Chapter 13
Later in the day
Oxford had scored a victory over Cambridge during the annual cricket match this evening, hence the Turf Tavern was hot and crammed with obnoxiously exuberant patrons. Tristan used his size to plow a path through the crowd toward the bar, already of a mind to leave. The Turf was damp and reeked of centuries of spilled beer and piss on a regular night. Then again, this was every tavern in Oxford.
His Lagavulin arrived in a sticky tumbler. Braying laughter shook the rafters. There must have been a time when he had enjoyed himself immersed in the noise and excitement of revelers, but tonight, it was simply loud and felt hollow. As though they were all a little lost and tried to cast an anchor in the fray by way of their own booming voice.
Somewhere in the shadows at the back of the room, Lord Arthur Seymour, second son to the Marquess of Doncaster, was lurking and watching him in a sulk, all while pretending to have a jolly good time with his friends. He had noticed the boy’s mop of curly blond hair on his way in. Ah well. Unrequited lust compelled people to do all sorts of ridiculous things.
He would know.
His whiskey glass came down hard on the counter.
Lucie was lying low, the little coward. She had not been in the London offices today, nor had she sought him out this evening, if only to berate him some more. Lust must have compelled his mind to circle around her today . . .
“By God, you are beautiful.”
A young man his age had been crowded against his left shoulder. Tall, but not as tall as him. Well-drawn lips. Overlong dark hair curled around his collar. His blue gaze was intent on Tristan’s face, tracing his features with the singular concentration of an artist.
Tristan leaned in close to keep his voice low. “And a good evening to you, sir.”
“Such a face should be eternalized in oil and marble, so that future generations may behold it and weep over the glory of the bygone days,” said the man.
Tristan gave his near-empty glass a little spin. “There’s weeping already, I hear, though it is caused by my lack of character rather than my face.”
The chap threw back his head and laughed. “Don’t be modest. Your beauty causes the tears—the carelessness of a plain fellow is rather forgettable.” He offered his hand. “My name is Oscar Wilde.”
“I know who you are, Mr. Wilde. You won the Newdigate Prize for your ‘Ravenna’ poem two years ago.”
The playwright inclined his head. “Why, I’m flattered. You enjoy poetry?”
“On occasion.”
“You write yourself? Lord Ballentine, is it?”
“Yes, and yes.”
Oscar Wilde was delighted. “A fellow scribe! I shall pay for your next drink. Brandy.” He shouted for the barkeeper and fished for coin on the inside of his coat—a remarkably sharply tailored, midnight blue coat, with velvet lapels and silver buttons depicting peacocks. Tristan would quite like to have it for himself.
He slid his hand over the velvet, over Oscar’s hand beneath the fabric, halting the futile scrabble for money with a light press of his fingers.
Wilde’s gaze jerked toward him, surprise flashing in his blue eyes. Tristan watched it heat to intrigue at a startling speed. He had already dropped his hand again. Playwrights. The one species with even less regard for convention than he.
“Allow me.” He procured a shilling from his own pocket and flipped it at the bartender. “Brandy for my friend, more of the same for me.”
Wilde was still contemplating him with a half-lidded gaze. “Just what are you doing in this student-infested pub when you could have the best of London at your feet?” he murmured. “Or better yet, Italy.”
The corner of his mouth twitched.
And he realized what he was doing—seducing people for the sake of it, as Lucie had called it. Shouted it. Damn, but he was doing exactly that.
The smile faded from his lips.
“London gets old. Variety’s the very spice of life that gives it all its flavor,” he cited, because using someone else’s words could convey a lot without saying much at all.
A second or two ticked past until Wilde gave a wry little nod. “You like Cowper, then?” he asked in a neutral tone, and slid the freshly filled tumbler across the counter toward Tristan.
His nape prickled with awareness as he closed his fingers around the glass.
He looked up and met Lord Arthur’s wounded stare from the other side of the bar. Arthur’s expression was as glum as though someone had just shot his puppy. Well. He would not invite impressionable young things along to an orgy again if this was the result. What a nuisance.
“Oh dear,” Wilde said, his gaze discreetly lingering on the lordling before he peered back up at Tristan. “What an unhappy fellow. A matter of romance?” He chuckled. “But of course not. It’s a matter of sex, isn’t it.”
Tristan clinked his glass to his. “It’s always about sex.”
“Everything in the world is about sex,” Wilde agreed. “Except sex.”
