bruises, and you know I’ve taken harder falls.”
“Don’t move,” she told Keeffe. “Don’t speak.”
“Miss, I vow—”
She looked at him. Keeffe subsided.
She turned her gaze to Ashmont and found him regarding her in a puzzled manner.
A few stray beams of sunlight broke through the morning clouds and glinted in his fair hair, like sparkles in a glass of champagne. He smiled, and his bruised, dissipated face changed and became ethereal.
In her mind’s eye arose a long-buried memory of an autumn night at Camberley Place and a ten-year-old Cassandra looking up in wonder at the heavens. Beside her stood the Duke of Ashmont’s beautiful son, a few years older than she. He was her brother Anselm’s age, but not as obnoxious. At the time he was Lord Selston—Selston to the other boys—but her aunt Julia called him by his given name, Lucius.
From lux: light. Cassandra was learning Latin, mainly on her own.
He was showing her how to find the constellations in the great mass of stars that formed the Milky Way.
“And there is Andromeda,” he said.
“Where?” she said.
Unlike her brother, he didn’t snort or sneer that girls didn’t know anything.
Lord Selston showed her how to pick out the relevant stars. “Do you know her story?” he said.
“No.” She looked up into his face and imagined he’d come from there, from the stars, while he told her the myth of Perseus and Andromeda.
His Grace with the Angel Face.
Alice called him that, among other things.
Years and years had passed since that night of stargazing. The boy who’d once seemed a celestial being had vanished a long time ago.
Cassandra swallowed a sigh. Such a waste. Such a great waste.
Still smiling down at her, the Duke of Ashmont swayed gently one way, then the other, and toppled to the ground.
Chapter 2
Her eyes were grey, like the clouds overhead. They had flashed silver lightning. Her eyes, that is. When Ashmont opened his, the clouds he gazed up at were calm, shadowy things, big as elephants, marching slowly across the heavens. Here and there between the fluffy elephants, one caught a glimpse of what might be sky, or clouds farther away. No hint of blue broke through the elephants and their world.
Her eyes were grey, and Ashmont felt as though the elephants had been dancing on him.
He became aware of voices. Hers said, “I don’t have time for this. You men, get the duke up from the ground.”
What seemed like hundreds of outstretched hands appeared above him.
“It’s all right, Yer Grace,” said one.
“You was took sudden-like, is all,” said another. “Coming out straight into the air, and running after Miss Pomfret and all.”
Pomfret. Didn’t he know that name? Never mind. Thinking hurt.
“All the fresh morning air overcame him, no doubt,” came her voice. “And why he should be awake at this hour is no mystery. There was a duel, I collect.”
Chorus of voices: “Oh, no, Miss Pomfret!”
“Them’s illegal, them duels.”
“Nobody does it anymore.”
“Not here, leastways.”
Ashmont waved a hand. “Stop your bloody row. Go away.”
They retreated. He was a duke, after all. When he waved his hand, people did things, like get out of the way.
He was the only one who didn’t.
No matter what he did, he didn’t get out of the way.
He wasn’t sure what that meant. Never mind. Didn’t care.
He lifted his head from the ground and shook it. Into his line of vision came a pair of lady’s half boots. Blue. And the bottom of a dirt- and grass-stained blue skirt. His gaze traveled slowly up a line of bows to a belted waist and up over a rumpled lacy bodice—not the most ample one he’d ever seen—framed by wrinkled wide lapels, and up to the face and the silver-flashing eyes and the dark red curls. No hat. She’d hit him with it.
All the effort of looking made his head tired.
He let it sink back again.
She said something to somebody. He heard footsteps, thudding hurriedly over the heath and fading away.
She held out a gloved hand. “Get up.”
Ashmont didn’t want to get up. His head was a great, throbbing, lead mountain.
“Get up.” The gloved hand remained, waiting.
He ignored it.
He closed his eyes. Time passed.
Cold water sloshed over him. He was drowning, gasping, bolting up so suddenly from the ground that he very nearly cast up his accounts. The world went round and round, green and brown and grey with bright blobs of color here and there.
“What? What?” His vision cleared and he saw her holding the bucket.
“Feeling better now?” she said.
He was distantly aware of laughter,