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“The chances are not nil, I notice.”
“My dear girl, what do you reckon the chances were of your getting killed racing to Putney in a hackney cabriolet? Those so-called drivers think they’re jockeys at Goodwood. The cabs are death traps. You know as well as I do they throw passengers into the road all the time. I’m the one ought to be furious with you for taking such chances, but I’m not, because I’m a forgiving fellow, and I know you did it out of worry for me. Which wouldn’t have happened if you’d slept as you were supposed to. Didn’t I tire you enough last night?”
Her eyes widened. “Was that why you did . . . all that? To wear me out?”
“Plague take it, do you think I’m as calculating as all that? All I wanted was you, and to make the most of our wedding night, and to make sure you never forgot it. I fully planned on not getting killed. But one does have to allow for the possibility, small as the odds may be.”
She regarded his bandaged head for a moment. “I suppose, if we must look at the matter logically, you demonstrate the odds. An inch or so would have made a vast difference.”
“I’d prefer the ball had whizzed an inch past the ear,” he said. “This was a hair too close.”
“Literally.”
“All the same, one must give Ashmont credit. He judged about as nicely as is possible to do. We’re all shockingly good shots. Blackwood’s father saw to it. Drilled and drilled Blackwood. Naturally, we couldn’t let him be better, so we drilled and drilled, too. But no matter how good you are, you can’t predict what the other fellow will do. Can’t know what he’s thinking, even if you’ve known him this age and he’s like a brother. I spoiled Ashmont’s cunning plan. Stupid of me. Didn’t mean to. Meant to shoot properly. But there you are.”
In the end, when all was said and done, he’d wronged a friend who was like a brother to him, and the only honorable thing to do was shoot into the air. Ripley wasn’t even sure he’d thought it out at the time. It was the work of an instant. He’d meant to aim at Ashmont, then he didn’t.
“Oh, Ripley,” she said.
The atmosphere had warmed, beyond a doubt.
“Come here,” he said. He didn’t wait for her to come, but pulled her into his arms and onto his lap. “That’s better.”
She rested her head against his shoulder. “That was the worst, worst, worst minute or two or however long it was, of my whole life.”
“Sorry.”
“But you thought I’d be asleep, and you assumed you’d get home, alive, before I woke and read your letter. You didn’t mean to make the worst moment of my life happen the day after my wedding. My real wedding.”
“It was deuced unsporting of you to wake so early.”
“I had a bad dream.” She told him about it.
“Me in a turban? Fancy that.”
She leaned back to look up at him. “The bandage looks rather like a turban. I don’t believe in omens, but I do believe I might have sensed something. With so many brothers, one develops an acute sense when they’re up to no good. You’re going to have the very devil of a headache, I hope you realize.”
It hurt already, and his nerves could have used a brandy, without soda. Two or three brandies. But she was in his arms, and it looked as though he was forgiven, and he wanted to get home and let her make a fuss over him while he pretended he didn’t want her fussing.
“I do realize. Went through this once with Ashmont. Long time ago.”
“Was this the time when he nearly lost his ear?” she said. “The duel with Lord Stewkley?”
He stared at her. “You know about that?”
She tucked her head back against his shoulder. “I only know there was a duel. Ten or more years ago, according to Mrs. Thorne. The seamstresses were talking about it, but she wouldn’t let them go into detail.”
“A boyish prank,” Ripley said. “Stewkley didn’t see it that way.”
“He’s a good deal older than you are,” she said. “What you did must have been dreadful, for him to fight a young man barely out of school.”
“He said we’d insulted his wife, and he fought Ashmont because the prank was Ashmont’s idea and he made sure to take credit.”
“That was Ashmont’s first duel?”
“Yes. Not but what he hadn’t been waiting for his chance, as we all did, wanting to prove ourselves, as young fellows do. The quarrel certainly livened up a dull gathering. Some sort of fete, as I recall. There were what-you-call-ems.”
“I have no idea what you call them.”
“Charades or tableaux or whatever they are. Unspeakably boring. We were to do ancient ruins. Ashmont picked Fountains Abbey. He had a large basin brought in and set on the floor. And we all three made fountains into it.”
