Buch lesen: «A Proposition For The Comte»

Chapter One
London 1815

Aurelian de la Tomber felt the bullet rip through his arm, rebounding off bone and travelling on to some further softer place in his side. Standing perfectly still, he waited, for life, or for death, his blood racing as vision lightened.

After a long moment he wondered if he might lose consciousness altogether and be found here by others in this damning position, caught red-handed and without excuse. Catching his balance, he breathed in hard and fast, his mind calculating all the variables in the situation as he struggled for logic.

The bullet had patently not pierced an artery for the flow from his wounds was already slowing. The heavy beat of blood in his ears suggested that his heart still worked despite the intrusion and, with careful movement, his impaired balance might also be manageable. That he could even reason any of this out was another plus and if the sweat on his forehead and upper lip was building he knew this to be a normal part of shock. Still, he had no idea of how deep the bullet had gone and the pain numbed in the first moment of impact was rising. A good sign that, he thought, for in the quickening of discomfort lay the first defence in a body’s quest for living.

The man before him was dead and no longer any threat, the blood from his neck pooling on to a thick rug. Kicking away the gun, Aurelian turned to the door. People would have heard the shot, he was certain of it, for the upmarket boarding house on Brompton Place was well inhabited. Unlacing his neckcloth, he used his teeth to anchor the end of the fabric before winding it as tightly as he could around his upper arm. It was all he could do for now. It would staunch the flow and allow him a passage of escape. Hopefully.

When he began to shake he cursed, the world blurring before him and moving in a strange and convoluted way. It felt as if he was on the deck of a ship in a storm, his footfalls not quite where he placed them, the roiling world making him nauseous.

‘Merde.’

The expletive was short and harsh. He had to get as far from here as he could before he collapsed. Placing his good hand against the wall, he counted the rises. Fourteen on one set of stairs and another fourteen on the next. He always knew how many steps went up or down in every building he entered, for it was part of his training and laxity led to mistakes. His breathing was laboured and he coughed to hide the noise as he passed by the small blue room to one side of the lobby. He was relieved to see that the watcher who’d been there when he arrived a quarter of an hour ago was now absent.

The front door was ten footfalls from the base of the stairs, the fourth tile risen and badly cracked, then the door handle was in his grasp. Blood made his fingers slip from the metal and he wiped his palm against his jacket before trying again.

Finally he was out, the cold of the night on his face, a blustery nor’wester, he reasoned as he turned, the stone wall a new anchor, a way to walk straight. His nails dug into the crumbling mortar, scraggly plants reaching up from the pathway and smelling of something akin to the chestnuts roasting on open fires on the Champs-Élysées at Christmas.

That wasn’t right, he thought.

There were no vendors at this time of night in Brompton Place in Chelsea. He closed his eyes and then opened them again quickly. Brompton Road lay before him and then Hyde Park. If he could get there he would be safe, for the greenery would hide him. He could take stock of things in solitude and stuff his jacket with grass to staunch the blood. If he followed the tree lines he could find sanctuary and silence. It was cold and the fingers on his left hand felt strange, the pins and needles lessening now down to nothingness.

If this had been Paris, he thought, he would have known countless alleys to simply disappear into and numerous contacts from whom to find help. He swore again, only this time his voice sounded distant and hollow.

Falling heavily, he knew he could no longer stand, but there was a grate that led to an underground drain in the gutter and he crawled there until his fingers closed on cold metal. He lifted the covering, straining for all he was worth, the weight of the thing throwing him backwards on to the road, slick with the black ice of a freezing January morning. His head took the knock of it as he slammed against the cobbles.

The sound of carriage wheels close by was his last thought before a tunnel of darkness took him in.

Violet Augusta Juliet, the Dowager Viscountess Addington, should never have encouraged the Honourable Alfred Bigglesworth to air his opinions on horseflesh because all night she had been forced to pay attention to them. No, she should have smiled nicely and moved on when he first waylaid her at the Barringtons’ ball, but there had been something in his expression that looked rather desperate and so she had listened.

