AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Hmm…” was his only response to his mother as he turned at the sound of Peter’s footsteps coming back toward the parlour.
“My lord, my lady, Mr Barnaby Tatford is without and requests an audience,” Peters explained as soon as he had stepped into the room and bowed respectfully.
Both Gabriel and his mother glanced at each other and the earl saw that she looked just as shocked as he was feeling at the announcement. Though he had talked to his cousin several times on the occasions forced upon him by his mother, he had never anticipated that the man would turn up at their door.
Feeling stiff with the stress of his previous conversation with his mother, Gabriel wasn’t certain he could handle the added stress of having to play nice with a family member who barely recognised him as such, yet he couldn’t help but feel mildly curious as to why the man had come to his home.
“Please, send him in,” Gabriel told the butler, shoving the invitations his mother had given him into the inner breast pocket of his jacket in the hopes that he might be able to ignore them for his cousin’s visit.
Peters bowed again and disappeared for a moment, returning once more with Mr Tatford in tow. The man looked like just about any other English gentleman that Gabriel had ever met. Though their colouring differed somewhat, they all held the same pompous and well-to-do nature that so irked Gabriel. With golden blonde hair and thickly grown mutton chops cut to his jawline, framing a somewhat handsome face, his cousin was no exception.
“Mr Tatford, welcome!” Gabriel’s mother greeted him before the earl had even the chance to open his mouth to speak. She swept forward with a curtsey and gestured him into the room. “What a lovely surprise to see you here. Please, sit. Peters will fetch another teacup.”
“Thank you, Lady Sutthers,” Mr Tatford said, offering her a bow of his own before he offered the same to Gabriel. “My lord.”
“Please, sit,” Gabriel said through gritted teeth. “I am sure that my mother will be pleased to keep you entertained, though I regret I am in need or attending to some business.”
“Gabriel, will you not stay a moment and drink with us?” his mother insisted, looking at him out of the corner of her eye with a clenched jaw that suggested she wanted so desperately to chastise him as though he were a small boy once again.
“I am able to if you had need of me,” Gabriel said, struggling to hold back a gut-wrenching sigh. “Mr Tatford?”
“Oh, please, do not let me keep you from important business,” Mr Tatford responded, and there was a slyness to his smile, as though he was pleased to be left alone with Gabriel’s mother. Suddenly, the earl was less inclined to leave. “I was merely passing through the neighbourhood on my way home and thought I would pop in to say hello and wish you all well.”
“Well, then if you have nowhere to be, we must insist that you stay for dinner,” Lady Sutthers assured him, and Gabriel’s stomach twisted into a tight knot. He wasn’t sure he could think of anything worse than sharing his meal time with another member of the family, although it might help to ease his mother’s almost constant talk of his finding himself a bride. All he could hope was that his younger brother might turn up to share some of the brunt.
“He must stay, mustn’t he, Gabriel?” his mother said when Mr Tatford did not offer up an immediate protest but started to look as if he might.
Knowing that if he denied his mother’s insistence, she would only make his life even more of a living hell, he concluded. “Yes, please, Mr Tatford. Do stay for dinner.”
“Oh, wonderful!” his mother said, clapping her hands in delight as though it had already been decided. Both Mr Tatford and Gabriel glanced at each other and for a moment Gabriel thought that he saw his own apprehension reflected in the man’s green gaze that was perhaps the only similarity that they shared.
I wonder if he will return to old Lady Tatford to discuss all he sees here tonight,Gabriel thought. Though he truly had no way of knowing just how close his cousin was to their shared grandmother.It makes no odds to me.
Chapter 3
That evening, dinner was much more pleasant than Gabriel might have anticipated. Though his brother did not attend, he found that Mr Tatford was far less abrasive and annoying than he would have expected. In fact, he was quite polite and although Gabriel found himself falling easily into conversation, by the end of the night, he was still weary.
He was more than a little relieved when his cousin left for home and his mother decided to retire to her bed.
“It wasn’t nearly so bad as you thought it would be, was it, sweetheart?” his mother said as he escorted her from the parlour where they had shared after-dinner drinks to the bottom of the staircase as he did almost every evening.
“No,Madre,” Gabriel responded, and he clenched his jaw when he saw the way that his mother flinched at his use of her home tongue. Was she so opposed now to remembering where she had come from? Whether she was or not, he would not give up on that side of himself, no matter how much the English gentry wished to change him. “è stato davvero abbastanza piacevole,” he said in Italian, while thinking in English.It was quite pleasant indeed.
Though he was pleased to find that his mother did not look nearly so distressed by his use of Italian then. Perhaps what he had seen earlier upon her face had been nothing more than a trick of the light.
“We must invite him again one day soon,” his mother insisted, and Gabriel was slightly disappointed that she had chosen not to continue in Italian herself. And before he could say a word either for or against the idea, she gripped hold of his forearm and used it to support herself so that she could look him directly in the eye as she added, “And your grandmother too, I hope.”
The urge to snap back at her was immediate, and yet Gabriel was fast to bite his tongue. It was so rare of late for them to have an evening without a single argument and he did not wish to start one right as the night was drawing to an end.
“As I said before, I shall think on it,” he promised, leaning down to kiss his shorter mother upon the cheek. “Good night,madre.”
And there it was again, the flinch. Though he wanted desperately to ask his mother why she reacted so, he did not get the chance. She was quick to offer a smile and ask, “Will you be retiring to your study to work now that Mr Tatford has gone?”
The suspicion in her eye suggested that she already knew the answer. Gabriel shook his head and cleared his throat to respond, “I think I might head to the club and do as you have been bidding me all these months.”
His mother scowled at him and he was certain that deep down they both knew he had no intentions of doing so and even fewer intentions of going out of his way to make any new acquaintances or even friends among the other members of the ton. Though he could not very well tell his mother that he was off to see his mistress, the only person in England whose company he did not entirely despise.
“Well, do not be out all night and be careful not to drink too much,” his mother warned. Though when she squeezed his forearm, there was far more to her warning than she was saying aloud. His heart sank a little to see the look on her face, knowing that she had heard the rumours of his rakishness, just as surely as anyone else had. Even were they not true.
