Louise Allen - Marrying His Cinderella Countess

The girl came back with a tea tray and he gestured abruptly for her to pour. ‘Put sugar in your mistress’s cup.’

‘I do not take sugar.’

‘For the shock.’ He took a cup himself and gulped it sugarless, grateful for the warmth in his empty, churning gut.

The maid went and sat in a corner of the room, hands folded in her lap. He could feel her gaze boring into him.

Miss Lytton lifted her cup with a hand that shook just a little, drank, replaced it in the saucer with a sharp click and looked at him.

‘Tell me what happened.’

Thank heavens she was not some fluffy little chit who had dissolved into the vapours. Still, there was time yet for that...

‘I was at the Adventurers’ last night, playing cards with Lord Anterton and Sir Peter Carew and a man called Crosse. I was winning heavily—mainly against Crosse, who is not a good loser and is no friend of mine. We were all drinking.’

Blake tried to edit the story as he went—make it somehow suitable for a lady to hear without actually lying to her. He couldn’t tell her that the room had smelled of sweat and alcohol and candlewax and excitement. That Anterton had been in high spirits because an elderly relative had died and left him a tidy sum, and he and Carew had been joking and needling Crosse all evening over some incident at the French House—a fancy brothel where the three of them had been the night before.

Blake had been irritated, he remembered now, and had wished they would concentrate on the game.

He had just raked in a double handful of chips and banknotes and vowels from the centre of the table and called for a new pack and a fresh bottle when Francis Lytton had come up behind him—another irritation.

‘Your stepbrother appeared, most agitated, and said he wanted to talk to me immediately. I was on a winning streak, and I certainly did not intend to stop. I told him he could walk home with me afterwards and we would talk all he wanted to then.’

Miss Lytton bit her lip, her brow furrowed. ‘Agitated?’

‘Or worried. I do not know which. I did not pay too much attention, I am afraid.’

‘You were drunk,’ she observed coolly.

It was a shock to be spoken to in that way by a woman and, despite his uneasy sense of responsibility, the flat statement stung.

‘I was mellow—we all were. And we were in the middle of a game in which I was winning consistently—Lytton should have seen that it was a bad time to interrupt. We began to play with the new pack. Crosse lost heavily to me again, then started to shout that I was cheating, that I must have cards in my cuffs, up my sleeves. That I had turned away to talk to your stepbrother in order to conceal them.’

That red face, that wet mouth, those furious, incoherent accusations.

The man had scrabbled at the cards, sending counters flying, wine glasses tipping.

‘Cheat! Sharper!’

Everyone had stopped their own games, people had come across, staring...

‘I told him to withdraw his accusations. So did the others. He wouldn’t back down—just kept ranting. It seems he was on the brink of ruin and that this bout of losses had tipped him over the edge. He was so pathetic I didn’t want to have to call him out, so I stripped off my coat, tossed it to him to look at. He still accused me of hiding cards. I took off my waistcoat, my shirt. Then, when he overturned the table shouting that I had aces in my breeches, I took those off as well. Everything, in fact. He’d made me furious. Francis stood behind me, picking things up like a confounded valet. People were laughing...jeering at Crosse.’

He paused, sorting out the events through the brandy fug in his head, trying to be careful what he told her.

Everyone had been staring, and then Anterton had laughed and pointed at Blake’s wedding tackle, made some admiring remark about size. ‘Hainford’s hung like a bull!’ he’d shouted. Or had it been a mule?

He had laughed at Crosse.

‘Not like your little winkle-picker, eh, Crosse? The tarts wouldn’t laugh at his tackle like they did at yours last night at the French House—would they, Crosse?’

‘Crosse fumbled in his pocket, dropped something, and went down on his knees, groping for it. Then I saw it was a pistol. He was shaking with rage.’

I thought I was going to die—stark naked in the wreckage of a card game.

As the club secretary had pushed his way to the front of the crowd Blake could recall wondering vaguely if you could be blackballed for being killed in the club like that.

Conduct unbecoming...

‘Crosse pulled the trigger. The thing was angled upwards, so the bullet scored the track you’ve seen across my ribs and hit Francis, who was still standing behind me.’

Miss Lytton gave a short gasp, cut off by a hand pressed to her mouth. She was so white that the freckles across her nose and cheeks stood out as if someone had thrown a handful of bran at her.

‘He really is dead?’ she managed.

Very. You don’t live with a hole like that in you.

‘It must have been instant. He will have felt a blow to the chest, then nothing.’ He thought that was true—hoped that it was. Certainly by the time he’d knelt down, Lytton’s head supported on his knees, the man had been gone.

‘Where is he now?’

She was still white, her voice steady. It was the unnatural control of shock, he guessed, although she didn’t seem to be the hysterical type in any case. She had dealt with a bleeding man on her doorstep calmly enough. An unusual young lady.

‘At the club. There was a doctor there—one of the members. We took him to a bedchamber, did what was necessary.’

They had stripped off the wreckage of Lytton’s clothes, got him cleaned up and dressed in someone’s spare nightshirt and sent for a woman to lay him out decently before any of his family saw him.

‘I have his watch, his pocketbook and so on, all safe.’

‘I see.’

Miss Lytton’s voice was as colourless as her skin, and that seemed to have been pulled back savagely, revealing fine cheekbones but emphasising the long nose and firm chin unbecomingly.

‘He must come here, of course. Can you arrange that?’

He could—and he would. And he would try and do something about that mass of blood-soaked papers with a hole through the middle that had been stuffed into Lytton’s breast pocket. There was no way he could hand those back as they were.

‘Certainly. It is the least I can do.’

The dowdy nobody of a woman opposite him raised her wide hazel eyes and fixed him with an aloof stare.

‘I would say that is so. If you had listened to your friend when he was obviously anxious about something, instead of drunkenly goading that man Crosse, then Francis would not be dead now. Would he, my lord?’

Chapter Two

Her hostility had hit home—visibly. Ellie suspected that if he had been himself, alert and not in pain, Lord Hainford would have betrayed nothing, but she saw the colour come up over his cheekbones and the bloodshot grey eyes narrow.

‘If your brother had not come to the club, yes, he would be alive now, Miss Lytton.’

‘My stepbrother Francis is...was...the son of my mother’s second husband, Sir Percival Lytton. I took his name when she remarried.’

She could hardly recall her own father, the Honourable Frederick Trewitt, an abrupt man who had died when she was eight. Her mother’s remarriage had given them much-needed financial stability, although Sir Percival had shown little interest in his stepdaughter at first—so plain and quiet, where her mother had been vivid and attractive.

Not at first.

As for Francis, three years her senior, he had ignored her until, his father and stepmother dead, he had needed a housekeeper.