Chapter Fifteen
Grosvenor Square,Mayfair’s lauded neighborhood of noble families and respectable wealth, was developed on swampland beginning in 1724. Although planners originally considered constructing a uniform block, a more heterogeneous design prevailed, and nearly every townhome boasts a different facade and color.
The great irony of the square may be that its center garden is actually an oval. The park is gated, but the privacy of the gardens is often breached. As early as 1727, vandals dismembered the mounted statue of King George in stately Roman martial dress.
Grosvenor Square, Grosvenor Street, Brook Street, and Park Street all public thoroughfares; Park Square open to residents only, although the still-vacant King George pedestal is visible from the street.
—FromA Noble Guide to Londonby Sabine Noble
They waited a week and a half to call on Bryson and Elisabeth Courtland. Sabine claimed she was under deadline for her next installment of travel guides (not entirely untrue), and Stoker abided. His manner since their heated discussion after the garden was careful and... if not abiding, then a little stunted. He did not challenge her when she ordered him to eat; he did not strain his stitches; he rested and slept. He did not make good on his threat to ravish her. He was, at long last, a compliant patient.
It made her even more resolved that they should put off the call to Bryson and Elisabeth Courtland until he was almost fully healed. It was ridiculous, perhaps. Stoker was not her personal invalid to keep locked away from his friends. If he was still sick, would they not take him from her?Yes,she thought,they would. And she was not prepared to let him go.
And so they passed twelve more healing days in Belgravia, and now they were due at the Courtlands’ for tea by four o’clock. Stoker had sent for a fresh set of clothes and had Harley dress him in waistcoat, cravat, and jacket. The finished ensemble belied no trace of infirmity; he was a handsome gentleman on morning calls. Even the tattoo was hidden.
Sabine, for her part, endeavored to match his aplomb. Perry prepared her orchid-colored day dress and hat, and dressed her hair with loose curls piled beneath the brim. It was silly, but she wanted to look worthy of Stoker when they met this couple. Sabine was a gentleman’s daughter, after all, despite the fact that she worked as a travel writer and lived alone in a cellar in Belgravia. Would it matter that she entered into a convenient marriage with a stranger and now kept him restricted to her bed? Possibly. It never hurt to look one’s best.
It was unlike her to be nervous about a simple afternoon tea with new acquaintances, but she found herself slamming down combs and stomped into stockings, her behavior to Perry nothing short of petulant. She had dreaded the meeting for days, but then she had swept down the stairs and the look on Stoker’s face when he saw her—a whipsaw double take, a sweep of his eyes, obvious desire—made calmness settle in. It shouldn’t matter, but his obvious appreciation was worth more than any approval she might receive from the Courtlands.
And then they were off, lurching through midday traffic to reach Grosvenor Square. Despite the fact that they spent their evenings together and most days just a corridor apart, something about the close confines of the carriage felt new and uncertain. Sabine found herself commenting on the autumn weather (although she loathed idle chatter) while Stoker retreated into his most stoic, silent scowl. Their short journey was so forced and awkward, she had half a mind to call off the visit and send him on alone.
But then again, she wasn’t a coward; she wasn’t afraid of his sulky moods and she did not want to go home. If she went home now, he would not be there and she was not prepared for an empty apartment. Not yet.
And how full the days had been since their time in the garden park. If Stoker had become an easy patient, she had also become a more cooperative host. She did not purposefully invite undue risks with the Dryden investigation just to worry him; and she did not start again with her surveillance of the Duke of Wrest, despite the fact that he was now the suspect in Stoker’s attack. She had plenty to do, keeping a safe but observant eye on the wagon master, the chemist in Regent Street, and the charcoal kiln master in Hampstead. She also had her very real deadlines to make, and she looked after Stoker’s rest and nourishment and... and...
