this was a bad dream. Although...could one faint in a dream? The room was beginning to spin and close in...
She closed her eyes and took a deep, steadying breath. Fainting would not help. When she opened them again Lord Hainford was still there, frowning at her. The crumpled shirt was still at his feet. Francis had still not come home.
‘This really is not a dream, is it?’ she asked.
‘No. I am afraid not.’ Simply a nightmare.
Blake saw the colour flood back into Miss Lytton’s cheeks with profound relief. Things were bad enough without a fainting woman on his hands and, ungallant as it might seem, he had no desire to haul this Long Meg up from the floor.
Her figure went up and down, with the emphasis on up, and showed little interest in anything but the mildest in-and-out. Even so, his ribs had suffered enough, and lifting plain women into his arms held no appeal.
He studied the pale oval of her face, dusted with a spectacular quantity of freckles that no amount of Lotion of Denmark, or even lemon juice, would ever be able to subdue. Her hair was a bird’s nest—a flyaway mass of middling brown curls, ineptly secured with pins. The wide hazel eyes, their irises dark and dilated with shock, were probably her best feature. Her nose was certainly rather too long. And there was the limp... But at least she had managed not to swoon.
The girl came back with a tea tray and he gestured abruptly for her to pour. ‘Put sugar in your mistress’s cup.’
‘I do not take sugar.’
‘For the shock.’ He took a cup himself and gulped it sugarless, grateful for the warmth in his empty, churning gut.
The maid went and sat in a corner of the room, hands folded in her lap. He could feel her gaze boring into him.
Miss Lytton lifted her cup with a hand that shook just a little, drank, replaced it in the saucer with a sharp click and looked at him.
‘Tell me what happened.’
Thank heavens she was not some fluffy little chit who had dissolved into the vapours. Still, there was time yet for that...
‘I was at the Adventurers’ last night, playing cards with Lord Anterton and Sir Peter Carew and a man called Crosse. I was winning heavily—mainly against Crosse, who is not a good loser and is no friend of mine. We were all drinking.’
Blake tried to edit the story as he went—make it somehow suitable for a lady to hear without actually lying to her. He couldn’t tell her that the room had smelled of sweat and alcohol and candlewax and excitement. That Anterton had been in high spirits because an elderly relative had died and left him a tidy sum, and he and Carew had been joking and needling Crosse all evening over some incident at the French House—a fancy brothel where the three of them had been the night before.
Blake had been irritated, he remembered now, and had wished they would concentrate on the game.
He had just raked in a double handful of chips and banknotes and vowels from the centre of the table and called for a new pack and a fresh bottle when Francis Lytton had come up behind him—another irritation.
‘Your stepbrother appeared, most agitated, and said he wanted to talk to me immediately. I was on a winning streak, and I certainly did not intend to stop. I told him he could walk home with me afterwards and we would talk all he wanted to then.’
Miss Lytton bit her lip, her brow furrowed. ‘Agitated?’
‘Or worried. I do not know which. I did not pay too much attention, I am afraid.’
‘You were drunk,’ she observed coolly.
It was a shock to be spoken to in that way by a woman and, despite his uneasy sense of responsibility, the flat statement stung.
‘I was mellow—we all were. And we were in the middle of a game in which I was winning consistently—Lytton should have seen that it was a bad time to interrupt. We began to play with the new pack. Crosse lost heavily to me again, then started to shout that I was cheating, that I must have cards in my cuffs, up my sleeves. That I had turned away to talk to your stepbrother in order to conceal them.’
That red face, that wet mouth, those furious, incoherent accusations.
The man had scrabbled at the cards, sending counters flying, wine glasses tipping.
‘Cheat! Sharper!’
Everyone had stopped their own games, people had come across, staring...
‘I told him to withdraw his accusations. So did the others. He wouldn’t back down—just kept ranting. It seems he was on the brink of ruin and that this bout of losses had tipped him over the edge. He was so pathetic I didn’t want to have to call him out, so I stripped off my coat, tossed it to him to look at. He still accused me of hiding cards. I took off my waistcoat, my shirt. Then, when he overturned the table shouting that I had aces in my breeches, I took those off as well. Everything, in fact. He’d made me furious. Francis stood behind me, picking things up like a confounded valet. People were laughing...jeering at Crosse.’
He paused, sorting out the events through the brandy fug in his head, trying to be careful what he told her.
Everyone had been staring, and then Anterton had laughed and pointed at Blake’s wedding tackle, made some admiring remark about size. ‘Hainford’s hung like a bull!’ he’d shouted. Or had it been a mule?
He had laughed at Crosse.
‘Not like your little winkle-picker, eh, Crosse? The tarts wouldn’t laugh at his tackle like they did at yours last night at the French House—would they, Crosse?’
‘Crosse fumbled in his pocket, dropped something, and went down on his knees, groping for it. Then I saw it was a pistol. He was shaking with rage.’
I thought I was going to die—stark naked in the wreckage of a card game.
As the club secretary had pushed his way to the front of the crowd Blake could recall wondering vaguely if you could be blackballed for being killed in the club like that.
Conduct unbecoming...
‘Crosse pulled the trigger. The thing was angled upwards, so the bullet scored the track you’ve seen across my ribs and hit Francis, who was still standing behind me.’
Miss Lytton gave a short gasp, cut off by a hand pressed to her mouth. She was so white that the freckles across her nose and cheeks stood out as if someone had thrown a handful of bran at her.
‘He really is dead?’ she managed.
Very. You don’t live with a hole like that in you.
‘It must have been instant. He will have felt a blow to the chest, then nothing.’ He thought that was true—hoped that it was. Certainly by the time he’d knelt down, Lytton’s head supported on his knees, the man had been gone.
‘Where is he now?’
She was still white, her voice steady. It was the unnatural control of shock, he guessed, although she didn’t seem to be the hysterical type in any case.
