A Gentleman Undone (44 page)

“That won’t be necessary.” Ah. She hadn’t known she intended this. “I’m coming with you tomorrow to Primrose Hill.”

“Lydia …” Her name came out on a sigh. He was too weary, too preoccupied, to make a forceful argument. He was depending on her recognizing the absurdity of what she proposed.

“Don’t try to dissuade me. You must have known this might be the outcome, when you didn’t trouble to hide the viscount’s note. If you don’t let me come with you, I’ll go by myself in a hackney.”

“It’s a duel. It’s no fit place for—”

“No fit place for the woman who’s at the center of the dispute? No fit place for my delicate feminine sensibilities? Don’t even try to say so. Surely you haven’t forgot the highwaymen.” She would win this argument, because nothing else was left to her. The sooner he saw that, the better.

“I don’t want to quarrel with you. Not tonight.” His hair made a scrubbing sound on the pillow as he turned to face the ceiling again. His hand clasped steadfastly about her own.

And every proof of his affection—every reminder of all that might be taken from her before she’d properly learned to enjoy it—touched her heart like the cut of a lash.

“I’m going with you,” she repeated, in place of half a dozen things she couldn’t bring herself to say.

S
TARS HAD
just begun to dwindle against the the waning black of night when Cathcart’s carriage pulled up. Will helped Lydia in and then took his own seat beside the surgeon procured for the occasion, a dour-faced man who scowled over his spectacles at this unexpected distaff addition to the party.

Cathcart opened his mouth and closed it again. He raised his eyebrows, hard, at Will.

“It’s her concern.” He turned to stare out the window. On what might be the last morning of his life, he was in no mood to make explanations.

If he’d been able to slip from the rooms without waking her, the seat across from him would be empty now. But of course she’d chosen this day to finally rise ahead of him, and he found himself unwilling, still, to part with her on a quarrel. Well enough. If it was his lot to die today, he would at least have her at hand to be the last thing he saw.

The drive to Primrose Hill passed mostly in silence, or rather, passed in that absence of conversation that lent prominence to every incidental noise. The springs creaked, the wheels rumbled over cobblestones in counterpoint to the horses’ clopping hooves, and something in the surgeon’s bag gave an occasional metallic rattle.

He remembered this from the hours before combat, this bodily need to perceive every last insignificant sight and sound and sensation. The grim morning taste in his mouth, because he’d got up too early to have hope of even coffee in the breakfast room downstairs. The texture on the inside of his gloves, usually as unnoticeable as his own skin. The way light from a streetlamp would crawl from one side of the carriage to the other as they passed, bathing Lydia’s somber face and glinting off her eyes before leaving her to darkness once more. Today, of
all days, he could read her. But then again he’d authored what was there.

He reached for her hand and held it, devil take the two men watching, until the wheels and hoofbeats finally slowed and came to a stop. “I won’t interfere,” she said, though he’d been in no need of that promise. He stood, leaned over to press his lips to her forehead, and stepped down from the carriage, winding his muffler an extra turn about his neck. Devil of a year for someone to die, with this endless winter.

Night had given way to a meager dawn: he could see the layout of the place. Bare ground, clumps of straggling trees, a downhill slope that might afford a prospect of distant London rooftops, if the fog should ever lift.

“They’re here before us.” The viscount, at his elbow, nodded toward a landau some thirty feet off. “That’s his second, standing by the carriage. Kin of some sort.”

Indeed he might have guessed that himself, once he’d drawn near enough to make out the man’s features. He proved fairer-colored than Roanoke, but the eyes were similar and he had that same blockish quality about the chin. He inclined his square-jawed head, when Cathcart made the introduction, and said nothing. The expression on his face was very like the expression Lydia had worn all this morning.

Some small thing splintered somewhere in Will’s chest. Here was where a duel differed from battle, or from defending yourself against a band of highwaymen: there, you knew in an abstract way that your adversary likely had a mother or sister who would mourn his loss, but you needn’t
face
that person. You needn’t see their pallor, or the grim set of the mouth. Needn’t sense the effort they took to project an air of nonchalance while privately rehearsing for grief.

