The Unexpected Marriage Of Gabriel Stone

‘Dinner is served, my lord,’ their butler announced, making her jump.

Caroline got a grip on herself. Dangerous peers of the realm might be lurking in the shrubbery—literally and mysteriously—but she had a dinner party to deal with. ‘We are a most unbalanced group, are we not?’ she said with an attempt at a gay laugh. ‘Lord Calderbeck, may I claim your arm? The rest of you gentlemen must escort yourselves in, I fear.’

She had set out the place cards with strict attention to precedence. Marcus Fawcett, Viscount Frampton, sat on her left hand as she occupied the hostess’s chair at the foot of the table with Lord Calderbeck on her other side. Woodruffe, a baron, was left watching her from his position midway down the table. She turned and began to flirt lightly with the viscount. The stare turned to a glare and young Lord Frampton sat up straighter, his expression faintly smug.

Just as long as I do not have to deal with him as well! Caroline accepted a slice of beef with a smile and asked the viscount about his horses. From experience, he could be relied upon to bore on for hours once started on that theme, which had the dual benefits of distracting his mind from flirtation and also allowing her time to think about a certain earl.

Why on earth hadn’t she recognised Gabriel immediately? That beard and the curling mane of hair, she supposed. And the fact that when they had met before she had been too embarrassed to study his face closely. It was that rangy body with its easy movement that had always attracted her and that was what she had recognised through the telescope.

‘Spavined? How distressing,’ she responded automatically to Frampton’s ramblings about one of his matched bays, then closed her ears to an account of just what the farrier had advised doing about it and what his head groom had thought.

But what was Gabriel Stone doing here with his Welsh accent and his poetry? She would wager her entire allowance for a year that the man had never so much as rhymed a couplet in his life. Surely he hadn’t come with a view to collecting on her shocking IOU after all? No marriage had been announced, no betrothal announced, so the terms of the bargain were not met in any case.

They had parted with angry words, on her part at least, but if Gabriel had wanted to make his peace with her he was going to preposterous extremes to do so. Besides, he had not revealed his identity when they met at the hermitage and he had made no attempt to contact her since.

‘And what do you think of your father’s hermit, eh, Lady Caroline?’ Lord Calderbeck’s voice was loud enough to draw the attention of all the diners.

‘I...I haven’t...I mean I don’t...’ She was blushing, she knew she was. And stammering and generally behaving in a most suspicious manner. ‘I have not had the opportunity to view the man at close quarters,’ she managed. ‘I have been rather occupied. But I consider the impression he creates from a distance to be most picturesque. My father has such a good eye for a landscape effect.’

That at least earned her an approving look from the far end of the table. Perhaps her father’s violent anger with her had been forgotten for now, although she could not delude herself that the truce would hold once she defied him again over Lord Woodruffe. And she would defy him, she was even more certain of that now as she watched her suitor eating his way through the mound of food on his plate without the slightest sign of appreciation or discrimination. His eyes, when they met hers, held promises of retribution that banished the image of a portly, middle-aged buffoon, replacing them with threats of domination and pain.

* * *

Gabriel dumped the bucket he had carried down to the stream to deal with his after-dinner washing up and closed the door of his cell. It was cool now that the sun was down and the mossy grove seemed to stay damp however high the daytime temperature. He had performed his first charade for his employer, seen the glint as the sinking sun had caught the lens of at least one telescope, and there was small risk the house party guests would leave after dinner to inspect him. It was safe to relax.

The fire was still alight after his culinary efforts earlier and he tossed on some wood, more for the cheerful flicker of light than for the warmth. For a man who had never had to so much as make himself a cup of tea before he was quite pleased with his cookery, even if all he was doing was converting the food sent over from the big house kitchens. He had heated soup without scalding it, he had chopped up what he assumed were the leftovers from yesterday’s roast along with onions and a carrot, fried the result with beef dripping and consumed the savoury mess along with a hunk of bread that was only slightly stale, washed down with a mug of the thin ale that had been provided in a firkin.

Not what he was used to, he thought as he stretched out his legs in front of the fire, but he was getting accustomed to it and the constant fresh air was sharpening his appetite, even for his own cooking. It was certainly easier to adapt to the food than it was to the long skirts of his robe. How the devil did women cope with the encumbrance? To say nothing of the fact that it was decidedly draughty around the nether regions.

The chilling effect of cold air had probably been an advantage to monks fighting the temptations of the flesh in their quest for celibacy. Not that cold draughts had been necessary the other day when he had found himself with Lady Caroline in his arms. It had been anger that had heated his blood then, fury that anyone could manhandle a woman, let alone her own father.

He had expected to discover that she had been bullied, but not that she was suffering actual physical harm. Bullying he had expected to be able to deal with by giving her moral support and by finding something on Woodruffe that would persuade the man to drop his pretensions to Caroline’s hand. His dubious sexual proclivities were well enough known for that to be ineffectual as a pressure point—Gabriel must find something else. It might amount to blackmail, but he had no qualms about that in this case. And probably Woodruffe would prefer it to facing him down the barrel of one of Manton’s duelling pistols, which was Gabriel’s fall-back plan. It wouldn’t be difficult to work up some kind of quarrel with a man as objectionable as Edgar Parfit.

But if Caroline was being mistreated then the whole business became more serious, for if her father blamed her for Woodruffe’s withdrawal then she could suffer more than bruised wrists.

Gabriel lifted the bottle of brandy from behind the log pile, poured himself two fingers into a horn beaker and sipped while the heat of the spirits settled the faint nausea that came with some ruthless self-examination. He had shaken his head over Caroline’s lack of foresight beyond her aim of retrieving her brother’s estate, now he wondered if he had been equally thoughtless.

