Chapter Eleven
Marchand furiously shoved his newly acquired pistol into his inside coat pocket. He might as well hurl it into the shrubbery.
It was an old and cheap stick and odds were good that bastard wouldn’t have even gotten off a shot if he’d managed to pull
the trigger.
His skin was still all over ice.
That bastard had aimed it at Guinevere’s heart.
Those thugs were very, very lucky Marchand hadn’t done murder.
He realized he was rushing Ginny when she stumbled; he curled his arm around her more tightly to steady her and slowed his
pace. She was trembling. It sent a fresh wave of fury through him and a nearly painful surge of protectiveness.
He reserved most of the fury for himself.
What bloody good were any of his instincts if they dissolved in the face of a girl’s doe-eyed entreaty? He’d known better.
What was happening to him?
She’d known he could not say no to her.
He didn’t like that at all.
And he didn’t like one bit being played. For she had indeed played him.
And now here they were.
Just below his feet something small and bright nestled in the grass nearest the stone path snagged his eye. He swiftly bent
to pluck it up and tucked it into his pocket as they passed. Miss Woodville didn’t seem to notice.
When at last they came upon a bench close enough to the main street to hear carriage wheels clattering over cobblestones,
he stopped. “Sit,” he suggested quietly.
She collapsed onto the bench.
He removed the pistol from his coat pocket, snapped it open, dumped out the powder and shot, and dropped it in the shrubbery.
Then he shrugged out of his coat and settled it over her shoulders. It all but engulfed her.
She immediately burrowed in and gripped it closed in her fist.
He sank down next to her and finally allowed himself to exhale. He hadn’t needed to fight quite like that in many a year.
It amazed him that his body had still known exactly what to do. He supposed it was the way a musician’s hands always remember
a song.
Merry, teasing voices—a woman’s, a man’s, mingled with children’s laughter—floated on the breeze to them from the nearby path.
It was both jarring and soothing.
“Are you angry with me?” she ventured finally. Her voice was a little frayed.
He decided to tell her the truth. “Yes. A little. I’m much angrier at myself, however.”
She accepted his verdict somberly. “I’m sorry.” She sounded subdued.
He shook his head. “I understand why you needed to do it, Miss Woodville.”
Neither spoke for a time. Merely breathed, and listened to the rush of wind and the voices.
“You might have mentioned you thought we would be robbed,” she said finally.
Damn the girl. He laughed.
She pulled his coat more snugly about her. “How did you know how to . . . how to do what you did back there? All the . . .”
She gave the air a chop with one hand.
“Experience.”
“At hells?” He had to admire her commitment to being sardonic even in times of danger. “Did you fight a good deal at hells?”
“It was less about fighting and more about defending. My first job at a hell was at a place called the Pit, and I was the
person who, shall we say, helped keep order. You get a feel for when trouble is about to ignite by just watching and listening.
Someone might clench their jaw, or utter the wrong word a little too loudly. Someone might look too nonchalant. Pickpockets often do. More than once I had to wade into a brawl well underway. You tailor your approach to the
circumstances and the men involved—height, weight, presumed strength, presumed weapons. Like that.”
She gaped at him, then closed her mouth again. “That is fascinating,” she said, sounding a little too sincere.
Which amused him. She really ought to have been appalled.
“You notice everything,” she quoted. She was recalling what he’d said about the buttons.
“I notice everything,” he confirmed quietly. Her knotted hands, the lush rose curve of her lips, the golden speckles on her
cheeks. Everything.
“Do you think there are any more thieves where they came from?”
“I’m here,” he said calmly.
She studied his face. He knew a wayward impulse to remove his glove and slide his thumb across the curve of her cheek just
to see if it was as soft as it looked. Finer than Ming, surely, that curve.
When she exhaled slowly, relaxing into, trusting, his protection, he felt gratified all out of proportion.
“Do you sing?” she asked.
He gave a short, startled laugh. “Do I sing? Not well.”
“I thought it might be soothing to hear a little song after our fright.” Her eyes glinted with mischief.
He sighed and shook his head slightly. For days now her audacity had been perforating his armor like kitten claws. He decided
he would tolerate it as long as it diverted him, and not a moment longer.
“The only songs I know are unfit for your ears. There’s one about a bloke named Colin Eversea that goes on for days. He gets
up to despicable things. Man after my own heart.”
