Master of Paradise (3 page)

A murmur of disappointment erupted from the
crowd. “
Must
you leave?” wailed one of the poets who’d been
afforded backstage privileges. “I’ve waited four dreadful months to
see you!”

They thought her brilliant, gifted, a
creature of magic. It reminded her now of how unacceptable she was
to her father and his world of perfect British order and
respectability.

Once again, she felt an uncharacteristic
flutter of nervousness coil inside her like a snake. In her
father’s house, she was nothing. What would she find when she
arrived?

Cullen accompanied her to the stage-door
alley where he had a hansom cab waiting. Gabrielle paused for a
moment before entering the coach, looking her brother in the eyes.
Silently, with a small touch to his hand, she assured him that all
would be well.

* * *

The cab lurched off into the enclosing fog as
Gabrielle settled herself in the seat.
Could
this be the
moment she’d been waiting for? Was it possible that all the work,
the determination, the suffering, had come to fruition at last?

She gripped her hands together in her lap,
trying to still their excited tremors, thinking back to a time when
she was seven years old. She and two-year-old Cullen had just come
to their father’s country house, soon after their mother’s tragic
death. The duke took them in, but under constant pressure from
Hastings, his spiteful legitimate son and heir, Douglas Cross
denied his parentage, finally even bowing to Hastings’s insistence
that the waifs be made to earn their keep. Gabrielle became a
servant of the house, and when he was old enough, Cullen was turned
out to work in the stables.

For years, Gabrielle secretly cried herself
to sleep every night. Cullen was too young to remember, but she
missed her mother, missed the feel of someone tucking her in late
at night, of holding her close—even if more and more the one who
kissed her reeked of gin. She couldn’t understand what her mother
had done, or why she’d been taken away.

But as she grew up in the duke’s household,
she began to piece together her mother’s story and to feel her
rage. The tropical island home that was stolen from her, Beau
Vallon, became the cornerstone of Gabrielle’s dreams.

When she was seventeen, after being deserted
by her only love, and enduring the worst night of her life, she
roused Cullen from bed just after dawn, and together they fled
Westbury Grange forever. With no place to go, Gabrielle stopped an
elderly woman in Hyde Park, asking her for any work she might have.
The woman turned out to be the incomparable Sarah Siddons, the
greatest actress of her time. An old woman, Mrs. Siddons had long
since retired from the stage, but something of the courageous
determination of the beautiful young girl captured her
sympathy.

She took them in, utilizing Gabrielle’s
striking appearance as a background player in several of her
friends’ productions. Gradually, she recognized in her young ward
the flicker of an authentic talent, but also saw in her an
impulsiveness and lack of discipline that needed to be conquered.
Handled properly, Mrs. Siddons advised, a career on the stage might
be the gateway to the attainment of anything she might want in
life. So the great actress tutored Gabrielle in the rudiments of
drama, which came easily, and discipline, which didn’t. She then
sent her to the provinces, where Gabrielle clawed her way through a
barrage of insignificant roles, temporarily suppressing all other
desires to painstakingly learn her craft.

It wasn’t an auspicious time to be in the
theater. The country had been in the throes of financial crisis for
years, and audiences were dropping away at an alarming rate. Plum
women’s roles were dominated by stars, so Mrs. Siddons—deciding to
utilize Gabrielle’s unfemininely deep voice as a strength rather
than a weakness—suggested she disguise herself as a man. Gabrielle
did so in a number of forgettable roles in the course of a year,
perfecting her impression until she played Iago to rave notices.
Soon theatergoers were trekking up to Stratford to see her
performance. Before long,
Othello
was brought to the
Haymarket, where it was an even greater success.

She was growing weary of acting when at last
she saw her opportunity.

The falling fortunes of her father’s British
East India Company were fueling the empire’s economic woes. And in
the far-off Indian Ocean, its problems were being exacerbated by
the now notorious Rodrigo Soro, who was terrorizing British
shipping with a boldness and swagger that had been unknown since
the golden age of piracy a hundred years ago. In a thunderbolt of
inspiration, Gabrielle realized she could use her intimate
knowledge of the scoundrel to create a play that would both
humiliate her father and sweep London off its feet.

