“No, of course not!” she exclaimed hurriedly, in horror. The expression in her eyes convinced him that he had shocked her profoundly. “Why should I wish to see you killed, my lord? I hardly know you, for one thing,” she pointed out.
“True,” he admitted, “but you could have been acting in the interests of those de Courcey brats. You thought perhaps that if I was out of the way—”
“I thought nothing of the kind! I assure you, my lord, I thought nothing—nothing of the kind!” She felt herself turn slightly cold because he could even think such a thing of her. “I only thought that—that perhaps I could prevent you, whom I understood to be an almost fatal shot, from killing—from killing—”
“One of the most experienced and deadly duellists in Europe?” He lay gazing up at her cynically. “Because that is what he is! The unfortunates whose days he has abruptly terminated make up quite an impressive list! I was very well aware of it when I issued my challenge to him last night. And perhaps that was one excellent reason why I issued my challenge. But I did not intend to kill him!”
“Then what purpose was there in your meeting him at all?”
“Ah, there speaks the daughter of Devil Yorke!” A faint relish stole about the curves of his handsome mouth, and he even bestowed upon her a look of mild approval. “Why endanger your own life if there is no rhyme or reason? Why do anything quite so foolish, even reprehensible, with a young lady like yourself on hand to reverse the possibilities! And in all truth I must admit I cannot give you a concise answer as to why I took such particular exception to his vulgarity last night.”
“Except that it concerned a lady? A friend?”
“Yes; a lady—and a friend!”
“And you would have done as much for any other—friend?” A glittering, amused smile appeared beneath his heavy lids.
“It is—possible.”
“I doubt it, my lord. I think the lady must mean more to you than—than perhaps you yourself are prepared to recognise...”
“Or perhaps I was simply foxed?”
“If you mean drunk, my lord, then in my opinion you were not at all drunk.”
“And you have a large experience of drunken gentlemen?”
“Of course not,” and she actually blushed a little.
He eyed the blush approvingly.
“Do you know, Miss Yorke,” he said suddenly, conversationally, “you are a most attractive young lady? Apart from being the daughter of the devil you have quite a few other things to commend you... And suffering acutely, as I am, it is amazing I can make such an admission! You attempt to interrupt the progress of a duel, you take on the nursing of a sick man, you are prepared to argue on any and every occasion—”
“No, sir,” she assured him, quietly, laying a hand gently once more on his brow. “I am merely trying to keep your lordship in a reasonably calm frame of mind while you await the attentions of your manservant. To divert you is important if it prevents you fretting overmuch. And if Fetcham does not arrive soon I really will have to call a physician—”
“You will do nothing of the kind.” He caught hold of her hand and held it tightly. “Fetcham will be here at any moment now,” which was an optimistic attitude he had not shown before. “But do you know of one thing about which I am now reasonably certain?”
“No, my lord?” She gazed at him in an enquiring way.
“If you had not jogged my elbow as you did, with the intention of preserving Aintree’s life for him, I might now be dead! I might now be very dead indeed! For had you not jogged my arm that ball, which was intended for my heart, would have found its mark, instead of merely burying itself in my arm. So you see, Miss Yorke, that although you may well be responsible for the demise of Aintree, you are the daughter of the devil to whom I owe my life?”
“Oh, no!” she gasped—not because she was shocked at having saved him, but horrified by the extent of the danger to which he had come so close. “Oh, no!” she repeated.
The Marquis of Capel smiled.
“That is what I think,” he said. “And indeed I am pretty sure of it.”
Voices sounded on the stairs—the voice of Captain Markham’s landlady, and what must without doubt be the voice of the Marquis’s valet. Slightly raised, and obviously prepared to engage in altercation on the smallest provocation, it was insisting on its owner being shown upstairs to the captain’s rooms with the minimum amount of delay.
“Of course, sir,” the landlady replied, a faint note of awe in her tones as if she was greatly impressed by this very fine example of a very fine gentleman’s gentleman. Yet when the door was opened, and Fetcham actually appeared in the bedroom—encumbered by such an extraordinary assortment of luggage that he found it rather difficult to negotiate the somewhat narrow entrance to the room—Harriet was amazed because he was such a slight and insignificant little man, wearing a distinct expression of anxiety, and with a somewhat harassed expression besides as if he had recently been put to no small amount of personal inconvenience.
He slammed the door smartly on the landlady, thereby ensuring that she saw nothing at all of the illustrious occupant of the bedroom, and advanced to the side of the bed with his many burdens still clutched to his minute person.
“Sorry, m’lord,” he gasped, plainly out of breath, “but I couldn’t get here no sooner on account of it being a bit awkward to get all this stuff out o’ the ’ouse without Pauncefoot wantin’ to know where I was takin’ it. He was hanging about in the hall, and Janies, too, and I had to smuggle it out the back way—”
“Yes, yes,” the Marquis replied peevishly, “but even so you’ve taken an unconscionable time getting here. Didn’t Captain Markham make it clear to you that the situation was urgent?”
