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A constable sawed through the silk and she was off the bed before he had finished, scurrying to her knees beside Anthony with her hands on his face.

“What were you thinking?” she whispered. “He had a gun. Who charges at a man with a gun?”

“Do not talk.” She pressed her palm hard over the wound, and his blood ran warm between her fingers. “You are bleeding. You’re bleeding and it scares me.”

“Are you hurt?” he asked lazily.

“No. I am not hurt.”

“Good.” He said it as though that settled everything.

“Anthony, look at me.”

He tried. His eyes met hers and held for a moment, then drifted past her, unfocused, and his head dropped against her shoulder. All at once his full weight slid into her arms.

“Anthony?” She shook him gently. He did not answer. “Anthony, please. Somebody fetch someone!”

Her mother was already kneeling beside her with a folded cloth from the washstand, pressing it over her hands. Beyond them the constables were hauling George upright.

Leonora held on. She said his name again into his hair, and then again, as if it were the only thing keeping him in the room.

EPILOGUE

“Thank God!”

The words came out of Leonora in a whisper that cracked down the middle. Anthony’s eyelids had fluttered, then lifted, and two vivid blue eyes were looking up at her from a pillow, unfocused but entirely alive.

She had not left his side since the constables carried him out. She had ridden beside the cart that took him to Glenhaven and stood in the corridor while the surgeon worked. When they let her in at last she had taken the chair beside the bed and stayed there through the whole of the night. Her wrists were bandaged, and she had not changed her gown. The cuffs were still stiff with his blood.

The surgeon had been very plain about it before he left. The ball had gone through the meat of the shoulder and missed the bone, which was a mercy, but Anthony had lost a great deal of blood on the carpet and on the road. A healthy man would have shrugged it off in an afternoon.

Anthony was not a healthy man just now. His butler had confessed that His Grace had barely touched a meal in a week, and slept in snatches when he slept at all.

“He will mend,” the surgeon had said. “But he must eat. Beef tea, to begin. Somebody must see that he does it.”

Somebody, Leonora had thought, with a grim kind of tenderness, would see to it.

“You are in a chair,” Anthony said. His voice was a dry thread. “Have been in a chair all night?”

“I have.” She leaned closer and pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. He was cool. Thank heaven, he was cool. “Do not try to sit up. You have a hole in you.”

“I am aware.”

“Are you? Are you really? Because I should like to know what in the world you thought you were doing.” Her voice had begun to shake, and she let it. She had been holding herself still for fourteen hours, and it all came pouring out at once. “You do not sleep, I am told. You have been prowling this house at night like a ghost, and you hardly seem to remember you have a body at all, and then you walk out of this house with no coat and no pistol, and charge a man with a gun. Who does that?”

“Leonora...”

“You could have been killed. Do you understand that? You could have died on that floor in front of me, and I should have had to go on living, knowing that you died because of me. You must learn to take care of yourself, Anthony. You must. You cannot go about worrying people like this, you cannot...”

“I am in love with you.”

Leonora stopped, almost like all the words were sucked out of her mouth.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I am in love with you, Leonora Ashcroft.”

She stared at him. Her first thought was that he was delirious. Men did say strange things after losing blood, she had read as much.