The Hazardous Gamble of the Alluring Duchess: A Historical Regency Romance Novel

by Hamilton, Hanna

  Lisa inclined her head, and Roger led the way to the dining room where he found Scarlet and Dahlia in a low-voiced, but intense discussion. Dahlia glanced up and flew to him. “Roger, he is very low and sinking fast, I fear. Can you find my brother?”

  “I will do my best, Lady Dahlia. This is Lisa, otherwise known as the Indian. She is here, as you know, to do the best she can for your father since most of the surgeons are currently busy.”

  Dahlia curtsied, a slight bob acknowledging an equal. “I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “You are his daughter?” Lisa asked.

  “Yes, I am. My older brother, the Marquess of Bochil, is the head of the family in my father’s absence or incapacitation.”

  “Quite so. Certainly, you should look for him, but we need not despair of your father’s life just yet. First, we must get him out of these wet, muddy clothes while disturbing him as little as possible. Perhaps, Lady Dahlia, you would care to leave the room?”

  “I’ll not leave him,” Dahlia said. “I have clean sheets at hand if his modesty needs to be preserved.”

  “Very good, My Lady,” Lisa said. “We shall then begin to cut away his clothing.”

  Confident that he was leaving the Duke of Cottleroy in the best possible hands, Roger hastened out the door to look for Aaron.

  * * *

  Dahlia turned her attention to her father, wishing that her brother or Miss Emma were at hand. But the odd little woman seemed to know exactly what she was doing.

  Lisa pulled a side table over next to the dining table and laid out an array of gleaming steel instruments. Her open bag held several bottles and vials of various sorts common to doctors and a few odd instruments Dahlia could not identify.

  The first thing that Lisa produced, however, was an ordinary pair of sewing scissors. In a trice, she had cut away the Duke of Cottleroy wet clothing and began examining him.

  “Three broken ribs,” Lisa said, “And the left arm is broken in three places. Extensive bruising, consistent with a beating. The pelvis is intact, but the left leg is out of joint, and the long bone is broken. The right leg seems to have sustained no injury. Scarlett, Lady Dahlia, we must turn him so that I can look at his back. But we must keep the spine straight so as to cause no injury. First, though, I will splint the broken arm so that it does not trouble him.”

  With that she took out a small case that contained several shining needles and began to place them strategically in the Duke’s shoulder.

  “What are those for?” Dahlia asked.

  “With these we block the messengers from the body to the brain so that I can set the bone without causing pain.”

  “That works?” Dahlia looked skeptical.

  “It works,” Scarlett said. “It don’ seem like it should, but it does. She sticks those needles in, then she can even cut on ya, ‘thout yer knowin’ it.”

  “How very odd,” Dahlia said. But she did not interfere with the odd little foreign lady’s work.

  Cottleroy awoke just as Lisa was putting the last touches on the splint. “Good, good!” she exclaimed. “Now, sir, your daughter is here to wait upon you and to make sure that you have family nigh to you. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  “Dahlia? Here? But that cannot be right. The river – that is what I remember last.”

  “I am here, Father,” Dahlia said.

  “Then you have been captured?” Her father seemed agitated.

  “Captured? No, Father. Roger found you and brought you to his townhouse. You are safe, and Lisa, who is something of a doctor, is helping you.”

  “But women can’t be doctors,” the Duke of Cottleroy protested, “It is not allowed.”

  “Then do not think of me as a doctor, but rather a minister of mercy,” Lisa said. “I shall bring you comfort and bind up your wounds. Now that you are awake it will be easier because you can tell us where it hurts.”

  Cottleroy started to laugh, then gritted his teeth. “Easier to say where it does not hurt. The arm you just splinted does not hurt.”

  “Good. Then perhaps you will have confidence in my ability to help. I want to look at your back before we try to put your left leg back in its socket and splint that broken bone.” Lisa smiled a little. “It is likely to hurt, but this is good if it does.”

  “I can’t feel my legs or move them,” Dahlia’s father said. “I don’t think anything you do will cause them to hurt.”

  “Very well,” Lisa said calmly. “Scarlett, are you ready? We will roll him up on his left side so that I can look at his back. Lady Dahlia, if you will be so good as to sit on your father’s left side and hold his left hand in yours so that he might feel your life force.”

  “Of course,” Dahlia said, seating herself in the indicated spot and holding her father’s left hand.

  Scarlett slid her left arm under the duke’s shoulder and down his side to support him, while using her right hand to steady his head. Lisa positioned herself so that she could turn the duke’s pelvis at the same time.

  “Carefully now, no twisting,” Lisa directed. Between them, the large woman and the small one carefully turned St. Cottleroy onto his left side. “So, so,” Lisa commented. “Just as I thought. This is Mad Harry’s work. You are very lucky to be alive, Your Grace.”

  “What happened to him?” Dahlia asked.

