The Devil's Daughter Page 5

  Charles Cavendish intervened in an urgent tone.

  “Pray don’t excite him, Miss Yorke,” he begged. “You can do no good.” He could have added: “You have already done quite enough!”

  Captain Markham returned, accompanied by a suitably sober-faced physician, who insisted upon examining the Marquis before answering his urgent questions.

  “How is he? Will he live?”

  “I don’t think we need worry overmuch about the extent of the damage done to your arm, my lord,” he said in as soothing a tone as he could muster under such circumstances. “It is no more than a rather nasty flesh wound...”

  “Yes, yes,” the Marquis replied, making an impatient gesture. “But Aintree? What of Aintree?”

  “He is alive,” the doctor replied very soberly. “But that is as much as I can say.”

  The Marquis drew in his breath almost painfully.

  “Thank God!” he exclaimed.

  “Naturally, his situation is critical,” the doctor added, with rather more of a note of criticism—not to say actual disapproval—in his voice this time. “The ball penetrated his shoulder, but it has done some damage in the area of his right lung, which as you will be aware is a vital area and could cause us some trouble. At the moment he is unconscious, and it is better that he should remain so until I have got him somewhere where I can operate. And if the ball is removed fairly expeditiously—and the loss of blood is not excessive—”

  Lord Capel nodded, his face very white indeed.

  “I understand,” he said quietly. “And I would like to make it clear that any expenses incurred must be my affair entirely, and no effort must be spared to save him. Will you give me your word that you will do everything in your power?”

  The doctor bowed.

  “I will, my lord. I will do my very best.” He shrugged his shoulders slightly. “But beyond that it is not entirely up to me ... Your lordship will understand that, of course?”

  Once again the Marquis nodded.

  “You saw what happened?” he said curtly.

  “I did indeed, my lord,” he replied, without glancing in Harriet’s direction.

  “Damnation!” the Marquis of Capel exclaimed, and turned and walked stiffly in the direction of his carriage. His two friends followed, and Harriet, although receiving no invitation to do so, trailed humbly behind them. She noticed that Lord Capel barely glanced at the man lying unconscious on the ground, with his stricken friends kneeling beside him, although they passed within a few feet of the unhappy little group on the way to the carriage. Harriet, on the other hand, felt as if something impelled her to halt beside the victim and bestow upon him a glance of the utmost compassion, and when she saw how completely inert he was, and how waxen his face, she could not prevent herself from dropping to her own knees beside him and enquiring of his companions whether there was anything at all she could do to help.

  But from their frozen expressions she gathered that they would prefer not to know her.

  “Thank you, madam,” one replied. “But Dr. Groves has already done all that is possible in such a situation as this. We are entirely in his hands.”

  Harriet nodded, and rose quietly to her feet, realising to the full as she did so how outrageously she had behaved. And yet all that she had intended was thoroughly admirable, could they but have understood her motives to secure the life of Greville Aintree, when it appeared to be desperately threatened, and prevent Lord Capel becoming a murderer! And if her concern with Lord Capel had been her primary motive, the thought of her three charges in Sussex had seemed a sufficient excuse.

  And yet now she was far from being sure. She was desperately certain that she had behaved in a completely unforgivable manner.

  She cast one more glance at Greville Aintree, staining the short, sweet grass of the common with the steady flow of his blood, and then heeded the urgent voice of Captain Markham.

  “Miss Yorke,” he called, “we are anxious to get the Marquis back to his house as quickly as possible. Will you please not cause us any delay.”

  “I am coming at once,” she replied, and moved hurriedly in the direction of the carriage.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Once inside the carriage Harriet allowed herself to be wedged between the captain and the austere but handsome Mr. Cavendish, while Lord Capel was disposed as comfortably as possible on the opposite seat. For the first half mile or so of the journey he remained completely silent, lying back with his eyes closed and his mouth tightly compressed, as if he was suffering a good deal. And it was only when he opened his eyes and looked directly across at her that Harriet realised, as she saw the glitter of cold fury between his thick black eyelashes, that the physical part of his ordeal was not that which was causing the greater disturbance to him at that moment.

  The line of his lips was positively frightening, and the cold glitter filled her with no small amount of alarm.

  “I hope you are satisfied, Miss Yorke,” he said, “with your performance today.”

  Without any real hope of appeasing his anger she made an attempt.

  “I have told you, my lord,” she replied, in the most abject of tones, “that I am so truly sorry for what I have done that I cannot possibly express how badly I feel about it. I have no certainty that I would not do it again in similar circumstances, but I know I behaved atrociously, and as a result a man’s life lies in the balance.”

  “If he dies, you will have the satisfaction of knowing yourself his murderer,” the Marquis informed her with icy cruelty.

  Charles Cavendish moved protestingly on the seat beside Harriet, and frowned across at the Marquis.

  “You cannot, if you wish to be entirely fair to Miss Yorke, make such a statement as that, Rick,” he offered in a quiet but firm tone, while he smiled unexpectedly at Harriet. His latent chivalry sent a little flood of warmth surging about her heart. “Her behaviour was no more than one might have expected from a member of her sex. It is quite clear that her only intention was to prevent you doing serious harm to Aintree.”

