His friend, who had seated himself in a chair by the fire, called upon him to come and sit down.
“We have enough to discuss, Rick, and very little time in which to do it,” he remarked. “Why in the name of hell you should have embroiled yourself in such a manner as this I cannot think. We are all perfectly well aware that Aintree is a liar and a cheat, but there are others of our acquaintance who are not much better, and you have never thought it necessary to call them out. So why Aintree? And why now, when the situation is so devilish sticky about duelling?”
“If I kill him I can always go abroad,” the Marquis said gloomily, staring down into the fire. “And as I almost certainly shall kill him you can kiss me goodbye after tonight, Charles—at any rate for a couple of years.”
“Poppycock!” Charles returned. “You must be mad, man! The fellow is hardly known to you...”
“But his remarks were offensive,” Lord Capel said broodingly, still standing in the middle of the rug before the fire and staring down into the flickering blue flames. “Deliberately so! And they concerned a—an acquaintance of mine...”
“A woman!” Charles exclaimed contemptuously. “Not even a lady!”
“And how would you define the difference between the two?” the Marquis enquired, as if he was genuinely interested. He looked thoughtfully at his friend, who was an attractive rather than handsome young man wearing a cravat that had been nothing short of a miracle of achievement when it left the hands of his valet earlier in the evening, but was a little crumpled and askew after an hour or so in one of his favourite haunts. “In my experience there is none. They both make demands—and they are both equally undependable!”
“Then in that case why are you risking so much in defence of one of ’em?” Charles reasonably wanted to know.
The Marquis of Capel shrugged his splendid shoulders, covered in a coat of dark blue velvet. His white satin small clothes and white silk stockings gleamed palely like the wings of a moth through the gloom of the library, and watching him through her peep-hole Harriet was temporarily diverted by the novelty of observing him. She preferred the looks of the young man seated in the chair by the fire, but the Marquis was something completely new in her experience.
“Six months in some hideout in Paris, and the rest of the time spent rediscovering Europe? What is so very terrible about that?” he asked. “I have many friends on the Continent. I shall enjoy looking to them for hospitality. It will be some small return for the many occasions when I have entertained them at Capel.”
“But what of your family? Your father!”
“My father will be upset, of course, but the rest of my family will be merely diverted.”
“The Duke will be more than upset,” Charles Cavendish gave it as his considered opinion. He stood up, and it was his turn to start prowling restlessly about the room. “From all that I know of him he will be quite shattered, and at his age that will not be good for him. You are his heir, his favourite son—despite the fact that the two of you seldom if ever see eye to eye on anything. And all because of a drab—a lady of no account!”
He looked directly at the Marquis, as if daring him to challenge him to a duel, also, but Lord Capel merely smiled.
“Aren’t you inclined to overlook something?” he asked, the smile creating a glimmer like starshine in his intensely dark eyes, fringed with eyelashes that were even longer and more luxuriant than Lady Fanny Bingham’s.
“What?” Charles Cavendish replied.
“The possibility that Aintree might get me before I get him. He’s a marksman with something of a reputation—even in these days when such things are inclined to be hushed up.”
Charles made a gesture as if he discounted such a possibility. “If he has a reputation, you are acknowledged to be singularly deadly. Have you forgotten what happened when you were only twenty-one? You made quite a mess of that Italian rake who affronted your sister, and everyone expected you to be carried home on a bier. The Duke got you out of that slight awkwardness, but I believe it was only after exacting a promise that you would never become involved in such a manner again. Yet here you are now about to turn your back on your promise—on your word to your father! Upon my word, Capel, I think this is a pretty shabby thing you are contemplating, and the lady isn’t worth it. If nothing would induce you to marry her, why should you risk your life for her?”
“Because the risk, as you have been at such pains to point out, is small,” the Marquis replied.
His friend made a gesture with his shoulders which indicated that his patience was wearing very thin.
“Very well,” he said. “If you are really determined to go through with it—”
“I am.”
“Then I had better leave you, and Bob and I will make the necessary arrangements. I shall return in about an hour, and after that I would advise you to get at least a couple of hours’ sleep. No man is at his best after a wakeful night—and, in point of fact, I think you ought to—er—”
“Make my last will and testament? But it is already made,” Lord Capel assured him smilingly. “However, there are one or two brief notes I think I might leave behind me—and perhaps some expressions of regret to my father.”
His expression sobered, and for a brief moment a certain faintly melancholy air of regret seemed to alter the curious harshness of his otherwise beautifully chiselled features.
“Poor father!” he exclaimed, almost softly. “If Bruce had been his heir life would have been so much pleasanter for him—bereft of the constant agitations which undoubtedly affect his heart. When my mama was alive she prevented many wild rumours from reaching his ears, but nowadays there is only Fanny... and she is almost as unpredictable as I am!”