“Then what is the sex about?”
The playwright smiled. “Power. But you know that already, don’t you, my lord.”
When he left the Turf three, maybe five, drinks later, he was not exactly staggering, but his head felt heavy. At least Oscar Wilde was in worse shape; by the end of his last brandy, he had made slurred promises to write Tristan into his first novel, one about the perils of eternal beauty; and the story would be gothic and dark.
How about the twisted tale of an earl intent on sending his own wife to an asylum, Mr. Playwright, gothic and dark enough?
The weather had turned; a fine spray of summer rain dampened the air and smudged rainbows around the gaslights lining Holywell Street. There was a halo fanning out from the pale blond crown of a woman hasting past.
A petite, very much unchaperoned woman.
He halted and squinted.
A rush of cold spread through his chest. Lucie. He would recognize her determined stride anywhere. And only she would be flitting about the town alone at night. She was weaving her way around a flock of students, already shrinking into the distance.
His body was in motion before his head had decided to follow her.
She was out alone when the night was crawling with drunken men, each one of them feeling masterful after a sports event. Foolish, reckless woman. When he got his hands on her—someone grabbed his arm, breaking his stride.
“Ballentine. A word.”
He reacted on instinct, twisted sideways, gripped the attacker, and yanked him close.
Grand. Lord Arthur Seymour was staring back at him, wide-eyed, his hands clutching at the hand that had locked around his throat.
“Never approach me from a dead angle, you fool.” He released his lordship with a shove. His pulse was thrumming fast, the blur of liquor gone. The night had edges again, wet black streets, glaring gaslights.
Lucie, he noted, had just reached the road junction at the end of the row of sandstone buildings. There was a silvery flash of hair as she turned off the main street into Mansfield Road. . . . Incredibly, Lord Arthur lurched back into his path. “Hear me out,” he slurred, unleashing a wave of offending whiskey fumes. Where were his friends to save him from himself?
“You’re drunk,” Tristan said. “Go home.”
At her brisk pace, Lucie would soon reach the eastern edge of the park. Was she contemplating crossing the park?
Arthur latched onto his arm. “Let us meet, just once.”
Tristan’s muscles tensed. Holywell Road was always lively even when it was not a sports night, as the narrow street connected two large pubs and was home to a number of small concert houses. Revelers were passing them on the pavement, and there was a steady supply of patrons tumbling from the closing taverns on the other side of the road.
“I saw you with Mr. Wilde.” Arthur was loud and belligerent. “You drink with him, but not with me—”
He hooked his arm through Arthur’s, pulled him hard into the side of his body and half dragged him along. Now they were just two fellows in their cups, propping each other up.
“Have a care,” he said, his voice low. “Do not approach others in this way, it might get you into proper trouble.”
Arthur’s free hand clutched Tristan’s coat lapel. “I am already in trouble. My every thought revolves around you.”
Christ.
“We have spent no more than three times in each other’s company; we drank, we gambled, as gentlemen do, and once, you were in the same room as I while I fucked. That is where our acquaintance ends.”
Arthur twisted in his grip, hot with rage. “Don’t deceive me. You knew what I was and yet you took me along . . . and your eyes were on me that night, while you were—”
He yelped when Tristan’s arm tightened like a vise.
“Seymour. I may not consistently limit my preferences. It does not mean I have any particular interest in you.” And while he might have been looking at Arthur, it would have had nothing to do with the young lord, and everything with the dark mood to watch or be watched, which sometimes struck at random. Ironically, the abundant stimulations of great debauchery could send his mind sprawling as hopelessly as reading a dull treatise in old Latin. There was, of course, no point in explaining any of that to an infatuated whelp.
He pulled Arthur with him when he rounded the corner onto the road to University Park.
People were drifting past them, exuberant and chattering. Lucie’s small form was nowhere in sight.
“This is where we must part,” he said, and abruptly let the young lord go.
The wet cobblestones, or his stubborn efforts to hold on, made Arthur lose his balance, and down he went.
This was bad, Arthur on his knees before him, in the middle of Mansfield Road.
He stepped round him, and an arm lashed around his calf.
“Gad—why are you so keen to see us arrested?”
“You are a monster,” Arthur cried, still attached, “you have no care.”
A group of students moving past hollered and jeered.
“Your pardon,” Tristan said and gripped the white, clinging hands to bend back Arthur’s thumbs. A squawk of outrage, and he was free, his long strides eating up the dark street.
