.’ And it was a deliberate choice to be so, she was certain of that. He wanted to push her away. Or perhaps the word was
needed
.

‘Are you only just discovering that, my dear?’ He paused at the door, as cool as she was heated. ‘You had best change if you are coming with me, I have hired a curricle.’

* * *

His mood was communicating itself to the hired pair who fidgeted and sidled as he kept them waiting for Caroline to emerge from the house. Gabriel forced himself to relax his hands, to speak to the horses until they calmed. He only wished he could exert the same soothing influence over his knotted guts. The memories of the past were bad enough. Not the pain, that he had learned to lock away, but the flashbacks to his father’s body at his feet, strangely pathetic in death, all that power and fury reduced to nothing but flesh and bone and expensive tailoring. He had been glad he had died, he had to bear the guilt of that as well.

The images flooded in as he fought them. Louis, a white-faced child, mercifully unconscious; Ben and George, just boys themselves, stammering questions; and further back, his mother as white as the sheet she lay upon and the doctor sweeping a bottle into his case with one hasty brush of his hand.
A tragic accident
, he had said, and fourteen-year-old Gabriel, shivering with dread behind the curtains, had known with absolute certainty that he lied.

But that was the past and he had learned to live with it, contain it. His marriage was the present and he had allowed the poison to leak from that sealed room in his mind to hurt Caroline. And what had he done this for, this marriage, if it were not to save her from hurt?

She came down the steps using her parasol as a cane, her weight on her heel, waving away the footman. ‘Thank you, Robert. I can manage.’ But she let the man help her into the curricle and settled herself with perfect composure beside Gabriel.

His wife was a lady through and through, he told himself as the pair moved sedately out into the traffic bordering the Steine. Whatever had passed between them, whatever hurts she had, mental or physical, she would not sulk and she would not show anything but a pleasant face in public. His mood softened, he felt himself grow calmer, just because she was beside him.

‘I had expected a high-perch curricle,’ she said as he gave a wide berth to the fishermen drying their nets on the end of the greensward nearest the beach and then turned eastwards along the seafront.

Play the cards as they were dealt
, he reminded himself. You didn’t win at cards by cursing every poor hand that came your way, but by working with what you had. And just now he had a wife who was apparently forgiving enough to drive out with him.

‘The roads around Edenvale are more lanes than anything. One needs a carriage built with substance rather than style. I had no wish to deposit you in a ditch when an axle broke.’

‘Then you had planned for us to make this expedition today?’ Unspoken was the question of why he had not mentioned it before.

Cowardice
was probably the correct answer, but he left that unspoken also. ‘Yes. It is less than an hour’s drive.’ Which was no answer at all.

Caroline maintained a flow of intelligent conversation as they drove, commenting on the landscape, the boats to be seen along the coast, the state of the tide, the occasional picturesque cottage or view. None of it was taxing, none required an answer beyond the occasional monosyllable. Gabriel decided he was probably being managed and that he deserved it. That he welcomed it. He did not want to be at odds with his wife.

He turned inland when they reached Saltdene, wending his way through narrow lanes up on to the rolling downland. ‘Access is better from the north, but this is a more attractive route,’ he added as he made the sharp turn into the park through the gate to the Home Farm.

She was silent as they drove across the parkland, past the famous herd of fallow deer, past the lake and the great stable block and, finally, to the front of the house.

‘Queen Anne,’ Gabriel offered when she was still silent. ‘Not over-large and the rose-red brickwork is considered rather fine.’

‘It is beautiful and seems very well kept up.’

‘I have excellent staff here.’

As he spoke the front doors were opened. Two footmen appeared and a groom came running from the stables. Gabriel helped Caroline down and offered his arm as she limped across to the steps. ‘Does it pain you very much?’

‘Just the bruising coming out. If I did not have to wear a shoe it would be trivial.’

‘My lord.’ Hoskins, the butler, stood waiting, permitting himself one of his rare smiles. ‘Welcome home, my lord. And, my lady?’

‘Indeed yes. My dear, this is Hoskins, who has been with me for ten years. Hoskins, Lady Edenbridge, your new mistress.’

Caroline smiled warmly at the man and then looked around the great double-height hall. ‘I see you manage the house in fine style, Hoskins. What a magnificent staircase!’

‘It is one of the showpieces of the house, my lady. That double sweep, the ornately carved newel posts, the painted ceiling—students of architecture frequently call just to admire it.’

She stood at the foot where the two arms of the stairs came together on the pure white stone and Gabriel could see, beneath her feet, the pool of crimson slowly spreading, spreading... Then he blinked and all was clean marble again.

