The Duke's Downfall (11 page)

With a single flick of the ribbons they were off, a spiral of red-gold leaves swirling up from the gutter in their wake. They reached Davies Street, a straight shot out of Berkeley Square, with Teddy leaning to his left to spy the boy, and Betsy, her cheeks flushed by the rush of the cool autumn wind, bobbing and craning beside him to do the same.

“There!” She pointed at a small, ragged figure jumping up and down and waving madly on the corner just ahead.

“Hyah!” Teddy shouted, urging his blacks to greater speed, as the boy and Scraps sprang away onto Brook Street, headed toward Grosvenor Square.

The curricle followed, making the turn very nearly under the noses of a bay draft team drawing a heavily loaded dray. Teddy lost his hat in the process, and Betsy her bonnet when she looked back to see the bays clopping placidly past the corner as if they hadn’t just missed a collision by inches.

Her bonnet bouncing against her shoulders by the strings tied around her throat, Betsy bit her lip in consternation as the blacks plunged out of Brook Street into Grosvenor Square. Neither the boy and his dog nor the hackney were anywhere to be seen.

“Oh, where are they?” she asked worriedly, twisting about on the seat.

“They didn’t double back or we’d have run smack into them,” Teddy said, thinking out loud as he pulled back on the leathers. “If they kept straight to Upper Brook Street they’ll end at—”

“Park Lane!” Betsy gasped, her thoughts jumping ahead of his.

“Good God!” Teddy blanched and snatched up his whip.

With a flick of his wrist he cracked it above the heads of his horses. Their ears sprang forward and they leapt ahead, the houses of the haut ton flashing by in a blur.

Paralleling Hyde Park, Park Lane was one of the busiest, ergo the most lethal, thoroughfares in all of London. Picturing Boru running amok into its midst in pursuit of the hackney brought tears to Betsy’s eyes.

Heavier traffic on Upper Brook Street made speed impossible. The blacks chafed when Teddy drew them in and so did Betsy. She strained to look ahead for a glimpse of the boy and saw him, near the juncture of Upper Brook Street and Park Lane. She also saw an overturned farm wagon, its load of turnips spilled on the pavement, and a shiny red barouche halfway up on the flagway with a broken wheel, and groaned.

“I believe we’re on the right track,” Teddy said needlessly, as he deftly steered the curricle around the wrecks.

The boy stood on the corner, jumping and pointing toward the orange and gold canopy of trees within Hyde Park. Betsy lifted a hand to acknowledge him, then shrieked as he sprang without looking off the flagway into Park Lane. Squeezing her eyes shut, she waited for the shouts of coachmen and the screams of horses that never came.

“Oh, no,” she moaned, opening her eyes to utter chaos as Teddy steered the blacks through the turn onto Park Lane.

A clear path stretched from Upper Brook Street to the Grosvenor Gate leading into the park, for the edges of the road were lined with carriages, drays, wagons, and curricles. All had come to rest at odd, abrupt angles, as if they’d been swept into the gutter by a great wind.

Or a whacking great dog.

The boy was hopping up and down and waving both arms before the gate. He pointed into the park, then took a firm hold on the string tied to Scraps, and ducked away into the crowds of onlookers on the flagway.

“Come back!” Betsy shouted, uselessly, for he’d already melted away into the throng.

“He daren’t enter the park,” Teddy told her, as he slowed the blacks to make the turn.

Betsy knew it was so, but nonetheless despised a society that begrudged a poor and hungry child a glimpse of green. Twice he’d come to the house in Berkeley Square. With luck, he would come again, and when he did, she would do what she could for him. The vow made, Betsy turned her gaze forward in search of Boru as the curricle swept past the gates.

There was no sign of him, the hackney, or of George. Only drably dressed nannies with prams and chubby toddlers in tow, a few couples strolling, and one or two horsemen. None of them seemed particularly overset, which suggested to Betsy that Boru had not come this way. At least not yet.

Easing his team to a walk, Teddy made a quick survey of the area, his gaze locking on a lone gentleman some distance away on a leaf-scattered stretch of green to the left of the path. Hatless and shed of his coat, he was flying a pair of monstrous yellow kites with bright-colored rags tied to their tails.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that was—”

“Boru!” Betsy cried joyfully, interrupting Teddy as the hound came bounding around a sharp curve in the path just ahead and she sprang toward the side of the curricle.

Boru was in hot pursuit of a rabbit, and George was in hot pursuit of him. The footman’s face was nearly purple—and he was beginning to stumble with exhaustion.