The gate to University Park was locked after nine o’clock, but there was a well-trodden path to a gap in the fence a few yards to the left, large enough to admit children or slight adults.
Lucie breathed easier the moment she had slipped through the iron bars. She had long resolved to walk alone wherever she went; it was most practical, and furthermore, the idea of a spinster guarding another spinster struck her as ridiculous. However, a woman who walked through Oxford alone should know the university’s schedule for sporting events. She had forgotten it was the day of the annual University Match, an understandable but still negligent lapse in attention after the bizarre encounter in the dress shop. Bands of student athletes and drinking societies roamed tonight, eager for brawls with townsfolk and each other. Shouting and fragments of lewd songs echoed from the street across the dark meadows of the park. The footpath to home, however, stretched before her blissfully empty and well-lit by a row of tall gaslights.
She walked rapidly. The misty rain had turned into a drizzle; cold rivulets ran from her cheeks down into her collar, and her skin rippled with goose bumps. She’d drink a hot cup of tea at home and go to bed; for once, her work would have to wait. Her mother was in Oxford. She’d add some brandy to her tea tonight.
She heard them first, raucous singing that made her ears prick with caution.
She slowed.
A group of men appeared on the footpath ahead.
Her shoulders tensed. It was five of them, some in pairs, arm-in-arm, weaving toward her. They must have set up camp in the park, drinking until night had fallen. Or perhaps, they had avoided the gates via the Cherwell, and their abandoned punt was now drifting downstream.
Wet steel glinted as they passed beneath a streetlamp. Foils. Her stomach gave a nervous lurch. Members of the fencing club? They frequently practiced in the park. They were also known to cause trouble around town.
Their bawdy singing ceased, and she knew they had spotted her. Bother. They had not stopped out of politeness. A woman alone in a park near midnight was not a lady, and the awareness crackled in the dark air between them. Their faces came into focus: leering mouths, eyes keen. Three sheets to the wind, each of them, and wealthy, judging by their top hats. The entitled ones were the worst.
Her heart was beating unpleasantly fast. In a moment, she’d have to walk right through them. There was no evading to the right—risky and humiliating, to leave the lit footpath and stagger over the lumpy grass of the meadow. The copse of trees to her left was a menacing black mass.
She squared her shoulders. They were young, just students.
As if on a silent command, the men fell in line next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, a wall of smirks and lewd anticipation.
Fear ran down her neck, cold like ice water. They were not going to let her pass.
Her right hand slid into her skirt pocket.
Too late, she noticed the man who had come up from behind.
Her body recognized him before she did, from the familiar warm scent of tobacco and spice, and it quelled the rush of alarm.
“There you are,” Tristan said lightly. “For someone so short, you are bloody fast.”
His hand slid around her waist and pulled her flush against his side. She let him sweep her along, dumbfounded, wrapped in the strength of his arm.
The rigid front the men had formed across the path dithered. Tristan moved toward them as if they were not there at all. And then he slowed. Intent coursed through his body in a dark current, and for a breath, panic flared. Was he not aware there were only two of them and five of the others? No, he became slower still, his heels grinding to a halt on gravel.
“Bloody hell,” someone said. “It’s Ballentine.”
Tristan stopped in front of the tallest one of the group, an inch too close as was polite. The stench of liquor breath and male sweat assaulted her senses. Her right hand was in her pocket, clutching cold metal, but she turned her face into Tristan’s coat and held her breath.
“Gentlemen,” he said. His voice was amicable. His voice lied. She was held snug against him, and through the layers of wool and cotton, she sensed something sinister crawling beneath his skin, something primal and keen. The feel of it raised all the fine hairs on her body.
The athletes had sensed it, too. They stood straighter, a little more sober.
“A fine evening for a stroll, isn’t it,” Tristan said, still friendly.
“Indeed,” drawled the young man with whom he was toe-to-toe. “Very fine.”
“Lovely and mild,” said Tristan.
“We should continue with it,” the ringleader remarked, “the strolling.”
“An excellent idea.”
Top hats dipped as nods were exchanged.
Still Tristan did not move. They had to walk around him, and therefore Lucie.
“Let me challenge him, and you grab the female,” someone slurred, a few paces on.
“He will make mincemeat out of you, idiot,” said another.
“I have a sword, he has a shtick.”
