Chapter Two
“Do not light that candle.”
Giselle had her hand on the tinderbox before the words reached her, low and scraped raw out of the dark beyond the restricted shelves, and she went still with the flint half lifted. “Your Grace?”
“Lower your voice. Lower it a great deal further than that.”
“I will lower it when you tell me why I should.” A board took weight near the cold hearth, careful and uneven, the gait of a man who did not wish to be heard. “Why are you whispering in your own library at one in the morning?”
“Why are you in it? You were engaged to catalogue the place, not to haunt it.”
“I could not sleep. I have turned that box over in my mind since you took it out of my hands, and I came down to read the catalogue and not the box, but I find you lurking in the dark instead.” She set the tinderbox down by feel and did not let go of it. “You have not answered me. Why the dark?”
“Because the house is not empty in the way a house ought to be at this hour, and I would rather you discovered that quietly than loudly.”
“That is the sort of sentence men use when they have done something foolish and intend to do another.” She moved towards the sound of him along the edge of the long table, one hand out, and her palm came down on the back of a chair that should not have been pushed askew.
“Stand where I can find you. I am no use to anyone breaking my shins on furniture that has wandered out of its place.”
“You are no use to me at all just now, which is the kindest thing I can say while keeping you alive. Go back upstairs, Miss Linfield.”
“I will go back upstairs the moment your voice stops sounding as though you have been running, and not a moment before.” Her hand found the edge of his sleeve, then the wet warmth soaking through it.
The smell reached her half a second later, copper and salt and the iron tang of a butcher’s yard.
“You are bleeding. You are bleeding a great deal, and you are standing here arguing with me about furniture.”
“It is a graze.”
“It is a graze the size of my hand, and it has not stopped.” She pressed her palm flat to it without asking leave, and he drew a breath through his teeth that he did not allow to become a sound.
“Sit down. Sit before you fall, and I am left explaining to Mrs Marlowe why her duke is unconscious among his own Acts of Parliament.”
The scream came up her throat the moment her eyes found his face, grey and slick at the temple, and his hand rose fast and closed over her mouth before the sound could leave her.
“If you scream, we both die,” he said against her ear, and the flatness of it was worse than any shout. “There were three. Two have gone over the south wall, I think. I am not certain of the third. You will nod, and you will not make that sound again.”
She nodded once, and he took his hand from her mouth slowly, his palm leaving its warmth behind on her lips, and the scream went back down where it had come from.
“Three men,” she said, very low. “In the house. And you came down to meet them with no servant, no light and nothing in your hands but your own opinion of yourself.”
“I had a pistol. It is somewhere on the floor, and it is empty, which is the entire reason we are whispering and not shouting.” He let the shelves take the weight his legs were tired of holding.
“Lock the gallery door. The far one. Then you may abuse my opinion of myself at whatever length pleases you.”
“You will not ring for help?”
“I will not.”
“A man bleeds in his own house in the middle of the night and refuses to call his own footmen.” She crossed to the gallery door and turned the key, and the bolt went home with a small definite sound that closed the two of them in together.
“Tell me why, and be quick about it, because you have lost enough blood to make you foolish, and I would rather have your reasons while you can still assemble them.”
“Because I do not know which of them I pay.”
The words settled in the dark between them.
“Someone drew the bolt on the area door tonight and left it drawn,” he continued, lowering his voice further.
“Someone admitted three armed men into a locked house and let them depart again unchallenged. I keep forty servants, Miss Linfield. I would trust perhaps four of them with my life, and tonight I cannot tell you which four. So, I will bleed in the dark with a sharp-tongued archivist and call it the lesser of two evils.”
“Who walks three armed men past your gates in the dark, Your Grace? Not a thief. A thief takes the plate and is gone before you wake.”
“Not a thief.”
“Then a man who wanted one thing in this house, and knew it was here, and also knew the hour you would be least guarded.” She heard her own certainty and did not soften it. “That is not a burglary. That is an appointment, and someone in your household helped to keep it.”
“You reach the ugly conclusion a good deal faster than I did, and I have had seventeen years at it.”
