“Oh no,” Madeleine assured him. “Your leg was very broken. If you were a horse, we’d have had to put you down.”

Braddon tossed two shillings to the boy watching his horse. “You’d better tie it up in the stables and then get me a hackney.”

The boy looked curious. “Got yourself an injury, milord?”

Braddon sighed and threw him another coin. “The hackney.”

“Right you are, milord.” The boy ran off toward the street, leaving the horse tied to a pole.

“I suppose he’ll remember my horse later,” Braddon said doubtfully. He started to hop toward the gate to Vincent’s Horse Emporium, delicately carrying his spare boot in his fingers. Kesgrave would kill him if he got greasy fingerprints on a boot, broken leg or no.

“Don’t worry,” Madeleine said. “I’ll rescue your horse.”

Braddon looked down affectionately at her soft rumpled hair.

“I love you, you know that?”

Madeleine stopped and clutched his arm. “Don’t talk like that! What if Papa heard you? You’re not even whispering.”

Braddon shrugged. “I’m a wounded man. What can he do? And it’s true. I love you, Maddie.”

“Pooh! You are a rake,” Madeleine said rudely. “You love me only because I have not given in to your demands.” They were at the edge of the street now, and the hackney was waiting, its door open.

Madeleine turned about and almost marched off without saying another word. Then suddenly she thought of something. “You’ll have to come back when you want that plaster removed. Unless you tell your man that it’s a fake.”

“No!” Braddon was revolted by the idea. “Kesgrave is a knaggy old gaffer. He’d have no sense of the fun of the thing. I shan’t tell anyone. Madeleine …”

She stopped and looked back at him, a rounded, curvy girl, her brown hair catching gold lights in the dusty sunlight of the horse yard.

“Thank you for helping me.”

Madeleine gave a sudden, sparkling grin. “It behooves a courtesan to ensure that her master doesn’t get married,” she observed. Then she laughed outright at the look of disgust that crossed Braddon’s face.

“You are not just a courtesan!” he protested.

“I’m not a courtesan at all,” Madeleine pointed out, and turned about again, walking quickly into the shadow of the stables.

From there she watched Braddon hop his way into the hackney, swearing fulsomely when the plaster caught and banged loudly against the hackney door. Good thing he hadn’t really broken his leg. That little maneuver would have hurt like the devil, in Madeleine’s opinion.

It was hard not to feel wistful, watching Braddon cram his large frame into the hackney. Life as his mistress would be blissful.

Madeleine shook herself. Poor Gracie! She had quite deserted her in the middle of bandaging her foreleg.

Poor Gracie indeed! Gracie had just licked up the last of the poultice intended for her leg, and when Madeleine’s father appeared he found his daughter scolding the greedy nag in bursts of irritable French.