The door opened and in rushed a stranger. A stranger with a revolver in his hand. He lifted the revolver with what seemed to Vere infinite slowness. Or was it that his perception and reflexes had become infinitely slow? Vere glanced at Palliser. The man hadn’t even noticed the intruder yet; he was still staring with dumb fascination at the broken halves of the marble bust.
The intruder fired. The sound barely penetrated Vere’s glue-like consciousness. He watched with a calm, distant appreciation as Palliser crumpled to the floor. The shot had gone in the left side of Palliser’s chest, leaving a neat hole in the middle of the gaudy peony Palliser wore as a boutonniere.
The intruder turned toward Vere. He pulled the trigger. Vere ducked. The sharp pain in his right arm abruptly revived all his rum-drowned instincts. His hand closed around the pewter vase on the floor.
That vase hurtled through the air and met the intruder squarely on the forehead. The man yelped and wobbled. Before he could recover, a chair hit him in the face. And then he was smashed with a side table, this time with Vere’s weight behind it.
The man collapsed in a heap. Footsteps came pounding outside the room. Vere flattened himself against a wall. But it was only Palliser’s servants—not his bodyguards, merely an excited and confounded pair of footmen.
“You, go fetch a doctor,” he said to one of the footmen, though he’d be surprised if Palliser was still alive. The footman left running. To the remaining footman he said, “And you, the constable.”
“But Mr. Palliser, he wants nothing to do with the police.”
“Well, then go fetch whomever it is he would want to fetch when someone has shot him.”
The footman hesitated. “I don’t know, sir. I’m new here.”
“Then fetch the constable!”
After he dispatched the second footman and made sure no more servants were arriving to witness the carnage, Vere slipped the chain from Palliser’s lifeless head. Wrapping the key in his handkerchief—the police could do things with fingerprints these days—he opened the safe and retrieved the packet of letters. He glanced through the contents—yes, quite mortifying if made public—and counted the letters—seven, just what he was looking for.
He’d come prepared with a different packet of letters, also from said royal, but on entirely inconsequential matters. He made the switch, pocketed his loot, and returned the key to Palliser’s corpse.
Only then did he glance down at his right arm. The bullet had grazed just below his shoulder. A fairly superficial wound. He would take care of it later, when he was in the safety and privacy of his own home.
Now he must vacate the premises before the doctor, the constable, or anyone else reached the scene.
Outside his house Vere realized that he should have gone to one of Holbrook’s hidey-holes instead. He had remembered to discard the wig, the mustache, and the spectacles he’d worn as part of the temporary identity he’d assumed for the evening, but forgot that he should never come home in a state of injury.
And now he was too disoriented and worn out to go anywhere else. He swayed and decided that bleeding arm or no, he’d best get inside.
He let himself in, grimacing as he did so. He was left-handed; a wound to the right arm did not overly inconvenience him. But that did not lessen the pain.
Somewhere a clock chimed quarter past four in the morning. He trudged up to his room and turned on the light just enough to see. The packet of letters immediately went into a locked compartment in his armoire—immediately meaning as soon as he could fit the key into the lock. His maids would find many scratches around the keyhole in the morning.
He grunted as he took off his evening coat. The waistcoat did not give him trouble. But the fabric of his shirt stuck to the wound and he grunted again as he ripped away the sleeve.
It was worse than he’d thought. The bullet had taken a chunk of his flesh. He would do what he could now and get himself to bed. When he woke up—assuming the bad head did not kill him outright—he would summon Needham, an agent of Holbrook’s who also happened to be a practicing physician.
He soaked several handkerchiefs with water from the pitcher on his washstand and cleaned the blood from around the wound. There was a bottle of distilled alcohol among his shaving things. He doused another handkerchief with it.
The burn of the alcohol made him hiss. His head hurt. Now that the rush of action had worn off, the vast quantity of spirits he’d consumed was once again making its effect felt. He would be lucky if he didn’t find himself on the floor shortly.
Suddenly he stilled. He wasn’t sure what he’d heard, but he knew he was no longer the only person awake in the house.
He turned. The connecting door opened; his wife stood in his nightshirt, which on her dragged to the floor. Strange how his vision, otherwise quite impaired by the alcohol, wasn’t so faulty as to not notice the way the nightshirt molded to her breasts, or the way her nipples peaked in the cool night air.
“It’s so late. I was worried. I thought—” She gasped. “What happened? Did my uncle—”
“Oh, no, nothing of the sort. A hansom cab driver wanted my pocketbook. I wouldn’t give it to him. He pulled out a pistol and waved it in the air. It accidentally went off, he bolted in a mad dash, and I had to walk the rest of the way home.”
A coherent lie, something he’d have thought quite beyond him at the moment. He impressed himself.
She stared at him as if he’d said he’d come home naked, dancing all the way. Her reaction annoyed him—implicit in her look was the assumption that he must have perpetrated an act of unspeakable imbecility to cause his wound to materialize. Surely sometimes cabdrivers shot their passengers. Even a country bumpkin like her should be able to imagine such a scenario.
He returned his attention to his arm and dabbed more alcohol onto his wound. She approached him and took the handkerchief from his hand.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
It was quite charitable of her. But he’d left the house in a very uncharitable mood toward her and that mood hadn’t improved in the subsequent hours.
I’m not so stupid I can’t clean a simple bullet wound.
She left for her room and came back with a petticoat torn into strips. He handed her a jar of boracic ointment he’d found in the meanwhile. She looked at the jar, then at him, with something close to wonder—yet another sign that he was still indisputably an idiot in her eyes when a normal, reasonable act on his part brought forth such disbelief.
She turned on more lights, spread the ointment over a square of cloth, placed the anointed cloth over his wound, and bandaged him.
Working swiftly, she wiped away drops of his blood from the floor and then gathered his bloodstained garments.
“I know London is dangerous. But I was never given the impression that it was this dangerous—that law-abiding gentlemen are in danger from merely going about.” She stuffed all the soiled items into his evening jacket and tied the bundle with the jacket’s sleeves. “Where were you when you were shot?”
“I’m…not sure.”
“Where were you then before you got into the hansom cab?”
“Ah…I’m not quite sure about that either.”
She frowned. “Is this a common occurrence? You don’t even seem alarmed.”
He wished she would let him be. The last thing he needed now was a cross-examination “No, of course not.” Most of the time—the vast, vast, overwhelming majority of the time—he did what he needed to do with a minimum of trouble and even less bloodshed. “I’m tiddly, that’s all.”
Her frown deepened. “What kind of cabbie carries a pistol?”
“The kind who drives at three in the morning?” he said, growing impatient with her questions.