by Mary Balogh
“I know,” he said.
“Do you need any help here, Carew?” another voice asked from a short distance away.
They both turned to see Lord Francis Kneller.
“I saw him follow Samantha—Lady Carew—outside,” he said. “I thought she might need my protection.”
“You may escort her inside, if you will, Kneller,” the marquess said.
“No, Hartley,” she said quickly. “Take me home. I want to go home now.”
“My lady?” Francis was offering her his arm, just as if she had not spoken.
“Go with him, Samantha,” her husband said.
What was he planning to do? Lionel was already straightening up. Obviously she had not done a great deal of damage. Lionel would pluck Hartley limb from limb. She opened her mouth to argue. And snapped her teeth together again. She had recognized the tone. She guessed she would hear it from time to time down the years, and her children, too. It was the tone that said he was to be obeyed without question. And she could not argue with that tone before witnesses. She could not humiliate him like that.
She took Francis’s arm and he led her with firm steps toward the ballroom. Music was playing, she realized. The supper waltz was in progress. Everything at the ball was normal. No one else appeared to be down in the garden.
“Francis.” She pulled on his arm. “What is happening? He is not being foolish, is he?”
“Good Lord, Samantha,” he said, “I hope not.”
Which was about as ambiguous an answer as anyone had given to any of the questions she had ever asked.
“Smile,” he said, smiling down at her. “We are about to be on view, Samantha.”
Her teeth were beginning to chatter. Her hands were stinging. Hartley was out there being murdered, at the very least.
She smiled.
“WELL, HART.” LIONEL LEANED a hand on the wall of the fountain and clenched the other hand in an obvious attempt to control his pain. “You have taken an admirably heroic stand. I am sure Samantha and Kneller were marvelously impressed. Are you about to slap a glove in my face? Or would you prefer to keep it on, to hide your deformity?”
“I’ll meet you at Jackson’s tomorrow morning at eleven,” the marquess said quietly. “Be there, Lionel. And come prepared to fight. Until one of us is insensible.”
Lionel looked at him incredulously for a few moments and then threw back his head and burst into laughter.
“By God, Hart,” he said when he finally had his amusement under control, “I hope you invite a large audience. It is going to be more amusing than a public hanging. Someone will be lugging raw meat back to Samantha’s arms.”
“Perhaps,” the marquess said curtly. “And then again, perhaps not. Choose your second and bring him with you. Though I daresay Jackson himself will set down the rules and see to it that we abide by them. It will be just as well. I might kill you, else.”
His words occasioned another roar of laughter.
“You had better reconsider before morning, Hart,” Lionel said, still chuckling. “Before this reaches a point from which you cannot back down. I will think no worse of you. I will hold you in the same esteem I have always held you in. You had better go inside now and tell Samantha and Kneller that you wagged your finger at me and scolded me roundly for trying to steal a kiss from your wife, and that you left me drowning in tears of remorse. Tomorrow you can crawl home to the safety of Highmoor and live there happily ever after. I’ll not come after you—or Samantha. I thought it would be amusing to revive old emotions, and I was right. It was. But she bores me now. She is all yours, Hart, my boy. Run away now like a good little boy.”
The marquess inclined his head. “Good night to you, Lionel,” he said with quiet courtesy. “I shall see you tomorrow morning. At eleven sharp.” He turned and made his way back to the ballroom.
Lionel’s laughter followed him.
He made his way as quickly and unobtrusively as he could around the edge of the floor—amazingly, the supper dance was still in progress—and out through the nearest door. He found the Duke of Bridgwater in the card room, watching a game in progress. He sent up a silent prayer of thanks that his friend was not dancing, as he had been most of the evening.
“Bridge.” He touched the duke on the sleeve and drew him to one side. “I need your services.”
His friend grinned. “I thought you were slinking off into the garden for a secret tryst with Lady Carew,” he said.
“I need a second tomorrow at Jackson’s saloon,” the marquess said. “I have challenged Rushford to a bout—until one of us is unconscious, if Jackson will allow it. Will you stand by me?”
His friend merely stared at him.
“He was molesting Samantha in the garden,” the marquess said. “She gave a good account of herself, but it was not enough.”
“No,” his friend said quietly. “No, it would not be. Yes, you can count on me, Hart.”
“And on me.” The marquess had been half-aware of Lord Francis Kneller entering the room and coming to stand a short distance away. “I’ll second you, too, Carew, if I may.”
“Thank you.” His lordship nodded curtly. “Where is Samantha?”
“Dancing with Stebbins,” Francis said. “He led her out despite the fact that the set had already begun and he was wheezing and as red as a lobster from the evening’s exertions.”
“My uncle could never resist treading a measure,” his grace said, “especially with a pretty partner.”
“She is smiling and sparkling and holding up like a trouper,” Francis said. “What time tomorrow, Carew?”
“Eleven,” he said. “If you will excuse me, I’ll catch the end of the waltz and then take Samantha home. It has been a trying evening for her.”
His friend and Samantha’s stood where they were as he limped away. Then their eyes met.
“It is going to be a massacre,” Francis said. “But he had no choice.”
