“After? What are you talking about?” When he didn’t answer, she sat down on the mattress. “If this marriage is going to work, you must be honest with me. You must trust that I can handle it, no matter what it is.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. He began to load the firearms, first the derringer, then his pistol.
“West.” She reached out her hand to cover his. “After all we have talked about, all we have shared, you must know that I can’t have this conversation when you are doing that.”
He breathed out, a ragged sound. “Mary,” he said, placing the firearms down on the mattress once more. “I know you don’t want me to do this,” he said, his voice close to cracking, “but talking about it won’t do any good.” He turned to face her. “I can’t—I won’t—back out of this.”
“Not even for me?” she demanded. “For us?”
His gaze met hers, anguished.
“I love you, West.” Her breathing hitched, and she realized she was dangerously close to crying, but this piece of it needed to be said before she dissolved into hysterics. “I love you the way I never imagined loving anyone. But now that I am finally emerging from that dark period of my life, the thought I might yet lose you, too, and to something so stupid, something you had a hand in orchestrating, something you have the ability to stop—”
Her words fell away as he caught her up in his arms. She could feel his body shaking against hers. “Christ, I love you, too, Mouse. And that is why I have to see this through.” She felt his breath, warm against the top of her hair, and she closed her eyes, wanting to burrow deep. “There is no choice, not for me. Whoever did this, they won’t stop. They know you tried to interfere, saw your face that day in Edinburgh and possibly even took a shot at you.” His tender words turned into a growl. “And I am not going to sit idly by and let that happen again.”
She breathed in, the familiar wool and tobacco scent of his jacket something she didn’t want to ever let go. But in spite of those comforting scents, she could feel the tension, vibrating inside him. “You are scared,” she asked slowly, “for me?”
She felt him nod against the top her head.
She pulled away. “But . . . if we know it is Southingham, we can take precautions to ensure my safety.” She picked up the small derringer. Hefted it in her hand. Though the feel of it against her palm sent her heart thumping in her chest, she imagined she could carry it, if she had to. Firing it, though . . . that was another thing entirely. She drew a deep breath. “I will even learn how to shoot this if need be. The point is, we can find another way—”
He shook his head, his gaze probing, insistent. “The man we saw going down into the vaults . . .” His body tensed. “I don’t think it was Southingham.”
Mary stared at him in shock. “But then . . . who?” But even as she asked the question, a sliver of selfish hope worked its way through her confusion. “If you no longer believe it is Southingham, there is no need to go through with this.” Her imagination helpfully supplied a change in the unfolding plotline. “You must summon Grant,” she insisted. “Have him issue the duke an apology on your behalf, and we can—”
He cut her off, shaking his head. “I can’t summon Grant.”
“But . . . that’s the role of your second, isn’t it?”
“I can’t ask Grant to do that because I think . . .” He swallowed. “I think the man we saw going down into the vaults may have been Grant, Mary. And while it may not have been Southingham down in the vaults, the man is almost certainly still mixed up in this somehow.”
The weight of what he was saying pressed down on Mary, making it hard to breathe. She placed the derringer in the pocket of her skirt, her thoughts swirling wildly. “You think . . . Grant and Southingham . . . are working together?”
“I don’t know. But it was Southingham’s study where I overheard the whispers about the Scotland plot. And the threatening note you received matched the handwriting on the receipt from Southingham’s study.”
“But . . . why would Grant do such a thing?” Mary gasped. “I thought he hated Southingham as much as you do?”
“I don’t know. But if he’s mad enough to be involved in a plot this dangerous, and carried it through to this point, one thing’s bloody certain: he isn’t going to issue an apology on my behalf. And I can’t stop the duel because I need to remove at least one of them as a threat while I still have the chance.”
It was a glorious summer morning.
Glorious, that was, except for the question of his own mortality.
