Page 5 of An Affair at Stonecliffe

Most of all, she was ever vigilant. Wherever she lived or worked, she first made a plan of escape. She impressed upon Gil the need to not speak to strangers, to immediately come to her if anyone tried to ask him questions or to entice him to go with them. And though she tried not to look at people directly, her eyes were always searching the area around her, alert to any quick, untoward movement.

Two months ago, however, she had broken her most cardinal rule: never return to England. She had worried over the decision. It was dangerous to come so near Carlisle Thorne. There had been no attempts for some time now, but she was certain Thorne was still looking for her, and the chance of her being recognized was far greater in London.

Though she had grown up quietly in Oxford and had not even been in London before she and Adam eloped, she had been considered something of a beauty by the university lads. No one but Adam had ever managed to breach her wall of polite disinterest, but a number of the students had tried. And doubtless her elopement with Adam had been the subject of gossip for months there, giving her further notoriety. And those idle, wealthy young gentlemen gravitated to the high life of London after they left school.

Perhaps the odds were small that she might run into one those young men in the city, but gentlemen did sometimes escort their wives, mothers, or sisters when they were out shopping for hats, and some even went into shops themselves seeking some gift for a wife or mistress. No matter how small, any chance of being discovered was too much.

So when Madame Bissonet decided to open another shop in London and asked Noelle to help her, she had at first refused. But Lisette Bissonet was Noelle’s friend as well as employer, and she was most persuasive, not to mention persistent. Lisette needed her help; it would be so much easier if she had someone she trusted who spoke English to hire employees and do paperwork, to bargain and lease and do all the things that opening a business in London involved.

Though Lisette did not mention or even hint at it, Noelle knew how much she owed Lisette. She let Noelle bring Gil with her to the store as long as he played quietly in the back. She let Noelle leave the shop to care for Gil when he was sick. She paid Noelle a little more than the others, as well as allowing her to design and trim hats on her own time, which Lisette would then buy from her to sell at the store.

Noelle’s future at the shop in England would be better than in Paris. In a few months, after the place was established, Lisette would return to her main store and workshop in France and Noelle would become the manager of the London shop. She would be in charge and draw a larger salary. Not only that, she would have the use of the flat above the store, where Lisette now resided. It was nothing grand, but it was far more pleasant and roomy than the cramped quarters Noelle could normally afford to rent. Gil would even have a small bedroom of his own, and the place was well lit, with windows in every room.

The factor that weighed most heavily with Noelle was Gil himself. She glanced down at her son now and smiled. With his mother’s blond curls and blue eyes and Adam’s smile, Gil was a sunny, sturdy, intelligent child. And he deserved more, so much more, than Noelle had been able to give him.

The money she could earn at the sort of work open to her was hardly enough to live on, and their frequent travels required even more money. She had had to sell several of the jewels Adam had given her in order to send back the money she had taken from Mr. Thorne. But she could not have lived with herself if she had not returned it. It was one thing to use his gold to get away, to keep her son free, but it would have been wrong to keep it. The rest of the jewelry had gone bit by bit, helping them to escape, providing medicine when Gil fell sick, supplementing the income she made from the sort of work she could do while also taking care of a baby.

She could have had an easier life, certainly, if she had accepted the help of the men who offered it, but she knew the return she would have to make for such help, and she could not do that. Noelle had managed to scrape by. She had done the best she could for Gil, but she knew that it had not been the life he should have had.

Like her, Gil didn’t have many clothes. He’d lived in cramped quarters all his life; he’d often been left in the care of another woman while Noelle went to work. There had been times when both he and Noelle had gone hungry or huddled together under all the blankets they had, still shivering, because their tiny flat had no heat.

He should have grown up in luxury as the grandson of an earl. He should have a soft bed and nice clothes and enough to eat. He should have countless toys and books. A pony to ride and grooms to teach him. A tutor and someday an education at Eton and Oxford. A hundred things that Noelle could never supply. Worry and guilt ate at her—had she done the wrong thing by keeping Gil with her? Should she have let Thorne take him from her, no matter how much it hurt? Had it been sheer selfishness on her part to keep Gil?

No, surely not. He had been just a babe; he had needed his mother more than he needed any of those other things. It would have been cruel to turn him over to that cold man, to allow Gil to be raised by the very parents who had cut off their own son. She had done the right thing for him despite all the hardships. Noelle clung to that thought.

