The wound was nothing, Dain was sure. He’d scarcely felt it. The bullet had gone clean through. Though his arm had bled a great deal, Dain was used to the sight of blood, including his own, and should not have swooned.
But he had, several times, and each time he’d come to, he’d felt hotter. A physician had come and examined the wound and treated it and bandaged it and told Dain he was very lucky.
It was clean. No bones had been shattered. Muscle and nerve damage was negligibly minor. There was no danger of infection.
Dain should not, therefore, be feverish, but he was. First his arm burned, then his shoulder and neck caught fire. Now his head was ablaze.
Amid this internal hellfire, he heard Esmond’s voice, smooth and soothing as always.
“She knows,naturellement, that no jury in France would convict her,” said Esmond. “Here, it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than to convict a beautiful woman of any crime which appears to be in any way connected tol’amour.”
“Of course she knows.” Dain gritted out the words. “Just as I know she didn’t do it in the heat of the moment. Did you see her hand? Not a hint of trembling. Cold and steady as you please. She was not in a mindless rage. She knew precisely what she was doing.”
“She knows very well what she is doing,” Esmond agreed. “Shooting you was only the beginning. She means to make a spectacle of you. I am to tell you that she will make public—in the courtroom if she can get the trial she insists upon, or in the papers if she cannot—every detail of the episode. She says she will repeat all you said to her and describe in full detail everything you did.”
“In other words, she’ll exaggerate and twist words to her purpose,” said Dain, angrily aware that all she had to utter was the truth. And that, in the eyes of the world, would reduce Lord Beelzebub to a lovesick, panting, groaning, sweating schoolboy. His friends would howl with laughter at his mawkish outpourings, even the Italian.
She would remember what the words sounded like—she was adept in Latin, wasn’t she?—and do an apt imitation, because she was quick and clever…and vengeful. Then all his mortifying secrets, dreams, fantasies, would be translated into French and English—and soon, every other language known to humankind. The words would be printed in bubbles over his head in printshop caricatures. Farces of the episode would be enacted upon the stage.
That was merely a fraction of what he’d face, Dain knew.
He had only to recollect how the press had pilloried Byron a dozen years earlier—and the poet had been a model of social rectitude compared to the Marquess of Dain. Furthermore, Byron had not been obscenely wealthy, terrifyingly big and ugly, and infuriatingly powerful.
The bigger they are, the harder the fall. And the better the world liked seeing them fall.
Dain understood the way of the world very well. He could see plainly enough what the future held. Miss Jessica Trent saw, too, undoubtedly. That was why she hadn’t killed him. She wanted to make sure he suffered the torments of hell while he lived.
She knew he would suffer, because she had struck in the only place where he could be hurt: his pride.
And if he couldn’t endure it—which she knew, of course, he couldn’t—she’d get her satisfaction in private, no doubt. She would make himcrawl.
She had him exactly where she wanted him, the she-devil.
Amid the hellfire raging over half his body, his head began to pound. “I’d better deal with her directly,” he said. His tongue was thick, slurring the words. “Negotiate. Tell her…” He swallowed. His throat burned, too. “Terms. Tell her…”
He shut his eyes and searched his throbbing, roiling mind for words, but they wouldn’t come. His head was a red-hot mound of metal a hellish blacksmith was hammering upon, pounding intellect, thought, into nothingness. He heard Esmond’s voice, very far away, but couldn’t make sense of the words. Then the satanic hammer struck one shattering blow, and knocked Dain into oblivion.
Consumed by the feverish illness he shouldn’t have had, Dain drifted in and out of consciousness for most of the next four days.
On the morning of the fifth day, he woke fully, and more or less recovered. That was to say, the fire and throbbing were gone. His left arm refused to move, though. It dangled uselessly at his side. There was feeling in it, but he couldn’t make it do anything.
The physician returned, examined, made wise noises, and shook his head. “I can find nothing wrong,” he said.
He summoned a colleague, who also found nothing wrong, and summoned another, with the same result.
By late afternoon, Dain had seen eight medical men, all of whom told him the same thing. By then, Dain was beside himself. He had been poked and questioned and muttered over for most of the day, and spent a great deal of money on physicians’ fees to no purpose.
To cap it off, a law clerk arrived minutes after the last quack left. Herbert delivered the message the clerk had brought just as Dain was attempting to pour himself a glass of wine. His eye upon the note on the silver salver, Dain missed the glass, and splattered wine on his dressing gown, slippers, and the Oriental carpet.
He hurled imprecations, as well as the salver, at Herbert’s head, then stormed out of the drawing room and on to his own room, where he worked himself into a fury trying to unseal and unfold the note with one hand. By then, he was so enraged, he could scarcely see straight.
There was little enough to see. According to the note, Mr. Andrew Herriard wished to meet with His Lordship’s solicitor on behalf of Miss Jessica Trent.
Lord Dain’s insides turned to lead.
Andrew Herriard was a famous London solicitor with an extensive clientele of powerful expatriates in Paris. He was also a pillar of rectitude—incorruptible, loyal, and indefatigable in serving his clients. Lord Dain was aware, as were a great many people, that beneath the lawyer’s saintly exterior loomed a steel trap with jaws and teeth a shark would envy. The trap was reserved primarily for men, because Mr. Andrew Herriard was a gallant knight in the service of the weaker sex.
It didn’t matter to the solicitor that the law was squarely on the side of male prerogative, and that a woman, to all intents and purposes, had no rights under that law and nothing she could call her own, including her offspring.
