Someone had shot at them, and not just once, but twice. Whilst in the midst of London’s best neighborhoods. It was not as if they were traversing the stews or the docks or—for heaven’s sake—a battlefield. Violet’s heart beat frantically, a marked change of pace after the dullness of the afternoon spent with Lady Almsley and Charles.
How dare they?
The carriage rocked and swayed as the driver ordered the horses into a faster pace. It had to be the Fenians shooting at a carriage marked with the coat of arms of the Duke of Arden. She swallowed hard, going to the window of the carriage and drawing back the curtains to peer into the wilderness of the London streets.
All she saw was the standard men and woman going about their day, carriages lumbering past, nothing to suggest outright warfare was being committed in Mayfair, of all places.
“For God’s sake, get away from the window,” ordered Aunt Hortense. “If they see you, they shall shoot you.”
Violet wanted to dare them to, whoever they were. The shadowy, faceless menace had first filled her with fear, but that fear was budding and blossoming into something else altogether. How she wished she was armed herself. If she had a pistol, and if she possessed decent aim, she could defend them.
How awful it was to be helpless, no remedy save lying down on the floor of the carriage and praying a bullet would not strike her.
Her hand still smarted from the cut she had received in Charles’s conservatory, and now this. She vowed, then and there, that she had endured enough. She had tolerated Lady Almsley and her thinly veiled insults and barbed comments. She had allowed herself to become betrothed to a man who prized his orchids more highly than his future countess. And now, she had been shot at in broad daylight by someone who either wanted her to experience fear, or someone who wanted to kill or injure her.
To the devil with that person. And to the devil with Lady Almsley, and even Charles, if he did not realize she would need to take precedence over his mother. And if he thought more of his bloody orchids than he thought of her.
If she did not come first, how could she ever shackle herself to him forever?
She was becoming a new Violet, and the new Violet did not want to tolerate nonsense. She did nothaveto tolerate nonsense.
Why had she ever done so before?
It seemed so logical and clear that she need not.
“Violet,” huffed Aunt Hortense.
They were nearing Lark House now. The houses and street were as familiar as the lines crossing her palms. “We are almost home, Aunt.”
“You do not think one of those jackanapes can shoot you at your home just as well as two streets away?” demanded Aunt Hortense. “Get away from the window at once!”
Aunt Hortense rather had a point, but at the moment, Violet was feeling too rebellious to comply. “Let him shoot an innocent woman. I dare him.”
She cast a grim eye about the street, searching for any sign of a man with a gun, or even a man who appeared suspicious. And that was when she saw him; a short, slight youth, with light hair peeping from beneath a hat, jogging away.
It had to be the shooter.
Her first instinct, and her every suspicion, told her the man could only be one and the same. She rapped on the window of the carriage with so much force her knuckles smarted. But the man was beyond hearing her, and even if he had, he would not stop.
“It is the Fenians,” she said, as much to Aunt Hortense as to herself.
Of course it was, for there would be no other reason for shots to be fired at a carriage bearing the crest of the Duke of Arden. Now that Lucien’s involvement in the shadowy Home Office agency had been revealed, there would undoubtedly be a great unleashing of similar attacks. Attacks that would be worse. Attacks that would be even more dangerous.
She could not help but to suspect that, if whoever had been watching them had been daring enough to take not one shot, but two, and perhaps even follow them as well, he would also have been observing from the moment she and Aunt Hortense had left Charles’s home. They could have been shot so easily.
The notion made the breath flee from her lungs.
She sat at last, her knees giving out. It was the first time she had ever been confronted with the notion of her own mortality. She was relatively young—four-and-twenty was not yet ancient—and though she and Lucien had lost their parents in their youths, she had foolishly never imagined something ill could befall her. Being confronted with the fragility of life was shocking, and it seemed, somehow, to underscore the necessity of reevaluating the future she had imagined for herself with Charles.
The carriage rocked to a halt.
“We are home now,” she announced to Aunt Hortense.
“Oh dear.” Aunt Hortense stared up at her, decidedly unlike her ordinary dragon self. “I am not certain I will be able to regain my feet.”
The august woman’s bearing had been growing stiffer of late, and Violet had noticed. “I shall help you. But you truly ought to be using the ointment Sally made for your joints. Are you using it?”
Sally was Violet’s lady’s maid, but she was also well versed in the arts of healing. Her salves, creams, and teas never failed to work wonders. Aunt Hortense, however, had been rather mulish in her refusal to accept the aid.
