Chapter 4
This was rich.
They’d sent all manner of doctors to see him.
Old ones, who tended the king himself. Younger ones, newly out of university, renowned for their skill, and exclusive agents of the Home Office.
This was the first time that they’d sent… a woman.
And why not?
“Get on with it,” William said sharply. He rolled his shoulders, his muscles chafing at the burden of the jacket his brother had insisted he don. With a growl, he shrugged out of it and hurled it at a nearby armchair. It landed with a whoosh along the back. “Well?” he demanded, stalking out of the shadows so he could better see the latest person sent to help him.
The woman cocked her head, like Prinny’s lazy terrier on a hunt.
“Isn’t that why you’re here?” he pressed impatiently. “At my brother’s request?” And the Brethren’s, of course. His entire existence had only ever been about that noble organization. He sneered. “Here to ease my pain and restore me to my former greatness?”
“Behest.”
She smiled, dimpling her olive-hued cheeks. That soft expression turned her bow-shaped lips up at the corners, knocking him slightly off his axis. The reaction came from too much drink and too little sleep the night prior. Nonetheless, hers was a face accustomed to sun, one that had gone without the benefit of a bonnet.
“What?”
“A behest,” she said, enunciating each of the three syllables. There was a lilting, almost singsong quality to her voice. Light. Airy. Pure. The tones, better belonging to a mythical fairy than a mortal woman, wrapped around him, enthralling. “An authoritative order. A command.” She took a step toward him and stopped. There was a calculated measure to her movements and speech, and she wielded both like a skilled swordsman. “The act or an instance of asking for something. Something that is asked for. That,” she said with deliberate emphasis, “is the distinction… Your Grace.” She tacked on that last part, his title.
William stared unblinkingly at the insolent baggage.
Mayhap he’d gone mad after all. By God, was the chit truly giving him a tutor’s lecture on the damned word behest? He narrowed his eyes. The only other possibility was that the woman was… mocking him. Either, even with his reduced faculties and power, proved an unfamiliar state for him. Men did not challenge or question him. Had he said, as a duke, that it was sunny in the midst of a rainstorm, all of Polite Society would have nodded their heads like eager chicks pecking at the ground. And anyone who’d dared challenge him, the Sovereign, would have been removed from power.
“Who are you?” he barked.
“Miss Allenby.” She gave him a long look.
She expected something from him.
But then, everyone always expected something. The only one who hadn’t had been wholly deserving of everything, and in the end, he’d given her… nothing. Pain radiated up his jaw, striking his temples and forehead.
“Your name means nothing to me,” he said flatly, stalking over to the Chinese red lacquer cabinet. Making quick work of the intricate metal locks that protected the stock, he fished out a bottle.
“I did not expect it should.”
Something in that quiet retort gave him pause.
He glanced over his shoulder, but the woman stood there, revealing nothing in her delicate features, her face a perfect mask that any member of the Brethren would have a struggle emulating. “On with it, then,” he snapped, whipping his decanter about. The liquid sloshed noisily within the crystal bottle. “Work whatever magic you possess that resulted in my brother bringing you here.”
“I have no magic,” she said quietly. “I rather suspect it was desperation on Lord Edward’s part that resulted in his visiting me.”
And she proved an excellent read of character. He dropped his hip atop the liquor cabinet. “I’ve been seen by more than six and twenty doctors or healers. What makes you believe you can help?” He yanked the stopper out with his teeth and spit it to the floor.
He’d give credit where credit was due. The lady gave no outward reaction at the uncouth display.
“I never said I can help,” she pointed out.
No, she hadn’t. His brother, however, had insisted as much. William tipped the bottle back and downed a long, slow swallow of the brew. It had long since lost its burn.
He felt the woman’s eyes on him, studying him.
William wiped the back of his shirtsleeve over his mouth. “Then get out.”
The tenacious wench remained. “I never said I could not help.” She lifted her palms slightly. “Nor will I know until I try.”
“Greater men than you have tried,” he said, taking another pull from his bottle.
“With all due respect, they can’t really be greater than I, if they are no longer here, and I am.” The woman’s eyes sparkled, eyes that were neither wholly green, nor brown, but rather, a perfect blending of both those colors.
As such, it took a moment for her words to register.
William set the decanter down behind him with a noiseless click and strolled forward. He stalked a circle around Miss Allenby. Nearly half a foot shorter than he, her frame painfully slender, she had a physique that could be confused for a child’s. If one did not look too closely… and appreciate the generous flare of her hips and bounteous breasts. He stopped behind the lady, tracing his gaze down the expanse of her back and lower, to the curve of her buttocks. Her body stiffened. “Are you being deliberately insolent?” he whispered.