“I am not so sure,” the duke said, frowning. “About the massacre, I mean. He will be beaten, of course, but maybe not quite as badly as one might think. For the last few years he has been having private sessions with Jackson. Jackson would not waste his time on nothing, would he? I have no idea what has been going on between the two of them, but it appears that tomorrow morning we will find out.”
“I’ll respect him in future,” Francis said, “however humiliating the outcome is for him tomorrow. I must confess I have thought him a weakling. That bastard has been stalking Lady Carew since he came back to England.”
“No, not a weakling, Kneller,” his grace said. “Hartley has a quiet dignity that does not need to assert itself in swashbuckling. But he has a wife now whom he loves. He is not the type to stand by and see her insulted.”
“Good,” Francis said. “If he had not challenged Rushford, you know, then I would have. And that would not have been quite the thing, would it?”
“Most unwise, my dear chap,” his grace said. He raised one eyebrow. “Though I am sure that if you look hard enough you will find some other lady with quite equal charms who would welcome your gallantry and your devotion and your willingness to rush to her defense.”
“By Jove,” Francis said, “I do believe you are warning me, Bridgwater.”
“My dear fellow,” the duke said, rearranging the lace folds of his cuffs over the backs of his hands, “I would not dream of it. I am merely suggesting that you avoid, ah, making an ass of yourself, shall we say? She is very lovely, but then so are many of the ladies who grace our ballrooms and drawing rooms if we but take the trouble to look. I am famished. Shall we make an early sortie into the supper room?”
“Lead the way,” Francis said, brushing an invisible speck from his pink arm.
“HARTLEY?” SHE LEANED ACROSS her empty breakfast plate and set her hand flat on the table, close to his.
He had been glancing through the morning paper. He looked up, set it aside, and smiled at her.
“Hartley,” she said, he
r best wheedling look on her face and a matching tone in her voice, “I have been thinking. My trunks are almost packed and I daresay yours are, too. The weather is good. Do we need to waste another day? Could we not start on our way home this morning?”
She wanted to be out of London. She did not believe she would ever want to come back, though she supposed that feeling might pass in time. She wanted to be home, back in that wonderful place where it had all started—her love affair with friendship. And with Hartley. She could not bear the thought of waiting even another day.
He covered her hand with his own—his right one, thin and crooked and ungloved. She had asked him not to wear his glove at home. There was no need, she had assured him, taking his hand in her own and raising it to her cheek and kissing it, the morning after she had massaged it for the first time. She had done so each day since.
“It will have to wait one more day,” he said. “I have a couple of pieces of business to attend to first. Tomorrow will come eventually, my love. And then we will have Highmoor and the summer to look forward to.”
She sighed. “And no one else can attend to this business for you?” she asked.
“I am afraid not.” He patted her hand. “And you will wish to say good-bye to Lady Brill.”
“I seem to have done nothing but say good-bye to her in the past month or so,” she said.
“Poor Samantha.” He smiled at her. “Take her shopping with you. Buy her something pretty, and yourself, too, and have the bills sent to me. Lady Thornhill has been known to complain, you know, even in my hearing, that there is nothing fashionable to be bought in Yorkshire.”
“You will be sorry,” she said. “I will spend your whole fortune.”
He chuckled and got to his feet before offering her his hand. “I will have to be going,” he said. “I have an appointment for which I cannot possibly be late.”
She pulled a face. “And so a mere wife has been put firmly in her place,” she said. “All she is good for is tripping out to shop for baubles.”
He chuckled again. “Scold me all day tomorrow,” he said. “You will have a captive audience in the carriage. Now I really must be going.”
Men and their mysterious “appointments,” she thought a few minutes later, alone with her maid in her room, preparing to call on her aunt. He had probably promised to meet the Duke of Bridgwater and Lord Gerson at White’s for luncheon, and that was more important than making an early start for home. Or than giving in to a wife’s best wheedling.
She did not really want to go out today. She dreaded that she would perhaps run into Lionel. Not that she would stay indoors merely to hide away from him. She had been rather proud of the way she had handled him the evening before—and enormously relieved to see later that Hartley was unharmed. She had rather expected a shattered nose and two black eyes, at the very least.
He had been very reticent about what had happened out in the garden after he and Francis between them had removed her from the scene of her triumph. He had merely assured her that she need not worry about Lionel’s harassing her ever again.
He had not—as she had half expected—asked her if she had finally got her feelings for Lionel sorted out. Perhaps her actions in the garden had spoken louder than any words.
And he had not—it had been a terrible disappointment—come to her bed last night. It had been the first time since their wedding. She had shed a few tears of self-pity and anger—he did believe she had gone out there to meet Lionel, despite what he had said at the time. Why had he not said so, then? She had done the unthinkable eventually. She had gone through to his room—she had never even set foot in it before—and stood by the side of his bed, shuffling and clearing her throat until he woke up. He had been sleeping.
“What is it?” he had asked, sitting up.
“I went out there to meet you,” she had said, her voice more abject than she had intended. “I was finding a secluded spot so that you could kiss me there.”
