[Samuel Barbara] The Black Angel(Book4You) (37 page)

Overhead, the sky was beginning to lighten, the horizon all around edging into palest light. His spine ached with the pressure of urgency, and he paused, like an animal scenting the wind, and sent up a prayer to protect those he loved, to any saints that might be listening. His prayer was meant for all of them, the whole wretched St. Ives family, who'd somehow slipped into his affections without his notice.

The beads were wrapped around his wrist, the crucifix against his palm, and with an idle thumb he rubbed the martyred body of Christ. These warnings had come on him often as a boy, footsteps on his grave, as his mother called it. He'd known when Aiden was in trouble, had known, by the thrust in his own chest, when his brother died. This felt much the same, only diluted and more confusing because of it. He'd once asked his mother why God bothered to send warnings of doom if he himself could do nothing to avert it. His mother, cloaked in her faith, had shushed his question without answering it.

Perhaps she'd had no answer. Tynan had still never found one. He fought superstition and his worrisome belief in omens with rational thought and purest logic and the square, solid intelligence of a good businessman. Since seeing that damned magpie the day before, however, his rational side had been buried beneath his fears—and had opened that side of him to this sense of warning.

But only his rational mind could give him answers. Sitting on his horse in the run-down street, he looked at the sky and fingered the beads and let possibilities come to him.

The torn dress… the way it was flung on the bed, as if in anger. The strange look on the footman's face when the man came to tell him Adriana had gone home alone. The wide, sorrowful eyes of a woman he'd never met.

Dawn crept over the sleeping buildings, and Tynan, with that strange, intuitive leap that had made him a fortune, remembered Adriana fencing with Gabriel in the back garden.

With a growl, he spurred the horse and raced toward Hyde Park, praying he was wrong.

His horse was blowing by the time they hit the edge of the lawns, and he halted to listen for voices. Only silence and the ragged cry of swans afloat on the Serpentine came to him.

Swans.

He turned the horse and a figure emerged from the trees. Gabriel, standing straight and tall, holding up a hand. In his black cloak and high boots, he looked a pirate.

"Where is she?" Tynan asked harshly.

Gabriel caught the horse's bridle in his right hand and looked up. "If you'll give me your word as a gentleman that you will not interfere, I'll lead you to her. Otherwise, I must hold you here."

"Are you bloody mad?" Tynan acted in fury, kicking upward to loosen Gabriel's hand. Before Gabriel could make another grab, Tynan kicked the black gelding into a full run through the trees.

Leaves, damp with dew, slapped at his face and arms, and as he broke into a clearing, Tynan spied the assembly on the grass. A crowd had gathered, making a circle for the pair to face each other in the gray-blue light of dawn.

As he rode closer, he saw with an almost violent sense of relief that only Adriana had arrived thus far. Perhaps the whole spectacle could be prevented. Blind and deaf to anything but the sight of his wife, looking small and too thin in her father's clothes, her hair tied back in a long yellow braid, he made a move to dismount.

So he did not pay attention to the horsefalls thudding up behind him, and the blow across his shoulders knocked him clear. He sailed from his mount and struck the ground. The wind was knocked from him as he landed, but nothing else gave way. Before he could roll and stand, however, the force of a body was atop him, pinning him to the damp grass.

"Sorry," Gabriel said in an agreeable tone, "but I'm afraid my sister has gone through a great deal of trouble to prevent you from sacrificing yourself to this cause, and I am compelled to assist her."

Adriana was nonplussed at the numbers gathered to witness this fight, women as well as men, dressed nattily. None spoke, and they kept a respectful distance as she paced and glanced at the sky, and forced herself to maintain the calm that had enveloped her as she rode here.

At last Stead and his second arrived, and Adriana had a split second to observe that Stead was distressingly sober before he raised his eyes and saw that his opponent was not to be Tynan Spenser, his loathed enemy, but Adriana herself.

"You can't be serious," he said.

"Oh, I am, sir. It was my honor you insulted, so it shall be me who puts it right." She wished now she'd asked Cassandra to be her second. She wished to shed her coat to illustrate just exactly how serious she was, and it would put her at a disadvantage to toss it on the ground.

She unbuttoned it anyway, as Stead unbuttoned his own. She shed hers when he shed his. A woman, heavily cloaked, came forward to hold Adriana's coat, and she lifted her head to give thanks. The enormous, black-fringed violet eyes met her own, and Adriana only gave her a nod of thanks to the woman who had assisted her at the Duchess's ball. With dismay, she realized her hands were shaking.

Considering this course of action last night, Adriana had been absolutely certain it was the right move. Now she felt intimidated by the onlookers, and a cowardly fear of his greater size and reach, and her own brazenness. In that instant she wavered, on the verge of conceding defeat.

As if this showed on her face, the woman said quietly, "For all of us."

Adriana lifted her chin and took up her sword.

Stead tossed his head. "Well, then, since you've no men to take up your cause, let's just make this sweet and swift and be done with it." In a most ungentlemanly way, he thrust his sword toward her, as if to tear her blouse.

