Chapter 20

A frozen silence descended upon the parlour. Rufus, who had been lounging in a wingback chair by the fireplace, continued lounging in a wingback chair by the fireplace. Crossing one leg over the other, he regarded the visitor placidly.

“Not today, thank you, Valour.”

The stranger, who could only have been Miss Carswile’s brother, was brought up short by this response. “W-wait. What?”

Rufus seemed to have become distracted by the speck of dust upon the cuff of his borrowed coat. “I have not defiled your sister. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

“I could give you some tips if you like?” Belle offered.

“That is very kind of you,” returned Rufus politely. “But given my unshakeable proclivities, I prefer to restrict my defilements to brothers.” His eyes flicked wickedly back to Mr. Carswile. “How about it? Can I interest you in a mortal sin or two?”

Belle watched the young man with interest. She had never seen anyone spontaneously combust before. His mouth dropped open, words falling out of it like apples in a windstorm. “You ... you openly admit your ... your ... your ...”

“If you can’t say it,” murmured Rufus, “you don’t get to complain about it.”

Mr. Carswile stilled, his face very pale and set. “I told Verity she should not debase herself entangling with a creature like you. I am not, however, pleased to be proven correct. How dare you jilt my sister, you piece of abject human filth. She is worth a hundred, no a thousand, of you.”

“I will not dispute that.”

“I dispute it,” put in Belle. “No human being is worth any more or any less than any other.”

“Then”—ignoring her completely, Mr. Carswile descended upon Rufus, sword drawn—“you will grant me satisfaction.”

Gently, Rufus pushed the blade aside. His voice was equally gentle as he said, “I will not.”

“I ... beg your pardon?” Once again, Mr. Carswile was nonplussed. “What do you mean you will not .”

“I mean precisely what I say: I will not.”

“Then you are a coward, sir, as well as a deviant.”

Rufus shrugged. “Indeed.”

“Did you not hear me?” demanded Mr. Carswile. “I called you a coward.”

“I did hear you call me that, yes.”

A new commingling of rage and bewilderment twisted the young man’s features. “Do you have no pride?”

“I think”—Rufus tilted his head back, better to meet the gaze of his interlocutor—“you have confused the question of whether I have pride, which I may not, with the question of whether I care what you say of me, which I certainly do not.”

“This is a matter of honour. It concerns what all right-thinking men will say of you.”

Lifting his hand delicately to his mouth, Rufus stifled a yawn. “As you are at such pains to point out, I am a lost cause to right-thinking men already.”

“Damn it, you . . . you . . .”

“Degenerate?” Rufus offered. “Caudlemaker? Sodomite? Catamite?”

“Will you answer me or no?”

“I have answered you. Several times, actually.”

“Will you,” persisted Mr. Carswile, “meet me upon the field of honour?”

“No,” said Rufus.

There was a long silence, broken only by Mr. Carswile’s harsh breathing as he leaned over Rufus.

After a moment or two, Gil cleared his throat. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’m a little confused. Is this some kind of theatrical performance?”

“In every sense but the actual. This”—Rufus indicated the man before him—“is Mr. Valour Carswile. He is the younger brother of Miss Verity Carswile, the lady I was engaged to before I ran away with Miss Tarleton here.”

“I confess,” said Gil, “I am no less confused. For a gentleman with such a marked partiality for gentlemen, you seem to be involved with a lot of ladies.”

Rufus sighed. “Believe me, I am as baffled by this as you are.”

“It makes perfect sense,” added Belle, who was highly relieved she hadn’t gone to bed. “In context .” And then, to Rufus, “I think you had better fight him, you know. He has said some very nasty and untrue things about you.”

“I am not fighting anyone. Let alone on so slight a pretext.”

“Is it slight? He has impugned—”

“Nothing of significance. Though”—and here he inched away from Mr. Carswile—“he is cleaving a little close for comfort.”

Mr. Carswile reared back, as though struck or kissed. “Am I to understand you are declining ?”

“Your marked incapacity to comprehend the word no is beginning to seriously concern me, Valour. For the last fucking time, yes, I am declining. I will not fight you.”

“Because you are a coward?”

“As you’ve said.”

“And a villain?”

“Apparently.”

“A man without honour.”

“If you insist.”

“And indeed no man at all.”

Rufus’s lips curled into the most contemptuous sneer Belle had ever seen them wear, and he had quite a line in contemptuous sneers when needed. “Why is it,” he said musingly, “that the greatest insult my sex can muster is to exile one from it? Where lies the great virtue in being a man? What is the great shame in being other than one?”

“I am not here,” exclaimed Mr. Carswile, pushed to new heights of fury, “to engage in sophistry with a ... with a ... with you .”

“Are you sure you won’t duel him?” asked Belle. “He’s being very annoying.”

“Bellflower”—there was a note of unusual gravity in Rufus’s voice—“let us not treat instruments of death any more lightly than we already have upon this journey.”

