Chapter Twelve
Willa woke early as usual and lay still, thinking over the events of yesterday evening and last night. It came to her that Dax really was beginning to care for her as more than the adoring little friend who’d followed him around and been on his side during most of the games played with the Shelbys and other local children. It was a sweet thought.
Unusually, there was movement beyond her door, in the sitting room. And it wasn’t Clara. She heard lowered voices conversing. One of them was surely Dax. Another might have been Lord Tamar. She couldn’t really tell. Then she heard footsteps and the sound of the passage door opening and closing. And all was quiet.
Either Dax was up extraordinarily early—for it was not yet quite dawn, judging by the light—or he had not yet been to bed. He’d certainly never gone out this early before. Rising, she padded across her chamber and opened the door to the sitting room. Clara was straightening cushions and yawning.
“You’re up early, m’lady,” she observed. “Shall I bring you hot chocolate? Or coffee?”
“It seems there’s coffee here already,” Willa said as the maid stood aside, revealing the pot and three cups.
“It’s still warm, and only one cup’s used,” Clara said. “I’ll bring it to you in bed, if you like.”
“Yes,” Willa said faintly. “Yes, please…Was his lordship up and drinking coffee at this hour?”
“With the vicar and Lord Tamar, though Lord Tamar didn’t have any. They both called for his lordship, and Carson already had him up and dressed, and off they went together.”
Willa frowned at the strangeness of such behavior and accepted the cup of coffee from Clara. Dax was up to something, and it made her uneasy. He would hardly have taken Tamar and the vicar with him on a tryst with Helena Holt, but there was more dangerous mischief than dalliance. What had Dax told her about rakehells? Womanizing, gambling, drinking, dueling –
“No,” she uttered, sitting bolt upright in bed. A little coffee sloshed out of the cup and into the saucer. He wouldn’t, would he? Distractedly, she raised the cup to her lips, drinking the coffee while she remembered his rushing off with Tamar instead of returning to their sudden intimacy in her bedchamber. He’d said he was going to take care of something. And then, last night, he’d surely entered her chamber again and merely watched her sleeping before he’d left again without trying to wake her. He hadn’t known she was awake already.
“Where were they going, Clara?” she asked with foreboding.
Clara, who was picking clothes from Willa’s ever-increasing collection, merely shrugged. “They didn’t say. Fishing, maybe? Or sailing. I heard them mention sand. Perhaps they were going for an early walk on the beach.”
“To watch the sunrise?” Willa said skeptically. “I’m not sure his lordship is quite so romantic.” Not with Tamar and the vicar at least. Though when she thought about it, the presence of Mr. Grant was actually comforting. How much trouble could he get into with the vicar? Surely no one would take a vicar to a duel…unless to administer some kind of blessing or last rites?
“Oh no.” She thrust the cup aside. “Hurry, Clara, I need to get dressed right away.”
*
With Clara trotting after her, Willa sped down to the harbor, from where you could see most of the way along to the castle beach. The sun was rising on another beautiful late summer’s day, but she could make out no one on the beaches on either side.
“Blackhaven Cove,” Clara suggested. “It’s mostly hidden from the town. Smugglers land there sometimes.”
“Lead the way,” Willa commanded.
She knew at once this was the place. Two closed carriages with their placid horses stood at the side of the road, just next to the path down to the beach. Willa hurried in that direction, but the door to one of the carriages was open and with sinking heart she recognized Dr. Lampton sitting on one bench and leaning over a patient stretched out on the other.
The patient was not Dax. She saw that right away because his hair was dark brown not golden. Then, as Dr. Lampton caught sight of her and straightened, frowning, she saw that his patient was her cousin.
“Ralph,” she whispered. “Oh God, he isn’t dead, is he?” If Dax had dueled with Ralph, if he’d killed him…
“No, he just fainted,” said quite another voice when the doctor didn’t answer her, merely returned his attention to the patient. The speaker was Sir Jeremy Leigh, whom she’d met last night. He stood at the other side of the coach, looking in. “What is Shelby to you?”
“My cousin. What happened to him?”
“Just an accident,” Leigh soothed.
“Don’t let her go down to the beach,” Dr. Lampton ordered. “Not until I’ve seen to her husband.”
With a cry, Willa fled without listening to the words the doctor called after her. Vaguely, she was aware of Clara scuttling after her as she slid down the path. “Oh wait, m’lady, please wait. Let me go down there.”
And the deeper voice of Sir Jeremy Leigh: “Lady Daxton, wait. It is not fitting…” She didn’t hear the rest of that either. She was aware of his pounding feet in the sand behind her. He even caught her arm at one point, but she shook him off with a strength that must have surprised him, for she’d already seen the figure on the ground. Lord Tamar and Mr. Grant were crouched on either side of him, though both rose hastily as they saw her approach.
