He pushed both hands into the amazing, beautiful weight of it. “You’re going to be my wife. Not Peter’s wife. Not Peter’s fiancé even. Mine.”
“I would like that,” Gabby whispered. A trace of shyness counteracted the flush high on her cheekbones. “I don’t want to marry Peter, Quill. I want to marry you.”
There was just a trace of conscience left in Quill’s soul, and he summoned it to the forefront.
“Even given—”
“Even if you were thrown under a carriage on the way home,” Gabby said.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Quill said, gathering together the shards of his self-control. He picked up Gabby and placed her on the seat, his fingers only lingering for a second on the delicious curve of her bottom.
Gabby picked up her bonnet, with trembling fingers, and pulled it over her tumbled hair.
Quill shot her a glance as he maneuvered the horses back onto the drive once more. “I’m afraid that I’ve dented your reputation once again.”
“That’s all right.” Gabby’s heart was singing. She was in love and he was in love and they were going to be married. She was marrying Quill—great, huge, beautiful Quill.
“Will you speak to Peter this evening?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe that he will mind terribly,” Gabby said meditatively, picking up her gloves from the carriage floor as it swept around the corner into Piccadilly, heading toward St. James’s Square.
“You may be right,” Quill returned, his face deliberately noncommittal.
QUILL HELPED GABBY down from the curricle, with a secret smile that warmed her to the tips of her toes. She fled upstairs to dress for dinner, only to be thoroughly scolded by Margaret. Margaret had no belief in the benefits of fresh air and felt that winter was no time to be taking drives in an open curricle. She dismissed Gabby’s rather feeble excuses with a sniff.
“You’ll be sick as a stout, no doubt about that. And you coming from a warm country as well! Just mind what Mr. Peter says about this. I expect he won’t want you to be tucked away in bed for the next few weeks.”
“Actually, I have decided not to marry Peter,” Gabby said cheerfully, helping Margaret remove what few pins remained in her hair.
Margaret’s mouth fell open. “You’re not marrying Mr. Peter?”
“I have decided to marry Erskine instead.”
Margaret crowed. “You’re going to be a viscountess! Oh, this is splendid!” Her eyes were shining with excitement. “I’m going to be a personal maid to a viscountess!” Then her face fell. “That is, if you still want me. Perhaps you had better hire one of those French maids. Viscountess Dewland has an awfully starched maid named Stimple. She calls herself a mademoiselle-de-service, rather than a plain maid.”
Gabby laughed. “Never fear, Margaret. You will be a lady’s maid to a viscountess. But not for a long time, hmmm? I wouldn’t wish the viscount any ill.”
Margaret sobered immediately. “Of course I don’t wish that, miss.” She started to brush out Gabby’s heavy locks. “None of us does, belowstairs. We’re that fond of the viscount. It doesn’t seem right, him dying off in some strange place rather than in his own bed.”
“I don’t think he’s dying,” Gabby said, rather startled. “I believe that his health is improving all the time, Margaret.”
Margaret shook her head. “Once a person has one of those attacks, there’s another right around the corner, miss. He should be home where he belongs, that’s what. We all think so.”
“I’m sure he’ll return to London just as soon as the doctors think it advisable,” Gabby murmured, rather shocked by Margaret’s comment. “And I certainly hope you are wrong about the possibility of future attacks.”
Margaret set her mouth obstinately and would only repeat her belief that the viscount ought to have been brought home by now.
The viscountess arrived from Bath just in time to join the family for supper. At first Gabby was very glad for the interruption, because she and Peter were avoiding each other’s eyes in a tedious fashion. She could only assume that Quill had caught his brother after their ride in the park and informed him that the betrothal was at an end.
But Kitty’s news was not good, and it seemed that Margaret had, in fact, been correct in her lugubrious prediction. Apparently Thurlow had slipped into a state of confusion, from which he was roused only with difficulty He seemed to sleep most of the time, and the doctors held out very little hope for recovery.
