Page 25 of The Duke’s Masked Wallflower

Her jaw clicked, but she had not walked away. She had not even stepped back. He watched her expression shift from wariness into something careful, and he felt something answer in his own body that he liked even less.

“Think on it. That is all I ask for today—that you consider carefully what you stand to gain before you refuse me outright.”

Silence followed until he suggested they return to her friend. She walked ahead of him, and he let her go, trailing behind.

She will say yes, he thought with more confidence than he had earned in their negotiations. And God help either of us for what happens after.

St. George’s Gardens were quiet at this hour. The earlier evening rain still clung to the air, and Gabriel supposed that was precisely why he had chosen to come now rather than in the morning. At this hour, in the damp and the dusk, when the rest of high society was preparing themselves for the evening ahead, and the laborers were returning home, he could stand before his mother’s grave without an audience of mourners or passersby. Even the sexton had retired for supper.

The fact was, he came here more often than he told anyone: every other week and sometimes more. He had never once admitted its frequency to James, who would ask too many questions and then want to accompany him. It was easier to let his friend believe these visits were rare and dutiful, the sort of thing a good son did—which he wasn’t really—on anniversaries and little else.

At least today is the anniversary, he thought, which removes some of the melodrama from this despairing scene. It had been ten years now since she had died in his arms with a request that he kept a promise she had never finished asking of him. He still heard her final breaths if he concentrated hard enough, that rasp against his ear that she had tried and failed to shape into words.

“Please, Gabriel... You must promise...” And then another rasp. And then nothing more from her ever again.

He had spent every year turning the unfinished sentence over in his mind, trying to guess the shape of what she had wanted him to swear, if not the sentence exactly. He still did not know. He suspected he never would. It had almost driven him to madness in the year following her death. He had chased relief all over the continent before the war and had uncovered nothing.

Checking that the graveyard was clear, he knelt and set down the small bundle of violets he had brought. They had been her favorite flower. Violets and lavender were what she had asked the gardener to cut for her sickroom in those last months. He couldn’t abide having them at Wide River. No lavender in their drawers like the Corneilles liked to practice.

For a time, he let himself sit with the quiet on a bench, fog curling low around the headstones and the base of the column beneath which she rested, his breath showing in the cold air.

“I did not expect to find you here so late.”

He turned quickly, rising from his seat. His aunt stood a little way off on the beaten path, dressed warmly in dark blue against the chill in the air. Her companion maid trailed a respectful distance behind her with an umbrella she did not appear to need.

“Nor I you,” Gabriel said. He relaxed a little and brushed the damp from his knees. “You did not tell me you meant to come.”

“I did not know I meant to come until I woke this morning and found I could not put myself to anything else.” Elisabeth came to stand beside him and looked down at the grave marked with flowers. Her expression was hard to read at the best of times. Today there was grief certainly, but something gentler beneath it, worn smooth by ten years of visits almost as frequent as Gabriel’s. “Elles sont belles.” They are beautiful. “She would have liked the flowers.”

“Maybe not lying on her grave.”

Elisabeth laughed miserably. “Stop that.”

“All right—but only because you asked.”

She slipped her arm through his, and they stood together a moment before she spoke again. “Shall we say anything more tonight?”

“No.”

“Then we won’t, about this.” A pause as she held him tighter. “I have accepted a dinner invitation with the Winthrops next week. Baroness Winthrop called this afternoon and was insistent. I confess... I have grown fond of her company since Italy. Will you come with me?”

The question caught him off guard more than it should have. He traced back the hours since their walk around Hyde Park. Lady Winthrop must have called in the short interim between him leaving them by the gates and riding home with James. The Devil works quickly, he thought, but Lady Winthrop works quicker.

He pretended to think but mainly tried not to entertain what this could mean for his plan with Miss Winthrop. He said automatically, “I’m afraid I cannot. I have other engagements.”

“Ha! You have not even asked which evening it is.”

“And yet I am confident I have engagements regardless.”

Her mouth curved, meaning she had caught him out and intended to enjoy it before she let him off the hook. “How very convenient, that your calendar should always be so full whenever I require you for anything important.” She patted his arm. “You know, Gabriel... I begin to wonder whether you have taken a fancy to the young Miss Winthrop. Could she be the cause of your hesitation to dine with them?”

Gabriel guffawed, leaning back to look at his aunt. “That is absurd. You cannot mean… Just because of the Peachey dinner? I should have let the woman choke to death for all the grief it has caused me.” Yet even saying the words felt wrong—like a world in which Miss Winthrop was not breathing was a world in which he did not want to live.

“I had a suspicion. I spoke it. But I am glad you feel so strongly about the matter. Mostly you just laugh at me...” She looked at him with the same direct attention that Miss Winthrop so often turned on him. “You need not make up your mind about the dinner tonight.”

“Hm.” He said nothing more than that brief acquiescence, and Elisabeth mercifully let the silence stand, turning her gaze back to his mother’s marble stone.

But the thought stayed with him regardless and would not leave him for the whole carriage ride home. He had asked Miss Winthrop to pretend an attachment to him not four hours past, certain he was arranging a manageable fiction that would ease his aunt, unsettle Sinclair, and cost him nothing beyond a little performed affection in public rooms.