LITMIR.BIZ

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expected her to thank him? It was all she could do to stay in the room and hear him out.

      ‘Men will know you have a fortune and there are some out there who could be unscrupulous in their promises. Great wealth comes with its own problems, my dear, and you will need to be most careful in your judgement. Pick a suitor who is strong in his own right, a man whose fortune might equal your own. A good man. A solid man. A man of wealth and sense. Stay well away from those who only require a rich wife to allow them back into the gambling halls, or ones whose family estates have been falling around their feet for years.’

      ‘I am certain I shall know exactly whom to stay away from, Uncle.’ Privately she hoped that every single male of the ton would want to keep their distance from her and after this she would never have to be beleaguered by such ridiculous frippery again.

      * * *

      The doctor’s rooms were in a discreet and well-heeled part of Wigmore Street and Gabriel had had it on good authority from the books he had acquired over the past months that Dr Maxwell Harding was the foremost expert on illnesses pertaining to problems in men of a more personal nature.

      He almost had not come, but the desperation and despondency caused by his condition had led him to arrive for the earliest appointment at noon.

      No other people graced the waiting area and the man behind a wide desk gave the impression of disinterest. For that at least Gabriel was glad. He did toy with the thought of simply giving a false name and was about to when the door behind him opened and an older man walked out.

      ‘It is Lord Wesley, is it not? I am Dr Maxwell Harding. I have heard your name about town, of course, but have not had the pleasure of meeting you. In my line of work you are the one many of my patients would aspire to emulate, if you take my meaning, so this is indeed a surprise.’ His handshake was clammy and he brought a handkerchief from his pocket afterwards to wipe his brow in a nervous gesture. ‘Please, follow me.’

      For Gabriel the whole world had just turned at an alarming rate. He did not wish for this doctor to know his name or his reputation. He certainly did not want to be told of a plethora of patients with their own sexual illnesses and hardships who all earmarked him as some sort of a solution.

      He suddenly felt almost as sick as he had a week ago outside the Temple of Aphrodite, but as the door behind him closed he took hold of himself. Harding was a doctor, for God’s sake, pledged under the Hippocratic Oath to the welfare of each of his patients. It would be fine. The doctor had walked across to a cupboard now and was taking a decanter and two glasses from a shelf and filling them to the brim.

      ‘I know why you are here, my lord,’ Harding finally stated as he placed one in Gabriel’s hands.

      ‘You do?’ With trepidation he took a deep swallow of the surprisingly good brandy and waited. Was it marked on his face somehow, his difficulty, or in the worry of his eyes? Was there some sort of a shared stance or particular gait in those who came through this door for help? Hopelessness, perhaps, or fear?

      ‘You are here about the Honourable Frank Barnsley, aren’t you? He said you had looked at him strangely when he met you the other day. As if you knew. He implied that you might come and talk with me. He said his father was a good friend of yours.’

      ‘Barnsley?’ Gabriel could not understand exactly where this conversation was going though he vowed to himself that after he finished the drink he would leave. This was neither the time nor the place to be baring his soul and the doctor was sweating alarmingly.

      ‘His predilection for...men,’ Harding went on. ‘He said you had seen him and Andrew Carrington embracing one another in the garden at some well-heeled brothel and wondered if you might begin making enquiries...’

      Anger had Gabriel placing his glass carefully down upon a nearby table. Harding was not only a gossip, but a medic with no sense of confidentiality or professionalism. Before the outburst he had had no inkling of the sexual persuasions of either man and it was none of his business anyway. He could also just imagine the hushed tones of Harding describing Gabriel’s own problems to all and sundry should he have decided to trust in the doctor’s honour. He was damned thankful that he had not.

      He’d buy Barnsley and Carrington a drink when he saw them next in his club as a silent measure of gratitude. But for now he had one final job to do.

      ‘Mr Frank Barnsley is a decent and honourable man. If I hear you mention any of this, to anyone at all, ever again, I will be back and I promise that afterwards no one will hear your voice again. Do I make myself clear?’

      A short and frantic nod was apparent and at that Gabriel simply opened the door and walked out of the building, into the sunshine and the breeze, a feeling of escaping the gallows surging over him, one part pure relief, though the other echoed despair.

      He could never tell anybody. Ever. He would have to deal with his problem alone and in privacy. He would either get better or he would not and the thought of years and years of sadness rushed in upon him with an awful truth.

      His reality. His punishment. His retribution.

      But today had been like a reprieve, too, a genuine and awkward evasion of what might have come to pass. He was known across the ton for his expertise with the opposite sex and if the scale of his prowess had grown with the mounting rumour he had not stopped that, either, his downfall sharpened on lies.

      This is what he had come to, here and now, walking along the road to his carriage parked a good two hundred yards from the doctor’s rooms to secure privacy and wishing things could be different; he could be different, his life, his secrets, his sense of honour and morality and grace.

      Once he had believed in all the glorious ideals the British Service had shoved down his throat. Integrity. Loyalty. Virtue. Principle. But no more. That dream had long gone in the face of the truth.

      He was alone in everything he did, clinging to the edge of life like a moth might to a flame and being burned to a cinder. There was nowhere else, or no one else. This was it.

      He had always been alone and he always would be.

       Chapter Two

      Two weeks in the London Season had already seemed like a month and this was the fourth ball Adelaide had been to in as many nights. The same grandeur, the same people, the same boring chatter concerned only with marriage prospects, one’s appearance and the size of a suitor’s purse.

      She was tired of it, though tonight the crowd was thicker and those attending did not all have the rarefied look of the ton. A less lofty gathering, she decided, and hence more interesting. Lady Harcourt beside her did not look pleased.

      ‘Lord and Lady Bradford are rumoured to be enamoured by the changing tides of fortune and one can see that in some of the guests present—a lot of wealth but no true class. Perhaps we should not have come at all, Penbury?’

      Her uncle only laughed and finished his drink. ‘Adelaide isn’t a green girl, Imelda, and I am certain she can discern whom to speak with and whom to avoid. In truth, even those with genuine titles seem to be rougher these days, less worried by the way a fortune is made or lost.’ His eyes fixed on a group of men in the corner.

      At that very moment the tallest of them raised his glass and said something that made the others laugh. Adelaide noticed he wore a thick band of silver around one of his fingers and that the cuff on his shirt was intricately embroidered in bronze thread. He was everything she had never liked in a man, a fop and a dandy, handsome to the point of beautiful and knowing it. Nearly every woman in the salon looked his way.

      From her place to one side of a wide plastered pillar she watched him, too. Out of a pure and misplaced appreciation, she supposed, the length of his hair as extraordinary as every other feature upon him.

      ‘The Earl of Wesley is the most handsome man in the King’s court, would you not say, Miss Ashfield?’ Miss Lucy Carrigan’s voice rose above the chatter, breathless

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