Gabby looked at her hands, uncertain how to offer sympathy. Peter stood behind his mother’s chair, gripping her shoulders. And Quill stood alone, next to the mantelpiece. What she really wanted to do was to walk over to Quill and take his hand. But she stayed next to Lady Sylvia on the settee.
This time Kitty wasn’t the least hysterical, and she did not weep as she told them the news.
“How much time has he got, Kitty?” Lady Sylvia’s voice was uncharacteristically gentle.
Kitty’s blue eyes were bleak. “Likely only a few days.” She paused and the words sank into the room’s silence.
“You and the boys should leave tonight,” Lady Sylvia said after a moment.
Kitty turned to Gabby. “My dear, I am terribly regretful that this unhappy event has occurred during your first weeks in England.”
“Oh, no! It is of no account. I am sorry, my lady….I am so sorry to hear of the viscount’s health.”
“You are a sweet girl, Gabrielle. I am sure you will be a great comfort to me.”
Kitty had clearly accepted the fact of her husband’s imminent death. Gabby’s heart twisted. What if it were Quill lying there? Without thinking about it, she rose and walked over next to him.
Quill looked down at her and smiled. He put an arm around her shoulders. “Mother, Gabby has decided to marry me rather than Peter,” he said.
Gabby instinctively looked at Peter, but he wasn’t angry. As a matter of fact, he smiled and nodded at her most genially.
Kitty Dewland’s eyes rested on Gabby and Quill in bewilderment and then lightened. “I am so happy, Quill! And dear Gabrielle.” She rose and walked over, taking each of their hands. “I always hoped that my children would marry for love, as I did.” She bent and kissed Gabby. “A double welcome to the family, dearest.”
She kissed her elder son and then paused. “We shall soon be in mourning, Quill.”
He nodded. “Perhaps I should marry Gabby tomorrow, by special license, Mama.”
A glimmer of tears shone in Kitty’s eyes, but her voice was quite steady. “Perhaps that would be for the best, dearest.”
Quill leaned down and kissed his mother on the cheek.
She blinked away tears. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be maudlin. It’s just that Thurlow would have liked to see you and Gabrielle …”
“Shall we be married in Bath?” Quill suggested.
One tear escaped and rolled down Kitty’s cheek. “That would be very amenable of you, Quill.”
“Then that is what we shall do, Mama.” He drew his mother over to a chair and she sank into it, clearly exhausted.
Lady Sylvia took charge. “Time we told the servants to pack,” she said. “And then we must have that meal before Cook has conniptions. If we’re going to be in a carriage half the night, we need some hot food first.” She rang the bell and snapped at Codswallop when he appeared. “Quill, you’d better go out and rouse Beilby Porteus. He is a bishop, and he is also a friend of the family. He’ll hand over a license with no fuss.”
It took most of the night to reach Bath, and there was little conversation in the coach. Gabby finally fell asleep on Quill’s shoulder as they jolted their way down the Bath road.
The following morning Gabby dressed in the most demure of Madame Carême’s gowns, and Margaret piled her hair into an elaborate design. Most surprisingly, Margaret then produced a wedding veil, a beautiful bit of gauze embroidered with white-on-white flowers.
“Where on earth did
you find a veil?” Gabby asked, startled. She hadn’t thought there would be anything weddinglike about the ceremony, under the circumstances.
“The master fetched it from Madame Carême yesterday,” Margaret explained, deftly pinning it to her mistress’s hair.
Gabby smiled. Quill had left the house directly after their conversation, and while the rest of them ate a glum and rather silent dinner, he was presumably obtaining a special license. But it seemed that he thought about the wedding itself as well.
A few moments later, Lady Sylvia appeared. The wedding was to be held in the viscount’s bedchamber on the upper floor of the inn. Gabby stood rather awkwardly on the side of the room, trying not to peer at the bed. Given that she had never even met the viscount, it seemed very odd to be in his chambers.
