Lord of Scoundrels (Scoundrels 3)

It was clean. No bones had been shattered. Muscle and nerve damage was negligibly minor. There was no danger of infection.

Dain should not, therefore, be feverish, but he was. First his arm burned, then his shoulder and neck caught fire. Now his head was ablaze.

Amid this internal hellfire, he heard Esmond’s voice, smooth and soothing as always.

“She knows, naturellement, that no jury in France would convict her,” said Esmond. “Here, it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than to convict a beautiful woman of any crime which appears to be in any way connected to l’amour.”

“Of course she knows.” Dain gritted out the words. “Just as I know she didn’t do it in the heat of the moment. Did you see her hand? Not a hint of trembling. Cold and steady as you please. She was not in a mindless rage. She knew precisely what she was doing.”

“She knows very well what she is doing,” Esmond agreed. “Shooting you was only the beginning. She means to make a spectacle of you. I am to tell you that she will make public—in the courtroom if she can get the trial she insists upon, or in the papers if she cannot—every detail of the episode. She says she will repeat all you said to her and describe in full detail everything you did.”

“In other words, she’ll exaggerate and twist words to her purpose,” said Dain, angrily aware that all she had to utter was the truth. And that, in the eyes of the world, would reduce Lord Beelze-bub to a lovesick, panting, groaning, sweating schoolboy. His friends would howl with laughter at his mawkish outpourings, even the Italian.

She would remember what the words sounded like—she was adept in Latin, wasn’t she?—and do an apt imitation, because she was quick and clever…and vengeful. Then all his mortifying secrets, dreams, fantasies, would be translated into French and English—and soon, every other language known to humankind. The words would be printed in bubbles over his head in printshop caricatures. Farces of the episode would be enacted upon the stage.

That was merely a fraction of what he’d face, Dain knew.

He had only to recollect how the press had pilloried Byron a dozen years earlier—and the poet had been a model of social rectitude compared to the Marquess of Dain. Furthermore, Byron had not been obscenely wealthy, terrifyingly big and ugly, and infuriatingly powerful.

The bigger they are, the harder the fall. And the better the world liked seeing them fall.

Dain understood the way of the world very well. He could see plainly enough what the future held. Miss Jessica Trent saw, too, undoubtedly. That was why she hadn’t killed him. She wanted to make sure he suffered the torments of hell while he lived.

She knew he would suffer, because she had struck in the only place where he could be hurt: his pride.

And if he couldn’t endure it—which she knew, of course, he couldn’t—she’d get her satisfaction in private, no doubt. She would make him crawl.

She had him exactly where she wanted him, the she-devil.

Amid the hellfire raging over half his body, his head began to pound. “I’d better deal with her directly,” he said. His tongue was thick, slurring the words. “Negotiate. Tell her…” He swallowed. His throat burned, too. “Terms. Tell her…”

He shut his eyes and searched his throbbing, roiling mind for words, but they wouldn’t come. His head was a red-hot mound of metal a hellish blacksmith was hammering upon, pounding intellect, thought, into nothingness. He heard Esmond’s voice, very far away, but couldn’t make sense of the words. Then the satanic hammer struck one shattering blow, and knocked Dain into oblivion.

Consumed by the feverish illness he shouldn’t have had, Dain drifted in and out of consciousness for most of the next four days.

On the morning of the fifth day, he woke fully, and more or less recovered. That was to say, the fire and throbbing were gone. His left arm refused to move, though. It dangled uselessly at his side. There was feeling in it, but he couldn’t make it do anything.

The physician returned, examined, made wise noises, and shook his head. “I can find nothing wrong,” he said.

He summoned a colleague, who also found nothing wrong, and summoned another, with the same result.

By late afternoon, Dain had seen eight medical men, all of whom told him the same thing. By then, Dain was beside himself. He had been poked and questioned and muttered over for most of the day, and spent a great deal of money on physicians’ fees to no purpose.

To cap it off, a law clerk arrived minutes after the last quack left. Herbert delivered the message the clerk had brought just as Dain was attempting to pour himself a glass of wine. His eye upon the note on the silver salver, Dain missed the glass, and splattered wine on his dressing gown, slippers, and the Oriental carpet.

