The clock chimed one o’clock in the morning. She had but five hours until Millie would awaken her. She finally fell asleep wondering if Millie suspected that something other than an early ride in the park with Mr. Scuddimore was the purpose for arising at such an ungodly hour.
When the Marquess of Oberlon unceremoniously slammed out of White’s, his many-caped greatcoat flung carelessly over his shoulders, he was in the grip of such rage that he covered the entire length of Bond Street before he was aware of the frigid night wind cutting unhampered through his elegant evening clothes. He drew to a halt and fastened his greatcoat securely about him, and jerked on the fur gloves that had hung out of his pocket.
It was perhaps the feel of the sticky dried champagne on his face and the still damp touch of his cravat against his neck that finally brought forth the reasonable man. Having a glass of champagne dashed into one’s face was certainly not a pleasant experience, yet it had proved to be as effective an insult in 1816, a year when dueling was considered most unfashionable, actually illegal, as a slap with a glove or a few well-chosen words had been to his father’s contemporaries in the bygone days when dueling was an honored activity that cut many a gentleman’s life short. The marquess remembered his bewigged grandfather, a full-lipped, lecherous old gentleman who, had he not broken his neck cramming his horse over a fence, would very likely have been felled by a ball from a pistol the very next day by a one-time crony whom he’d negligently insulted. As it was, the one-time crony had sniffed copiously at his grandfather’s funeral and the marquess’s father had sarcastically muttered to his small son that he didn’t know if the man’s sniffing was from grief or from being cheated out of putting a bullet through his grandfather’s heart.
Lord Oberlon paused a moment, realizing that his wayward thoughts had carried his feet into Millsom Street, altogether in the opposite direction from Berkeley Square. He turned and began to retrace his steps. How very ridiculous it was, he thought anew, to be forced to fight a duel with a young gentleman whose very existence had been unknown to him but a month before. There was but one man whom Jason Cavander had ever wanted to call out. Even so, his father’s sincere disgust at the waste resulting from duels had stilled his fury, if not his contempt for Sir William Filey. He found himself wondering, even now, what he would have done if he had been able to prove beyond doubt Filey’s loathsome conduct in the affair. Damn Filey anyway, and damn Elizabeth. Filey had cared too much for his own skin to ever openly taunt the marquess. As for Elizabeth, he knew that toward the end she had hated him as much as she had Filey. He shut his mind against further unpleasant memories. Elizabeth was dead and long buried, her hatred and bitter unhappiness locked away with her forever.
The marquess walked up the steps to his town house and raised his hand to the knocker, only to have Rabbell open the door. “Ah, your grace. The earl of March awaits you in the study, your grace.”
“So my faithful second comes to give me encouragement.” Lord Oberlon felt no hesitance in speaking aloud of the duel, for Rabbell’s unnatural mannerisms told him clearly enough that every servant was undoubtedly aware in the most minute detail of the evening’s fiasco. Sometime, he thought, as his butler helped to divest him of his greatcoat and gloves, I must force him to tell me how the servants’ infallible grapevine can be so damnably efficient.
He walked thoughtfully to his study. “Well, Julien,” he said, upon opening the door, “I’d call this a fine night’s work. Have you come to sympathize or tell me what a damned fool I am?”
The earl was lounging next to the large Italian marble fireplace, looking as lost in his thoughts as Jason had earlier. “Come, St. Clair, I should be the one thoughtfully depressed, not you. Yours is a simple task. You have only to take the boy away after I am done with him.”