Chapter Three
Chapter
THREE
“I am sorry, Abigail, but I am putting my foot down.” For some inexplicable reason, to underscore his frustration, Leo’s booted foot came down with a decisive thud on the parquet, which made his sensitive giant mastiff whimper.
He didn’t like being the despotic big brother who laid down the law any more than poor Snifferson liked to hear his humans arguing but, frankly, his wayward sister had given him no choice of late.
“My decision is final! You are all staying here in Bath for the rest of the season and that is the end of it.” By which time he hoped his unsettlingly frayed nerves had repaired themselves and his headstrong sister would have the time and space to get over her worrying infatuation with the handsome, charming, and exceedingly dangerous Mr. Percival Digby.
Reading his mind, Abigail folded her arms, defiant.
“If you think your being heavy-handed and keeping me here against my will for months on end is going to make me love Percy any less, you are wrong!” Good heavens above but she was being dramatic!
“We shall pine for each other for the duration of my imprisonment because we are hopelessly in love. Not that I expect you to understand such an alien concept when all you seem to care about nowadays is yourself!”
He folded his own arms and, feeling wholly justified to have been heavy-handed, descended into sarcasm.
“Ah yes … I am such a selfish, self-centered soul. I love being weighted down with the responsibility of a dukedom. Of managing all those thousands of acres that pay for your comfortable life. Of burning the midnight oil trying to juggle the unwieldy accounts of the estate and two households alongside the pressing matters of governance that we dukes get dragged into, whether we want to or not. Of wasting hours and hours—that I do not have—traveling backward and forward to London to accompany my ungrateful sisters to pointless balls which I have no interest in. Chatting to annoying, superficial, social-climbing people who have fluff for brains and live for naught but mindless gossip when I have so many more pressing things to do here. That is just so selfish of me.”
He wagged his finger like a disappointed schoolmaster.
“I especially love having to clean up the frequent messes that my spoiled sisters get themselves into! Because heaven only knows someone needs to have a care for your safety when you both have such little regard for it yourselves!” If Abigail thought being him was fun, then perhaps she could take a stint at being the 11th Duke of Debden, because Lord only knew that he was sick to the back teeth of it all.
Leo was only thirty, for goodness’ sake, but felt more like sixty after just four years of ducal responsibility.
It wouldn’t be fair to blame his father for dying on him so young and leaving him to it all, because poor Papa had been a duke for twenty years before he had turned up his worn-out toes and floated off to heaven.
But this last month, Leo repeatedly wished he’d had an older brother so he wouldn’t have been destined to be a blasted duke in the first place and could just go off and be plain old Leopold Sloane instead.
He would have liked being the spare rather than the heir.
Spares could freely indulge in unburdened selfishness.
But instead, he had been cursed with sisters who had suddenly decided to gravitate toward trouble like moths to a flame. They were determined to think of him as the devil incarnate because he was the only thing keeping them from it.
He wanted to stamp his foot again but, for the sake of Snifferson’s delicate nerves, settled for another finger wag.
“So yes, Abigail, as the frustrated head of this family and entirely because of your utterly reckless deception, you gave me no choice but to drag you here to keep you safe from your blasted self!” Perhaps it had been a more extreme reaction than usual from him, but it had been instantaneous and visceral as well as entirely necessary, so he refused to regret it.
Abigail, who had more than a modicum of sense when she chose to remember, quickly changed tack. “How many times do I have to tell you that I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time before you realize that you are overreacting? None of it was Percy’s fault.”
“Overreacting!” Leo pointed to the bandage still wrapped around his sister’s head, queasy at the sight of it, and queasier still at all the what-ifs that had kept him awake this past week since she had acquired it.
“If bloody Percy hadn’t taken you to that protest rally in the first place, then you wouldn’t have been hit in the face by the hilt of a soldier’s bloody sword! ”
The image of his sister being carried through the front door of his Berkeley Square town house by the scoundrel, barely conscious and bleeding profusely, was one that had haunted him ever since.