The blacks snorted and laid back their ears, which drove all thoughts of the man with the kites from Teddy’s head. If he hadn’t snatched the bits from his team with a dab-handed tug on the leathers, they might have bolted at Betsy’s sudden lurch. He held them steady as she jumped to the ground, then set the brake, looped the leads over it, and bailed out of the curricle.

Hiking her dress and pelisse nearly to her knees, Betsy ran like a deer behind Boru as the rabbit dodged left off the path onto the grass. A moment before he stumbled into them headfirst, Teddy leapt in front of his team and caught George as the footman nearly swooned and fell into his arms.

“Where is his lordship?” Teddy demanded.

“L-long g-gone, m’lord,” George panted. “Nearly h-had ‘im we did, then the beast spied hisself a r-rabbit an’ we ‘us off agin t’other direction.”

“Well done.” Teddy let him go and stepped back. “You may rest now.”

“Thank you, m’lord.” George’s eyes rolled back in  is head and he collapsed safely out of reach of the blacks’ teeth.

The rabbit was not so lucky, Teddy saw, as he wheeled off the path at a run. Only a desperate last-second leap saved the summer-fattened hare from Boru’s snapping jaws. It was a less than graceful lunge, which sent the hound skidding along the leaf-strewn grass on his chin. And Betsy behind him on her stomach as she made a grab for the hound that missed when he found his feet again and went charging off after his quarry.

“Blister it, Boru! Come back here!” Betsy sprang up on her knees, snatching leaves from her hair and flinging her bonnet, which now rested beneath her chin, over her shoulder. As she did so, the heavy reticule looped over her elbow swung in a wide arc and nearly toppled her again.

Tripping over her torn pelisse and gown, she struggled to her feet. Teddy reached her side and caught her arm, which gave her the moment of balance she needed to tug her reticule over her elbow, kick her skirts out of her way, and gather them up again.

Mere inches ahead of Boru, the rabbit bounded across the green. Projecting its leaping, zigzag course, Teddy realized the man with the kites, whose back was turned to the pursuit, stood squarely in the rabbit’s path. The hare could be trusted to veer off in time, but what of Boru?

“Oh, Teddy! That gentleman!” Betsy gasped, her eyes widening as the same thought struck her. “Sir! Sir!” she called, pulling Teddy to a halt so she could shout louder.

“You there!” he yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth.

It was no use. The brisk wind that held the kites aloft tossed and rattled the autumn-dry trees dotting the lawn and muffled their shouts. Just as Teddy had predicted, the rabbit leapt nimbly aside at the last possible moment—but Boru did not. He crashed into the man with the force of a runaway carriage, upending the poor devil and spinning him around in a midair tangle of strings.

The kites plummeted earthward, their twisted tails engulfing Boru. Horror engulfed Teddy as he watched man and hound, hopelessly entwined in strings and rag-tied tails, tumble to the ground.

The poor devil was his brother Charles.

Chapter Eleven

Oh, God, let this be a nightmare, Betsy prayed, clapping one hand over her eyes and clutching Teddy’s sleeve in the other. Let me waken in my bed in my night rail. Let me open my eyes and see anyone but the Duke of Braxton.

Unfortunately he was still there, sprawled and unmoving on the turf beneath Boru when she spread her fingers and peeked between them. “Oh, no,” she moaned. “Not again.”

“What do you mean, ‘not again’?” Teddy demanded, prying her fingers from his arm and spinning sharply toward her.

“I mean,” Betsy explained, her voice little more than a dismal groan, “that I first made your brother’s acquaintance when our carriages stopped side by side in Oxford Street. I tore the sleeve of his coat, and Boru knocked him senseless.”

“My apologies, Lady Betsy,” Teddy said, as he grabbed her hand and pulled her into a run, “but damn and blast it!”

Stumbling along behind him, Betsy wished desperately she could be anywhere—or anyone—else. Netted by strings like a giant furry fish, Boru turned his head as she approached and whined imploringly. Charles lay spread-eagled in a tangle of kite tails beneath him, a grass stain smeared from cheek to chin, eyes closed but his lashes fluttering.

Sinking next to him in a billow of ruined skirts, Betsy placed one hand on Boru to soothe the trembling hound, lifted the other to smooth Charles’s tousled hair from his forehead, and froze. Where had the impulse to touch him come from? Surely it was only concern for his well-being, not the sudden and vibrantly remembered sweep of his arm about her waist the night before. Or perhaps it was simple light-headedness. Caused by exertion, Betsy told herself firmly, not the vivid recollection of the torchlight flickering across his handsome features.