“He’s alive, Lady Dax, don’t fret,” Tamar said, trying to ward her off.
She swerved around him, throwing herself onto the sand beside her husband. They’d taken off his coat, revealing a bloody shirt and a gory hole in his shoulder.
“Oh, Dax,” she whispered, dragging her appalled gaze from the wound to his pale face and closed eyes. She took his face between her hands. “Don’t you dare die, Dax, don’t dare!”
His lips moved. “Of course, I’m not going to die,” he growled. Then his eyes opened and one of his most dazzling smiles lit his whole face. “Willa.” He reached up his left hand and pulled her face the rest of the way down to his, kissing her lips with a strength and thoroughness that certainly lent credence to his statement that he wasn’t going to die.
“Careful there, Dax,” Tamar said sardonically. “You’ll get blood on Lady Dax.”
Dax released her with flattering reluctance to peer at his wound instead. “Where’s the damned quack?”
“Here,” Dr. Lampton intoned dryly from behind Willa. “Stand back, if you please, so that the damned quack might at least see his other patient.”
Willa stumbled to her feet to let him in.
“How is Shelby?” Mr. Grant asked.
“He’ll live,” Dr. Lampton said. “No thanks to you. I had to dig a ball out of his side. I suppose we should be grateful it didn’t hit anything too vital. As for you, you’ve lost a lot more blood this time. Sit him up there, will you?”
Whether he needed the help or not, Tamar heaved Dax to a sitting position while the doctor examined the even bloodier back of the wound. “The ball went straight through him,” he said slowly.
“From the back?” Mr. Grant asked.
“The back?” Sir Jeremy repeated at the same time as Tamar. “How can it be from the back?”
“I don’t know, but it can’t have been Shelby who shot him.” Mr. Grant passed a pistol somewhat gingerly to Sir Jeremy, “This is Shelby’s pistol and it hasn’t been fired.”
Sir Jeremy stared. “Hasn’t been…?” He took it, examining it with care.
“Then who the devil shot me?” Dax demanded.
“Someone behind you,” Dr. Lampton said. “Grant is correct. The ball entered your shoulder from the back. And it will need a stitch or two. Here.” Unexpectedly, the doctor handed Daxton a flask which Dax sniffed before a quick smile flitted across his lips and he drank.
“Good brandy,” he observed. “There’s a lot of good brandy in Blackhaven. Very well, Doctor, do your worst.”
Thoughtfully, Sir Jeremy walked back up the sand, pocketing the pistol. The coach with Ralph in it appeared to have left without him.
With tight lips, Willa watched the doctor work. Dax seemed quite stoic about the whole procedure, although his skin was alarmingly pale and he had recourse to the brandy a couple of times. Mostly his eyes remained fixed on Willa’s face.
“How did you track us down?” he asked.
“Clara heard you mention sand. And I knew, I knew you were up to some mischief or other. How on earth did this happen?”
“He accused me of cheating, remember? You were there.”
“That was more than a week ago!” she protested.
“I just recalled it,” Dax said firmly.
With neat efficiency, the doctor bound his wound. Tamar and Grant had walked up to the road and were investigating the rough tree and brush-covered ground on either side.
“Someone who was not Ralph tried to kill you,” Willa said shakily.
“You do make a lot of enemies, do you not?” the doctor observed. “Everyone and his brother seems ready to shoot you. In fact, if I’m called out to you again, I might do it myself, properly this time.”
“What a comfort you must be to your many patients.”
“My many patients need me,” Dr. Lampton retorted. “Frivolous shootings are not my priority.”
Dax blinked. “Frivolous?”
“Frivolous,” Dr. Lampton repeated, and Dax actually laughed with what seemed to be genuine amusement. “Can you walk, or shall we summon your friends back?”
“I can walk.” Leaning on the doctor more than on Willa, Dax rose to his feet and they walked slowly up to join the others.
Dr. Lampton addressed Willa. “This time, he should stay in bed. Today and tomorrow at the very least. Here is some laudanum for the pain. I’ll come back and change his dressings tonight. He must not use the arm and give that wound an excuse to open again, which is why I’ve placed his arm in the sling. It has to stay there, as still as possible. Are you hearing this, my lord?”
“He shot my shoulder, not my ears,” Dax retorted.
“He’ll be fine,” the doctor said dryly. “Send for me if there are any signs of fever.”
“I will. Thank you, Dr. Lampton.”