But if she could give him more—a better place to live, more of the comforts of life—then she must do it. The position Lisette offered gave her just that. More, it allowed Gil the opportunity to live in the country that was his homeland, to know England and Englishmen. She wasn’t stupid; she knew that one day Gil would inherit the earldom, as Adam would have when his father died. He would become important and wealthy. She must do what she could to prepare him; she didn’t want him to feel like a foreigner among his own people.

So in the end she agreed to move to London and help Lisette set up the shop. She would stay for at least three months, until Lisette returned to France. After that, she would decide whether to stay here and run the shop or to retreat to France.

So far, it had been going well. Gil seemed happy. He always enjoyed the excitement of a new place, the challenge of a different language, but it seemed to her that he especially enjoyed it here, pleased to add new words, new accents, to the proper English he had learned from his mother. He listened, entranced, to the Scottish widow who lived next to them and was soon salting his words with “wee” this and “auld” that, just as he memorized and repeated the cries of the street vendors.

Nothing had happened to alarm Noelle. She’d seen no one she recognized. The women who entered the shop had no interest in her other than to ask her about a hat. She and Gil walked to and from the shop to their small room every day without incident. The butcher’s assistant tried to flirt with her, and a stranger had tried to start up a conversation on the street, his intentions obvious, but she stopped each man with a stony look, and they left her alone.

She kept a careful eye on the street outside the shop window and had come to recognize those who were regulars along it, who lived or worked nearby or delivered to the shops. No one had been loitering about on the street or watching the shop with unusual interest.

Only one man had come into the store to buy a hat. He asked Noelle to model it and smiled as he studied her, which made her uncomfortable, but he said nothing untoward and bought the hat, giving them a delivery address. Noelle watched him after he left the store. He strolled lazily along, studying the wares in the window of the jewelry store, then entering a tobacco shop, and she was reassured that he was merely a shopper.

The other day Noelle had felt a prickling across the back of her neck, the uneasy feeling of being watched. She’d stopped in front of a window, casually glancing back, but she saw no one who suspiciously came to a halt, as well, or ducked into a doorway. She continued to keep an eye out, making an unnecessary visit to the chemist shop, just to see if anyone behind her had chosen to linger nearby.

There had been no one. She was being overanxious. She could not go running just because she had felt uneasy one day. But since then, she had kept a sharper eye out than before. Gil, beside her, showed no such uneasiness. He walked along, sometimes taking a skipping step or jumping across a puddle, chattering all the while.

Noelle unlocked the store, then cast one last look all around the street. There was nothing but the usual early morning contingent of shop owners opening their stores and vendors trundling along, calling out their wares. She opened the door and slipped inside, heading to the back to hang up her bonnet. The place was empty but for her. Lisette, upstairs, was a late riser, and so Noelle was usually the one to open the store.

Two more workers entered as Noelle went about making sure everything was in order, the displays set properly, taking a bonnet that had not sold well and placing it in another area where it would catch more notice. Nan, who worked in the front with Noelle, helped, and the other girl, Kate, went back to the workroom. Gil followed Kate to the back, where he usually spent his days playing quietly and doing little tasks for Lisette and Kate, bringing them ribbons and decorations or retrieving something they dropped.

It was a slow morning with only a few customers. Lisette came downstairs and after greetings, took up her favorite spot in the workroom and began to create. Noelle spent her time working on the books, a task she was training to take over when Lisette returned to France. Nan loitered at the window, watching people go by and commenting on them.

“Oh, my, would you look at that? That’s a beauty of a carriage. Hope they’re coming here; it looks like they’re plump in the pocket.”

Noelle, having finished the books, strolled over to look. It was, indeed, a lovely brougham, glossy black and fitted with brass hardware, curtains drawn across the window. A man opened the door and stepped out. He was dressed in a jacket and trousers such as any working man might wear, with a soft cap on his head—not at all the sort to be getting out of an expensive vehicle.

Any sort of oddity always caught Noelle’s attention, so she continued to watch as the man stood to the side, holding the door open for the gentleman climbing out after him. That one suited the carriage very well. He was dressed in black with a snowy white cravat meticulously arranged at his neck and an equally elegant hat on his head. The two men started forward, and Noelle drew in a sharp breath.

She didn’t know the working man, but the gentleman was Carlisle Thorne.

CHAPTER TWO

NOELLE STOOD PARALYZED for an instant as her nightmare came to life before her eyes. Coming to her senses, she spun around and ran toward the back, calling over her shoulder, “He’ll ask for me. Tell him I haven’t come in yet. Delay him.”