Please don’t let it be too late.
She was lying in the gloom of the hall, on the dark hardwood floor, crumpled on her side with the hem of her wrapper fanned out around her bare feet like the frill of a pale flower. Her eyes were closed. She didn’t move. She didn’t seem to breathe.
Cold dread seized him even as he dropped to his knees beside her.
“Beth.” His voice was a hoarse croak as he touched her neck, checking for a pulse, afraid of what he would find.
Please God please God please. . . .
She had a pulse.
“What the hell . . . ?” It was Richmond, clad in a barely secured dressing gown with a pistol in his hand, who first came pounding toward him. More members of the household poured onto the scene from every direction. Neil, preoccupied with ascertaining how badly Beth was hurt, barely heard any of the shouts or questions and didn’t look up.
“She’s been shot,” he said in answer to Richmond as the other man reached him, spewing questions, leaning over Beth. “Two men”—he gave a jerk of his head toward his room—“in there. Another fled through the house. Be careful, they’re killers. They came for me.”
Richmond barked sharp orders at his household. Neil neither listened nor cared. A dark stain spreading over the front of Beth’s wrapper caused Neil to wrench it open. What he saw made his gut clench. His head reeled. His heart filled.
Had he been that much younger version of himself, the one who had fought so desperately to reach his family before the guillotine fell that day, he would have dropped his head and cried.
Because this prayer had been answered.
The ball had hit her high in the shoulder. He was no sawbones, but bullet wounds he knew.
“Beth!” Claire reached the scene just as Neil, gathering Beth up in his arms, stood up.
“Beth!” Gabby was not far behind her. Clad in wrappers, hair spilling over their shoulders, panic in their faces, rife with exclamations and questions that he couldn’t make enough sense of to even try to answer, they both crowded around him as, almost light-headed with relief, he carried Beth toward her bedroom.
“She’s going to be all right,” he told them, and sent a grateful prayer winging skyward that it was so. “She’s been shot, but she’s going to be all right.”
“Fetch hot water and bandages,” Gabby ordered someone he couldn’t see.
“A doctor’s been sent for.” DeVane spoke behind him just as Neil reached Beth’s room.
“What happened?” There was terror in Claire’s voice.
“They came to assassinate me. Beth surprised them in the act. They shot her.”
“Oh my God!”
“How do you know that’s why they came?” DeVane’s voice was sharp with tension.
“I know them. Fitz Clapham and his associates. They’ve tried to kill me before.”
“Damn it, everyone who knew you before thinks you dead. And Richmond and I have been working on securing a pardon for you, just on the off chance that someone might recognize you in the future. It was granted late yesterday. There is no longer a kill order for the man who was known as the Angel of Death. This should not have happened.”
Neil heard DeVane’s talk of a pardon being granted, and knew he owed his brothers-in-law a great debt because of it, but he didn’t reply, because just then Beth started to moan and stir in his arms. Pale and big-eyed, Claire opened the door to Beth’s chamber for him, and he carried Beth toward the bed.
“Neil.” Beth’s eyes fluttered open. Her voice wasn’t much louder than a sigh.
“Don’t talk. You’ve had an accident.”
Alarm sharpened her gaze. She stirred in obvious agitation, then winced in pain. “Those men! Your room . . . I thought they would kill you.”
“It’s all over. I’m fine.” He laid her gently on the bed. “You’re going to be fine, too. Don’t try to talk anymore.”
“I remember. They shot me.” She sounded faintly disbelieving that such a thing could have occurred.
“Yes.”
When he would have straightened away to let the women, who were hovering with towels and who knew what else, take over, she caught at his shirt.
“You didn’t say it,” she said. “I was coming to ask you.”
“Say what?”
“I love you. I told you, but you didn’t tell me.” Her eyes had clouded with what he was sorely afraid was pain, but still they clung to his. Neil felt his gut clench. The knowledge that she was suffering wrung his heart.
“I do,” he answered in a low voice, conscious of listening ears but unable to deny her. That admission was a weak, sad thing and he knew it, knew that Beth deserved better, deserved more, even if the entire household was listening in. Looking into her eyes, he tried again. “I love you, Beth. More than my own life. So much that if you died, I wouldn’t want to live. I love you with all my heart and soul.”
For a moment the pain that had so worried him receded, and the faintest hint of a twinkle came into her eyes.
“Very pretty,” she said, and smiled at him.
Then her sisters practically pushed him out of the way, going to work to stanch the bleeding and make Beth as comfortable as possible until the doctor arrived.
Epilogue
“DON’T LOOK SO NERVOUS. ’Twill all be over soon.” That was DeVane, speaking humorously rather than soothingly in Neil’s ear.
