Corey McFadden (22 page)

They gained the sanctity of one of the small, darkly paneled private rooms. It was used for private card parties and the earl found it empty as he had hoped he would at this late hour. He closed the door behind them and turned to face Sommesby, who stood facing him, rigid with barely suppressed fury.

Calmly, but with deadly concentration, Radford laid out for Sommesby precisely what had been observed this evening. He left Ramsey out of it, allowing Sommesby to infer that Radford himself had seen the switches.

“This is preposterous!” Sommesby raged. “I shall demand satisfaction. You have no proof of any of this!”

Radford crossed to him in two easy strides. Sommesby flinched back, but not before Radford bent and slipped his hand into the duke’s left boot, drawing out a deck of cards.

“There’s my proof, you sodding bastard!” He flung the cards at the duke’s feet. “You may deny it from here to doomsday, but we both know that you are a card cheat. And as for meeting you on a field of honor, I should be delighted to put a bullet through your heart. Although it is not just recompense for what you did to Atherley or Brompton, or tried to do to me!”

Sommesby’s face drained of color. He stood stiffly, staring back at Radford. He certainly knew the Earl of Radford’s reputation with pistols and he would have no doubt he would be the one to die were he to demand a duel. He breathed heavily, seeming to weigh his options against this most deadly adversary.

“I have a solution to your dilemma, Your Grace.” Radford spoke the honorific as if it were a slur. “I will not kill you, and I will not denounce you, if you will resign at once from White’s and any other gambling club. You will never again play a game of cards under wager. Not in London, not in England, not anywhere on the continent. If you violate the agreement, I will hear of it. Then I will kill you. I do not do this for you. I do this to preserve the good names of Atherley and Brompton. Do we have an understanding, Your Grace?”

There was a long silence while Sommesby considered his position. Radford had him and he knew it, trussed and spitted, with no alternative but to concede.

“I yield.” The Duke of Sommesby spoke mildly, bowing slightly from the waist. “I trust our unpleasant little discussion is at an end?”

“I shall expect you to submit your resignations tomorrow morning,” the earl continued. “I will verify that it has been done. If it has not, I shall set a time and place for our meeting.” Radford’s gut fairly churned with revulsion. “Get out of my sight. I hope never to see your face again.” He spoke through clenched teeth.

Casting a look of hatred at the earl, Sommesby turned and left the room. Radford stared for a moment at the door, then sank heavily into a chair, his anger draining into exhaustion. Playacting was not his forte, and he marveled in retrospect that he and his guileless Mike had managed to pull it off so easily. He had relied heavily on the boy; perhaps that had been unfair. There had been something so feral in Sommesby’s face when he had left.

Nevertheless, it was over with, and he was relieved to get it behind him. He wondered whether he had made the right decision in letting the bastard off so easily. But there had been less in his threat than he had let on. He knew it would have been impossible to prove that Sommesby was a cheat, not without highly credible witnesses, and no one would take the word of a serving boy over that of a peer of the realm. It would have been Radford’s accusation against Sommesby’s denial, and Sommesby was a very powerful man. Radford had no doubt he could win in a duel, but he was keenly aware of the social censure that would follow from those who deemed the meeting an unfair fight, a robust young man with a deadly aim versus an elderly, foppish gentleman.

He dropped his head into his hands, massaging his pounding temples. He had not realized he was so fatigued.

“My lord?” A quiet voice intruded on his thoughts.

“Did I or did I not request that you meet me at the front entrance, boy?” Radford looked up with exasperation, hiding the relief he felt at that steady, friendly voice.

“I am sorry, my lord, truly I am. But when the Duke of Sommesby went tearing by me, I just had to check and make sure he hadn’t murdered you.”

“The bugger has left?”

“Yes, my lord. Just a minute or so ago. I watched him get into his coach and drive off.”

Radford sighed and leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed. It was done.

“My lord? Can you tell me what happened?”

“I bluffed him out, boy, shook a deck out of his boots, by the way.” Radford indicated the cards strewn about the floor. “His Grace will not play here or anywhere else again, not for money. He was not happy, but I offered him that, or a match with pistols.”

“And he accepted that? He will leave you alone?”

