Free A Disappearance in Drury Lane by Ashley Gardner Page B

climbed with some difficulty into the coach, my ribs still aching, and settled next to my wife.
    My wife. I could scarce believe it. Would I become old, very married, and dull, nodding to Donata down the table while I shoved my feet deeper into my slippers and absorbed myself in newspapers? I hoped so.
    The fifty or so miles back to London was blissfully uneventful, and Donata’s private landau kept up a good pace. Donata slept much of the way, the coach swaying slowly. Gabriella alternately rode with us and with her uncle and aunt in the coach lent by the Pembrokes behind us. Donata’s son Peter alternated along with her, his nanny in the coach with the Auberges.
    Donata expressed surprise that I was happy to have a six-year-old boy in the coach with me, but I wanted Peter to learn I would not shunt him aside now that I’d married his mother. He was a sturdy lad, already with the bullish look of his father. He was a bit awestruck with me—my great height and voice, I supposed. Plus, I had been told, to my distaste, that I at times resembled the late Lord Breckenridge.
    Peter sat quietly on the seat when he rode with us, as though determined to prove he could behave. He seemed taken with Gabriella and talked with her readily. My new family was a bit pulled together, I reflected, but that ride to London was the best journey I’d taken in many years.
    Grenville, despite the chill, had elected to ride horseback, changing horses at inns along the way. He did not explain his choice, but I knew he did it in deference to his motion sickness. The gentle ride that had me dozing with my head on Donata’s shoulder would have had him quaking and ill in a trice.
    Seeing the smoke and chimneys of London as we rode down the last hill told me my blissful journey was over. The idyll of being with Donata and the comfort of the Pembrokes’ house was coming to an end.
    Why returning to the metropolis should dishearten me, I did not know. I’d be living in Donata’s comfortable South Audley Street townhouse now, with her butler Barnstable bringing me coffee and remedies whenever I wanted them. But the sight of so many buildings packed together after the peace of the countryside in Oxfordshire made my high spirits dissolve. Perhaps it was my nature to sink when entering the gloom of black smoke and too many houses, to rise when riding alone in the openness of wilder lands.
    Donata’s coach pulled up, very late in the night, at the house in South Audley Street. Barnstable, having left Oxfordshire the previous day to arrive before us, led us inside to put us to bed.
    The first impediment in my married life occurred then. Barnstable led me to a bedroom separate from Donata’s.
    “All gentlemen require their own chambers, sir,” Barnstable said with some surprise when I objected. “As do ladies. I do not believe his lordship and her ladyship ever occupied the same bedchamber in all of their marriage.”
    “I will point out that I am not Lord Breckenridge,” I said, weariness making me sharp. “Nor will I ever be. The current Lord Breckenridge is bunking down in a cot in the nursery. I am a simple army captain, who shares a bedchamber with his wife.”
    Barnstable had been taught not to argue with his employers, so he said nothing, only stood in the middle of the chamber looking put out.
    Donata wandered in as though she noticed nothing amiss. “Very well-done, Barnstable. Thank you. Is the chamber not to your taste, Gabriel?” she asked once Barnstable had discreetly retreated. “I know you are partial to my guest room, but it is far too small for you, and this one has a dressing room through there.” She pointed at a slender door in the middle of the wall.
    When I’d been an overnight guest in her house ere this, I’d always stayed in a tiny but comfortable bedchamber, or in Donata’s bed. The chamber currently in question was next to hers—Donata had the room in the front of the second floor, while this was in the back.