He had landed himself in this situation on a sudden impulse when Alex Tempest had reported overhearing Knighton at White’s talking about his advertisement in The Times. He had been brooding on what to do about his unease over Caroline’s welfare and Alex’s gossip seemed like the answer on a plate, so he’d snatched at it.

Pretend to be a hermit—there would hardly be competition for the post—combine an amusing small adventure with the opportunity to soothe his nagging conscience over Caroline, get himself out of his London rut for a while. It had all seemed like the perfect answer.

Perhaps if things had not fallen into place so easily he might have reconsidered the masquerade and found some other way of discovering how Caroline was faring. But the necessary delay while his ‘agent’, otherwise known as Corbridge his valet, had negotiated on his behalf, and he ostensibly travelled from Wales, had given him time to grow an impressive beard and for his untrimmed hair to develop an unfashionable shagginess. He had to shave twice a day to maintain an acceptable appearance for a gentleman and the resulting thicket of neglected growth was enough, he was confident, to hide his identity from a self-obsessed man who had only seen him closely in a poorly lit gaming hell.

The Welsh accent that he had learned to mimic when he had stayed with his Great-Aunt Gwendoline near Caernarvon as a boy had come back easily. Alex had been so amused and impressed by his disguise that they had even tried the imposture out on Alex’s wife, Tess, although with Gabriel in ordinary clothes and not his monkish robe. Lady Weybourn had carried on almost five minutes of polite social chit-chat in Green Park with Mr Petrus Owen, the gentleman from Wales, before her husband’s poorly suppressed laughter had made her suspicious.

It was a shock to find Caroline at the chapel when he’d returned from his morning dip in the lake and he’d been surprised, too, that she had failed to recognise him. With the painful discipline of self-examination that he had imposed on himself recently Gabriel pondered whether his reaction to that lack of recognition was hurt pride. They had, after all, discussed becoming lovers—one would expect a woman under the circumstances to have looked closely at the man she was proposing such a bargain with.

‘Coxcomb,’ he muttered to himself. Caroline had been in turn embarrassed, mortified, shy, angry and afraid during both of their encounters. It would have been a miracle if she had recognised him in the street, let alone hiding behind all those whiskers. Which cover all my best features, Gabriel thought with a grimace as he tugged at the offending growth.

He needed to talk to her again, reveal his true identity and discover the truth about her situation. That might be easier said than done, because catching her alone so that any startled reaction was not observed was not going to be easy. He found that it was not just the fire and the brandy that was warming him. The thought of Caroline Holm was...stimulating. In much the same way as a hair shirt, no doubt, Gabriel told himself as he reached for a book and moved the candles closer. She was likely to cause him nothing but trouble, anxiety and hard work, all things that he normally avoided like the plague.

He had become unused to worrying about anyone else’s welfare. His employees were easy enough—you paid them properly, made your expectations clear and dealt fairly—and mistresses were much the same. His brothers more or less looked after themselves now they were adults and, except for the occasional request for money, seemed quite happy with the state of affairs.

But Caroline was alone and courageous. She had been hurt, was probably still at risk, and he could no more stand by and see a woman injured than he could fly. And she had blue eyes like speedwell in sunlight and soft, soft skin under his fingers. That thought was almost worse for his peace of mind than fighting old nightmares, but he could not walk away and leave her, not if he wanted to live with his conscience afterwards. Gabriel removed a bookmark and applied himself to an analysis of the post-war European political situation.

Chapter Six

Gabriel, staying firmly in the role of Petrus Owen, poet and hermit, had bathed, broken his fast and tidied his humble residence. He was contemplating a visit to the kitchen door of Knighton Park in the hope of discovering if the mistress of the house came down to give her orders to Cook or sent for her, when the sound of approaching riders brought him to the threshold of the chapel.

He picked up the large book that he had selected, thinking it looked like an appropriate text for a hermit to be studying, shut the door on the domestic interior and took up a position looking out over the wooded dell down to the lake.

The horses filled the clearing behind him, hooves tramping on the leaf mould, bits jingling, breathing heavy after what must have been a gallop up the long slope on the other side of the crest. There were at least half a dozen of them, perhaps more, but the riders fell silent as they saw him and he could not be certain.

Gabriel waited, counting up to twenty in his head in Welsh to make certain his accent was firmly in place. The sound of movement subsided, leaving only the occasional snort and stamped hoof.

When he turned he made the movement slow, scanned the clearing until he saw Lord Knighton, then bowed, straightened and waited, his gaze on his employer’s face. The man was pleased, he could see that. Pleased to find his hermit in the right place, pleased with his bit of theatre and pleased, too, by the admiring murmurs from his guests.

There were nine mounted men facing him. Seven guests in addition to Knighton and his son and, on the edge of the group, Caroline on a neat bay hack, her habit a deeper shade of the blue of her eyes, a pert low-crowned hat on her head. He let his gaze pass over her, frustrated by the veil that hid her expression from him.

‘So this is your hermit, eh, Knighton!’ Woodruffe, of course, was always ready to state the obvious, probably because it saved thinking. ‘What are you doing, fellow?’

Gabriel turned by a few degrees, met Woodruffe’s stare and bowed again. ‘Meditating.’ He let the silence hang heavy and saw the two youngest men, the Willings brothers, if he was not mistaken, shift uneasily in their saddles. He had spoken as though to an equal and they were uncertain, he guessed, how to react to that. ‘I was pondering upon the transience of glory and the fall of pride.’

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