"I keep my promises, Gabriel."
For a moment the child hovered in an agony of indecision. Then he cast one more glance at the woman who had made him believe in magic. He turned and ran out of the garden.
Tristan watched his son go and battled for inner balance, groped for some hold on all that had happened since Alaina MacShane had tumbled from a tower of chairs into his arms and into his life. In the end, he clutched on to blessed logic. He was a reasonable, rational man. Surely there must be a way to handle one small boy and a woman who crawled in through unlocked windows.
"You deliberately defied me, Miss MacShane," Tristan said in measured accents. "I suppose I could be angry with you. However, I hope I'm man enough to admit when I am mistaken. You were right to stay with Gabriel. I see that now."
"You do?" Had there ever been such wide, welcoming eyes? Such a soul-melting smile? It was all Tristan could do not to reach out and touch it.
"Gabriel has been lonely for some time. He needs a governess for the remaining time he is at Ramsey House."
"A-A governess—but you barely know me."
"And what I do know about you hardly qualifies you as the kind of steady, responsible woman who should be in charge of a nursery. But it's obvious someone needs to look after the boy. Normally, I'd ask for references, but you've already demonstrated your skill with Gabriel. He's become quite attached to you."
"He's a darling child. Affectionate and so tenderhearted. Any governess would be lucky to have a child like Gabriel put in her care. But I... I intended to leave London altogether after last night."
Why was the notion of her leaving suddenly alarming? "I'm hardly asking you to move in permanently. I will need you for two weeks only. After that, Gabriel will be joining my sister's household. I suppose even a lunatic ... or an angel couldn't get in too much trouble in such a short length of time." He softened the words with a half-smile.
"I-I don't know what to say." Alaina gazed up at him with an eternity of secrets in her face, secrets that seemed to plumb straight to Tristan's soul, to make him want to discover what lay beyond the sunlight-on-honey hue that was her eyes.
"You were willing to commit larceny on my son's behalf," Tristan said gently. "Surely you could be persuaded to take gainful employment? I will make it worth your while. However, there are conditions."
"Conditions?"
"No more of this Christmas nonsense. I won't tolerate it."
"Surely it can't hurt to play a few games—"
"Play anything you wish as long as you do so far away from me. And no more nonsense about angels or magic. I don't want the boy disillusioned when you go away."
"Do you really believe I could hurt Gabriel?"
"Let's just say that, unlike my son, I do not believe in angels, wishes upon stars, or miracles that drop from heaven, even when they come tangled up in holly and ivy and kissing boughs."
A sudden, sharp sorrow stung her features.
"I don't know who you are or why you've come," Tristan continued. "But I do know that Gabriel needs you for a little while. Of course you did say you had somewhere else to be. If so, Gabriel can be made to understand that you have another commitment."
She gazed up at him, something unnerving in her eyes. "I thought my work here was finished. But maybe I was wrong."
Tristan's brow furrowed. She spoke as if she'd come here for some purpose. Drifted down on moonbeams.
Tristan's jaw clenched. Damn the woman, why was she looking at him that way? Luminous eyes, bruised with disappointment, as if he'd failed her somehow. As if she were hoping—for what? Miracles from him? Miracles he'd never been able to give to anyone, not even his wife or his son?
It didn't matter, he told himself sharply. He wouldn't even have to see her in this huge house. It was only for two weeks. Two weeks, and then Gabriel and his angel would be gone.
Five
THE ATTIC BLOOMED LIKE A CHAOTIC FLOWER GARDEN, bursting with color. Ballgowns and petticoats well past their first blush, outmoded frock coats and impossibly bright waistcoats, blossomed in disarray over the edges of the trunks Gabriel had pilfered for costumes to use in the game of charades that had whiled away the afternoon.
His grandmama's turban had graced the head of the dread infidel Saladin, while silver gauze had gilded Richard the Lion Heart with regal magnificence. Marie Antoinette had lost her head, and Sir Lancelot had saved his Guinevere from the flames.