‘Refreshments for her ladyship in the Chinese Drawing Room, Hoskins. And no doubt Mrs Hoskins will make certain the countess’s suite is in readiness should she wish to rest.’

‘Thank you, but I feel the need for tea more than anything else.’

‘You have the butler charmed, which is a good start,’ Gabriel observed as they seated themselves in the drawing room. It was in good order, but then it should be: he had written before they had set off to Brighton to tell Hoskins that he would be opening up the house again.

‘A good start for when you leave me here by myself, you mean?’

‘There is little to entertain you in London just now, I would have thought. Naturally you will want to return when the Season starts, but in the meantime I assumed you would want to order this place as you see fit.’

‘While
you
will have plenty to entertain you in London?’

‘Probably. My clubs... It is pretty much a bachelor society at this time of year. And then when hunting starts I expect to receive invitations to various people’s boxes in the shires.’
The clubs, the hells, the safe, solitary evenings
. The loneliness that had seemed like peace before he had become used to Caroline’s presence.

‘I see. You no longer require my company?’ Caroline’s colour was up. ‘Or my presence in your—’ She broke off as a footman came in with a tea tray and thanked him as he set it at her side. ‘Bed,’ she finished when the door closed again. ‘I cannot say you did not warn me. But I also warned you, Gabriel, that I take marriage vows seriously. I am not prepared to simply acquiesce to this. I will not nag, I will do everything in my power not to mention it again, but I will not be closeted in the depths of the country while you commit adultery all over London.’

‘Adultery?’ It took him so much aback that he stared at her. ‘Who said anything about adultery?’

‘You did. Before we were married. You said you would not keep your vows, you as good as instructed me to take a lover once I had provided you with the requisite number of sons. Well, Gabriel Stone, I am not prepared to be stabled down here in the country like a brood mare awaiting the attentions of the stallion. I will be faithful to you because
I
take vows seriously, but I will live in London or here or visit friends as I wish.’

He could not deny what he had said, fool that he was. ‘I have no desire to be with another woman.’
When had that happened?
‘Nor would I force myself on you. If you allow me to your bed then I would be...honoured. There will be no other women in my life.’

‘Then why do you want me away from you?’ Caroline attempted to pour tea, sloshed it into the saucer, said a word he had no idea she knew and banged the teapot back down again.

‘Because I thought you would want your freedom to do the things that interest you. I want... I am not used to this intimacy, of living with someone, sharing thoughts.’

‘The day you share a thought with me, an intimate, important thought, without it being forced from you, will be a first, Gabriel.’ Caroline lifted the teapot again and this time managed to pour two cups. ‘I do not want to pry, I do not expect you to share every passing thought, every private contemplation with me. I do not want to force your secrets out of you. But I do not want to spend the rest of my life alone and I find it hard that you seem to want loneliness. Aloneness.’

‘Everyone is different,’ Gabriel said harshly.

‘Your brothers love you. Your friends and their wives love you. What are you afraid of, Gabriel? That I might love you, too?’

‘You love far too many people for your own safety, Caroline. That is your nature and I cannot prevent you including me in the band that you take to your so-loyal heart. But to fall
in love
with me? You have far more sense than that. It would be a tragedy, would it not?’

He could accept love now, he was learning that. The changes in the lives of his three closest friends had made those friendships richer. His brothers, rallying round at the wedding, welcoming Caroline without hesitation, had stirred something deep inside him. He was their older brother and it had always been his duty to protect them as well as he could, and, at the end, he had so nearly failed. Caroline was a woman who had turned to him for help and it was his duty to give that, whatever it took.

But he had always known there was something lacking in him, some spark that some other men seemed to have, the willingness to expose himself to the risk of pain that love, accepted and returned, brought. Had brought. He
would not
think of his mother. ‘I fear hurting you,’ he said now, as gently as he knew.

‘Deliberately?’ she asked, watching him with a frown line between her brows as though he was a puzzle to be solved.

‘No. Never that.’

‘Then do not shut me away. This is a lovely house and I would like to spend time here with you. But not now. We will go back to Brighton, finish our honeymoon, learn to co-exist a little better, if you can bear that. Then we will decide what each of us does next and discuss it.’

Caroline was making plans. He was beginning to recognise that when she was under pressure she felt better for having a strategy. ‘Very well. Shall I show you around now we are here?’ He could manage that, surely? He had the courage to face a duel, wade into a street fight. Take a beating. He could summon up the guts to show his wife around a house.