“Only if one considers honesty insolence, as has been my experience with Polite Society.”
He pounced. “You have experience with Polite Society, then.”
Her voice grew shuttered. “I had enough.”
Another clue about the mysterious chit. She spoke in the past tense.
“Furthermore,” she demurred, “I never promised your brother that I would take on your care.”
Take on his care. As though he were a bothersome child a lord or lady wished to rid themselves of. “I’m not looking for a damned nursemaid,” he hissed.
“I merely promised that I would meet with you and determine whether I thought I might help,” she said over his words.
No one could help. And yet…
Through the hurt humiliation, his curiosity stirred. When was the last time anyone had told him, the Duke of Aubrey, no?
When every other man who’d entered his rooms had either averted their gazes in deference to his title, made his head dizzy with the amount of bows they’d bestowed, or tripped over their words from fear of the man he’d become, this slip of a woman remained composed.
Almost… bored.
“What medical skills do you possess?” he tossed, and for the condescension that crept into that query, an inherent part of his speech this past year, a genuine hungering to know evoked the question.
There was an element of unexpected intrigue to the fresh-faced girl.
“Few,” she conceded.
“My, my. You are either modest, or failingly honest.”
“I believe you mean ‘unfailingly,’” she corrected him once again. “Either way, I’m one who speaks only the truth.”
No one, not even his wife, had challenged him. Unlike this chit, who did so at every score.
William lowered his head and placed his lips close to the shell of her ear. “I do not misspeak, Miss Allenby. I said what I meant. Honesty,” he whispered, so close he detected the little shudder that went through her slender frame, “is a failing. It will destroy you every time.” Such had been the lesson he’d instructed the men who served under him.
She shook her head once. “You are wrong.”
He stiffened.
This marked the first time in the whole of his thirty-three years that he’d been told he was incorrect—about anything. No one challenged him. No one questioned him. He’d been born in the right, and it was a state that had only been strengthened through his appointment as the Sovereign.
Until now.
Until her.
William folded his arms at his chest. “Well, then, Miss Allenby, enlighten me as to your distinguished schooling and patients.”
“I never made any assertions about my skills. I am not schooled in medicine,” she said quietly. “Nor do I have patients.” She hesitated a hair of a moment. “That is… the… hum… sor…”
His ears pricked up. Either his hearing was a good deal more improved than he’d credited since he’d been thrown from a shattered carriage, or he was hearing things. “Speak up, Miss Allenby.” William resumed his path around the young woman, and this time, he stopped so that they faced each other. “What was that?” he asked, cupping a hand about his right ear. “It sounded as though you said you do not have patients of the human sort.”
She gave a toss of her dark curls, and the disheveled knot at her nape freed several more auburn-tinged strands. In any other woman, that gesture would have only ever been construed as flirtatious. In this spitfire, it was another mark of her defiance.
“I am a horse doctor.”
His mouth moved, but no words were forthcoming. His brother had brought him a…?
“I’ve cared for dogs, cats, and birds, as well,” she added. “Badgers.”
“Badgers?” he mouthed.
She nodded. “Indeed.”
He started, unaware he’d spoken aloud.
The young woman continued her never-ending enumeration. “Grey wagtails. Tree creepers.” By God, at this point, the minx could be making up beasts and he’d have no idea if she were funning at his expense. “Goldfinches.” Miss Allenby scrunched up a slightly too-small nose in an endearing wrinkle, and she lingered her stare pointedly on him. “I’ve cared for all animals, really. They are not so very different from humans.”
He blinked. By God, surely she wasn’t implying… Surely she didn’t mean that he himself… “I should throw you out on your arse,” he whispered.
Her cheeks exploded with color in the first crack in her otherwise remarkable composure. And at a bloody curse word.
“Where in hell did my brother find you?”
“The Cotswolds.”
His had been a rhetorical question more than anything. She’d answered anyway. William pressed his index fingers and middle fingers against his temples.
“That won’t help, you know.”
His already muddled mind struggled to make sense of that.
The young woman matched his movements, placing callused fingers to her own head. “Your headaches.”
