Trapped at the Altar

? ? ?

Gabriel Fawcett stood in the shadow of a doorway on Dacre Street, looking at the house into which Ariadne, her maid, and her husband had just disappeared. It was such a grand house, and Gabriel couldn’t really imagine Ariadne, his Ari, with her disheveled curls and hiked-up skirts and sandaled feet, living in such magnificent style. And yet that very afternoon, he’d glimpsed her, every inch the noblewoman, being received into the Queen’s apartments. And when she had come out, she had seemed to walk upon some cloud, above the mere mortals like himself, cowering unnoticed in corners, folk who did not have the credentials to move beyond the royal antechambers where they hung about, hoping to draw the attention of someone of influence.

He felt diminished, rudderless. He had expected to find her overyjoyed to see him, eager as ever, hot for his kisses, filled with plans for their escape into the future they had imagined for themselves. Instead, she was someone quite different, always in the company of her husband and seemingly perfectly happy to be with him.

Ivor Chalfont was her husband. A distant cousin who had grown up as she had in the rough-and-tumble world of outlaws. How did two such outcasts fit into these surroundings? And yet they did. Whatever lay beneath the surface impression, Chalfont and Ariadne fit their new surroundings as if they had been born into them. And Gabriel was so out of his depth that he was close to drowning.

The more he looked at the house, the more hopeless it all seemed. Ari had talked so blithely of their being able to meet in secret in the midst of the metropolis, but he had nothing to offer her to compete with Dacre Street. Even if she were still willing, even if it could somehow be managed, he had little enough to spare to fund a clandestine liaison, let alone a life for the two of them away from the world.

He was still watching the door five minutes later when it opened and the maid appeared holding a small dog. Gabriel retreated further into the shadows. The girl looked around before carrying the dog down to the pavement. She set the animal down and stood with arms folded against the cold, waiting for the puppy to relieve herself. Then she picked up the dog again and, before entering the house, glanced around once more before bending and slipping something underneath the winter-bare flowerpot on one side of the door. Light showed for a moment as she opened the door, and then it closed, and darkness fell again.

Gabriel waited, but the door did not open again. He darted across the street, bent, and lifted the flowerpot. A glimmer of white showed. It was a scrap of tightly folded paper with a large G scrawled above the fold. Ari always wrote his initial on her missives. Bold and black, with no frills of curlicues. Without opening it, he tucked the note into his breast pocket and hurried back into the park, out of sight of the house.

He was lodged in the house of a shoemaker in Shoe Lane. His father’s merchant friend had sent him there, to a cousin of his, promising a fair price for a clean room and a decent dinner. He smelled roasted mutton as he let himself into the narrow hallway and raced up the staircase to his own chamber before his inquisitive landlady, a motherly soul with a nose for gossip, could poke her head out from the kitchen regions and quiz him on his daily doings.

Only when he had shot the bolt on the door did he open the note. Just one line: Gabriel, meet me in St. James’s Park, just inside the gate from Dacre Street, at mid-morning the day after tomorrow. A large A ended the short missive. He stood looking down at it. There was no salutation, no tenderness, no promise of any. None of the usual soft and loving sentiments that had accompanied her communications in the past, those hasty, love-filled notes hidden under the stone on the cliff top above Daunt valley.

But he would see her, speak to her. Convince her again of his love, remind her of her promises. And surely all would be as it used to be between them.

? ? ?

Ari fought her distraction throughout the evening. Had Gabriel picked up the note? Tilly said she had seen no one on the street when she’d gone out to put it under the pot. If it was still there in the morning, Ari would find a way to remove it and wait for another opportunity. Tilly had looked askance at being given such a strange errand, but she never questioned Ari’s actions and if asked to keep a secret would do so without demur. Ari didn’t like to burden her with deception, but just this once, she had reasoned. If Gabriel had been watching them in the park, then it was not unreasonable to imagine that he had followed them home.

Fortunately, Juno provided diversion and, after a visit to the kitchen where she had been plied with chicken scraps and generally petted by the maids, recovered her courage and her spirits. When Tilly brought her into Ari’s small parlor where she and Ivor were having supper, the puppy’s antics were sufficient to exasperate Ivor and entrance Ariadne, who quickly forgot that dogs were supposed to be working animals.

“Oh, Ivor, don’t look so disapproving,” she chided as he separated Juno for the umpteenth time from the fringe of the Turkey carpet. “She wants to play.”

Ivor merely frowned and cut into his meat. He was not fooled for a moment by his wife’s appearance of normality. She was not really herself, despite the effort she was so clearly making. So what was she hiding? And why? The woman who had given herself so wholeheartedly to him was now withholding something from him. And it was beginning to make him very uneasy.

In bed that night, Ari was as warm and passionate as ever, and yet still he felt something holding her back. But there was nothing he could confront her with, nothing he could put his finger on. And when, afterwards, she turned on her side with a sleepy murmured good night, he kissed her turned cheek and lay looking up at the flicker of firelight on the tester above, racking his brains for something that could sound an alarm.

Ari felt his wakefulness as she tried to breathe deeply, rhythmically, hoping that if Ivor thought she was asleep, he would sleep himself. She felt, absurdly, that even thinking about Gabriel while Ivor was awake might somehow alert her husband to thoughts he would consider treacherous. It had been such a hard-won battle to get him to accept the past and accept that it didn’t affect their present that she was terrified if he had the faintest inkling she was even thinking of Gabriel, he would feel betrayed.

And her thoughts of Gabriel hitherto, which she had always confined to when she was alone, had been more curious than longing. She wanted to know he was safe and well, that perhaps he, too, had found happiness outside their own passion. But seeing him, feeling his presence as a physical reality, had shocked her out of a pleasant oblivion.

She wanted to see him, to talk to him, not just to bring things to an end between them but also to find out how his life was, how he was feeling, what poetry he had written. She didn’t love him as she had thought she had, but she still had his best interests at heart. But she knew that Ivor would not accept that. He would never be convinced that what she wanted did not imply a deeper want. Any contact she had with Gabriel would be seen as a betrayal. Even if she knew it wasn’t. And the unhappiness they had endured to get to their present equilibrium had been too intense to risk again.

She rolled onto her back and became suddenly aware of a faint mewling sound from somewhere below her in the darkened chamber. It was a pathetic whimper that she could not resist. She rolled onto her side again and peered over the edge of the bed. A pair of soulful eyes gazed pleadingly up at her from the shadows beside the bed. She listened for a moment to Ivor’s deep, regular breathing. He seemed to be sleeping soundly. She leaned down over the edge of the bed and scooped up the puppy, tucking her under the covers in the crook of her arm.