‘Anna?’ He looked about blindly. ‘Is...she...safe?’
‘Here. She is here.’ Presuming Francis must mean the child, she wrapped the girl against her warmth and saw what she had not noticed before. The same hazel eyes. The same lines of beauty. The same colour of hair and grace of movement. The same stubborn line of jaw.
His daughter? His offspring? Just another secret that he had allowed her no knowledge of?
All her marriage lines fell into a dissolving welter of lies and omissions though her attention was caught by his raspy laboured breathing as he fumbled to loosen the stock at his neck.
When the white linen fell away she knew another truth as well. The deep red twisted line of where a rope had cut into his flesh was easily visible, knotted welts of skin raised one over the other, and a shocking hue of indigo beneath.
Hurt. Damaged. Left for dead. Once before and now yet again.
She lifted his head carefully, the matted dark curls falling dank across her fingers, and then she pressed her hands down hard against the welling bloodied hole in his shoulder.
‘Get a doctor,’ she shouted and refused to let him pass into the care of anyone else until a proper physician had come.
* * *
The first hours afterwards had been the worst.
Once home at the Douglas town house and upstairs in his chamber, Francis had begun to breathe in a strange way, blood gushing from the hole just above his shoulder blade.
‘Elevate him,’ the Douglas physician had instructed and with the help of a few of the servants they got him off the bed and sitting up in a large chair nearby.
Sephora was panicking, but Francis wasn’t. He simply sat there gathering in his hurt and his circumstances and moderating his breathing as best he could. The bandage the doctor tightened around him finally allowed the blood to congeal, but would no doubt gush again with any movement whatsoever.
The earl’s eyes were closed, the dark bruising beneath them worrying, and he was clammy. Shock, perhaps. Sephora found a heavy wool blanket at the foot of the bed and draped it across him as Mrs Wilson bustled in with a young servant and instructed her to light the fire.
‘I do not think the bullet has injured any organ of great import.’ The physician lifted up his bag as he said this. ‘But it is a nasty wound and will need to be tended with great care in order to stop fever or inflammation from appearing. There is also a severe gunpowder burn around the site that will be painful so I will leave medicine to be administered and return on the morrow. The instructions are on the label, but the thing needed most now is a good dollop of sleep so that healing can begin to take place.’
The child, his daughter, had sat next to Sephora without speaking for all of the last hour, refusing to leave the side of the earl. Up close she looked older than Sephora had first thought her and much more unkempt. Her eyes were large orbs of pure and utter fright and her hands were freezing as Sephora brought the girl into her side, trying to warm her.
As her initial stiffness relaxed Sephora felt thin cold arms creeping about her middle.
‘It is quite, quite all right, Anna,’ she said softly, remembering the name the earl had used. ‘The earl will recover, I am sure of it, and this terrible fright will be a thing of the past...’ She stopped even as she said the words, recalling her own dislocation after her fall from the bridge. ‘You are safe now. Nothing will ever happen like this again. You will always be safe.’
The shaky nod almost broke her heart, a child trying desperately to find her courage and appear brave, but when Mrs Wilson reached out and told the girl to come away Sephora could do nothing but watch her go.
‘I hope she is not too hurt. The man who tried to take her on the street hit her across the mouth...’
She did not quite finish as the housekeeper nodded. ‘Anna disappeared from the side of her governess earlier in the afternoon and could not be found. Mrs Billinghurst was most upset.’ Her voice petered out as the physician stood to leave.
‘We will put his lordship into bed now with pillows to prop him up. He needs sleep to regather his energy.’ Three manservants carefully lifted him off the chair and across to the bed where the covers had been pulled back so that he could simply slip inside.
He groaned at the movements and breathed in a rough manner, but once there appeared more comfortable, the blood from a cut on his right hand staining the snowy white coverlet. So much blood, she thought, glad that the Douglas physician had not wanted to bleed him further. His pallor now was as pale as the sheets of the bed he lay in and his breath was shallow.
