Where Mrs Gleason’s distrust merely amused him, the butler’s attitude filled him with a strong desire to apply one booted foot to his chubby buttocks. Gabriel picked up the chair by the back rail and hefted it into the salon without replying.
Blackstone waved a hand towards the piano. ‘Lady Caroline said you might need to play it.’ His expression showed strong doubt that the silent hermit was capable of such a feat.
Gabriel, without acknowledging he had heard, shifted the piano stool, dumped down the chair, sat and ran his hands up and down the keyboard in a series of perfectly accurate scales. He rarely played the piano, but he could recall enough of his lessons to manage that, at least.
‘Ha! Don’t touch anything else. I will tell her ladyship you are here.’
It was almost silent when Blackstone’s footsteps died away. There was the draught from the open door on his cheek, the sound of birdsong through the window and, distantly, the lowing of cattle in the meadow beyond the ha-ha. It was curiously soothing, this bucolic peace. If he was not careful he would find himself seduced—
‘What on earth are you doing?’
Gabriel brought his hands down on the keys in a jangling discord and swung round and to his feet. ‘Lady Caroline.’
‘Lord Edenbridge.’
She knows me. ‘Not so loud.’ He reached her side in three long strides and pushed the door half-closed. ‘Where the blazes is your chaperon?’
‘Unnecessary, according to my father.’ She was tight-lipped and pale and he felt his temper rising.
‘Your maid, then?’
‘Upstairs immersed in a pile of fine mending and a lurid novel I deliberately left just by the mending basket. Never mind that, we are alone for a few minutes at least, so tell me, what are you doing here? And like this?’ Her sweeping gesture encompassed his beard, hair, robe and the scuffed toes of his oldest pair of boots showing beneath the frayed hem. ‘I do not know whether to laugh or run and hide in a cupboard.’
‘From me?’
‘No, of course not from you,’ Caroline said with a laugh that wavered dangerously before she closed her lips tightly upon it. ‘From my father when he discovers this imposture.’
‘What imposture? He cannot seriously delude himself that I am a genuine Welsh hermit. He assumes I am a gentleman or scholar fallen on hard times, but if I am an earl eccentric enough to wish to seclude myself in a chapel and write poetry for a few weeks then that makes me no more peculiar than the earl prepared to employ me.’
‘But that is not why you are here, is it?’ She had retreated to the far side of the piano and from there was studying his face with an expression somewhere between bemusement and alarm. ‘I wish I knew what you were thinking. That beard is extraordinarily effective in concealing both your features and your expression.’
‘I am glad to hear it. But how did you realise, if you did not recognise me close up that first day?’
‘I was watching from the terrace with the guests that evening. There was something about you that was nagging at the back of my mind and then, when I saw you moving, without the distraction of the beard and Welsh accent, I realised.’ She blushed for some reason.
‘I came because I was worried about you. Your note saying you were leaving London was written in a hand that shook and you mentioned your father’s displeasure. I know what kind of man Woodruffe is and I feared you were under intolerable pressure to marry him. If you are, then I could...discourage him.’
‘You were worried? Why should you be? I am no responsibility of yours.’
Gabriel gave a half-shrug. Honour? He supposed it must be that. And he liked Caroline, which in itself was a puzzle. He was unused to liking women for themselves, not as sexual partners, or flirts. Perhaps associating with the wives of his close friends, three brave, intelligent women, was changing his perspective. It was unsettling the way he felt so protective of Caroline. As though she was a sister, he thought, then discarded the idea. It felt strangely wrong.
‘I am not used to associating with well-bred virgins, but it seems that an encounter with you was enough to lay bare the few gentlemanly instincts I do possess,’ he said, unwilling to express his half-understood feelings. ‘I was concerned, as I say, but what I did not expect was to find that you had been physically mistreated. I cannot walk away from that.’
‘I told you, it was an accident.’
‘That is not true, we both know it, Caroline. Women tell those lies to shield the men who mistreat them.’ Mama’s voice as she explained away another bruise. So careless, she had been, so clumsy. His father had hit his own wife and he found the sight of a bruise on a woman intolerable. And now he was an adult he could do something about it. He felt his voice begin to rise and regained control with an effort. ‘Your loyalty is misplaced.’
She made a little gesture of rejection, whether of his persistence or of the violence, he could not tell. Nor did he realise he had moved until he found himself beside her, her hand in his. He lifted it and pushed back the sleeve, feeling her skin under his fingertips, satin-smooth, rather cool. ‘The bruises are almost gone. Do you have new ones?’
* * *
She should make him let go of her hand. Caroline did not stir, letting the warmth from the long, sure, fingers soak into her skin. Calloused horseman’s hands, perhaps swordsman’s hands, she thought. Strong. ‘No, there are no new ones. My father is content that I am allowing Lord Woodruffe to court me.’
‘Is he? Courting you, that is.’
‘No, not really. He is behaving as though he already owns me and has no need to exert himself to win my approval. He expects my father to deliver me at the altar steps as a neatly wrapped parcel complete with dowry, in return for his acres that adjoin our land. One daughter disposed of, Lucas’s inheritance expanded—all with minimal fuss and bother.’ Her aunt would warn her sharply about the bitter tone. So unladylike, so undutiful.
Gabriel was tracing the veins in her wrist with his fingertip. She should free herself, she was not that careless of proper behaviour. But why should I? I want his hands on me, I like the strength and the gentleness and the anger on my behalf that is in this man.