“Come in and close the door,” Race told him.
Prattle obeyed and shuffled toward the table. The man wasn’t very tall, but he was round as a barrel and looked solid as a rock.
He stopped in front of Race, nervously twisting his hat in his hand. “My lord?” he said, with sweat beading on his upper lip and shining on the top of his balding head.
“There’s no reason to be nervous, Prattle. I only want to talk to you. Sit down.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Race poured him a glass of the dark red wine and slid it toward him. The man looked at the glass as if it might contain poison, so Race picked up his glass and took a sip before saying, “I’m hearing about Town that you don’t really want to fight Sir Randolph. Any truth to that?”
Prattle placed his hat on the table and picked up the glass and took a long drink, downing more than half of what Race had put in the glass. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then said, “I’m not a fighting man.”
But he obviously was a drinking man. Race looked at the man’s large shoulders and barrel chest and found it odd that such a stout man didn’t have the stomach for fighting. But maybe that was a good thing. With his build, if Prattle knew how to fight, Race wasn’t sure there’d be a man who could beat him.
Race kept all that to himself and simply said, “Neither is Sir Randolph a fighter. Yet you challenged him to a duel and he accepted.”
“I-I know now that I shouldn’t have done that. I’d had a bit of ale the night before and I was jug-bitten when I talked to Penelope that morning. I didn’t really want to harm anyone.”
“I wish you had thought of that before you made your pronouncement in the park with more than thirty witnesses.”
Prattle’s round eyes twitched, and his heavy cheeks trembled. “I-I don’t know what happened. Some kind of madness overtook me and I wasn’t thinking clearly. We went to see Sir Randolph later and apologized. We asked him not to—”
“Wait a minute,” Race said, leaning over the table. “Are you telling me that you and your sister went to see Sir Randolph?”
“Yes, of course. Penelope apologized and told him she was sorry for what she told me and hadn’t meant to cause so much trouble when she asked him to kiss her. She knew him to be a gentleman and was hoping if she accused him of compromising her, he might simply agree to marry her.”
“Didn’t she realize what she was doing to Sir Randolph’s honor and her own reputation by accusing him of something that wasn’t true?”
“Not at the time. She was dreadfully sorry, my lord. She thought if she accused him of wrongdoing, he might agree to marry her to keep scandal away from his good name. She told him she had always fancied him. She asked him what she could do to make it up to him.”
Race was going to strangle Gibby. That devilish whipster should have told him about this. “What did Sir Randolph say?”
“He said the only thing we could do was go on with the fight. That I’d already ruined my sister by challenging him in the park, and if we didn’t fight our reputations would be ruined too.”
Gibby was probably right about that. The entire city was in a heated fervor over the fight. Race picked up his glass and sipped his wine.
“How is your sister now?”
The man breathed deeply. He had such a sad look on his face. “She won’t come out of the house. She knows this is her fault, and she says she’s never going out in public again.”
“There’s enough blame for both of you to carry, but there might be something I can do.”
“I know I don’t deserve a portion, but if there’s anything you can do to stop the fight, I’d be obliged.”
“I’m talking about helping your sister, Prattle, not you. Unfortunately, at this point, I agree with Gibby. The fight must go on. The men who have put down their wagers deserve their fight. If you didn’t show for the mob that will gather in the park, they would probably come and find you both and make you fight. And quite frankly, you both would deserve it. However, your sister started this by her error in judgment.”
The man cast his eyes downward.
“This is what I’m prepared to do. You and Gibby will fight, and you will make it a good fight. You must hit him because he will hit you. But after a reasonable amount of time, let him knock you to the ground and stay down. And if you do that, I will see to it that your sister gets enough money to move to a new place where she can start her life over, away from this scandal. Whether or not she wants you to go with her, I’ll leave to her.”
Prattle’s eyelids shot up and his eyes bulged. “You would do that for us?”
“For her, Prattle, not you. Also I insist that neither of you speak of this incident again.”
The man picked up his wine glass and took another long drink. He wiped his mouth with the back of his beefy hand.
“I’m glad she confessed to Sir Randolph. That was the right thing for her to do, and that is why I’m willing to do this for her. Now, do we have an agreement?”
