The steel in his voice sent Aunt Nora skittering sideways like a startled shellfish.
Aaron carried Catherine through the doorway and into the cool afternoon air. She tried to lift her head, but it weighed like lead. Her arms looped shiveringly around his neck, her cheek pressed to the solid warmth of his chest. Through fluttering eyelids, she watched Haventon Manor grow smaller behind them.
Then consciousness fled.
CHAPTER 5
“Christ, what have I gotten myself into, Ben…” Gideon muttered rhetorically.
He took his shot, and the ball careened wildly across the billiard table, missing its target. He made an angry sound in his throat, stepping back as his friend came forward for his own shot. Benedict had dark-gold hair and a youthful face with bushy side-whiskers and a moustache to add gravity to his features.
“What honor demands. You could not leave her in that place. It sounds…” he gave a theatrical shudder, “ghastly.”
The shot was precise and potted the target. He glided around the table for the next.
“But now I am saddled with her.” Gideon leaned against his cue, watching his friend play. “And she is either ill, or…” He let the sentence die. Better not to voicethatparticular suspicion aloud—not yet. “Regardless, I cannot afford to be playing caretaker.”
His mind returned to the conversation at Haventon about Catherine's ‘medicine’. It had planted an ugly seed in his mind, but voicing it felt too uncharitable. Even to Benedict, the Earl of Daleshire—good of a friend as Ben had been.
“She will recover, and thenthat,” another shot, another pot, “particular problem is behind you.” Benedict chuckled, unused to being in the winning position against him. Gideon glowered at the man, uncertain whether Ben was actually grasping the gravity of the situation at hand.
“I have to marry her. The scandal will destroy my name, otherwise. Oh, damnation, why could I not just walk away and call in a favor from the constable!”
Benedict put down the cue and thumped his hands on the green baize.
“Now look here. You are an honorable sort, and you took the only course that honor allowed. You came to the aid of a damsel in distress. I would have done the same. So would Everdon… probably.”
He grinned, but Gideon was in no mood for jests.
“I must know more about her and that family if I am to protect myself and my investments. She knows…”
He stopped, disguising it by making a disgusted growl and stalking across the room to the decanter of brandy. There wasone in every room in which he spent any time. After years in which he had nothing except the clothes on his back and the constant gnawing hunger in his belly, it was good to have luxuries on tap.
“Bit early, old chap,” Benedict tilted his head.
“Then have some tea,” he snapped.
“What were you about to say there? Before the siren song of the brandy interrupted you?” Benedict asked innocently.
I was about to say she knew Aaron and is the most likely person to find me out. But you cannot know that, Ben—you never knew my brother. You are the one person I can be myself with, albeit using another man’s name.
“That she knows more than I do about the Tresswells. About her own circumstances. I think it would be worth finding out the story of that family. And the Ainsleys. Do you know them?”
Ben raised his eyes to the ceiling, pursing his lips. His youthful face made the moustache and whiskers appear false, a disguise worn by a boy imitating his father.
“Can’t say I do. Where did you say they hailed from?”
“Haventon, which is beyond the north-east boundary of the city, on the outskirts of Kilburn.”
“Not an area I know particularly well. Nor have I met them socially. Sarah is your best bet. She knows everyone who’s anyone, and those she doesn’t know personally, she at least knows of them.”
It was an excellent notion. Sarah Thorpe, the Countess of Daleshire, had earned herself a dozen nicknames over the Seasons—theSocial Oraclechief among them—for there was scarcely a drawing room in London whose currents she could not read at a glance. She would be able to tell him the story of the Ainsleys and the Tresswells. How Catherine came to be in her current situation.
There came a knock at the door, and the butler, McKay, entered. He walked stiffly across the room, arms swinging as though he were a soldier on parade.
He came to a crisp halt before Gideon and clicked his heels smartly together.
“Your Grace. The young lady is awakening. Sally is sitting with her.”
