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‘Lucian—I am sorry, but not tonight. Do you mind very much? I had such a bad night last night. Tomorrow—come for luncheon and then you need not leave at all.’
‘Of course.’ His kiss was quick as they stood in the shadows, then he took her latch key and waited until she was inside before murmuring, ‘Good night and sweet dreams, Sara.’
‘I will try and dream of you,’ she promised as she shut the door.
Maude came out into the hall at the sound of the door closing, but Sara held up her hand for silence, leaning back against the panels until the sound of Lucian’s footsteps faded away down the street.
‘Did a gentleman call, Maude?’ she said at last.
‘Yes, my lady. He showed me your card and I put him in the drawing room. I gave him a light supper, my lady, and the decanters. I hope I did right?’
‘Yes, thank you, Maude. He is an old friend from Cambridge.’ Which did not explain receiving him at night. She took a deep breath. ‘Maude, that is the man who fought the duel with my husband.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘My lady! Shall I call the constable?’ Her maid caught at her hand, tried to pull her towards the front door.
‘No, he is quite safe to be with.’ Sara freed herself and patted the other woman’s hand in reassurance. ‘It was an accident, Maude, a horrible accident. But I need to speak with him before all of society knows that he is back. I would like you to sit in the dining room, if you would, and we will leave both doors ajar. I am quite confident that will be adequate, but I would not like Lord Cannock to think I was unchaperoned.’ Lord Cannock was probably going to resemble one of Congreve’s military rockets going off when he found out about this, but she would deal with that when she had to.
‘Yes, my lady,’ Maude said dubiously as she took herself off to the dining room, leaving the door wide open.
Sara did not give herself time to get any more nervous than she already was. She tossed her evening cloak and reticule on to the hall chair and went straight in.
Francis got to his feet, a brandy glass
clenched in one hand. ‘Sara. Thank you for receiving me. I would not blame you if you never wanted to see me again.’
‘I do not know how I feel.’ She sat down before her shaking knees betrayed her and forced herself to look at him. ‘I just want to hear what you have to say and then, I think, I will ask you to leave.’
‘Of course.’ He sat down again. ‘We were both drunk that evening, you know,’ he began abruptly. ‘I could not believe it at first when he challenged me, Michael had always been so scathing about men who fought duels. But I had been such an idiot, I knew it as soon as I opened my mouth and all that nonsense came out, I could hardly blame him. I was too proud to apologise, can you imagine? If he was too proud to back down, I was far worse.
‘But I knew I had to delope, whatever he intended, whatever he did to me. It was all my fault that it had come to such a pass and besides, I couldn’t hit a barn door with a pistol if I threw the thing at it. That was the trouble, I suppose, my utter hopelessness with a gun—’ He broke off, scrubbed his hands over his face, then swallowed hard as though forcing his stumbling words to come out in some order. ‘I aimed wide, as I intended. The white handkerchief dropped, Michael deloped, fired into the ground, and I twitched, I think, at the noise and with nerves and I stumbled and the gun went off. And…’
‘And he was dead, shot through the heart,’ she finished when his voice gave out. Strange that she could say it so steadily, but there seemed to be a cold emptiness where her own heart should be.
‘Yes. And George Harper, my second, said he had to get me away, off to the Continent, because the coroner could bring it in as murder, or unlawful killing at the very best, and I could hang. The doctor had already made a bolt for it, there was nothing he could do and who can blame him, he didn’t want to be an accessory. Jimmy Philips, Michael’s second, said he didn’t think I had done it deliberately, but he agreed with George that it wasn’t safe to chance it, so I ran.’
Sara could imagine him, white-faced, stark with the horror of what he had done, driving at breakneck speed through the early morning light. While Michael lay still and cold in the dew in a Cambridge meadow.
When she did not speak he picked up the story again, his voice a monotone. ‘I went home, confessed to my parents, packed my bags, took all the cash that was in the house. They promised to send me money regularly when I found somewhere safe. My father suggested Brussels, my mother was crying too much to say anything. I tried to write to you before I left, but what could I say? I am sorry? Much good that would have done.’
‘I wanted to kill you—and yet I wanted to hold you and tell you that I knew it must all have been a horrible mistake. I wanted to believe that. I wanted to know that you were all right, but no one would speak of you to me.’
Francis ran his hand over his mouth as though to control the words on his lips. Eventually he said, ‘I went to Ghent in the end. It was not so full of people who would know me as Brussels was. I called myself Mr Smith and found a small apartment to rent. My parents sent money and I settled down to a life full of nothing except the knowledge that I had broken their hearts, killed my best friend and made you a widow. I thought about putting a bullet in my brain more than once, but that would have finished my mother.’
‘So what happened to change everything?’
He shrugged. ‘Good fortune. My godfather knows the Lord Chancellor and he started chipping away at him about the inquest. The original coroner was dead set against duelling, especially in a university city because of encouraging students to fight. Apparently he refused to take any evidence about how we had both deloped—or, rather that I had tried to. Finally, Lord Eldon agreed to a new inquest and both the seconds spoke out, and Michael’s groom who had been driving his gig and saw it all did, too. It was brought in as death by misadventure and the time I had spent in exile was taken into consideration.’ He seemed to run out of words, then added, ‘So I have come back.’
‘What will you do now?’ Sara felt sick with reaction, but at least she felt something. Nausea was better than that cold hollowness inside. Why had the seconds not told her what had happened? Why hadn’t Jed, the groom, told her? Because she had not been there, she supposed. Her family had swept her up, taken her away, cocooned her in love.
‘I will go home to Haddon, stay away from London and learn to manage the estate, take some of the burden off my father and try to make it up, somehow, to my mother. There’s a girl she wants me to marry, who’ll likely have me, it seems. I’ll do my best to make her a good husband, raise children. I’ll soon be forgotten outside a ten-mile radius, with any luck.’
The words were bitter, but his voice was not. Francis was home from exile, his name was cleared and he could begin to build a new life, even if he would never, Sara suspected, be able to forget Michael’s death or forgive himself for it. Could she? Face to face with this handsome, likeable man, could she forgive herself for what had happened to cause it all?
‘I flirted with you.’ The words seemed to come from very far away and her lips were numb. ‘When Michael was away, out for the evening or late working and you would call round, I flirted. I enjoyed your company, I was flattered by your friendship and your interest in me and I was lonely. That is no excuse,’ she admitted, more to herself than to him. ‘It was my fault you said those things to him when you were drunk.’
‘No. No, you never overstepped the bounds of what was honourable. You never treated me as anything but Michael’s friend, your friend.’ He sprang out of his chair, knelt at her feet, ungainly in his urgency, and caught her hands in his. ‘Yes, you teased a little, but only a rake or a fool would have thought you meant anything by it. But I was that fool.’ He looked up, into her eyes, his own startlingly blue in his haggard face. ‘I was fool enough to fall in love with you.’
