Sophia James – A Proposition For The Comte (страница 3)
‘Bring him into the carriage. Owing to the lateness of the hour and the falling temperature, I think it wise to deliver him home ourselves without further ado.’
With a struggle the servants righted him and Violet saw that he was tall, towering a good way above her own five foot six.
He swore in fluent French, too, a fact that made her stiffen and take in breath. Then he was sick all over his boots, the look of horror on his face plain.
‘Find the water bottle and sluice him down.’
Her driver’s frown was heavy. ‘It seems the man might be better left to go his own way, my lady.’
‘Please do as I say, Reidy. It is cold out here and I should like to be inside the warmth of the carriage.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
The water soaked her own silken slippers as it tumbled from the man’s Hessians on to the icy street. As the stranger wiped the blood from around his mouth with the fabric of his sleeve, a scar across the lower part of his chin was much more easily detected.
He looked like a pirate dragged in from battle, dangerous, huge and unknown, his dark hair loose and his eyes caught in the half-light to gleam a furious and glittering gold.
‘Where do you live, sir?’ She asked this question as soon as she had him settled, instructing her driver to wait and see which direction he required.
But even as he coughed and tried to speak his eyes simply rolled back and he toppled against the cushioned leather.
‘We will make for home. He needs warmth and a physician.’
‘You are certain, my lady?’
‘I am. Mrs Hamilton will see that I am unharmed and the young footman can join us inside. If there is any difficulty at all we will bang loudly on the roof. In his state, I hardly think that he constitutes a threat.’
As the conveyance began to move, Violet looked across at the new arrival. She thought he was awkwardly placed, the stranger, his good arm caught in an angle beneath him. He held a weapon in his pocket and another in the soft leather of his right boot. She could see the swell of the haft of a blade.
Armed and unsafe. She should throw him out right now on to the street where another might find him. Yet she did not.
He was wounded and the strange vulnerability of a strong man bent into unconsciousness played at her heartstrings.
It had begun to sleet, too, the weather sealing them into a small and warm cocoon as they wound their way back to her town house. Soon it would snow hard for the storm clouds across the city last evening had been purple. Further off towards the river, bands of freezing rain blurred the horizon. She shivered and then ground her teeth, top against bottom with the thought of all that she had done.
Impetuous. Foolish. How often had Harland said that of her? A woman of small and insignificant opinion. A woman who never quite got things right. Amara was observing her with uncertainty and even the footman had trouble meeting her eyes. The price of folly, she thought, yet if she had left him he would have died, she was certain of it.
Arriving home, she bade her servants to help the driver to carry the man in and sent a footman off to fetch the physician.
‘At this time of night he may be difficult to find, my lady.’
‘All I ask is that you hurry, Adams, and instruct the doctor that he shall be paid well when he comes.’
Placing her guest in a bedchamber a good few doors down from her own, Violet ignored Amara’s qualms.
‘He does not look like a tame man,’ her sister-in-law offered, watching from the doorway. ‘He does not quite look English, either.’
She was right. He looked nothing like the milksop lords they had waded through tonight at the Barringtons’ ball. His dress was too plain and his hair was far longer than any man in the
‘Clean him up, Mrs Kennings, and find him one of my late husband’s nightshirts. The doctor should be here in a short while. Choose others to help you.’
The clock struck the half-hour as she walked past the main staircase to the library. She no longer felt tired. She felt alive and somewhat confused as to her reaction to this whole conundrum.
Harland had insisted that every decision had been his to make and she had seldom had a hand in it. Tonight there was a sort of freedom dancing in the air, a possibility of all that could be, another layer between who she had been and who she was to become.
If the servants wondered at her orders they didn’t say, obeying her and refraining from further query. Power held a quiet energy that was gratifying.
A knock on the door of her library a few moments later brought a footman inside the room with an armful of weapons. ‘Mrs Kennings sent me in with these, my lady. She said she thought they were better off here than on the stranger’s person. The doctor has just arrived, too.’
‘Ask him to come and see me when he has finished then, Adams. I shall wait for him in here.’
‘Very well.’
She noted the armaments were many and varied as she looked over the array on the table. A flintlock pistol made of walnut and steel sat before her, the brass butt plate catching the light. A well-weighted piece, she thought, as she lifted it and wondered at its history. A selection of knives sat to one side: a blade wedged into rough leather; a longer, sharper knife with a handle of inlaid shell; and a thicker, broader half-sword, the haft engraved with some ancient design.
The tools of his trade and a violent declaration of intent. Such a truth was as undeniable as it was shocking. This man she had helped was a dealer in death, a pillager of lives. She wondered how being such would have marked him. Perhaps at this very moment Mrs Kennings was lifting away the fabric of his shirt to show the doctor the scars written on his skin as a history.
She was sure it would be so. A darkness of blood was smeared across the dull grey of the sword’s steel where it had bitten into bone and flesh only recently. She imagined what the other opponent might now look like and crossed to the cabinet to pour herself a brandy.
She had not drunk anything stronger than a spiced punch in all the years of her marriage. Now she found herself inclined to brandy for the spirit took away some of her pain, though she was always careful to drink alone. The brandy slid down her throat like a warm tonic, settling in her stomach and quelling her nerves.
She wanted to rise and go to the stranger just to make certain that he was not dead. She wanted to touch him again, too, and feel the heat of his skin, to know that he breathed. Tilting her head, she listened for any sign of footsteps, glad when they did not come, for if the moments multiplied it could only mean he lived. The dead would not hold a physician here for an extended length of time and a medic expecting payment would be quick to come to the library and claim what was owed.
She heard a deep cry of pain and tensed, the ensuing silence just as potent as the noise had been. She imagined the treatment that he was now being subjected to as the doctor tried to make sense of his wounds.
‘Please, God, help him.’ She whispered these words into the night and looked across at the fire burning in the grate.
The maid must have been roused from the warmth of her bed to set it. Sometimes the unfairness in life was a never-ending carousel—a misfortune here, a death there, the nuisance of it left as a past-midnight duty for those who served their masters even in exhaustion.
Harland was a part of it, too, with his immorality and anger. After their first few months together she had rarely seen him happy. She frowned. The events of the evening were making her maudlin and there was no point in looking back on all that had been so shattering.
Her father’s words were in the mix there, too. When he had seen her off into the arms of Harland Addington, he had leaned down and given his advice.
‘The Viscount is a man going places, a clever and titled young man. He will do you well, Violet, you will see.’
She had imagined at the time he’d believed it, but now she was not so certain. Her father had been a hard and distant parent whose personal relationships had faltered consistently.
They had hated each other after a few years together, her stepmother and father, almost with the same heated distaste that she and Harland had regarded one another by the end of it all. Like father like daughter. Lost in the tricky mire of right and wrong.
A noise in the passageway twenty-five minutes later had her turning and she put the empty second glass of brandy on the table and waited for the door to open.
‘Dr Barry is ready to depart, my lady.’ Her housekeeper stood at the old physician’s side. Violet vaguely recognised the man. Perhaps Harland had had him here at the town house before to diagnose one of his many and varied physical complaints.
‘How does the patient fare?’