The story of Rodrigo seemed made for the
stage. He was the son of a pirate who challenged England’s hegemony
over the waters around the Seychelle Islands. When the pirate was
captured and hanged, the duke brought the lad to England, took him
in. Determined to civilize the young savage, the duke anglicized
his name to Roderick Smythe, saw to his education, sending him
eventually to Haileybury, the training school of the East India
Company. Rodrigo had been an apt and willing student, bearing the
prejudice that his fellow schoolmates—and Hastings in
particular—heaped on him with a calmness and seeming unconcern that
had fooled everyone, including Douglas. Then, on his initial
Company voyage to the East Indies, Rodrigo betrayed them all by
putting a sword to the captain’s throat and boldly taking charge of
the ship. Not only did Rodrigo become a pirate, he became the most
effective pirate those waters had ever known, largely because of
the education he’d received at the hands of the Company. He was
known as Simba—the Lion—no doubt because of his unusual golden
Portuguese beauty and striking lion’s eyes, and not even the best
efforts of the Royal Navy could bring him to heel.

Gabrielle knew this story better than anyone,
knew intuitively how to play the character. She made her name with
The Lion’s Revenge
, but her real motivation for writing the
play, of course, was to force her father’s hand. To create a
scandal and to personally embarrass him to the point that he could
no longer ignore her. To force him to give her what she demanded,
even if it was just to silence her.

Now her father had so uncharacteristically
called for her in the middle of a performance. Surely that meant
her scheme had succeeded at last!

Westbury House was a four-story building in
Grosvenor Square adorned with majestic statues of medieval
warriors. The fog, which filtered and drifted eerily in the
moonlight, caressed the granite figures like stealthy cloaks,
lending them a pervading impression of menace. It was an imposing
structure meant to intimidate, to announce to the world that a
preeminent man dwelled within.

Shivering in the spring night air, Gabrielle
stood before the house she’d passed so many times, but had never
entered. On the steps, several men were just leaving, the kind of
important men of government she’d often seen from the edges of the
duke’s world. She recognized the powerful Judge Martin Matson,
unmistakable because of his uncanny resemblance to a wharf rat. As
they passed her, she overheard their angry mutterings and the words
“slavery” and “Buxton.” When they’d gone, she knocked on the
door.

She was greeted with strained civility by the
majordomo and ushered inside. All about her were the gloom and
ancient armor of a fortress. Swords, lances, and shields lined the
cold stone walls, creating an atmosphere of harsh masculine
dominance.

“His Grace and His Lordship are expecting
you,” the majordomo announced, his hushed voice vaulting off the
silence of the walls.

“His Lordship? Is Hastings here?”

“The Marquess of Breckenridge is in
attendance,” the servant corrected.

It wasn’t happy news. She despised Hastings,
and had ever since they’d first seen each other, when her mother
was on trial for her life. After Gabrielle and Cullen moved to the
duke’s country residence, Westbury Grange, thirteen-year-old
Hastings—who never for one moment gave credence to her claim of
being his sister—set out to make their lives miserable with a
vindictiveness and calculated cruelty that had taught her a harsh
lesson about human nature and made her grow up fast. And every time
she thought she’d witnessed the limits of his capacity for
deception, he surprised her with some daring new innovation.

The marquess had been in the Indian Ocean for
the past eight years, the last two of them as governor of the
Seychelles. A month ago, he’d returned to England on leave.
Gabrielle had made it a point not to see him. Even when he’d come
to the theater and demanded an audience, she’d had him turned away.
It had afforded her great satisfaction to be able to deny
him
for a change.

She followed the butler through the massive
tomb of a house and up three flights of stairs. At her father’s
bedroom, the servant bowed deferentially, opened the gargantuan
portal with a white-gloved hand, and waved her soundlessly
inside.

