But now he felt alive, raging with desire, if unfortunately directed to absolutely the wrong place. But still, it was back. His head didn’t hurt. He felt alive, every inch of him, alive.
He knew without thinking that he wouldn’t drink again.
Ever.
16
In Which Imogen Issues an Invitation
Gabe woke up at one in the morning with a peculiar feeling. He pulled on a dressing gown and walked out of his room. Sure enough, by the time he reached the end of the corridor he could hear her furious little squall. A second later he pushed open the door of the nursery and snatched Mary from her bed.
She gulped when she saw him and kept wailing, so Gabe dropped into the rocking chair and tried to soothe her against his shoulder. Her eyes were all small from crying, and she was obviously exhausted. Not to mention wet. Gabe’s nose twitched.
Where the devil was the maid? Or her wet nurse? There was no one in the room at all. But he could hardly carry her about the dark house in this state. So he took her over to the low table where her supplies were set up and carefully peeled off all the wet layers.
She had fat little legs. The moment all that cold wool was removed she stopped crying and gave a few snuffling gasps.
“That’s my Mary,” he heard himself saying to her, rather idiotically. Which made her smile at him, and he had the heart-wrenching realization that he would jump out the window for her. Which might be easier than fixing her clothing.
He found a clean cloth without a problem. All the material around her waist was supposed to tie, he could see that. But whenever he tried to pull the ties, the cloth just fell off her legs. Finally, he just pulled all of it around her waist and put on one of her little shirts. Then he wrapped her in a blanket and picked her up.
He had started down the hallway when Mary decided that now she was awake, she might as well test her voice.
“Mamamamama!” she shouted cheerfully.
“Shhhh,” he said. He had made up his mind to go down to the kitchens and see if Mary’s wet nurse was to be found there.
She apparently took that as encouragement. “Mamamamam!” she shouted. And then, just for a change: “Ammmmmmm. Ammmmmm.”
Sure enough a door opened in front of Gabe. He had one second to wonder whether it would be Imogen, when out stepped not a flagrant seductress in a nightrail but a neatly wrapped Miss Pythian-Adams.
“Are you and Mary going for a stroll?” she asked, smiling up at him.
She was very small, no higher than his breastbone.
“Mamama!” Mary said, by way of greeting.
“I can’t find her nurse,” Gabe said, feeling ridiculously embarrassed. “And I couldn’t manage to fix her undergarments together.”
“Oh dear,” Miss Pythian-Adams said. She paused. “That would likely explain the puddle on the floor.”
Gabe looked down. “Mary!” Now he felt an unpleasantly warm liquid dripping from his forearm.
Miss Pythian-Adams stepped neatly around the puddle, put a hand on his arm, and turned him about. “I’m sure I can figure out how to fix her underclothing,” she said. “Why not ring for help? I have found that someone generally comes if one rings long enough.”
Gabe could feel his face growing hot. He hadn’t thought of ringing for help—because in his own house, and the house he grew up in, there hadn’t been as many servants as Rafe maintained. Of course, in this house someone would be up at all times. It seemed Brinkley never slept.
A second later they were back in the warm nursery and put Mary on the table again. She kicked joyously when the newly wet fabric was taken off her.
“She’s so active!” Miss Pythian-Adams said, laughing a little. “Here’s a cloth. I’m sure it just goes on…”
A minute later Miss Pythian-Adams had the cloth wound around Mary’s legs…and a second after that it fell off. She frowned and tried again.
Gabe watched in the flickering light of the fire. She was an alarmingly beautiful woman who either didn’t realize how lovely she was, or didn’t care. She had a straight nose and such thick eyelashes that he couldn’t see her eyes as she struggled with Mary’s nappy. He should have been helping her, but instead he just drank her in.
She was the quintessential English gentlewoman. She was everything that he could never have, given his illegitimacy: delicate, refined, bred through generations of gentlefolk into a perfect bundle of femininity.
“Bloody hell,” muttered the delicate bundle of femininity. “How on earth does anyone get these things fastened?”
