The Unexpected Marriage of Gabriel Stone (Lords of Disgrace) (22 page)

‘And me,’ Ben said, making to draw his sabre from his belt in formal surrender.

‘For what?’ Sir Humphrey enquired. ‘No perjury was involved. Neither of you was called to give evidence and you were both schoolboys. It is up to my colleague, of course, but I can see no legal reason to reopen the inquest. No new evidence has been brought forward that would make the verdict of Accidental Death unsafe in my opinion.’

‘Nor mine,’ Barton said. He looked at George. ‘Reverend Stone, can you confirm what has been said?’

‘Yes, sir. Every word.’

‘Then Sir Humphrey and I will issue a report stating that we have interviewed three new witnesses to the death of the late earl and that their evidence supports the original verdict of accidental death. The newspapers will get their teeth into that, I have no doubt. I suggest, my lord, that you take legal advice and issue your father-in-law with a strongly worded warning of what will happen if he does not withdraw his slanders. Major, Reverend, Mr Stone, I will take down your evidence with Sir Humphrey as witness. I see no reason to detain you, my lady, my lords. Good day.’

Gabriel found himself outside a firmly closed door. ‘I can’t leave my brothers.’

‘They are grown men.’ Cris gave him a decidedly unfriendly shove towards the front door. ‘I would suggest you cannot leave your wife.’

There was a considerable crowd in the street outside, far more than could be explained by the sight of Cris’s magnificent coach and team of matched bays. ‘Get in.’

‘Cris—’ Gabriel realised that he was confused, relieved and, quite simply, furious
.

‘Damn you, accept some help from your family for once. The last time you were this aggravating I knocked you on your backside and I swear if you do not get in that carriage with Caroline in the next twenty seconds I’ll do it again.’

Gabriel offered his hand to Caroline and she got into the carriage. She had put down her veil and he could not see her face, but her chin was up, he could tell.

Cris slammed the door on them. ‘Now go home. I’m walking.’

‘Gabriel?’

‘How could you?’ he asked, hearing his own voice cold and hard. ‘How could you do that without asking me? All my life I have protected my brothers and you tossed them to the wolves.’

‘They told the truth, finally, and everything is all right.’ Caroline threw back the veil. ‘You are safe, they are safe, my father’s horrible scheme has been checkmated. Can’t you be happy about that?’

‘Not when you lie to me in front of a room full of people, try to manipulate sympathy by telling falsehoods. You cannot know that you are pregnant, it is barely a month since that first night.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

S
o, this is what you get for loving a rake. Accusations and ingratitude and anger.
Caroline took a deep breath and saw they were drawing up at their own front door where there was another, smaller, crowd with Cris’s grooms holding them at bay. This was not the time to lose all control and scream at the man, tell him how much he hurt her, how much she cared for him.

‘I may not have to tell our child his father is a murderer,’ she said as she lowered her veil. ‘But I
am
going to have to explain to the poor little soul that he is an ungrateful idiot.’

The groom holding the door for her lost his composure for a moment, then got his face under control as Caroline swept out of the carriage and up the steps to the front door that, thankfully, opened as she reached it.

‘
I
am an idiot?’ Gabriel slammed the door behind him, shaking the silver tray on the hall table. ‘I was not the one smuggling hairpins and firearms and sovereigns into a magistrate’s house. Why not go the whole nine yards and bake a cake with a file in it?’

‘I didn’t think of that.’ She paused on the bottom step of the stairs and swung round. ‘Perhaps because I am a poor feeble woman with my brain turned to porridge by pregnancy. Or perhaps because I knew there were no bars, but that you might need to get out of the house and bribe a boatman to take you across to France. For some reason, which is escaping me now, I did not want you to hang.’

Caroline stalked upstairs, ignoring the throbbing in her toe, and found a little comfort in the fact that she could close the bedchamber door without slamming it. She turned the key and sat down at her dressing table. Men were the very devil, all of them. But she loved one, was married to one and she was carrying his child, whatever the stubborn creature believed.

* * *

She had expected Gabriel to come to the door and ask her to open it. She had half-expected him to kick it down, but when the tap came half an hour later it was Tamsyn.

‘May I come in?’ When Caroline opened the door Tamsyn caught her in a hug, then held her at arm’s length. ‘Cris says we are to pack and go back to London straight away. He says, and I quote, “Gabriel always was the one with the brains, if he could only be brought to realise it. Let him work this out, because it is beyond me.”’

‘Oh. If Cris is abandoning us...’

‘I think he is simply putting a safe distance between himself and the urge to hit Gabriel. Personally I think it would be an excellent idea to punch him, but men are strange.’ She cocked her head on one side. ‘This isn’t just about his father, is it?’

‘I told him I was expecting his baby.’

She could see Tamsyn doing some mental arithmetic. ‘Er...’

‘It is very, very early. But it is his. I am certain, but he thinks that I lied to the magistrate just to get sympathy.’