West squinted into the dawn, waiting for Southingham to arrive. The mist rising off the Serpentine lent a fairy-like quality to the scene, but the crowd of witnesses quite destroyed the effect. They joked and drank and jostled each other to get a frontline view for the gossip that would almost certainly dominate tomorrow’s rags.
Mary stood to one side, her hands wrapped around her slim body, her eyes locked on him. She’d insisted on coming in spite of his objections, pointing out that his insistence on “sticking together” applied to duels every bit as much as dark, dangerous vaults. In the end, he’d been forced to give in or else tie her up. She was clearly better with a knot than he was, and so this morning he’d chosen the battle he was more likely to win.
But he wasn’t happy about it. Not one bit.
A commotion in the crowd pulled his attention toward the left. He could see Southingham striding toward him through the mist, coattails flapping.
“He’s here,” Grant said beside him.
“Yes.” West studied the man who was approaching them, looking for cracks in Southingham’s armor. The man looked as pale as Mary did, and far less composed. “He doesn’t look all that eager for a shot at me,” West mused, which was a small blessing. Nervous men tended to have shaking hands. It was the stone-faced ones you needed to worry about.
And beside him, Grant’s jaw looked chiseled from granite.
“Do you wish to issue an apology?” Grant asked, though he didn’t sound enthusiastic about the prospect.
“No.” West gritted his teeth. Do you? The unspoken question roared through his mind. Because God knew that he and Grant were sidestepping a very pointed conversation about just what, exactly, was going on.
Grant grunted. “I’ll confer with Southingham’s second, then.”
West watched as his friend walked toward the man who was supposed to be their enemy. Doubt sizzled down the edges of his resolve. There were so many unanswered questions, not the least of which was why. To West’s knowledge, Grant hated Southingham, nearly as much as West did. Grant, too, had suffered the man’s fists during their days at Harrow. Christ, it had been Grant’s desire for revenge to sneak into the man’s house on his wedding night, every bit as much as it had been West’s.
But none of this made any sense unless Southingham and Grant were working together.
And the sting of that imagined betrayal hurt worse than any future bullet.
Grant returned to stand beside him, holding out one of the dueling pistols. “I made sure he took the other one,” he said, his face unreadable.
“Why?”
“Trust me on this.”
West took it. Confirmed the pistol contained the requisite, single bullet. Checked the barrel. But something caught his eye. Scratches along the inside of the barrel, marks that hadn’t been there before. “What is this?”
“I took the liberty of having the barrel rifled for you,” Grant said, keeping his voice low.
“What?” West scowled at his friend. The point of dueling pistols was their marked inaccuracy, though he’d practiced enough with this pair to imagine he might be able to compensate for their shortcomings. Rifling the bore of a smooth barreled pistol provided the shooter a vastly improved aim. In a duel, it would nearly be considered murder. “Did you rifle the barrel of Southingham’s pistol, too?” he demanded.
Grant snorted. “Christ, no.”
“Grant. That is—”
“Ungentlemanly?�
� Grant shrugged. “You’re my best friend, West.” He reached out a hand, taking back the pistol and performing the same check West had just done. As he stared down the barrel, his face finally softened, a wistful smile tugging the corners of his mouth. “Friends forever, eh? And I can’t have you dying on me this morning.” He looked up, the smile falling away. “At least, not until we’ve had a proper chance to talk.”
“If you want to talk, talk now,” West said, clenching his teeth. Because when all was said and done, they might not get another chance. “Tell me where you were two days ago. Because I know for a fact you weren’t here in London.”
Grant’s eyes narrowed. “You and your lovely new wife did not really go to the Lake District, did you?” Not that it needed to be said. Something in Grant’s voice told West his friend already knew the answer to that particular question.
“We went to Edinburgh, actually, hoping to see the queen. The odd thing is, though, the queen didn’t come.” West raised a brow. “I imagine that must have come as a disappointment to some.”
A muscle ticked beneath Grant’s eye.
