“It is nothing,” he kept telling her. “Do not fret.”
“Is it something to do with Edmund?”
She couldn’t pin down why that was the main concern, or even her first guess. But if Edmund had been involved in shady business, if he had owed people more money than Gabriel realized, if anything from his past reared its head up, why would Gabriel not tell her?
Instead, he would leave her looking at his tight grimace every time he read another letter, and when she asked, he would give a forced smile and tell her all was well.
Until he had announced the day before that they were returning to London and that she was to pack for a few days.
“Why?” Sibyl asked.
But Gabriel merely shook his head, rose from the chair he had been sitting in with her in the library, and went to order his valet to pack his belongings. Sibyl never got the chance even to take a peek at the letters.
Now, she was back in London, with Rosie asleep in her lap, having visited a teahouse with Alicia. She could not help but remember Nicholas’s words. The more they had laughed and debated over tea, the more she could see how Alicia might be the challenge he sought.
Sighing, Sibyl gazed out the window as the London streets blurred past. She passed Wickleby House, her stomach doing that strange dip it did whenever she thought of her parents for too long.
She had thought of speaking to Gabriel about her mother’s pressure and her father’s passiveness, but she had never quite found the words.
How did she even begin to try to say that she had a good upbringing, but her parents were never truly there for her when she needed them? That her mother only cared about her marrying well, yet even when Gabriel offered for her, she was not satisfied?
Nothing would ever satisfy Barbara Dennis, and Sibyl had learned the hard way, like Hermia, like Isabella, that nothing ever would. She had suggested as much to Alicia, who had spent enough of their tea time complaining about the marriage mart and how her feet ached from the countless dances she had been pushed into.
Those thoughts wound her up so much that she didn’t hear the horses neighing and didn’t feel the carriage jolting. She knew how close Wickleby House and Stonehelm House were, but she was lost.
One moment, she was deep in thought, her bitterness over her parents, over being back in London, over Gabriel’s caginess about the letters he had been receiving, clouding everything; the next, she cried out as she fell to the floor, catching herself just in time to move Rosie from her lap.
As her head slammed into the floor, her heart broke, for she could hear her daughter’s cries as everything slipped into darkness.
She did not know how much time had passed with her there, in a heap on the carriage floor, when she heard the voice she had needed most.
She had not known how badly she needed Gabriel’s voice—her protector, her tether—until he was saying her name.
“Sibyl?”
Her tongue was thick, her mind and body swimming.
“Sibyl?” Gabriel’s voice rose, and with it, his urgency.
I am fine,she tried to say, but her ribs ached.
Something feltbad.Something waswrong. Her head hurt as though she had drunk too much wine the night before.
“Gabriel?”
She thought she said his name, but he spoke her own again with too much panic. It broke his tone, and that, in turn, broke her. Hands found her face, her hands, but she couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t squeeze back.
Everything felt too heavy and too much, and she was helpless.
The darkness came back for her, and she succumbed to it, comforted only by the voice saying,Please take Rosie into the house.
Rosie was safe. That was all Sibyl needed.
She slipped back down into the darkness, where her worries ebbed.
“It has been sabotaged,” Gabriel growled, pacing by the overturned carriage in the middle of the street. “It has beensabotaged.”
“Gabriel.” Nicholas’s voice brought him back a notch, enough that he stopped.