The anger she'd nursed through the night now rose afresh, and with savage joy she let everything come back to her: Malvern smirking when he sent her away, the chatter and talk in the streets, the ugly drawings. And more. As she lifted Gabriel's sword, she felt his strength and laughter, his deadly skill, fill her. She let Martinique, that wild, exotic place that had so shaped her life and her world, enfold her.

And she thought of her love, of Tynan, for whom she also fought today. "On guard," she cried, and thrust.

And they were engaged. Stead quickly saw his opponent was no girl playing dress-up, and they settled in to a deadly serious fight. A thrust, a parry, a block and a strike point to Stead, one to Adriana. In moments they were sweating. Adriana heard only her own breath, and the clank of metal to metal. Her being narrowed to this, to deflecting the slit-eyed ferocity of Stead's hatred, to giving vent to all she had endured. He cut her, high on her left arm, and the sleeve grew sticky with blood. She thrust and caught his side, only a glancing blow, but enough that he stumbled backward momentarily, and then she rushed her advantage home, dancing forward on quick feet. But he recovered with a swift upswing, and Adriana found herself very nearly without a sword.

But she, too, parried, and they were off again. Weariness weighted her arms after a time. Her shoulders burned with effort. Sweat prickled on her scalp. Her breath grew ragged and she fought to avoid the slightest sign of retreat. Stead was tired too, and with a blunt animal cry made a murderous thrust toward her belly.

Adriana swiveled sideways and simultaneously thrust her own sword, and in one sickening moment she felt the sword sink into flesh. A low dark murmur went up from the onlookers, and Gabriel was somehow grasping her arms, pulling her backward as Stead wavered in place, cold shock on his face.

He put his hand on the place and pulled it away, staring in disbelief at the blood on his palm. "It appears you have bested me," he said, and fell.

A surgeon rushed forward with his bag, and there was a sudden commotion, people dispersing quickly. Adriana dropped her sword, and all at once her entire body began to tremble, hands and knees and hips.

She raised her eyes to Gabriel. "Did I kill him?"

"Only if we're exceedingly lucky. I saw it go in—it was flesh only."

And as if to give weight to the words, the surgeon helped Stead to his feet. Adriana reached for Gabriel's hand to brace herself, her trembling increasing. Was this reaction? she thought wildly. Exhaustion? If she fainted now, like some swooning maiden, it would bloody ruin everything.

"Gabriel," she whispered, "hold me up. I fear I am going to faint."

He made a motion with one hand, but Adriana was only aware of gritting her teeth against the encroaching fuzzy blackness at the edge of her vision. She inhaled deeply, but it only made her more lightheaded. Gabriel, behind her, was the only point in the world she could find, and she felt him holding her as the world spun. She kept her eyes open, staring hard at a world narrowed to a small slit as she breathed in and out very slowly, willing herself not to faint, to make her watery body remain upright.

Then into that narrowed world haloed with that fuzzy black came Tynan, but not Tynan, dressed in a peasant's garb, his grass-stained shirt open at the neck and an expression of unholy fury on his face. She reached for him, grateful, no matter how angry he was, to see him.

But the motion jolted free the pain that she had not until that moment acknowledged, a wave of slightly nauseating pain from her shoulder to her wrist, and in surprise she looked down and saw that her entire sleeve was soaked with crimson.

Blackness engulfed her vision. Strange, she thought, feeling herself fall in slow motion, she'd always thought fainting would be like sleeping, but it wasn't. It was fuzzy and confusing and it made her head ache, but she was distantly aware the whole time. Aware of her body simply refusing to support her, of strong arms catching her, of the cold, damp grass below her when she was stretched out. She was amazingly dizzy and there was an odd sort of buzzing sound in her ears, or maybe only her head. She felt the sleeve being ripped away and heard a low, Irish curse.

She turned her head slowly and opened her eyes. "Tynan," she whispered.

But he did not smile. Did not kiss her, as she hoped. He raised his heavy curtain of lashes and revealed only the same anger she'd seen a moment ago. She'd wounded his pride, she thought vaguely. "I had to," she said. "Don't you see?"

Gabriel's hand smoothed over her head. "All's well, Riana, but we've got to take you to a surgeon. Can you sit up?"

With his help she did so. And there, kneeling before her was the woman with the extraordinary eyes. A long black lock of hair fell out of her cape as she flung the coat around Adriana's shoulders and pulled it tight. "Well done," she whispered, and squeezed her hand.

Then she was gone in a swirl of skirts.

"Who is that woman?" Gabriel asked.

But Adriana only shook her head. "I don't know."

Then Tynan was lifting her in his strong arms, and even though she knew he would not welcome it, she put her hands on his face and kissed him, hard on the mouth. There was nothing he could do to stop it, and she felt the rigidness in him as he stiffly resisted, but then he was kissing her back, fervently, before he drew away.

"This will not be so easily solved as that," he said, and lifted his chin, shutting her out.