A Gentleman Undone (45 page)

Besides, he’d be doing a kindness to this fair-haired younger Roanoke who stood before him now, proffering the pistols and reminding everyone of the agreed-upon terms. One shot apiece, simultaneous fire, and a misfire counted as a shot. Cathcart said something too, as to the surgeon and his qualifications and the steps they would
take to avoid notice by the law in the event there was need for medical treatment. He’d proven himself a surprisingly generous and dependable friend, the viscount had. He’d see his goodness repaid, if he didn’t mind friendship with the husband of a demimondaine—and if, of course, Roanoke didn’t choose to fire on a man who’d already told him his own shot would go wide.

His heart pounded, robust and regular, as he took a pistol and followed to the patch of ground the seconds had picked out. If he was mortally wounded he would have a devil of a time explaining, with his dying breaths, why he’d declined to inflict a wound in his turn.

Never mind. To condition his deloping on an assurance of his opponent’s doing the same would have been but a timid gesture. And a dueling-ground was no place for timidity.

Twenty paces. He took the left-hand direction, because that was the one that would leave him facing Lydia, and when he set his feet he had a good long look at her.

She’d let go her cloak, to bring her arms straight down at her sides. Her hands were balled into fists. Her chin jutted at a deliberate angle, as though to emphasize to any viewer how she did not shrink from the scene. Her eyes glittered like a mishap in a chemist’s workshop, quicksilver mingled with broken glass.

I love you for your quickness and your brokenness and your sharp edges too
. Let her read that in his eyes, on his face, in every part of his body even as his right arm rose and extended straight out to the side, pistol in hand. He turned his head to the right, sighted down his arm, and bent his elbow in close. Forty paces away Roanoke was doing the same, and somewhere out of his view one of the seconds was counting down.

Let happen what would. He angled his face for a sight
of Lydia again, for one more draught of that fierce, irregular beauty. She saw him look away from his target, saw the sudden slant of his wrist, and as the powder flashed and the pistol kicked he was conscious of nothing but her smile, spilling out across her face with such warm incandescence as put the sunrise to shame.

Epilogue

T
HREE MONTHS LATER

I
’M FAIRLY
certain your parents will think better of this someday. Such a connection does no credit to any young lady.” Lydia kept her voice down, as the parents in question were walking several paces behind. Miss Mirkwood, to whom the words had been addressed, received them with an expression of as much sagacity as an infant could manage, while occupied with cramming her own bonnet strings into her mouth.

Of course she’d heard this admonition before, more than once. Lydia took care to repeat some version of it every time she saw the child. If the Mirkwoods eventually came to their senses and cut the connection, she would at least have been prepared.

“However, provided they continue so careless in these matters long enough for you to reach a reasoning age, I shall teach you a great deal about playing cards. A little skill at vingt-et-un can make a lady’s fortune in more ways than one.” Miss Mirkwood must wonder, if she understood the words, what kind of fortune brought a woman down into this neighborhood, all narrow streets
and ramshackle buildings and every offensive smell of close city living mixed with every foul odor that came off the river. “Are you quite sure you want to go on?” Lydia said over her shoulder. “If you’d rather, you could wait back a block or two with the baby and I could go the rest of the way on my own.”

“Not at all. Mrs. Mirkwood is fond of squalor.” That lady’s husband flashed his perfect teeth—some women did prefer that kind—in a smile of such mischief as ought by rights to try a serious-minded wife’s patience.

But other people’s marriages were things of mystery, and to have her patience tried seemed to suit Mrs. Mirkwood very well. “I take an interest in the
alleviation
of squalor, as must any country landowner.” She had her brother’s disarming direct gaze as well as his dark-chocolate eyes. “Poverty doesn’t belong only to the city. I expect I’ve seen enough, in Sussex, to prepare me for whatever we encounter on this walk. That is what Mr. Mirkwood meant to say.”

“Precisely what I meant to say,” agreed her husband, just as satisfied to be corrected by her as she was to be teased by him. “We fear nothing. Lead on.”

So on she led them, past dockworkers staggering out of public houses, harlots soliciting sailors flush from the last voyage, children chasing after drays in hopes some merchandise might tumble off into the street. She would never have been easy in this neighborhood, if she’d remained respectable. She would have missed so much.

A thrumming started up in her chest as the stones underfoot gave way to the timber of the massive dock, with its warehouses and offices and ongoing bustle of industry. A small crowd of emigrants thronged ahead of her, waiting for the boats that would ferry them to one of the ships moored out in the river proper. She wove through their ranks, one Mirkwood on her hip and two more in tow, and cut right to arrive at the office that had
been their destination. The door stood open and she paused, on the threshold, just to look.

Her husband stood at a table directly in line with the door, coatless, cuff-buttons undone and sleeves pushed up to the elbows. His palms lay flat on the tabletop, at either side of a document in which he was absorbed, and as he leaned forward, head bent, hair falling over his brow, the beauty of his forearms alone was enough to make her dizzy.

At his right was a man she recognized as the ship’s first mate, explaining something at which he nodded with that easy authority that must come from his time leading soldiers on the Continent. He glanced up to ask the crewman a question, caught sight of her, and smiled.

