“Oh no, Ash.” Major Cunningham raised a staying hand. “I am an excellent shot. I was close. I was careful to hit the target I had set myself. If she had only been capable of hearing, I would not even have had to graze her skin.”
“And last night?” Ashley asked. “You have been deliberately trying to terrorize her. You were in her room. You took her night robe. You put the portraits there. Why? But I need not ask that, need I? You have correctly divined my feelings for her. You have thought to drive her away and therefore to drive me away. You very nearly succeeded.”
“You could not be happy here, Ash,” the major said. “Not with your wife’s ghost haunting you every day of your life. Not with the knowledge that young Eric should be living here as the rightful owner. A few hours more and his mother would have been married to his father. Sell to me. I will marry Katherine and make the boy my son. He will be where he belongs, and so will she.”
“Just tell me what happened on the morning of your arrival,” Ashley said. “What did you do to frighten Lady Emily so?”
“She has not told you?” Major Cunningham laughed rather ruefully. “My apologies, Ash. I saw her in what I now realize is a common guise. But at the time I mistook her for a milkmaid. No harm was done—fortunately for all of us, she is rather fleet-footed. Since discovering her true identity, I have been the soul of honor. Besides, I have other interests of a more serious nature than that aroused by milkmaids. Come, Ash, shake my hand. There is no point in making a damned quarrel of all this.” He held out his right hand and took a step forward.
“One of us is going to die here today,” Ashley said. “If ’tis me, my property will become Harndon’s. He will discuss with you how he wishes to dispose of it. If ’tis you, I will bury our friendship with you and consider that the deaths of my wife and my son and the nurse as well as the terrorizing of Lady Emily Marlowe have been justly avenged. I have brought you your own sword, as you see.”
“This is very foolish, Ash, and very unnecessary,” Major Cunningham said. “I have no wish to kill you.”
“Then you must stand and be killed,” Ashley said. “I suggest we strip down to shirts and breeches.”
He set down the major’s sword on the floor and walked away to prepare himself. Luke was standing motionless inside the door, looking tight-lipped and rather pale.
“Ash,” he said quietly as his brother removed his skirted coat, “let me do this for you. I have a reputation as a swordsman that has been well earned, I believe.”
Ashley’s smile was somewhat grim. “I had to do something for physical exercise in India,” he said. “I practiced swordplay. Besides, Luke, they were my wife and my son. And Emmy is my woman.”
“Yes,” Luke said rather sadly. “I love you, brother.”
Ashley grinned. “Zounds but I will hold those words over your head for the rest of your life,” he said, setting his long waistcoat down on top of his coat. He was no longer smiling when he straightened up and withdrew his sword from its scabbard. “Luke, tell her I love her. Care for her if she is with child.”
“Yes,” Luke said. “For your sake and because she is almost my sister and almost my daughter. She will always have my love and my protection. So will any child of hers—and yours.” He strode away then to the middle of the ballroom to talk quietly with Major Cunningham, who was ready in his shirtsleeves, drawn sword in hand. After a minute or so, Luke looked across at Ashley and nodded curtly.
“’Tis, as I understand it,” he said when Ashley had approached and the two men stood face-to-face and had crossed swords, “a fight to the death. Nevertheless you will not begin until I give the signal and neither one of you, for honor’s sake, will hit the other from behind or stab the other when he is down.”
Ashley had not noticed that Luke too was wearing his sword. But he had it drawn now and set it beneath their crossed swords. Major Cunningham’s eyes were on Ashley’s, cool, calculating, rueful. He was a friend, Ashley thought, who had betrayed him during every moment of their friendship. A friend who must now die or who must kill him. This was no moment for sentiment, for regrets, for hurt feelings of betrayal.
Luke’s sword came up, and with a clash of steel the swords of the combatants were separated. “Begin,” he said.
Major Cunningham was solidly built, strong, and fit. He was a soldier. As an officer, he habitually carried a sword. He led his men into battle with drawn sword. But that did not necessarily make him an expert in its use during single combat. Ashley was slender in comparison, taller, also fit. He had never been in a real sword fight. But, as he had just told Luke, he had learned and practiced the art of swordplay.
And Ashley had the advantage of motivation. His anger was cold and controlled. Alice had been many things. Perhaps—even probably—she had been a wicked woman. Certainly she had been a tormented woman. But she had been his wife and under his protection. Thomas had been another man’s son, conceived in sin. But he had been an innocent baby, and a baby to whom Ashley had given the protection of his name. Emily was simply his love. He fought for all three of them, so that the two might finally rest in peace, so that the third might again live in peace. And he fought, though he did not consciously think of it, for the restoration of his honor, lost when his wife and child died while he was in the arms of another woman.
Swordplay, he discovered, was very different from serious combat. Swordplay was conducted according to strict rules of gentlemanly etiquette and honor. Combat was not. And in combat a hit drew blood. Major Cunningham drew first blood after several minutes of circling and clashing swords and sizing each other up. He did something with his left hand that drew Ashley’s attention away from his sword for a mere fraction of a second and in that time was past Ashley’s guard and had pricked him on the right shoulder.
There was pain, shock, and a fast-spreading stain of red in the corner of Ashley’s vision.
“Enough, Ash,” Major Cunningham said, his voice breathless. “You have made your point. Honor has been served. Enough now.”
“To the death,” Ashley said coldly. Though it was painful, the wound did not incapacitate him. Instead it made him cautious. It made him grimly aware with his whole body of what his mind already knew—that one of them was to die. He ended the momentary lull in the fighting and bore his opponent back with the force of his attack.
They fought to what seemed an inevitable stalemate. They fought for long minutes until it seemed that exhaustion must end the fight before death did. But Major Cunningham lost his patience first. He lunged forward into what was only an illusory opening. A mere turning of Ashley’s body sent the major’s sword harmlessly past. But Ashley’s own sword, firmly held, impaled his enemy.
The major went very still as his sword clattered to the ballroom floor. He stared into Ashley’s eyes, and a peculiar twisted smile distorted his lips. A line of blood oozed from one corner of his mouth and trickled down to drip off his chin. Ashley pulled his sword free, and the dead body of his erstwhile friend crumpled at his feet.
Ashley looked down at the red sword in his hand and dropped it to the floor. There was no feeling of relief at being the survivor. There was no feeling of triumph at being the victor, or of guilt at having killed a man. There was no feeling at all. He stared downward.
“You will need to have that shoulder tended to, Ash. You are losing blood.” Luke’s voice. Cool and calm, as might have been expected of him.
“Yes,” Ashley said.
“’Twas a fair fight. And a necessary one,” Luke said.
“Yes.”