“There is a blade in the stick, fool.”
Their voices faded as the distance between them grew.
Her back was still tense, as hard as rock, half expecting an angrily hurled foil to hit between her shoulder blades. After a few paces, she glanced back.
The athletes swaggered onward in a disorderly heap, slapping each other’s backs. Someone laughed.
A shudder ran through her. They would have tried to make casual sport of her and moved on, looking like exuberant but respectable gentlemen. No one on the other side of the park gates who saw them walking down the street would have been any wiser.
Tristan’s arm around her tightened, and her cheek was pressed against the smooth fabric of his coat. The smell of damp wool mixed with his scent. Her shoulder easily fit under his, like a chick under a wing, protected from the elements and predatory eyes.
She felt anything but safe. The way he moved, on the cusp of a crouch, called to mind a predator’s prowl, and his silence was entirely too preoccupied. Just like there was apparently a blade hidden in his silly cane, there was a mean, well-honed cutting edge to him, concealed by his glibness and his crimson waistcoat.
She peered up at his face.
He was focused on the path ahead, a faint smile on his lips. A shudder ran down her arms. A Nero would smile this way, while turning down his thumb. He was a thousand shades of angry.
She strained against his hold, and he released her easily. The night was immediately colder without the shelter of his arm. She’d have welcomed any one of his annoying remarks now, but he remained silent as they walked side by side. He wordlessly stood back as she wriggled through another gap in the park fence and watched as he, somehow, vaulted the fence without becoming stuck on the wrought-iron spikes. He followed her like a formidable shadow down Norham Gardens, and she knew better than to try and send him away.
She would have to thank him.
Her lips were still trying to form the words when they arrived at the gate to her front garden. Still trying when she climbed the two steps to her door.
She slid the key into the lock and glanced back over her shoulder.
Tristan had remained standing at the bottom of the stairs. It put her slightly above him, an unfamiliar vantage point.
The rim of his hat cast most of his face in shadows, revealing only his mouth and the clean curve of his jaw. The usually alluring, soft lines of his lips were tense.
She turned to him fully and took a deep breath. It was just three simple words, was it not? Thank you, Ballentine.
Instead, she said, “Go on then, say it.”
His lips gave a humorless twitch. “Say what?”
“Are you not eager to lecture me on the perils of walking around alone at night?”
His head tilted speculatively to the side. “Would lecturing you keep you from doing it again?”
She blinked. “No,” she conceded.
He gave a shrug. “Then I would be wasting my time. There are more pleasant things upon which to waste time.”
He was still seething; she could tell from the silky coolness of his voice and the stiffness of his usually languid posture.
“It might make you feel less displeased,” she suggested.
He gave her a dark smile. “Oh, it would not be nearly enough for that.”
“I don’t make my excursions unarmed.”
He processed this with an unreadable expression. “A pocket pistol?”
She nodded.
His chin tipped up in appreciation, and then he held out his hand. “May I see it?”
She reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out the double derringer. It was dainty and ornate, made for a woman’s hand, but it was cold and impersonal to the touch.
Tristan turned it over in his palm with deliberate care, checking the lock and running his thumb over the shimmering pearl handle.
“Lovely,” he said, and handed it back. “But are you prepared to use it?”
The line of leering faces in the park flashed before her eyes. A primal aggression had swirled around the men, and the mere memory tightened her throat.
“I am,” she said.
Tristan was quiet.
“You disapprove,” she said, and wondered why this would give her second thoughts.
He shrugged. “It is a funny thing, shooting at a fellow man,” he said. “You go about it as the situation requires, but few people, if any, will tell you that a while later, you may turn morose at the oddest of times, and your nights may become haunted by peculiar dreams.”
“Haunted,” she echoed.
“Just try and avoid putting bullets through people unless you must.”
Rain dripped off the rim of his hat. He could not stand here indefinitely—he’d catch an ague; besides, he must not be seen at her door, as it would cause talk.
Why was he still standing there?
Because she had not thanked him yet, and of course he would want to hear her say the words. This was the man holding her suffrage coup hostage and blackmailing her in a most appalling fashion, after all.
“It’s a good thing then that you have no need for a pistol,” she said. “You can walk around on your own quite undisturbed. Your mere presence was enough to let us go on our way even though they vastly outnumbered you. Remarkable, isn’t it?”
