A Gentleman Undone

by Cecilia Grant

  Movement by the carriage snagged his attention: she’d stepped outside. Doubtless she’d noted the multiple glances cast her way by both men, and now she stood, just clear of the wheels, clutching her cloak against the wind, poised to approach if summoned. Her eyes held him as fast as they’d done that first night in the darkened library, but this time there was nothing of indifference in her gaze. For all her strength and steadiness he could see the ardent hope burning there. Even now she let herself believe he and Roanoke could be coming to some terms that would avert the duel.

  The splintering sensation started up in his chest once more. This on its own might not have swayed him; even in tandem with that odd sunlight-shaft of pity, it might not have done. But his right thumb chose that instant to recall the hushed cadence of Talbot’s pulse, and that impression acted upon the other two like the final drop in an alchemist’s potion, or the prism that splintered a shaft of sunlight into something brilliant and new.

  And now all was clarity, and decision, and action. “Listen, Roanoke.” He didn’t have much time. Cathcart and the Roanoke brother had finished with the surgeon and pistols and were turning this way. “I’m going to delope.”

  Square-jaw’s head jerked up, eyes wide, nostrils flared, disbelief writ large across his brow. To be sure it was a disgraceful act, deliberately missing one’s target. Apology was the honorable way out of a duel.

  Well, hang that. After all he’d gone through, he’d surely wrested from life the right to decide for himself what was honorable. “The truth is I find myself uninclined to kill, this morning. If I could be certain of my aim I’d probably shoot you in the leg. But I don’t know these pistols.” Quickly. Here they came. “They might kick just enough to put a bullet in your vitals. Altogether I think it’s safer to aim away. Ah—is it time, then?” He swung away to address the seconds before Roanoke had a chance to reply. He wanted no reply. He’d made up his mind.

  Prince Square-jaw was no more deserving of mercy than he’d been ten minutes since. That part hadn’t changed. Rather the shift had come in his perspective, as though he’d climbed some peak to look down on the terrain of his life and seen the duel from a different angle. He had the privilege and power of granting mercy, regardless of whether it was earned. And if he did this—if he waived his right to dispatch a worthless bounder—then his history would have an act of irrational grace to balance, in some small way, the memories of his helpless complicity in the death of a man who’d never deserved such an end.

  Besides, he’d be doing a kindness to this fair-haired younger Roanoke who stood before him now, proffering the pistols and reminding everyone of the agreed-upon terms. One shot apiece, simultaneous fire, and a misfire counted as a shot. Cathcart said something too, as to the surgeon and his qualifications and the steps they would take to avoid notice by the law in the event there was need for medical treatment. He’d proven himself a surprisingly generous and dependable friend, the viscount had. He’d see his goodness repaid, if he didn’t mind friendship with the husband of a demimondaine—and if, of course, Roanoke didn’t choose to fire on a man who’d already told him his own shot would go wide.

  His heart pounded, robust and regular, as he took a pistol and followed to the patch of ground the seconds had picked out. If he was mortally wounded he would have a devil of a time explaining, with his dying breaths, why he’d declined to inflict a wound in his turn.

  Never mind. To condition his deloping on an assurance of his opponent’s doing the same would have been but a timid gesture. And a dueling-ground was no place for timidity.

  Twenty paces. He took the left-hand direction, because that was the one that would leave him facing Lydia, and when he set his feet he had a good long look at her.

  She’d let go her cloak, to bring her arms straight down at her sides. Her hands were balled into fists. Her chin jutted at a deliberate angle, as though to emphasize to any viewer how she did not shrink from the scene. Her eyes glittered like a mishap in a chemist’s workshop, quicksilver mingled with broken glass.

  I love you for your quickness and your brokenness and your sharp edges too. Let her read that in his eyes, on his face, in every part of his body even as his right arm rose and extended straight out to the side, pistol in hand. He turned his head to the right, sighted down his arm, and bent his elbow in close. Forty paces away Roanoke was doing the same, and somewhere out of his view one of the seconds was counting down.

  Let happen what would. He angled his face for a sight of Lydia again, for one more draught of that fierce, irregular beauty. She saw him look away from his target, saw the sudden slant of his wrist, and as the powder flashed and the pistol kicked he was conscious of nothing but her smile, spilling out across her face with such warm incandescence as put the sunrise to shame.

  Epilogue

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  I’M FAIRLY certain your parents will think better of this someday. Such a connection does no credit to any young lady.” Lydia kept her voice down, as the parents in question were walking several paces behind. Miss Mirkwood, to whom the words had been addressed, received them with an expression of as much sagacity as an infant could manage, while occupied with cramming her own bonnet strings into her mouth.

  Of course she’d heard this admonition before, more than once. Lydia took care to repeat some version of it every time she saw the child. If the Mirkwoods eventually came to their senses and cut the connection, she would at least have been prepared.

