"I was to put a ball through the meat of your left shoulder," he said. "High and outside, clear of the lung and the great vessels. Mr. Ogilvie advised me on the exact place. You were expected to give me your left side because you'd changed hands. I knew you had. I was told about the hand." He paused. "I've done it forty times this week at Manton's, on a sawdust figure with a chalk mark. Mr. Ogilvie would dress the wound. Then the carriage would take you down to Dover, and you'd be in Calais by dark. A man who has been out goes abroad for his health. Everybody knows it, and nobody asks questions. I was told you'd be in no real danger."
"Told by whom?" Kit said harshly.
"By the man who paid. I won't name him. I gave my word, and it's about the only coin I've got left that isn't counterfeit." Stannard's mouth twisted. "But I'll tell you this, Garrow, since you're owed it. I asked him: what if I miss? What if the ball goes an inch the wrong way? And he said, 'Captain Stannard, I have made inquiries, and you do not miss.'" He laughed, briefly and without pleasure. "He was right. I don't. That's my whole fortune: a steady hand and a bad name. I've lived on the first and been living down the second since I was twenty."
"And the lie," Edmund said. "About her."
Stannard turned his head and looked at Sophia. For the first time that morning his steadiness gave a little.
"I was told to find a quarrel," he said. "I wasn't told what quarrel. That was mine. I'd heard you were — that you thought well of Lady Sophia. I'd heard about the night in April. Everyone had. I knew it was nothing. Jane told me what it was: widows' letters, and a girl sitting in the corner with her knitting. I knew it was nothing, and I said it anyway, because I knew it was the one thing you'd fight for." He made a small, stiff bow to Sophia, the kind a man makes on a quarterdeck to an officer he has failed. "Of everything I've done this week, ma'am, that's the part I'm most sorry for. Your name was never mine to spend."
Sophia looked at him for a long moment. Edmund could not read her face. He thought later that she was deciding something, weighing the man against what he had done to her, and that the scales would not settle.
"You may be sorry to my face, Captain Stannard," she said at last. "I will take that, because Jane has been kind to me and I would rather not hate her brother. But you will be sorry in print as well. A letter to the *Morning Chronicle* over your own signature, retracting every word you said at the Cocoa Tree and saying plainly that it was false. Before the week is out."
"You'll have it by tonight."
"And you will tell Jane yourself where the money came from. I won't do that for you."
Stannard flinched. It was very slight, but Edmund saw it. "Yes," he said. "Yes. I'd thought of that."
Darnell had been opening and shutting his mouth. Now he found his voice and his outrage together. "Hugo, I had no notion of this. None. I'd never have stood for you if I had. This is not an affair of honour, it's a bought assault. If it came before a magistrate—"