The pain, God, it was every kind of sensation, burning and stabbing and a wild ache at the same time. The darkness rolled in, and he turned toward it. He’d wanted it for so long. But as his vision narrowed he saw one face shining in his mind’s eye—Henrietta, the way she had looked after he kissed her, warm and surprised and wondrous and desirous and his.
Henrietta could save him. He needed Henry. It was his last thought before he pitched forward into Charley’s arms.
Henrietta wentto bed thinking of Darien. That delicious kiss wove through her dreams, imprinted on her soul for eternity. When she opened her eyes, that startling moment slipped into her awareness with a glow of astonishment. That Darien should have the power to so entirely enthrall her! Darien, the man she had thought herself safe from.
As if she didn’t know better. As if she didn’t know she would end up like Forsythia Pennyroyal, another goose who had made a pitch for him and lost. Or worse, a soiled dove wrecked in his wake, whom no one else would touch.
She rose and washed, then sat at her dressing table to brush her hair. A quick twist and a few hairpins dispatched that chore. She shucked her bedgown and passed over the lovely morning gown that Duprix had laid out, choosing instead an ancient sepia-brown muslin with ink stains on the sleeves. It was her writing morning, and this was her writing dress.
The maid would bring tea and toast with preserves and her own butter to the sunny sitting room next to her bedchamber, and Lady Mama would leave her unmolested unless some urgent household matter arose. There were a great many things she had to organize before she could head north—various letters, columns, speeches, and petitions that she had promised to one cause or another. Then she would visit Mary Ann and the baby, join the family for lunch, and no doubt Aunt Althea would call to start preparations for the wedding. It was strange to think of Marsibel being married—it was almost like contemplating a marriage for Matilda, who was nine.
Of her own proposal, Henrietta refused to think. It was not sincere—not real—and she refused to devote herself to fanciful imaginings.
She sharpened her quill, opened her inkpot, and was rereading her summary of Mary Wollstonecraft’s arguments to be included in the next bulletin of the Minerva Society when, over the usual morning noise in the street, she heard male voices raised in a rowdy drinking song. It was not customary for their quiet square to be a route for drunk young gentlemen parading home from their night of debauchery, but one problem with drunk young gentlemen was that they never conformed to expectation.
“Voice, fiddle, and flute, no longer be mute,” a male voice bellowed, off-key. It sounded like Charley. Henrietta shook her head. If Charley turned up here, drunk as a wheelbarrow, she would send him off with a flea in his ear. Miss Wollstonecraft said of women’s education that?—
“I’ll lend you my name and inspire you to boot,” caroled another male voice in a deeper register, one she didn’t recognize. How exasperating of Charley to bring a friend. She would refuse to receive them. Wollstonecraft?—
“And besides, I’ll instruct you, like me, to entwine?—”
This was a weaker voice, faltering, slurred. Still, she recognized it and rose from her desk. She opened the window and leaned out to catch all three men joining in the last line: “The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine!”
“Soaked, at this hour! You should be ashamed of yourselves,” Henrietta shouted. “Respectable people are still in their beds, you know.”
“You ain’t,” said Charley, squinting up at her. “Come down, Hetty, and give a fellow a hand.”
“He’s awfully heavy,” said the third man. She recognized Mr. Lionel Havering, whom she had danced with at the Bicclesfield ball. The man who had jilted Lady Celeste.
“Take him to his own bed,” Henrietta said heartlessly. “I don’t know why you think I would want him.”
Darien’s head slumped on his chest, his hair mussed and falling from its queue, his cravat dreadfully flattened, and a stained cloak thrown carelessly over his shoulder. His splendid boots dragged across the pavement as the other men hauled him along.
“Aw, Hetty, show a heart,” Charley cried. “He’s your intended.”
He gave the last word a strange emphasis and shrugged the shoulder that bore half of Darien’s weight. Darien’s head rolled to the side, and he blinked up at her like a man blinded by the light. His face was as white as the part of his cravat that did not bear a dark muddy stain.
He wasn’t drunk.
Henrietta clattered down the stairs ahead of Dearbody and pulled back the bolt. A quick glance at Charley’s face showed his urgency.
“But to bring him here disguised!” she said loudly, seeing the heads turning on the street outside. Her voice sounded as strained and obvious as Charley’s, barely audible over her suddenly pounding heart. “As if I want to see him in such a state.”
“Hullo, Henry,” Darien said, his head rolling forward again. He did appear drunk, when it came to that, his eyes heavy-lidded, his speech muffled. As his compatriots heaved him across the threshold, the cloak slipped and she saw the dark stain on his beautiful coat.
“How bad?” she whispered, staring at Havering’s hand on Darien’s waist. It was smeared with red.
“James is bringing the leech,” Charley said grimly, and Henrietta’s blood went cold.
“That’s my girl,” Darien announced.
“Not the parlor,” Henrietta hissed, slamming the front door. “He’ll upset Lady Mama and the girls. Take him upstairs to my sitting room.”
The men dragged their burden up the stairs while James led another man in from the kitchen. Henrietta’s heart stopped as she recognized the surgeon’s bag. Darien’s boots slipped and scuffed on the runner, as if his muscles did not obey his command.
“The swell’s still in the rattler, dark in his daylights,” James reported.
“Havering will take Freddy home,” Charley said. “Best to pretend he’s sodden too.”
