Chapter 13 Rescue and Confession
The third blow never lands.
There is a shout first—male, furious, familiar enough that my battered brain tries to make sense of it before my body does.
Then the hand fisted in my sleeve is gone.
Air rushes around me. Someone slams into the stone wall with a grunt that sounds expensive in teeth. I slide down until my knees hit the wet ground, one hand pressed to my ribs, the other braced against the wall because the world has become a poorly balanced carousel.
“Touch her again and I will kill you.”
James.
Not calm James. Not ducal James. Not the man who makes duty look like a tailored coat.
This James sounds like something dragged up from a battlefield.
I blink through the blur. He is between me and the men, hat gone, coat dark against the gray light, one hand clenched around the collar of the man who grabbed me.
Another attacker lunges. James turns, fast and vicious, and drives his fist into the man’s stomach.
The man doubles over. A footman appears behind him with a shout, then another, and suddenly the narrow passage is full of bodies, boots, curses, and the metallic taste of panic.
“Run!” one of the men snarls.
They do. Of course they do. Bullies have excellent instincts when consequences arrive wearing an excellent coat.
The missing-tooth man staggers back, one hand to his bloody mouth. “Was only a lesson.”
James catches him by the throat and shoves him against the wall so hard mortar dust falls. “Who paid you?”
The man’s eyes bulge.
“James,” I manage.
It comes out thin. Wrong. Like my voice belongs to someone else.
His head snaps toward me.
Everything in his face changes.
The rage does not vanish. It redirects. Narrows. Becomes terror with better posture.
He releases the man, who drops coughing to the ground. “Hold them,” James orders the footmen without looking away from me. “All of them. If one escapes, I will know whose hands failed.”
Very motivating management style.
He is on his knees beside me in the next second.
“Emma.”
I try to smile. “I think I may have offended someone.”
His eyes move over my face, my torn sleeve, my hand clamped to my ribs. His jaw tightens so hard I can see the muscle jump.
“Do not make jokes,” he says.
“I find that instruction medically unsound.”
His hand hovers near my cheek, not touching. Asking without words.
I nod.
His fingertips brush my jaw with impossible gentleness. Pain sparks where my lip has split. I flinch despite myself.
He goes pale.
“Forgive me.”
“You didn’t hit me.”
“No,” he says, voice low. “I merely failed to prevent it.”
Oh, no. Absolutely not. I do not have the emotional bandwidth for noble guilt right now. I barely have the bandwidth for staying upright.
“James.”
He looks at me.
“Help me up before I become a permanent feature of Carlton House drainage.”
For half a second, something like relief cuts through the horror in his eyes.
Then he gathers me carefully, one arm behind my back, the other beneath my knees. I mean to protest. I truly do. I am a modern woman. I have opinions about being carried without consultation.
Unfortunately, the moment my ribs move, pain blooms hot and white.
My protest becomes a very undignified gasp.
James freezes. “Where?”
“Ribs. Left side. Not stabbing. Breathing is annoying but available.”
His eyes sharpen, absorbing the information like an order of battle.
Beatrice appears at the passage entrance, face bloodless. “Emma!”
Behind her, the older woman who intercepted her is making noises somewhere between scandal and poultry.
“She is hurt,” James says. “The carriage. Now.”
Beatrice’s gaze darts to his arms around me, to my torn gown, to the men being hauled upright by footmen. Her face changes. She looks young for one terrible second. Then she becomes an Ashbourne.
“I shall ride with her,” she says.
“Yes.”
“And those men?”
James’s expression goes flat. “They will be questioned.”
One of the attackers spits blood onto the stones. “We did not know she were yours.”
The passage goes silent.
James turns his head slowly.
“She is not a possession,” he says. “She is under my protection. You would do well to understand the distinction before you answer another question.”
I should probably object to being discussed like a diplomatic incident.
Instead, I rest my head against his shoulder because the world is tipping and he is the only steady thing in it.
His arms tighten.
Not enough to hurt.
Enough to promise.
* * *
Ashbourne House receives us like a struck bell.
Doors fly open. Mrs. Finch gasps once, then begins issuing commands with the efficiency of a field marshal.
Molly bursts into tears and is immediately sent for hot water, which is a very Regency solution to emotion and injury alike.
Beatrice snaps for clean linen. James carries me upstairs without asking anyone’s permission, which I suspect is one of the benefits of being a duke in your own house.
“My room,” I say when he turns toward the guest chamber.
“The sitting room has better light.”