  “However, provided they continue so careless in these matters long enough for you to reach a reasoning age, I shall teach you a great deal about playing cards. A little skill at vingt-et-un can make a lady’s fortune in more ways than one.” Miss Mirkwood must wonder, if she understood the words, what kind of fortune brought a woman down into this neighborhood, all narrow streets and ramshackle buildings and every offensive smell of close city living mixed with every foul odor that came off the river. “Are you quite sure you want to go on?” Lydia said over her shoulder. “If you’d rather, you could wait back a block or two with the baby and I could go the rest of the way on my own.”

  “Not at all. Mrs. Mirkwood is fond of squalor.” That lady’s husband flashed his perfect teeth—some women did prefer that kind—in a smile of such mischief as ought by rights to try a serious-minded wife’s patience.

  But other people’s marriages were things of mystery, and to have her patience tried seemed to suit Mrs. Mirkwood very well. “I take an interest in the alleviation of squalor, as must any country landowner.” She had her brother’s disarming direct gaze as well as his dark-chocolate eyes. “Poverty doesn’t belong only to the city. I expect I’ve seen enough, in Sussex, to prepare me for whatever we encounter on this walk. That is what Mr. Mirkwood meant to say.”

  “Precisely what I meant to say,” agreed her husband, just as satisfied to be corrected by her as she was to be teased by him. “We fear nothing. Lead on.”

  So on she led them, past dockworkers staggering out of public houses, harlots soliciting sailors flush from the last voyage, children chasing after drays in hopes some merchandise might tumble off into the street. She would never have been easy in this neighborhood, if she’d remained respectable. She would have missed so much.

  A thrumming started up in her chest as the stones underfoot gave way to the timber of the massive dock, with its warehouses and offices and ongoing bustle of industry. A small crowd of emigrants thronged ahead of her, waiting for the boats that would ferry them to one of the ships moored out in the river proper. She wove through their ranks, one Mirkwood on her hip and two more in tow, and cut right to arrive at the office that had been their destination. The door stood open and she paused, on the threshold, just to look.

  Her husband stood at a table directly in line with the door, coatless, cuff-buttons undone and sleeves pushed up to the elbows. His palms lay flat on the tabletop, at either side of a document in which he was absorbed, and as he leaned forward, head bent, hair falling over his brow
, the beauty of his forearms alone was enough to make her dizzy.

  At his right was a man she recognized as the ship’s first mate, explaining something at which he nodded with that easy authority that must come from his time leading soldiers on the Continent. He glanced up to ask the crewman a question, caught sight of her, and smiled.

  His smile—and with all due respect to Mr. Mirkwood, here was what a man’s smile ought to be, crooked and imperfect and crammed with character—made all her innards bloom like flowers under a tropical sun.

  So had she bloomed under his smile that morning on Primrose Hill, in the instant when she understood he’d chosen to leave Edward standing. Granted she would have killed Edward herself if he’d been so craven as to answer that clemency by inflicting even a flesh wound—but she hadn’t had to. Something had bloomed in Edward, too, at least for the span of time it took him to fire at the ground and mutter a few imprecations on shoddy pistols and how they kicked. Such was the influence of a nature like her husband’s.

  “Bringing the gentry in to gawk at those of us who labor for our bread, are you?” Just one moment, said the gesture he made to the crewman as he came from behind his table. “I don’t know but we ought to charge admission. Sixpence, or a firstborn child.” Miss Mirkwood had by now spied him and was reaching out her arms; he hoisted her neatly from Lydia’s hip to a perch on his shoulder. “What say you, Fuller?”

  Mr. Fuller, at his own desk by the east wall with its windows, had come to his feet. “All order in my account books is owing to Mrs. Blackshear. She may bring in whatever visitors she likes.” He directed a bow toward the Mirkwoods. He’d met them, of course, at the wedding breakfast. And he was exaggerating about the account books, but she could let that pass.

  Happiness still felt, at odd moments, like something with which she oughtn’t to be trusted. A delicate and costly music box put into the hands of a maladroit child. Yet happiness felt, too, like a prize she and Will had fought for and seized. An edifice they’d built with their own bare hands out of the scrap heap of mistake and misadventure.

  There would never be any but borrowed children to sit atop her husband’s shoulder. They must live modestly, with tradesmen for neighbors and only a slight income from what remained of their winnings to supplement his wages. Their friends would probably always be few. And still, knowing what she knew—what they both knew—of fortune and misfortune, the bounty of their life together seemed sometimes almost too much to bear.

  “Don’t let us interrupt.” She advanced a step or two farther into the office, yet another improbable place where she’d begun to feel at home. “Mr. and Mrs. Mirkwood have come to town on business, and called to invite us to dine with them. I said I’d carry the invitation to you and they proposed to come along.”

  “Excellent.” He sent her insides spinning with one more smile as he shifted himself toward the crewman again. “Give me a minute to finish here and then I’ll show you all about the place.” And on he went with his business, one hand steadying the child on his shoulder just as though that were the ordinary way to conduct these things.

  Hours later he still glowed with the pride and pleasure of having his work thus acknowledged by what family remained to him. Stretched out in her bed, sated by the six courses they’d enjoyed in Brook Street that evening and at least temporarily sated in other appetites as well, he looked as though sparks might jump from his skin to set the sheets ablaze.