“Unless Beth decides to leave him standing at the altar. You know the odds are running twenty to one in the clubs that she will,” Richmond said with some relish, though, like DeVane, he was careful to keep his voice low enough so that his words wouldn’t reach beyond the three of them.
“She can’t bolt. They’re already wed,” DeVane objected. “That’s why I put a monkey down on her going through with it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have wagered so much as a groat on the chance.”
“When it comes to weddings, I put nothing past Beth. Claire was telling me only last night that little sister was so nervous about today that she couldn’t eat. This big Society do wasn’t her idea, and she don’t like the thought of it.”
“Probably shouldn’t tell him so.” DeVane’s tone was faintly reproving. Neil realized that he was the “him” DeVane referred to. “Don’t want him taking it to heart and ripping up at Beth.”
“Oh, he knows if he doesn’t treat Beth right, there’ll be the devil to pay. Isn’t that right, Durham?”
Neil set his teeth without replying. Though it had nothing to do with any threat of Richmond’s, he was practically quaking in his boots. Neil acknowledged the sorry truth of that even as he willed himself not to reveal it by so much as a twitch of a finger. He, who had survived so many attempts to kill him that he’d lost count, who’d faced down without feeling so much as a stomach flutter the most vicious men of his time armed with every imaginable deadly weapon, who for more than a decade had rarely known from one day to the next whether he would be alive to greet the next dawn, felt his throat tighten and his mouth dry and his skin grow cold with nerves as his gaze ran over the assembled crowd, all of whom seemed to be looking directly at him as they whispered to their neighbors.
Waiting. Just like he was waiting, with something akin to bated breath, for Beth to appear.
Or not.
It was his wedding day. Or, rather, his officially recognized wedding day. He was standing at the altar of St. James Church in Piccadilly, Richmond and DeVane at his side supposedly for support, though with their jocular comments they’d so far provided precious little of that, waiting for his wife to arrive from Richmond House, walk up the long, flower-strewn aisle, and remarry him. Unless, of course, she succumbed to an attack of wedding-day jitters and at the last minute decided not to go through with it. Which he wouldn’t precisely blame her for, although it would leave him looking every kind of a fool in the eyes of the ton. Of course, to almost everyone present—and the large and fashionable church was packed—what they were preparing to witness was a wedding, period. It had, in fact,
been dubbed the Wedding of the Season, the much-talked-about union between one of Society’s most scandalous beauties and a prized catch on the Marriage Mart. Nobody, as it had turned out, wanted to miss that.
Which was why this was shaping up to be a debacle of major proportions. Being in a church in and of itself made him uncomfortable. He couldn’t help feeling he needed to beware of stray lightning bolts. Finding himself the cynosure of all eyes didn’t help. And knowing that his beloved was as skittish about wedding days as an unbroke yearling was of a rider—that was the icing on the cake.
He figured that his chances of being left at the altar on this bright sunny June morning were about even.
Richmond cleared his throat. “It’s five minutes past the hour. I’ve got James”—Richmond’s longtime valet—“on the lookout, and he just gave me the signal: no sign of the bride’s carriage yet.”
As the wedding was supposed to commence at precisely eleven o’clock—five minutes ago—this bit of needling by Richmond was designed to make him sweat, Neil knew. But, conscious of several hundred pairs of eyes on him belonging to several hundred people who knew Beth’s record with weddings and were waiting most avidly to see if history would repeat itself, he sweated anyway.
“By God, if she doesn’t show, won’t we roast her forever?” DeVane was sounding amused again. “By the by, Hugh, if she does stand him up, you get the happy task of announcing to this circus that the ceremony’s off.”
“You’re the elder. And you’ve been in the family longer,” Richmond objected.
“Don’t matter. You’re the duke,” DeVane parried.
Neil stopped listening to them. “Circus” was, he thought, exactly the right word to describe the glittering extravaganza this supposed family-only wedding-for-show had turned into. For that, he knew precisely who to blame: Beth’s aunt Augusta. After the storm of gossip that had followed Beth’s second weeklong confinement to bed in the course of little more than a month—the story was that she’d suffered a recurrence of the influenza, because of course admitting that she’d been shot was impossible—the old battle-ax had gotten a bee in her bonnet and the bit between her teeth and taken control of the wedding.
After that, special licenses and private ceremonies were out the window. The only thing that would satisfy her, and, she insisted, go some way toward restoring Beth’s reputation, was the kind of huge, fashionable Society wedding expected of the sister of a duke who had become betrothed to a wealthy and handsome Marquis.
