Chapter 12

                                    

                                              
        
                          
"Tony! Wake up, Tony! The constable will be here soon to take your story, and Mrs. Poultney is sending up a tisane for your head."

                          
Anthony woke up to a roaring headache and a general overall feeling of pain. "Stop it," he growled to the person who was shaking his shoulder. "I'm in no condition to be awake right now. Jes' let me sleep."

                          
"Tony." The tone was ominous and Anthony recognized his younger brother Marcus in one of his set-down moods. "Tony, you've got to get out of this self-destructive binge. You were almost killed tonight, and it's only because Pierson and Lawton happened to notice it was you being attacked by thugs that you were not."
                          
"What the hell happened?" asked Anthony weakly, his hand gripping his throbbing head as he struggled to sit up. "Where am I?" The room was unfamiliar to him.
                          
"You were over-the-top foxed when you left that gambling hell on Hamblin Street—whatever were you thinking to go to that seedy neighborhood in the first place?—and you were apparently targeted as an easy mark by a trio of ruffians. They beat you up pretty bad and robbed you and probably would have killed you if your friends hadn't come by and chased them off.
                          
"They brought you to my lodgings because it was closer and because they wanted someone to talk some sense into you." His voice became grim. "Apparently, all of your friends have been trying to pull you out of this senseless bender you've been on for the past several weeks, and you just swat them away like flies."
                          
"What is it, Tony? What's wrong? I've never seen you behave like this before."
                          
The landlady arrived just then with a tisane that she "garrunteed" would ease the throbbing head, and she said that the doctor had been sent for, but not to count on him, since he too was in the habit of getting jug-bitten himself from time to time.
                          
Anthony groaned as his brother pulled him up to a sitting position, and eyed the brew in the cup warily. "What's in it? It looks like mud."
                          
"Just drink it," urged Marcus. "Mrs. Poultney's late husband was a sot, and she knows how to help people who are as tap-hackled as you are right now."
                          
Anthony tipped the cup into his mouth and sputtered after the first swallow of the mysterious brew. "Oh my God, that stuff is noxious. No doubt it was very useful in assisting Mr. Poultney into the hereafter."
                          
"Don't be silly, Tony. In any case, why should she want to off you? She don't even know you," said Marcus in his sensible, matter-of-fact manner. "Drink it all, Tony. You're a wreck."
                          
Closing his eyes, Anthony forced himself to swallow the remainder of the liquid in the cup, and then fell back against the pillows. "Not her. You. Don't forget you're one heartbeat away from being an earl."
                          
"And I'd be one at this moment if those ruffians had had their way," said Marcus sharply. "Tony, you know I have no designs on your title. Find yourself a wife, get sons, enjoy the life of an idle nobleman, if that's what you wish. But that's not what you've been doing of late. Tell me what's gotten into you to make you so careless of your life."
                          
Anthony contemplated his brother silently. Despite being the younger son, he had always been the sensible, responsible one. Three years younger, he would have normally been expected to take up the church or soldiering, but instead had opted for a career in the law, and was in the process of completing his studies at Oxford. It was fortunate that his future father-in-law, a neighbor of the family estate, had five daughters to marry off and was not averse to giving one of them—Marcus's childhood sweetheart—to an earl's brother who was taking up a profession.
                          
"Marcus, do you remember Mrs. Jones? The widow from Leyton?"
                          
Marcus flushed. "Of course, I do. Tony, why bring up the village whore? Are you knocked in the head?"