Eleanor heard them answering Hart, but dizziness spun the room about her, and she had to close her eyes. The next time she opened them, Isabella, Beth, and Ainsley hovered over her.
“Let us take her, Hart,” Beth was saying. “She needs looking after.”
Hart didn’t want to let Eleanor go. He held Eleanor on his lap, against his chest, great rage on his face. His eyes were wet, though, making the golden light in them glitter.
Eleanor tried to reach for him, to comfort him, but her hand fell back.
Her words came out a mumble, which worried her. Beth shoved a glass under her nose. “Drink this.”
Eleanor obeyed because she was suddenly very thirsty. The water tasted wrong, but she drank. It slid down her throat, and her limbs went limp.
When Eleanor woke again, she was lying flat on her back in bed, her left arm stiff and hot. Her fine wedding dress was gone, and she was in her nightgown. From the way the light slanted through the windows, it was late afternoon.
She threw the covers off in panic. Today was her wedding day. Why hadn’t Maigdlin or Isabella woken her? She had dreamed of the wedding—the crowd, the queen, Hart fine in his plaids, his eyes holding triumph.
Eleanor sat up, but her head spun so much that she fell back to the pillow. After taking a few deep breaths, she lifted her head again, carefully this time.
She discovered that her left arm was wrapped, wrist to shoulder, in a tight bandage. Eleanor stared at it in surprise. No wonder it felt so odd.
The arm’s soreness cleared the fog of sleep, and Eleanor remembered. She’d been walking back down the aisle with Hart, a married lady, when the lad in a horse boy’s livery had darted through the windows, aimed the pistol, and fired. In panic, she’d shoved Hart aside. The bullet must have hit her as she and Hart tumbled to the floor.
She lifted her arm, and pain rippled through it like fire.
Her cry brought hurrying footsteps, then Maigdlin. “My lady, are you all right? Do you need more laudanum? I’ll fetch it.”
“No.” Eleanor lay down again, being careful not to move too quickly. “I don’t want to sleep. Where is Hart? Is he all right?”
“His Grace is in his study, my lady. I mean, Your Grace. He’s been shouting something fierce. The constable took that boy with the pistol away, even though His Grace told him not to, and now His Grace is threatening to sack him if he don’t get the boy back here. But the constable says he answers to the magistrate, and now His Grace wants the magistrate here too. And the guests don’t know what to do—about half have left, but the others are staying the night here, and it’s a right mess.” Maigdlin related the tale with relish. “His Grace is torn up about the bullet hitting you. Right off his head, he is.”
“It grazed my arm. I remember now.”
Maigdlin’s eyes rounded. “No, Your Grace. It went right through. Doctor says it’s a mercy it didn’t lodge in the bone or rip open all your blood vessels. Went clean through and out the other side. He says if you hadn’t dodged just right, it would have gone straight through your heart.”
“Oh.” Eleanor looked at her arm again. The revolver had been much too heavy for the boy’s thin hands. He must not have been able to aim it properly. “What about my dress?” Eleanor bit her lip. She thought of its froths of lace and roses, and felt a pang of loss. It had been beautiful, and she and Hart hadn’t yet posed for the wedding photograph.
“Their ladyships are working on it now. Lady Cameron says you’ll want the gown, but she keeps crying over it. So do the other two.”
“Tell their ladyships I will be perfectly fine, and that they must save that dress. Now, help me into my dressing gown. I’m going downstairs to speak to my husband.”
“His Grace says you’re not to get out of bed. Not for any reason.”
“His Grace is too certain that I will obey his orders. Now, help me.”
Maigdlin’s worried face creased with a sunny smile. “Yes, Your Grace.”
The magistrate finally crumbled under Hart’s commands. Hart’s pugilist footmen and the constable dragged the young man back to Kilmorgan, with Fellows accompanying them, and brought the culprit to Hart’s study.
The constable dropped the lad into the chair in front of Hart’s desk. It was a comfortable, padded chair, reserved for Hart’s important guests. Mackenzie ancestors glared down from the walls in the huge room, the deceased Mackenzies all swathed in the same dark blue and green plaid as Hart. Their gazes seemed to fix on the young man cringing before them.
Hart leaned back against his desk and looked at him too. Hart was still tight with rage, the bile of it in his mouth. When he’d seen the blood, and Eleanor falling, he’d experienced a horrible helplessness he never wanted to feel again, a knowledge that, no matter how hard he fought, he would lose her. Now, this instant. As he had Sarah, as he had Graham.
The assassin was a child. He couldn’t be more than thirteen, fourteen at most. He had a clear white face, his skin almost translucent, the hue of Celtic tribes from northern Ireland or the Hebrides. He had black hair badly hacked short, eyes like blue glass, ruddy cheeks, and an expression of abject terror.
Hart said nothing. He’d discovered long ago that silence made a fine weapon. Forcing someone to wait and wonder what Hart was thinking gave him the upper hand from the outset. The youth stared back at him, his defiance and bravado evaporating under Hart’s gaze.
“What’s your name?” Hart asked.
“He won’t give it,” the constable said from the far end of the room. “Not even when we hit him.”
Hart ignored him. “What is your name, lad?”
“Darragh.” His voice was faint, scratchy, but with an unmistakable lilt.
“Irish, are you?”
Hart left the desk and moved to a chair that stood against a window, the plainest seat in the room. He carried the chair back to the desk, set it down, and sat on it himself, leaning forward, arms on thighs.
“There are no Fenians in this room,” he said. “None of your mates, or the boys you grew up with, or the men who took you in and gave you the gun.” A new, American-made Smith and Wesson revolver, which must have cost a pretty penny. “Right now the only thing between yourself and the constable—and my men, who I guarantee are itching to beat you into oblivion—is me.”
Some of Darragh’s bravado returned. “I’m not afraid of them.”
“I would be. My men used to be prizefighters, some of the finest Britain has produced. Most are bare- knucklers, and they aren’t worried about following rules. The matches they fought weren’t always legal.”
Darragh looked more uncertain, but his chin stayed up. “Ye deserve to die.”
Hart nodded. “Many people think so. Some people want me dead because they’ve hated my family so long that it’s tradition, but I admit I have more enemies than friends. Why do
“All th’ stinkin’ English deserve to die until the Irish are free.”
“I’m not English, and I happen to agree.”
“Ye don’t. You threw out th’ only Englishman who was pulling for us, tore Irish Home Rule to pieces.”
“Is that so, lad? Tell me what the Irish Home Rule bill is.”
The boy wet his lips and flicked his gaze away. “English words. They don’t mean nothing now.”
“No one bothered to explain it to you, did they? They shoved a gun at you and told you that you’d fight for the glory of Ireland. The gist of Home Rule has been in every newspaper every day for the last few years. All you need to know about it has been there.” Hart waited until Darragh’s gaze swiveled to his again. “But you can’t read, can you?”
“Ye deserve to die,” Darragh repeated.