A laugh wrenched its way out of Gabe’s chest.
She looked up at him, blinking through those eyelashes, one hand protectively keeping Mary from rolling off the table. “I’m sorry if my language offended you. I know you’re a man of the church—”
“No,” he said quickly. “I am a professor, but never a priest.”
“Well,” she said, and he watched the emotions dance over her face. “Mr. Not-a-priest, do you think that you could give that bell a good tug? Because we don’t seem to be able to clothe little Mary. Not that she minds much.”
Mary was pinwheeling her legs joyfully.
“She wears so many clothes normally,” Gabe said.
“The curse of womanhood,” Miss Pythian-Adams replied.
“Why so?” Gabe asked.
“Haven’t you ever noticed how difficult it is for a woman to be properly dressed?” And, when he shook his head, she continued, “As a man, you wear simple yet comfortable attire at all times, occasionally changing in the evening. Ladies must change their dress for every period of the day: morning gowns, riding costumes, evening gowns, opera gowns, ball gowns—even the greatest folly of all, presentation gowns sewn with pearls and other fripperies, and worn with hoops!”
“I thought women liked changing clothes,” Gabe said. His mother certainly had.
Miss Pythian-Adams sighed. “Some indubitably do. And there are times when I quite relish it. But it’s a sad way to spend one’s life.”
Gabe was quite aware that he would be happy to spend his life and time taking Miss Pythian-Adams’s clothes off. That was a ridiculous thought. He had sworn off women forever after the debacle with Loretta.
And Miss Pythian-Adams was a lady. His face started to burn a little with embarrassment. Should she be here with him, in the middle of the night? What if someone came and her reputation was damaged? What if—
The door swung sharply open. “Oh, so there’s my lovey,” said a blowsy, sleepy-looking woman.
“We have had some trouble fixing her nappy,” Gabe said. “She was wet through when I arrived here and had been crying for some time.”
There was a touch of steely cold in his voice that sent the woman jittering with apologies: she was downstairs, it was that warm by the fire, she had fallen off for a moment. The ribbons on her cap danced as she hurriedly tied the strings on Mary’s garments.
A second later Mary had been wrapped into a snug, warm bundle. Gabe ushered Miss Pythian-Adams out the door before him, and they stood for a moment in the hallway. He knew he was acting like a great lummox, staring down at her without saying a word.
The color rising in her cheeks made him ache for things he could never have: the clean, sweet smell of a good woman. The kind of woman who would never be called a chipper, who would never be overtaken by female hunger. You could see that in Miss Pythian-Adams’s face. She would never be led astray by her emotions, the way his mother had been.
It was perverse, the way her very coolness, her lack of interest in him as a man, was kindling his body like dry timber. Quite rightly, she had put him in a category marked “illegitimate” and never thought twice about him.
Even now her eyes were thoughtful, meeting his, obviously wondering what on earth was the matter with him. “We must say good night,” he said, his voice rough.
“Yes,” she said. “Do you know, I think Mary’s maid might have spent a great part of the evening in the kitchen?”
/> She apparently didn’t feel the tension in the air, even though he was standing before her vibrating like a tree in a high gale.
“Mary needs a nanny, but I haven’t found a replacement yet.”
Her lips had perfect definition: the mouth of a woman who would never succumb to animal passions. He was bowing when yet another door opened in the hallway. He snapped up, cursing himself, wondering whether a woman could be compromised simply by being seen in the corridor with a man.
Imogen Maitland peered around the door, her eyes curious. “What on earth is going on?” she said, walking into the corridor. To Gabe’s relief, she was wearing a dressing gown, and her bosom seemed to be covered.
“Mr. Spenser’s child has been crying,” Miss Pythian-Adams said. “Good night, Imogen.” And then without even a look at him, she vanished through the door into her bedchamber.