  “Lydia,” he said. “Mrs. Blackshear.” He gave the words a moment to shimmer in the air between them as his eyes roved over her face. “You know I have reason to disbelieve in the benevolence of Fate.”

  “I know. So do I have reason.” It was the most sober of their intimate bonds. She lifted a hand to rasp her fingertips on his unshaven cheek.

  “Then how do we account for this? How do you account for it?” He caressed without touching her, through his voice and his bay-rum scent and his reliance on her reason. “That we should have found each other. That of all the epochs in which to be born, our souls should both have chosen this one, and that we both should have been in England, when it might have been me in France and you in China.”

  “That we both survived to adulthood.”

  “Exactly. That’s no small accomplishment.” He was caressing with his hand now as well, following the curve from her lowest rib to her waist to her hip. “That one outrageous circumstance after the next should have led to our both being in the same gaming club on the same night.”

  “And that you didn’t wash your hands of me after I fleeced you that first night.”

  “That too, yes.” A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “The odds against our being in this bed together, happy in the life we have, must be nearly beyond human reckoning. And yet here we are. How are we to understand it?”

  “Some of the odds can be reckoned. If we begin, for example, with the numbers of people presently living in each country of the world, and if we could arrive at an approximate count of all people who have ever lived …” But that was the wrong answer. She knew, not from any change in his expression—he only watched her with a fondness that made her vision go hazy—but because the right answer was suddenly there, square in the middle of her thoughts.

  “Luck,” she said, and meant it. “I think we must ascribe it all to luck.”

  With thanks to Laura:

  repository of medical knowledge,

  tireless supporter,

  all-weather friend

  BY CECILIA GRANT

  A Lady Awakened

  A Gentleman Undone

  If you loved A Gentleman Undone,

  you won’t be able to resist

  A Woman Entangled

  The next breathtaking novel from Cecilia Grant

  Coming Spring 2013

  Read on for a sneak peek

  at this unforgettable story …

  FEBRUARY 1817, LONDON

  DISCOMFITURE, FOR all that it felt like a constant companion, never failed to find new and inventive guises in which to appear.

  “I’d like to take out A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the first volume.” Her sister’s voice soared into every corner of the lending library, all but rattling the bay window in whose alcove Kate had taken refuge. “I’m engaged at present in a work of my own that will build on Miss Wollstonecraft’s foundation. Where she restricted herself to theory, however, and broad societal prescription, I address myself directly to the individual woman of today, arming her with practical methods by which she may begin even now to assert her rights.”

  She wouldn’t speak of bodily emancipation in such a setting, would she? Kate held her breath. Surely even Viola had better sense than to—

  “In particular I introduce the idea that women will never achieve true emancipation until we have absolute governance of our own persons, within marriage as well as without.”

  A stout young man, sitting at the long table nearest Kate’s alcove, looked up sharply from his book. An elderly woman seated on the opposite side of the room did the same. So, no doubt, did every peacefully reading patron in this establishment. Vi’s was a voice that commanded attention, all crisp consonants and breath support, exactly the voice you’d expect from the granddaughter of an earl.

  Or the daughter of an actress.

  The young man’s table was scattered with volumes, all perused and discarded by patrons who hadn’t bothered to return them to the desk. Kate swiped one up and bent her head over a random page, to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes. To Elizabeth it appeared that had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit or finer success …

  Pride and Prejudice. That single line was enough to set her bones vibrating like a struck tuning fork. Surely it had been written for her, this tale of a young woman struggling under the incessant mortifications thrust upon her by a family that did not know the meaning of discretion.

&nbs
p; She turned a page. No more sound from the library’s other end; the clerk must have gone to fetch the requested volume, and to escape any more discussion of practical methods for asserting a woman’s rights. In the book, meanwhile, the party at Netherfield dragged dismally on, plaguing Elizabeth with the disagreeable attentions of Mr. Collins and the cold silence of the Bingley sisters and Mr. Darcy.

  Of course, Mr. Darcy had already begun to take note of Elizabeth’s fine eyes by this point in the story, and Mr. Bingley was so smitten with Jane that he never noticed half the graceless things the Bennet family did. Could there really be such men in the world? And if so, where did they reside?

  “There you are.” Viola stood at the other side of the book-scattered table, Vindication volume in hand, peering at her through those plain glass spectacles she always insisted on wearing in public. “Are you ready to go?”

  The stout man glanced up again, no doubt recognizing Vi’s voice. He sent a quick look from one lady to the other, piecing together their relation.

  And then he saw her, properly. Though he’d been sitting no great distance away all this time, a mere half turn of his head necessary to bring her into view, his eyes apparently had not landed on her until now.

  A dozen or more variations she’d seen of this response, on too many occasions to count. Some men managed it without looking witless. Most, unfortunately, did not.

  The portly man’s features stalled, then veered away from the jolly smirk they’d been forming in favor of a glazed-eyed reverence. He blushed and bowed his head once more over his book.

  Not terribly useful, the admiration of such a man. Still, it gave a girl hope. If she could one day drive a marquess, for example, into a like slack-jawed stupor—and why should she not? Title notwithstanding, a marquess was a man with the same susceptibilities as any other—then she might make something of the triumph.