“One can’t help but feel a little sorry for the Duke of Coltsfoot,” Charles Cavendish remarked, tight-lipped. “But at least, as you say, there is always Bruce “And he succeeded in covering himself in so much glory during the recent campaign against Boney that his left leg has scarcely started to mend itself yet. He is nursing it at Hollowthorne, which I have lent to him for as long as he wants it. I had better put it on record that he can have it as a gift if I depart this life.”
His expression, for a man endowed by nature with so many startling attributes in the way of good looks and a voice which was quite singularly attractive even when heavily overloaded with sarcasm, caused Cavendish to pause on his way to the door and stare at him rather hard.
“There is nothing I can say,” he enquired, “that will cause you to change your mind?”
“Nothing, dear fellow.”
“Then in addition to one or two other things you had better say your prayers. Aintree will not just try to wing you.”
“I am well aware of that.”
The Marquis bowed in a slightly mocking way, and the door closed on his friend. But the sound of his footsteps was still reaching them from the hall when Harriet literally sprang forth from her place of concealment.
“But you cannot possibly do this thing!” she cried. “I cannot possibly let you!”
The Marquis turned and confronted her, putting up his quizzing-glass.
“Good Gad!” he exclaimed. “Who in the world are you? And where, if I may put such a question, did you spring from?”
CHAPTER
FOUR
Having been forced to endure her own society for so long, and to remain entirely silent during that period, Harriet burst into speech. Never in her life had she suspected that she was capable of such eloquence.
“I am sorry, my lord, but I am not here for any purpose that concerns myself, and I am painfully aware that my presence here in your own home is a quite astonishing thing. And, indeed, some people might say that I have behaved outrageously ... you yourself, very probably, even when you have heard why I am here. I should not myself feel inclined to look upon such an intrusion lightly, but there are occasions—there are occasions, my lord, when one finds oneself with no other course open to one!”
&nb
sp; “You alarm me,” Lord Capel remarked in a smooth tone. “On how many occasions do you think you will find it necessary to hide behind my window curtains?”
She made a little gesture with her hand, appealing to him, “My lord, you misunderstand me. I have no intention of concealing myself in this room again. But your butler must have acquainted you with my arrival this morning?”
“At what hour was that?” his lordship asked curiously.
“At about eleven of the clock, my lord.”
“Then it would have been more than his life was worth to acquaint me of anything. I was safe in the arms of Morpheus at that hour, and Pauncefoot is only too well aware of the particular kind of dire retribution that would be his should he be so unwise—so extremely unwise!—as to attempt to arouse me under such circumstances.”
“But he kept me waiting downstairs in the anteroom for fully another hour,” Harriet protested. “I understood it was because he was making some attempt to, er—urge you to see me.”
The Marquis shook his head slowly.
“Not my poor Pauncefoot. I would have had him shot at dawn for far less.”
The unhappy turn of phrase seemed to amuse him.
“Instead of which it is I who am to be shot at dawn,” he murmured. “Singular, do you not think?”
“I—I know that your lordship is contemplating something which has to be prevented.”
“But not by you, I’m afraid, my dear Miss—er—? You must forgive me if I am a little curious about your identity. Pauncefoot may be well aware of it, but I, unhappily, am not.”
“I am Harriet Yorke,” Harriet told him, not thinking it in the least strange that he hadn’t offered her a chair, since her method of calling upon him was a trifle unusual, and he had much on his mind besides. “I live in Sussex with Miss Verbena and Masters Robert and Ferdinand de Courcey, whose wellbeing I am responsible for—at least partially.”
“I see,” the Marquis murmured. “Sussex, you say? But who the deuce are Miss Verbena and Masters Robert and Ferdinand de Courcey? And why should I be troubled with their concerns at this time of night?”
“Because you are their guardian, my lord.”
“I—am their guardian?” Lord Capel put up a white and shapely hand to his brow in seeming confusion. He frowned very noticeably, his well-marked black brows meeting above the bridge of his exceedingly well-formed nose. So far as he could recollect he had drunk very sparingly that evening, and apart from that unpleasantness caused by a remark of Greville Aintree’s while they were playing cards, and his own reaction to it, and the knowledge that he must write a letter to his father, he had nothing very much else on his mind. But this young woman was causing him a distinct feeling of uneasiness. “Perhaps you will kindly explain to me how I can possibly be a guardian to anyone apart from my dog Rufus, and his latest bitch puppy?”
“Because you apparently agreed to accept them as your wards when approached by Sir Willoughby de Courcey. He died nearly six months ago.”
The Marquis of Capel began to look as if some slight glimmering of understanding was dawning.
“Good God, yes,” he agreed, “now you remind me of it... And I do seem to remember that you wrote to me at some time or other...”
“On three separate occasions, my lord,” she said with the very maximum amount of reproach in the words.
“And signed yourself Harriet Yorke. I wondered who the hell you were—”
“I explained most carefully in the letters, if your lordship had only read them.”
