“Oh Papa,” Rosalind said, “you cannot mean anything by it. What would we have thought of Lord Baderston if he’d not answered the insult?”
“He could not ignore it, Papa,” Viola said. “Though I take full responsibility for putting him in the situation.”
“And what a situation it is,” Conbatten said behind her.
“I find Baderston is shaping up to be a fine fellow,” Darden said.
The play had started and Viola turned her head toward the stage, though her eyes were elsewhere.
Were anyone to apply a lorgnette to discover what she was doing, they would note that while her head seemed to look one way, her eyes were looking at Lord Baderston’s box.
Would he return to it? It was hard to know. If he’d ended up boxing that rude fellow he’d chased out, his clothes might be rumpled and torn.
She did so long to see his face, even as it was now—marred by a rather gruesome swollen and purple eye.
The play proceeded, but Viola could not have explained to anybody what it was about. Her thoughts were all taken up by Lord Baderston. If he would ask her the momentous question, they might marry in all haste and leave London. They need not linger to hear what people would say about her. Or what his mother would say about her.
They would go on a wedding trip somewhere. Rosalind had done her best to convince all her sisters to never set foot on a boat after her harrowing trip to the continent, but Viola did not think she would mind it. She imagined floating up and down on the waves and thought it might be very soothing. In any case, wherever they went they would go together and that was the important thing.
Her thoughts took her here and there, all with Lord Baderston. Finally, sometime into the second act, the lord did return to his box.
Viola instantly realized that she’d not been the only person wondering if he would come back. Heads turned in waves as if the king himself had taken his box.
This gave Viola just enough of a moment unobserved to apply her lorgnette without being spotted.
Lord Baderston sat, very straight and stoic, looking at the stage as if he were intrigued by the play.
His poor dear face, though. Could he evenseethe play? His other eye was swollen now too, and his lower lip cut.
He must have had a terrible fisticuffs with that rude fellow.
“Hard to tell who got the worst of it,” Darden said.
“I cannot quite imagine worse than what I am seeing,” Conbatten said. “He’d best be careful he does not find himself spending his mornings on lonely greens.”
“You may be right,” Darden said to the duke. “Chelderberry is being sent out of Town, but too many more of these fights and he just might receive a challenge.”
A duel? Viola’s heart felt as if it had turned to ice. Before she’d come to London, when she’d only dreamed of gentlemen in fine clothes who were desperately in love with her, imagining a duel had sounded highly romantic. It had sounded like some sort of game for a gentleman to risk his life for love of her.
It did not sound romantic now. It did not feel like a game. She could not bear it if something were to happen to Lord Baderston.
“Duke, you do not think…”
Behind her, the duke said gravely, “Many a hot-tempered fellow has found himself in that ridiculous situation.”
There was something in the duke’s tone that she did not like. It was almost as if hedidthink Lord Baderston would end up in a duel.
It could not be! She could not allow it.
But how was she to know of it or stop it if she did know? Duels were never spoken of else they be interfered with by a magistrate. Sometimes they were widely known, but that was only afterward if there had been a serious injury that could not be concealed. Or worse, a death.
Viola’s ideas about love were changing so rapidly she could hardly keep up with them. Where once she would have thrilled over a dawn meeting to defend her honor, now she only wished that she and Lord Baderston could go on to live a quiet and peaceful life.
That was how it must be. She must find a way to stop Lord Baderston from boxing people who caused her offence. She would have once demanded his fury. She would have expected it and approved of it. Now she wished for quite the opposite.
*
When Roland wokeup, he found his eyes had swollen to such a degree that he could only see through two narrow slits.