“If Your Grace needs me, I shall be at hand,”
he pronounced stiffly.

Douglas Cross, twelfth Duke of Westbury, lay
propped in his four-poster with a mountain of crisp pillows at his
back. Even in bed, he displayed an impressive demeanor. His hair
was white now, but with a striking silver tint that made him look
all the more distinguished. He was so patrician in appearance that
no one could ever mistake him for other than what he was, an
influential member of the peerage and a director of the powerful
British East India Company.

Hastings Cross sat in a chair by his side,
upright as always, under a large framed map of the Seychelle
Islands. Dark-haired, he had a sharp nose that lent him the
countenance of a bird of prey, and dark, darting eyes that showed
his cruelty. His hands were curled round the arms of his chair like
the talons of a hawk.

The sight of him under this map emphasized
the outrage of his appointment as governor and reminded her of this
family’s obsession with these islands. Douglas first went there as
a much younger man when the islands were still a colony of France,
falling in love with their incomparable beauty and serenity,
convinced it was the earth’s one true paradise. While there he met
the young and lovely Caprice Ashton, daughter of one of the
archipelago’s original French families. Her parents had died within
a year of each other, leaving her a struggling cotton plantation,
Beau Vallon.

When she met Douglas Cross, he seemed like a
godsend. The wealthy duke was smitten with her at once. He was
married, but he convinced her it was a marriage of convenience.
That he couldn’t bear the sight of his wife. That she was frigid
and only graced his bed in an attempt to bear a son and heir. That
she’d tried unsuccessfully for years, and when at last she’d
succeeded in becoming pregnant, she’d abandoned the duke for his
country estate and put herself in bed for the nine months it took
her to bear Hastings. After which, she’d kept to her bed, a virtual
invalid, complaining about her husband’s lack of feeling.

The story touched Caprice, made her sorry for
the lonely duke. She became his lover, but when he asked her to
return to England with him, she refused. The idea of leaving the
place where she’d been so happy, so wild and free, bathing in the
year-round sun, was abhorrent to her. All his pleadings fell on
deaf ears. So one day, Douglas simply bought up the mortgage on
Beau Vallon and made a bargain. If Caprice followed him to England
and remained for two years as his mistress, he would give her the
deed free and clear.

She made the journey, hating every minute of
being away from her paradise. The two years stretched to three and
then four, and still Douglas—who seemed to be obsessed with her
even more with each passing year—found some excuse not to give her
back the property.

Gradually, she realized he never intended to
give it back to her—that it was his hold over her, the thing that
kept her in bondage to him. It would have done her no good to have
left him for another man. No matter how wealthy the pursuer,
Douglas wouldn’t have sold the property at any cost. Even though
she was only seven when her mother died, Gabrielle never forgot the
anguish in her mother’s voice as she told the tale. “I should never
have left Mahé,” she told her daughter before bursting into tears.
“I began to die the moment I left Beau Vallon.” They were her last
words.

When first Gabrielle and later Cullen was
born, the duke became more determined than ever to keep his
beautiful French mistress under his thumb. Their relationship
deteriorated under the strain. Crazed with jealousy and the growing
suspicion that she was sharing her bed with other Englishmen,
Douglas flatly denied his paternity when she tried to sue for his
Seychelles property in their name. Sensing that her situation was
hopeless, Caprice took to discouragement and drink.

She fought with Douglas to no avail until, in
utter frustration, she bolstered her courage with a healthy dousing
of gin, talked her way into Westbury House, and confronted Douglas
with a pistol, demanding that he hand over the deed. They struggled
and the gun went off just as the duke’s wife—Hastings’s
mother—walked in the room to see what the fuss was about. The stray
bullet hit the duchess in the chest, and she died almost at
once.

During the publicity and trial that followed,
it was never once mentioned that the murderess, Caprice Ashton, had
been the mistress of the distinguished Duke of Westbury. Rather, it
was maintained that she was a crazy French woman he didn’t know.
She was hanged publicly at Newgate Prison because of his
silence.