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Gaby had not known what to expect when she told him. Pleasure, joy, surprise... Not blank shock.
‘You are?’ Gray asked when she had, finally, to let go of the breath she was holding. ‘Henry’s?’
‘No! No, of course not. How could you—’
‘It is not mine,’ he said flatly. ‘Damn it, I thought I’d been mistaken in him. I apologised for hitting him, for believing, even for a moment that he and you, after all, had followed that lunatic scheme.’
‘What? You thought that I left England because I was pregnant?’ She got to her feet, the chair legs screeching on the tiled floor. ‘You thought I could...with someone else...after you and I had...’
Gray was on his feet, too, the bruises stark on his face where the blood had drained away. ‘I was careful when I lay with you!’
‘You are an idiot!’ she flung back. ‘A hateful, suspicious idiot. I told myself I could trust you, now I find this poor child has to endure you for a father.’
* * *
Gray stood looking after her as the shop door slammed, sending the bell clanking. Across the room th
e other couple looked up, startled. The woman bustled out from behind the counter, picked up Gabrielle’s cloak and thrust it into his hands.
‘Estúpido! Burro! Imbecil!’
‘I—Oh, hell. Oh, my love.’ He ran, the door banging in the wind and rain, the cloak tangling around his legs. Gabrielle was easy to catch on the slippery stones. She wasn’t well, she was distressed and she could hardly see in front of her face because she was blinded by tears, he realised as he caught her. When he swirled the cloak around her shoulders she batted at it, her face worryingly white.
‘Gabrielle. I’m sorry.’ He scooped her up in his arms, kicking and struggling, spitting anger and misery at him. ‘I’m stupid, an ass, an imbecile. I can’t count. I’m jealous and fearful. I love you.’ He shouldered open the shop door and the woman gestured through to another room beyond, shaking her head at him.
The wood-panelled chamber was empty and there was a fire. The woman came in with more chocolate and cups, a plate laden with pastéis de nata, the traditional custard tarts fragrant with cinnamon and lemon. She patted Gabrielle on the shoulder, shook her finger at Gray and bustled out, taking Gabrielle’s cloak with her.
‘I love you,’ he said again, urgently as though his words could bandage a bleeding wound. ‘I love you. I’m sorry. When you left so hurriedly and Henry was so... I saw the letter you wrote to him and then yours to me sounded ambiguous. I feared the worst. I thought you had...’
‘So you hit him.’
Was he forgiven? Gray couldn’t tell, couldn’t recognise this thin, tense woman.
‘He hit me back. I deserved it. I was being an ass. When we finally got rid of your aunt, who managed to arrive in the middle of it, we talked. He explained what you two had been so secretive about at the Terringtons’ ball, explained that what you were thanking him for when you wrote was being a sounding board to talk everything through, someone to confide in.’
Gabrielle reached out and touched the bruised skin under his eye. ‘This must have hurt.’
‘Not as much as I deserved.’
‘And yet just now you still could not trust me?’
Gray knew he had to be honest even if it meant stripping away all his pride, laying himself utterly open to her. ‘I am not used to being unsure, Gabrielle. I am not used to feeling insecure. Damn it, I have never been in love before, never felt jealousy like this. I thought I had been careful. Too careful to have got you with child. And I was not and that I could have been careless, could have risked you like that—it is hard to admit.’
‘I thought it impossible, too. You were not careless, we were both too ready to believe it would be safe.’ Her smile was a little shaky, but it was there and, suddenly, he felt hope. ‘That is why I didn’t realise until we were at sea and Jane made me work it out. It was the second time we made love. I am certain. You had been exhausted. You probably still were. You had woken from a deep, deep sleep and I think left it just a fraction of a second too long. I was rather clingy, I suspect, which cannot have helped. I saw a very good doctor the other day. He said it really is a very unreliable method.’
She is being generous, far more generous than I deserve, and now she looks so fragile.
He tried to imagine how a single woman, a gentlewoman with a reputation to preserve, must feel, realising that she was with child and alone. ‘Are you well? You’ve lost weight, you are pale and cold and I have upset you.’ He poured chocolate and put a tart on a plate. ‘Eat, drink, get warm.’
‘I’ve not been feeling much like eating, that is all it is.’ But Gabrielle took the cup and sipped. ‘The doctor says I am very well.’ After a while she put down the cup, reached for his hand, looking down at their joined fingers, not up at his face. ‘Why did you come?’
‘To tell you I have solved it. I have unravelled our Gordian knot. I can marry you and Frost’s will be safe.’
‘And I was here to book a passage back to England. I was coming to tell you that I loved you and that I trusted you—if you still want to marry me, I would like that, too. If you love me.’ She looked up then.
He did not know what she saw in his face, clearly not the startled joy that he felt, because Gabrielle stumbled on, looking back at their hands. She began to stroke her thumb over his. ‘I wanted to tell you that, although I am so happy about the baby, that isn’t why I want to marry you. I realised that I cannot put fear before love and I cannot love you without trusting you. Some things are more important than tradition or business or inheritance.’ She looked up and met his gaze and he knew it would be all right, that his love had come to meet him halfway. More than halfway. ‘Tell me how you solved the puzzle.’
‘I remembered my tutor talking about Alexander the Great cutting the knot, which is what every schoolboy remembers. But there was something else. He was a real old pedant. Plutarch said that Alexander pulled out the linchpin and then he could see the working of the knot and he simply unravelled it. He did not cut it. The moral of the story is that he saw the essence of the problem, not a violent solution to it that would damage everything.’