“Oh, yes, m’lord.” Fetcham wiped his brow with a violently spotted handkerchief, and stared across the bed with open curiosity at Harriet. “He did that, m’lord, and at first I thought it was one of his jokes—you gettin’ the worst of it! I just couldn’t believe it, knowing how handy you are with any sort of firearm. It must have been one of your bad days, m’lord.” He bent over the victim and, as Harriet had so frequently done in the past few hours, laid his hand on his forehead. He frowned. “You’ve got a regular fever, me lord. I’ll have to have a look at that arm of yours.”
“Then bring me a very large brandy first,” ordered the Marquis. “Very large!”
But Fetcham shook his head.
“From the smell of your breath, m’lord, you’ve had more than enough of that stuff already,” he offered it as his opinion. “But afterwards we’ll see.”
The bright, birdlike glances of open curiosity he was continually shooting at Harriet caused Lord Capel to explain her presence in as brief and pettish a way as he knew how.
“You can trust Miss Yorke, Fetcham,” he assured him. “She’s not likely to faint if you open me up and flood the room with my blood. But, on the other hand, she’ll give you a good set-down if you do anything she disapproves of.”
Far from arousing any natural antipathy in Fetcham, this recommendation appeared to satisfy the manservant. He nodded at Harriet in an unreservedly pleasant manner, said: “In that case, miss, I’m glad to know you,” and ordered her to get a grasp of the Marquis’s free hand in case he tried being awkward while the bandage was being removed. And later, while Fetcham went to open up a small case of surgical instruments which he had brought with him and selected those he needed with infinite care, and the nasty raw wound in the Marquis’s arm was exposed to view, Harriet urged the recumbent figure to avert his eyes from the unpleasantness of the sight, and once again earned the approbation of Fetcham.
“That’s right, miss, keep his heart up!” he approved. “It’s amazin’ how gentlemen can turn faint at the sight of a hole in their own arm, though they don’t mind makin’ holes in other people’s,” with the very mildest note of rebuke in his voice as he looked down at his master. “And from what Captain Markham said to me this morning the other gentleman in t
his case ain’t feeling exactly happy at this moment.”
Lord Capel gritted his teeth.
“Get on with it, Fetcham,” he urged.
“Very good, m’lord, I’m getting on with it,” Fetcham replied.
When it was all over, Harriet released the Marquis’s fingers and felt herself becoming a little faint. Lord Capel’s assertion that she would refrain from showing weakness whatever occurred was not entirely deserved, and the aftermath of the manservant’s extraordinarily skilled probing, which resulted in the final extraction of the bullet, was enough to shatter the confidence of the most stout-hearted young woman of her years. While the Marquis was actually in need of her support, and the bruising effect of his hold on her actually numbed her fingers, she was not in any danger of sliding into a little heap on the carpet; but once it was over, the patterns in the carpet began to waver before her eyes, and as for Lord Capel’s face—white and drawn and a little blue about the lips—it was for one moment blotted out of her comprehension.
“Fetcham,” his lordship called faintly, “you’d better give Miss Yorke a tot of brandy. She looks to me as if she needs it.”
“Just what I was about to do, m’lord,” the imperturbable Fetcham replied, and put a wineglass into Harriet’s hand. She gulped at it gratefully, and then choked a little.
“I’m so sorry,” she gasped. “I’m not used to—to spirit.”
“Nor assistin’ at operations o’ this kind, I’m sure, miss,” he replied, bestowing upon her an almost paternal glance of approval. “But takin’ all that into account, and makin’ proper allowance for you being a female, I must say I wouldn’t have minded havin’ you at my elbow on more than one occasion when I was doin’ similar things at Orthez. And having said that, I’ve said a good deal, believe me, miss!”
“Hear, hear,” came somewhat sarcastically, but in not quite such a faint tone, from the bed. “You’ve won the accolade of Fetcham’s full and unreserved approval, Miss Yorke,” the Marquis told her.
Taking another, rather more furtive, sip at her brandy, Harriet set the glass down and approached the bed once more. “And you, my lord?” she asked. “How are you feeling?”
“Very much as you were feeling just now—only worse,” the Marquis told her.
“But the bullet is out, and the wound is quite healthy. You will recover very soon,” Harriet assured him, making fluttering movements with her hands and straightening his pillows.
The Marquis smiled up at her.
“I really am grateful,” he said a little huskily.
“And now, I’m afraid, I will have to leave you.”
But he caught her arm and held it with bruising fingers. “You’ll do nothing of the kind!” he astonished her by telling her. “If you think I’ve survived all that I have just suffered to lose my nurse at a moment when I am sadly in need of all the tender care and ministering she can provide me with, then you will, Miss Yorke, have to think again I’m afraid, I should have a relapse immediately if you left me to the mercies of Fetcham in this dismal apartment,” glancing around it as if he had conceived a quite disproportionate dislike of it and its very obvious comforts. “I intend to leave here at the very first moment that we can put some practical plan into action, and you, Miss Yorke, will go with me! Come here, Fetcham!”
Fetcham approached the bed, and waited for his master’s orders.
