‘James!’
‘That w
ill teach him to try and poach my mistress,’ Luc said, his voice echoing round the suddenly quietened street. He took my arm and pulled me, kicking and struggling, away from his brother. ‘Come, madam.’
Chapter Twenty
There was a carriage with a driver on the box waiting just around the corner. I hardly spared it a glance as a footman opened the door and Luc bundled me into it.
‘You hit him,’ I raged as he slammed the door. ‘You left him there with Reece and a mob.’
The door opened again before he could reply. James was heaved into the carriage by Garrick who followed him in and laid him flat on the seat opposite us.
‘Bloody hell, Luc,’ James mumbled. ‘Did you have to hit me quite so hard?’
‘Yes.’ Luc went down on his knees between the seats as the coach lurched into motion. He took out a handkerchief and began to dab gently at the blood on James’s face. ‘Did I break anything, Jas?’
‘No.’ James sat up, took the handkerchief and held it to the corner of his mouth as Garrick turned up the wick on the little carriage lamp and pulled down the blinds. ‘Damn, that hurts.’
‘What did you hit him for?’ I prodded Luc hard in the shoulder. ‘You can’t think – ’
‘Of course not.’ He touched his brother’s hand then got off his knees and sat down. ‘But a large number of people saw me punch my brother for taking my mistress to an accommodation house.’
‘And a magistrate and a number of constables saw him making love to me on the stairs,’ I said. ‘Sorry, I’m being very slow. I should have realised what you were doing.’ A snort of slightly hysterical amusement escaped me. ‘Elliott Reece has gone to a great deal of trouble to establish James’s reputation as a lover of women.’
‘Thank you, Cassie,’ James said. ‘And you Luc, Garrick. I might have been playing chess, or in the refreshment room, but Reece was going to compromise me somehow. This was about the only thing that could have saved me.’ He smiled, after a fashion. It was lopsided because of his brother’s punch but that was not what was putting the darkness in his gaze. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To Albany to get you cleaned up before Mama sets eyes on you. I didn’t tell her why I had to leave in such a hurry, so she won’t be worrying.’
‘Stop fussing round him, I’ll do this,’ I said. Garrick had taken James’s filthy coat and stripped off his shirt. Now he was sitting in Luc’s bedchamber wearing one of his shirts and looking as though someone had hit him over the head as well as punched him in the face.
‘Garrick’s heating water, you leave him to me.’ I pushed Luc out of the door, closed it and turned back to James. ‘What’s wrong? Oher than the fact that your face hurts and Reece is trying to get you hanged?’
His gaze shifted away from mine. ‘Nothing.’
Then I realised. ‘It is that young man, isn’t it? Miles, the one you gave your place at the chess board to. He’s the one you are in love with.’
Garrick, with less than his usual impeccable timing, came in with a bowl and a jug of steaming water. I pushed him out too, poured water into the bowl, dipped in a clean cloth and began to clean blood from James’s face.
‘Yes,’ he said abruptly. ‘The one I was in love with.’ There was no mistaking the bitterness. ‘The one who told me that loving a man was going to send him straight to hellfire so he married the girl his father wanted him to wed and turned his back on what we had.’
‘That was understandable,’ I said slowly, frowning at a nasty split at the corner of his mouth. ‘He decided to obey the law and his conscience, live a conventional life. But…’
‘But this isn’t. I’ve had an hour to think it through.’ James’s eyes were clear now, I was glad to see. The misery had gone, replaced with anger. ‘Doing what his father wanted kept him safely in the old man’s good books and made sure his very nice allowance continued. And he hasn’t given up loving men either – casually. But I wanted more than hole and corner meetings. I wanted fidelity and companionship and commitment. I should have seen through all those agonised speeches about doing the right thing and renunciation.’
‘You loved him, so you believed him.’ I leaned in and hugged him hard. ‘There’s someone else out there for you. Someone you can trust.’
He hugged back, then nodded as we sat back. ‘Luc and I seem to like our relationships complicated, don’t we?’
I admired his guts. In his position I’d be face down on the bed sobbing into the pillow with a mixture of hurt and fury. ‘Your face doesn’t look too bad now,’ I said briskly, gathering up the soiled linen and resisting the urge to hug him some more. ‘You can go to St James’s Square tonight and Lady Radcliffe will know you are quite all right before she has to see you black and blue in the morning when the bruises start to come out.’
The bruises weren’t too bad as it turned out and, by some miracle, the gossip columns did not appear to have caught up with the Earl of Radcliffe brawling with his brother outside an accommodation house over an unnamed mistress.
James and Luc spent the day at St James’s Square and Garrick and I scoured the papers for any mention of The Swan and Chequers and the raid and found nothing.
‘Someone with influence keeping it quiet,’ Garrick suggested.
I could guess who – Sir Thomas shutting down all mention of his nephew’s stupid attack on James, and through him, Luc.