Lady Maitland turned to him. If there was no recognition of him as a man in Miss Pythian-Adams’s eyes, there was abundant appreciation in Lady Maitland’s. She drifted toward him, and her intentions were unmistakable. In the moonlight coming through the high windows at the end of the corridor, her features looked slightly exotic. Her hair was loosely braided and curled around her face as if she were some sort of night witch, come to bewitch men from their senses. And yet…and yet to Gabe, Lady Maitland’s crimson lips and secret smile didn’t move him at all.
Well, perhaps a little.
She was one who would know precisely what she wanted: him, on a limited lease. Illegitimacy worked in the proper way, for her. It would make him the perfect parti, not likely to infringe on her fashionable life.
Yet there was something slightly uncertain in her eyes that belied the bold way she was standing before him, asking in a husky voice whether he would accompany her to the library to find a book.
Of course she was the sort of woman he could have. Exquisite and yet available. Approaching him, rather than the other way around. It was oddly mortifying. Her eyes were dark and interested, even with that bit of uncertainty in the back of them. She was no whore. Perhaps this was her very first seduction of an appropriate man.
The thought was sour in his stomach.
“I—” he cleared his throat. “I’m rather tired.”
Her face fell and then instantaneously smoothed to a sophisticated smile. And his heart lurched. What was he doing? Who was he to make her feel less than entrancing? Shouldn’t he be kissing her hand for even looking his direction?
“I quite understand,” she said. “In fact, this is not the first time—that is, I should go to bed at once as well. I have much to do tomorrow and—”
Gabe felt a surge of protective anger against whoever it was who had dared to refuse such a beautiful young woman in the past. And a strong inclination to inform her that her lack of parents need not transform to a lack of morality. Obviously, he couldn’t refuse her.
“Would you possibly like to—to—” he searched his memory. Where did illicit relationships happen when people were at a house party? One had to suppose they just tiptoed from room to room. The last thing he wished to do was ask her to his room. He took Mary there sometimes. “Would you like to accompany me to Silchester tomorrow evening?” he asked.
“Someone might see us,” she said, a little light dawning in her eyes. Of course, she couldn’t be seen with someone like himself. “I say that only because Rafe is quite nervous about my being chaperoned,” she added, putting a hand on his arm again. “I would not want you to think that I did not wish to go.”
“Why don’t we go in disguise?” He heard himself say it, as if another person were speaking. And her face lit up.
“What fun that would be! Perhaps we could go to a rather out-of-the-way spot.” Her eyes were glowing, clearly picturing all kinds of debauched environments about which he knew nothing.
Gabe suddenly remembered that he’d seen a broadside nailed to a tree in Silchester. “There’s a singer from London performing at the Black Swan.”
“This would be wonderful!” she whispered, looking more like a child anticipating a treat than a young woman fixing up an illicit liaison.
He bowed. “In that case, tomorrow night.”
Her eyes were melting, with exquisite hints of laughter deep in them. Gabe knew with a bone-deep knowledge that to make love to Imogen Maitland—nay, even to spend an evening with her—would be the kind of pleasure that a man is lucky to have once in his life.
She disappeared into her bedchamber, presumably to drop her dressing gown and climb into bed in a swish of delicate silk.
And Gabe stayed there in the chilly hallway, staring at the two doors. It was like the old medieval mystery plays where a man was offered the choice of good and evil. Except as life always is, the doors were so much more complicated than that.
Gillian Pythian-Adams was coolly uninterested in him. Perhaps in all men, but certainly in him. And yet she had that old-fashioned quality, decency, that his very soul yearned for.
Imogen Maitland was a woman so beautiful that a smile from her, laced with desire, was as potent as sin itself. She was not indecent, nor yet sinful. She was…just Imogen, and she wanted him, the son of a chipper, who was only good for a liaison.
Never for marriage.
17
A Mustache and a West Wind
Rafe was not sleeping. It was such a new experience for him, to be up in the middle of the night and yet not inebriated, that he was bent on exploring it. He found himself hanging out of his own window, for all the world like a second housemaid with a blushing acquaintance with a groomsman. There was a soft west wind blowing: a night wind. His old nurse used to say that a night wind from the west made men tumble into love.