Dozens of games and hours of laughter had almost disguised the fact that it was Christmas and that almost every other house was bursting with family and laughter and good cheer.
Alaina looked down at her small charge, who had curled himself up on a mountain of cast-off clothes, his last ginger cookie drooping from his fingers as he slept. She wished that Tristan could see him.
Tristan, with his sad eyes and his implacable mouth, his broad shoulders carrying pain he wouldn't acknowledge even to himself, let alone anyone else. Tristan, who had smiled for just a heartbeat in the garden, snow sprinkling his ebony hair and glistening in angel kisses upon the chiseled contours of that starkly beautiful masculine face.
She'd been so angry with him the night before, this man who had become so hurt and disillusioned in the years she'd been away from the window. But in that stark moment in the garden when she'd stared into eyes that were suddenly naked, vulnerable, she saw a shadow of the Tristan she had known: a man, sensitive, kind, loving, staring at her through cold bars of a prison of guilt and self-loathing.
Her heart had broken for him, and she knew that if she held the deed to every star in the heavens, she would gladly have traded all their shimmering beauty to put the light back in Tristan's eyes.
She ranged about the attic, her gaze tracing a rocking horse with a crooked leg, too unsteady for another child's play, yet too beloved to be cast into the rubbish heap. The nook beneath the eaves was filled with cherished memories, bits and pieces of childhood, legacies of first dances and weddings, mourning brooches and castaway dreams.
Alaina wandered to the corner, searching for pieces of the Tristan she had loved for so long—letters home from the years he'd been a scholar at Harrow, an abandoned cricket bat.
A leather-covered volume was tucked beneath a broken fan, and Alaina drew it out, running her fingers over the legend embossed in gold upon the cover: Charlotte Sophia Koenig, Her Journal.
Alaina tensed, catching her lip between her teeth. Charlotte ... this journal had belonged to Tristan's wife. She should put it back among the cobwebs, where layers of dust could dull the edges of the broken dreams it held. A life cut short, a love robbed by death.
She had no business prying through its pages. And yet, where else would she have a better chance to discover the truth, the secrets that had changed the Tristan who had given Alaina his Christmas guinea so long ago?
I can't, she cried inside herself, can't bear to read how he kissed her, courted her. How they fell in love. It would hurt too much …
And her imagination had already tormented her with images of the delicate blonde in Tristan's arms, his mouth dipping down to capture her mouth in love's first kiss.
But the journal might hold the key to helping him ...
She let it fall open to the middle, the inked lines spinning into focus. Tristan asked me to marry him today ...
The words were like a knife to her heart. She shut the book and shoved it back onto the shelf, almost tripping over a sheet-draped mound in her haste to get away.
A wooden clatter sounded; something had tipped over beneath the mound and landed a sharp blow on her instep.
She reached down to straighten it, caught a glimpse of something dull gold beneath the white cloth. Guilt jabbed her as she took hold of a corner of the drape. What was she doing, prying into things that were none of her business? Why was she so compelled to keep rooting around the attic, searching for pieces of a childhood she'd never experienced, keepsakes of the family she'd never been part of, yet claimed as her own?
&n
bsp; One peek only, she assured herself, slipping the sheeting back from what it concealed. She gasped as the faint light from the window fell upon a cluster of paintings, some framed, others mere canvases, jumbled together as if someone had shoved them here, pell-mell, to get them out of sight.
The first canvas portrayed a cream and gold pony caparisoned like a knight's steed of old, a childish Beth Ramsey seated upon it in the guise of a fairy-tale princess. The scene was so real, so filled with the beauty only children could see, that it stole Alaina's breath away. In the corner, the name Tristan Ramsey had been signed with a flourish.
She moved that portrait aside, her gaze scanning a still life of roses, a slipper, a fan, and a filled dance card with the name Allison painted on it—a tender tribute to the first ball of the sister Tristan had adored.
A boy's voice echoed in her memory, his boast ringing out against a crisp winter wind: I'm going to be the greatest artist who ever lived....
