A child of the rookeries. Somehow he’d escaped, to find his calling and climb to the very top of jockeydom.
. . . until that day at Newmarket, when he’d been all but trampled to death. In fact, he’d been reported dead at first. Yet here he was. He’d survived, against impossible odds, much in the way he’d won his earliest races.
If he didn’t survive this . . .
It didn’t bear thinking about, and so Ashmont wouldn’t think about it.
He said, “While you were gone, the locals started brawling. Wasn’t in the humor for it. Went out and fired the pistol. Didn’t you hear it?”
Morris shook his head. “Heard something. Don’t know what. Don’t actually remember very much.”
Ashmont told him.
Morris’s eyebrows went up. His light brown eyes opened very wide, as did his mouth. “Did you say Miss Pomfret was in the carriage?” His facial expression softened and his voice became hushed. “Not Miss Hyacinth Pomfret?”
“Miss Pomfret,” Ashmont said. “Red hair. Grey eyes. Five and three-quarter feet tall or thereabouts. A Boadicea sort of female. Threw a bucket of water on me.”
Called him Lucius. Whoever did that?
Morris’s dreamy expression sharpened into horror. “Oh, no! Cassandra Pomfret! Here!”
“You know her, I take it.”
“You don’t? How can you not know her?”
“Someone said she was Miss Pomfret, and most of Putney seems to know who she is.”
“One of her brothers has a place here,” Morris said. “Lets it now. Lord deGriffith’s family. Earl of Chelsfield’s heir. There’re ten of them. She’s the eldest of the three girls. Also known as Cassandra Prophet of Doom, which is, she opens her mouth and horrible nightmare things come out. You must know her. Ripley’s sister’s friend. Lady Charles Ancaster is Lord deGriffith’s sister.”
Lady Charles Ancaster: Ripley’s aunt Julia. She’d always treated Ripley’s two friends as though they were his brothers and she was their mother. She’d called Ashmont by his given name only the other day, in the course of a sharpish dressing-down. Having grown up without a mother, Ashmont didn’t mind the tongue-lashings. They seemed to go with the affection she supplied with equal generosity.
Lucius.
No one else called him that anymore.
Except Miss Pomfret, on the heath, when she also called him disgraceful and disgusting.
It came back then. The redheaded girl. Camberley Place. So long ago that was, ages and ages. A lifetime.
“No genealogy,” he said. “My head isn’t right and I haven’t the stomach for fourth cousins six times removed on the mother’s side or wherever it is.”
“Lady Charles Ancaster,” Morris said patiently. “Ripley’s aunt.”
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“Also Miss Pomfret’s aunt, but from the other side. How can you not know Miss Pomfret? She and Lady Alice—the Duchess of Blackwood, that is—have been as thick as thieves since they were in the nursery.”
“Seem to have lost touch,” Ashmont said. “Good girl? Good family? Unwed? What would I have to do with her, then?”
People had introduced him to eligible girls, and he’d bowed and gone the other way. He’d avoided the species when he first entered London’s social whirl, and he’d kept on doing so. Respectable misses were boring. Chaperons everywhere. No privacy allowed. You certainly couldn’t have any fun with them. If you did, you had to marry them.
Olympia, the girl he’d decided to marry, was a good girl. Not that he’d been looking for a wife at the time. He’d found her by accident.
She wasn’t boring.
But his best friend had stolen her, the thieving, lying maggot.
Now Blackwood and Ripley had wives and Ashmont didn’t. Ripley hadn’t even had to work for his! He hadn’t spent weeks courting her and persuading her family he wouldn’t ruin her life. No, all Ripley had to do—
But no, not all Ripley’s fault, the backstabbing swine. Women were unpredictable, and respectable women were especially troublesome, because they didn’t play by the rules of trade, as the fallen sisterhood did.
No, Olympia had gone her own way, tossing aside vows and signed papers as though they were old gloves. And he and Ripley had fought this morning, as they were obliged to do, and cleared the slate. Friends again. And that was that.
Always best to clear the slate. Saved endless botheration.
And best to clear it as quickly as possible.
If it could be cleared.
But Keeffe wouldn’t die. He couldn’t. He’d live, and Ashmont would pay whatever it cost.
He returned his attention to Morris, who was rhapsodizing about one of Miss Pomfret’s sisters.
According to Cassandra’s watch, more than two hours had passed by the time Mr. Greenslade entered the small private dining parlor on