“But you have lots of hair.”
“No matter. It’ll drive Peabody quite frantic when he doesn’t locate the pomade, something he deserves since he’s always sticking his long nose in my business.”
James drew a deep breath. “I want to look at your arm, Father. Jason is right as well-someone is after you. We have to do something. But first I want to see for myself that the wound isn’t bad.”
Douglas raised a dark brow at his son, saw the fear in James’s eyes, and knew James had to see for himself that the wound was nothing.
“Very well,” he said, and let James untie the linen he’d just wrapped around it.
James studied the angry red slash that had torn through his father’s flesh. “It’s nearly stopped bleeding. I want to wash it, then I want Hollis to see it. He will have some salve to put on it.”
Of course Hollis had exactly the right nasty mixture. He also insisted, under James’s watchful eye, on smearing it over the gash himself. “Hmmm,” he said. “Hand me the clean bandage, Master James.”
James handed him the clean linen. The old man’s hands shook. From fear for his father? No, Hollis never was afraid of anything. “Hollis, how old are you?”
“Master James?”
“Er, if you don’t mind my asking your age?”
“I am the very same age as your esteemed grandmother, my lord, well, perhaps she is a year older, but one hesitates to speak bluntly about such things, particularly when it involves a lady who is also one’s mistress.”
“That means,” Douglas said, laughing, “that Hollis is older than those Greek statues in the west gardens.”
“It does indeed,” Hollis said. “There, my lord, you’re tied up right and tight. Would you care for a tetch of laudanum?”
His arm throbbed, but who cared? He raised a haughty brow, looked disgusted, and said, “No I would not, Hollis. Are the two of you happy now?”
The door opened and Jason walked in, turned white, and blurted out, “I knew it. I just knew it was something bad.”
James looked at the blood in the basin of water, swallowed, and told his brother what had happened.
“You know, sir,” Jason said before the three of them went downstairs, “Mother will know there’s something wrong when she sees the bandage on your arm.”
“She won’t see it.”
“But you and Mother always sleep together,” James said. “Surely she’ll see it. I heard her say once that you never wore a nightshirt.”
James said quickly, “She didn’t know we were listening.”
“Hmmm,” Douglas said. “I’ll think about that.”
“We don’t wear nightshirts either,” Jason said, “once we heard that you didn’t. What were we, James, about twelve?”
“Something like that,” James said.
Douglas felt a lurch in his chest. He looked at his boys-his boys-and the throbbing in his arm became nothing at all.
Of course Alexandra found out quickly enough, not later than five o’clock that afternoon. Her maid, Phyllis, told her what the laundry girl-who’d washed a bloody linen strip-had told Mrs. Wilbur, the Sherbrooke housekeeper, who had rightfully passed it along to Hollis, who’d told her sharply to close her lips over her teeth, which, naturally, Mrs. Wilbur hadn’t, and thus it had come to Phyllis’s sharp ears over a cup of tea in Mrs. Wilbur’s parlor.
“A bloody cloth?” Alexandra said, swiveling about on her dressing chair to stare up at Phyllis, who had mossy green eyes and a lovely thin nose that constantly dripped, necessitating a handkerchief in her right hand most of the time.
“Yes, my lady, a bloody cloth. From his lordship’s bedchamber.”
Alexandra raced out of the bedchamber and through the adjoining door to confront her husband, to run her hands all over his body, to even check the teeth in his mouth. Curse him-he wasn’t there. And she knew when she confronted him, he would look down his elegant nose at her, call her a twit, and tell her it was all a tale invented by some silly girl in the laundry room.
Even though it was five o’clock in the afternoon, Alexandra hurried downstairs to the butler’s pantry, a lovely airy room with black and white marble tiles on the floor. The only problem was, Hollis wasn?
??t alone. Indeed, he was in the embrace of a woman. A woman she’d never seen before. Alexandra stared, then retreated, step by step, until she quietly closed the door.