She’d thrown herself on a sword, becoming a martyr to misery out of some misguided sense of honor.
Perhaps misguided wasn’t the word… she’d made some salient points, after all. Fate, it seemed, wanted them to choose between their happiness.
Or the lives of others.
But he was a scientist, goddammit. He was a man who—when presented with a conundrum—reveled in the solving of it. There had to be a way, and if she wasn’t willing to find it, he would.
Perhaps at the bottom of his glass.
“Do you want another one, Morley?” he asked, raising his hand to the barkeep at the Hatchet and Crown. War veterans and officers often took their respite at this mahogany bar, therefore a man with a bleak expression and desire for solitude could find a place to drink unmolested. Men here often wallowed in their loneliness together.
As the chief inspector was a fair-skinned man, his cheeks now glowed with warmth as he pushed his glass away and fought to contain a belch. “I’ve had quite enough, which is still two fewer than you. I’ll have to pour you into a hackney.”
“I’ll get him back home.” Dorian yawned from where he perched on Titus’s other side, and drained his stout. “I’ve business in that part of town anyway.”
“Do I want to know what sort of business?” Morley goaded.
“You probably already do, you meddling cur.” Dorian’s eye patch hid his expression until he turned to flash a taunting smile at them both.
“He said he deserved it,” Titus told the inside of his glass, puzzling over the same conversation for two weeks now. “What did he mean?”
“Who?” Morley and Dorian asked at the same time.
“Nora’s father.” Titus wondered when he’d begun to slur. He didn’t even feel that inebriated. “What did the Baron mean when he said he deserved a punch from me? Why would he say that? Because he put me on the streets? What man wouldn’t for deflowering his daughter?”
“Enough of this.” Morley relieved him of his glass, which still had another two hefty swallows. “It’s only making you maudlin. You’ll be bound to the bottle if you keep it up.”
Reflexively, Titus plucked the glass back and downed it in one burning gulp, before slamming the glass onto the bar with a resounding noise. “One does well to treat an outside wound with alcohol,” he contended. “But it is also an effective treatment for internal injuries.”
“Sound science.” Dorian shrugged into his coat.
“Yes,” Titus heartily agreed. “The soundest of hypothessissiess. Hupothesi? Hypotenuse.”
Suddenly his stomach lurched, and he tried to remember if he’d eaten since breakfast. He’d no appetite lately. No vigor. Everything tasted flat and beige.
“Come on, man.” Dorian hauled him to his feet. “Let’s get you home to bed.”
“I don’t sleep in my bed. It smells like roses.”
He missed the glance his compatriots shared because he felt a perfectly good brood coming upon him.
“I’m—I should have stopped her.” He swayed, looking for his hat before Morley shoved the thing into his hands. “I should have just trussed her up and thrown her in my carriage and run away to Italy. But who does that kind of thing?”
“Only the best of men,” Dorian said cheekily. “So, I cannot argue the point.”
Morley reached in his pockets and left a generous several coins on the bar. “Prudence says Lady Woodhaven is as bereft as you are. She hasn’t accepted any kind of proposal. Not officially. There’s still time to fight for her, you know.”
His still, cold heart began to beat at the prospect, thrumming and stalling as if it’d forgotten how. “I’d fight the entire world for her… if she’d let me.”
A youngish man with an air of danger and an overconfident swagger came toward them. Titus braced for trouble, but the lad merely handed a folded note to Blackwell, tipped his hat at the gratuity he received, and melted back into the London night.
Dorian opened the note and read quickly, his lips compressing into a tight line.
“What is it?” Morley asked, suddenly alert.
“It would seem we’re going to Sheerness,” he said.
“But that’s…hours downriver,” Titus protested, stumbling out onto cobbles shining in the pallid gaslight from a recent rain.
“Which is fortunate for you, because you’ll need to sober up on the way.” Dorian whistled and motioned to where his carriage waited idly a block down. “It would seem your errant lady love has hired an entire handful of personal safety guards to conduct her and her two sisters there tonight rather than