He hurled imprecations, as well as the salver, at Herbert’s head, then stormed out of the drawing room and on to his own room, where he worked himself into a fury trying to unseal and unfold the note with one hand. By then, he was so enraged, he could scarcely see straight.

There was little enough to see. According to the note, Mr. Andrew Herriard wished to meet with His Lordship’s solicitor on behalf of Miss Jessica Trent.

Lord Dain’s insides turned to lead.

Andrew Herriard was a famous London solicitor with an extensive clientele of powerful expatriates in Paris. He was also a pillar of rectitude—incorruptible, loyal, and indefatigable in serving his clients. Lord Dain was aware, as were a great many people, that beneath the lawyer’s saintly exterior loomed a steel trap with jaws and teeth a shark would envy. The trap was reserved primarily for men, because Mr. Andrew Herriard was a gallant knight in the service of the weaker sex.

It didn’t matter to the solicitor that the law was squarely on the side of male prerogative, and that a woman, to all intents and purposes, had no rights under that law and nothing she could call her own, including her offspring.

Herriard created the rights he believed women were entitled to—and got away with it. Even Francis Beaumont, devious swine that he was, could not touch the tenth part of a farthing of his wife’s income, thanks to Herriard.

This was because Herriard’s approach, when a fellow balked at outrageous demands, was to subject the poor sod to an endless stream of barristers and petty litigation, until the sod caved in from sheer exhaustion, was ruined by legal fees, or was carried, screaming, to a lunatic asylum.

Miss Trent, in short, was not only going to make Lord Dain crawl, but she would have Herriard do the dirty work for her, and have it all done legally, with not a loophole for Dain to wriggle out of.

“There is no animal more invincible than a woman,” Aristophanes had said, “nor fire either, nor any wildcat so ruthless.”

Ruthless. Vicious. Fiendish.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Dain muttered. “Not via go-betweens, you demon spawn.” He wadded the note into a tight ball and hurled it at the grate. Then he stomped to his writing desk, grabbed a sheet of notepaper, scrawled an answer, and shouted for his valet.

In his note to Mr. Herriard, Dain had declared that he would meet with Miss Trent at seven o’clock that evening at her brother’s house. He would not, as Herriard had requested, send his solicitor to meet with hers, because the Marquess of Dain had no intention, he wrote, “of being sworn, signed, and bled dry by proxy.” If Miss Trent had terms to dictate, she could bloody well do it in person. If that didn’t suit, she was welcome to send her brother to Dain, who would be happy to settle the matter at twenty paces—with both combatants armed this time.

Given the last suggestion, Jessica decided it would be best if Bertie spent the evening else-where. He still had no idea what had happened.

She had returned from the police station to find her brother suffering painful consequences of his alcohol consumption during Lady Wallingdon’s ball. His constitution weakened by months of dissipation, he had succumbed to a violent dyspepsia, and had not left his bed until teatime yesterday.

Even in the best of circumstances, his brain functions

were unreliable. At present, the effort to comprehend Dain’s anomalous behavior might trigger a relapse, if not apoplexy. Equally important, Jessica dared not risk Bertie’s bumbling after Dain with the misguided idea of avenging her honor.

Genevieve had agreed. She had, accordingly, taken Bertie to dine with her at the Duc d’Abonville’s. The duc could be relied upon to hold his tongue. It was he, after all, who’d advised Jessica to hold hers until she spoke with a lawyer.

It was also the duc who was paying Mr. Herriard’s fee. If Jessica had not agreed to let him do so, Abonville would have called Dain out himself. That offer had told Jessica all she needed to know about the French nobleman’s feelings about Genevieve.

At seven o’clock, therefore, Bertie was safely out of the way. Only Mr. Herriard was with Jessica in the drawing room. They were standing before a table upon which a neat pile of documents lay when Dain stalked in.

He swept Herriard one contemptuous glance, then bent his sardonic obsidian gaze upon Jessica. “Madam,” he said, with a short nod.

“My lord,” she said, with a shorter one.

“That takes care of the social niceties,” he said. “You may proceed to the extortion.”