Finally he splashed cold water on his face. He managed to dress himself only after his man, Cooper, asked twice, and after he realized that he was foolishly thinking that her brothers-in-law wouldn’t attack an unclothed man.

By ten in the morning he had walked a circle in his study a hundred times. Of course she would tell them. She would leap at the chance to marry the eldest son of a squire. Damn, damn, damn.

She did have a dowry, he kept telling himself. And her breasts weren’t so bad. In fact, a woman in the dark is the same as any other woman. He could—

He couldn’t! He wanted to howl at it. The idea that he—one of Darlington’s friends, his intimates—marrying a woman called the Scottish Sausage made his gorge rise.

It was almost a relief when Cooper appeared and announced a visitor. “Tell them to come in!” he snapped.

Cooper blinked. “It isn’t more than one. It’s a man called Harry Grone.”

Not a gentleman. Not a brother-in-law. Thurman nodded. Could he be some sort of intermissionary, a lawyer, perhaps?

He positioned himself in front of the fire, legs well apart. “What do you want, then?” he barked, the moment the door closed behind Cooper. He had to be aggressive and manly. He had decided to deny everything. It was worth a try.

But this was no lawyer to an earl. In fact…

“I’ve come to ask a small favor,” the man said. He was a dried-up old prune of a thing who looked as if he had few teeth and less wits. Thurman couldn’t stand old people. They smelled and pissed in their trousers.

“The answer is no.”

“I’m prepared to pay magnificently for your generosity,” the man said. He drew out a bag of sovereigns.

Thurman could feel his heart slowing back to normal. His father kept him well-stocked with everything a young heir-about-town needed. “Get out of my house,” he snarled.

“And all I wanted was a bit of information from your family’s printing house. Just a wee bit of information. Wouldn’t take the young master more than a moment to find it out.”

The idiot didn’t think that he, Thurman, actually entered the premises of the printing press, did he?

“’Tis a powerfully expensive life,” the man crooned. “Perhaps you might use this small gift to pay a gambling debt…or a tailor’s bill?”

“I don’t gamble.” He started walking toward Grone. It would feel absolutely right to take this bounder apart, limb from limb. Grone was questioning his honor. He deserved to be beaten.

The man jumped back faster than Thurman could imagine a bald-pate could move. “I’ll leave my card,” he squeaked, throwing something on the table. “The offer is good, sir.” And he was gone before Thurman could grab him.

Thurman satisfied himself with picking up the entire table with the card on it and throwing it against the wall. It flew to pieces with a great splintering of wood. Bloody Hepplewhite furniture was made of toothpicks.

33

From The Earl of Hellgate,

Chapter the Twenty-third

She came to me on a Monday, and she died on Friday, in a most lamentable series of events. I like to think that she flew from my arms into God’s bosom, although in a less poetic vein, she ate a bad piece of eel pie and died soon after.

T hey were sitting around a scrubbed white table in Darlington’s little kitchen. “Have you ever eaten in a kitchen before?” he asked, handing her an apple he’d polished.

“Never.” Griselda was perched on a kitchen stool, hugging a bowl of cocoa.“I have a kitchen maid and a cook,” he explained, “but they live in their own houses.”

“I am rather confused,” Griselda observed. “You are not a penniless man.”

“Luckily, no.” Darlington was cutting perfect squares of cheese, and handing them to her to eat with the apple.

“You know perfectly well what I mean,” Griselda said. “Does your father make you an allowance? It must be very generous.”

“Nosy, aren’t you?”

She grinned at him, feeling her hair down her back and the pure deliciousness of knowing that there were only the two of them in the whole house. She’d never been alone in a house in her life. She and Willoughby lived in a house populated by at least fifteen other souls at any given time. But this house was quiet. The only thing that could be heard was the distant rumble of a carriage passing now and then. “In my house,” she said, “one can always hear the sound of someone walking down the corridor, or building up a fire, or washing dishes.”

“I like to live alone.” He handed her another piece of cheese, balanced on an apple. “There are servants’ quarters in this house, small though it is, but I still send everyone home.”

“Why do you have so many books?”

“I enjoy them,” he said, putting the knife away. “What do you read for pleasure? Have you read Canto IV of Byron’s Canto Harold? It was just published.”

“At the moment I am absolutely absorbed by Hellgate’s Memoirs, as I told you the other day. I think I’ve figured out every single one of his amours. I know without question, for example, who Hermia is, and no one else seems to have figured that out.”

“You do?”

“Hellgate says that Hermia is a duchess; he met her at court, and she made love to him in a broom closet. Well!” Griselda leaned closer. “I myself spied the Duchess of Gigsblythe emerging from just such a broom closet a year or two ago. I was in St. James’s Palace, on my way to the Chapel Royal. You know that monstrous long passage that leads from the Office of the Treasury? She sneaked out of the closet ahead of me!”

“How on earth did you know it was a closet?” Darlington said, looking amused and not at all dazzled at the wonderful piece of gossip she had just handed him.

“I opened the door and checked, of course!”

“My goodness, how enterprising of you. What if her amour had been still there, perhaps wearing only his smalls—or not even that?”

“There was nothing but a small room with a few buckets and the like. You could stop cutting cheese and apple if you wish; I am no longer hungry.”

Darlington looked almost surprised as he looked at the plate full of wafer-thin cheese and apple slices before him. He pushed it slightly to the side. “But Griselda, what would you have done had you surprised one of the Royal Dukes straightening his stockings?”

She giggled. “The truth is that it hadn’t even occurred to me that the room was used for such encounters…not until I read Hellgate’s memoirs. Then of course I knew who he was talking about. She must use the room on a regular basis. I would never have thought it of her.”

“Fibster,” Darlington said. “There’s not a person in the ton who wouldn’t have imagined Gigsblythe using such a room if it struck her fancy.”

Griselda laughed.

“The more interesting point is how do you know that she ever met Hellgate in that room? There may be many who know of that convenient closet.”

“Did you?” Griselda demanded.

“I did,” he said. “And yet I have an unblemished history that is quite the opposite of Hellgate’s. I do believe that useful little closet, and one or two others like it, are known to most of the ton. You, my dear”—he reached out and tapped her nose—“are a virtuous woman. There are few of you.”