  “Instead of which she has got the fellow killed—or as good as,” Lord Capel said with a curl of his remarkably handsome upper lip. “And I suppose it never even occurred to her that I might have been the one left behind there on the common!”

  Harriet shivered uncontrollably.

  “Oh, no!” she protested. “It was simply that I—I didn’t really think!”

  And for the first time she did think how utterly disastrous that would have been for the de Courceys.

  His lordship bowed to her ironically, and winced immediately afterwards because the unwise movement caused him considerable discomfort.

  “You are too kind, ma’am,” he said to her witheringly. “And it does incline one to wonder what precise action you would have taken if you had thought!”

  Captain Markham, who had been gazing out of the carriage window in an unseeing way, barely aware of the familiar landmarks that were gliding past on either hand, or the increasing evidence that they were drawing nearer and nearer to London and their ultimate destination, St. James’s Square, with every turn of the wheels, rounded suddenly upon his three fellow-travellers and accused them of wasting valuable time.

  With the utmost resolution he announced:

  “There is no point in blaming Miss Yorke for what has happened. It has happened, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But you, Rick! Now there’s a problem we have to deal with, and little enough time to do it in. If Aintree dies it’ll be a devilish awkward situation—devilish awkward! Those friends of his will be out for your blood like a pack of hounds, and they’ll be on to you before you can say ‘It’s a damn fine morning!’ unless you go to ground. And, hell and damnation, Rick, it won’t be no fine morning for you if they catch up with you—it’ll be a devilish gloomy day!”

  “Thank you very much for such a comforting expression of your personal opinion, Bob,” his lordship said with languor and a very great deal of dryness. He added,
“But so far as we know Aintree isn’t dead yet.”

  Markham shook his head at him.

  “I wouldn’t count on his surviving if I were you, Rick. The last I saw of him stretched out on that blasted heath he was certainly as good as dead, and I don’t think that fellow Groves thought he was going to work any miracles when he started hacking away at that bullet of yours. I know you offered to recompense him handsomely if he achieved a miracle, but I thought his expression was pretty glum.”

  “I’m afraid that’s perfectly true, Rick,” Cavendish echoed his friend’s sentiments in a very sober voice indeed.

  “So?” the Marquis said, wishing he had a bottle of laudanum somewhere about his person, and wondering why a little group of trees on a nearby knoll appeared to be wavering most uncertainly despite his best endeavours to focus them.

  “There’s only one thing I can suggest,” the captain responded earnestly, bending forward a little the better to impress the Marquis with the soundness of his reasoning. “We can’t have you turning up in St. James’s Square, and Pauncefoot turning pea-green at the sight of all that blood—to say nothing of all the errand boys in the district congregating on your doorstep to watch you being assisted into your house. Not if you’re to go to ground until the whole thing’s cooled off a little...” He paused, as if preparing himself to meet a considerable amount of opposition, and already detecting signs in the Marquis’s face of positive mutiny. “You know my rooms in Albemarle Street? You’ve dined there on several occasions.”

  “Of course I know your rooms,” Lord Capel replied pettishly. “But I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed your dinners.” The captain decided to overlook the ungraciousness of such an admission, and continued:

  “Nevertheless, my housekeeper, who is also my landlady, is a woman of discretion and sound common sense, and she would be unlikely to bother you if you moved in for a short time. The rooms are comfortable enough, and you could remain hidden there for as long as we deem it necessary. I could move in with my sister and her brood in Berkeley Square. Her husband’s hardly ever sober, so he won’t really notice, and I haven’t seen much of any of them since Waterloo. You won’t be putting me about... I find her brats diverting, and it’s high time I took them about and bought them a few presents and things like that. Took on the role of uncle, don’t you know?”

  “I don’t,” Lord Capel replied feebly.

  “Well, what do you say? It’s better than Charles’s place, because his man is forever on the watch and would smell a rat as soon as he set eyes on you, and in any case Charles would find it difficult to move out. If you say the word I’ll order the coachman to stop and tell him to avoid St. James’s Square like the plague and make for Albemarle Street.”

  It took a great deal more argument than this to convince the injured man that he had virtually no alternative to his friend’s highly considerate and practical suggestion. And in the end he gave in ungraciously and only made one stipulation, and that was that his man Fetcham should be brought to him with as little delay as possible, and without alerting or alarming any of the other occupants of the house in St. James’s Square. When the carriage stopped in Albemarle Street he declined to allow himself to be assisted to the pavement, and strode into the house and up the stairs to the sitting-room on the first floor with the vigour of a man in very fine fettle. It was only when he saw the inadequacy of the settee in the sitting-room that he turned through the door into the bedroom and collapsed on the bed. Harriet, who had followed the party into the house—once again without being invited—moved immediately to his side.

  “Brandy,” she called urgently. “Will someone please bring the Marquis some brandy?”

  She was well aware that raw spirit was the last thing a man in his condition should receive, but as he appeared more dead than alive as he lay sprawled on the bed she could think of nothing else that was likely to revive him.

