Chapter 72

It was true, wasn't it? Every single word about the earl. Although she'd told herself no one was that black-hearted, as Splendor tried to ignore the damp soaking through the paper-thin soles of Gabe's boots, she knew the extent of that truth.
Dueling was illegal. The thought that Kendall Winterborne could end the day in court on a murder charge was no consolation. Not when the tang of frost sent no shivers up her spine, the caw of crows left her bone marrow untouched. She was beyond these things.
She had practiced shooting last night, trying to hit the door handle. The fact she had blasted a hole in the fender instead was not auspicious. Mrs. Hanney, to whom she had paid four months' rent in advance, had gone berserk. That was never a good thing.
Neither was Gabe's terse whisper on the dawn mist.
"The whole of London says he's a crack shot and you just have to be here now. Ain't you seen that pair of pistols he's got?"
"He may yet back off."
"Back off? Back off? Which bit of I am beyond the furthest reaches of my infinitesimal but stark raving mind don't you understand here, Splen? Well?"
She peered over her spectacle rims. Even at this distance with the mist wreathing Stillmore's darkly coated and booted figure in white, she could discern the sheer bloody-mindedness of his expression, the darkness that hung about his eyes and brows like a funeral shroud. And the way he leveled both pistols on a hapless tree trunk.
"That is how it may seem to you, but look how it turned out that day at Starkadder's when the bailiffs arrived."
Yes. She may have been years too late to save her father from the debtor's ward, she had still managed to snap up everything she could, necklaces, coins, notes, and escape out the garret window from that rat's warren of rooms, in advance of the bailiffs breaking down the door. Yes. Her, little Aurora-Do-It-All-Splendora.
Gabe's breath coiled like smoke in the air beneath the chimney pot hat he'd somehow come by. "This ain't then."
"How well do I know that? It's never too late till it is too late. Papa always said that. Fortune will smile on me again."
"The count is eight. If there is a misfire, you start again. Fine, if you ain't dead. As for the one shot, it ain't exactly calmin'. Three or four might suggest that bastard can't shoot a peacock's arse-"
"Excuse me..." Viscount Framerton-she was moving in exalted circles, wasn't she?-squelched through the fat droplets of dew beading the grass. "Is there something wrong?"
Apart from the fact that her face was probably the same shade as his coat? Mottled green with a distinct yellow tinge and starched as his shirt cuffs, what could be wrong? She squared her shoulders. She was meant to be a man after all.
"Should there be?"
Already it was bad enough she was here. She didn't want anyone thinking she was getting in another dueling match with her second about it before the first was even finished. Her second who'd adopted another middle name to go with his first. Mulish Moaner when she hungered for his belief, his encouragement, his love. She especially didn't want anyone knowing there was something wrong when the viscount was surely going to tell her Earl Stillmore apologized for his gross affront in accusing her of cheating. Surely that was the reason Framerton's lips now parted around what looked to be snake fangs? Because he was about to say ...
"Well, then, if that's the case? If you are ready?"
She swallowed. So he wasn't going to say Stillmore apologized? So she hurriedly walked from this field. Now. Ran stumbling from it in fact. Disappeared back to where she belonged.
After all, it didn't matter how little was left in the trinket box, the one she'd deposited with Mr. Squibbs, pawnbroker extraordinary. The one he'd made such a fuss about because the contents had been stolen from around the wrists, necks, fingers, and safes of half of London, so really she was flat broke. Gabe was everything that mattered, despite how bad it had been of late. Not money. Not anything. So now, now, she also parted her shrunken skeletal lips, and she graciously said ...
"But of course, Your Grace. Where do you wish me to stand?" My God. That wasn't what she meant.
"Over here if you will, sir. Walk this way." The viscount wasted no time in ushering her across the festering piles of sodden leaves, although whether she should mince across the mud as he did in his ridiculous French shoes was another matter. "The center of the field where His Grace is waiting."
Trying to look knowledgeable-what else could she do?-she nodded sagely. Mist enveloped the boots Gabe had lent her. Alarming, that with the crows deafening her in the gray sky overhead, the place should have the same derelict quality as a cemetery. Deathly and ... ghastly actually, the dank air forming bands on her lungs as if its main desire was to strangle them. The gnarled, leafless trees spread dark branches at the edge of her vision, like fingers that would do the job in advance of the air. The pistol, long, shining silver, and far bigger than that thing Gabe had procured for her to practice with, glared from the box. The beautiful wooden box with silver clasps, the sinuous Viscount Framerton, like some blood-sucking creature from a lifeless crypt, gravely opened for her perusal, then set down on the small folding table she'd somehow failed to notice till now.
What would make a nice funeral hymn? She had always liked, "Who Would True Valor See?" She would rather be a pilgrim and labor night and day than end this one in a box, wouldn't she? There was only one thing she could do now before this went further.