“Vastly outnumbered?” He sounded surprised. “Hardly. And approaching a woman who is already claimed by another man goes against instinct; I expected no trouble.”
She leaned against the door frame. “I had no desire to be claimed,” she said quietly. “I was merely walking home on a public footpath.”
She felt him study her sodden form. She was too fatigued to pull herself together; her strength was rapidly draining from her legs into the damp bricks beneath her feet.
“You know,” he said casually. “I could still go and shoot them. On your behalf.”
A chill spread over her skin, which was not caused by the cold nor the rain. It was the dark thing she had sensed coursing through him in the park, simmering just beneath his attractive surface again.
“You just told me to aim wide,” she said.
“Oh, you should,” he said. “However, I have long missed the boat.”
He would have, she thought; he had been in the army for years.
Did he feel morose? Were his nights haunted?
Her knees were shaky. Her collar was drenched inside and out. She wanted to crawl beneath downy covers, already warmed by a bed heater, and demand a sugary drink, like the spoiled girl she had once been: an earl’s daughter with a vast bed at her disposal and kindly servants who brought hot chocolate at the ring of a bell.
The last thing she needed now was to let Ballentine see her unravel. He would take it and forge it into one more weapon for his armory, to be used against her on a better day, because this truce was an illusion. Midnight was near; he’d soon turn back into a scoundrel and she into a woman with a target on her back.
“Thank you, my lord,” she said. “For escorting me home.”
She turned and unlocked the door.
Boudicca’s accusing cat face greeted her. She had sat right behind the door like a furry little sphinx, overhearing every word and not liking it. She was wary of men.
Lucie removed her damp glove and bent to run her hand over Boudicca’s soft black back.
To her surprise, the cat strode past her, her green eyes fixating on Ballentine.
He hadn’t moved from where she’d left him, a sentinel in a top hat at her doorstep.
“Good evening,” he said politely, surprisingly, to the cat.
Incredibly, Boudicca slunk down two rainy steps to investigate. If there was anything her cat disliked more than men, it was getting her delicate black paws wet.
She watched with narrowed eyes as Boudicca made a figure of eight around Tristan’s legs. He bent and scratched beneath Boudicca’s chin with two fingers, just the way she liked it. “That’s a dear girl,” he crooned.
“How do you know she is a she?” Lucie asked indignantly.
He looked up. “Because she took one glance at me and was enamored?”
There was the Tristan she knew, smug and alive behind his eyes.
What he said was true, as well. Boudicca was rubbing her head on his trouser leg, shamelessly demanding another stroke.
Traitress.
She whistled. “Come inside, Boudicca.”
Tristan straightened.
It still took two more progressively insistent whistles until her feline ladyship obliged and came back up the stairs.
Tristan stood waiting until she closed the door in his face.
Her arm full of damp cat, she peered out the reception room window from behind the curtain and caught a glimpse of Tristan vanishing into the night. For the first time since the encounter, she wondered what had brought him to the park at that hour of the night.
She had not slowed down. The thought kept circling with the grim persistence of a vulture as Tristan strode through the rain. Round and round the image went, of Lucie’s narrow shoulders pulling back as she marched toward five men.
His feet took the turn onto Broad Street on their own volition, driven by a cold emotion which had to be rage. Was she unaware how easily she could be harmed? Was she suffering illusions about her size and strength? She does know. She carried a pistol in her skirts. He was the fool, having for inexplicable reasons deemed her unbreakable.
His pulse was still high by the time he strolled into the ivy-covered porter’s lodge of Trinity College and infused his gait with an inebriated sway.
A porter manned the desk, looking as uncircumventable as his position demanded: stout, and with a decidedly resolute face beneath the hat of his uniform.
Tristan placed his signet ring onto the counter.
“This must be delivered to Mr. Wyndham posthaste,” he announced. “Room number twelve, in the west wing.”
The porter squinted at him, then the ring, and back at him, his watery eyes assessing.
It was past the curfew, and thus the gates to the Oxford colleges were locked and blocked by porters who had become quite inured to lordly behavior after years of managing student antics, and as such were a rather formidable match for a would-be intruder. Any students returning at this hour required a special permission to enter; any visitors would find themselves out in the cold unless they, too, had a written permission. Or, unless they remembered from their own student days where to climb the wall surrounding Trinity gardens from the Parks Road side.
