A Gentleman Undone

by Cecilia Grant

  One quick glance around the clearing: they’d felled four. The fifth was gone, and the horses with him. “Cathcart.” The viscount stood arrested, staring at Lydia the way he might stare at some banshee dropped into their midst. “See if any of them are still alive, and bind any that are. Your men can cut the rope from the trunks.”

  He went to her. She didn’t look up, or slacken in her grim exertions, so he crouched. “Lydia.” This near, he could hear that she was panting. She gave no sign of having heard him.

  “Lydia,” he said, more forcefully. He might as well have been whispering into a whirlwind. He shifted behind her and wrapped his arms round, pinning her elbows to her waist, then stood, lifting her right off her feet.

  “Smash him.” Her voice shook with passion. She twisted, struggling to get free, but his grip was too solid. “Smash his face like you did those others.”

  “There’s no need.” No inclination, either. His appetite for violence never did outlive a threat. But he’d seen reactions like hers before, among his fellows in battle, and he’d heard of worse. Several of the more senior in his regiment had been at Badajoz, and come away with tales that could curdle a man’s blood. He bent his head to bring his voice closer to her ear. “He can’t hurt you, this man. You’re safe from him.”

  “You don’t know.” It sounded like a sweeping and final pronouncement on his character, and to be sure there were many, many things he didn’t know.

  Nevertheless he held her. Ignorant as he was, he stood with his arms locked fast, absorbing all her residual fury. His kneecap ached and his knuckles stung and his whole body felt the effects of two largely sleepless nights. But he was alive, and so was she, and so was the viscount. Easily it might have been otherwise.

  She didn’t speak again. Her body, too, went quiet at last, and he set her on her feet—she would want some time alone to collect herself—and went to see how Cathcart got on.

  “The one whose face met with your knee is the only one still breathing.” The viscount jerked a thumb toward where his footmen were just knotting a length of rope round the ankles of the form in question. “Well, that one and the bloody coward who ran away with the horses.” He laughed, a bit manically, passing the back of a glove across his forehead. “Thank God Miss Slaughter proved aptly named.”

  “One of the shots was yours, I think. I owe my life to you both.”

  Cathcart shrugged, and gestured imprecisely at one of the fallen figures without turning his eyes that way. His complexion wore a grayish tinge that Will had seen on other men more than once.

  “They would only have gone to the gallows, you know, if we’d left them alive.” Sometimes you put a hand on a man’s shoulder, in this moment. But the viscount was his elder, halfway in years between him and Nick, and possessed of a rather delicate dignity. Will flexed his fingers but kept his hand where it was.

  “Oh, I know. They deserved what they got. If one of them rose up alive I’d shoot him again. And still it’s …” He hesitated, jaw working as though to find the proper word. “… odd … to know you’ve ended someone’s life.”

  That it was. No getting round it. In this one matter, he had a great deal more experience than his older friend. “That you say so is testament to your humanity.” His hand lifted after all, just to glance lightly off Cathcart’s shoulder. “And I won’t do you the disservice of trying to persuade you into callousness. I’ll only suggest you turn your thoughts to Lady Cathcart and everyone else who would have been grieved if it were you instead of these villains lying facedown in the dirt.” He dusted his hands together. “Now let’s move this last fellow nearer the road. If he’s lucky his friend with the horses will come back and find him. If he’s less lucky it will be the law.”

  He couldn’t help glancing back at Lydia on the word lucky, just to see what might be her response.

  She didn’t respond. She stood just where he’d set her, arms wrapped round her midsection as though to steady herself in the absence of his grasp. For all her bravery, she’d surely been harrowed by the past quarter hour. They’d best finish up here and get her home.

  HE’D RELOADED the pistols, shaken powder from the horn into both pans, wrapped them in their flannels and put the whole box neatly away by the time they pulled into the outskirts of London. He had not found the proper words to say to Lydia in that time.