Beth had been busy recovering from the gunshot wound. He had been busy dancing attendance on her, accepting a job from the War Office (who better to assist in rounding up the other renegade assassins than one such as he, after all?), and extracting from Clapham, who had survived, the details of how he’d found him. (Like so many things, it was a matter of pure chance: Clapham had spotted him on a London street, recognized him immediately, and been convinced that the Angel of Death had bamboozled them all by faking his own death. This he had immediately set out to rectify.) Claire had been distracted by the happy news (so Beth told him) that she was increasing at last, and by her concern for her sister. Gabby had been consumed by a desire to take care of them all. Richmond and DeVane, of course, were worse than useless: though uninterested in the details, they were amused enough at the whole to throw no rub in the old cat’s way.
And so the wedding had just kind of snowballed without him or Beth really realizing what was afoot until it was too damned late to do anything about it.
“The carriage must be here,” DeVane said suddenly. “Look, Hugh, there’s James over there nodding like his neck’s broke.”
“Doesn’t mean Beth’s in it,” said Richmond the tormentor. “Could just be sending round a message saying the whole thing’s too much for her.”
From the outside, somebody was already pulling open the huge oak doors that opened into the church. Neil recognized the grizzled little man: a favored servant of Gabby’s, by the name of Jem, he thought. Beyond him, he could see Gabby in her lilac silk bridesmaid’s gown, clutching a silver filigree holder with some kind of purple flowers in it, already ascending the church steps on Barnet’s arm. A glimpse of another lilac skirt just stepping down from the carriage convinced him that Claire was not far behind. And with them, he hoped—no, he was sure now—would be Beth.
Beth the brave would not leave him to face this arena full of gossip-hungry lions alone. He should have known it from the outset.
“They be here,” Jem called from the back of the church, where he’d closed the doors to the chapel, which meant Neil could no longer observe the wedding party’s approach.
Immediately the music, which had been playing softly, swelled. The archbishop—no ordinary cleric would do for Lady Salcombe—shook out his robes. Richmond and DeVane fanned out into proper position on either side of him. The congregation rose.
Then the doors opened again, and with a slow and stately gait Gabby began to walk toward them. She smiled at DeVane, whose heart was suddenly there in his eyes, plain for all to read. Some distance behind her came Claire, so beautiful that she drew every eye and caused Richmond, beside him, to swell with love and pride. Watching them come up the aisle as he waited for Beth to enter, looking over the faces of the assembled company, Neil realized something: in the months since that failed assassination attempt had driven him from France, he had acquired not just a wife but a whole extended family that he was learning, slowly but inexorably, to care about. Two sisters, of course, in the persons of Claire and Gabby. Brothers (a little less caring about here) in Richmond and DeVane. A masterful, managing battle-ax of an aunt. A pair of sweet-faced nieces and one noisy and mischievous nephew, whose ranks were apparently soon to increase by one more. A ghastly array of cousins he intended to avoid whenever possible. Loyal retainers by the dozens. Six women—Mary, Peg, Alyce, Dolly, Nan, and Jane—whose lives he had saved and who had, in the process, changed him forever. A raft of friends and acquaintances. All tied to him by Beth, and all here in this church to celebrate his and Beth’s official wedding day.
The door to the chapel opened one more time. The congregation let out a collective breath—of relief, disappointment, or excitement, depending on their individual natures—as Beth entered. Aunt Augusta, claiming the honor as Beth’s late father’s representative, was beside her, beaming in triumph as she prepared to escort her niece up the aisle. But after one glance, Neil had eyes for no one but Beth.
Mine. That was the thought that crowded out all others.
He’d never seen a woman look more beautiful in his life. Vaguely he was aware of her dress, some confection of satin and lace that she and her sisters had spent countless hours fussing over, the delicate veil that floated behind her, the pearls around her neck, the flowers in her hands. But what he mainly saw was Beth: her glorious hair as vivid as a flame amidst all that white, her lovely face faintly flushed with, he thought, happiness, her eyes bright and smiling as they met his.
He smiled back at her.
Then, as she drew near, he moved forward to meet her. She gave him her hand. Instead of being cold, as he might have expected, it was soft and warm and alive. Lifting it to his lips, he kissed it briefly, then tucked it in his arm as they turned to face the archbishop. The old man started saying some words over them, but Neil wasn’t really listening. Instead, he was preoccupied by the sudden realization that he’d just been granted his own private miracle.
All these years, he’d thought heaven was past praying for. Now he knew he’d been wrong. He’d found heaven right here, in this red-haired snip of a girl he meant to cherish for the rest of his life.
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Shameless Page 37
