Dear Impostor (43 page)

          He had come home.

          Gabriel found that he could not speak; the
lump in his throat was too big, and he feared that his vision had blurred. He
blinked hard, not willing to reveal such unmanly weakness before the woman at
his side.

          Psyche stood quietly, giving him the privacy
of the moment. She made no comment, and he blessed her for her perception and
her containment.

          At last he felt that he could trust his voice.
“It looks reasonably well,” he said. “Shall we go closer?”

          “It’s a very handsome building,” she said. “At
least, as much as we can see of it.” Psyche glanced toward the east. The first
faint touches of dawn lightened the darkness; while they had stood there, the
ebony sky had faded to gray and then to lavender. Almost as they watched, a
faint wash of gold and peach showed above the treetops. A bird sang, and then
another, and another, the chorus slowly building. The sound was exultant,
matching Gabriel’s mood.

          “I’m glad you are here.” His heart full, he
reached to take her hand.

          Psyche smiled up at him, her face pale in the
dimness but her eyes shining with a radiance to rival the rising sun. She
gripped his hand firmly, and they walked closer to the house.

          The front carriage way was almost bare of
gravel, weeds thrusting through the once carefully combed drive. The stone
steps had withstood the passage of time, but Psyche could see that the large
windows were dark with grime and she made out one or two broken panes. She
hoped that the interior was not in too bad a shape. Gabriel had his whole heart
already committed to this place; she did not wish to see him disappointed.

          They climbed the steps slowly, Gabriel seemed
to be holding his breath. The daylight was growing brighter, and the birds in
the trees now peeped loudly, a disjointed hymn of delight at the start of a new
day.

          Gabriel reached out to knock on the heavy
wooden door. He rapped once smartly and then exclaimed in disbelief.

          “Oh, no!” Psyche gripped his now slack hand in
sympathy.

          Beneath the impact of his touch, the door
listed precariously, creaking as rusty hinges gave way. Then its own weight
pulled it downward, and it crashed into the dark interior, sending up a cloud
of dust that floated toward them, while the sound of the door’s fall seemed to
echo through the house.

          Gabriel stood very still; even in the pale
early light, she thought that his face had blanched. Then he took a deep breath
and stepped forward, treading on the dry-rotted wood of the door, which
crunched beneath his weight.

          “Gabriel, wait!” she called, but he did not
seem to hear. He plunged into the house. Choosing her path carefully, Psyche
followed.

          The inside of the house would have daunted the
most optimistic of new owners. Psyche looked around; the walls were streaked
with damp, and the wooden wainscoting showed signs of rodents’ teeth. The house
smelled strongly of mildew and mold and rot. Psyche put one hand to her nose to
block the smell and walked further, glancing into the first doorway.

          It had once been a small morning room, but
rooks had nested in the paneled shelves beside the empty fireplace, and spider
webs festooned the old-fashioned chandelier so heavily that she could barely
make out the outlines of the piece. She took one step inside; there was little
furniture, and what there was had been left uncovered and was dark with damp
and streaked with mildew. An empty outline above the mantel marked where a
looking glass or painting of handsome size had once hung; it had been taken
away, and the wall showed only the lines of dust attesting to its loss. Psyche
took another step inside the chamber, then heard a skitter as of tiny feet. Shivering,
she retreated to the hallway.

          The other rooms she peered into seemed no
better. There was a library, thankfully with few books left on the almost bare
shelves, because those which remained were certainly ruined by damp and cold
and neglect, not to mention by the mice who scurried away every time Psyche
ventured into a room.

          It would be a cat’s paradise, she thought
wryly, but as for Gabriel–she took a deep breath, then regretted it at once as
she coughed on the dank odors. Oh, Gabriel, who had been so happy, so full of
anticipation, who had entertained such high hopes for a new start. How could he
bear such a disappointment?

          She hastened further into the house as the
brightening sunlight shone through dirty windows and allowed her a better view
of the interior. Unhappily, more light did not alter her perceptions of the
house.. Everywhere, there was damp and neglect; strips of wallpaper had
loosened from the walls and drooped in sad fingers; cobwebs were thick in every
corner, sometimes inhabited by dark shapes that scurried away from her passage
and made her shudder again. And the track of small rodent feet made tiny trails
through the dust on the floors, otherwise marked only by one man’s footsteps.

          “Gabriel, where are you?” she called.

          She found him at last, sitting on the
staircase which curved up to the upper floors, his face hidden in his hands. From
the touch of grime that marked his cheek, the wisp of cobweb that adorned his
dark hair, he had ventured even further through the house, and from his
silence, his bowed shoulders, he had found nothing to contradict the ruin of
the ground floor.

          “Gabriel?” she whispered.

          When he raised his head, she was shocked by
his expression. The spark of hope and happiness had vanished, and the bleakness
of his face, his cheeks hollowed by shock, his eyes dark with a grief so deep
that it cut her to the heart, made her take a shuddering breath.

          “Gabriel, it will be all right.”

          He shook his head. “This was to be my home, this
estate was to be the key to remaking my reputation, restoring my lost status as
a gentleman, giving me back the life I should have had. And it is as empty as
all my most foolish dreams.” His voice was flat, so devoid of his usual
intonations that she would have thought it belonged to a stranger.

          “Gabriel, it is not so–your dreams were not
foolish.” She tried to take his hand, but he waved her away.

          “I had the presumption to think that someday,
after careful stewardship, this would be well enough so that I could ask a
woman of good birth to share it with me. It was to be the house to which I
would someday be proud to bring my bride.” He could not seem to look her in the
face.       