“Ah. I know, love,” he had said. And he had reached out and lifted her bodily over him and onto the bed beside him. There had appeared to be no lack of strength in his right arm. He had covered her with the blankets. His bed was soft and warm. “I did not doubt you for even a moment.”
“Then why—?” she had asked.
“I thought you would be as tired as I was,” he had said. “I did not realize my not coming would upset you.”
“It did not—” she had begun, but he had shushed her and then kissed her.
He had not made love to her.
It had not mattered. She had been asleep within minutes.
Well, she would go out, she thought now. The day would crawl by if she stayed at home. She would do as he had suggested and take Aunt Aggy shopping. She smiled and met her maid’s eyes in the looking glass. The girl smiled back. And she would spend a fortune, too. She was never a spendthrift. But today she would be. She would punish him horribly.
“No, my straw bonnet,” she said when her maid handed her a more subdued and more elegant one.
This was going to be a day of gaiety. She was going to enjoy her last day in London. Her last day for maybe a long, long time. This time next year she was going to be nursing a baby—no wet nurses for her, even if Hartley tried using his I-must-be-obeyed-without-question voice. And the year after next—well, she was sure the nursery at Highmoor must be far too large for one child. Probably even for two.
17
HE WAS GAZING DOWNWARD, TRYING TO BLOCK out both sight and sound, trying to concentrate. It was not easy. This particular sparring room in Jackson’s boxing saloon was crowded with eager spectators. He had told no one and Bridge and Kneller had just assured him that they had not. But Lionel, of course, would have no reason for keeping quiet about the fight and every reason to publicize it.
Barefoot and stripped to the waist, he felt woefully inadequate. He knew that in appearance, even apart from his twisted foot and hand, he was laughably inferior to Lionel, tall and splendidly built and beautiful in his corner with Viscount Birchley, his second. He was flashing his grin on all comers and loudly greeting every new arrival.
“It is a good thing you are punctual,” he called gaily to someone who had just arrived. “It will not be a lengthy entertainment. But then neither is a hanging.”
He had obviously liked that analogy the evening before and had thought it worthy of repetition.
Jackson had agreed—reluctantly—to a fight that would end only with the unconsciousness of one or other of the combatants. Normally very strict and very gentlemanly rules applied to the sparring bouts at his establishment. He had just finished explaining to both of them and their seconds and anyone else who cared to listen—there had been a dead hush in the room—that there would be a limitless number of rounds, each to last three minutes. There were to be no hits after he had called the end of a round or before he had called for the beginning of the next. All hits were to be cleanly above the waist.
“Pipe down, Jackson,” someone had called from the back of the room. “Your instructions are taking longer than the fight will last.”
Gentleman Jackson had fixed the offender with an iron stare and invited him to take his leave. It was a measure of the power he wielded within the doors of his saloon that Mr. Smithers rather sheepishly slipped away through the door and did not come back.
And now the fight was about to begin. The Marquess of Carew tried to concentrate, to remember everything he had learned over the past three years—though he had never expected to be using his skills in actual combat.
“Defend with your right and attack with your left,” Lord Francis Kneller advised him rather urgently. “Protect your head.”
“You will need to get in close, Hart,” the Duke of Bridgwater said. “He has a longer reach than yours and powerful fists. But protect your head. Keep your chin tucked in.”
“Go get him,” Lord Francis said. “Think of your wife.”
Poor advice. Very poor. He tried to concentrate on
the fight itself. A fight he could not win, perhaps. But one in which he must give a good account of himself.
“Round one,” Jackson said. “Begin, gentlemen.”
The marquess looked up and stepped forward to a swell of sound from the onlookers.
“Daniel and one of the lions,” some wit said.
“David and Goliath, more like,” someone else shouted from the other side of the room.
Lionel was grinning and dancing and waving his fists in a most unsportsmanlike way. He was making very little pretense of defending himself.
“Time to draw your slingshot from your belt, Hart,” he said. “See if you can get me right between the eyes.”
The next moment he was flat on his back on the floor while a roar of mingled astonishment and amusement went up from the crowd. And then murmurings of outrage and calls of “Foul!” and “Shame!”
Lionel roared with wrath as he scrambled to his knees. “What the bloody hell!” he shouted.
“Disqualification, Jackson,” Viscount Birchley cried. “The verdict goes to Rushford.”
“By God, Hart, splendid hit, old chap,” the duke said.
The bout appeared to have stopped.
“You were not listening, gentlemen,” Jackson said crisply. “The rule was that no hit was to be below the belt. That hit was full on the chin. The rule did not state that hits can be made only with the fists. The foot is a permitted weapon within the rules of today’s bout. Proceed, gentlemen.”
“I am not fighting a bloody contortionist,” Lionel said scornfully.
Since he was still on his knees, it took the marquess little effort at all to twist his right leg high enough to poke Lionel on the chin again hard enough to send him sprawling.
“Then yield,” he said coldly, “while you are still conscious. Before all these witnesses of yours, Rushford. And be stripped of what little honor you have remaining.”
Lionel scrambled to his feet and put himself in a far more respectful attitude of defense than before.