Another few moments of flurried activity and then everyone was gone with only silence left as Sephora shut her eyes and held her head in her hands. Today had been a revelation. Francis St Cartmail had a child, a girl child, and she looked neither much cared for nor particularly happy.
The horror of it struck her anew. What sort of man could be so lax with the needs of a daughter? Her hair stuck out in all directions, her nails were as dirty as her clothes and he had not even asked her to his own wedding?
She struggled to find some sense in the whole thing. He had gone to save the child without thought for himself and nearly died for it. Surely that must count for something and the girl had stuck like glue to his side in all of the doctoring and aftermath. Her behaviour was not exactly that of a well-raised daughter and the manner in which she had sworn roundly as they had lain in a heap on the side of the road was most surprising.
Mrs Wilson had appeared wary of the girl, as had the servants. A child who might lash out, Sephora thought, or refuse any direction? An uncivilised and worrisome child.
Her own head had begun to ache with the direction her thoughts were going in. Francis St Cartmail had wed her today without mentioning that he had been married before and had heirs already. What of the legal documents and the implications for an heir already existing? My goodness, the scandal that followed him had arrived with a hiss and a roar on her very doorstep and not two hours after they had been wed.
‘I am not perfect.’ She remembered his words. But there was long distance between the lies and deceit she was suddenly confronted with and the small discrepancies she was imagining.
A marriage of convenience. A marriage forced upon him. A marriage that had not even begun before it was threatened.
She swiped at the tears that fell across her cheeks and sat up straighter. She would not cry. She was beyond even allowing such a release. She would wait for the Earl of Douglas to regain consciousness and then she would find out exactly what else he had not told her.
* * *
It was late when Francis awoke, a single candle burning on the side table in his room at the Douglas town house in London.
This was wrong.
He should be somewhere else. There was a substantial pain across his shoulder and the smell of stale sickness in the air. He wore nothing but a sheet draped over him, and he began to gingerly move pieces of his body to see what functioned still and what did not.
Sephora. The name made him take in his breath and hold it, the ache of hurt radiating downwards in a sharp and jabbing violence.
‘You are awake?’ Her voice was soft in the late-night silence and he looked around. His new wife sat on his other side dressed in different clothes than she had last been in, her hair tied back in a simple knot, small golden curls escaping such confinement on each side of her face. There were deep shadows under her eyes and a bruise across her cheek that had not been there before.
‘What happened?’
‘You were shot, do you remember?’
He nodded, the noise and the instant pain coming back.
‘Anna?’
‘Your daughter is safe.’
He shook his head. God. He’d not managed to safeguard either of them, but had gone down with only the barest of resistance. ‘Make sure...they...don’t come back.’
It was all he could do, give such a warning before the dark and pain returned and he was once again floating.
* * *
The next time he came awake there was sunlight at the windows and he was glad that it was not night. He felt better, less light-headed. He was also very thirsty.
‘Is there something to drink?’
Sephora was there again, soft and competent, her hands raising his head so that he could take a sip of some lemon concoction and just as gently lowering it down again.
‘How long...have I been here?’
‘Two days. For the first day the doctor thought you might not live and when you took fever he was certain of it. But you pulled through and now he is pleased with your progress.’
‘And Anna?’
‘I have not seen her again, though I hear her, of course. Your daughter is remarkably unruly.’
‘She is...not my...daughter. I am her guardian and she has only recently come...to me.’
Sephora looked away from him, her blue eyes filled with pain and a hint of relief.
‘No one explained this to me.’
‘She is my uncle’s illegitimate child. I have brought in a governess and a tutor for her, but...’
‘She is difficult?’
He nodded. ‘But...getting better, I hope.’ Each word was breathy with the pain he felt and he hated his exhaustion.
‘She looks just like you.’
He smiled. ‘I know.’
‘She did not wish to leave your side when you were shot. Perhaps if she was allowed in to see you she might be more inclined to behave?’
‘Was she hurt?’