  I’m so sorry to have brought you into danger. I’m grateful beyond measure for your courage. Will I ever see you again after tonight? That their acquaintance might close this way—a near encounter with death followed by a polite farewell not twenty-four hours after he’d finally found release in her arms—made him want to put a fist through the nearest window. For pity’s sake, might he really fight a duel at the end of this week over a woman who’d be nothing but a vivid memory by then?

  The carriage swayed going round a turn, and her body leaned briefly into his before she was able to pull herself away and back upright. She’d brushed aside his and Cathcart’s every attempt at solicitude, insisting she had no need of brandy or a seat to herself. She was fine, she’d assured them, and then she’d pressed herself into the seat’s farthest corner and stared out into the dark.

  Clearly she was not fine.

  Well, why should she be? With everything she’d undergone in this one day it was a wonder she wasn’t curled up and raving on the carriage floor. So why the devil wouldn’t she let him help her?

  “Is there a friend with whom we can leave you?” Did she have any, besides the two ladies they’d left behind in Essex? “I fear your maid will be caught unprepared by your early return. She won’t have had a chance to light all the fires, or see to supper.”

  “She’s not there. I sent her to visit her family for the week.” She turned from the window. The carriage-lamps shed scarcely enough light to show her face, and of course her face showed him nothing. “And you’re not leaving me anywhere. I’m going to your rooms with you.” She sent her attention back to the dark outside, not waiting for his response.

  Her words gutted him, or rather the combination of her words with that flat, brook-no-dissent timbre he remembered so well. Devil take it all, were they really here again? After what they’d just borne together, after the honest intimacy they’d attained this morning, after he’d engaged himself to a duel with her damned protector on her behalf, could she really think to drag him through another antagonistic coupling?

  Cathcart watched him, one eyebrow raised. The viscount’s eyes cut to Lydia and back. She’s not well, said his face with mute eloquence.

  Yes, I know. And that’s exactly why I can’t just set her down at her empty house and drive off. He turned his hands palm-up, a gesture of quiet resignation. “Did you catch that, your lordship? My lodgings. One less stop for you.” He angled away to look out his own window. Lord only knew what would happen when they reached his rooms and she found out he wasn’t going to give her what she wanted. Doubtless they were in for a long night.

  SOMEWHERE IN the bustle of unloading the trunks and directing the porter, Cathcart pulled him aside. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” he muttered, throwing another significant glance to where Lydia stood, arms folded, surveying the facade of Lewes Buildings.

  “I’m almost sure it’s not.” A thoroughly inappropriate spasm of laughter threatened; clearly the events of the day were taking their toll on him too. “Only I don’t know what else is to be done. I’d have gone mad with worry if I’d left her off in Clarendon Square in this state.”

  He mightn’t have said so much, had he been in fuller possession of his faculties. Going mad with worry suggested a stronger attachment to Miss Slaughter than he’d so far owned, and the viscount’s expression made it clear he hadn’t missed that nuance.

  So be it. He was too weary to dissemble with a friend, particularly a friend who’d proved his worth more than once today. “Write to me when you’ve arranged matters with Roanoke.” He put out his hand, and the viscount shook it, and in another minute he was gon
e. Three or four minutes more, and Will was slipping a shilling to the porter in gratitude for his discretion as well as the work of hauling trunks and lighting the lamps and fires.

  Quiet descended as he shut the door and turned to put his back against it. Lydia stood facing away from him in the middle of the … parlor, one might call it. Sitting room. The room that was not the bedroom. He could imagine the sweep of her gaze across the plain curtains, plain unpapered walls, plain cabinet, and single stout armchair.

  He’d never been ashamed of his lodgings. Lewes Buildings was a bit on the Spartan side, perhaps, when compared to the Albany or any other first-rank bachelor-quarters, but there was nothing shabby in these rooms. Still, the rooms numbered only two. No pantry; no place to house a personal servant. If she’d harbored delusions of his keeping her, those fancies must be crumbling like slipshod plasterwork.