‘Oh, so you...before the wedding?’

‘Yes, not long before. The night my father found me, after we agreed to marry. I don’t understand why he is so upset, I thought he wanted children.’

‘Don’t be a cloth-head,’ Tamsyn said inelegantly. ‘You blurted it out in the middle of that meeting, in front of his brothers and the magistrate and the coroner? My dear, that might not be the best time and place to tell a man he is going to be a father.’

‘I was becoming angry with him,’ Caroline confessed miserably. ‘And frustrated that he would not tell the simple truth. He is so protective of his brothers, he seems to feel that he has total responsibility for them, whatever they have done.’

‘He is protective of you, too. Look what he did for you,’ Tamsyn pointed out.

She didn’t need reminding. ‘But his oldest loyalty is to them. He actually worked it all out, how if they hanged him I would be looked after and how Ben would get the title. He is angry with me because I acted without telling him, exposed Louis’s part in their father’s death.’

Tamsyn shivered. ‘So cold blooded.’

‘He is a gambler. And I think that being like that helps him cope. He has pushed all his emotions right down so they can’t hurt him.’

‘Are you going to leave him? You can come back with us.’

‘Would you have left Cris?’

‘Yes. I did.’ Tamsyn looked bleak. ‘I thought it was the best thing for him. It was horrible. But he didn’t agree with me and came and got me, thank heavens.’

‘You were not married then?’ The other woman shook her head. ‘Well, I am. For better, for worse. I promised.’

‘When he calms down he’ll want to do the right thing because of the baby,’ Tamsyn suggested.

‘I don’t want him doing the right thing because that is his duty. I want him to trust me and to love me. And, yes, I know I am wishing for the moon.’

‘Good luck.’ Tamsyn got up and pressed a kiss on Caroline’s cheek. ‘I would offer to stay, but I think you two need to work this one out for yourselves.’

Caroline clung for a moment. ‘Thank you. You have been such a good friend. And Cris and Alex and Tess. Give them my love.’

A carriage pulled up outside, then away again.
Cris and Tamsyn
. The sound of voices in the street ebbed to its normal level and when Caroline tilted the dressing-table mirror to reflect the view outside she saw the crowd beginning to disperse across the Steine. They had heard the news about Gabriel’s innocence and were off to discuss the whole intriguing scandal over the tea cups, she assumed. The house was quiet, the servants were tiptoeing about while their master brooded behind closed doors.

She could go down, insist that he listen to her and then he would accept that she was telling the truth about the baby, that it wasn’t simply a ploy to attract sympathy from the Coroner and that would be that. She could forgive him being angry to have that sprung on him in public, he’d had a lot on his mind, to put it mildly.

‘But I love him,’ Caroline said into the silence.

And I want him to love me. I want a real marriage, a love match, a family. I want him to be happy, not just content with an arrangement.

But how? If she marched in and explained and then announced she loved him Gabriel might very well be feeling guilty enough to pretend he loved her, too, and that would be...awful. She would have to think and hope her instincts would guide her, because just at the moment her brain was not helping in the slightest.

The front door slammed and she jumped to her feet and went to the window. Gabriel, hatless, gloveless, was striding across the grassy expanse of the Steine towards the sea, anger in every uncoordinated, jerky step. She had never seen him move like this, without elegant, careless grace. He was hurting.

Well, so am I, Gabriel Stone. So am I.

* * *

The wind had got up and the clouds, a ragged grey threat of rain, scudded across the sky. The sea was already showing white horses in a vicious chop of small waves and the last bathers were being towed up the beach towards warmth, dry clothes and their luncheons.

A few brave souls were promenading along Marine Parade, but the ladies were furling their pretty parasols and clutching the arms of their escorts who were hurrying towards their lodgings before the rain fell, free hands clamped to the top of their hats.

Gabriel went down the steps on to the beach, his feet sinking into the shingle, walked almost to the water’s edge and then began to follow it. The tide was on the ebb and he was walking in sodden pebbles, his boots already wet. He hunched his shoulders, thrust cold hands into his pockets, the wind whipping his hair into his eyes, stinging with the salt-laden air.

He walked on, the loose footing, making each step as much effort as ten on hard sand, walked until he lost track of time and found himself beyond even the newest developments that were spreading Brighton along the coast. There were dinghies pulled up clear of the high-water mark, like so many turtles, and he sat down on one with his back to the town and tried not to think.

Not that his mind would clear, that was the problem. His brothers, his parents, Caroline, his friends.
A baby
. Everything was churned up and nothing made sense.

The threatened rain came in a sudden, spiteful shower that whipped against him like handfuls of thrown grit. It was gone in moments, leaving him damp and cold, but at least it had shocked him into vaguely rational thought.

It must have been that very first time, that night at Springbourne when all that had seemed to matter had been persuading her to marry him and finally losing himself in her. The time before he realised he loved her, the time when he had complacently thought of children as some theoretical, abstract outcome of their marriage. But they were not an abstract. They were real, important, and he had thrown the miraculous news that he was to be a father back in her face along with his anger and ingratitude at being saved from the gallows.