  “His spine has been pierced with a very small stiletto. It is just long enough to pierce the spine. This interrupts the flow of his life force. With this interruption, he cannot direct the movement of his legs.”

  Lisa took up one of her small needles. Dahlia could not see what she was doing, but the little woman asked, “Does that hurt?”

  “No,” Cottleroy replied.

  For several minutes, this continued, until he let out a yelp of surprise. “Ah, good. I think they must have been interrupted. The spinal cord is not completely severed. With a little luck and great care, function might be restored. Now, while we have him turned, let us place a sheet beneath him so that he can be moved to a more comfortable resting place.”

  Before turning the Duke to his back again, Scarlett and Lisa moved the rags of his clothing to one side so that they could be taken from beneath him easily, and Lisa cleaned the Duke’s back with the lavender water that Dahlia had brought in.

  Lisa then packed the tiny would with an herbal poultice and secured it with a thin layer of honey covered by a large comfrey leaf. Over this, she placed a wide cloth bandage.

  The two women rolled the duke to his back again, with the wide bandage and the sheet beneath him. Once that was done, Lisa neatly knotted the wide bandage on his stomach, then she and Scarlett cleared away the rags of clothing and spread out the sheet.

  It took only a short time more to have a cot brought in, and a board placed under the mattress so that it could not sag. With some of the maids assisting, the women then transferred the Duke of Cottleroy to the cot. He bore their ministrations stoically and only cried out once when Lisa popped the hip back into its socket, then set the leg, but he was sweating profusely by the time they had finished.

  Dahlia wiped her father’s face and upper chest with a cloth that was lightly dampened with the lavender water.

  “Do you want something for the pain, Your Grace?” Lisa asked.

  “Not just yet,” Dahlia’s father said. “I need to talk to my daughter while I have my wits about me. Dahlia, where is your brother?”

  “He was out fighting the fires last night, Father,” Dahlia replied. “Roger has gone out looking for him.”

  “I must tell you, then,” the Duke said. “Because this must be known, but not to everyone in the world.”

  “I saw others who could use my help,” Lisa said. “Scarlett, are you prepared to be my nurse assistant?”

  “Of course,” Scarlett replied. The two of them left the dining room, heading back to the ball room where most of the injured were resting.

  “Tell me, Father,” Dahlia said, “Then you need to rest.”
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  “I am sorry, Daughter. You were right about Goldstone. I don’t know the whole of what is going on, but he was blackmailing me.”

  “Blackmail? But Father, what could he have against you?”

  “Insurance fraud and treason,” her father said grimly. “Oh, it didn’t start out with that intent. I had a ship with some spoiled goods, and I padded the bill to Lloyds of London. They paid up, but they threatened to stop insuring my shipments. Goldstone caught wind of it and suggested a different shipping company. Could I trouble you for a sip of water, Dahlia?”

  “Of course!” she said.

  “At first, it seemed like a good solution. But after a time, some of my shipments started coming up short. When I asked Goldstone about it, he was indignant, saying that the full amount of goods had been shipped. And so, they had – they just weren’t arriving intact. Then the late Duke of Shelthom, his wife and all of their goods went missing.”

  He took a sip of water.

  “But what did that have to do with your shipping, Father?” Dahlia asked.

  “Nothing that I knew of,” the Duke replied. “My shipments continued to go through, but those insured by Lloyds of London were coming up missing or only bits of the items that were on the ships would turn up on the tide. I didn’t think anything of it, at first.”

  “But then?” Dahlia feared she knew what was coming.

  “Goldstone asked me to invest in his new assurance company. It was doing well, and it seemed like a good business venture. The only buy-in price that he asked was your hand in marriage.” Her father paused. “I am so sorry, Daughter. That should have been my first clue that something was truly wrong.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then you ran away, and Goldstone told me that I was implicated in insurance fraud and, oh, just incidentally, in treason. It seems that the missing goods had been siphoned off and sent to Napoleon’s army. He told me that he would expose me if I did not give your hand in marriage to him.”

  “And you thought this was a good thing?” Dahlia’s voice broke a little in outrage.

  “Not a good thing, exactly, but an expedient thing. You had not fixed your interest, or so it seemed to me, with any suitable match. You were going on toward being an old maid, my child.”

  “Somehow that seems rather negligible compared to fraud and treason. Father, whatever were you thinking?”

  “Not of committing either, actually. But deliberately misdirecting a ship belonging to a peer of the realm is considered treason, as is providing aid to the enemy. And when the peer in question is on board the lost ship– well, it really doesn’t look good at all.”

  “Father! You didn’t!”

  “No, Daughter, I didn’t, but Goldstone laid plans to make it look as if I did. Fortunately, the late Duke’s crew were loyal to him and it didn’t go quite as the Earl planned. But it went badly enough.”

  “Late Duke? Father, not the late Duke of Shelthom?”

  “I am afraid so. I had a shipment of goods very similar to the Duke’s and asked Goldstone if he could help me find a marketing edge. Little did I realize that to him a ‘marketing edge’ constituted a dead rival. By the time the Shelthom’s ship came up missing, I was too deeply implicated to get out of the mess gracefully.”

