A Proposition For The Comte

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.

He was hot. She could see this in the bloom of his skin and the stretched closeness of bone, the pulse in his throat skittering and thready.

‘Let him live,’ she pleaded to no one in particular, though she supposed it was to God that she made this entreaty. It had been a long time since she had prayed with any sincerity.

He was pale and the dark bruising of tiredness lay beneath closed eyes. His nails were short and well trimmed, the ring he wore brought into full relief by the light in the room. It was crested and fashioned out of a heavy gold, a row of small diamonds caught under an engraved coronet.

He had lost the top of the third finger on his right hand, a clean healed cut that spoke of intent and expertise, but a relatively old wound for the scarring was opaque and faded. A man with life drawn upon him like a story and tonight with more chapters adding to the tale. The bed barely contained his height, his knees bent so that his feet did not overlap the base board. The boots placed beside the bed were of the finest leather, the buckles heavy, well fashioned and expensive, the same coronet of the ring engraved in silver.

With a sigh she stood and turned to the window, looking out across the city and the tableau of fading lights. London felt safe and busy. It felt peopled and close with the movement and the noise and the constant change of things to see. She had been here for twelve months now and had not once left the central district of the town. An ordered life with nothing surprising in it. Why had she then insisted that this dangerous golden-eyed stranger be brought home?

Taking up the book she had brought in with her, she sat again on the chair by the bed and began to read aloud. She’d heard somewhere that connections to the living world were advantageous to those knocking on the door of the next one, for it brought them back, guiding them.

Half an hour later when he spoke she almost jumped.

‘Where...am...I?’ His tongue wet the dryness of his lips, each word carefully enunciated.

‘In Chelsea at my town house. I am Violet, Lady Addington, sir, and we found you wounded on Brompton Place in the very early hours of this morning. When you were unable to give us your address we brought you here.’

‘We?’ The one word held a wealth of questions.

The quiet blush of blood ran across her cheeks. It was the curse of having such a fair skin and she gritted her teeth in fury. She had no need to explain any of her circumstances to him and she would not. Ignoring his query, she went on.

‘You have a substantial wound in the hairline above your right ear. It has bled profusely, though it has now been stitched. You also have a bullet hole in your left side which travelled through your arm to enter your ribcage. It has been removed, but the doctor who was summoned to tend to you is not certain of the effects it might engender. My housekeeper, however, insists she has seen others with your malady up and walking within a matter of days.’

In point of fact, Mrs Kennings had said a lot more than that about the patient, Violet thought, but was not about to repeat her servant’s fervent appreciation of the more favourable parts of his body.

‘Did anyone follow me here?’

The horror of such a question had her staring. ‘No. Did you expect them to?’

He turned his head away.

‘Where are my clothes?’

‘They were filthy, sir. We placed a nightgown upon you and tucked you into bed. There are garments you can wear in the drawer across the room when you recover. Your own clothes shall be returned to you on the morrow.’

‘And my weapons?’

‘Are being cleaned. I think you need to rest, for it was the opinion of my driver that you would feel dizzy if you moved too fast.’

‘He was right.’

He raised his hand against the light to shade his eyes. A headache, perhaps?

‘I do not think it was a robber who hurt you.’

‘No. I do not think that, either.’

His diction was aristocratic and old-fashioned. He spoke as if every word needed to be carefully said and thought about. She had the vague impression that perhaps English was not his first language and another worry surfaced as she remembered how he had sworn in French when first she had found him.

‘Who exactly are you, sir?’

This time Violet allowed more sharpness into her tone.