Page 80 of Gentleman Jim

St. Clare inwardly sighed. “What would you like me to say? I’ve tried to master my feelings for her. To rid myself of this restlessness.” He gave his grandfather a wry look. “Have you not wondered why I’ve passed so many hours sparring at Jackson’s?”

Allendale frowned. “That bad, is it?”

It was worse. Far worse than St. Clare had expected it to be when he’d promised Maggie he would stay in town.

Wait and hope, he’d said.

But he’d also warned her that he was impatient.

“It’s been a week,” he told his grandfather. “I don’t know when she’s coming back.”

If she was coming back.

Beasley Park was the great passion of her life. She belonged there, far more than she belonged in London. Not only because of her health, but because it was her home. The place she loved best in all the world.

What if she never came back? What if she decided to remain there? To marry Fred in order to keep her claim on the estate?

Good lord.

She wouldn’t, would she?

The very notion made his heart seize as if it were being tightened in a vise.

“I should have gone with her,” he said. “An oversight on my part. But it’s not too late. If I leave in the morning—”

Allendale’s brow clouded with outrage. “Don’t be daft. You’d risk being recognized. I’ve warned you—”

“It doesn’t matter,” St. Clare said in a burst of impatience. “Can’t you see that? Not if she needs me. I’m doing nothing for her here. And she’s there, at the mercy of Burton-Smythe, and Beresford and his mother.”

“She has a chaperone, hasn’t she? Trumble’s daughter, I thought.”

“You don’t understand.” St. Clare fell silent for a long moment, reluctant to give voice to what it was that troubled him so. “She hasn’t written,” he said finally. “She wouldn’t. Not when we’re trying to quell the gossip. But I can’t help worrying about her. She…She hasn’t been entirely well.”

“Not well? What the devil’s the matter with her?”

“She took ill some years ago. A bout of influenza weakened her lungs. Sometimes, when she’s exerted herself, she finds it hard to catch her breath.”

Allendale returned to his supper. “You know how I feel about frail, sickly females.”

“She’s not frail. She’s the strongest person I know. The strongest, the bravest.” A lump formed in St. Clare’s throat. “She saved my life in Somerset. If not for her…”

“A gel with spirit. That’s something, at least. Only natural you should feel gratitude toward her.”

“It’s more than gratitude. I told you. My feelings for her—”

“Feelings, bah! You appeared willing enough to forget those feelings before we came here.” Allendale speared a piece of sturgeon with his fork. “You weren’t moping about Rome or Venice, as I recall.”

St. Clare’s expression hardened. There had been precious little time for moping when his grandfather had first taken him in hand. Indeed, in the beginning, every waking moment had been absorbed by lessons. Lessons upon lessons from an endless string of pitiless foreign tutors.

He’d had to learn everything over again. More than just the reading and writing that Maggie had taught him as a boy. He’d had to re-learn how to walk and talk. How to think. Most importantly of all, he’d had to prove that he had the aptitude to change. The raw material, as his grandfather had called it.

“No use wasting my time if you haven’t the capacity for it,” he’d often said. “You can go straight back to where you came from. I’ve no patience with a lad who won’t put in the effort.”

St. Clare had put in the effort and more.

He’d studied ceaselessly, his hours in the schoolroom broken only by hours spent with his fencing instructor or practicing his shooting. In time, he’d mastered pistols and swordplay. Even more difficult, he’d learned how to master his own unruly temper.

None of it had been easy. Every day had ended in physical and mental exhaustion. And then he’d gone to sleep, only to start over again the next day and the next. Training and studying and learning, until he didn’t only look and act different, he was different. Until Nicholas Seaton was dead and a new man had risen in his place. A gentleman. A nobleman.