Ten Things I Hate About the Duke - Loretta Chase Page 0,12

was one of the things she’d missed about England.

“Saw the girl burst out of the office, waving her ticket,” Morris said, reclaiming her attention. “Only an outside place left, but she took it. Climbed up and went. Last I saw was her ducking her head and holding her hat when they went out under the arch. Didn’t know she was yours until Greenslade here asked me did I see a female in a drab green dress.”

Cassandra gazed at him for a very long time while her mind digested this and ran through the implications. “Did you find the pistol?” she said.

“Not yet.” He swallowed. “Sorry about your jockey, Miss Pomfret.”

“Let me know when you find the pistol,” she said. “I may need it.”

Meanwhile

A small dose of ducal dominance and a large dose of “You’re worrying Miss Pomfret” worked better than the laudanum to settle Keeffe. In short order, a contingent of inn servants and local volunteers gently transferred him to a bedchamber. After the men left, Ashmont, who never apologized, except by way of coins and bank notes, apologized.

Looking embarrassed, Keeffe thanked him. “I’m not like to die, Your Grace. That quack got me wrapped up like one o’ them Egypt mummies. You could drop me off the topmost gallery and onto the courtyard cobblestones and no damage done. The only thing could hurt me now is maybe if you was to shoot a cannonball straight at me, and then it might make a dent. If a pileup of racehorses couldn’t do for me, a couple cracked ribs won’t.”

“Glad to hear it,” Ashmont said. The man didn’t look well. His face was drawn and his brown eyes were cloudy.

“Only thing worries me is my miss, and what’s to become of her.”

Ashmont took the chair by the bed. In spite of or maybe because of the laudanum, Keeffe wanted to talk. He was supposed to rest, but it seemed he wouldn’t rest until he said what he had to.

Which made it Ashmont’s job to listen.

He still couldn’t see his way. He’d sobered, but the fog remained: Confusion; feelings that came and went; and scenes from long ago, mingled with recent ones, swirled in his head.

A somewhat overwrought Morris had told him about a to-do with some fellow named Owsley at a lecture and the rule Lord deGriffith made about one of Miss Pomfret’s younger sisters as a result. Morris was privy to countless details, his mother being not only a notorious gossip but a friend of Lady deGriffith.

Keeffe had a view of the family even more intimate than Lady Bartham’s: Miss Pomfret loved her sisters dearly, and this business “cut her up something bad.”

There was more, too, filling in Morris’s gossipy sketch of Miss Pomfret: how her grandparents had taken over her upbringing. How her grandfather had found Keeffe, some two years or so after the accident, sweeping stables in Blackwater and the worse for drink.

“Those was bad days, Your Grace. But then his lordship hired me to look after his granddaughter. A bodyguard, he said, but discreet about it. And a tutor—me! But she was a strong-willed girl and he worried about her. He knew how I grew up, and he wanted me to teach her how to take care of herself. He trusted me with his granddaughter when nobody else would trust me with a horse. I was bad luck, you know.”

Ashmont understood. The turf was rife with corruption, and Keeffe, who’d spent his childhood in the lowest dens of London, was famously incorruptible. His swift, unlikely rise to fame had made enemies eager to kick him when he was down.

“And me a cripple,” the jockey went on. “What use was I anymore? But his lordship saw the use. She did, too. She never took no notice how lame I was. She listened—and oh, she has a sweet hand with the horses, Your Grace. You saw how she kept calm and steady. If the reins hadn’t’ve broke, we’d’ve come through as easy as kiss your hand.”

“I saw,” Ashmont said. “You taught her well.”

“It’s easy when somebody wants to learn and is willing to work hard. I only wish I knew how to get her through this without harm. It’s bad, you know, Your Grace. Not like if she was a man. Ladies got their reputations, more precious than them gold plates at the sweepstakes.”

Ashmont knew all about ladies’ reputations. Between his uncle and guardian, Lord Frederick Beckingham, and Blackwood’s autocrat father, it was impossible not to know. The easiest

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