The Courtesan

Belle must have paled, for the doctor patted her hand. “Don’t distress yourself, my dear. Your husband appears to be a strong fellow, and from the looks of that scar on his shoulder, has weathered worse. Send a servant to fetch me in Curzon Street and I’ll check him again this afternoon.”

Belle opened her mouth to deny the relationship, then closed it. There seemed no reason to correct the doctor’s misapprehension and make this incident more embarrassing for the captain than it was already bound to be.

“Thank you very much, Doctor,” she said instead.

Hauling himself to his feet, Thompson laughed and shook his head. “Pricked in a fencing match! You’d think he would have gotten his fill of that in Belgium. Doubtless he’ll soon recover and go haring off on some other fool stunt, causing you to doubt your joy at his deliverance. I shall see you this afternoon, ma’am.”

With Ludlowe and Darnley echoing Belle’s thanks, the doctor departed. “Signore Armaldi, have you anything that can be fashioned into a litter?” Belle asked.

“Sì, mia Bella, I go prepare it,” the fencing master said. Gathering his assistant, he walked out, leaving Belle alone with the injured captain and his friends.

“Where should he be conveyed?” she asked them.

Darnley and Ludlowe exchanged glances. “I’m afraid that’s a bit of a problem, ma’am,” Darnley replied. “Jack just arrived back in England and is staying in borrowed rooms. His family is still at their country home, and at present, he hasn’t even a valet to attend him.”

“I suppose my valet could undertake Jack’s care,” Ludlowe said, “though he has no experience in a sickroom.”

“I’ve nothing better to offer,” Darnley said with a frown. “My mother would gladly take up the task, but she, too, is not yet in London. I suppose we could ask the physician to recommend a competent nurse, but…”

Both men stared at her. A panicky foreboding added to the mix of fear, regret and worry churning in her gut.

Though she would be more than willing to pay for the services of a competent nurse, it would be unconscionable to send the captain back with only a hired stranger to watch over him. ’Twould be best for his own family to supervise his care. But in the absence of his relations, his friends clearly expected her to volunteer for the task.

“I…I have some sickroom experience,” she admitted. “However, I am sure that his family, who will be most distressed to learn of his injuries, would be even more upset to find he was being tended by one of my…reputation.”

“They’d be more upset to find he’d died from lack of care,” Darnley said bluntly.

It isn’t fair, she thought despairingly, torn by guilt and anxiety. Not now, when she could at last begin searching for something that might lay to rest the torments of the past and offer her peace—or absolution. She’d rather introduce a viper into her house than invite the disturbing captain to reside within her walls.

At present, though, his ability to disturb her would be limited. Besides, she could not escape the fact that, having been the cause of his injury, she must do whatever she could to assist in his recovery. Though she dreaded what she must say next, she knew there was no alternative.

“Transport him to my house. I shall manage the captain’s care until the doctor declares him well enough to be moved to a more…suitable location.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Darnley said quietly. “I know how great an imposition this will be, and if there were any other practical alternative, I should embrace it. You will be doing Captain Carrington a very great kindness.”

“I sincerely doubt, when they hear of it, that the ladies of his family will agree,” Belle replied grimly.

To her surprise, Darnley smiled. “His mother, Lady Anne, is a fair and reasonable lady who will feel only appreciation for the kind woman who assisted her son.”

Even the infamous Lady Belle? Belle shook her head. “Let us hope the captain’s sojourn in my care will be brief enough to escape general notice.”

Darnley made no reply, but Belle knew, as his friends must also, that such a hope was vain. The titillating news that Lady Belle had wounded a soldier in a fencing match would by midday have become the ton’s latest on-dit. The information concerning that soldier’s current location probably wouldn’t remain secret much longer.

Captain Carrington would just have to deal with the problem later, Belle thought with a sigh. One could only hope that his mother had the strength of mind Lord Darnley claimed—and that he didn’t have a fiancée waiting somewhere with a tendency to be missish.