She gazed at him for a moment. Then her eyes turned very blue and sparkled like stars. And she laughed. And laughed.
That wonderful sound. She made him forget his hurting head. She made him forget his heartache, too, at the prospect of causing her sorrow. She made him forget all the other feelings he’d pushed away, in order to do what had to be done.
He undid her bonnet and took it off. He buried his face in her hair and inhaled the simple scent he liked so much.
He held her, and they didn’t talk a great deal for the rest of the way, but at intervals she’d laugh. She said, “I’ll never be able to say ‘Fountains Abbey’ again without going off into whoops.”
He grinned down at her, like the doting imbecile he was.
There were, he decided, many, many fine advantages to marrying a bad girl.
The Duke of Ripley hadn’t been married a week before he gave a party. Well before the bandages came off, he was closeted with his wife, planning. As he’d told her, he liked to entertain. In the usual way of things, by this time he would have organized some sort of gathering to celebrate his return from the Continent.
One difference for this event was, he’d acquired a hostess: a duchess, in fact. Another difference was the guests: not a lot of men bent on carousing and curious about the next Their Dis-Graces prank, but a large segment of the beau monde.
Olympia’s cousin Edwina attended, looking very cross. But she wouldn’t have missed it for the world. This was the case for most invitees. In fact, machinations had gone on behind the scenes, to obtain the coveted invitations. It was the event of the Season: Dreadful Duke Weds Runaway Bride in Scandalous Circumstances.
If the great world had been surprised at the Duke of Blackwood’s marriage to Lady Alice Ancaster a year ago, it was thoroughly confounded by this match.
“But she’s so boring!” Cousin Edwina said to one of her friends as they watched the couple dance.
The duchess was looking up, saying something to the duke, which caused them both to laugh.
“He doesn’t think so,” said the friend.
As everybody had hoped, there was further excitement not long thereafter.
When the Duke of Ashmont led his hostess out to dance, the room grew hushed, the atmosphere tense.
“You had to choose a waltz,” Olympia said, as Ashmont swept her into the dance.
“Looks better that way,” he said. “More exciting. There’s Ripley looking daggers at me while I swoop down and carry off in my arms his wife, who happens to be my former bride.”
“You three are masters of show,” she said.
“It’s fun, getting everybody into an uproar,” he said. “Always has been. Breaks up the boredom.”
They danced for a while before he spoke again. “After all these years of my upsetting hostess’s plans and turning their balls and routs and fetes upside down, they think it served me right to have my wedding go to pieces. Poetic justice, they say. Maybe they’re not wrong.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “About ruining your wedding.” She giggled. “But not really.”
He looked at her. “But you wrote—”
“Oh, I meant it. Then.”
After a short time, his handsome face broke into one of the smiles
that must have undone countless women. “You wrote, asking me to forgive him, but I had to go and shoot him anyway. I did have to, you know.”
“So you both claimed. To show I was worth fighting for.”
“That, yes,” he said. “But there’s more. Complicated, as Ripley said. If I hadn’t shot him, you’d be truly sorry. You’d feel guilty about what you did and sorry for me, because I would have been so noble and self-sacrificing. What an appalling prospect! Good thing, then, I shot him.”
“I should not call it a good thing, but you did spare me a great deal of penitence.”
“And myself a sick-making stain on my otherwise black reputation.”
“If you’d hurt him a whit more than you did, I should have made you a great deal more than sick,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “Do you know, when you pushed me off him the other day, that was the first time a woman ever knocked me over?”
“I sincerely hope it won’t be the last.”
“Wicked girl,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, and laughed.
He laughed, too. And if he felt regrets, and if they went deep, he put them in a place where they couldn’t bother him.
Ripley, dancing with his sister, was looking in the same direction as most of his guests: at Ashmont, laughing with the Duchess of Ripley.
“You do have the devil’s own luck,” Alice said. “Had you come home from the Continent one day later—”
“Don’t say that. You’ll give me nightmares. I know it was luck, every step of the way. When the whole business started, I was cursing you for going to Aunt Julia’s.”
“I? What had I to do with it?”
“If you were at the wedding, I reckoned you’d get the bride back to the groom and the minister in no time.”