“Couldn’t you just stab him or shoot him a little bit?”

“He is a callow youth. I am a moderately seasoned soldier. There is no good outcome for either of us if we meet in violence.”

“What did you call me?” snapped Mr. Carswile.

“Nothing less true, nor more insulting than the things you have called me, my dear.”

“It is astonishing to me that Wellington would ever honour someone like you.”

“That’s the thing.” Rufus accompanied the words with a languid gesture. “On the battlefield, where you stick your prick matters a lot less than where you stick your sabre.”

The young man drew himself to his full height, which was quite impressive, for he probably cut a fine figure when not infuriated beyond reason. “I will not stand for this. I cannot.”

“Learn,” suggested Rufus.

“And perhaps”—Gil spoke up unexpectedly—“consider that the things of which you are accusing Sir Horley here are fundamentally incompatible with each other.”

“Who the hell are you?” Mr. Carswile rounded on the bookseller.

“Um, nobody. Um, a friend. Maybe? But ... but logically , the sort of gentleman whose tastes incline him towards other gentlemen is not the sort of gentleman to imperil a lady’s virtue.”

“This isn’t about logic . It is about honour. And decency.”

Gil twitched nervously. “I feel those things should probably bear at least some relation to each other?”

“What you feel,” cried Mr. Carswile, “is wholly irrelevant to me. And as for you”—he spun back to Rufus—“I am done with your prevarications.” With that, he delivered a sharp slap to Rufus’s cheek—a blow intended for insult as much as injury. “Now what have you to say for yourself?”

Rufus patted gingerly at his face. “Ow?”

Mr. Carswile struck him again, the sound of it unnaturally loud in that bright, ordinary room.

“Please do stop hitting me; there’s a good fellow.”

“I will stop hitting you,” snarled Mr. Carswile, “when”—slap—“you”—slap—“give”—slap—“me”—slap—“satisf—”

He got no further. Rufus was out of the chair in one swift, sure movement, his hand closing around the young man’s wrist as he levered it behind his back, the position sufficiently unforgiving as to wring a strangled yelp from his would-be assailant.

“I see you had the right of it as usual, Belle,” Rufus remarked, not even out of breath. “He is very annoying.”

Then he marched Mr. Carswile, whose resistance had been reduced solely to the vocal, out of the room.

“Oh my,” said Gil, in the wake of their departure.

He was looking, Belle thought, even more flushed than usual. “Are you quite well?” she asked.

“Mostly. I mean, not really. That was ... that was, um, really quite unreasonably attractive, wasn’t it?”

“I certainly enjoyed it, though I’m sorry I didn’t get to witness a proper duel. The last one I attended was an absolute bust.”

“You have contrived to live an extraordinarily eventful life, Miss Tarleton.”

She was not accustomed to thinking of her life in such terms; mostly she spent it chafing against its restrictions. Then again, perhaps everyone did, in their way. “I have done my best,” she said aloud. “But it has not always brought me happiness.”

“I hope that will change for you.”

“I had hoped to change it for others also. For Rufus at least. Unfortunately, that, too, seems out of my power.”

“He adores you.”

“He feels entrapped by me.”

“I think ...” Gil’s gaze drifted to the open doorway through which Rufus had propelled his captive. “I think he is a complicated man. And complicated men are not always the best judges of their own needs.”

“And some men,” said Belle archly, “need to be better judges of each other.”

His eyes went wide. “Surely you can’t mean—Miss Tarleton, he would never.”

“Never what?”

“Allow it. Look upon me favourably.”

To that, she delivered a huff of well-earned scorn. “Well. If that isn’t the silliest thing I’ve heard today, and we just had someone in here shouting about manliness and iniquity.”

She might have said more—or she might not; it was not, after all, her job to bridge the foolishness of her friends—but it was at this juncture that Rufus returned, slightly tousled but otherwise unharmed.

“Well, Bellflower,” he said. “We may count this interlude as your ten minutes of entertainment.”

“Oh, we may, may we?” It was a halfhearted protest at best, for Belle really was more than ready to retire.

“Come, dear heart.”

He lifted her into his arms, blanket included, making her feel like the cosiest of all the fairy-tale princesses. As a general rule, she was not a fan of being picked up. Her male lovers often liked to, because she was small and dainty, and it seemed to fulfil some deep-seated desire they bore to be physically overpowering. With Rufus, though, she had decided she liked it. There was something ... safe about it when it was him. It made her feel treasured. An illusion, of course, because you did not treasure what was forced upon you. But even the illusion she had not been able to bring herself to give up.

They had not made it three paces across the room before there came the rapid staccato of new footsteps in the corridor outside. And there was barely even time to exchange “What now?” glances before Miss Carswile, travelling cloak streaming behind her, raced through the door, threw herself to her knees, and cried out, “Please, I beg you, have mercy, do not kill my brother.”