Page 6 of Lord Gabriel’s Undoing

Aunt Fanny sounded pleased, though. “Why, Tobias, I didn’t expect to see you here tonight.” She had a soft spot for Phoebe’s maternal cousin.

“I’m here with my mama,” Tobias said. “Not Papa, of course.” He laughed. “He considers socializing beneath him, as you know.” He paused. “But I came over for a reason. Wycliff here asked me to introduce him to you, and to Phoebe, so that’s what I’m doing.” Another laugh. “If she will only look up at us.”

Phoebe felt rather than saw her aunt’s stern gaze fall upon her. Any moment now she was going to be abjured not to spend the evening looking at her feet or it would give her a hunched back. Forestalling the remark which she knew to be on Aunt Fanny’s lips, she took a deep breath and raised her head to look Tobias in the face. And peek at the gentleman by his side.

“That’s better, Coz,” Tobias said. “May I present Lord Gabriel Wycliffe to you both.”

Lord Gabriel was even more handsome up close, and consequently Phoebe was even more overcome with shyness in his presence. She wouldn’t have been if they’d met while walking in the park at Coakham, but here, at the ball, she was. Her feet and hands seemed to double in size until they were like the flippers she’d seen on the sea lions at the Exeter ’Change, and she was sure that if she were called upon to speak, she’d barely be able to get a word out.

Tobias seemed completely unaware of her turmoil though. “And, Gabriel, Lady Phoebe Nicholson is my cousin, don’t you know. A splendid girl. We spent chunks of our childhood together in darkest Warwickshire. Next best thing to a boy.”

Aunt Fanny’s face registered the extreme disapproval she must be feeling at so inappropriate an introduction.

Tobias must have noticed her reaction, for he gave a self-conscious cough. “Sorry, nearly forgot. And her aunt, Lady Brockwood, of course. My cousin’s guardian since she’s had the misfortune to lose both her parents. I think her cousin Mattie is out on the dance floor with Mr. Wade.”

Lord Gabriel swept an elegant bow to Aunt Fanny then turned to Phoebe, a smile of some charm curving his lips. “Enchanté, mademoiselle.” And he bowed to her, even more deeply than to her aunt.

If Phoebe could have blushed more, she would have done so, but she’d reached the pinnacle of embarrassment already.

“Lord Gabriel,” she managed to mutter as he rose from his bow. If only this were the park at Coakham and she was meeting the man of her dreams under more favorable circumstances. But life was never that fair.

He was taller than Tobias by several inches, and, although slim, somewhat broader than her still boyish cousin, so no doubt several years his senior. “Forgive me for intruding, Lady Phoebe,” he said, those blue eyes dancing with something that might have been amusement, “but I saw you from across the room and had to know your name. How handy it was that I chanced upon Toby here on my way to accost you.”

“Caught me on my way to the card room,” Tobias said. “Told me I had to introduce him to you or he’d spend the evening pining. Dashed keen for me to do so, I’ll say.”

Lord Gabriel smiled more widely, which for a moment made him look almost as young as Tobias. Only he had about him the air of someone who knew a lot more about life in general than her cousin did. “And now we are acquainted, might I have the pleasure of the next dance with you, Lady Phoebe? Unless, of course, someone has already claimed it.”

If she’d been thinking of turning him down, the sudden pressure in the middle of her back from her aunt’s hand changed her mind. She might not want to dance, even with such a paragon, but if she didn’t she would be in Aunt Fanny’s black books for days. “We’ve only been here a short time,” her aunt said with humiliating honesty. “Phoebe has no names written on her dance card as yet. Of course she will dance with you.”

Resigning herself to having to accept his offer, as well as even more embarrassed that her aunt had revealed her lack of future dance partners, Phoebe bobbed a not-at-all-elegant curtsy to Lord Gabriel. A somewhat inauspicious start to the dance. “Why thank you, Lord Gabriel. I should like that very much.” Which was both true and not true. But oh well, she might as well take advantage of this and get a dance with him. After she’d trampled on his feet a good few times, he wouldn’t be back for more.

He smiled down at her and, before she had chance to change her mind, seized her hand and whirled her out onto the dance floor where the next dance was about to begin.

Chapter Two

Lord Gabriel Wycliff had arrived at Lady Caithness’s ball not long before the Nicholson party, in the company of his older brother Ambrose, Marquis of Buckland. Ambrose’s wife of just over a year, Isabel, had not accompanied them as she was at present in the later stages of what Ambrose and Gabriel’s stepmother liked to call ‘a delicate condition,’ the outcome of which everyone hoped would be a boy. Consequently, she was at home at Wentworth Castle in Dorset under the care of her old nursemaid, a woman who strongly resembled a dragon, who’d come with her on her marriage. Both Ambrose and Gabriel always stayed well out of the way of this woman, for fear, Gabriel had suggested, of having a spell cast on them. She looked the sort who knew magic. The black variety.