He got to his feet, raked the wet hair off his forehead and turned to walk back. Apologise. Thank her. Try to understand his own feelings about his past, about their future. Hope against hope that somehow he could understand hers, because Caroline was his wife and he loved her. Somehow, with no model of how to do it right, he was going to have a family to look after. For the first time in his adult life he felt fear, gut-clenching, knee-weakening fear.
What if I can’t do it? Can’t be a decent father and husband? What if...?
The doubts raged in his head like the wind that was battering the coast now.

It seemed like a hundred miles back along the shore, the shifting pebbles dragging at his feet until his legs began to feel like lead. He should cut up towards the coast road. Gabriel stopped and assessed the ways up the low, crumbling cliffs and saw, in the distance, a figure coming towards him, laboriously battling wildly blowing skirts and hampering shingle. As he watched her bonnet whipped off her head and out to sea and her hair broke loose as she clutched for the ribbons, the blonde streamers in the wind like a flag.
Caroline.

Gabriel began to run, heedless of the strain on his tired legs. It was like a nightmare where every step seems to be mired in mud. She was carrying a child, she shouldn’t be struggling along this damned beach. She was coming to him.

He realised the moment she saw him and recognised who it was, because she stopped walking and bent over, hands on her knees, out of breath. When he reached her, breathless himself, she had straightened up and only the high colour in her cheeks and the rise and fall of her bosom revealed the speed she must have been walking at.

‘Caroline. You shouldn’t be out here, not exerting yourself like this.’

‘I am pregnant, not sick.’

‘Why did you follow me?’ He took her arm and steered her, unresisting, up the beach to where a fisherman had constructed a rough shelter out of driftwood and old planks. ‘Sit down, it is going to rain again in a moment.’

‘I saw you leave, so angry you could hardly walk straight. And I saw where you were heading and I thought...’

‘That I was going to throw myself in the sea?’

‘No.’ She smiled faintly. ‘But I thought you might need me.’

‘If I did, why should you care? This is the man who is so damned thoughtless and insensitive that a shock is enough to make him cruel and ungrateful.’

‘You are my husband.’

‘And you take your vows very seriously,’ he said, feeling the weight of despair on his shoulders. He was a duty to her and she was going to do her duty if it killed her.

‘So do you. To whom did you make a promise to always look after your brothers? Your mother, I suppose.’

He nodded, unable to find the words. When she did not press him he managed to say it. ‘She killed herself. Took poison. I’ll never know whether my father beat her or whether it was the unkindness of words or neglect. I was fourteen, too young to really understand. Such a good little boy.’

‘Were you?’ That little smile had deepened, made soft dimples in her cheeks. He wanted to kiss them.

‘I was the heir. It was my duty to be good,’ he said, mocking the earnest child he had once been.

‘And then you turned into a miniature hellion to deflect your father’s anger on to you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Clever, as well as brave. Your mother would have been very proud of you.’ When he shrugged, embarrassed by the praise, appalled to find it mattered so much, she asked, ‘But why did you become so remote from them that they were unable to come to you and tell you what they had seen?’

‘If I had shown I was fond of them then he would have suspected.’

‘So you made yourself be alone with no one to love you.’ To his horror Caroline burst into tears, just as another squall hit, lashing them with icy rain. Gabriel curled himself around her, sheltering her, and let her sob on his shoulder until the squall and the tears ceased together. ‘Oh, I am sorry. I feel so weepy at the moment. Harriet says it is because of the baby and her sister was a complete watering pot for months.’

He found a handkerchief and mopped her eyes, but she took it from him and blew her nose briskly. ‘I am too stunned to add up.’

‘I have only just missed my courses, but I am always so regular and I am absolutely convinced that something has changed.’ Caroline took a deep breath. ‘It is far too early to have said anything. Many pregnancies don’t go beyond the first month or two. But somehow...’

‘Somehow you are sure.’ He stood up and held out his hand to help her to her feet. ‘Shall we start out before the next rain squall comes?’ When she nodded and slipped her hand into his he felt a shock of fierce protectiveness. ‘I’ll do my level best to be a good father, Caroline. At least I’ve plenty of experience of what makes a bad one.’ She said nothing, but tightened her grip for a moment. ‘I’ll do my best to be a good husband, too. I’m not good at emotion, Caroline.’

‘I noticed.’ She was teasing him, he thought. Hoped. ‘I understand. It has never been very safe for you to feel, has it?’

He thought that was all she was going to say. They walked back slowly in silence, then, as they reached their own front door, she said, ‘Promise me something?’

‘Anything.’

‘Rash!’ She was serious again in a moment. ‘Promise never to lie to me. I won’t probe your secrets, I won’t expect you to open your heart to me. But do not lie to me, Gabriel. Not about how you feel. You told me you do not obey vows, but you do, don’t you?’