The shock of his proposed meeting with Aintree in the mists of an early April morning was passing slowly, and he began to be aware of a decided feeling of resentment and irritation because someone of whom he had never heard before, although he might vaguely have noted her name on a letter, had succeeded in doing a quite unpardonable thing, and was putting him through some sort of inquisition here in his own library. It was too much ... And with the minutes ticking away, and so much to be done. He recollected that she had said something about preventing his meeting with Aintree, and his ire rose further.
What an impertinent female! And a red-headed one, too! He had disliked red-headed females all his life, and only jades possessed green eyes—as green as a cat’s in the fireglow. Although, admittedly, in that drab pelisse and with those carroty curls escaping from beneath the brim of that decidedly unpretentious bonnet, she did not look like a jade.
He pushed a chair towards her.
“Sit down, Miss—er—Yorke,” he invited. “This intrusion of yours is most unfortunate, since I have much on my mind—as you must be very fully aware, having shamelessly eavesdropped behind my curtains.” Harriet turned rather pink, having very strong views herself on people who eavesdropped. “But the subject of the young de Courceys is one that I have faced up to on one or two occasions since their father, without any encouragement from me, I assure you, apparently left them in my charge. I will admit that I consulted my own lawyer on the matter, and he was all for making an issue of the thing; finding some means by which I could extricate myself from a situation which was not at all unlike becoming enmeshed in somebody else’s web.”
“But you must have been a very close friend of Sir Willoughby if you allowed him to prevail upon you to accept such a charge
“I give you my word I was nothing of the sort!” He flung a glance of such dislike at her that she began to feel a little alarmed, closeted as she was alone with him at that very late hour. “But I cannot go into the matter now, and moreover I do not intend to do so. I have other problems, much more—pressing, on my mind!”
“But the young people’s estate? Had you any idea that they are almost entirely without funds of their own?”
“Good God!” he exclaimed.
“And Verbena is growing out of her dresses, and Robert cannot even return to Oxford because there is no possibility of his being able to pay his fees! I think, my lord, that these are matters which most certainly you should pay some attention to.”
“Do you mean to tell me I have control of their money, too?”
“Weren’t you already aware of that?”
“I understood their father left something—” He flung away from her, in the direction of the massive desk in a comer of the room. He seated himself behind it, and groped for writing materials. “All this I will discuss with you on some other occasion.”
“But I am leaving London tomorrow, and—”
“And what?” he asked, regarding her with complete cynicism.
“If—if you are to engage in this—this duel, we have no idea at all what—what might happen to you “I have,” he assured her. “I shall be sitting here at this desk at this hour tomorrow night and destroying the letters I now intend to write—if you will very kindly leave me alone in order that I may do so. The servants will have retired to bed, but if you have no very great objection to letting yourself out—”
“But your friend,” she said hastily, rising and moving across the room until she stood at his elbow, “your friend, the gentleman who has just left, seemed to think there was no possibility that your adversary would—wing you. He seemed to think he would—kill you!”
“Unless I happen to kill him first!”
“But that would mean you would have to flee the country!”
“A somewhat poetic assessment of the opportunities open to me,” he commented. He rested an elbow on the desk and leaned his chin on his hand, and regarded her with a somewhat tired air of making a supreme effort to be patient with her.
“Will you go now, Miss Yorke, and if I am alive at this time tomorrow I will grant you a further interview.”
“But I would prefer to see and talk with you when it is daylight. It would be a little less unconventional.”
“Then you must accompany me to the spot where either I or my friend Aintree are to be despatched before our time. There will be several other people participating in the affair in order to make certain it is conducted on lines acceptable to gent
lemen, if not to the mealy-minded who make the laws of our country, and from your point of view there will be nothing incriminatingly unconventional about it. We could always explain,” with great dryness, “that my wards were not unnaturally anxious about me.”
She was about to protest further that she would not enjoy being an onlooker at a duel, when the front door bell pealed with alarming loudness, and Lord Capel rose and urged her to take refuge again behind her curtain.
“This will be Charles returning, accompanied, I have no doubt, by another of my friends and well-wishers—on this occasion, at least,” with some of the dryness he had used before. “Make sure that you remain well hidden, and whatever you hear do not interfere. That is an instruction I lay precisely upon you!”
When he returned to the library with Charles Cavendish and a young man wearing the uniform of the Coldstream Guards, all three of them were discussing the suitability of the contents of the long black case the young officer carried beneath his arm.
He set it down on the table in the library, and the three heads bent over it. On a bed of velvet, funereal in hue, lay a couple of handsomely mounted duelling pistols. Lord Capel lifted out one of them and balanced it on his hand. By his expression he obviously approved, and through her peep-hole near the window Harriet saw how the candle flames danced in the silver embellishments on the exquisitely slender weapon.
“These will do nicely,” the Marquis said. “These will do very nicely!”
The detachment in his voice, apart from a faint note of admiration, amazed Harriet. Men, she thought, were utterly unlike women. A woman in such circumstances could not have behaved with such utter calmness. She might even have been growing a little hysterical as the dawn drew that much nearer.
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