It was both her best and worst point, she thought, this worry for other people’s feelings and her need to make them...happy. She shook her head and turned to gaze out of the carriage window and into the darkness. Happy was not quite the word she sought. Valued was a better one, perhaps. Frowning at such ruminations, she removed her gloves. She’d never liked her hands wrapped in fabric and it was a nightly habit of hers to tear off the strictures as soon as she was able. Her cap followed.

‘Mr Bigglesworth seemed to have taken your fancy, Violet?’

Amaryllis Hamilton sat beside her in the carriage, dark eyes observant, and Violet felt a spurt of guilt for she’d meant to leave earlier as she knew her sister-in-law had only recently recovered from a malady of the chest.

She continued, ‘He is said to be a sterling catch and those who know him speak highly of the family.’

Her tone was playful and dimples showed plainly, but Violet hoped Amara might have said all she wanted to. However, she was not yet finished.

‘You deserve a good man to walk in life beside you, Violet, and I pray nightly to the Lord above that you might yet find one.’

This was a conversation that had been ongoing across the past twelve months between them, but tonight Violet was irritated by it. ‘I have attained the grand old age of twenty-seven, Amara, and I am not on the lookout for another husband. Thank goodness.’

That echo of honesty had her sitting up straighter, the wedding ring on her left hand catching at the light.

She remembered when Harland had placed it on her finger under a window of stained glass and beside a vase filled with lilies.

She’d never liked the flowers since, the sheen on waxy petals somehow synonymous with the sweat across her new husband’s brow. Avaricious. Relieved. A coupling written in law and not easily broken. Her substantial dowry in his hands and her father standing there with a broad smile upon his face.

The carriage had now slowed to pass through the narrow lanes off Brompton Road and then it stopped altogether—which was unusual given that the traffic at this time of the early morning should have been negligible.

Pushing back the curtain, Violet peered out and saw a man lying there. A gentleman, by the style of his clothing, though he was without his necktie and was more than rumpled looking. Unlatching the window, she called out to her driver.

‘Is there some problem, Reidy?’

‘It’s nothing, my lady. Just a drunk who’s fallen asleep on the throughway. The young footman is trying to remove him to a safer distance as we speak. We shall be off again in a moment.’

Violet glanced down and saw the half-truth of such a statement, for the Addington footman was a slight lad who was having a good deal of trouble in dragging the larger man to safety. The glint of dark blood caught what little light there was and without hesitation she opened the door and slipped out of the carriage.

‘He is hurt and will need to be seen by a doctor straight away.’ A heavy gash in the hairline above his right ear had spread blood across his face and there was a bandage wrapped about the top half of his left arm. His eyes opened at the sound of her voice, but she had no true picture of his visage in the midnight gloom.

‘I...will...be...fine.’ It was almost whispered, irritated and impatient.

She bent down. ‘Fine to lie here and die from loss of blood, sir, or fine to simply freeze in the cold of this night?’

Her driver had brought forth a light and the stranger’s smile heartened her. If he was indeed dying, she did not imagine he would find humour in anything. Laying one hand across his own, she felt it to be frozen.

‘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 ton would have worn theirs. He looked menacing and severe and beautiful. Society would tiptoe around a man like this, not quite knowing how to categorise him. Left in a bedchamber filled with ruffled yellow fabric and ornate fragile furniture he was badly misplaced. His natural home looked to be far more rudimentary than this.

‘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?’

‘Poorly, I am afraid, Lady Addington.’ She knew from the expression on his face that the prognosis was not a hopeful one. ‘The whole site is swollen. If God in all his wisdom wants him to recover then he might, but if not...’

He left the sentiment hanging for a second before he carried on. ‘A man of violence must take his chances with the angels or the demons.’

‘Are there instructions for his care?’

‘There are, my lady. Make certain he takes in water and apply this salve to his right temple and left arm every six hours. I have a compress in place at his side under the bandage and will change that in the morning. The ribcage is the area of the most worry, but the bullet has been removed. I will return on the morrow at the noon hour to examine him again unless you would wish to have him taken from here...’

‘No, I do not.’ She barely knew where that reply came from and the doctor looked surprised.

