Page 73 of Lord Gabriel’s Undoing

The countess wetted her lips, tears sparkling in her own eyes. “You…you are truly my son?”

Gabriel nodded. His heart felt as though it was about to burst. “I am.” He could hardly get the words out. Tears that matched hers threatened to fall.

She held out her arms and he stepped into them. She held him close, her hands on his back, his face against her shoulder, the warm scent of her enveloping him. She was his mother. His real mother. And she loved him. If he’d had a free hand, he would have wiped away the tears, but she had him fast, as though she never wanted to let him go again.

“Out of my way.” Mandeville’s order to Officer Whitely broke into the moment and the dowager released her hold on her son. Gabriel swiped his hand across his eyes to clear his tears.

Officer Whitely, well briefed on what had occurred twenty-three years ago, stood his ground, his billy club now held threateningly in his hands. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to come along with me, sir,” he said. “I have reliable information that it was you who had your brother assassinated and his heir stolen, and that you intended to kill an innocent child.”

“Frederick?” The dowager’s voice held a nervous question. “It was you? All the time it was you? All these years when I’ve lived in your house as a poor relation? No, not your house. When you’ve been dishonestly living in my son’s house?”

Frederick’s eyes flashed with fury, but there was no escape. Officer Whiteley was getting out his handcuffs.

Phoebe nodded. “We have a lot we need to tell you, Lady Mandeville.”

Her future mother-in-law looked at her in surprise. “And where on earth do you come into this?”

Phoebe smiled. “It’s a long story.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Three weeks later

On a wet and windy day in late March, three people clad in somber black stood beside a freshly filled in grave. They were in the New Burial Ground of St Andrew’s, to the North of London, where they’d come to see Sidonie, or Héloise, interred.

Phoebe stood between Gabriel and his mother, watching as Lady Mandeville laid a bouquet of daffodils on the raw earth heap. “You kept him safe,” she said, almost as though talking to herself. “You brought him back to me in the end. Thank you, Héloise. I forgive you for your sins.”

Sidonie had not been attempting to make them feel sorry for her when she’d said she was dying. She’d hung on for the week it had taken for the Common Licence for their marriage to arrive, and she’d been there at Gabriel and Phoebe’s wedding in St George’s Church by Hanover Square—the church Phoebe had passed on her way to St Giles in her disguise as a boy.

After that, she’d gone downhill rapidly. On Phoebe’s insistence, Gabriel had caused her to be brought to Mowbray House, now theirs as it had been vacated by his uncle, aunt, and cousin, where she could be treated by the best of physicians. He’d been reticent to do so at first, still struggling with forgiveness, but Phoebe had pointed out that the thing he should be focusing on was not that Sidonie had assisted in his snatching, but that she’d refused to allow his kidnappers to kill him. She’d saved his life. She was suffering. She deserved as pain free an end as it was possible to give her.

Phoebe had been helped in this by Gabriel’s mother, who’d been delighted to discover her brother-in-law’s wife, who’d always been condescending to her and treated her as a poor relation, no longer held the title of countess. And nor was she likely to ever again. Especially not with her husband currently residing in Newgate Prison under a charge of not just kidnapping, but also the murder of his half brother. Sidonie had dictated a detailed statement revealing everything he’d done before she died. As a consequence of this, Lady Mandeville had insisted that her new-found son, despite his mixed feelings, should show mercy to the woman who’d saved his life.

So Sidonie had passed her last days in comfort and a swirl of laudanum that had kept her sleeping for most of the time. She’d finally slipped away in her sleep, and Phoebe and Lady Mandeville had organized her funeral and burial in the New Burial Ground. She would have a smart tombstone when the ground had settled over her grave.

Phoebe squeezed Gabriel’s hand. “It’s over. You know who you are at last. This is the start of your new life.”

He was staring at where the daffodils lay. “I think even if she’d allowed my uncle’s men to do what he’d planned, he would never have given her what he’d promised. She knew too much. She was a loose end. I’m certain that if she hadn’t run that day then she’d have been killed too.”

Neither of them had ever discussed this possibility with Sidonie. But both of them were convinced of it. In saving the child in her charge, she’d saved her own life as well. And she’d delivered Gabriel into a family that had loved him and given him everything he’d ever needed. Except his real mother.

“And now we can set about the finding of a suitable country house for our orphanage,” Phoebe said. “A place where city children can breathe fresh air and grow tall and strong. I can’t wait.” And maybe where one of their own could be born. Perhaps because she knew how he’d been deprived of his own mother, the idea of giving him his own child to love seemed more than attractive. And she would love it too. She was already very fond of Ambrose’s sweet little daughter, born only a day after their adventure with the Bow Street Runners, and Isabel was proving to be nowhere near as bad as Gabriel had painted her.

Gabriel nodded. With the discovery of who he really was had come not just a title but all the wealth that went with it. He and Phoebe were equals in more than just birth, and now the idea of a proper country orphanage could at last begin to take shape.

Lady Mandeville turned away from the grave. “I hope she finds some peace, poor woman.” She’d spent a lot of time sitting with Sidonie in those last two weeks, and Phoebe had the impression she had forged some kind of understanding with the dying woman. She’d never asked what was said between them, but she’d observed the softening of the dowager countess’s attitude to her old servant as the days passed. She’d cried when Sidonie breathed her last.

They walked back through the graveyard to the road where Gabriel’s carriage, drawn by four splendid black horses, waited. Most suitable for a funeral party.

“I’m glad she found some peace in life at the end,” Phoebe said. “I think she was a very sad woman. She told me she never stopped wondering what had become of you, Gabriel.”

Lady Mandeville smiled. “As did I. Everyone insisted on telling me you must have been dead, Gabriel. Frederick in particular, although now I know why.” The smile became a frown. “But I clung onto the hope that you still lived, somewhere, all these years. Everywhere I went, I searched the faces of little boys, hoping one day to see your face. I looked at shoe-shine boys, at boys running across the streets or behind carriages. I looked at barefoot boys and shop boys taking out deliveries. But with each passing year, that hope faded a little until it was almost, but not quite extinguished.” She smiled again but had to wipe a tear away. She waved her hand at him. “Don’t. These are happy tears. I think I’d stopped believing miracles could happen until you came to my door. To the door I thought was Frederick’s.” She shook her head. “When I think of all the years I spent in subservience to him and his awful wife, dependent on them for my allowance. Eating with them, being forced to agree their son was such an upstanding young man.” She shook her head.

The ex-Lady Mandeville, Frederick’s wife, had moved out with alacrity when faced with the incontrovertible truth about her husband, busily professing she’d had no idea what he was truly like. But had she known? Had she been part of it? She wasn’t saying. It seemed unlikely they would ever know for sure.

Lord Evesham, or just Mr. Austin Mowbray as he was now, had made a lot more fuss than either of his parents, ranting about Gabriel being an impostor and Sidonie an out-and-out liar. He’d tried, but he’d failed. As the son of criminal parents, he wasn’t blamed for their actions, but rather for his own reaction. People had been cutting him dead for the last three weeks and were likely to keep on doing so. A somewhat belated justice for a man who’d been a bully all his life.

They all climbed into the landau and Gabriel closed the door. “I’m paying to have her grave cared for. It’s the least I can do for the woman who saved my life, even though it was partly her fault it was in danger in the first place.”