  A short time later, propped up by pillows and with a certain amount of colour returned to his face, his lordship uttered a grudging “thank you” to Miss Yorke. After she had taken a good look at his wound, it struck her as by no means the kind which anyone as unskilled as herself should be called upon to deal with; but at the same time she understood the unwillingness of the Marquis’s friends to call in a local doctor.

  There might be awkward questions to answer, and it could do harm to the Marquis himself. The whole object of taking over Captain Markham’s apartment was to prevent anyone asking awkward questions.

  “Don’t worry,” the Marquis urged them at last, becoming increasingly petulant as the argument over what was the best thing to be done in the circumstances was waged over his head—quite literally, in fact, since he was lying completely supine throughout the better part of it. It was only when he found he could not endure it any longer that he struggled into a sitting position. “I have no feeling that I am actually going to die, although it might simplify matters all round if I could be so obliging as to do so. You could then have me smuggled down the back stairs and interred somewhere locally with as little delay as possible and as decently as you could contrive. But unhappily for you two gentlemen, associates of my bosom, I am extraordinarily resistant to pressures upon me, and with the help of Fetcham, when he arrives, I shall survive. He has dug more bullets out of wounded men than I have tied cravats, and if you want to know all about it I suggest you question him when he arrives. He was with the fifty-second at Orthez.”

  Captain Markham drew an instant breath of relief, and even Charles Cavendish’s expression brightened.

  “In that case, Rick,” he said, “perhaps you will forgive me if I leave you now. I have an engagement which it would be excessively impolite of me to ignore, and it appears there is little more I can actually do for you at this present.”

  “There is nothing,” his lordship assured him, anxious to be left alone.

  “And I,” Markham spoke up swiftly, being comfortably aware that a greater degree of urgency attached to his reason for leaving the wounded man to his devices, “have to prepare my sister for my descent upon her, and to acquaint your man Fetcham with your need of him here. So I trust you will forgive me too, Rick, if I do not delay any longer?”

  Lord Capel acknowledged this with a very faint movement of his hand. Then, as the other two men looked somewhat awkwardly at Harriet as if by no means certain they had a right to impose on her any further, but hoping fervently that she would volunteer to remain with the invalid until his manservant could take over the duty, a faint glimmer of amusement appeared in the eyes of Richard Wendover, and he made an unexpected but quite open appeal to her.

  “Well, Miss Yorke?” he said, those over-bright eyes watching her with a certain amount of relish. “Are you going to abandon me, too, having reduced me to such a parlous state? Or do you propose to do your womanly duty and stay and hold my hand until Fetcham arrives?”

  Harriet ignored the suggestion about holding his hand, and replied—having already made up her mind that there was no other course open to her—that she would remain. But only, she added firmly, until such time as he was unlikely to be left alone.

  “Of course,” his lordship agreed smoothly. “Of course! Otherwise Bob’s landlady might have some reason to object!”

  “Oh, she won’t trouble you,” Markham assured him. “She’ll stay out of sight unless you need her, and if you do need her just ring the bell.” He smiled appreciatively as well as gratefully at Harriet. “Then she’ll come at once. She’s a devilish fine, sensible sort of a woman—and the best cook in London, despite what Rick says!”

  Lord Capel snorted.

  “If I have to endure both her food and her company I shall devise prompt plans to remove myself from such unwanted ministrations,” he assured them all with a sudden burst of energetic emphasis. “I give you my word on that!”

  Harriet approached the bed and laid a cool hand on his forehead.

  “If I were you, my lord,” she advised sensibly, “I would lie very still and
conserve your strength. You must remember that any unwise movement is likely to cause your wound to start bleeding afresh.”

  The other two tiptoed hastily from the room, very much relieved that they were making their escape and convinced that Harriet had the makings of a remarkably fine nurse. And for a young woman with such enchanting curls and remarkably fine eyes that was a quite extraordinary thing.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  The morning wore slowly away, and it was late afternoon before Fetcham put in an appearance. During those hours, which seemed to Harriet to drag interminably, the patient lay on the bed and slept intermittently, and when he was not sleeping he complained bitterly of the pretty pass to which he had been brought, of the stupidity of women, and the unreliability of his friends.

  “What do you suppose they are doing?” he asked constantly, staring up into Harriet’s face with his feverishly bright dark eyes. “Fetcham would come at once if he was made aware of my situation, but since he has not come Bob must have been unforgivably negligent. That sister of his ... She’s an empty-headed scatterbrain if you like! She’s probably got him crawling all over the nursery floor, tempting the little ones with bonbons, while I lie here practically at death’s door...”

  “You are not at death’s door.” Harriet spoke with a good deal of firmness, because this was not the first time he had made such an assertion. “You are not even close to death’s door. You have sustained a nasty wound, and I suspect you are suffering from mounting fever; and when your man arrives—”

  “But he hasn’t arrived! And, in any case, whose fault is it that I am suffering from what you call mounting fever?” he demanded, raising himself on his uninjured elbow and glaring at her. “Whose fault but yours? Yours, you redheaded, green-eyed, disobedient, ill-omened, disaster-procuring female? And tell me,” he added, lying back in a more relaxed attitude on the bed, “what precisely was your reason for jogging my elbow? Did you really wish to see me killed?”