“Is that the subject of the gossip you mentioned?” Jane asked. “Well, is it?”
George groaned. “You know how things are. It’ll begin with a few old tabbies stopping Miss Honeywell in Bond Street to ask after Burton-Smythe’s health and end with all of the ton saying that the duel was fought over her honor.” He shook his head in disgust. “Some of the fellows are already talking. Wouldn’t you know it, that infernal gabster Beauchamp was at the duel, and by the time I arrived at the park, he was already there, telling the other gents how Burton-Smythe and St. Clare had looked as if they hated each other, and how he’d give a monkey to know what the duel had really been about. ‘No doubt it’s a woman,’ he says. What a heap of rubbish. Everyone knows they fell out over a game of cards.”
“I may as well go home,” said Maggie.
“You most definitely will not,” Jane replied. “Nor will we postpone any of our pleasure. If there’s gossip going round connecting you to this duel…well, as far as I’m concerned, that’s even more reason for us to be seen abroad. We shall go shopping just as we planned.”
George heartily agreed, even going so far as to offer to escort them to the dressmaker himself, and afterward, if they weren’t too worn down from their exertions, to take them both to Gunter’s for an ice. “And if anyone dares inquire after Burton-Smythe’s health,” he said, “I’ll send them off with a flea in their ear.”
Maggie could do nothing but agree. In short order, she and Jane were tugging on their gloves and tying the ribbons of their bonnets, and George was handing them up into the Trumbles’ barouche.
“I don’t even really care about the gossip,” Maggie confessed to Jane in a whisper while George stepped away to have a word with the coachman. “The truth is… Dash it, I don’t like to think of myself as cold-blooded, but the only emotion I feel at the possibility of Fred succumbing to his wounds is worry over Beasley Park and my inheritance. Am I very awful?”
“No indeed.” Jane unfurled a pale-yellow parasol. “Fred has been an inconsiderate clodpole. If I were you, I’d be white with rage.”
“I should be, I know. And I am angry. But somehow…somehow I’m far more upset with Viscount St. Clare than I am with Fred. I can’t think why.”
Maggie recognized the untruth as soon as she said it.
She did know why she was more upset with St. Clare, even if she couldn’t admit it to her friend. The fact of the matter was that, though she’d often felt powerless in the years since her father’s death, she was wholly unaccustomed to being made to feel a fool.
Three forfeits indeed.
What a country bumpkin St. Clare must have thought her. No doubt he’d been laughing at her the entire time. And she so disposed to think well of him for no more reason than that he bore a passing resemblance to Nicholas Seaton!
After shooting Frederick Burton-Smythe through the shoulder, John Beresford, Viscount St. Clare returned to his grandfather’s house in Grosvenor Square. He had a brief word with his groom, an even briefer word with his valet (who gaped at the singed sleeve of St. Clare’s shirt with blank horror), and then, as he did after all of his duels, he withdrew to the breakfast room and ate an exceptionally large meal.
It was while he was drinking his coffee and reading the newspaper that his grandfather strode into the room.
“Out!” Lord Allendale growled at a lingering footman. The servant scurried away as the earl took a seat across from St. Clare at the table.
A taut silence permeated the room, so ominous that, at last, if for no other reason than mere curiosity, St. Clare was compelled to lower his newspaper. “Well, sir?”
The Earl of Allendale’s once golden hair had gone silvery white, and except when his blood was up, the fire in his distinctive gray eyes had dimmed, but a life of activity and adventure—a life that had bronzed his skin and strengthened his body—had left him free of many of the maladies of old age. He didn’t suffer from rheumatism or gout. He was never confused or forgetful. And though he was the first to admit that he walked a bit slower than he once had, he stubbornly did so without the aid of a stick.
He’d never been a typical English aristocrat. Some even called