“I would place it in his pigeonhole,” Tristan said, leaning in close and speaking too loudly. “But as you may have guessed, since you have the look of a clever chap about you, this”—he gestured a vague circle around the ring—“has some sentimental value attached to it.”
The porter’s expression became very stolid. “Indeed, my lord.”
“Excellent,” said Tristan, his eyebrow arching expectantly.
“If his lordship returned tomorrow, during the daytime, Mr. Wyndham would be available, here in the lodge, for a safe delivery of the valuable.”
He shook his head. “This is a matter between gentlemen which must be brought to conclusion tonight.” His voice had lowered to a dramatic murmur. “So if you were so kind as to deliver it to room number twelve, in the west wing, right now, I should be much obliged.”
“The hour is late, my lord.”
“Much obliged,” Tristan repeated.
The porter clearly wished to boot him out of the lodge posthaste, but much as Tristan had expected, he decided to bow to rank on a matter as inconsequential as a room delivery rather than rile an already troublesome and intoxicated nobleman.
“Very well,” the man said. “Is the ring destined for room number twelve in the west wing, then, or for Mr. Wyndham?”
“Good man, you speak in riddles. I’m not in the mood for riddles.”
“No riddles—Mr. Wyndham is not in room number twelve in the west wing.”
Tristan tilted his head. “You are jesting, then.”
“I don’t jest, my lord.”
“Oh good, for I’m not in the mood for jests, either.”
He really was not, in fact. He wanted to get his hands on Mr. Wyndham.
The porter’s lips set in a line. “You have either the room correct, or the recipient—which one shall it be?”
“Who delivers things to rooms?” Tristan wondered. “What would a room do with my ring? Of course it must go to Mr. Wyndham.”
“Very well,” said the porter, at this point, quite possibly, thinking the French had had the right idea to cull the titled classes. “I shall deliver the ring to Mr. Wyndham.”
“To room number twelve,” Tristan said brightly.
“No, because he does not reside there.”
“And yet I have it on good account that he does,” Tristan said. “It saddens me to say so, but I am losing faith in a safe delivery at your hands.” His eyes narrowed. “Is it a trick, perhaps? Assuring me the ring will be brought to Mr. Wyndham, but because of an unfortunate confusion over the room number, it never arrives at all? Ends up in the wrong hands altogether, perhaps?”
The insinuation that the man was presently planning to steal his signet ring had the porter draw himself up to his full height and straighten his hat. “Tricks!” he snarled. He turned to pick up the sacred leather-bound ledger from the porter’s desk, to which it was attached with a chain, placed it onto the counter, rapidly flicked through the pages, then spun the ledger round and thrust it toward Tristan, his blunt fingertip tapping on a line.
Mr. Thomas Wyndham resided in room number nine in the east wing.
“I see,” he said softly. “A misunderstanding, then. No, no.” He placed his hand over the ring before the porter could pick it up. “Perhaps the matter is not quite as pressing. I shall take my leave.”
The climb over the slippery garden wall to reenter the Trinity grounds was satisfyingly compensated by the look of horror on Wyndham’s long face when he found himself facing Tristan on the doorstep to room number nine. He was in his shirtsleeves, probably in the process of readying himself for bed.
“What is this?” he said sharply, when Tristan used the moment of surprise to push past him into the room. Without the company of his fellow fencers, he did not quite display the measure of bravado as earlier in the park, when Tristan and he had stood toe-to-toe the first time.
“Wyndham,” Tristan said, and closed the door. “I have a proposition for you.”
“The hell,” said the man whose name was Wyndham. “We have never been introduced!”
“Indeed, we have not,” Tristan said. “But your scarf is rather chatty.” He nodded at it, the scarf, dangling from the clothing rack next to the wardrobe, having fulfilled its function for today’s sporting event. And when the young man looked from him to the scarf with a painful lack of comprehension, he added, almost gently: “Your college colors. And it happens to have the Wyndham coat of arms stitched onto it rather prominently, too.”
Wyndham’s dark eyes narrowed, but his throat moved nervously. “What—what do you want? We parted ways in the park; no offenses were taken.”
Lucie’s tired face flashed before his eyes. He had never seen the little shrew in such a sorry state as when she had leaned against her entrance door, damp and somewhat crumpled. Something about the idea of her being laid low by a band of cowardly dimwits grated on the aesthete in him, and it made him irrationally bloodthirsty.
“I was wondering, old boy,” he said to Wyndham, “how highly you prize your sword hand.”