Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

S he climbed the stairs and went to her bedroom, deriding herself for her naiveté. She let Dora's maid help her out of her dinner gown and dismissed her. Like a sleepwalker, she went into her dressing room and picked at the bodice of the ball gown she'd wear tomorrow night. Four years old, the dress was still pretty. Of French gauze over a pink silk slip, the gown fit her only because she'd sewn gussets into the side seams to accommodate her larger bosom. Given her meager circumstances, enlarging the dress had been the only option for her if she wished to attend Dora and Barr's ball. Before Gabe's arrival, she hadn't minded that she would be so attired. But now, she would not attract him. Others would. Could.

She was foolish to want him. Silly to think that now when he'd made his fortune and the earldom had also come to him that he could want her. His affectionate nature was an offering he'd always given her. His embraces, his delicious kisses he had always conferred upon her in sequestered spaces. Never in open regard. She understood why. The restrictions he lived with had painted him into the margins of his family's and his social class's order. Years ago he had no titles or earnings—and by all, was considered to have no prospects. He was a spare's spare. One of the forgotten men of a family whose nobility should have granted him more than the honor of bearing their presumably respectable name. He had been unfairly and damnably discounted.

While she, too, was held in as little regard. A female of no consequence. Without desires of her own or ambitions to improve her station, save to be anything more than some man's wife, mate, in charge of his house, his servants and hopefully his children. She had a dowry then. At ten thousand pounds, it was a goodly sum that mere whispers of its size, set bachelors aquiver with expectations of financial liquidity. A few even condescended to speak of acquiring her for her comeliness or even her intelligence. Talbot, the one man whose proposal had met with praise by her father, had proudly offered her his dead mother's dower house. "To live in, year-round," he had notified her the day her father approved his offer. "My mistress prefers the manor house."

That woman was now spending Alyssa's eight thousand. For many years, she did curse the woman's very name. Alyssa had given up her anger the day her father died. She decided that no longer would she allow resentment of Talbot and his doxy to destroy the serenity of her days.

Tomorrow she would welcome Dora's choice of governess for Reggie and Thomas. Tomorrow night she would enjoy the musical ensemble Dora and Barr had hired to play at the ball. She would dance. Once with Barr. She always did at their parties. Perhaps once with Gabe.

Then the day after Christmas she would go home to her comfortable cottage four miles away and prepare for the new year. In it, she promised herself to open her bookstore and look into offering her books in a lending library. Perhaps teach in the village church school to earn extra money.

Her life was rich. She had promised herself that. And she would make it so.

December 23, 1818

Darby Priory

The next afternoon, as Rosalind and Mary rose from the dining room table, so did Gabe. The girls were agog to be invited to Priory to celebrate the Barringtons' annual Christmas ball with their friends, Reginald and Thomas. Because the dancing would continue to the wee hours, the girls would spend the night. As Gabe, too, had been invited.

He had prepared in London for this Christmas after Barr's invitation. Though at that point, he had not met his two charges since they'd been toddlers, he wished to give them gifts to mark the occasion of their new relationship. Their mother had died three years ago. Their father, his cousin, had not been a generous man and Gabe feared what the girls might have learned from him about the nature of men and family affection. Whatever calibre his cousin's displays of affection had been toward his daughters, Gabe knew the problems his own sire's indifference to him had generated. He wished not to emulate the man.

As the girls' legal guardian, he would be responsible for them until their marriages or their twenty-fifth birthdays. He wanted to endear himself to them and mark a new life for them and himself. He'd brought to England with him for each of them a fine porcelain doll from his own supplier, an expert craftsman in Naples.

For the adults, he had other gifts he'd claimed from his storage factory near the East India Docks. For Dora, three yards of Morone peony red silk from Lucca. Barr was to have the finest cheroots from his tobacconist supplier in Amsterdam. A gift for Alyssa had been more difficult to select. He did not wish to be forward or lacking in etiquette, and so he could not give too personal an item. Not creamed soap from his man in Karlsruhe or scent from his perfumer in Grasse. Not an item too impersonal such as the royal purple skeins of wool from a mill in Edinburgh. Nor the much-too-suggestive four-foot-length of ivory Chantilly lace from his friend north of Paris.

On a whim to wrap up all of them and give everything to her, he found himself sitting in what had become his favorite chair in the old walnut-paneled library. Drumming his fingers on the arm of the leather chair, he sipped a good Armagnac from his friend in Bordeaux and pondered what to give the woman he loved for Christmas. Here amid the items that infused his lonely childhood with those who had become his erstwhile champions, kings and rogues, knights and mythical heroes who fought against fierce odds, he had valued courage. He had learned to savor the sport of a strong challenge and to demand of himself the subtle art of the shrewd victory.

At once he was on his feet. Here from this shelf, he picked Julius Caesar. There and there and there were multiple copies of Aristophanes' plays. And where…? Where was the one that would make her laugh and cry and throw her arms around him? At least one copy of the poor girl who attracts a prince at his ball had been here. He remembered a very old tattered copy of Cendrillon that the girls' mother enjoyed. It had to be here still. The frayed red leather, a collection of…yes! The Frenchman Charles Perrault's perfect little tales.

He'd wrap them all up in swaths of the Pomona green silk from Lyon. To bloody hell with etiquette. He'd give her all! Give her anything. Everything. If only she might give him the one thing he'd never thought to desire. Never before had the right to ask to possess.

Her very self.