Page 58 of Not Quite a Lady
Jack was not at all sure he approved of the duel either, but there was nothing to be done about it. It was an affair of honour and he was damned if he was going to leave that sneering lordling unchastised.
Lily apart – he was trying very hard not to think about Lily just now – he had a long score to settle with Randall, going right back to his schooldays as the undersized victim of Randall’s bullying.
I am not so undersized now.
He smiled grimly to himself, then was struck by a thought. As Webster and Dunsford took the pistols over to Randall for him to make his choice, Jack shrugged out of his coat and began to untie his neck cloth.
‘What are you about?’ Lord Gledhill asked, finding coat, neck cloth and finally, shirt, thrust into his hands.
‘I’ve seen bullet wounds with cloth carried into them before now. They fester. I am sure our good surgeon would agree with me that this is a sensible precaution.’
‘What’s the matter, Allerton?’ Lord Randall’s sneering voice carried across the short distance between them as the remaining pistol was handed to Jack. ‘Afraid I am going to hit you?’
‘Of course. With unrifled barrels goodness knows where the shot might go – even you might hit something.’
Randall turned an angry shoulder and his seconds began to whisper at him urgently as he began to button his coat right up to the neck, hiding the target of white shirtfront and neck cloth.
Lord Gledhill grinned at Jack. ‘You are a sight to scare anyone with those scars on you. You strip well,’ he added with the assessing stare of a sporting aficionado. ‘Box do you?’
‘Occasionally. Mostly I wield a pick.’ Jack glanced up at the scrub on the edge of the depression. ‘Thought I saw something up there.’
‘Fox probably.’ Lord Gledhill looked across. ‘We are ready.’
The sudden, fleeting, pressure of his hand was warm on Jack’s bare shoulder as Jack moved the pistol from hand to hand, relaxing the muscles and tendons so that his grip, when he finally took it, was steady.
He spared a final thought for his family and the letter he had handed to Gledhill, then steadied his mind as he walked towards Randall. The man’s blue eyes flickered as he met them.
The duellists turned and stood back to back, the heat radiating from the other man’s body just reaching Jack’s chilled skin. Then Gledhill began to count and he paced forward, stopped, turned and waited.
‘Take aim.’
Li…
Before Gledhill could finish, Randall’s pistol arm came up, there was a bang, a sudden lash like a red-hot wire across his left bicep, a puff of smoke, and his opponent was staring at him, white faced, across the damp grass.
‘Damn it, Randall, you fired too soon!’ The baronet’s own second was shouting at him, aghast.
The pain was shocking. Jack did not look down. Slowly he raised his own pistol, feeling the sweat break out on his brow with the effort to stand still, to exercise control while his body hurt. Randall’s face swam into focus and he took aim, squarely in the middle of his chest.
Now I have you.
Time seemed to stand still, sound vanished, the only reality was his opponent’s white, terrified face and the weight of the pistol in his hand, the ache of his wrist as he held it steady, the heat of blood on his left arm, the pain.
Lily. Jack turned the muzzle of the pistol away, out over the deserted heath, insultingly wide of Randall, and pulled the trigger.
Then noise flooded back, and movement. The surgeon was at his side, Gledhill was steadying him.
‘I am all right.’ He glanced down at his arm. The bullet had cut a red raw furrow through the flesh. ‘It is merely a flesh wound.’
‘Sit on this tree stump and let me bandage it.’ The surgeon produced an unpleasant black bottle and poured it over the wound.
‘Hell and damnation!’ Almost deprived of breath by the fiery wash of the spirit, Jack sat down and submitted his arm to be bandaged.
‘Where’s Randall?’ Gledhill’s lanky frame was blocking his view. It was beginning to dawn on him that he was alive, relatively unscathed and was neither a murderer nor a fugitive.
On balance, even with a wound that stung like hell, that was a better outcome than he had expected at three in the morning when he was lying flat on his back, giving up on sleep as the noise of night coaches reached his high room.
‘Slunk off back to his carriage.’ His second stood aside, revealing the black coach swaying off across the rough ground. ‘That was a bad business, firing early like that. And you deloping simply highlighted how badly he has behaved.