  “Let me guess,” Dahlia said wrathfully, “Some of the current Duke’s bad fortune at cards and at the track was not because he was a poor judge of character, but because there were people cheating and defrauding him out of his funds.”

  “You are not mistaken on this point, my daughter,” Her father said regretfully. “Goldstone had it in mind to entrap the Duke of Shelthom in much the same way he did me. He would cause him to go into debt, then offer a lucrative way to repair his fortunes. Before he would realize it, he would be indebted to Goldstone and obliged to help him cover up his activities.”

  “With gambling debts.” Dahlia glared at her father. “I cannot believe that you would be party to such a thing.”

  “It isn’t really quite as simple as you might think. One thing led to another, until I was implicated beyond any ability to extract myself.” He sighed. “Then you ran away with Shelthom. I was angry, but now I think I am glad. You will have a protector when I am dead.”

  “You are not dying, Father. That is sheer nonsense.” Dahlia said firmly.

  “Daughter of mine, if my wounds do not carry me off, I am likely to be hanged for treason,” Cottleroy explained. “I am glad that you have a protector, one who clearly cannot have been any part of Goldstone’s plot.”

  “I don’t see it,” Dahlia said. “Goldstone might have convinced you that you are responsible for his actions, and you might have been greedy, but you are not a traitor. That much I do know about you. The rest of it is dreadful enough, but I cannot think that he can pin the death of Roger’s mother and father on you, especially since you knew nothing of what he had planned until after the fact.”

  “I think he might be able to.” Remorse showed clearly on her father’s face. “The worst of it is I liked the late Duke. He was a good man.”

  “Well, well, well,” Scarlett said from the door. “I did wonder how a man like you got mixed up with Mad Harry.”

  “You’ll not harm him,” Dahlia sprang from her chair, ran around the cot and placed herself between them.

  “No, no, my dear,” Scarlett said, pulling out a chair from the dining table, and sitting down. “Far from it, and if he’d had the sense to come to us in the first place, a great deal of harm would not have happened at all.”

  “Us? Who is us?” Dahlia still stood between Scarlett and her father, her hands clenching and unclenching.

  Scarlett crossed one ankle across her knee, exposing an expanse of black silk stocking in a most unladylike manner. “Bow street Runners, Lady Dahlia. We knew about Mad Harry and his little ways, but it is deucedly hard to snabble a top-lofty cove if you aren’t a member of the ton yourself.”

  “Wonderful,” Cottleroy snorted. “How long have you been listening?”

  “Since about the beginning. I think if you would be willing to present your evidence to His Royal Highness, or a representative, that your involvement could be repairable. Especially since that ship with the late Duke and Duchess aboard didn’t really go down.” Scarlett reached a hand into her skirt and pulled out an evil looking pipe. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “I guess not,” Dahlia consented. “Father?”

  “Scarcely material what I think,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  “Thank you.” Scarlett expertly tamped tobacco into the pipe and lit it from one of the candles in the room. She sucked in a lungful of smoke and blew it out. The stuff smelled like rags and old socks, but the giantess seemed to relish it. “I’ve been dying for a smoke since yesterday evening, but quality morts don’t and I’ve been tryin’ like anything to stay in character.”

  “But what do you mean that ship didn’t go down?” Dahlia enquired. “It was lost two years ago.”

  “Lost, yes. Sunk, no. Privateers sailed it up around the northern end of Scotland and ran it aground in the islands. We knew something was up when cargo that rightfully should have been on it started surfacing in Ireland.”

  “Does this mean that the Duke of Shelthom and the Duchess are not dead?”

  “We are honestly not sure. We know that when our man, who was aboard that ship, managed to escape they were both alive. But that was a good eighteen months ago.” Scarlett shook her head. “No survivors from any of the lost ships have been found.”

  “I know,” Dahlia said. “I read about them in a stack of old newspapers in the library. There is a pattern to the way they are happening and to the people whose ships are lost. I made notes just before the festivities.”

  “What sort of pattern?” Scarlett asked, taking a deep puff on the evil-smelling brier pipe clenched in her teeth.

  “It would seem –,” Dahlia began.

  “Stop, Daughter,” the Duke of Cottleroy bade her, “Stop. Please listen. I a
m mired in this to my neck and am like to die of it. I tried to stop Goldstone last night, but he would have none of it. We fought, and the results are as you see. He came at me from behind as I tried to walk away.”

  “Then surely, Father, you should have no objection to stopping him and his cronies from whatever it is that they would do.”

  “Oh, my child,” her father drew a tortured breath, “This goes deeper than you can possibly know.”

  “Very deep indeed,” Roger entered the room, his clothing mud and soot spattered again, and his face somber. “Cottleroy, you might wish to allow Lady Dahlia to share what she has found, for I have dreadful news.”