‘Very well, Lady Addington. I have left my receipt and wish you well for what remains of this night. If he dies by the morning, send word. I’ll come for the body.’

Nodding, she swallowed away any thank you she had been about to offer. Violet had expected more grace, honour and hope in one whose path in life was to tend to the needs of the sick. She would not let him call again, she swore it.

Moments later she was perched on a chair by her tall stranger’s bed, the weight of her decision to bring him into her custody firming upon her shoulders.

He was even more beautiful without the blood and the dirt. She could see that in the first second of observing him. Better for him to have been plain and homely, for Harland had been as remarkably handsome and look at what had happened there.

Shaking her head, she concentrated on the man before her, glad to be alone with him, glad for the night-time and the candles and the half-forgotten world outside.

Her housekeeper had dressed him in one of Harland’s starched and embroidered gowns, the collar of it stiff about his neck. The gash above his ear had been stitched and his long dark hair fell over the yellow ointment smeared across the wound. Nothing could hide the mark on his chin, though, a scar just under the side of his mouth and curling beneath his neck. A knife wound, Violet thought, that had been left untended till it festered for it was no cleanly healed injury at all. She wondered at the pain of such a wound.

He was hot. She could see this in the bloom of his skin and the stretched closeness of bone, the pulse in his throat skittering and thready.

‘Let him live,’ she pleaded to no one in particular, though she supposed it was to God that she made this entreaty. It had been a long time since she had prayed with any sincerity.

He was pale and the dark bruising of tiredness lay beneath closed eyes. His nails were short and well trimmed, the ring he wore brought into full relief by the light in the room. It was crested and fashioned out of a heavy gold, a row of small diamonds caught under an engraved coronet.

He had lost the top of the third finger on his right hand, a clean healed cut that spoke of intent and expertise, but a relatively old wound for the scarring was opaque and faded. A man with life drawn upon him like a story and tonight with more chapters adding to the tale. The bed barely contained his height, his knees bent so that his feet did not overlap the base board. The boots placed beside the bed were of the finest leather, the buckles heavy, well fashioned and expensive, the same coronet of the ring engraved in silver.

With a sigh she stood and turned to the window, looking out across the city and the tableau of fading lights. London felt safe and busy. It felt peopled and close with the movement and the noise and the constant change of things to see. She had been here for twelve months now and had not once left the central district of the town. An ordered life with nothing surprising in it. Why had she then insisted that this dangerous golden-eyed stranger be brought home?

Taking up the book she had brought in with her, she sat again on the chair by the bed and began to read aloud. She’d heard somewhere that connections to the living world were advantageous to those knocking on the door of the next one, for it brought them back, guiding them.

Half an hour later when he spoke she almost jumped.

‘Where...am...I?’ His tongue wet the dryness of his lips, each word carefully enunciated.

‘In Chelsea at my town house. I am Violet, Lady Addington, sir, and we found you wounded on Brompton Place in the very early hours of this morning. When you were unable to give us your address we brought you here.’

‘We?’ The one word held a wealth of questions.

The quiet blush of blood ran across her cheeks. It was the curse of having such a fair skin and she gritted her teeth in fury. She had no need to explain any of her circumstances to him and she would not. Ignoring his query, she went on.

‘You have a substantial wound in the hairline above your right ear. It has bled profusely, though it has now been stitched. You also have a bullet hole in your left side which travelled through your arm to enter your ribcage. It has been removed, but the doctor who was summoned to tend to you is not certain of the effects it might engender. My housekeeper, however, insists she has seen others with your malady up and walking within a matter of days.’

In point of fact, Mrs Kennings had said a lot more than that about the patient, Violet thought, but was not about to repeat her servant’s fervent appreciation of the more favourable parts of his body.

‘Did anyone follow me here?’

The horror of such a question had her staring. ‘No. Did you expect them to?’

He turned his head away.

‘Where are my clothes?’

‘They were filthy, sir. We placed a nightgown upon you and tucked you into bed. There are garments you can wear in the drawer across the room when you recover. Your own clothes shall be returned to you on the morrow.’