“Hush!” he snapped as he put his shirt back to rights—the Morgans were still in an uproar—and he was downright shocked when it worked. He had to take a moment to adjust to the silence and to think about what came next. “We have your Mr. Bull in hand, and I daresay that with a bit of strategy we can get out of here undetected, but only if no one causes a scene.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Olive said at the same time that Clementine said, “But I shot you!”
And then Olive said, “That’s true; shedidshoot you” at the same time that Clementine said, “He’s notmyMr. Bull.”
“’Tis merely a flesh wound,” Archie said, choosing to address first the unfortunate circumstance of Clementine havingshot him. He winced as he gestured behind him. “The ball, I believe, is lodged in the paneling of the corridor outside.” Archie was an accomplished hunter now, but he hadn’t always been, and as a boy, he’d hit enough trees in error to know the sound of lead embedding in wood. “It only grazed me.” His shoulder hurt like the devil, but the wound was nowhere near mortal.
“She thought you were Mr. Bull,” Olive said weakly.
“What in God’s name are youdoing, Clem?” he shouted, forgetting for a moment his own directive that they should keep their voices down. But for Heaven’s sake, Clementine was disrobing.
“I am disrobing.”
He rolled his eyes. “I can see that. In case you have failed to grasp what is happening, I am attempting tosalvageyour reputations, but you have discharged a weapon that has surely been heard by everyone downstairs, and—”
“I have several yards of muslin beneath this shirt that I was using to bind my . . . apple dumplins.”
“Yourwhat?”
“I’ll thank you to turn your back for a moment, Arch.”
“Don’t call me that,” he said automatically, but he turned as instructed, his face oddly hot.
“I say, Clementine,” Olive said, “your disguise is ingenious.Irecognized you, of course, but that’s because I’m me and you’re you. But if I remove that familiarity, you look remarkably like a boy.”
“You may turn, Arch,” Clementine said.
“Don’tcall me that,” he said peevishly, though he turned back and registered that Clementine Morgan was wearing gentlemen’s clothing. Plain buff knee breeches, scuffed but serviceable Hessians that appeared absurdly too large, and a wrinkled white shirt she was finishing buttoning back up.
She did not look like a boy whatsoever.
Clementine made a shooing motion at Olive, who said, “Oh, yes!” and hurried over to him with Clementine’s muslin in her hand and said, “Archie, take off your shirt.”
“I will do no such thing.” There had been quite enough public disrobing for one day.
“If you want to escape without drawing attention to ourselves, we’ve got to stop that bleeding,” Clementine said, looking reproachfully at him.
He followed her gaze to his arm and had to admit that his wound, while superficial, was doing a rather impressive job of bleeding through his shirt.
Archie sighed and shrugged out of the bloody sleeve. The muslin Olive wrapped around his arm was still warm. From Clementine’s body, he supposed. It was damp, too. He eyed her. It was an unseasonably hot September. She must have been quite warm with her . . . self wrapped in so much fabric beneath a shirt, waistcoat, and coat. And now that she was no longer thusly wrapped, he was confronted by the fact that there was an awful lot of her . . . self there. More than he remembered noticing in the past, anyway. How . . . discomposing.
The sound of footsteps jolted him back to the task at hand. “Clem,” he said urgently, “look at me.” She did, and he noted, as he always had when they were young, that her eyes were the exact color of an old thruppence. He shook his head. That the color of her eyes was unchanged was unremarkable. “Someone is coming. Probably to investigate the noise from your havingshot me.” She winced. Good. Sheshouldwince. “If anyone knocks, Olive and I are going to hide behind this door. You open it and profess to have heard the gunshot but say you are certain it came from the floor below, from the other end of the building.” He pointed. “Do you understand?”
She nodded, and though he feared she wouldn’t be able to pull off the subterfuge, especially now that she had de-muslined her . . . self, he needn’t have worried. A knock came, and she opened the door a few inches and conferred with the innkeeper in a voice Archie would have recognized as hers in the middle of a ballroom full of nattering masses, but he supposed she was doing a decent enough job lowering it that she sounded credibly mannish to a stranger.
When she shut the door again, he said, “That will buy us a little time, but we must make haste.”
“What did you mean when you said you had Mr. Bull in hand?” Olive asked, tucking in the end of the muslin to secure the bandage she’d been fashioning around Archie’s upper arm. “Where is he?” She tilted her head at him in the exact same way Clementine used to. “What are you evendoinghere, Archie?”
He started on her first question as he pulled on his coat. He’d merely been winged, but good God, the wound smarted. “I threatened Mr. Bull with a rifle—quietly, withoutactuallyshooting him.” He looked pointedly at Clementine, and she winced again.Good.“He’s currently outside, being held discreetly by two friends of mine.”
“Oh, yes, it’s September!” Clementine exclaimed, her serious demeanor undergoing a sudden reversal. “Are Lords Marsden and Featherfinch with you? How wonderful.”
“You sound as if you’re commenting on a musicale we all happen to find ourselves at and not the potential ruination of yourself and your sister.” He turned to Olive to answer the latter of her questions. “I’m here because your father bade me come after you.”
He watched both girls absorb the fact that he had been dispatched by Sir Albert. After a beat, they said in unison, “I can explain.”
Clementine shifted her attention to her sister. “Don’t you think you owemean explanation as well?”