West took a step toward his friend, his fingers closing over the barrel of the pistol in his friend’s hand. “Now why don’t you tell me why you were in Edinburgh, damn it. The truth this time. What are you mixed up in, Grant? Whatever it is, it isn’t too late to stop it.”
Grant exhaled, a rough sound. “How did you know?”
“I saw you, the morning of the parade. You seemed to have a special interest in the vaults below Southgate Bridge.”
“You are the one who dampened the fuse?”
“Mary and I did it. It was her idea to use the rainwater.”
“She’s a smart woman,” Grant admitted, a bit grudgingly.
“Yes. The most brilliant woman I know. And if you tried to kill her in Edinburgh, I swear to God, Grant, it won’t matter if you saved my life a half dozen times in Crimea. My hands will be tied as to the conclusion of this conversation.”
Grant’s eyes narrowed. Held a moment. “Christ. You’re in love.” He snorted. “I should have guessed. Deucedly inconvenient thing, that. Makes a man lose his very mind.” His eyes hollowed, as if reaching a grim conclusion. “Very well, I’ll tell you everything.” He relinquished his hold on the gun. “But only after this is over.”
West’s fingers tightened over the handle of the dueling pistol. “Bloody hell, Grant, tell me now—” But his protest was cut short.
A call rang out, a summons to start.
“This isn’t finished,” West warned, and then strode, head down, toward an uncertain fate. Perhaps it was too late for explanations anyway. Grant had all but confessed his role in the plot to kill the queen, though he hadn’t precisely said why he’d done it. Perhaps there wasn’t any more to it than that. It was perhaps too late for regrets, as well.
But that didn’t stop him from having them.
He regretted not guessing Grant’s role sooner. Christ, he should have suspected the moment he’d realized the prostitute Vivian was involved. The moment Grant had pretended not to believe him, placing that bloody wager in the betting books to throw West off the trail.
He stood like a statue, seething, his pistol pointed firmly toward the ground. Just behind him stood Southingham, similarly arrayed. Somewhere to the right, the countdown began.
“One. Two. Three.”
West counted off his paces, his heart thudding in his chest, hoping to God Mary would forgive him when this was all said and done.
“Seven, eight.”
As he strode past Grant, West risked a look at his friend, his finger slick on the trigger. Grant was watching Southingham, his face an unreadable mask. The question arose as to just who the bullet in his pistol’s chamber might best be reserved for.
“Eleven, twelve.”
And no matter what was going on in his friend’s head, West could not get past this one pertinent question: had Grant really tried to shoot Mary in Edinburgh? Because while he could forgive a great deal, there were some limits to friendship.
“Fifteen, sixteen.”
As he walked, West caught sight of the Duchess of Southingham in the crowd. He imagined making the woman a widow today. Felt sick to his stomach at the thought of it.
“Nineteen. Twenty.”
West stopped. Turned.
Raised his pistol, his lungs working like a bellows. He could see Southingham in the distance, the man’s hand similarly raised. They stood that way for several seconds, the silence of the watching crowd nearly deafening. He ought to be able to pull the trigger, no regrets. After all, the man staring at him from across the field was a man he hated.
But was it a man he could kill?
Southingham looked nervous. Hesitant. Not at all like a man with West’s murder on his mind. He saw Southingham’s gaze pull toward his duchess. Was he questioning it all now? He should be. After all, the Duchess of Southingham had presumably possessed the power to stop this duel. She could have told her husband he was wrong in his suspicions, that she and West were not having an affair. She could have begged him to stop.
But she hadn’t, apparently. She was standing, her chin up, watching it all unfold with an almost preternatural calm.
The question of why flailed about in his mind.
And just like that, the facts settled into place.
Your Grace, the voices had whispered that night in the library. But dukes were not the only peer of the realm addressed as Your Grace. Duchesses, too, had that courtesy.
Oh, good Christ.
Had he and Mary been wrong, all these weeks, searching for a bloody duke?
