abruptly stifled.
Mainly he was aware of her, standing tall and straight, chin up, grey eyes daring him . . . and was that a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth?
“I did not have time to wait for you to come to your senses,” she said. “I strongly doubt that will ever happen, in any event.”
For an alarming moment, he couldn’t remember. Everything before this moment was lost in a heavy haze. Clouds.
“My man needs help,” she said.
“Miss, there was no call for that. He’s a duke. I’ll be right as rain in a wink.”
“Save your strength, Keeffe,” she said. “You’ll need it.”
Ashmont looked in the direction the male voice had come from.
It all came back.
The gun had gone off, then everything went wrong . . . but nobody dead. Yet.
She moved nearer, and he resisted the strong and unusual temptation to retreat. She said, her voice much lower, close by his ear: “You are so intoxicated, Lucius, as to be a danger to yourself, not to mention everybody in your vicinity. Regardless of my personal feelings—and personally, I find your condition and behavior disgusting and disgraceful in the extreme—”
“Never mind the sweet talk, m’dear,” he managed to croak. “Say what’s on your mind.”
“Horrifying as the thought is, I need your help. Now. I need you to throw your weight and your money about. You must collect yourself and try, for once in your misbegotten life, to make yourself useful.”
Somehow through the haze and the nearly overwhelming desire to lie down and die, Ashmont made sure a litter was produced in short order, along with transport. He saw Keeffe carefully loaded onto it, then onto the cart, where he was secured, to reduce jolting as much as possible. Miss Pomfret insisted on walking alongside the cart to the inn, and warned the driver of every bump and rut in the road ahead. Ashmont walked on the other side. By the time they reached the White Lion, the surgeon he’d sent for had arrived, and Ashmont was ready to have his head amputated.
Though a young man, in practice for only a few years, Mr. Greenslade had immense experience with concussions, near drownings, broken bones, and divers other injuries, all thanks to Their Dis-Graces. He could have performed admirably in wartime. Likewise, neither plague, pestilence, famine, nor cannon fire would daunt the proprietor and staff of the White Lion, the three dukes’ favorite stopping place in the area.
They’d done some damage here and elsewhere, but Ashmont and his friends always balanced the scales. They paid for the trouble, whatever it was, and paid handsomely, wiping the slate clean of pranks, fights, seductions, and destructions. As a result, the dukes’ return met with welcome instead of pitchforks, blazing torches, and snarling dogs.
The surgeon had Keeffe transferred to a table in one of the private dining rooms. This was the same table and room in which Ashmont had seen more than one fellow stretched out, awaiting Greenslade’s ministrations. Miss Pomfret was determined to remain to supervise, but this once she was overborne. Though he’d submitted to everything else, Keeffe would not submit to her seeing him undressed. He became so agitated that she finally left, to prevent his injuring himself further.
At the surgeon’s suggestion, Ashmont took himself to the coffee room.
Shortly after the waiter took his order, Morris Tertius arrived, carrying the pistol case and Ashmont’s hat.
Only then did Ashmont realize he’d lost the hat. And a fine dueling pistol. What had he done with the weapon?
“Where’d you get to?” Morris said. “One minute you were there, and then you weren’t and then I woke up under a table and nobody knew where you’d gone, and then they did, only it was ten different directions. Somebody said you were shot, and somebody else said it was a servant, and then I looked down on the table and there was the pistol case and only one weapon in it. ‘What happened to the other one?’ I wondered.”
Blackwood had said of Humphrey Morris that he had tongue enough for two sets of teeth. At the moment, Ashmont didn’t mind the talking. It stopped the thinking.
Drink did that, too, but oddly enough, the duke felt he might have drunk enough for one morning.
Two women injured. And the little fellow, the little fellow. Of all the men in all the world Ashmont had to damage, it had to be Tom Keeffe. A hero of the turf? Hell, a hero of life. Born in a workhouse.