Yours Until Dawn (29 page)

Cecily turned her face away, but not before Estelle saw the blush come creeping into her cheeks.

“Why, Cecily Samantha March, he’s not the only one you’ve been keeping secrets from, is he?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do! Is it true? Were the two of you…” Throwing a glance over her shoulder, Estelle lowered her voice to a whisper. “
Lovers?
”

“Only one night,” Cecily confessed.

“Only once?”

“No.
Only one night,
” Cecily repeated, carefully enunciating each word.

Estelle gasped, looking both delighted and horrified. “I can’t believe you’ve done
that
. With
him
! You’re very progressive, you know. Most women wait until after they’re married to take a lover.” She leaned closer, fanning herself with her hand. “I just have to ask. Is he as
accomplished
as he looks?”

Cecily closed her eyes as Gabriel’s
accomplishments
came flooding back into her memory, sending a rush of hot desire melting through her veins. “More so.”

“Oh, my!” Estelle fell back in the grass, her arms spread in a mock swoon. But she sat up just as abruptly, stealing a troubled look at Cecily’s slender form. “Dear Lord, you’re not …with child, are you?”

“I wish to God that I was!” The confession burst from Cecily without warning. “Doesn’t that prove what a terrible person I am? I’d be willing to break my family’s heart, suffer the censure of society, and risk everything if I could just have some small piece of him to carry with me always.” She buried her face against her knee, no longer able to bear the weight of her friend’s pitying gaze.

Estelle stroked her hair. “It’s not too late, you know. Why don’t you go to him? Tell him the truth? Beg his forgiveness?”

“How could I?” She lifted her head, gazing at Estelle through a mist of tears. “Don’t you understand what I did? I nearly got him killed. I abandoned him when he needed me the most. Then, to try and atone for those sins, I tricked my way into his house and toyed with both his memories and his affections.” A harsh sob tore from her throat. “How could he ever forgive me for that? How could he ever look upon me with anything but loathing?”

Even as Estelle gently drew her into her arms so she could cry out the tears she’d been holding in for the past two months, Cecily had another terrible thought. Now that Gabriel knew Samantha had been lying to him, how long would it be before he started to wonder if the night she had spent in his arms was nothing but a lie as well?

My darling Cecily,

One word from your lips and I would never leave your reach…

T
he stranger made his way through the crowded London streets, his expression so forbidding and his long strides so determined that even the beggars and cutpurses scurried to get out of his way. He seemed oblivious to the bitter October wind that cut through the shoulder-cape of his woolen greatcoat, the chill droplets of rain dripping from the curved brim of his tall beaver hat.

It wasn’t the jagged scar marring his face that made the passersby hug their children closer and sidle out of his path. It was the look in his eyes. His burning gaze searched every face that passed, evoking a shiver in everyone it touched.

The irony was not wasted on Gabriel. He could finally see, but he was denied the one sight he most desired. Every sunrise, no matter how breathtaking its pinks and golds, only lit up the dark road ahead of him. Every sunset foretold the long and lonely night to come.

He stalked through the falling dusk, keenly aware that the shadows were descending earlier every day. The year was growing older and so was he. Soon it wouldn’t be rain falling to wet his cheeks, but snow.

Despite the generous retainer Gabriel had offered them to keep looking for Samantha, Steerforth and his Runners had been forced to admit defeat. After that, Gabriel had taken to the streets himself, returning to his town house in Grosvenor Square each night only after he was too chilled and exhausted to take another step. He’d visited every hospital in London, but no one remembered a former governess named Wickersham who had tended the wounded soldiers and sailors.

He had only one fear greater than not finding Samantha—what if he didn’t recognize her when he did?

He had dragged Beckwith along with him for the first month of his search. The shy butler had looked equally miserable huddling in the corner of some squalid tavern or questioning the street vendors in Covent Garden. Gabriel had finally taken pity on him and sent him back to Fairchild Park.