His smile—and with all due respect to Mr. Mirkwood,
here
was what a man’s smile ought to be, crooked and imperfect and crammed with character—made all her innards bloom like flowers under a tropical sun.

So had she bloomed under his smile that morning on Primrose Hill, in the instant when she understood he’d chosen to leave Edward standing. Granted she would have killed Edward herself if he’d been so craven as to answer that clemency by inflicting even a flesh wound—but she hadn’t had to. Something had bloomed in Edward, too, at least for the span of time it took him to fire at the ground and mutter a few imprecations on shoddy pistols and how they kicked. Such was the influence of a nature like her husband’s.

“Bringing the gentry in to gawk at those of us who labor for our bread, are you?”
Just one moment
, said the gesture he made to the crewman as he came from behind his table. “I don’t know but we ought to charge admission. Sixpence, or a firstborn child.” Miss Mirkwood had by now spied him and was reaching out her arms; he hoisted her neatly from Lydia’s hip to a perch on his shoulder. “What say you, Fuller?”

Mr. Fuller, at his own desk by the east wall with its windows, had come to his feet. “All order in my account books is owing to Mrs. Blackshear. She may bring in whatever visitors she likes.” He directed a bow toward the Mirkwoods. He’d met them, of course, at the wedding breakfast. And he was exaggerating about the account books, but she could let that pass.

Happiness still felt, at odd moments, like something with which she oughtn’t to be trusted. A delicate and costly music box put into the hands of a maladroit child. Yet happiness felt, too, like a prize she and Will had fought for and seized. An edifice they’d built with their own bare hands out of the scrap heap of mistake and misadventure.

There would never be any but borrowed children to sit atop her husband’s shoulder. They must live modestly, with tradesmen for neighbors and only a slight income from what remained of their winnings to supplement his wages. Their friends would probably always be few. And still, knowing what she knew—what they both knew—of fortune and misfortune, the bounty of their life together seemed sometimes almost too much to bear.

“Don’t let us interrupt.” She advanced a step or two farther into the office, yet another improbable place where she’d begun to feel at home. “Mr. and Mrs. Mirkwood have come to town on business, and called to invite us to dine with them. I said I’d carry the invitation to you and they proposed to come along.”

“Excellent.” He sent her insides spinning with one more smile as he shifted himself toward the crewman again. “Give me a minute to finish here and then I’ll show you all about the place.” And on he went with his business, one hand steadying the child on his shoulder just as though that were the ordinary way to conduct these things.

Hours later he still glowed with the pride and pleasure of having his work thus acknowledged by what family remained to him. Stretched out in her bed, sated by the six courses they’d enjoyed in Brook Street that evening and at least temporarily sated in other appetites as well, he looked as though sparks might jump from his skin to set the sheets ablaze.

“Lydia,” he said. “Mrs. Blackshear.” He gave the words a moment to shimmer in the air between them as his eyes roved over her face. “You know I have reason to disbelieve in the benevolence of Fate.”

“I know. So do I have reason.” It was the most sober of their intimate bonds. She lifted a hand to rasp her fingertips on his unshaven cheek.

“Then how do we account for this? How do
you
account for it?” He caressed without touching her, through his voice and his bay-rum scent and his reliance on her reason. “That we should have found each other. That of all the epochs in which to be born, our souls should both have chosen this one, and that we both should have been in England, when it might have been me in France and you in China.”

“That we both survived to adulthood.”

“Exactly. That’s no small accomplishment.” He was caressing with his hand now as well, following the curve from her lowest rib to her waist to her hip. “That one outrageous circumstance after the next should have led to our both being in the same gaming club on the same night.”

“And that you didn’t wash your hands of me after I fleeced you that first night.”

“That too, yes.” A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “The odds against our being in this bed together, happy in the life we have, must be nearly beyond human reckoning. And yet here we are. How are we to understand it?”

“Some of the odds can be reckoned. If we begin, for example, with the numbers of people presently living in each country of the world, and if we could arrive at an approximate count of all people who have
ever
lived …” But that was the wrong answer. She knew, not from any change in his expression—he only watched her with a fondness that made her vision go hazy—but because the right answer was suddenly there, square in the middle of her thoughts.

“Luck,” she said, and meant it. “I think we must ascribe it all to luck.”

With thanks to Laura:
repository of medical knowledge,
tireless supporter,
all-weather friend

B
Y
C
ECILIA
G
RANT

A Lady Awakened
A Gentleman Undone

If you loved
A Gentleman Undone
,
you won’t be able to resist

A Woman Entangled

The next breathtaking novel from Cecilia Grant
Coming Spring 2013

Read on for a sneak peek
at this unforgettable story …

F
EBRUARY
1817, L
ONDON

D
ISCOMFITURE, FOR
all that it felt like a constant companion, never failed to find new and inventive guises in which to appear.

“I’d like to take out
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, the first volume.” Her sister’s voice soared into every corner of the lending library, all but rattling the bay window in whose alcove Kate had taken refuge. “I’m engaged at present in a work of my own that will build on Miss Wollstonecraft’s foundation. Where she restricted herself to theory, however, and broad societal prescription, I address myself directly to the individual woman of today, arming her with practical methods by which she may begin even now to assert her rights.”