Ambrose, who, now the short honeymoon period was over, rather felt as though he had been duped into the marriage, had been glad to escape his wife’s constant bad temper and vapors, not to mention her demands for out of season foods, and flee up to Town to join Gabriel. Tonight, he’d been more than happy to accompany him to Lady Caithness’s ball. One of the biggest and best of the early Season. But that might well have been because he was expecting his current mistress to be present, a fact he’d confided to Gabriel on their way over.

To Gabriel’s relief, Ambrose had soon sloped off to join a group of his friends, most of whom were still unmarried and under the same sort of pressure from their families that had led him to marry Isabel last year. Gabriel could picture him boasting that he’d done his bit and Isabel was about to provide the dukedom with an heir, and the others slapping him on the back as though it were all down to him and Isabel had played no part in it.

But behind their hands they’d be pitying him for having been so easily talked into getting himself leg-shackled. Last year he’d been amongst the wildest of young rakes about town, and he and Gabriel had been collectively referred to as the Wild Wycliffs. Not so now, or maybe Ambrose was thinking that now he’d done his bit for the family in producing an heir he could take up his old lifestyle again. His mistress, Dora Sutcliffe, widow of the old Earl of Matcham, was no doubt most pleased to find him back to his old bachelor ways in Town with no wife in tow.

Standing leaning against one of the overly ornate Greek-style pillars in the large ballroom, Gabriel could see that formidable lady making her way through the crowd towards Ambrose, as though drawn by a magnet. Heads turned at her passing. Most of the young bucks envied Ambrose his luck in snaring so beautiful and experienced a mistress.

The thought occurred to Gabriel that he should suggest to his brother that taking up with his mistress again so soon after his marriage might not be a good idea but was dismissed. After all, Ambrose never interfered in anything he did, so why should he bother. It wasn’t as though he even liked Isabel, a waspish young woman who’d taken an instant dislike to him on their first meeting and not been afraid to show it. He shrugged. Ambrose’s behavior was nothing to do with him and, if he tried interfering, it would only create bad blood between them. He didn’t want that. Easier to rest on the side of the brother he loved.

Instead, he let his gaze wander across the crowded ballroom, lingering here and there on one bejewelled lady or another, taking in their beautiful gowns, elaborate hair, and above all the fortunes with which each was festooned. A show of wealth that was abhorrent to his taste, particularly when he thought of the poverty just outside this well-insulated island of unearned, for the most part, opulence. For he was well-acquainted with the seedier side of life. Far more so than any other person in this exalted building. In fact, he’d be surprised to hear if anyone present had any notion of how the other half of the world, the poor who kept their world in motion, lived.

Did any of the people here even know what went on in the rookeries of St Giles, near Holborn, or Jacob’s Island on the south bank of the Thames a bit further down than the Tower of London, or the Devil’s Acre, that bordered so closely on Westminster itself? Did they know places existed where people lived in dirty, wet cellars, babies died by the score and crime was rife? Here in their comfortable, clean, warm ballrooms where nothing sordid was allowed to even be hinted at, they persisted in their ignorance. An ignorance of all things sordid they refused to acknowledge. Or, at any rate, nothing worse than a gentleman’s mistress or a gambling debt.

His lip curled in scorn.

He had his late mother, Camilla, Duchess of Sherborne, to thank for first opening his eyes regarding the rookeries. When he was only seven, and she was dying from some kind of malignant tumor, she’d admitted to him how she’d saved him from a life of poverty when a young Frenchwoman from the rookeries had thrust him, as a small baby, into her arms and fled. It had been fate, she said, that had given him to her. He’d been meant to become her son, and, as an impressionable seven-year-old, he’d believed her, despite the shock of discovering she wasn’t really his mother. Perhaps that had been why he’d so fiercely clung onto that belief and never shared the fact that he knew his origin with anyone.

That shock had been softened by the fact that for all of the seven years before she died, she’d been as loving to him as she’d been to her true-born son, Ambrose. Knowing she was dying, and wanting him to know the truth, she’d assured him he was old enough and sensible enough to understand the story of his origin. And to illustrate that, despite the pain she was suffering, she’d shown him the sort of life from which he’d been saved.

This had produced a profound impact on an impressionable child. “I never want you to forget that others are not so lucky as you are, little Gabriel,” Mama had said, holding his hand tightly as they observed the amorphous boundary of the St Giles Rookery from the safety of their carriage. He’d gazed wide-eyed at the crowds of ragged, dirty people, the filthy roads, and the tumbledown buildings Mama has said were their homes. And above all, at the barefoot, starving children.