Ceasebury: Chapter Forty
Hermes bolted off towards the back of the manor with my clinging to him for dear life. He seemed to know where he was headed, even if I didn't. He galloped with the fury of a god as he headed towards the plantation, only gaining speed as I caught sight of Valentine. He was shirtless and working with a scythe in the field. His rippling muscles in the morning sunlight were a wonderful sight, but I couldn't get distracted. He caught sight of me in the rolling green fields just as I caught sight of him, a look of concern plastered over his face.
"Valentine!" I shouted across the field to him, galloping towards him steadily.
"If it isn't my duchess." She shouted back to me, a smile creeping across his lips. "What's wrong?" he asked as he saw the expression on my face.
"They've found Gabriella." I said.
"What?" he asked, "How?"
"I don't know; Cheyenne came here and told me that Gabriella is being defended by Charles out in the brothel in Williamsburg; we have to help her."
"That makes no sense." Valentine said.
"What? Why?" I asked.
"Because Charles isn't in Williamsburg, he's at Ward's Tavern fighting."
"What?" I asked, incredulous.
"He wrote to me a couple of days ago telling me he was about to leave to go into battle."
"It's much worse than I thought then." I said. "We have to go quickly." Valentine nodded, dropping his scythe and quickly mounting Hermes behind me, tucking himself neatly into the saddle with a certain kind of masculine precision.
"Come on, Hermes!" he shouted. I leant back into Valentine's strong chest as we galloped towards Williamsburg. I found now that I was married to him, I had given myself permission to fantasy about him more, almost as if some imagined sin had been lifted now a priest had said a few words. That thought, I suppose, was what was meant by being religious. But now I felt like I was his, and he was mine; I had the freedom to dream of him. Now I had him; I could also have him in my mind.
We got to Williamsburg quickly, and my heart began to sound like the beat of a military drum. It wasn't hard to find the site of the altercation between Gabriella LeBolt and the rest of Virginian society, for we could immediately see a huge mob of the middle and upper classes standing around outside the brothel. It was interesting to see them so upset and cross outside Mr Jamestown's establishment, for I knew full well that all these men had most likely visited this establishment at some time or other, and their wives probably knew full well where they had gone. The prostitute was a perpetual threat to any middle-class home.
I caught sight of some dirty blond hair and assumed it to be the hair of Gabriella, but as we approached gingerly as I was dressed without a proper skirt and Valentine was shirtless, we realised that the blond figure hadn't actually been Gabriella at all – it was the head of Mr Jameston. It was still attached to his body, of course, but he stood in a wide, heavy stance, which made him appear almost as a soldier. But he didn't wear a red coat; he wore a black one with shiny buttons that glinted in the light. He did his best to keep the crowds away as we approached.
"What's your angle here?" Valentine shouted as I tried frantically to push my way through the noises and the people.
"I'm going to go up there and break it up."
"Right. And is that going to work?"
"Well, have you got a better idea?"
"No, but be careful."
"I will." I said with a reassuring nod. "I'll be fine. At least if I go, no one will challenge me to a duel." Valentine smiled. I pushed quickly through the crowd, elbowing past people and knocking the shoulders of the people who stood there, jeering and shouting for no other reason than the fact that they were bored and enjoyed storming the lives of young, tremulous women.
"Gabriella!" I shouted up to her. She was standing on the porch of the brothel in a scarlet jacket, the white hem of her dress poking out beneath. Both she and Mr Jameston turned suddenly towards me, and an eager smile washed over their faces.
"Hey!" a red-faced older man shouted up to me as I walked up the steps of the brothel to join Gabriella by the door. "Give us some then, darling!" he shouted at me.
"Sir, I am Duchess Ravenswood, and you will show me some respect." I said to him.
"A Duchess wouldn't dress like a common whore!" he shouted back.
"A Duchess wouldn't dress like that!" he shouted.
"Gabriella, are you okay?" I asked her, gripping her hand as soon as my fingers met her palm.
"Yes." She turned to me, looking much more alive than any of the time she had at any of her time before rebirth as Charles' wife (whatever it meant exactly to be someone's wife). And it was at that moment that I first wondered what Gabriella would look like as Gabriella Jameston – a young girl of Williamsburg with some vague kind of family. No, it wasn't quite wondering, for this was her as Gabriella Jameston, well, as much as she would ever be, for Gabriella wasn't really a Jameston, was she? At this moment, standing beside Mr Jameston, she did appear as one. But perhaps only in half.
Mr Jameston clasped her other hand. And then I was back in my present. The gentile shouting continued, for it had not stopped while my mind had been elsewhere. Hands were reaching up onto the platform we were standing on, pulling at Gabriella's dress, calling for her to be excommunicated from Christendom as a fallen woman. She had not fallen. No, Gabriella Kingston, LeBolt, Jameston, whatever anyone wanted to call her had risen. She had risen from a girl who couldn't read as well as I could and wore yellow to a girl who ran away to wed the love of her life and now stood, holding her own on the steps of a brothel handing tight to the hands of two people that loved her – well, one person that loved her and one that had chosen to help – and now she wore white and scarlet. She looked for a moment as if she were about to cry, and I had to pause to question if she had just realised the colossal significance of her own journey in the last fortnight. For it had only been a fortnight since I had met Marquess Ravenswood as he was then in the dining room. She had been a married woman for ten days.
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