He had been taught, very early, by a man who had no other virtues worth naming, that the measure of a fighter was not in how quickly he brought an opponent down. It was a question of whether hewaited.
He had always waited. He waited now, his breathing controlled, his hands up, watching Harwick work through his accounting.
They went twice more. Harwick was honest and hard, and the right hand found Anthony’s cheekbone once in the fifth exchange and produced a sharp bloom of pain that he breathed through and kept moving. He was sweating freely, his ribs carrying the compounded record of the evening, and his left hand had opinions about the last two rounds that it was articulating with considerable persistence.
“You’re bleeding,” Harwick observed, between breaths.
Anthony touched his cheekbone before he looked at his fingers briefly. “So I am.”
He brought his hands back up. None of this brawling touched what was actually underneath.
This was the thing he had not told himself on the ride here, and was telling himself now, in the narrow, undecorated honesty of the ring: that the exertion was not erasing anything. It wasclarifyingit. Each shot absorbed, each shot delivered, each exchange stripped the evening down, and through all of it, her voice in his house remained constant.
I only want these things first, while they are still possible.
He went inside on the tell one final time, both hands into the body, nothing withheld.
Harwick went down to one knee.
The basement erupted. Anthony stood back and waited. Harwick spent some time with himself, whatever time that required, and then he rose and held up one hand.
Done.
The man in the brown coat reappeared at Anthony’s elbow with a towel and the expression of a man professionally vindicated. “Another bout, Your Grace?”
Anthony pressed the towel to his cheekbone. “No.”
He retrieved his coat. He walked up the stairs and back through the passage into the tavern’s warmth, where the dice game had concluded, and the merchants had graduated to sing deeply off-key.
Margot was behind the bar with her back to him, talking to the barman, and she did not turn as he passed.
He was grateful for that.
He stood at the bar and drank a glass of water. Then another. The cut on his cheekbone had nearly stopped. His ribs would say something pointed about this bout in the morning, and he would accept their commentary as entirely merited.
He set the glass down and looked, from habit, at the candle across the room.
He waited. He gave himself the time of one full, measured breath, prepared to receive an honest result.
It was still the same.
She was still there, and the ring had done nothing whatsoever about it. And now, he was standing in a tavern on a Tuesday night with split knuckles and a cut above his cheekbone and the complete, unambiguous understanding that he was in deep trouble.
He put his hat on and walked out. The night air was cold and entirely indifferent and made no effort to be of assistance.
He stood on the pavement for a moment, looking at nothing in particular, while the city conducted its late business aroundhim with the cheerful disregard of a thing that had never once concerned itself with the interior difficulties of dukes.
She had a list to complete, and he had agreed to help her through it. Those were the plain facts of the matter, and they were the only facts he intended to deal with, and if the plain facts happened to be in conversation with other, more inconvenient facts, then that was a matter he would address at a later date. In better conditions. When he was not standing on a pavement outside a tavern, bleeding gently into a borrowed towel.
He walked to the carriage and got inside.
The city moved past the window in its familiar, undemanding succession of lamplight and shadow. Anthony looked at it and tried thinking about nothing at all.
But he was completely unsuccessful.
Chapter Seven
“Chin up,” said Lady Hayward, without looking up from her embroidery. “You look as though you’re attending a funeral.”