He pulled his pocket watch from his waistcoat. “It’s almost seven,” he said under his breath.
Grim Jack glanced appraisingly at his rather battered timepiece.
A small flat-bottomed barge drifted toward the adjacent dock. Griffin stared absently at the three passengers hurrying down the pier. A gentleman carrying a portmanteau, his wife nudging a slender hooded figure who might have been an invalid or-
She turned her head. He couldn’t make out her face. But he’d known her from the day she appeared like a changeling on the castle drawbridge. He had carried her on his shoulders and caught her when she tired of swinging from the chandelier. He thought she called his name. The woman at her side raised a pistol to Edlyn’s head.
His mind froze. Jack shoved him aside and Griffin shoved him right back, shouting out the one word of warning that he knew Edlyn would understand.
“Drop!”
Four shots erupted, two from the cabin of a shallop drifting by, another from a boarded-up window in the deserted tenement that overlooked the wharf. The fourth came from his own gun.
Rosalie Porter fell in her final performance, her male accomplice crumbling in her shadow. And Edlyn dropped with the death-defying grace of her former self, only to be surrounded by more bodyguards than Griffin could begin to number.
“Oh, God,” he said, aware of footsteps pounding down the pier and a jubilant shout from the captain of the shallop. And… surely that was not the Boscastle battle cry, resounding from the cabin of the shallop that had floated by? “Jack Gardner, I will seek your pardon if it costs me a dukedom. And if any man brings evidence against you-”
He turned.
Grim Jack was gone, and so was the enameled pocket watch and gold-link chain that had been attached to Griffin’s waistcoat pocket. The mate to his dueling pistol, however, lay at his feet.
He carried Edlyn back to his carriage on the bridge, escorted by an entourage of well-wishers, mudlarks, and river policemen. She was crying against his neck, and nothing he said could have stopped her.
“You’re all right, Edlyn. It’s over. It’s done. If they hurt you… well, that will never happen again. We’ll be together. It’s going to be fine now.”
He could have sworn that his first footman, Trenton, was fighting tears himself as he opened the carriage door. “I want to tell you something,” Edlyn whispered, her hands knotted around his neck. “I was on the turret when my father took that jump. I knew it was an accident, and I didn’t tell. I let everyone blame you, Uncle Griff. I saw that it wasn’t your fault, and I never told. I wanted to find my mother, and no one helped me.”
He nodded. “We shall search for her together.”
He deposited her on the seat. He knew that Edlyn expected him to be angry at what she had confessed. But he could not find it in him. He should also have known that the woman who had seen him at his worst, and loved him anyway, would be waiting in the carriage. And that he wanted her, needed her, to be there.
“Thunder all you like,” Harriet said, gripping Edlyn to her with one hand, the other grasping the cuff of his coat. “I’ve heard it all before, duke.”
“Doubtless you shall hear it for a long time to come.”
She stroked Edlyn’s hair. “My heart stopped when I saw you both standing on the pier and heard that gunfire.”
He bent his head to kiss her. “Is it beating now?” he asked, lacing his fingers through hers.
“Harder, I fear, than I can stand.”
His thumb sculpted the fine bones of her face. “Then I shall take it into my safekeeping so that nothing can ever threaten it again. I am yours, Harriet. And you are mine.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
He had vowed to be with me on my wedding-night, yet he did not consider that threat as binding him to peace in the meantime.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
The Duke of Glenmorgan got arrested on the night before his wedding.
He’d considered refusing when two of his Boscastle cousins, Lords Drake and Devon, appeared on his doorstep that evening and innocently announced that, as he would be taking a wife tomorrow, they would escort him for a last night on the Town.
He shrugged. Why not? Harriet, Aunt Primrose, and Edlyn had been whisked off in an impressive coach-and-six by a bewigged driver and a haughty assembly of footmen, who closed the carriage door before Harriet could blow her betrothed a kiss. The ladies would spend the night at Lady Sedgecroft’s Park Lane mansion, discussing… he didn’t know. The mysteries of the marriage bed? That Primrose should have an opinion on such matters chilled his blood. As long as it did not involve raising an Egyptian pharaoh from the dressing closet, he assumed he would be able to deal with it.
“Are we taking my carriage or yours?” he asked as he walked out the front door, where the two blue-eyed brothers awaited him.
“Neither,” Drake said, staring up at the cloudy sky. “We’re walking.”
Shoulder to shoulder, the Boscastle men owned the streets. Only a fool would cross a member of the legendary brood and hope to escape unscathed as well as with all his teeth intact.
Still, more fools come out at night than do stars, and it was only a matter of time before the boys ended up at a low-stakes silver hell, where Lord Devon not only lost his proverbial shirt but sheepishly realized he didn’t have a sixpence on his person to pay up.
The other player, who was not only missing a few teeth but had obviously never heard of the Boscastle family, reached across the table to grab Devon by the lapels of his double-breasted gray frock coat.
Devon’s hand shot up and caught the man’s wrist in a paralyzing hold. “Ask him to pay,” he said, grinning in Griffin’s direction. “He’s a duke.”
The man spat a stream of spittle on the table, shaking his wrist as it was released. “Dook, my arse.”
The clink of glasses, the rattle of dice, and uninhibited conversation ceased. Lord Drake Boscastle looked up from his hand of cards with a half smile. The guard who stood at the iron-grilled door turned in expectation.
Griffin bestirred himself from his private musings of bedding Harriet and glanced around the smoke-filled den. For a moment he wondered if some bawdy toast was about to be made in his dishonor. But suddenly the player who’d beaten Devon lifted a stool over his head.
“Be ye deaf, boy?” he shouted at Griffin. “I said, ‘Dook, my arse.’”
Griffin smiled, rolling up his sleeves. “I could do that.”
And so he did, with Drake and Devon at his back joking that this hell was nothing compared to what they would go through when they returned in a disheveled state to their wives.
Griffin tore off his coat, flung it into a leering face, and threw a punch at another. “If this is your idea of a bachelor party,” he said with a laugh, “I bloody well hope I wake up tomorrow for my own wedding.”
Drake upended a table as the last of three entry doors splintered open and the guard yelled, “Raid!” The den swarmed with bludgeon-armed Bow men who had only yesterday been on Griffin’s side. Gamblers scrambled for secret passageways, their cards and dice boxes swooped up before Griffin could even find his coat.
“All right.” A club prodded his ribs. “Party’s up. There’s a penalty for illegal gambling, as if you didn’t know.”
“Oh, for the love of God. I’m the Duke of Glenmorgan.”
The constable shifted his gaze to the two other men leaning idly against the wall. “Right. And those would be your duchess and her hairdresser, I suppose?”
Who would have dreamed that the wicked Duke of Glenmorgan would learn everything he needed to know about love in a gaol cell, from one of London’s premier rakes? A helpless audience, he slumped on the hard wooden bench he shared with Devon’s lanky frame, while Drake paced and waxed philosophical in the dark. Griffin felt his skull throb with what might evolve into the worst hangover of his life. At least he would meet Harriet on the morrow with all his teeth.