A vision shimmered, unbidden and unwelcome, of a summer day in his boyhood spent with his brothers out
of doors. Nothing of moment had occurred—they’d passed an afternoon in setting up targets and hitting them with rocks—but he prized the memory, as he prized a hundred other such memories of hours spent with Nick and Andrew. No doubt this fellow had golden-hued recollections of his own from a childhood in which Prince Square-jaw might have loomed as an admired elder.

Well, Square-jaw ought to have valued that admiration, then, and worked to stay worthy of it. Will excused himself; Cathcart and Roanoke’s second had details to sort out concerning pistols and the surgeon, and he’d caught sight of the opponent himself, leaning one shoulder against a tree a little way off with his back to the others. He’d put off his hat and greatcoat already, perhaps to make a show of his indifference to the cold. Not wise. His reflexes would pay a price.

He glanced up at Will’s approach and then put his hands behind his back, not quickly enough to hide the fact that they were shaking. Possibly due to the cold. But then his cheeks ought to be ruddy, not dull and wan as spent tallow.

Hell. Will dusted his own hands together. He had every right to fire a pistol at this coxcomb, and to enjoy whatever advantages nature and his experience had seen fit to give him. “You ought to put your coat on,” he said nevertheless. “Warm muscles will serve you better when the time comes.”

Roanoke jerked his head in a nod, eyes averted, but he didn’t move from the spot.

Confound him. Confound this whole cursed undertaking. Will shoved his hands deep in his greatcoat pockets. The pair of seconds had gone to consult with the surgeon now, and the carriage door stood open. Dimly he could see Lydia’s shape within. “Is it your brother who’s come with you?” The fellow really did
look like a more refined edition of the Roanoke template, as sometimes happened with the succeeding issue in a family.

Square-jaw nodded again, not turning that way. He brought a hand from behind his back just long enough to pass it across his mouth. One couldn’t help wondering whether he’d recently cast up his accounts. Then his eyes met Will’s. “He doesn’t know all the circumstances. If he should ask you—if this is the end of me, for instance, and he wants to know more of how it came about—you’d oblige me by omitting any mention of my striking Lydia.”

“Please to call her Miss Slaughter now.” Those words rang and rattled swift as a sword unsheathed, and if he’d
had
a sword, he couldn’t answer for what it might have done in that moment. “You’d descend in his opinion, you mean, if he knew you’d struck a woman.”

“He has notions of what’s proper.” Roanoke frowned at his feet, and rolled his shoulders one at a time against the cold. “I never hit her, you know, besides that one time.” He half-mumbled, though he must know his brother was well out of earshot. “And I don’t think I would have, if she hadn’t hit me first. Only it took me by surprise, and I didn’t stop to think and I forgot myself.” His weight shifted from one leg to the other and he adjusted his position against the tree.

“Are you making an apology?” He could see his own breath before him, small puffs of mist in the chilly air.

The man hesitated, and shook his head. Stupid stubborn bastard. Shaking and puking and pale as a ghost at the prospect of being fired upon, but ready to take a bullet rather than risk being thought a coward. “I never hit her before. I only wanted to say that.”

A number of responses rose up and subsided.
Do you think that signifies at all? Am I to forget that you were vile to her the entire time we were at Chiswell? Are you angling for a more lenient judgment in the afterlife, perhaps?—because I assure you your testimony makes no impression on me
.

He let his gaze drift back to the carriage, where he could see the gray of a cloak and a face in shadow. “You might speak to her, if you like. If you’ve anything to say to her.” Probably he oughtn’t to make this offer without her permission. Too late now. “She insisted on being present, since the duel was entered into for her sake.”

Roanoke straightened with surprise, and threw a furtive look toward the carriage before facing forward again. “I don’t see what I’d have to say to her. She knows I never hit her before.”