She had believed in him, with every fiber of her child heart, but never had she imagined the reality of such remarkable talent, Tristan's own unique vision. Shape and color cast a spell so real her finger stole out to touch a drop of dew on a rose petal, and she half expected her skin to come away wet.
He was brilliant, Alaina thought numbly, his paintings holding that indefinable quality that would make eyes hunger to see them as long as there was a forever.
The next image elicited hollow pain in Alaina's chest: the young woman Tristan had loved, garbed in the gown she'd worn when he'd made her his wife. Every brushstroke was alive with hope and tenderness. Every hue glowed with passion and promise. How had everything gone so horribly awry? Had he been unable to paint because Charlotte had died?
Had Tristan lost his gift of painting as Alaina's father had lost the melodies that wound like a silver ribbon through his soul, too wounded to care anymore, to try anymore? Yet Thomas MacShane had been weak, for all his brilliance, where Tristan's dark eyes had blazed with inner strength. And the tiny numbers scribed in the corner of the paintings didn't record dates up to the time of Charlotte's death, but rather ended abruptly three years after Tristan's marriage.
Alaina started to pull the drape back down over the image, unable to bear looking at her another moment, when suddenly a small canvas toppled over. She straightened it, then froze. Of all the paintings she'd seen, this one pierced to the core of her heart.
An angel. Pale silver-gold curls haloed a face like a pink and white rose—perfection was captured in dark, laughing eyes as a chubby hand reached up to capture a star. Yet the hand wasn't finished, the dream unfulfilled. The brushstrokes ended, leaving only the artist's sketch of that grasping little hand forever longing for what it could never have.
What could have possessed Tristan to leave this unfinished? It was a masterpiece. One that could make heaven itself cry. It was like staring into Tristan's own heart, and it made her aware of just how much this man had lost.
There was a creak on the stairs, but Alaina didn't even look up. Her eyes were too filled with tears.
"Gabriel? Alaina?" Tristan's voice—uncertain, searching. She knew instinctively he'd been drawn to the attic by forces he couldn't resist. She knew, too, that she should cover the paintings, like a wound too raw to be touched by air, but she couldn't bring herself to extinguish the rare force of Tristan's world captured on canvas.
"It's past time for supper—" His words broke off, and Alaina could feel Tristan's eyes on her where she stood, silhouetted against the paintings he had done. She felt as if he'd caught her prying inside his soul.
"Tristan." She turned to him, aware of everything about him—his. wind-tossed hair, his square-cut jaw, the muscle-honed perfection of his body, yet mostly, the raw expression in his eyes.
"I suppose I should say that I'm sorry," she stammered. "But I'm not. They're the most brilliant paintings I've ever seen."
"Not many artists up in heaven, eh? One would think Michelangelo would have received some special dispensation after all the work he put in on the Sistine Chapel." He was attempting to make light of his childhood dream. But she could still see the emotion stripped bare in his gaze.
"Tristan, I mean it. Your paintings are magnificent. I knew you wanted to be an artist. I just never suspected you were this gifted. These should be displayed where people can see them, not stuffed in the attic."
Tristan gave a bitter laugh. "The attic is where they belong. They're nothing but rubbish—a waste of time and effort."
"How can you say that? Surely if you have the skill to create such wondrous things, you have the ability to recognize true genius when you see it. You must have had every artist in Rome ready to teach you."
"Rome?"
"You were going to Rome, to study. It was all you'd ever dreamed of. I remember—"
"I do my damndest to forget." His eyes clashed with hers, uncertain, confused, yet this time he didn't bother to question how she knew. He jerked the cloth until it spilled back over the jumble of paintings. It was as if he'd reached up and snuffed out the sun. "Those dreams and aspirations were a boy's fantasies. They were never real."
"I don't believe that! Your trunks were packed. You were leaving for Italy. You and your bride—" Alaina choked out the words, remembering the slashing pain that had accompanied the knowledge that Tristan was married. Remembering how she had run away from that stark reality, devastated herself, and yet glad that Tristan at last had everything he wanted. "Why, Tristan? Why didn't you go?"