Now, just like the men he had hired to find her, Gabriel was forced to rely on descriptions that varied depending upon whom you asked. As best as he could tell, he was searching for a slender woman of average height with thick auburn hair, delicate features, and eyes too often veiled by those homely spectacles she had worn. Some of the servants insisted they were green, while others swore they had been brown. Only Honoria believed them to be blue.

He knew it was insanity, but Gabriel had to believe that if he came face to face with Samantha, something in his soul would recognize her.

He turned down a poorly lit street that wended its way toward the docks. The crowds were thinner here, the shadows deeper. Whenever Gabriel explored the seedy underworld of Whitechapel or Billingsgate, he wasn’t so much afraid that he wouldn’t find Samantha, but that he would. The thought of her wandering some dark alley, heavy with his child, maddened him. It made him want to start kicking down doors and snatching up strangers by the throats until he found someone who could prove she wasn’t a figment of his imagination.

His determination to find her had not wavered, but the doubts he’d suffered since his visit to the Carstairs estate still haunted him. He remembered the rainy afternoon when she had read to him from
Speed the Plough
. She had played every role with such conviction. What if she’d only been playing the role of a woman falling in love with him? But if that were so, how could she have given herself to him so generously? How could she have surrendered her innocence without asking for anything in return?

As he crossed a narrow alley, an elusive whiff of fragrance drifted to his nose. Halting in his tracks, he closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath, embracing the darkness instead of fleeing it. There it was again—an unmistakable hint of lemon verbena rising above the mingled aromas of scorched sausages and spilled ale.

Opening his eyes, he scanned the shadowy figures around him. A cloaked woman had just passed him on the other side of the alley. Through the mist of rain, he could have sworn he saw a strand of dark auburn hair escaping her hood.

Racing after her, Gabriel caught her by the elbow and jerked her around to face him. Her hood went tumbling back to reveal a nearly toothless grin and a pair of sagging breasts that threatened to spill out of her gaping bodice. Gabriel recoiled from the gin-saturated stench of her breath.

“Whoa, there, guv’nor, there’s no need to get rough with a lady. Unless, of course, you like it that way.” She fluttered her sparse eyelashes, looking less coy than grotesque. “For a few extra shillin’s, I just might be willin’ to find out.”

Gabriel lowered his hand, barely resisting the urge to wipe it on his coat. “Forgive me, madam. I mistook you for someone else.”

“Don’t be in such a rush!” she called after him as he turned and began to hurry away, nearly trampling a cursing chimney sweep in his haste to escape. “For a pretty fellow like you, I might even give you a taste for free. I know I ’aven’t got too many teeth, but some gents says that only makes it sweeter!”

Weary to his very soul, Gabriel fled the shadows of the alley, determined to seek the refuge of the carriage he’d left parked around the corner.

Turning the collar of his greatcoat up against an icy gust of wind and rain, he crossed the busy street, dodging a carriage stuffed with giggling belles and a ruddy-faced lamplighter. The urchin scampered from lamp to lamp, igniting the oil with the briefest kiss of his sputtering torch.

Gabriel might not even have noticed the shabby figure huddled on the sidewalk beneath one of those lamps if he hadn’t heard the man call out, “Alms, please! Spare a halfpenny to help them that can’t help themselves!”

“Why don’t you crawl off to the workhouse and help us all?” a passing gentleman snarled, stepping right over him.

His cheerful smile undaunted, the man thrust his tin cup toward a hatchet-nosed woman who was trailed by a maid, a footman, and a beleaguered African page struggling to juggle a towering armful of packages. “Spare a halfpenny for a warm cup of soup, ma’am?”

“You don’t need a warm cup of soup. You need a job,” she informed him, jerking her skirts out of his reach. “Maybe then you wouldn’t have time to harass decent Christian folk.”

Shaking his head, Gabriel drew a sovereign out of his pocket and tossed it in the man’s cup as he passed.

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

Those soft, cultured tones stopped Gabriel in his tracks. He slowly turned.

