“The color you wore last night was about thecolor of the stain left behind. A pale rose. Your dress was quite ruined. We cut it up into rags and St. John wrapped it around his shin and pretended to be a bloodstained, wounded pirate.” Giles laughed.
Lillias didn’t. She was at once abruptly silent.
She didn’t look at him.
But Hugh knew she was thinking about that scar on his torso, and gunshot wounds, and the loss of his family members. And how he’d been alone in a hospital and imagined Amelia Woodley in order to have something to live for.
She looked up into his face, swiftly. Then away to Giles, who had never done anything so unseemly as kill or nearly be killed.
“It doesn’t pay to justwounda pirate,” Hugh said finally. “If you don’t kill one outright, you’re as good as dead. A bit the way you would an attacking puma. It’s best to aimrightfor the heart. Or maybe throat.”
This resulted in uniformly dumbstruck silence. Not one person knew how to respond to this unprecedented bit of information.
But it did put Giles in the untenable position of needing to ask Hugh how he knew how to kill pirates, which was both a gauche thing to mention and an inarguably, hopelessly manly thing to do.
“Mr. Cassidy knows a lot of very specific things,” Lillias said. Her tone was indecipherable. She glanced at Giles worriedly, which Hugh found both touching and a trifle infuriating.
Giles refrained from taking up the topic and elected to brood a little.
“Everywhere I look there’s a memory,” Lillias said, absently. “That tree . . . the one with the knots on it that look like an old man’s face?”
“We were there the day our new hound puppy Poppin jumped up and put muddy paws all over your dress?”
“A bear once nearly killed Hugh and his hound,” Lillias said idly.
“The hound survived,” Hugh said comfortably.
Giles, perhaps understandably, went completely silent.
“Things are often trying to kill you, Mr. Cassidy. I do wonder why,” he said, finally.
This made Hugh smile slowly.
“My dear Mr. Cassidy, you must be relieved to be on English shores now and far away from so many terrible dangers.” This came from behind them. Lady Bankham had promoted him to her “dear,” which he supposed was flattering.
“Well, the primary danger to Americans in recent years has been the English,” Hugh said, but with a mischievous sidelong glance at Lillias.
It was a statement that could be taken a number of ways, and was calculated to make all of the aristocrats both charmed and uneasy, and it succeeded.
They emerged from the hedge maze onto a vast swath of green surrounded by a low stone wall.
The groundskeeper, a patient-looking man with a mop of wiry gray hair and a face grooved in interesting lines, was waiting for them.
“Ah, look, the targets are set up for shooting.” Giles sounded relieved. He was confident in his prowess.
“We’ll just be over here covering our ears, dear,” said the Countess of Bankham, speaking on behalf of all of the parents. “Do hurry, as the cheese will sweat if we don’t eat it soon.”
The groundskeeper had brought out a pair of fine Baker rifles, along with powder and cartridges. Gleaming on the low stone wall were two apples. He’d come equipped with a few others, should there be a call for it.
Hugh inspected the rifle he’d been handed.
It was inhale/exhale, to Hugh. Loading and shooting. Instinct. His hands were a deft, deadly blur of cartridge and powder. A half second of lining the apple up in his sights.
Then aiming.
And he fired.
The apple exploded.