“My room has fewer witnesses.”
His mouth tightens, but he changes direction.
Small victory. I will take them where I can.
He sets me on the edge of the bed as if I am made of blown glass. Beatrice follows with a basin, vinegar, linen, and the expression of someone who intends to remain whether propriety likes it or not.
“I should examine the injuries,” James says.
I blink.
Beatrice blinks.
James seems to hear himself. Color rises along his cheekbones. “I mean—Mrs. Finch can—if you prefer—”
“I prefer not to be pawed at by a committee,” I say, then immediately regret the phrasing when his face goes rigid. “Sorry. Poor word choice.”
“You need not apologize.”
“I do. I’m trying not to be hysterical, and apparently my mouth has chosen litigation.”
Beatrice kneels in front of me and takes my hand. “Tell us what to do.”
That steadies me.
Right. Patient first, even when the patient is inconveniently me.
“Light. Clean water. No vinegar in the cuts unless we are trying to torture me for information. Cloth soaked in boiled water once it cools. I need to check whether my ribs are broken or just bruised. Pupils too, because my head hit the wall.”
James moves before I finish speaking.
The next few minutes become a strange mirror of every crisis I have managed since arriving here, only now I am the one trying to sound calm while my hands shake.
I press my fingers along my scalp. Lump, no open gash.
My pupils react when James brings a candle close, though the brightness makes my stomach roll.
My lip is split. My cheek will bruise spectacularly.
My wrist aches where the man grabbed it, but I can move my fingers.
Ribs: tender, no obvious instability. Breathing hurts, but not in the punctured-lung way.
Fun fact: self-assessment is harder when every finding is accompanied by your love interest looking as if he may personally invade Belgium.
“Nothing feels broken,” I say finally. “Possibly cracked rib, definitely bruised. Headache, but no confusion beyond my usual amount.”
Beatrice makes a small broken sound that might be a laugh.
James does not laugh.
He is washing his hands at the basin with unnecessary force. He has removed his coat and rolled his sleeves to the forearms. Under different circumstances, this would be a problem for my moral stability.
Under current circumstances, it is still a problem. Just with more swelling.
“Let me clean your lip,” he says.
Beatrice looks from him to me.
I know what propriety requires. A maid. A chaperone. A small army of people ensuring no one accidentally develops feelings in a bedroom.
Unfortunately, that horse has not only left the stable, it has married the stable boy and opened a medical practice.
“Stay,” I tell Beatrice.
She nods.
James sits beside me, close enough that I can smell rain, wool, and the faint spice of his shaving soap beneath the sharper copper scent of my blood. He dabs the cloth against my lip with a care so controlled it almost hurts more.
“Thornbury paid them,” I say.
His hand stills.
Beatrice’s head lifts.
“You saw this?”
“I saw him speaking to a man in the corridor. Money changed hands. Then the same man identified me outside. It was not subtle. Honestly, for a conspiracy conducted in a palace, the production values were disappointing.”
James sets the cloth down very slowly.
“He will answer for it.”
“How?”
The question lands harder than I intend. His eyes meet mine.
“How, James? He is a physician with connections. I am a woman everyone already thinks is strange. If I accuse him, he will say I was confused from the assault. Or lying. Or mad.”
“Not if those men confess.”
“Will they? To implicating a gentleman’s physician? After being paid to frighten a woman no one can legally place on a family tree?”
Beatrice’s fingers tighten around mine.
James rises and crosses the room once, then back again, like stillness is a punishment he refuses to accept. “You should have told me how bad it had become.”
The guilt I feared arrives with him.
I am tired. I am in pain. I have blood on my sleeve and Thornbury’s smile still crawling under my skin.
So my walls, which have been performing admirably under poor working conditions, finally crack.
“Which part?” I ask. “The pamphlet? Hartwick threatening to have me declared mad? Victoria being pregnant by Captain Harrow and planning to pass the child off as yours? Weston proposing because marriage is apparently the only legal umbrella available to me? Princess Charlotte asking me to keep her alive through a childbirth everyone else treats as ceremony? Please be specific. I’ve had a busy week. ”
The room goes completely silent.
Beatrice closes her eyes.
James stares at me.
“Hartwick threatened you?”
His voice is too quiet.
“In his study. He said no one would miss me if I disappeared properly. He knows I have no papers, no family who can come forward, no proof I am who I say I am.”
James’s face drains of color.
“And you did not tell me.”
“You were engaged to his daughter.”
“I am engaged to no man’s permission to harm you.”