Quill was standing beside a young minister as he blessed the viscount. Gabby shivered. She couldn’t help thinking that the occasion was rather morbid. This wasn’t how she had pictured her wedding day. She had envisioned an elaborate ceremony and had seen herself walking up the aisle of an enormous church while Peter watched, his brown eyes alight with adoration. Gabby sighed. Quill had only glanced at her this morning. Except for the fact that he pulled her onto his shoulder in the coach, they might have been nothing more than acquaintances.
Grief had pulled Quill’s face and darkened his eyes; exhaustion was giving him a pronounced limp on the right side. Gabby longed to help him, but had no idea what to do. It didn’t seem correct to move toward the bed.
After what felt like an interminable period, the minister walked over to her and bowed. “Miss Jerningham, my name is Mr. Moir. I am ready to conduct the ceremony.” He, too, was looking pale and strained. This was a most unusual wedding for everyone.
The family moved to the side of the viscount’s bed. Lady Sylvia remained seated at the side of the room, next to the viscount’s doctor.
Quill’s face was expressionless. Gabby stood next to him and the minister, on one side of the bed. Kitty and Peter stood on the other side. Kitty picked up her husband’s limp hand.
“We might as well go ahead,” Quill said. His voice was not rude, but there was no emotion in it at all.
Gabby put her hand on his arm. “Quill,” she half whispered.
“What is it?”
“Will you introduce me to your father?” she asked awkwardly.
“Of course,” Quill said courteously, and he moved away from the bed so that she saw the viscount for the first time. He was a tall man, with an unmistakable resemblance to his elder son. He had Quill’s eyelashes, lying dark against drawn cheeks. Death spoke in the white look of his face. But he also seemed very peaceful, sleeping so quietly that the breath hardly moved in his chest.
Quill stooped over and said, “Father, I would like to introduce you to Gabrielle Jerningham. I am going to marry her.”
There was no response from the sleeping man.
Kitty put her hand on his cheek and said, “I believe that Thurlow can hear us. This morning I told him all about the wedding.” She leaned over and called, “Darling!”
Thurlow’s eyes flickered open and sought out his wife, standing by the bed. He murmured something.
“What is it, darling?”
“Cherish,” he said, quite clearly. “Lovely Kitty.”
Gabby could feel tears in the back of her throat. She reached out and laid her hand briefly on top of the viscount’s. “I am very pleased to meet you, sir.”
“Dearly beloved,” Mr. Moir said, his voice gentle. “We are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this family, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony….”
Quill took Gabby’s hands in his large, warm ones. Gabby looked up at him and clutched his hands as if they were lifelines.
“It is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand,” Mr. Moir was saying, “unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the face of God.”
Quill took a deep breath. Part of his mind still couldn’t believe that he, Erskine Dewland, was marrying Gabrielle Jerningham. As a matter of fact, it was hard to believe that he was marrying at all. He was aware of his father’s inert body at his right shoulder, of Mr. Moir talking of procreation and remedies for sin, of his mother holding his father’s hand to her cheek.
But most of all he was aware of his almost-wife. Of Gabby’s lovely brandy-colored eyes, shining with grief for a man she had never met. Her glorious hair was shaded by a veil that looked like a wisp of cloud.
And he repeated after the priest, “I, Erskine Matthew Claudius Dewland, take thee, Gabrielle Elizabeth Jerningham, to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer …”
Gabby was dimly aware that the viscountess was cradling her husband’s hand against her cheek and that Peter was smiling slightly on the other side of the bed. But the room had narrowed to Quill’s deep-green eyes and to his large hands, still holding hers tightly. “In sickness and in health,” she said clearly, “to love, cherish, and to obey, till death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I give thee my troth.”
Quill smiled then, and the smile flew to her heart. He took her hand and slid a ring onto the fourth finger.
“With this ring I thee wed,” Quill said. “With my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”
Gabby swallowed hard. The viscountess was weeping silently on the other side of the bed.
Mr. Moir put his hand on top of their joined hands. “I pronounce that they be man and wife together.”
Quill stepped forward and put one hand under Gabby’s chin, tipping her face up. He bent his head and his lips met hers. There wasn’t a trace of the intoxicating fever that generally assailed him when he touched Gabby. His lips lingered with a sense of sweet possession.
