Page 30 of The Duke Decides

“Someone attacked you? Who?”

“Someone else who doesn’t think I’m fit for my position. Someone I suspect wants to be Duke more than I do,” he said.

Her heart squeezed again, on his behalf this time. She knew how it felt to bear the suspicion of others that you could not handle the position assigned you. That you weren’t fit to bear the authority you’d been given. She’d known, when she was elected Matron, that one or two of the elder Sisters objected to the choice, feeling she hadn’t served long enough, even if she’d proven her loyalty ten times over.

As for Gabe—she knew nothing of his background, his family or his past, and she wanted to know more. She wanted to know everything.

Louisa lifted her hand from her lap and laid it on his wrist. His gaze flicked to hers, revealing surprise at her bold touch, then heat. The same heat she felt near him, always, spreading through her veins like liquid gold.

She was going to leave it all after this night. Him. Everything. She would have nothing else.

So she resolved, for this night, to have everything she could.

“Tell me,” she said.

Chapter Ten

Tell me, she said, as if baring his soul to the open air, the burn of the sun and the scorn of others, was something he might ever be foolhardy enough to do.

And yet he sensed that this woman, out of all others, would not judge him.

She looked delectable in the saffron silk, with the fall of her open sleeves and the wrap of her shawl giving prim hints offset by the luscious tops of her bosoms nestled in the neckline of her gown. Her skin was golden cream in the evening light, catching the sun lowering over the river behind them. He stared into her eyes, into the shifting hues of brown and amber and brandy-red, and he knew she could see inside of him.

No other person in the world could see inside him, save for his mother, when she had time and inclination to look. Of late, Aysha Powlett was more often overset by the change in circumstances into which the death of the 4th Duke of Barkham and her own revelations about her first marriage had catapulted her to inquire much about how Gabe was taking all this.

Everyone behaved as though it must be the greatest luck in the world that Gabriel Declan, a soldier’s half-breed orphan, a blacksmith’s apprentice, and the butt of every prank at his school—possessor of no skills, no career, no distinctions, and no talent—should suddenly be handed a ducal coronet wreathed in strawberry leaves and the crimson Parliamentary robes with their four bars of miniver.

Who on God’s green earth would complain about becoming a duke? Of being lifted from bastardy and the coattails of his scornful relatives to become, in fact, the head of the family, the one to oversee all the incomes and investments, the rents and contracts, the pensions and jointures and debts which all the previous dukes had accrued?

Of course it must be considered a fair trade for the inconvenience of having his whole life upended to be addressed as Your Grace, to inherit the ancestral seat in Barkham and the house in Cavendish Square, and to have in addition to a great many other comforts an entire stable of blooded horses and equipages like this one in which he might air his lady.

Men would kill for such an honor. Fenton was trying very hard to do so.

Gabe turned his hand so Louisa’s palm settled in his. “I must not complain,” he said. “One does not bemoan being made a duke, however unexpected the circumstance might be to oneself, or alarming to everyone else about one. One is to render to God pious praises for the sudden uplift in one’s fortunes, and to express anything less than gratitude for the elevation shows a great lack of character and want of spirit.” The words, verbatim, of the Dowager Duchess of Barkham, Harry’s grandmother and Gabe’s.

Louisa squeezed his hand. The effect was unexpectedly bracing. There was the constant and undeniable heat of attraction around her—always that—but he sensed a deeper affinity developing. As if some vine stronger than passion were sending down roots and branching outward like the beanstalk of the fairy tale, growing at frightening speeds, lacing its tendrils around his heart.

“A sudden change of fortune will always be a source of upheaval,” she said. “Whether the change is an improvement or otherwise.”

“Moreso if one has been told, all one’s life, that one is nothing,” Gabe replied.

Her lashes fluttered, and her lips pinched into a frown. “No one is without worth,” she said with conviction. “Every single being in God’s creation has value in His eyes and a role in His plan.”

Gabe pushed for a smile, but felt only one part of his mouth lifting. “You say that to all of your girls.”

“I say that to everyone who comes through the doors of Hospital,” she answered, “and we live by it. We do not believe that misfortune is a punishment or a penance, or that those with less are less. We do not believe in leaving people alone in their suffering, and we are not the only ones who believe this. Every unfortunate deserves for their circumstances to improve. So many long for it, and so many try to help them. Look around you and see how many charities there are in just this stretch of Southwark.”

She pointed toward Astley’s, behind them. “There, not far from your theater, is a lying-in hospital for women who cannot safely give birth at home, or do not have a home to give birth in.”

She turned and waved a hand to indicate the broad front of the sprawling edifice they were passing on Westminster Road, an extensive building with a columned portico and bell tower rising above. “That is the Asylum for Female Orphans, and they house many more bodies than we do, though they adhere to requirements for admission that we do not apply. Beyond, if you can see it, is the new Bethlem Hospital, where one can pay to view the experiences of those afflicted with illnesses of the mind.” She winced, and Gabe understood; “Bedlam” had a place in London parlance, he’d learned.

“There,” she said, indicating another long, grand edifice on their right as they entered St. George’s Circus, “the School for the Indigent Blind. I come to hear the annual concert that the students put on in the chapel. And past the theater,” she pointed again, as they circled the obelisk with its four oil lamps, just being lit, “up Great Surrey Street, is the Magdalen Hospital. Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, the King’s sister, is the patroness now. Have you never gone to the chapel to hear the Magdalens sing?”

“I have not,” Gabe said, though he was aware it was an occasional entertainment of the young bloods to attend the services, where one was expected to make a contribution to the Hospital for the privileges of hearing its penitent fallen angels harmonize. The women sat behind a screen, protecting their identities as young women who had been seduced from their homes and families but had vowed to reform and turn to the path of virtue.

To those safe in their perch of righteousness, or secure in their lack of righteousness—as Gabe had previously been—the attempts at reform by others were a spectacle to be enjoyed or gambled upon. Would the fallen angel fall again once she had attempted to rise? Would the young buck chastened by humiliation or penury fall again to the temptations of his peers, the gaming tables, the inns with their women and drink?

“It pleases the righteous to share their pennies now and again with the poor,” Gabe said. “It secures them in their own virtue. But let a man once deemed worthless in the eyes of the world only try to choose the sober path of making something of himself. He may wish to cast off the shackles of his past failures and disappointments, but no one around him is like to let him forget them.”