He gnashed his teeth and then immediately regretted the reflexive movement. William swallowed back a groan. “I trust my brother”—the disloyal cur who must have designs on driving William into complete madness—“illuminated you as to my—”
“Impairments?” she asked, so casually that he could not stop himself from wincing. “No,” she explained. “Lord Edward was not forthcoming. I gathered as much from… this…” Miss Allenby dragged a fingernail down her own jawline. Strong enough that it was borderline masculine in its lines, and yet, it lent an exotic quality to the peculiar chit. “And this…” She ran her fingers over her lips, drawing his gaze to the plump, bow-shaped flesh. “Your mouth,” she murmured. “It barely moves as you speak.” This time, it was the minx who took a step closer, scrutinizing him through long, black lashes. “As if… it pains you.”
It did. It was a searing agony that had held him prisoner since he’d been tossed from a carriage and landed face-down upon the pavement.
Of its own volition, his gaze worked a path over her sun-kissed cheeks.
He’d tupped two whores last evening, transforming this very room into a den of carnality. Those wicked, wanton women had been no different than so many others whom he’d spent mindless hours this past year burying himself within. But this spitfire had an air of innocence and strength rolled together, a merger of sentiments he’d believed could not exist within one person.
A wave of lust gripped him, and he fought to rein in that yearning, instead focusing on her unerringly accurate assessment of his injury.
“Am I correct?” she ventured, her hesitancy pulling him back. “Is it your jaw?” Miss Allenby hovered on the balls of her feet in anticipation of his answer.
He’d belonged to the Brethren enough to know not to ever concede a personal fact about oneself or one’s family. Everything she’d gleaned could have come as easily from the scandal sheets that had written of the Duke and Duchess of Aubrey’s tragic accident and his subsequent recovery.
“Well?” he taunted. “Doctor of animals. Can you help?”
*
Elsie ignored the taunting and focused on his question.
Could she help?
The better question to be asked was… did he wish to be helped? After all, he’d pointedly ignored the query she’d put to him regarding his jawbone.
As such, her immediate answer would be no.
Some creatures were content to remain in a corner and lick their wounds until they drew their last labored breath.
And there could be no disputing the truth: His Grace, the Duke of Aubrey, was as much a wounded beast as any of the ones she’d cared for over the years.
Snarling. Lashing out. And, in his case, drinking too much spirits. The Duke of Aubrey as he stood before her was certainly not what she’d expected of the gentleman.
When Lord Edward had sought her out, Elsie had assumed the gentleman had spoken of physical wounds that his brother had suffered. Given the work he did for the Home Office, and the injured agents her father had tended from that organization, she’d expected there would be marks just as the one he wore upon his jaw.
But this man before her? Elsie did a sweep of him. He was vastly more complex than that.
If one looked too closely, one would miss the details she herself had seen. And yet, though there were no outward scars revealing a physical suffering, that did not mean none existed.
No, but that being true, the most visible, the most tangible marks of this man’s misery were subtle. His sunken cheeks, covered with several days’ worth of growth. The tangle of greasy black curls that hung over his face. And the most telling of all… the ease with which he downed spirits that would have seen any other man ape-drunk.
The Duke of Aubrey was very much broken.
“Well?” he prodded. “Do you believe you can help?”
Tell him no. An angry, unforgiving figure such as he would never question the reasons for that answer. He’d want to lick away at his wounded pride and, therefore, would be as content with her leaving as she herself would be.
“I’ll ask you again. Where did my brother find you?”
“Bladon,” she clarified. “It’s a small village in the Cotsw—”
“Are you being deliberately obtuse?” he shot back.
“He came knowing my father, Francis Allenby, was more skilled than any doctor to have set foot in this household,” she said with the Allenby pride her father once predicted would be the ruin of her. As soon as the admission left her mouth, she recoiled. She’d said too much.
And yet…
Elsie searched for a hint that her revelation meant… something to this man. That it meant anything.
His face remained coldly blank. “So, your reputation has been earned because of who your father was?”
A haze of red descended over her eyes as the implications of that question slammed into her with a force, knocking the air from her chest.
Why… why… He truly did not know of the work her father had done. He neither recognized her name, nor the service Francis Allenby had provided for the country.
But then, what should she expect of an organization who’d use a man as they had her father and let him perish in the cruelest way possible at the hands of an enemy?
“Miss Allenby?” His Grace demanded impatiently.
“I suppose it is no different than one earning one’s reputation from a title one was born with,” she shot back. Elsie rocked back on her heels as all the hatred, pain, and horror this man and his organization had caused consumed her. It eradicated the inherent need to help, the curiosity to meet the once-great leader of the Brethren. All the suffering he knew was deserved. “You are correct. I cannot help you.” Elsie turned to leave. She’d done all that she’d promised she would. She’d met with the gentleman and evaluated him. She owed neither him, nor his brother, nor the Brethren, another blasted thing.