“Tell that woman downstairs to send up a tray of tea and something light to eat for Miss Yorke, and while she is recovering her energies you must collect what luggage she has deposited at some address she has been staying at in Paddington—bring it back here to Albemarle Street. After that you must arrange for a carriage to be here around about the hour of midnight, when it should be safe to set forth, and Bob Markham’s inquisitive landlady will have retired to bed in her curlers, and we will make for Hollowthorne, where my brother Bruce will be the only human we need contact who will not endanger us—or, rather, me! And I think he’ll be able to vouch for his physician, too, if I should need one.”
Fetcham regarded him quizzically.
“And you really think you’ll feel up to it, m’lord? Such a journey as that! After all that poking and probing you ’ad to put up with just now?”
“Of course I’ll feel up to it,” Lord Capel assured him impatiently, his impatience bringing rather a hectic flush to his cheeks. “I have no alternative course open to me.”
“And the young lady?” One of Fetcham’s eyebrows cocked upwards quite comically, and Harriet felt a flush rising to her cheeks also. “Won’t it be rather like kidnapping her, m’lord? Especially if she don’t agree!”
“I really must return to Paddington,” Harriet began urgently, but his lordship’s long, slender fingers were still clinging so tightly to her sleeve that the seam of it was threatening to come apart. “And there are the de Courceys—”
“To hell with the de Courceys!” Lord Capel dealt with them summarily.
“But it will be so highly inconvenient ... So completely unconventional!”
“Fiddle-faddle!” His lordship looked up at her with blazing, appealing eyes. “I have no use for convenience or convention, if it comes to that. And you owe me so much! If you devoted a whole lifetime to me and my service you could not repay what you owe me!”
Harriet recoiled a little.
“But only a short time ago you said that I saved your life...”
“I was delirious,” the Marquis replied coldly.
“Then you must be even more delirious now,” looking as it' she was very much alarmed. “What you are suggesting is quite—quite extraordinary! And I am not even a nurse ... I have no real knowledge of nursing, apart from the exercise of a little common sense. And your lordship requires someone to attend to you who is skilled and capable and—and—”
“Stay with me!” His lordship lifted himself on to his elbow, and the colour was receding fast from his face. “If you don’t I shall burst open my wound and sink into a decline, and all that will be on your conscience, which is burdened enough already.”
“But, my lord—!”
“As a matter of fact,” Lord Capel continued, casting his eyes up to the ceiling as if he was appealing for a divine dispensation on her behalf, “if I had your conscience, and were a member of your unfortunate sex, I would be thinking of going into a retreat until such time as I had either expiated my crime with much prayer and fasting, or accepted as an alternative the more human and merciful way of atonement which would lead me to the care and comfort of the sick. I am inclined to feel strongly that the latter is your only worthwhile course.”
“You mean the care and comfort of yourself, my lord?” Harriet enquired with a good deal of dryness.
“Ex—actly,” the Marquis replied, his voice becoming so very faint that it was an indication he was about to collapse.
Fetcham, with a mixture of perplexity and concern on his face, leaned across the bed to her and spoke urgently.
“Don’t agitate him, miss. We’re going to have a bad enough time with him as it is. And once he takes a notion into his head he don’t get rid of it easily. I think he really will burst open that wound if you won’t go along with what he says, and he can’t afford to lose no more blood.”
“Oh, very well.” Harriet removed the pelisse she had only recently donned, and sat down again very primly beside the bed. “But it is very much against my will,” she added, addressing herself to the impervious face on the nest of lace-edged pillows. “Very much against my will, and Fetcham, I hope, will bear me out on that point should it ever become necessary—should such a small matter as my reputation become involved in this quite extraordinary affair!”
“Oh, certainly.” The Marquis opened one eye and smiled at her, and for the first time it struck her that he could, when he felt like it, smile in a manner which had a quite extraordinary sweetness and amiability about it—quite unlike the arrogance which settled round his mouth when he was in complete control of a situation, or the petul
ance reflected in his slumbrous dark eyes when he was even mildly frustrated. “Fetcham will give you his word on that, won’t you, Fetcham? And do any amount of vouching for the excellence of your reputation should it become necessary!”
Fetcham mumbled awkwardly:
“If you say so, my lord. Although the young lady and I haven’t met before today.”
“It might surprise you to know, Fetcham,” the Marquis informed him, “that until very late last night I hadn’t met the young lady! But now that she has become indispensable to me—oh, very temporarily, shall we say?—I feel that I have known her throughout the course of several lifetimes.”
Harriet merely stared straight ahead of her, as if endeavouring not to listen to ramblings such as this, and Fetcham said hastily that he would consult the landlady about the tea. And he added that if she would provide him with her address in Paddington he would set about the collection of her luggage.
“There is merely a small holdall, which is all I shall require in any case,” Harriet informed him unwillingly. “And will you please inform my friend that I shall be in touch with her by letter?”
“Merely a small holdall,” the Marquis murmured, echoing her, when Fetcham had left the room. “That sounds to me like a remarkably pitiful wardrobe for a young lady of so many pretensions.” He was obviously becoming drowsy, and about to drift off into sleep. “It would be interesting to do something about it one of these days,” his words becoming slurred.
The Devil's Daughter Page 6