Sophia James - A Proposition For The Comte

She was right. He looked nothing like the milksop lords they had waded through tonight at the Barringtons’ ball. His dress was too plain and his hair was far longer than any man in the ton would have worn theirs. He looked menacing and severe and beautiful. Society would tiptoe around a man like this, not quite knowing how to categorise him. Left in a bedchamber filled with ruffled yellow fabric and ornate fragile furniture he was badly misplaced. His natural home looked to be far more rudimentary than this.

‘Clean him up, Mrs Kennings, and find him one of my late husband’s nightshirts. The doctor should be here in a short while. Choose others to help you.’

The clock struck the half-hour as she walked past the main staircase to the library. She no longer felt tired. She felt alive and somewhat confused as to her reaction to this whole conundrum.

Harland had insisted that every decision had been his to make and she had seldom had a hand in it. Tonight there was a sort of freedom dancing in the air, a possibility of all that could be, another layer between who she had been and who she was to become.

If the servants wondered at her orders they didn’t say, obeying her and refraining from further query. Power held a quiet energy that was gratifying.

A knock on the door of her library a few moments later brought a footman inside the room with an armful of weapons. ‘Mrs Kennings sent me in with these, my lady. She said she thought they were better off here than on the stranger’s person. The doctor has just arrived, too.’

‘Ask him to come and see me when he has finished then, Adams. I shall wait for him in here.’

‘Very well.’

She noted the armaments were many and varied as she looked over the array on the table. A flintlock pistol made of walnut and steel sat before her, the brass butt plate catching the light. A well-weighted piece, she thought, as she lifted it and wondered at its history. A selection of knives sat to one side: a blade wedged into rough leather; a longer, sharper knife with a handle of inlaid shell; and a thicker, broader half-sword, the haft engraved with some ancient design.

The tools of his trade and a violent declaration of intent. Such a truth was as undeniable as it was shocking. This man she had helped was a dealer in death, a pillager of lives. She wondered how being such would have marked him. Perhaps at this very moment Mrs Kennings was lifting away the fabric of his shirt to show the doctor the scars written on his skin as a history.

She was sure it would be so. A darkness of blood was smeared across the dull grey of the sword’s steel where it had bitten into bone and flesh only recently. She imagined what the other opponent might now look like and crossed to the cabinet to pour herself a brandy.

She had not drunk anything stronger than a spiced punch in all the years of her marriage. Now she found herself inclined to brandy for the spirit took away some of her pain, though she was always careful to drink alone. The brandy slid down her throat like a warm tonic, settling in her stomach and quelling her nerves.

She wanted to rise and go to the stranger just to make certain that he was not dead. She wanted to touch him again, too, and feel the heat of his skin, to know that he breathed. Tilting her head, she listened for any sign of footsteps, glad when they did not come, for if the moments multiplied it could only mean he lived. The dead would not hold a physician here for an extended length of time and a medic expecting payment would be quick to come to the library and claim what was owed.

She heard a deep cry of pain and tensed, the ensuing silence just as potent as the noise had been. She imagined the treatment that he was now being subjected to as the doctor tried to make sense of his wounds.

‘Please, God, help him.’ She whispered these words into the night and looked across at the fire burning in the grate.

The maid must have been roused from the warmth of her bed to set it. Sometimes the unfairness in life was a never-ending carousel—a misfortune here, a death there, the nuisance of it left as a past-midnight duty for those who served their masters even in exhaustion.

Harland was a part of it, too, with his immorality and anger. After their first few months together she had rarely seen him happy. She frowned. The events of the evening were making her maudlin and there was no point in looking back on all that had been so shattering.

Her father’s words were in the mix there, too. When he had seen her off into the arms of Harland Addington, he had leaned down and given his advice.

‘The Viscount is a man going places, a clever and titled young man. He will do you well, Violet, you will see.’

She had imagined at the time he’d believed it, but now she was not so certain. Her father had been a hard and distant parent whose personal relationships had faltered consistently.

They had hated each other after a few years together, her stepmother and father, almost with the same heated distaste that she and Harland had regarded one another by the end of it all. Like father like daughter. Lost in the tricky mire of right and wrong.

A noise in the passageway twenty-five minutes later had her turning and she put the empty second glass of brandy on the table and waited for the door to open.

‘Dr Barry is ready to depart, my lady.’ Her housekeeper stood at the old physician’s side. Violet vaguely recognised the man. Perhaps Harland had had him here at the town house before to diagnose one of his many and varied physical complaints.

‘How does the patient fare?’

‘Poorly, I am afraid, Lady Addington.’ She knew from the expression on his face that the prognosis was not a hopeful one. ‘The whole site is swollen. If God in all his wisdom wants him to recover then he might, but if not...’

He left the sentiment hanging for a second before he carried on. ‘A man of violence must take his chances with the angels or the demons.’

‘Are there instructions for his care?’

‘There are, my lady. Make certain he takes in water and apply this salve to his right temple and left arm every six hours. I have a compress in place at his side under the bandage and will change that in the morning. The ribcage is the area of the most worry, but the bullet has been removed. I will return on the morrow at the noon hour to examine him again unless you would wish to have him taken from here...’

‘No, I do not.’ She barely knew where that reply came from and the doctor looked surprised.

‘Very well, Lady Addington. I have left my receipt and wish you well for what remains of this night. If he dies by the morning, send word. I’ll come for the body.’

Nodding, she swallowed away any thank you she had been about to offer. Violet had expected more grace, honour and hope in one whose path in life was to tend to the needs of the sick. She would not let him call again, she swore it.

Moments later she was perched on a chair by her tall stranger’s bed, the weight of her decision to bring him into her custody firming upon her shoulders.

He was even more beautiful without the blood and the dirt. She could see that in the first second of observing him. Better for him to have been plain and homely, for Harland had been as remarkably handsome and look at what had happened there.

Shaking her head, she concentrated on the man before her, glad to be alone with him, glad for the night-time and the candles and the half-forgotten world outside.

Her housekeeper had dressed him in one of Harland’s starched and embroidered gowns, the collar of it stiff about his neck. The gash above his ear had been stitched and his long dark hair fell over the yellow ointment smeared across the wound. Nothing could hide the mark on his chin, though, a scar just under the side of his mouth and curling beneath his neck. A knife wound, Violet thought, that had been left untended till it festered for it was no cleanly healed injury at all. She wondered at the pain of such a wound.