His features drew into a grim mask, one that almost hid the half-forgotten sense of loss. "There was some difficulty at Ramsey and Ramsey. I found I had a knack for straightening it out. A head for business, my father called it. There was money to be made, deals to be struck. Things that were far more important than dabbling at art."
There was more, so much more, but Alaina knew he wouldn't tell her. Not now. She looked into those dark, guarded eyes and wondered if he would ever tell her the true depths of his pain.
"It's time to eat. Cook prefers that her dishes be served while they're still warm." He turned to his son, shaking the child gently by the shoulder. "Gabriel, wake up," he said. "It's dinner time."
Gabriel yawned and blinked and smiled—a cookie-crumb-dusted smile that Alaina could see struck Tristan to the heart.
"Papa? We played the most delicious games. Alaina got her head cut off, and I got to rob the rich."
"Wonderful. Next Miss MacShane will be teaching you housebreaking," Tristan muttered.
"No," Gabriel said. "Next we get to set the house afire. She promised."
"Did she?" Tristan arched one brow at Alaina.
"I promised we could play that delightful game where you snatch things from a bowl full of flames. You know the one—you were always so good at it."
"Snap Dragon?"
"That's the one! Cook promised if I came in after dinner, she would help me fix it up."
"I'd wager the woman would do anything you asked. You've already got her singing your praises." Alaina smiled. "I wish you would join us, Tristan." For a heartbeat she could see a flicker of yearning in those chocolate-colored eyes, as if he were tempted. Then he shook his head. "No. I've a great deal of work to do before morning." He turned and walked down the stairs.
Alaina cast one more glance toward the paintings. It was so easy to imagine him up in a garret, painting until his eyes blurred and his hand trembled with exhaustion, so easy to imagine the satisfaction that would transform his face as he completed each image. Why was it she couldn't imagine him barricaded in some shipping office, monitoring voyages to places he would never see, counting up bolts of silk, bales of tobacco, and kegs of brandy he didn't care about?
Alaina stood, her knees aching from the hardness of the floor. She peeked one more time beneath the veiling of white sheet at the angel reaching for a star. How had Tristan Ramsey lost his dream?
Glancing after Tristan and Gabriel, she took the leather diary from its shelf and tucked it in her apron p
ocket. Somewhere in the journal she just might find the answer.
The kitchen was a shambles, piles of dishes and pots and pans littering the large worktable in the center of the room, when Alaina poked her head through the door after dinner. Cook glanced up from her washbasin, a smile of welcome softening her old face, while Burrows, the dignified butler, helped her to dry a large platter. The two had embraced her as if she were their long-lost daughter the instant they had heard Gabriel laugh.
And Alaina had adored them on sight, their honest, hardworking faces beautiful to her because of the warmth that radiated from them both.
"I came to get the bowl for Snap Dragon," she explained, "but you're obviously much too busy—"
"Too busy for you, missy?" Cook said, casting aside her washrag and drying chapped hands on a towel. "May none o' me breads ever rise again if I'm too busy to help an angel the like of you."
Alaina flushed. "Please, I—"
"Don't go tryin' to pretend you haven't worked a miracle, dearie. We've got eyes, the both of us. We've seen what you've done for our little Gabriel today. And it's passing grateful we are."
"I only played a few games with him. He's such a darling."
"That he is. But he's always been a somber little mite until today. Laughin' and squealin' and runnin' about, like a real child should."
"I hope we didn't disturb you."
"Disturb us? By St. Stephen's wounds, it was music to our ears, miss," Burrows said. "I only wish Master Tristan had been here to listen. I'd wager he's forgotten what it sounds like—laughter in this old place. There was a time when not a day went by without sounds o' joy."
Alaina peered up into that wistful old face. "What happened—to make the laughter stop? Tristan—I mean, your master doesn't seem to care about it anymore. And he has a child that needs it so desperately."
Burrows frowned. "You mustn't be blamin' Master Tristan, miss. It weren't his fault. He was never made for shippin' lists and hours and hours locked up in that office o' his father's."