Gabby’s arms came up around his neck and she clung to him. For a moment Quill forgot where he was in a rush of exultant triumph. He had wooed her and wed her. She was his, this whole enchanting bundle of woman, Gabby, wife.
Then Kitty hurried around the bed, and a second later Gabby was enveloped in a scented hug. “I am so happy, darling, and so would Thurlow be as well. He would wish you all the best. That is, he is wishing you all the best, because I’m quite certain that he is aware of what just happened, Gabrielle.”
“Mother,” Quill said quietly. He was still standing at the head of the bed.
The viscount’s eyes were closed and his hands were relaxed. Gabby thought he had gone back to sleep. But then Quill tenderly laid his father’s hand back on the coverlet, and Mr. Moir came forward, touched the viscount’s head, and said, “Go with God.” Kitty whispered, “Oh, Thurlow, no, no,” and Peter came around the bed and drew her into his arms.
Soundlessly, Gabby retreated to a chair next to Lady Sylvia.
LIKELY, MARRIAGE VOWS always brought with them a terrifying feeling of change, Gabby thought later, back in her room.
One part of her was fascinated by the fact that Quill could—he had the right!—walk into her bedchamber at any moment, even though she was wearing nothing more than a slight chemise. A hastily summoned seamstress was measuring her for a suit of black clothing.
Another part of her was trying hard not to think of her wedding as a turn from white to black, from joy to sadness. That was the problem with an imagination like hers. It was entirely too active and too ready to leap to idiotic suppositions.
Superstition, her father had often said, was the bane of uncivilized cultures. Gabby tried to hold on to that thought.
But it wasn’t until the door swung open and a large body walked through, as if there was nothing unusual about entering a lady’s bedchamber, that Gabby really understood just how much her life had changed.
Quill’s eyes moved down her body, his face inscrutable. His eyes dropped to th
e seamstress, who was scrawling notations, and then to Margaret, waiting to dress her mistress again.
He jerked his head, and Margaret jumped to her feet and grabbed the seamstress’s arm.
And then, before Gabby could have said Jack Robinson, Quill was standing alone in the middle of her bedchamber.
GABBY BIT HER LIP. Was he going to consummate their marriage right now? It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Of course, Quill had kissed her on the library rug when it was only eight in the morning. She felt a prickly flush rising up the back of her neck.
Likely he was. She had heard maids talk of newly wedded husbands. Husbands who didn’t let their wives out of bed for three days after the marriage. Husbands who couldn’t keep their hands from their brides, even during the ceremony…. Gabby had always listened with fascination.
She stood still, watching as her husband sent Margaret away. Her skin woke up, all over her body, and spoke to her about Quill’s fingers and where they would linger, about his lips and slow kisses.
In fact, Quill had no such intention when he entered the room.
He had in mind a sensible conversation with his wife. He would instruct her, plainly and simply, about the parameters of their marriage. He would inform Gabby that consummation would have to wait until after the funeral. He could not risk missing the ceremony because he was reduced to a pain-ridden husk, lying in a darkened room with a wet cloth over his eyes.
It was too late for her to back out, Quill had told himself all the way down the inn corridor. She’d done it: married him. Promised to obey him. Perhaps he’d consummate the marriage in a month or so. When they were back in London. After his father was—he shied away from that thought. He had never been close to Thurlow, and they had grown quite distant in the years since the accident, given his father’s inability to hide his shame at having a crippled heir, let alone an heir who dabbled in commerce and other ungentlemanly business pursuits. But Thurlow had been his father. There was a hot feeling at the back of Quill’s eyes that stiffened his backbone.
The important thing was to begin the marriage as they meant to go on. He would tolerate a certain amount of nonsense on Gabby’s part—talk of love and such—but only a reasonable amount. And he himself wasn’t going to indulge her by telling more lies about being in love. She was his now, and there was no further reason to perjure himself. Honesty had always served him best.