Slowly—because, after all, he was no longer sure that Southingham was the man he needed to kill—West lifted the point of his gun into the air. A collective gasp rang through the crowd. He held his breath, ready to dive to one side if it came down to it, hoping his reflexes might be enough to save him if the duke decided to take advantage of his decision.
But then the barrel of Southingham’s pistol swung wide, veering off course, aiming for the center of the path. West saw the smoke curl out of the barrel before he heard the retort. He heard a shout—not his own.
And then he saw Grant slump to the ground, a crimson hole in his friend’s chest.
Dear God.
A woman’s shrill scream arose from the crowd, and it gave chase at his heels as West raced toward his fallen friend, guilt and fear colliding in his chest, the unused pistol tight in his hands. He was skidding now in the wet grass, falling to his knees. In the back of his mind, he prayed that perhaps it was just a mistake. That Southingham hadn’t really meant to shoot Grant, that the aim of the pistol had been too unpredictable to properly control. He prayed, too, that the gaping hole in his friend’s chest might be nothing more than a bad dream.
But the grass was damp beneath his knees, soaking through his trousers, and the blood on his hands was slippery and warm.
No dream, this. A nightmare come to life.
Shrugging out of his jacket, he pressed the wool against the wound in his friend’s chest, as Grant had once done for him, on the lower deck of the HMS Arrogant.
“For Christ’s sake, don’t die on me,” he warned his friend. Not yet. Not without answers.
And not without a chance to make things right.
Grant coughed, an agonizing sound. “West?” he croaked, his eyes fluttering open.
“I am here,” West told him, fighting back a snarl of frustration.
“I knew you would be.” Grant closed his eyes again. “Friends forever, eh?”
“Damn it, Grant, why did you do it?” West choked out, trying in vain to stanch the endless flow of blood.
“Someone . . . had to . . .”
The words scarcely made sense. No one believed they had to kill the queen—not if they were of sound mind. West lifted Grant up and cradled him in his arms, a terrible weight pressing down on him. It occurred to him, then, that Grant might well and truly be mad.
Grant
shivered in his arms, though it was scarcely a cold day. “I want you to know, though . . . I didn’t try to kill Mary. Knew . . . you wouldn’t forgive . . . that.” The words rattled in his throat. “Killed Carlson. Before he told her anything.”
“But why, damn it?”
“I did it . . .” Blood gurgled on Grant’s lips. “. . . for Crimea. For them.”
“Them?” West blinked, knowing instantly his friend meant their colleagues, the ones who had not made it home from the HMS Arrogant. The ones they never spoke of. He leaned over, straining to hear Grant’s garbled words. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were thinking? What was happening to you?” he said hoarsely. “I could have found you help, made sure you had someone to talk to. We should have talked about what happened more. We should have spoken their names, and talked to their families. If only I’d known—”
But it seemed speaking of them now was no longer an option.
Because Grant went limp in his arms.
“Grant!” West shouted, shaking his friend. Grant’s head lolled back, the light in his eyes extinguished. “Damn it, no!” Unexpected tears clouded his eyes. In spite of it all, in spite of what Grant himself had just confirmed, there was still a swirl of guilt in West’s mind. Hadn’t he wrestled his own demons, those long months since their return from Crimea? He’d always thought he’d had the worst of it. But he could see, now, how wrong he had been.
In the distance, he could hear the shouts of a struggle as a group of men tackled the duke, wrestling him to the ground. West couldn’t even summon any pleasure with the knowledge his former nemesis was being taken care of in such an undignified manner. Duels might be the gentleman’s way to resolve a dispute, but Southingham had just killed someone in cold blood, to the horror of two dozen or more witnesses. One didn’t need a room full of rats to bring down a duke after all. They’d manage it themselves, if you gave them enough rope.
Slowly, he picked up the pistol he’d tossed to one side.
And then slowly, regretfully, he climbed to his feet. He drew a deep breath.
The Perks of Loving a Scoundrel Page 33
