Marriage Made In Shame by Sophia James

Author:Sophia James
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harlequin Historical
Published: 2015-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Daniel Wylde came again to visit Gabriel in the early hours of the evening.

‘I saw Frederick Lovelace this morning. He hopes to have some news of a wonderful new development in his life, I think was how he phrased it. He then asked me if I knew Miss Adelaide Ashfield from Sherborne.’

Hell. Hell. Hell.

The anger in Gabriel twisted into regret and then reformed again into fury. Would she do it? Would she marry him just for a place in the world?

‘Lucien said Miss Ashfield looked more than upset after talking with you at the McWilliamses’ ball, Gabriel? Is there some problem between you?’

He shook his head. ‘The fault was completely my own. She is blameless.’

‘Of what?’

I cannot touch a woman without feeling sick.

He actually imagined he might have said the words out loud and his heart began to pound so violently he thought he would fall.

‘God, what is wrong with you, Gabriel? Are you ill?’

Everywhere. All over. Sick to my very soul.

‘It’s the damned Service, isn’t it? Is Adelaide Ashfield involved somehow in an investigation?’

You never loved me in this life, Gabriel, not like I loved you...

Henrietta’s last words before the fire, plaintive, shaking. He still felt her fingers on the pulse at his neck, nails scraping over the bloodline that flowed there, and the world began to fade somehow into a further-away place. It was coming back, his memory, slowly and by small degrees, little pieces of the past fitting into a whole.

‘Sit down before you fall down.’ Daniel manhandled him into the chair by the window, the moonlight silver across his lap. ‘For the life of me, Gabe, I need to understand what the hell is going on with you.

Sitting, he felt better, more able to breathe and think. Betrayal was all mixed up together suddenly, in Henrietta’s neediness and Cressida’s revenge at the ball. Even the British Service’s insistence on a certain persona to confound those in society held the scourge of it. To him as a person, to his life, to his honesty, to the hope of something better and finer and good.

‘After the fire...I lost my way.’

‘The fire in the Ravenshill chapel? The one that killed Henrietta Clements?’

‘I think she wanted to die.’

‘God.’

‘I can’t remember properly, but...’ He could not finish.

‘Rumour has it you were burned. Badly.’

Looking up, Gabriel tried to find the energy to hide all he had been so very careful with. ‘I was. It isn’t pretty.’

‘That’s why you went to the brothels, then, because of the scarring. You didn’t want anyone save the prostitutes to see you like that? Barnsley said you’d been at the Temple of Aphrodite and he wondered if you had said anything of it to me. I told him he must be mistaken because you never used to...’ He stopped momentarily before going on, a new comprehension in his glance. ‘So the body-and-mind discussion of Miss Ashfield’s the other night was more personal than you let on?’

‘Leave Adelaide Ashfield out of it, Daniel. I mean it.’

‘She talked with Christine Howard of mesmerism.

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