“Sing it like a lullaby, under your breath. Maybe I won’t even notice the lyrics.”
“No, Miss Woodville,” he said sternly, “and here’s the reason.
When you nurse an injured wild animal back to health—let’s say it’s a fox—you have to be careful not to allow them to get too accustomed to their cozy indoor accommodations, or they won’t be fit to live in the wild again.
Too much exposure to bawdy songs and cutthroats and the like and various other discomforts and you might get used to them, which will make you unfit to marry an aristocrat.
And that’s how you’re going to survive. A big country house, or a London town house on Grosvenor Square? Those are your natural habitats.”
Her lips curved slightly. “Oh, very well.”
“Surely you’ve some hopeful suitor hovering in the wings,” he added idly. “Your sisters can’t be the only Woodvilles in demand.”
He felt peculiarly tense in the silence that followed.
“Francis,” she replied almost abstractedly.
“Francis?” He knew the oddest combination of relief and antipathy toward Francis, whoever he was.
Then he recalled that her sister’s fiancé had mentioned Francis in Fleegle’s Emporium of Wonders.
“He’s the third son of a duke,” she said offhandedly. “Francis Balfort.”
“Of course he is. My point exactly,” he said shortly.
Francis was not yet a member of Lucifer’s Fall. Perversely, Marchand considered this a mark in Francis’s favor. Possibly he
had a few mild outdoor hobbies. Francis might hold on to his fortune and was in all likelihood not disaster-prone.
“My mother’s last wish was in fact that we all make the kind of marriages befitting the Woodville title. Grand and appropriate
and titled. I vowed to her that I would make certain of it.”
“Ah.”
He didn’t know why this information should settle heavily on his chest. Because he admired the way Miss Woodville hewed to her responsibilities as though they were commandments handed down on stone tablets.
And he also understood that her promises were, after a fashion, monuments erected to the memories of those she’d lost. A little
like those heart-shaped rocks.
He understood this because he’d long held on to his own pain and loss as if it were the island he’d washed up on after a shipwreck.
It anchored him even as it had stranded him.
“So what is Francis like?” he asked.
“He’s nice,” she told him.
“Sounds perfect for you,” he said dryly.
She smiled. She cleared her throat. “I’ve never heard that Francis has done anything with . . . ropes . . . for instance.”
She delivered the word “ropes” on a hush, as if she were a smuggler and it was the password.
He sighed. “I’m going to need you to translate whatever it is you keep trying to say about ropes, Miss Woodville.”
A slightly worrisome silence ensued. He suspected it was the sound of Miss Woodville gathering her nerve.
She was studiedly looking away from him now, straight ahead. “Lady Tomelty said you did, ah, things with ropes. In the same
conversation where she mentioned your prowess.”
“What the devil?”
Her eyes were lit up with wicked amusement when she pivoted toward him again. She was absolutely thrilled to have thrown him.
“I didn’t know what she meant,” she confessed. “She implied that it was depraved. And yet she made it sound like a good thing.
It’s all very puzzling.”
“I couldn’t tell you what it meant if I wanted to, either.” This wasn’t true. He could definitely hazard a guess.
He cast about in his mind for memories of assignations that had gotten a bit adventurous. Some most assuredly had, but ropes
had not factored in any of them, and none of the details were anyone’s business, least of all Miss Woodville’s. He told no
one anything about that side of his life, he was discreet, and he was not precisely promiscuous. Especially as he grew older and understood
thoroughly the risks versus the satisfaction of such liaisons.
It was both disconcerting and amusing to know he’d infiltrated the London gossip stream so thoroughly. And, at least from
the sound of things, flatteringly.
Perhaps because if he had any credo at all, it was that leaving a naked woman unsatisfied constituted failure.
“She said it as if it was something everyone knew,” Ginny pressed on.
“She must have me confused with someone else, as impossible as that seems.”
“So odd that people persist in just making things up about you.” She did not sound convinced.
“Can you blame them for being fascinated?” He leaned back and indolently stretched out his legs.
She snorted.
In the silence that followed, he could all but feel her next question forming. He was pretty certain he knew what it would
be.
“Do people do things with ropes?”
“For God’s sake, Miss Woodville,” he said, pained. “You have really got to stop talking to Lady Tomelty.”
“Then why would she say it?”
He sighed and gave this some thought. “Do you like blancmange?”
“Yes. Is blancmange somehow involved, too?”