“This is hopeless.” Teddy grimly surveyed the latticework of kite tails ensnaring Charles and Boru, then rocked back on his heels to pat the pockets of his waistcoat. “We’ll have to cut them loose.”

“You can’t mean with that!” Betsy exclaimed, incredulously, at the penknife he produced. “It will take all day!”

“Have you a better idea? Or perhaps another knife in your bag of tricks?”

“As it happens, I do.” Betsy flung her reticule off her arm, thrust her hands indignantly on her hips, and glared at Teddy. “And allow me to point cut, Lord Earnshaw, that if I were a man, I wouldn’t have to resort to a bag of tricks!”

“This is no time to be on your high ropes.” Teddy shot her a frown as he caught a handful of strings and began cutting them. “I do not stand especially high in Charles’s esteem at the moment, and judging by the tale you’ve just told me—and the way he stormed into our mother’s house last night— neither, my lady, do you.

"'Stormed'?" Betsy repeated faintly, her eyes widening.

“Yes, stormed.” Teddy clipped the last of the string he held and gathered up another handful.

“In a towering rage and shouting for brandy.”

Memory and dread laced a chill up Betsy’s back as she recalled Charles glaring at her across Lady Pinchon’s ballroom, the flash of breaking glass as he’d snapped his goblet cleanly in half. “Quickly, keep cutting,” she told Teddy, as she jerked open her reticule and began pawing through it. “I have Papa’s knife in here somewhere.”

She could have the crown jewels as well, Teddy thought darkly, as the pair of spectacles she’d shown him at Lady Parkinson’s plopped into her lap. Wisely, however, he did not say so, simply watched a snuffbox roll off her knee and a purse heavy with coins jingle onto Charles’s chest.

When a set of hazard dice rolled across the torn and muddied hem of her gown, Teddy grinned. When a volume of Ovid’s
Amores
bounced open on its cover, its pages ruffling in the breeze, he sat back hard on his heels.

The scandalous Roman work was the only book written in Latin, poetry or prose, that he’d ever managed to stumble through on his own. Avidly, with a rapidly thudding pulse, by the faint light of a single candle in a dark, secret stairway at his school in the Midlands.

“Capital choice!” he exclaimed, his meaning escaping Betsy until she looked up and saw the  fallen volume and Teddy’s eager expression.

“Our study of Latin will be confined to Caesar’s legions and the parts of Gaul,” she said scathingly, flushing as she snatched up the book and laid it aside. “Not the anatomical parts of the ladies of the Roman court.”

“My deepest apologies,” Teddy said, his face scalding, “but I thought—”

“I know precisely what you thought.” At last, Betsy’s hand closed on the hilt of her father’s knife. She withdrew it slowly from its sheath, watching with satisfaction the incredulous leap of Teddy’s eyelids. “But I keep Ovid in my reticule only as a last resort.”

“Gemini!” Teddy swallowed hard. “I should think
that
would make a much better last resort.”

That
was no mere penknife. It was a dagger, with a jewel-crusted hilt and wickedly keen blade.

A stiff gust of wind rustled the nearby trees where one of Charles’s kites had come to rest. A shaft of sunlight sliced through the torn yellow paper stretched across the frame, gleamed on the finely honed blade, and, just as Charles’s eyelids slowly fluttered open, caught and blazed like a diamond on the viciously pointed tip.

Blinded by the glare, Charles winced and blinked to clear the dazzle and the tears it brought from his eyes. When he opened them again, his wet lashes made a halo of the sunlight shimmering on Betsy’s golden hair and a misty blur of her elegant profile. His dulled senses and befuddled mind told him this was no earthly vision.

He dimly recalled coming to the park to launch the kites he’d constructed to carry his wind device aloft for further testing, remembered being lifted off his feet, but nothing else. He’d obviously fallen, but where? Such ethereally beautiful creatures as the one before him did not frequent Hyde Park. Heaven, mayhap, or Mount Olympus. Was she an angel, or was she perhaps—

“Bloody hell!” Charles shouted, as his vision finally cleared and he recognized the face before him. “You again!”

Unaware of the kite tails entwining his limbs, he shot straight up on his spine, and from there halfway to his knees, the sudden stress on the strings threatening to yank Boru off his feet. Yelping and scrabbling madly, the hound did his best to keep his balance, but his strength was no match for the inexorable pull on the web of strings binding him to Charles. Several snapped under the strain, but the rest held, flinging him like a missile from a sling into the chest of the Duke of Braxton.