There was a resounding bang below, followed by pounding footsteps. The door burst open, revealing Lord Randolph Gresham. Verity felt her humiliation complete. Of all the people who might have found her here, he was the last she wished to see.
Rochford released her. “Really?” he said.
Lord Randolph bared his teeth. He hurtled in, plucked one of the sabers from the wall above the fireplace, and brandished it at Rochford.
“What the devil?” said their inadvertent host.
Lord Randolph lunged and slashed at him. Rochford jumped out of the way. “Have you lost your mind?”
The saber whistled through the air again. Rochford leaped aside. Hard pressed, he grabbed the second saber from the wall and defended himself. The clash of metal filled the room as they moved back and forth, striking and parrying. Verity was startled to realize that Lord Randolph was by far the better swordsman. He was astonishing. He moved around the room like a great predatory cat. He made Rochford look clumsy and oafish. This Lord Randolph was nothing like a boring country parson.
“You’ve pinked me, you lunatic!” cried Rochford after a clanging interval. He dropped the saber and gripped his upper arm.
“I’ll do worse if you ever mention this night to a living soul,” Lord Randolph replied.
“Good God, you should go on the stage,” said Rochford. When Lord Randolph waved the saber under his nose, he added, “Yes, yes, I’m sworn to silence. Word of honor, et cetera. Now will you get out?”
Gripping Verity’s upper arm, Lord Randolph pulled her from the room.
Pearson stood on the landing, gripping a fireplace poker. “Stand back,” Lord Randolph said to him.
“Have you killed Mr. Rochford?”
“Of course not,” replied Lord Randolph impatiently.
“Pearson!” the former called from inside.
The valet dropped the poker with a clang and shoved past Verity. Lord Randolph pulled her onto the staircase just as the servant’s foot came down on the pooled cloth of her skirts. For a moment, Verity was suspended between the two points, then there was a ripping sound. Seams parted in her old cloak and the waist of her gown before Pearson moved on.
Lord Randolph hustled her down the stairs. “Let go,” Verity said.
He didn’t until they were out the door and across the street to a waiting hack. It was full dark now. The vehicle’s lanterns offered the only light. Lord Randolph practically threw her into the seat. “Drive,” he commanded as he jumped in after her.
He was breathing hard. Verity could hear it above the clop of the horse’s hooves. She could also feel a stream of air along her side where her dress had torn. Her mind was awhirl.
Randolph panted. Not from exertion, but from the lingering effects of the…temporary insanity that had caused him to skewer Rochford in his own home, with one of his own sabers. “I’m a peaceable, reasonable man,” he said. “Yet somehow you, uniquely, drive me to extraordinary excesses.”
“I do?”
“How could you go to that man’s house? If ever there was a bird-witted—”
“I went there to rescue Olivia,” Verity interrupted.
“As did I. But she wasn’t there. You were.” Randolph shook his head, hoping the movement might reorder his scattered wits.
“How did you find out?”
“Hilda.” He shook his head again. “If there’s a secret within a mile of her, that girl discovers it. I thought that if anyone had heard about your friend—”
“Oh, now you admit that I have a friend in trouble. Had. I thought.”
If he’d listened then, perhaps they wouldn’t be here now, Randolph thought. And yet, in an odd way, his jealous thoughts of Rochford had turned out to be prescient, if skewed.
“Beatrice must have told her, too,” Miss Sinclair went on. “She can’t keep a secret.”
Randolph’s breath had returned to normal. He was beginning to feel a bit amused. “They held out through the first act of the play. Until I threatened to get Hilda sent back to Herefordshire unless she told me whatever they were, very obviously, concealing.” Randolph snorted. “The things I do because of you.”
“I do not make you behave badly,” she said. “I’m not in control of your actions.”
“I ran a bit mad, seeing Rochford’s hands on you.”
She gathered her cloak closer, a gesture that exposed the long rents in its seams. Randolph glimpsed a flash of white through one of them. “I was just about to hit him again,” she said.
“Did you hit him?” Randolph was sorry to have missed that part.
“Of course I hit him! I would have gotten away on my