“I forbade you to involve yourself with those radicals and he went behind my back and dragged you into danger! Are you aware that you could have been killed?” Because that was all he could bloody well think about.
That she had almost died—again—while on his watch, and it had scared the life out of him.
Enough that he kept being sucked into a spiral of blind panic as a result.
Panic that left him breathless, tight in the chest, and was so overwhelming he could barely function.
“For the millionth time—” Abigail stamped her own foot in frustration and Snifferson whimpered again.
“I didn’t die and Percy did not convince me to go!
” She fisted her arms at her sides and stuck out her chin, not in any way prepared to see reason.
“If you must know, he begged me not to go to that rally because he sensed there would be trouble, but I disobeyed him too!” That he believed, because Abigail had always been as tenacious as she was stubborn and historically reckless in the extreme.
But that defense only increased Leo’s unease.
“I joined that protest of my own accord!”
As his hair follicles bristled at that terrifying comment and his innards constricted, it only reinforced how right he had been about refusing to leave his headstrong sister in London.
There was too much temptation there for her to indulge in her second grand passion after Percy—politics.
Except rather than simply read about it or debate it over dinner like most did, she was one to rally behind a cause.
What had started as the desire to knit socks for the poor, a perfectly hazard-free use of her time, had now morphed into the need to show her support more vocally.
That hadn’t been the first protest march she had gone on in recent months, and he sincerely doubted it would be the last, hence he had been forced to take this decisive action to stop her.
“In which case, Percy should have done the decent thing and immediately dragged you home where none of that”—Leo pointed to her wound again as the tight bands of panic that had decided to plague him since the incident twisted themselves around his throat like choking brambles—“would have happened and your stubborn, willful head wouldn’t have been sliced open! ”
“Why must you always exaggerate! It’s naught but a graze and looked far worse than it actually was.” She waved the injury away as if it were nothing. “The physician doubts it will even leave a noticeable scar.”
“That graze was bad enough that it needed five stitches!” Stitches he had sat holding her hand for while sick to his stomach because he had never been any good with the sight of blood. Especially his sister’s.
“And you had a concussion.” That rare interjection of support, miraculously, came from his mother, who did not approve of Leo’s hasty solution of removing them all to Bath either.
“Your pretty new summer pelisse was ruined. Bloodstains are forever, darling.” And that, in a nutshell, pretty much summed up his mother, who put a silly stain above personal safety and believed, catastrophically in his humble opinion, that his sisters needed to make their own mistakes.
“I really don’t understand what you were thinking, Abigail, to chant with a group of filthy rabble-rousing radicals in the center of Westminster like you did. ”
“Asking for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work hardly makes those poor factory workers radicals, Mama, and any rabble-rousing came from the unnecessarily heavy hand of the king’s own soldiers.
Soldiers, I might add, who were sent to quash a peaceful protest simply because they did not like what the protesters were protesting about.
” Abigail jabbed the air. “Just as they did at Peterloo two years ago. For heaven forbid they should tolerate any justified dissension in the lower ranks.”
The mere mention of the infamous Peterloo Massacre, where eighteen had been slain and several hundred more were injured by overzealous soldiers, instantly made Leo’s hair shoot vertical again.
Just as it had that day when bloody Percy had carried her limp body home.
In truth, the fear of history repeating itself while his sister was present was the main reason he’d brought her here where he could keep a constant eye on her.
“The army was only called in because it was an unauthorized protest!” As soon as those words left his lips, Leo knew he had given his outraged sister more ammunition.
“Of course it was unauthorized! The new laws against any form of protest are so Draconian and unreasonable, the only way to protest nowadays is illegally!”
As her point was valid, Leo quickly pivoted. “There are better ways to bring about reform, Abigail, than to align yourself to the radical cause. And reform will come.” Bloodlessly. Or so he hoped. And without any further danger to his reckless sister. “The tide in Parliament is changing.”