*
Fortunately, it was still early morning and the hotel was quiet. Dax in his torn and blood-stained clothes was able to enter and walk upstairs more or less surrounded by Willa, Tamar, and Grant without anyone seeing his state. Not that it mattered, for the news of the duel would no doubt be all over Blackhaven before luncheon.
Carson was discovered pacing the sitting room and he hastily took over the burden of his master. “My God, you’re injured!” he exclaimed.
“This never happened before?” Willa asked.
“A graze once or twice, but—”
“Help me get him into bed,” Willa instructed. The doctor says he is to stay there today and tomorrow.”
Carson groaned. “God help us all.”
“And if you hit me, I’ll dismiss you on the spot,” Dax warned.
“No, you won’t,” Carson said with confidence. “All the same, don’t make me hit you! You do exactly as her ladyship tells you.”
In the end, Willa left the men to it, and in no time, Dax was ready to hold court from his bed. He looked ridiculously young and rakish with his rumpled fair locks and his arm in a sling, a clean white shirt thrown around his wounded shoulder.
“Forgive me,” Grant said, “but I must leave you to it. I have duties to attend to. I’ll ask Kate to call later on, or send earlier if you need anything at all.”
“He’s a good fellow for a vicar,” Dax observed when the outer door had closed behind Mr. Grant.
“He was in the army,” Tamar volunteered. “Fought in India and the Peninsula before he took Holy Orders. And actually, it was he who first thought the gunshot came from behind us. It all sounded like one loud bang to me. But Grant had the gumption to check Shelby’s pistol. No wonder he kept calling for it.”
“Did he?” Daxton frowned.
“I heard him as they carted him off the beach to the coach, then he fainted.”
Willa gazed from Tamar to Dax. “Then…you think Ralph knew? You think he was responsible for the other shooter?”
Dax rested his head back against the pillows propping him up. “I think he didn’t want us to know his pistol hadn’t been fired. And not all doctors are as perceptive or as attentive as Dr. Lampton.”
“Also, you turned and shot pretty fast,” Tamar remarked. “Which might have taken him by surprise. He might have meant to shoot you in the conventional way, with his hidden man as reinforcements. Perhaps a signal was missed, and his man shot too late to save Shelby a ball in the side.”
“Whatever, it’s entirely dishonorable,” Dax pronounced, looking at Willa. “And you don’t seem terribly surprised, let alone indignant about the accusation.”
“I’m not,” Willa agreed. “It’s a long time since I’ve believed my cousin had any honor at all.”
Dax looked as if he would say more, but in the end, he closed his lips, apparently turning his mind back to the duel. “Do you know, Lampton’s right. Everyone and his brother does seem to shoot at me. Even the other day, driving back from my cousin’s house after seeing my mother there, someone shot from close enough to startle the horses. And then there are footpads leaping out of nowhere!”
Willa stared at him. “Someone is trying to kill you?”
“No, no, just thinking aloud,” Dax said quickly. “It’s a lot more likely Shelby hired someone just to save him from the duel. The other shot will merely have been some local shooting rabbits. And in truth, the footpad wasn’t much of a threat.”
“But this is Blackhaven,” Willa said. “Not the London underworld! Who on earth could Ralph have hired for such a purpose?”
“You’d be surprised,” Tamar said. “There are some very unsavory characters that haunt the Blackhaven tavern. Villains in hiding, escaped prisoners, navy deserters, invalided and desperate soldiers and sailors. Most of them would pick your pocket, and a few wouldn’t mind slitting your throat while they were about it. I’ll ask around. Pretty sure Grant will already be doing the same. And he knows everyone in this town.”
Lord Tamar left a little later, promising to return tomorrow, if not before. “But send to me if he gets difficult,” he instructed Willa.
“Why, what are you going to do about it?” Dax challenged.
Tamar grinned. “Call you out, of course.
Willa pointed silently to the door.
The rest of the day passed rather pleasantly, considering all that had gone before. Willa entertained her husband with a mixture of childhood games and chatter. She read to him, including a couple of poems from the book of his own works which Mr. Yoeville handed in, until Dax cried for mercy, possibly because his wound was paining him too much when he laughed. Kate Grant called in and sat on the edge of Dax’s bed as if he were her little brother.
Some of his drinking and cardplaying cronies also made a call, blatantly trying to learn the details of the duel.
“What duel?” Dax said aggressively, and they lapsed into silence.
To everyone who didn’t already know, they maintained the fiction that he’d slipped on the wet rocks at Blackhaven Cove and injured himself.
In the early evening, Willa and Dax enjoyed a companionable dinner together. The only friction between them came when he tried to take his right hand out of the sling to eat, and Willa insisted he use his left. But even this had childishly hilarious consequences as his left hand was awkward in the task.