“I think so, boy. He has more to lose in this than I do. If exposed as a cheat, he would be shunned throughout the
ton
. No one would receive him. He would be anathema, particularly when people put two and two together with regard to Brompton and Atherley.”

“Then would you like to go home, my lord? Shall I send for the carriage?” The boy sounded painfully eager to be away.

“Aye, do that. I am tired unto death. I do not yet have my full strength back.”

He sank his head again into his hands and was quiet.

* * * *

They sat in the dark in silence. The well-sprung carriage moved as smoothly as was possible over the cobbled streets. Normally, as a retainer, Maude would have ridden up front, outside with Hobbs, but the earl had invited her in for the wintery ride home.

“Help me get these bandages off, boy, and I’ll put my boot on,” he said.

She knelt at his feet and began to unwrap his foot.

“You did very well, tonight, monkey, very well indeed.” Radford spoke quietly, as if he were very tired. “I find, now that it’s over, I’m feeling a bit guilty at having involved you in this. I think in my haste to avail myself of your skills, I willfully blinded myself to the danger involved. It is unpardonable for me to have placed a servant at risk to further my own ends, however noble. I learned that at my father’s knee. I owe you an apology, boy. I am very sorry for my selfishness, regardless of our success.”

Maude shivered, as if a goose had walked over her grave. He had spoken words to her like this once before, only then she had been the culprit, so long ago, when she had talked Joe into shooting Grampa’s pistols with her and they had shot the young Edward Almsworth off his horse.

“My lord, I was never in any danger,” she said, keeping her face down so he would not see her blush even in this dim light. “It is you who could have been hurt by that vicious man.” She helped Radford to tug on his boot, a mundane but difficult task in the confines of the coach.

The earl chuckled. “By the way, we must have a chat about your appalling attitude toward the peerage. Mrs. Formby would have fainted dead away to hear you describe the duke’s conversation as ‘inane,’ as you pronounced it to me in White’s. And ‘vicious’, well, she would simply pass on.”

They laughed together. The boot finally secured in place she scrambled up to the comfortable leather seat, both relaxed now after the prolonged tension of the evening. She was so relieved to have gotten  away from that place, where, as her fears mounted, the over made-up, strutting peacocks in their garish finery had begun to look to her like walking nightmares, surreal and threatening.

It was very late. After a few moments of companionable silence, Maude felt herself begin to drift a bit into sleep. She willed herself to stay awake, fearful that she would fall against his shoulder, a most unseemly position for a valet.

Suddenly, there was a shout from the coachman, then the carriage lurched drunkenly and halted. With dizzying speed, Radford reached over and shoved Maude to the floor, crying, “Stay down!” then lunged forward to open the carriage door. Before he could reach it, however, the door was flung open from the outside. There, barely visible in the dim light from a street lamp, stood a black-clad figure, wearing a dark cloth on the lower half of his face so that only his eyes could be seen. He held a large pistol in his hand.

There was a moment of shocked silence, then the figure bowed slightly and said in a raspy voice, “my lord,” and raised the pistol to point it directly at Radford’s chest. With a scream of horror, Maude leaped up to knock the pistol away. Seeing her movement through the corner of his eye, the gunman countered her attack by swinging the pistol hard into her chest, just as Radford lunged forward to grab her and pull her away. As she fell away from the assailant, the pistol discharged, the shock of the reverberation deafening in the small carriage. Maude felt a searing pain in her left side. She was conscious of only one thing as she fell back, insensible, into Radford’s arms. She had seen those eyes before, laughing at her over a deck of cards. They were Tom’s eyes, the Duke of Sommesby’s footman....

* * * *

Holding Mike in one arm, Radford reached to grab the pistol away from the assailant. The pistol fell to the floor of the carriage but the man twisted free of the earl’s grip, kicking out with a snarl, striking Radford in the chest with his hard boot. Radford fell back on top of the pistol, and the boy fell with him. The gunman turned and fled into the darkness.