Elsie made it no farther than three steps.
The duke slid himself before her, blocking her path to the door.
Run, poppet… Run…
The warning bells screamed as the past merged with the present, jumbling it all in her mind, melding the Duke of Aubrey’s face with that of another.
Crying out, Elsie let her fist fly.
The duke instantly caught it.
The unexpected human touch, firm yet hot, seared her skin and snapped her from the reverie. Shivers radiated from her hand, tingling up her arm. This hold, also as unrelenting as another’s had been, was yet so very different. There was a gentleness to the grip at odds with the one that haunted her still five years later.
Elsie blinked wildly.
I am safe. I am safe. I am safe.
She let the mantra envelop her in a steadying calm.
She was safe.
Or as safe as one could be in this man’s presence.
The Duke of Aubrey released her.
Elsie brought her shoulders back and braced for an interrogation or chastisement.
After all, one did not lift a finger to a duke, and certainly not the Sovereign.
His Grace spoke. “I have not dismissed you.”
Yet.
That single, unspoken syllable hung there.
And still, the innate understanding she’d always possessed of battle-worn creatures hinted at one who wouldn’t dismiss her. He’d keep her here… regardless of what she wished or didn’t wish.
“You worked alongside your father,” he murmured. And a half-mad laugh gurgled in her throat. Any other nobleman would have railed at her for having dared to lift a hand with even the threat of violence. This gentleman carried on like they merely resumed a pleasant discourse over tea. “Was he a man of some skill?”
Skill enough that he’d been entrusted with the most wounded, broken men in the Brethren. “He was,” she said, her voice thick.
The capacity in which her father had served, however, was a detail she kept close. By his own valuable reminder of moments ago, one should be careful with what information one dispensed. Or mayhap he merely toyed with her. Mayhap this was as much a test as the one they’d put to her late papa, and the Duke of Aubrey well knew who her father was and of what he’d been accused.
Elsie peered at him, searching his breathtakingly chiseled features.
And finding… nothing. No guilt. No understanding. No larger game he played.
And that absolute lack of knowing was somehow worse. It left her bereft and aching. Her father had given of his services, tending men within the Brethren, and this man, their great, fearless, vaunted leader had no recollection.
“And some of those skills have transferred to you, the daughter.”
Elsie didn’t wish to remain here, caring for a dissolute lord who’d lost himself in drink and sorrow. She weighed her response. “That is what your brother presumes.” And pain. He’d lost himself in pain.
Never turn your back on those who are suffering, poppet.
The reminder, given to her by her father with the arrival of each midnight patient, pinged around her mind, sending guilt through her.
“What about you?” His Grace pressed. “What is your assessment of your own abilities?” There was a faint thread underlying his words. One tinged with… hope that the gentleman himself likely couldn’t hear and didn’t know. And she despised with every fiber of her being the heightened attunement her father had called a gift, but now proved very much to be a curse.
Elsie contemplated the doorway, yearning to put the heavy oak panel between her… and this world of treachery and darkness she’d vowed to never again be part of. She briefly closed her eyes, damning the lessons ingrained into her by her father. She opened her eyes and looked up at the towering gentleman. “There is no proper reply I can give to that question.” At his questioning look, Elsie lifted her shoulders in a little shrug. “To proclaim myself my father’s equal in skill”—which would be false in every way—“would mark me conceited, and that level of conceit would diminish any capabilities I might otherwise possess. But to insist none of his talents transferred would suggest I was inadequate.”
He pierced her with his obsidian gaze, that probing stare capable of stealing secrets that he had no right to but would command at a whim if he so wished.
“You are correct,” he said at last, the admission unexpected. “It’s my jaw. I broke it a year ago.”
Elsie waited for him to say more on it, but he shared nothing else. “I… see.” And yet, she didn’t. Questions remained about how he’d sustained the wound, details she’d wager he’d tell her to go to hell if she dared ask about. “I venture your…” Pain. She called the word back. All animals took umbrage with the world witnessing or knowing of their suffering. “…mouth and head are also afflicted by the previous injury.”
A muscle ticked at the corner of his right eye. He gave a tight, infinitesimal nod. “You have three weeks,” he said flatly, striding past her and stopping at the door. “Let us hope you are as skilled as they say, Miss Allenby,” he murmured as he drew the door open.
Gooseflesh climbed along her arms, and as Elsie took her leave, she could not dispel the sense that she’d just made the same deal with the Devil her father had all those years ago.