Grimacing at the sticky residue of blood on her hands, Belle wiped them on her ruined trousers. “Gentlemen, with your leave, I will go make myself presentable. Ask Armaldi’s staff to have my coach made ready. I’ll return shortly to help you transport Captain Carrington. Thank you again for your prompt assistance.”

Darnley and Ludlowe bowed. “Jack is one of my oldest friends. I would do anything for him,” Darnley affirmed.

Including never forgiving someone who’d done him an injury, Belle thought as she walked out.

Pensively Belle paced back to the small room Armaldi allotted her as a dressing chamber, thankful that an errand had prevented Mae from accompanying her this morning. As she rang for a maid to assist her, another sigh escaped as she considered what her excitable companion would have to say once she learned of this morning’s work.

A few moments later, suitably dressed and outwardly composed, Belle returned to help Armaldi and the captain’s friends carefully convey his still-unconscious body into Belle’s waiting carriage. Settling herself beside him, she ordered the coachman to drive them slowly home.

Though she tried to close her mind to the possible consequences of having the captain under her roof, as she gazed at Carrington’s pale expressionless face, Belle knew the queasiness in her gut was only partly due to the shock of the morning’s events and the stench of blood lingering in her nostrils.

CHAPTER SEVEN

AWAKING GROGGILY to the sensation of his chest aflame, as he struggled to consciousness Jack tried to summon the words to rebuke whichever trooper had been clumsy enough to knock a flaming brand out of the campfire and nearly incinerate his officer.

As he instinctively turned from the heat, a blast of pain engulfed him, so searing that it drove every vestige of sleepiness from his head. His eyes flew open, the half-formed words tumbling out in an unintelligible gasp.

“Awake at last!” said a cool, soft voice. “I was beginning to fear you would never come back to yourself.”

Narrowing his focus against the agony radiating downward from his shoulder, Jack halted his gaze at a candlelit face haloed against the room’s darkness. A face of such perfect, classical beauty he was momentarily distracted from his pain. Then memory flooded back.

Lady Belle. His challenge. The protector on her blade coming loose.

Lady Belle trying to kill him.

As he gritted his teeth and cautiously shifted to see her better, he noted that she had very nearly succeeded.

“You must be thirsty. At least, the doctor said you would be when you finally reached consciousness.”

He was thirsty, he discovered. His tongue seeming too thick for speech, he nodded. As Belle put a glass to his lips, he leaned forward and drank greedily, ignoring the immediate protest from his shoulder. Before he’d barely slaked his thirst, dizziness assailed him and he sagged back against his pillows, his eyes fluttering shut.

Damn and blast, he thought in disgust. He had about as much strength as a newborn kitten.

“Dr. Thompson said I could give you laudanum for pain, once you were fully conscious. You…are conscious?”

He opened his eyes, as much to prove it to himself as to reassure her. “Yes.”

Picking up a spoon and a small brown bottle from a tray beside the bed, she asked, “Do you want—?”

“No,” he said, recalling the nightmarish narcotic-induced sleep he’d endured after being wounded at Corunna. “Pain is…tolerable. Don’t like being cloth-headed.”

“As you wish. The doctor also said you might have difficulty breathing, if the injury affected the lung.”

“Hard to tell,” he said with a grimace, “but I can breathe.” Inhaling deeply enough to utter more than a few words at a time, however, was a different matter.

“Praise heaven!” She opened her mouth as if to say something else, then hesitated.

Jack might be in a sorry state, but he wasn’t half-dead enough not to feel a spark of masculine response as she ran the tip of her tongue over those plump lips. “Do you remember…how you became injured?” she said at last.

Why she had tried to kill him? he asked himself. A disturbing vision of her lovely face contorted with hate flickered through his mind and he inhaled sharply, then gasped as another surge of pain seared his chest.

He struggled to regain his concentration. If he could induce her to describe what had happened, maybe he could find out what had prompted her violent response.