Night smelled different from the day. Leaves were drifting gently to the courtyard, blown inside out by the wind. They littered the ground, darker splotches on the soft gray of the cobblestones. Those cobblestones, Rafe thought, have been here since the 1300s. My ancestors walked those very stones.
It should have been a profoundly moving thought, but Rafe couldn’t quite manage the proper emotion. All he could think about was his great-uncle Woodward, who used to prance about in pumps with high red heels, his hair powdered and his face carefully painted. He had been a quintessential Georgian rake, according to servants’ gossip when Rafe was growing up.
It must have been difficult to negotiate cobblestones in such high heels, Rafe thought idly.
Just then there was a sound at his door, and he turned.
“Gabe!” And: “I’d offer you a drink, but water is so tedious.” For some reason his brother looked as burnt to the socket as Rafe used to feel after a fourth brandy. “Is Mary all right?”
“She was crying again,” Gabe said, throwing himself in a chair. “I apologize for bothering you, but I saw the light under your door.”
“Isn’t crying normal for children?” Rafe asked. “My understanding is that they are irksome at their best and pestilent at their worst.”
“That has a faintly poetic quality.”
“Trying to impress you,” Rafe said honestly. “I find myself wishing that I’d paid more attention to books. Perhaps the two of us could discuss philosophy if I’d had.”
“I’d rather discuss women,” Gabe said, drumming his fingers against the chair.
Rafe’s eyebrows rose. “A subject about which I know slightly more than I know about ancient philosophers. Only slightly, mind you.”
“I’ve made an assignation for tomorrow night.”
Rafe’s heart sank so quickly that he almost imagined it was visible outside his body. In fact, it took a moment for him to gain control of his voice, and then he heard it as if he stood outside his body, oddly calm. “Ah, my ward, I presume. Much though I deplore her behavior, I have every belief that the invitation came from Imogen and not from you.”
“No, I did issue the invitation,” Gabe said.
“Ah.”
“But only after she invited me to the library to help her fi
nd a book,” he added.
The ice in Rafe’s veins was replaced by fury. “Imogen is a remarkably light-heeled young woman. I don’t know why I feel surprised.”
Gabe waved a hand in the air. “I don’t wish to meet your ward tomorrow evening.”
“That is, of course, something the two of you must decide between yourselves,” Rafe said rigidly. Then he couldn’t help it and added: “I will note, Gabe, that Imogen is newly widowed. She is rather desperate.”
Gabe nodded. “It surprises me that she seems to have suffered some sort of rejection in the past.”
“Lord Mayne,” Rafe said. “He understood that she didn’t truly wish for the sort of scandal she was courting.”
There was a veiled rage in his voice that made the hair on Gabe’s neck stand on end. And told him, without words, that his instincts were correct. He would have to play this just right.
“We agreed to go in disguise to see a concert in Silchester tomorrow night. So that we wouldn’t be recognized. She seems to be of the opinion that you would prefer her to be chaperoned.”
“I would,” Rafe said grimly.
“Yet she’s a widow, of course, and on her own, is she not?”
Rafe’s eyes were chilly. “She is not on her own. She has me, and make no mistake, I shall watch out for her interests.”
Gabe opened his mouth, but Rafe held up his hand. “I may not be able to protect her from issuing inadvisable invitations to all and sundry but”—he leaned forward—“I can make damn sure that anyone who toys with her is tied to her. So make very certain, brother, that you wish for the parson’s mousetrap before you take Imogen to Silchester tomorrow.”
There was an odd, pulsating moment of silence in the room. “I don’t,” Gabe said.
“You don’t what?”
“I don’t wish to marry Lady Maitland.”
“Then,” Rafe said, leaning back in his chair and speaking very softly, “you might want to rethink the advisability of meeting her tomorrow night.”
“It is my impression that Lady Maitland would be disappointed if I withdrew my invitation.”