“I have had a lifetime of being lied to. It sharpens the arithmetic wonderfully.” She crossed back to him. “Who is he, the man who helped them in?”
“If I knew, he would already be gone from my house and my memory both.”
“Then your sharp-tongued archivist had better stop the bleeding, since you have disqualified everyone with the training to do it.” She knelt and set her hands to the buttons of his waistcoat, brisk and impersonal, with the same care she gave a damaged binding.
“Hold still. I am going to open your shirt. You are going to permit it, and neither of us will make anything of it, because I have your blood under my nails and that has always spoiled romance for me.”
“You wound me worse than the shot did.”
“The shot at least had the manners to be quick about it.” She parted the linen where it had gone dark and stiff, and the wound showed along the side of his ribs, a long furrow ploughed clean across the muscle, ugly, shallow and still welling.
“It has not gone in. It ran along the bone and out again. You are luckier than you deserve and a great deal luckier than you behave.”
“You are very calm for a woman with a duke’s blood to her wrists.”
“I am calm because panic has never once persuaded a wound to close, and I have tested the matter from both directions.” She wiped her palm on the ruined hem.
“Tell me what you require.”
“Clean linen, a quantity of it, and there is none in this room, which leaves me a single source.” She sat back on her heels and reached beneath the hem of her gown before she could think better of it, and her fingers found the seam of her petticoat and tore.
The fabric gave with a long bright rip, baring her stocking to the knee and the green garter ribbon tied above it. “Do not look.”
“I am bleeding to death. I shall look at whatever I please.”
“You are not bleeding to death, and if you keep talking like that, I shall bind it too tight on purpose and call it an accident.” She folded the strip lengthwise and pressed the pad of it hard into the furrow, and his whole body went rigid beneath her hands.
“There. Breathe. It always hurts worse before it hurts less.”
“A great comfort. Did you learn by binding books?”
“I learned it from binding a printer’s apprentice who put his hand through a press.
” She drew the strip around his ribs, and her arms came around him to pass the end behind his back, which set her face close to the side of his throat.
“He did not flirt with me while I did it, you understand. I have begun to think that as a failure of imagination on his part.”
“You are very near my throat for a woman who claims not to make anything of these things.”
“I am near your throat because the bandage requires it, and because you are too proud to lean the way I need you to lean.” The heat came off his skin against her cheek, and the fast knock of his pulse moved beneath the very scar she had marked that afternoon.
“Lean forward, Your Grace. I cannot tie what I cannot reach, and I will not have you bleeding through my best petticoat for nothing.”
“It is a fine petticoat, judging by the sound it made giving up its life.”
“It was the finest I own, and you will replace it. You are the reason it is now a bandage, and I warn you I have ruinous taste in linen and no shame whatever about a duke’s accounts.”
“I begin to understand why the Strattons parted with you.”
“The Strattons wept when I left. You are welcome to write and ask them once you have stopped bleeding on me.” She set her hand flat on his shoulder. “Lean.”
“And if I will not?”
“Then you will bleed upright, and grow faint, and I shall tell the whole house you swooned at the sight of my garter and had to be revived.” She pressed, gentle and unarguable. “Lean, Your Grace.”
“You are a tyrant with a strip of petticoat.”
“I have no needle to hand. Be grateful. If I had a needle, you would be a great deal quieter and I would be a great deal happier.” She steadied him with one hand. “Now lean.”
He leaned forward, and the movement brought his mouth to her hair, and his breath stirred it once before he spoke. “You are not afraid of me.”
“I am a little afraid of you. I am simply more afraid of you bleeding than of you talking, and I am managing my fears in the order they have earned.” She caught the strip behind him and drew it taut.
As she did, her knuckles passed across ridged skin lower on his side, old scars, three of them, raised and white, grouped close where no graze had ever been.
Her hands stopped of their own accord. “These are not from tonight.”
He did not answer at once.
“These are not of tonight, nor of any honest accident either. I have examined enough to distinguish a wound hastily closed from one deliberately inflicted.” She set her fingertip lightly to the nearest of them. “Three. Close together. Someone held you while they did this.”
“Tie the bandage, Miss Linfield.”