A little after dinner, Dr. Lampton came to change Daxton’s dressings and pronounced the wound clean enough, although he didn’t like the redness forming around the stitched area. He slathered more of the muddy ointment upon it before he bandaged it up again. By then, Dax had a couple of reddish patches on his cheeks.
Dr. Lampton said abruptly that someone should check on him during the night and that if the fever didn’t abate, she should send for him before morning.
“Try and keep him calm,” he added as she walked with him to the outer door.
“I’m perfectly calm,” Dax insisted when she returned to his bedchamber. “You’re a very calming person, Willa Blake.” He frowned. “Though I suppose that is Willa Dacre now.”
She smiled. “I seem to be Lady Dax to most people.”
“Hope you don’t mind that. My friends are somewhat informal.”
“No, I like it,” she said, passing by the bed toward the window seat.
But he patted the bed beside him. “Come, sit by me here. I want to talk to you.”
“What about?” Obligingly, she changed course, and perched on the bed next to his good shoulder. She liked being so near him. It made her whole body tingle and her heart beat faster.
“About Shelby,” he replied, taking her by surprise.
She frowned slightly. “What about him?”
“What did he do to hurt you?”
The direct question threw her. He’d just fought a duel with Ralph. What more could he do?
Dax took her hand. It jumped and then lay still in his, letting his fingers close warmly about it. “Look, I know he’s a boor. And if he has any power or authority over anyone, he’d rather hurt their feelings than not. I’m sure you came into that category. But I think there’s something more.”
Willa thought of deflecting the question again. But he was her husband, and if she wanted honesty and openness from him, she had to return them. So, she opened her mouth to tell him, then closed it, overwhelmed by the difficulty of putting it into words. She swallowed and tried again.
“One day, in the spring, he cornered me in the breakfast room and wouldn’t let me go.”
Daxton’s fingers tightened on hers. “What did he do?”
“He pulled me against him, put his hands on me. All over me. He tried to kiss me but I had my head strained so far away that he just slobbered over my face. That wasn’t very nice either.”
But for once Dax wouldn’t be distracted by humor. “Did he hurt you?”
“He was rough,” Willa admitted. “I was a little bruised. But not as badly as he was.”
Daxton’s brow twitched. “You got away from him? How?”
“In a very unladylike manner. I rammed by knee between his legs and shoved,” she said candidly. “He made a great fuss about it, and in truth, I did not realize that could be quite so painful for gentlemen. It was luck on my part because my knee was one of the few parts of me that was free to move at the time.”
She hesitated, but she’d begun now and had to finish. “While he was doubled up and rolling on the carpet, I told him if he ever touched me again, I’d tell his mother about him and Haines—my aunt’s abigail.”
He put his arm around her shoulders, drawing her into his side. “You bested him. And he’s been punishing you ever since. That’s why he got you to bring him the money the night we played dice.”
“I’m sure he meant to humiliate as well as inconvenience me. And in front of you, too, because you punched him for pushing me into that wall.”
His arm tightened around her. “Well, I know it can’t have been very comfortable for you, walking into such a party, with all eyes upon you, too. But I find I can’t be sorry for it.”
She smiled. “Neither can I.”
For a time, they sat in companionable silence, Willa very aware of his closeness, the warmth of his arm and his shoulder. Then she said, “Ralph has hated you ever since you punched him when we were children. I don’t think you cared or even knew. Yet now, you hate him. Why? What happened?”
This time it was Daxton’s turn to hesitate. “It’s not a very edifying tale, particularly not for a lady and my wife to boot.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Ralph kept a mistress, an opera dancer called Julia. She was beautiful, graceful, and I became obsessed with her. I think I was all of nineteen years old. But she liked me, let me visit her, and before long I could tell she was unhappy with Ralph. More than that, he ill-treated her, beat her, indulged in…pleasures, shall we say, which were no pleasure to her. So, I took her away from him, gave her my protection instead. And there was nothing he could do about it without appearing sillier than he already looked for losing her to a nineteen-year-old boy in the first place.”
Willa’s heart welled with pity. “What became of your Julia? Do you still see her?”
He smiled. “Lord, no. After a few months, she went off with an American sea captain and I haven’t seen her since. To be honest, it was a relief, for my youthful infatuation was wearing off.”
Willa couldn’t help being glad of that.
They spoke desultorily of other things that were more comfortable and pleasant, and gradually, Willa’s eyes began to close. It had been a long, anxious day. She was warm and comfortable and contented. It wasn’t surprising that she fell asleep with her head on his good shoulder, and the heat of his body seeping through her flimsy clothes.