“Hobbs! Hobbs! Can you hear me?” Radford shouted in the dark. There was no reply. He shifted gingerly and lifted Mike to the seat where he stretched him out gently. “Oh God, boy, no!” he moaned as he pulled back a hand covered with blood. Quickly, he tore away the livery jacket and saw that the wound was bleeding heavily from the side of the chest, too low for the heart, thank God, but too near the lung for safety.

He sank to his knees and mopped at the blood with part of the discarded jacket, crooning over and over, “You’ll be all right, boy, you’ll be all right.” He ripped the white cotton shirt open to the waist, then stared in consternation at the sight that met his eyes. The boy was swaddled from neck to waist in cotton binding, wrapped several times around his mid-section. At the lower part of the rib cage, the white cloth was blood red. Without stopping to fathom the purpose of this unusual garb, Radford found the end of the strip of material and began to unwrap it, lifting Mike gently from behind, careful not to pull at the wound.

As he pulled away the last of the binding, he gasped in shock. What monstrous joke was this? What freakish twist of fate? Stunned, he stared at the obvious. A girl. No, a woman, by the looks of the small, but full, rounded breasts, pink-tipped and firm. He sat back on his heels, open-mouthed with shock, unable for the moment to remember that this boy—this girl—this young woman was wounded and needed assistance.

With a start, he realized that he was now able to see the wound. He probed gently and was relieved to find that the blood flow had slowed considerably. From the location of the wound, he had reason to hope that the bullet had only creased the rib cage and had not embedded itself in her flesh. As it was, it had obviously cut deeply, but had apparently not penetrated vital organs. He hoped he would find the bullet buried in the squabs of the carriage when he bothered to look.

“Who are you, boy? Mike...Ramsey?” he whispered in the dark, while he wiped gently at the blood on her rib cage. “I’ll wager neither of those names is a true one. Who are you and what are you, and why have you masqueraded in my household as a male?”

Still, he could not deny that she had saved his life, spoiling the aim of the gunman, who had held a pistol pointed inches from his chest. Whoever the girl was, she had taken the bullet herself, and now she lay unconscious, his savior and his responsibility. Gently, he traced his hand across her cheek, marveling that he had not bothered to really look before, to see what was now so perfectly obvious: the delicate features, the small bones, the gentle manner.

With a sigh, he closed the folds of her shirt and jacket over her breasts, relieved that the bleeding had stopped. He found he was oddly embarrassed, as if he had spied on something he should not have seen. Unlike many of his rank, he had never been one to consort with the female servants in his household. Whoever she was, she seemed so vulnerable lying there, and he was quite sure she would be mortified to learn that he had viewed his fill of her lovely bosom.

This was going to be a big problem. He could not simply stroll into the house and announce that Mike was actually a girl. And whatever the reason for her deception, he at least owed her the opportunity of an explanation before he exposed her masquerade.

He stared down at her face for a moment, then turned and stepped from the carriage, closing the door behind him. Climbing up to the driver’s seat, he found what he had-feared. Hobbs lay over on his side, a deep gash running from his temple to his cheek. He was breathing regularly, but was unconscious. Propping the man against him so that he would not fall, the Earl of Radford took the reins into his hands and spurred the horses forward through London’s deserted streets. He would think it through as he drove.

Chapter Fourteen

He pulled into the stables, blinking in the sudden light from the oil lamps kept lit whenever he was out for the evening. The two stableboys, tousled and sleepy-eyed, appeared, then stopped short at the sight of the earl at the reins, the slumped figure of Hobbs up against him.

“One of you go for Frederick, the other for Mrs. Formby,” Radford ordered tersely. “We’ve had an accident. Now look sharp and be very quiet about it. I’ve no wish to awaken the rest of the household.”

The boys vanished, and as Radford gently settled Hobbs on the bench, he was relieved to hear a groan from the coachman. The earl climbed quickly down from the driver’s seat. Opening the door of the carriage, Radford saw that the girl was awake, her eyes heavy-lidded with pain.

“Hold still. I am getting Mrs. Formby to tend to you. You’ll be all right.” He held her gaze for a moment, loathe to bring himself to tell her he had discovered her secret, yet unable to tell if she had already guessed.

“M’lord?” Frederick’s quiet, steady voice broke into the earl’s muddled thoughts. “Wot’s amiss?”