As the man lifted his hand in a salute, it was impossible not to notice his uncontrollable shivering or the glint of intelligence in his light brown eyes. “Martin Worth, my lord. We served together aboard the
Victory
. You probably don’t remember me. I was only a midshipman.”

Looking closer, Gabriel realized that what he had mistaken for rags was actually a tattered naval uniform. The faded blue jacket hung loose over a chest so bony it was almost skeletal. The dingy white breeches had been pinned up over Worth’s legs—or what was left of them. He no longer had any need for stockings or boots.

As Gabriel slowly lifted his hand to return the salute, a hacking cough rattled up from somewhere in Worth’s chest, nearly bending him double. It was clear that the damp had already settled deep into his lungs. He would not survive the coming winter.

Some men still haven’t come home from this war. And some men never will. Others lost both arms and legs. They sit begging in the gutters, their uniforms and their pride in tatters. They’re jeered at, stepped on, and the only hope they have left is that some stranger with an ounce of Christian charity in their soul might drop a halfpenny in their tin cups.

As that damning voice rang through his memory, Gabriel shook his head in stunned disbelief. He had been searching for Samantha for months, yet it was here on this unfamiliar street corner, gazing into a stranger’s eyes, that he finally found her.

“You’re right, Midshipman Worth. I didn’t remember you,” he confessed, dragging off his greatcoat and kneeling to sweep it around the man’s gaunt shoulders. “But I do now.”

Worth gazed up at him in open bewilderment as he beckoned toward the other side of the street and let out a piercing whistle, summoning his waiting carriage to their side.

“I can’t believe I let you bully me into this,” Cecily whispered as she and Estelle descended the polished parquet steps that spilled down into the crowded ballroom of Lady Apsley’s Mayfair mansion. “I’d never have let you drag me to London at all if our parish didn’t have a new curate.”

“Unmarried?” Estelle asked.

“I’m afraid so. Although if my mother has anything to say about it, not for long.”

“I gather from your glum tone that you don’t find him a suitable prospect for matrimony.”

“On the contrary. He’s everything my family believes I should desire in a husband. Dull. Stolid. Given to long rambling dissertations on the charms of raising blackface sheep and curing tongue sausages. They’d be perfectly content for me to spend the rest of my days darning his stockings and raising his plump, placid children.” She sighed. “Perhaps I should allow him to court me. It’s no more than I deserve.”

Not even Cecily’s elbow-length gloves could soften the bite of Estelle’s fingernails into her arm. “Don’t even think such a terrible thing!”

“And why not? How would you prefer I spend what’s left of my life? Crying on your shoulder? Mooning over a man I can never have?”

“I can’t predict how you’re going to spend the rest of your life,” Estelle said as they reached the bottom of the stairs and began to wend their way through the crush of chattering guests, “but I do know how you’re going to spend tonight. Smiling. Nodding. Dancing. And making scintillating conversation with besotted young men who care nothing for sheep or curing tongue sausages.”

“So what esteemed occasion are we celebrating tonight? Did Lord Apsley’s horse win another race at Newmarket?” Cecily knew as well as Estelle that the most renowned London hostesses were quick to seize upon any excuse to brighten the long, dull months between Seasons.

Estelle shrugged. “All I know is that it has something to do with Napoleon following through on his threat to blockade us. Lady Apsley decided to throw a ball in honor of some of the officers who are shipping out tomorrow to spare us the horrors of a life without Belgian lace and Turkish figs. Why don’t you think of tonight as your sacrifice to support the noble cause?”

“You forget,” Cecily said lightly to hide the sudden ache in her heart, “I’ve already done my duty for king and country.”

“So you have.” Estelle sighed wistfully. “Lucky girl. Oh, look!” she exclaimed, distracted by the sight of a liveried footman weaving through the crowd bearing a silver tray of punch glasses. “Since we haven’t yet caught the eye of any prowling gentlemen, I suppose we’ll have to fetch our own punch. Wait here. I’ll be right back.”