Well, Sabine wasn’t certain what, exactly, to call the third (although no less pressing) component of Stoker’s care. As a sea captain, world traveler, businessman, and general outdoorsman, he was not accustomed to bed rest or even prolonged captivity inside of doors. It fell to her to... if notentertainhim, then certainly to distract him. The doctor had begun to wean him from the sleep-inducing pain medicine, and a restless, glowery demandingness settled into his copious waking hours. He wrote countless letters and devoured every available newspaper (and thereby used up all but forty-five minutes of his morning). After that he summoned a steady stream of hired men to his bedside. Her cellar apartments became a spinning top of sailors, shipbuilders, runners, property managers, clerks, and secretaries. The ruckus was almost enough to wish Elisabeth Courtland would step in and take him off her hands.
Almost.
“Would you allow me to take in Mr. Stoker’s supper?” Perry had asked one night as Sabine carried down trays of cod and turnips at nine o’clock. “You must be exhausted, after being out of the house all morning and locked in your study all afternoon.”
“I am perfectly up to the task,” Sabine had called with a smile.
“What a good wife you are, Miss Sabine,” Perry had praised.
Sabine had had no reply for that. Was this what a good wife did? Busied herself with her own pursuits all day and then brought supper so late, most reasonable people were already abed?
She had never guessed that marriage might allow her to occupy herself all day with her own work while her husband occupied himself with his separate undertakings, only to convene together in the evening to leisurely discuss the events of the day. The model of her own parents’ marriage involved the exalted hero-worship of her father, with all meals and the daily routine in service to the rhythms of his work or the provisions for and countdowns to his journeys. So complete was her mother’s devotion to her father that her own tenuous health had taken a terrible turn when he died. It was as if a part of her mother’s very purpose for living had perished with Nevil Noble.
In contrast, Sabine availed herself of all of Stoker’s business; they talked for hours about it every night. With everything she heard, she challenged or intruded, praised or rebuked. He told her of every person he assigned and hired and dispatched throughout the day, the letters he wrote, the things he bought and sold. He talked about his investigator’s impending arrival from Portugal and his work with the man to build a case against the Duke of Wrest.
Stoker, in turn, listened to her new conclusions and discoveries about the case against Dryden, weighing in on what he thought and what he did not believe.
These were lively discussions that stretched late into the night. They also spoke of books and music, his travels, and her guides and maps. Sabine could not remember ever looking more forward to time spent with another person. She worked very hard all day, and happily so, but shelivedfor the evening meal with Stoker.
Only two topics seemed glossed over or omitted. The first was his most immediate personal plans for the future—his next voyage or his vague references to buying an estate somewhere and setting up “a real home.”
The second was any reference to some intimate, physical... “something” that would take their relationship from fulfilling and captivating to intimate. To touch or, God forbid, to kiss. But nothing was said and nothing was done. Her desire to reach for him was so very great, but also so very uncertain. It was like looking out at distant mountains but having no map to show the way to reach them.
There had always seemed like too much to say, he was too prone, she too upright, there was crockery in the way, the dog was barking, Perry or Harley were in the room, on and on it went.
The truth was, Sabine was too inexperienced as a seductress to know how to parlay dinner conversation, no matter how scintillating, into, well—her touch. What was more, she didn’t want to seduce him; she simply wanted to touch him and to kiss him, and for him to do those things in return. She’d spent considerable time and energy weighing the consequences to her heart if and when they did touch and kiss again. By all accounts, he would leave her when he was whole and able. She’d finally decided the thrill was worth the risk. But now he would not even meet her halfway.
In theory, the carriage ride with the vehicle’s velvet seats and close confines offered a more ideal environment to finally, at long last, lean against one another (at the very least). But they were in the carriage for some purpose, and social calls introduced the complication of tight wool clothing, stunting leather gloves, and hats that would collide if ever they ventured too close. Not to mention, they rode in a sort of uneasy silence rather than the familiar banter of her bedroom.
Sabine could, she knew, simply put it to him plainly—she was not shy—but she also had her pride, and if he denied a bald statement such as, “I believe we should have another kiss,” any such future requests would be even more fraught and difficult. She did not want to make things worse.
And, she thought, he probably would deny her. She knew this deep down, no matter how hotly he watched her or how suggestively she teased him. He’d made it very clear that denying himself (as he put it) was, in his mind, the same as protecting her. It was an obstacle she had no idea how to get around. Was the guise of “protecting her” simply a gentle way to say he did not fancy her? She did not think so, but this assumption did nothing to make his detachment go away.