Will shrugged, and took a half step back. His muscles needed that outlet, and that distance, in order to sidestep the temptation to knock this obstinate lack-wit down all over again. “It’s none of my business what you have to say.” He tipped his head back and frowned at the sparse branches above. “Only I speak from experience. It’s a useful kind of tidying-up, an emptying of your pockets. You don’t like to go into battle with things hanging unreconciled, when they might have been reconciled.” One more half step back, one more lift of the shoulders. “Perhaps you haven’t got anything to say to her. I wouldn’t know. But if you have, then now’s the time to say it.”

Roanoke shot another look round the tree. He folded his arms, shoulders hunching against the cold, hands gripping tight to the opposite elbows. He inhaled, and for the length of the inhalation it seemed possible he would scrounge up what honor he possessed, turn on his heel, and go make some sort of account to Lydia.

Then he let the breath out, shaking his head. “I’ve nothing to tell her.” He fixed his gaze on a patch of ground several feet past Will’s boot.

Pathetic. Pitiful. Pitiable. Good God, was he really pitying this man? When had his clean, bracing contempt lost its shape and sagged into pity?

But he couldn’t help it. To see a man grope so feebly toward honor—and without doubt he did have some concept of the virtue, else he shouldn’t care whether or not he were tarnished in his brother’s eyes—but to see the fellow recognize, if only dimly, the standard of which he fell so far short, must necessarily pluck at the sympathies of any fair-minded man. He knew what it was, after all, to lose a brother’s good opinion. He knew about smothering a clamorous conscience. Didn’t he owe the keenest joy of his life, in fact, to the lapses and deceptions and willful transgressions that had brought this man’s own mistress into his bed and his arms?

Movement by the carriage snagged his attention: she’d stepped outside. Doubtless she’d noted the multiple glances cast her way by both men, and now she stood, just clear of the wheels, clutching her cloak against the wind, poised to approach if summoned. Her eyes held him as fast as they’d done that first night in the darkened library, but this time there was nothing of indifference in her gaze. For all her strength and steadiness he could see the ardent hope burning there. Even now she let herself believe he and Roanoke could be coming to some terms that would avert the duel.

The splintering sensation started up in his chest once more. This on its own might not have swayed him; even in tandem with that odd sunlight-shaft of pity, it might not have done. But his right thumb chose that instant to recall the hushed cadence of Talbot’s pulse, and that impression acted upon the other two like the final drop in an alchemist’s potion, or the prism that splintered a shaft of sunlight into something brilliant and new.

And now all was clarity, and decision, and action. “Listen, Roanoke.” He didn’t have much time. Cathcart
and the Roanoke brother had finished with the surgeon and pistols and were turning this way. “I’m going to delope.”

Square-jaw’s head jerked up, eyes wide, nostrils flared, disbelief writ large across his brow. To be sure it was a disgraceful act, deliberately missing one’s target. Apology was the honorable way out of a duel.

Well, hang that. After all he’d gone through, he’d surely wrested from life the right to decide for himself what was honorable. “The truth is I find myself uninclined to kill, this morning. If I could be certain of my aim I’d probably shoot you in the leg. But I don’t know these pistols.” Quickly. Here they came. “They might kick just enough to put a bullet in your vitals. Altogether I think it’s safer to aim away. Ah—is it time, then?” He swung away to address the seconds before Roanoke had a chance to reply. He wanted no reply. He’d made up his mind.

Prince Square-jaw was no more deserving of mercy than he’d been ten minutes since.
That
part hadn’t changed. Rather the shift had come in his perspective, as though he’d climbed some peak to look down on the terrain of his life and seen the duel from a different angle. He had the privilege and power of granting mercy, regardless of whether it was earned. And if he did this—if he waived his right to dispatch a worthless bounder—then his history would have an act of irrational grace to balance, in some small way, the memories of his helpless complicity in the death of a man who’d never deserved such an end.