          “And it’s nothing but a moldering ruin. Barrett
has stripped it of every item with any possible value, and then he used the
deed, with lies about the property’s condition, as a stake in one final game. Lies
and deception, and I bought them all, I–who counted myself such a sharpster.” He
laughed, a harsh sound that cut her to the quick. “I was once again the most
pathetic of fools.”

          “Gabriel, stop it!” she said, her tone sharp. She
could not bear the bitter anger of his words, nor the misery that she knew lay
behind them. “It is not so bad.”

          “You think not?” He raised his gaze to meet
hers, and she saw again how deep this blow had struck. “You would wish to make
your bed with the spiders, spend your time with the rats and the mice who are
busily chewing away at what is left of the foundations? Such good caretakers
they are.”

          “Stop it, Gabriel,” she repeated. “It is in
sad shape, I grant you. But the bones of the house are most likely sound–it has
not been untenanted that long. You can still restore it, it will simply take
longer than you had hoped–”

          ”And more money,” he added quietly. “I shall
have to go back to the gaming tables, and desperation does not make for a clear
head. And if I lose the property itself, my only asset, where do I go, then?”

          She thought of Gabriel leaving England yet again, returning to exile, the wandering which had been his life, and she felt
a wrench of her own. No, she could not allow it.

          “I wanted this to be worthy of you,” Gabriel
said, so softly that she wasn’t sure she heard him aright. “I wanted it to be
clean and beautiful and good, like nothing has been in my life for so many
years. I wanted to dust it off and polish it up and offer it to you on a velvet
cushion. It would never have been enough, of course, for someone who deserves
gold and diamonds and castles suitable for a queen. But I had hoped.”

          His voice trailed off into silence, and she
saw how his pride had been shattered, how much pain trembled behind the facade
of control he strained to maintain. It was a mask more potentially concealing
than the one he had worn for the masquerade–the night of fanciful deception
that seemed so long ago, yet was only a few hours behind them.

          It was time to put aside the masks.

          “Gabriel.” Psyche took his hand. This time, he
did not pull away, but regarded her with an almost puzzled look, as if behind
his shock and grief and disappointment, he could not think clearly. “I do not
need elegant houses, nor gold, nor jewels. I need you, Gabriel. I need only
your love–that is the greatest gift you can bestow upon me.”

          Unblinking, he stared at her for a long moment,
then he laughed, an ugly sound of derision and pain. “Do you think I would
accept your love out of pity?”

          “It is not pity–” She tried to interrupt, but
he was not listening.

          “Or that any man who cared about you would
allow you to throw yourself away on a wastrel with a stained past and a
cobweb-cluttered pig sty for a home? You are worthy of so much more than that,
sweet Psyche, with your clear eyes and generous heart, which even all your icy
decorum cannot conceal. How could I offer you such base coin?”

          “Offer me your heart,” she said, her voice
soft but clear.

          He was not sure that he had made out the sense
of her words. How could she possibly consider loving a man so far beneath her? He
had hoped for so much, and to find himself once more cast down upon a rubbish
heap–the shock of disappointment made him almost mad with grief. He had wanted
it in the beginning for his own selfish purposes, but lately he’d desired it
even more for her, for Psyche, as a gift to offer the goddess who now held his
heart in her keeping. Because of that, the regret was twice as hard to bear.

          Unable to believe in her words, he shook his
head. “Never would I allow you to lower yourself so far.” His voice was hoarse
with pain and despair and a longing that made her ache.

          She gazed back at him, her blue eyes hard to
read. Her lips were pressed together–oh, if he could only kiss them open again,
tease that full sweet mouth with his own lips, his questing tongue, taste her
sweetness and teach her–

          So much that he could have taught her about
love and laughter and delight too deep for words. But only if the cards had
fallen a different way. Not like this, with nothing to give her, no safe haven
to offer, only this wreck of a house, which echoed the havoc of all his dreams.

          “As soon as the driver returns, I will send
you back to London,” he said, his voice dull with weariness. “You will be safer
without me.”

          “And you?” she asked, her voice whisper soft.

          He didn’t answer, not sure how he would go on.
How many times could a man pick himself up, regain some semblance of
self-respect, and try again? Worse, now that he had seen Psyche, loved Psyche,
he would never be content to wander as a gamester with no reputation and no
place in the world, with nothing to offer but his skill with cards, his perhaps
pleasing face and his easy charm. Worthless, all of it.

          Her eyes narrowed, and he heard her draw a
sharp breath, as if she read something of the depths of his despair.

          “No,” she said. “I will not leave you.”

          ”You must,” he told her, his tone flat and
cold. “There is no need for you to be ruined, too. Go back home, protect your
safety and your reputation. I will find Barrett and we will settle this fight,
once and for all. I know now that I owe him even more enmity than I had thought.”

          The thought of Gabriel putting himself in such
direct danger made Psyche sick with fear.

          “No,” she said. “I am staying.”

          “I will not allow it.”

          “You cannot stop me,” she told him calmly. “That
is–”

          He waited, too weary to be eloquent, to explain
to her properly what folly all this was. But in his wildest dreams, Gabriel
could not have predicted her next words.

          “I shall play you for the choice,” she said in
a rush.

          This time, despite his bemusement, his brows
rose. “What?”

          “You mean to go back to being a gamester, yes?
Then you might as well start now. We shall play to see who prevails. If you
win, I shall go quietly back to London. If I win, I stay, and . . . and you
will be my prize.”