  “It’s nothing very grand.” He crossed to the table and set to clearing away the ink and paper, the few letters that sat there. Somewhere in the cabinet he had a tablecloth. Didn’t he?

  “It’s as I imagined.” He could see her face now, taking in his living quarters with keen attention. “Modest and well maintained.”

  It was exactly that. And of course she hadn’t harbored delusions. No hint of disappointment intruded on her quiet approval of his rooms. He put his papers and ink in the cabinet and came back for his jar of sand. “Are you hungry? There’s a public house round the corner that makes a fair pigeon-and-mushroom pie. I could fetch us a pair, and some ale.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Her expectancy rippled outward to fill the small room. “I presume that door leads to your bedroom?”

  Damnation. He’d hoped for a few peaceful minutes more. “It does. But Lydia.” Now for it. He put away his sand and faced her. “I’m not going to bed you tonight.”

  “Yes, you are.” Not even the slightest pause to absorb his refusal, nor any trace of uncertainty in her features.

  “I’m not. It’s been a long and trying day, and you, in particular, are in no condition for such—”

  “Neither was I in any condition last night, as I recall.” She shrugged. Her eyes hardened and left him altogether as she began to tug down her right glove. “Maybe you ought to have a drink. Claret seems to overcome your scruples quick enough.”

  One flash of temper, one quick knife-twist of guilt; then he recovered his resolve. “No.” He folded his arms and put his back to the wall. “I’ll stand here all night if you like, listening to every angry thing you can think of to say. I will bear as much acrimony as you care to deliver, if that does you good. Out here, though. Standing up. Fully clothed. I will not couple with you.”

  “You ought to have left me at my house, then.” She was starting to crumble. He’d taken away her plan of action and she clearly had no idea how else to proceed. Her glove slipped off her right hand and hung limp in her left. She stood still, blinking and pressing her lips tight together.

  It was all coming down on her now, he knew. The fear she’d held at bay in order to play her part with the pistols. The shock and humiliation of having been struck across the face by the man who kept her. The question of where she was to live, in a few days’ time, and how she was to provide for herself. Probably the old familiar losses were joining in as well, adding their practiced voices to the general dirge.

  He pushed off the wall and went to where she stood. “I think you ought to get into your nightgown and go to bed.” He took the glove, put it in his pocket, and started easing the second one off. Soothingly as he could, he spoke. “There’s nothing more to be done tonight. You’ll feel better when you’ve had some rest, and in the morning we can consult about what to do.”

  Her hand closed convulsively on his. “I won’t feel better. I won’t ever feel better again.” She stared past his shoulder, her words barely clearing a whisper.

  He waited for her to say more, and when she didn’t, he pried her fingers gently loose and drew off the glove. “It’s natural to think so, after such a day as you’ve had. Fear, in particular, has a kind of residue. But it does lose strength over time. Soldiers couldn’t very well come back to marry and raise families if that weren’t so.” Glove in his pocket, he moved round behind her. “With your permission I’ll unbutton your gown and unlace your corset. Only so that you may dress for bed. My intentions regarding your person haven’t changed.”

  Her head dipped forward, the back of her neck impossibly stark and vulnerable. The sight made him light-headed, his breath suddenly shallow. So easily he might have lost her tonight. If her pistol had misfired, if her aim had been less true, if just one highwayman had been a bit quicker in his reaction …

  No. That way lay madness. He bent his attention to her buttons, small flat bone-colored things with carved edges that pressed unevenly into the pads of his thumbs. Layer by layer, careful and chaste, he got her out of her clothing and down to her chemise. She could manage the rest without his help. He ought to withdraw to the bedroom and pour water into the basin so she could wash.

  She was so tired, though. Her shoulders sagged. She hadn’t made the least attempt to play on what she must know of his susceptibility as he’d undressed her. She hadn’t even spoken since confiding her fear that she’d never feel better again.

