Ten Things I Hate About the Duke - Loretta Chase Page 0,11
here for I don’t know how long with only my maid, who will never qualify as a proper chaperon. Even with a chaperon . . .” She trailed off and took a deep breath.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched her bosom rise and fall. It wasn’t easy. The enormous sleeves of her carriage dress mostly blocked the view, already half-hidden by lace and big lapels. Maybe the bosom was a degree fuller than he’d at first supposed?
Was she pretty? He wasn’t sure. Though his head had cleared to a great extent, he still had a sense of moving in a fog.
She hadn’t been a pretty child. Of that he was certain. He remembered vividly his time at Camberley Place. So many memories of the warm and welcoming old house. And the fishing house—possibly his favorite place in the world.
“One thing at a time,” she said. “Keeffe first. It isn’t manly pride. Not all of it. You need to understand.”
“No, I don’t. It’s simple enough.”
“It isn’t what you think.”
“I wasn’t actually thinking.”
“It’s the accident at Newmarket,” she said. “Months and months. All that time when he was told he’d never walk again.”
Ashmont didn’t need to hear this. He wasn’t happy, and for the present, he couldn’t cheer himself with drink or any kind of carousing. He had things to do. He needed a clear head. This was only the start. He knew that.
“He can’t abide the idea of being immobile,” she went on. “That’s why—”
“It makes no matter,” Ashmont said. “I’m not going to reason with him. I’m not going to understand him. I’m going to be a great bastard of a duke who tells him to do as he’s told.”
“Very well, do it your way,” she said. “But it had better work. If he hurts himself—”
“It’ll work.” It had to. He had to clear the slate. Whatever else anybody said of the Duke of Ashmont—and that would fill volumes—he paid his debts, and generously. Always.
“If it doesn’t, I’ll shoot you,” she said. “That won’t solve anything, but it’ll make me feel better.”
Cassandra didn’t find her maid or the surgeon in the public dining room.
“He’s in the coffee room, Miss Pomfret,” a maidservant told her. “Don’t know where she’s got to.”
Cassandra found Greenslade standing by a box compartment where sat an alarmed-looking Humphrey Morris, the third of the unpleasant Countess of Bartham’s sons. That was to say, Morris didn’t appear alarmed until he looked up and caught sight of Cassandra.
His alarm grew as he watched her approach. Coffee rooms, generally, were men’s domains. Cassandra usually observed such proprieties, because men became hysterical when women trespassed, and that was tedious. Not to mention it was precisely the sort of thing gossips would use to smear her character and shred her reputation. Not that she had much of a reputation at present, or saw how it would survive this day’s events. But one thing at a time.
“Ah, Miss Pomfret,” the surgeon said. “I beg your pardon for putting you to the trouble of seeking me. I have been looking everywhere for your maid. It would appear that Mr. Morris was among the last to see her.”
She looked at Morris, who hastily rose and slid from the seat and bowed, his face crimson.
“Didn’t know who she was,” he said. “Didn’t see—you know—the crash—and Ashmont told me to hang about in case he needed me. I went out into the courtyard to find out if anybody heard where his pistol got to.”
A dueling pistol, beyond a doubt. Morris must have been Ashmont’s second this morning.
“The fellows reckoned one of them from the Green Man picked it up wherever Ashmont dropped it and took it inside for safekeeping. He left his hat as well, but that was only on the hook, and I got it back to him, along with the pistol case and the other weapon. I’ve been worried about the thing lying in the damp, or run over by a wagon. So I was thinking whether to send somebody to the Green Man when the coach came, and we all stopped to watch.”
People invariably did. Crowds gathered at London’s General Post Office to watch the night mail depart. Departing and arriving coaches always had an audience at the White Horse Cellars in Piccadilly as well, and at other London coaching inns. The entertainment was sometimes as good as a play. Even she enjoyed the sight of the night mail setting out. Any driver would appreciate the coachmen’s expertise and flair. It