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‘Any single woman with gems like that is a beauty,’ Fitzwalter, a man in no need of a rich wife, observed cynically. ‘Didn’t know you were planning on a stay in town, Leybourne. Care to join us at the theatre tomorrow night? Thought we’d dine at Brooks’s and go on from there, finish up with some cards.’
‘Thank you, yes,’ Gray agreed, half his attention on Gabrielle.
‘Watch out, the cavalry’s arrived,’ Freddie said, nodding towards the door where five men in scarlet dress uniforms were entering.
‘That’s Turner and Appleton. I haven’t seen them since we left France,’ Gray said. ‘Excuse me.’
He made to intercept his old comrades, but the room was now crowded and he was detained several times by acquaintances he could hardly push past and ignore. By the time he located the officers they had joined the group around Gabrielle and, it was clear, she knew all of them.
‘Now, let me see if I have learned everyone’s names correctly,’ she was saying. ‘Lady Ferris, Mrs Horton, Miss Platt, Lord Knighton and Mr Horton, may I introduce Major Lord Appleton, Major Carfax, Captains Sir James Grigson, Turner and Colney.’ She glanced round and saw Gray. ‘And I am sure Lord Leybourne is known to all of you.’
‘Colonel.’ The officers came to attention, although Appleton and Turner were grinning at him, old friends he had known too well for considerations of rank off-duty, even when he was one of them.
‘I’m a civilian now,’ he said as he shook hands and endured some brisk backslapping. ‘No need for the rank, I assure you. It is good to see you and we must catch up with our news another evening, I’ll give you my card. But I see you already know Miss Frost, whose aunt, Lady Orford, is my godmother.’
‘We often met Miss Frost when we were based in Pinhão,’ Appleton explained and made a gallant bow in her direction ‘She was the ornament of all the best dinner parties in the district. You were off on the Staff, as I recall. We got shouted at less and had the better port, I would make my guess.’
‘It is good to see you are all safe and sound,’ Gabrielle said. ‘Once you had left to chase the French out of Spain we had no idea what had happened to anyone, and then I had no idea which of my old acquaintances fought at Waterloo. I tried to check the casualty lists, but they were so long.’
There was a moment’s silence when they all were clearly thinking of just what those lists in smudged black newsprint signified. ‘We’ve had a charmed life,’ Carfax drawled with a grin, breaking the mood. Then he sobered. ‘Except, of course, for poor Norwood.’
The rest of the group, the civilians, had drifted away, taking Captain Colney with them. ‘Poor Norwood?’ Gray queried. ‘Major Andrew Norwood, the intelligence officer?’ He’d never quite taken to the man and now it sounded as though the major had not made it back.
‘That’s him,’ Carfax agreed. ‘He was pulled out of the river downstream of Pinhão just before we moved behind the lines.’ He flicked a glance at Gabrielle as though wondering what to say. ‘Been knifed in the ribs, very efficiently.’
It was Gabrielle’s very stillness that told Gray of her distress. She had gone pale now and he recalled that Norwood had been the man who had involved her brother in the spying work that had led to his death. When she had spoken of the riding officer before she had been cool, almost hostile.
‘Perhaps an angry father or husband,’ she suggested, her voice unemotional. ‘He had a certain reputation, I believe.’
‘Er, yes. That could be it. Shouldn’t have mentioned it at all, not a fit subject for a lady’s ears,’ Carfax apologised. ‘Do you make a long stay in London, Miss Frost?’
She answered readily enough and the talk turned to theatre and the opera, but Gabrielle was still pale, her eyes dark and shadowed, and Gray had a disturbing memory of the long, thin-bladed knife in her hand that day on the terraces, and the easy competence with which she used it. Had she blamed Norwood for her brother’s death and taken her revenge, a life for a life?
He reined back the tumbling thoughts. Norwood had been a tough soldier and a big man. There was no way a slight young woman, even a fit and courageous one, could have overcome him, let alone dragged him to the river and thrown him in.
But her staff would do anything for her, a little voice whispered in his ear. Anything. Oh, hell.
* * *
Gray thinks that I killed Norwood. He had gone very still, his eyes watchful despite the easy social smile on his lips. She had come to distrust that smile, it was his mask. She had betrayed too much when she had spoken of Thomas’s death, of the way Norwood had recruited and used him. His eyes had narrowed when Carfax had spoken of the knife wound and she, so foolishly, had shown off just how good she was with a blade.
Gaby kept her chin up, her tone light and amused, and fought the urge to close her eyes as though to hide from that assessing, judging, look.
I did not kill him, she wanted to shout. But I might as well have, her nagging sense of guilt amended. If she could have done so in those desperate, frantic moments, she would have, she knew that. But not in cold blood. She did not think she could kill anyone, whatever they had done, whatever they were, with premeditation.
She dropped her fan, gave a pretended mutter of annoyance and dipped to pick it up, colliding with Lord Appleton and Major Turner, who both dived to rescue it. It gave her a moment’s respite, broke the temptation to give in, like a mouse held by a snake’s cold eyes, and confess all.
The trance broken, she found she could breathe again. Gray had turned away and was saying something to Grigson about a sergeant they both knew who had lost a leg at Waterloo and was now running a successful posting inn on the Brighton road.
Lord Appleton offered his arm. ‘Shall we take a look-in at the refreshment room, Miss Frost? I hear great things of the fruit tarts and we need to get there before Grigson or there will be none left.’
Gaby laughed at the sally and at Sir James Grigson’s half-hearted denials of gluttony and found herself with both men as escorts to the supper room. It was easy enough to eat, especially when she found cheese tartlets and lobster patties. Tension always made her hungry rather than the reverse and neither man seemed to find her manner strained.
‘I will have a dinner party when I have my house and I have settled in,’ she promised. ‘If you are all still in London, you must help me with my house-warming.’
That was greeted with enthusiastic acceptances and suggestions on what they might bring as house-warming gifts.
‘A basketful of kittens for catching mice might create more mayhem than the mice,’ Gaby said, laughing over Sir James’s fanciful ideas of what constituted a suitable present. ‘I do hope you are not serious.’ She felt the smile stiffen on her lips as Gray came to the table.