  Devil take it. He bent and lifted her into his arms. Her hand took a hold on his coat and her muscles all subsided against him, an acquiescence as gratifying as if it had been the first salvo of intimacy between them, rather than an overlooked piece of ordnance pitched in after the skirmish was well under way.

  He stood for a moment, eyes closed, breathing in her scent. If only … Truly, it didn’t bear thinking of. But they’d been near in station once, youngest son and youngest daughter in respectable families, both with unstained, marriageable souls. If he could have met her then … he might have one day lifted and carried her in just this fashion, over a threshold and—

  Madness, again. No use indulging those thoughts. The bedroom door stood partly open; he used his foot to swing it the rest of the way in. She lifted her head to view this room’s furnishings, shadowy shapes in the firelight. Chair, table, washstand, clothespress, and the bed, in all its austerity of black posts and white linen. He bore her there, and sat. If she asked what he thought he was doing, he would have no answer.

  Her hand tightened on his coat. Her head ducked against his shoulder. Where his arms met her, round her shoulders, at the back of her knees, he could feel the muscles tensing as though to shrink herself small. “I want to tell you something,” she said, and his heart began to race like a coursing hound.

  “You can tell me whatever you wish.” He tightened his hold.

  Twice she drew in breaths as though to begin speaking, only to let them out again. On the third breath, she managed it: “I spoke of my parents having died in an accident.”

  Hell. Suddenly he knew the rest.

  “In fact they were killed in a highway robbery. Murdered by men just like the ones we—” Her voice faltered and she pressed her face into his coat.

  He let out a long breath, and touched his chin to her bound-up hair. “Were you with them?”

  She shook her head, forehead brushing out a rhythm against the wool at his shoulder. “I was still recovering from the illness of which I’ve told you. They’d gone to look at a house, in another part of Lancashire. They intended …” She started trembling then, giving in to tears. “They planned to sell our house and move to a new neighborhood, where we could live among people who wouldn’t know …” Her hand let go his coat to swipe at her face. “Because of what I did, they would have had to give up everything familiar and start over among strangers. And because of what I did, they were on the road that night.”

  He gathered her in closer, close as he could. She shuddered like some hapless small prey seized in the very jaws of grief. “It was bad luck.” With his flesh he would absorb her every shudder, just as he’d absorbed her rage when he held her back from the body of the man she’d
shot. “Bad luck, and an evil act by villainous men. You’re not to blame.”

  “I’ve told myself that.” She let the reference to luck pass unchallenged. “But I don’t find any comfort in it.” She pressed her head against his coat as though she meant to burrow in there. “I try so hard not to think of what their last moments must have been.”

  “I know, sweetheart.” Everything he had went into those words. I know exactly how hard you have to work to keep that out of your thoughts. He knew how banished memories, banished images hovered, only waiting to spot some breach in your defenses by which they might slip in. “Your nightmares …”

  She nodded against his shoulder. “I think I’ve seen their end a hundred times or more.” She was breathing in gulps now, not well able to talk.

  “I’ve lost my own parents, as I told you.” His left arm braced her shoulders and his left hand stroked her upper arm, a painfully paltry gesture of reassurance. “My mother in childbed when I was ten; my father after a long illness some few years ago. It’s difficult enough when it comes of a natural cause. No one should have to bear what you’ve borne.”

  Should. That was the flimsiest of notions, wasn’t it? Like pebbles from a slingshot against a raging tidal wave. Things happened to people, and they bore them, or failed to bear them, and should really played no part in the matter.

  She pressed the heels of both hands to her eyes. “I didn’t bear it, truly. I wasn’t strong enough.” A hesitation. Her voice sank near a whisper. “I wanted to … quit life altogether.”

  “Did you …” He swallowed. “Did you make any attempt to …” And then he saw. “Of course you did. You went to work in a brothel.”

  Again she nodded. “I thought I would catch the pox, at least. I thought the suffering might … cleanse me even as it consumed me. Like fire.” For a moment she was silent, studying her own hands. “I was ignorant.” She wiped her palms together and let her hands fall.