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But Portia had suffered shock and embarrassment after a second-hand report of some reprehensible, and entirely predictable, adolescent behaviour. Laurel, her shock fuelled by a jealousy she was probably unaware of, had stirred up an almighty row, the fathers had overreacted, Portia had responded with hysteria and the young men themselves had made matters infinitely worse by fleeing the scene, giving the entire episode an importance it did not merit.
She remembered how her own father had dealt with her brother when he had been caught sniggering over a group of village girls he had come across bathing in their shifts in the river: a tanned backside and a lecture on the conduct befitting a gentleman. The ladies of the household were not supposed to know, of course, although no one could miss the ginger way Thomas sat down for a day or two, or the way he blushed whenever a female came within speaking range.
‘No doubt you should have tried harder, but I imagine that coming home on leave and having to attempt to build bridges afresh every time can’t have been easy. Every time she saw you, you must have seemed harder and tougher and more difficult to reach. Anyway, it doesn’t mean you would be a bad husband to a different wife, if that is what is stopping you remarrying.’
‘What is stopping me remarrying now is the refusal of the lady in question to accept me.’
* * *
‘You know why I refuse.’ There was more than a hint of gritted teeth about Gabrielle’s response, but there was something else. Surely not a shimmer of tears as the torchlight made stars that glimmered in the brown depths of her eyes?
‘Yes. I know and I understand.’ He put certainty into his voice. Conviction. ‘And yet I cannot help but feel we can do better than this. Find a compromise.’
‘Compromise?’ Gabrielle said indignantly. ‘Who would be compromising? Me. I was reading Mary Wollstonecraft the other night. “A wife is as much a man’s property as his horse or his ass; she has nothing she can call her own.” Marrying a decent man, one she...respects, makes no difference.’
A footman came out with a loaded tray while Gray wrestled with that. ‘I need a drink. I am usually good at riddles, but this one has me at a stand.’
He had to walk away from her, catch his breath, which appeared to be tied in a knot in his chest.
I love her and I think she loves me, or so very nearly. But she cannot trust me and so I have to let her go.
And he had to stop saying things that would make it more difficult for Gabrielle, even if the difficulty was simply making her feel sorry for him and guilty as a result. He understood enough about guilt to know now that it didn’t have to be logical to hurt, to be an ulcer on the soul. Her lack of trust in him hurt, though, he realised, illogical though it was. Why should she trust him when the experience of the women around her, the law, the attitude of every man she met reinforced her fears?
The footman proved to be carrying champagne glasses and another followed behind him with a tray of canapés. Gray directed them both to the table and sat down again to face Gabrielle across four glasses and an array of lobster patties and assorted savoury oddments.
‘Are we expecting anyone else?’ The sparkle that might, or might not, have been tears had vanished and her smile was back, even if it was a teasing one.
‘I thought we both needed the sustenance.’ Gray lifted his glass. ‘To the ghost of Alexander the Great and inspiration on how to untangle our own Gordian knot, because I think this is the same sort of unsolvable puzzle.’
‘Alexander cut it with his sword because he said the prophesy did not state how it was to be untied,’ Gabrielle said. ‘It seemed the oracle was satisfied with his solution because he did become King of the Phrygians. We have no kingdom to conquer and I doubt that the Greek gods are keeping a watchful eye on us.’ She sounded almost as though this was not personal any longer, he realised. Gabrielle was a practical woman, a strong one. Perhaps she was already putting whatever feeling she had for him aside, facing up to the fact that they would part, preparing to regret it for a while.
‘True.’ Gray drained his glass and reached for another. He was not prepared to give up. Not on her, not on himself. Not yet. Something was nagging at the back of his mind, but all it resolved itself into was one of his tutors—Mr Turner, was it? Or the one before him with bad breath?—prosing on about Plutarch. In the original Greek. He ate a lobster patty, but it provided no inspiration.
Gabrielle put down her glass and the tiny noise brought his attention back to the present. All four glasses were empty. That, at least, was something he could deal with. Gray raised one hand to summon the waiter and saw Gabrielle shiver. ‘You are cold. We will go in.’
‘It isn’t that.’ She had gone pale, he saw in the flickering torchlight. ‘Lord Appleton has just come out on to the terrace. I had not realised he was here. He looked at me in such...such a strange way.’
‘It is just the light.’ Gray glanced over at the major, who stood out like a red punctuation mark against the dark-clad men around him by the doors. He did appear to be looking in their direction, that was true. Gabrielle still seemed uncomfortable and he realised that he had almost forgotten Norwood’s death, the dark secret that haunted her.
‘Let me take you inside and then I will distract him if he makes you uneasy.’
‘Thank you.’ Her chin was up, her smile was bright as she rose and went with him, and Gray wondered at her courage. She was safe, he was sure, having heard her story, but even so the trauma must have left deep scars. Gabrielle greeted Appleton pleasantly, then glanced behind him. ‘I see my aunt waving to me, she must have wondered where I had vanished to. If you will excuse me, gentlemen.’ Then she was gone. When Gray watched her and saw that Lord George Welford was standing beside his stepmother he realised that Gabrielle’s desire to escape the proximity of Appleton must be pressing.
‘You are still in town, then,’ he remarked, too uneasy to think of anything more intelligent to say.
‘Yes, sir. But not on leave, I’m working at Horse Guards for a few months. Helping catch up on the filing,’ he added with a smile that struck Gray as false. And he’d addressed him as sir, which he no longer should now that Gray was not a senior officer any more. They were equal in rank now. Clearly the major’s thoughts were firmly on military matters. Matters from the past?
‘The filing?’ Horse Guards was the army’s headquarters, not a bad place for an ambitious officer to be in time of peace, but an officer with Appleton’s field experience was not going to be used as a lowly clerk.
The other man grimaced. ‘Clearing up intelligence material from the Peninsula, sir.’
‘The French are no threat now, surely, whatever their intelligence officers might have got up to during the war.’
‘It isn’t the French we’re worried about.’ The major glanced around. ‘I’d welcome your advice, frankly. But we can’t talk here. Are you committed to stay longer or would you be able to join me for a nightcap? I’ve a bolthole in Albany.’
‘I will, with pleasure, if I can help. But I’m a civilian now. Call me Gray, all my friends do. If you aren’t going against orders talking about this?’
‘Not to a senior officer with your record, sir—Gray. I’d welcome your advice because you know about the situation in the Douro Valley.’
