Alex just looked at him. Then he reached across Hastings’s oak desk and ruthlessly grabbed his carefully arranged cravat, jerking him to within an inch of Alex’s furious glare.

“I should hate to hear that you ever repeated any of this foul, slanderous information,” Alex told him through clenched teeth.

“I will not,” Hastings managed to squeak. He could feel sweat pouring down his back. Alex disdainfully pushed him back. Hastings took in a shaky breath. Alex turned on his heel and left without a word.

The minute the door shut, Hastings sat down plumply in his chair. He was trembling like an autumn leaf in a high breeze, he realized. Insane—that’s what Alexander Foakes was. A lunatic. He, Hastings, had only told Foakes what any man on the street could tell him. Just what did Foakes intend to do? Threaten half the population of London?

Hastings carefully cracked the knuckles on his left hand. It calmed him, and his heart began to slow down. Really, what a madman, he thought with a touch of conceit. He started on the knuckles of his right hand. Finally a little smirk touched Hastings’s mouth. His high-and-mighty lordship could abuse as many civil servants as he wished; it wouldn’t change the fact that his new wife was a trollop who was sleeping with his own brother. Hastings’s smile widened. He leaned back in his chair and began to hum a little tune.

Hastings disliked his own wife—a clutch-fisted, quarrelsome woman, he thought—but he could say without the slightest hesitation that she would never sleep with anyone but him. Indeed, she hated the whole performance, as she’d often told him. But if a man’s wife is not his own, well, that man is poorer than the poorest chimney sweep. That’s a fact, Hastings thought. And if that fact made the high-and-mighty earl a bit touchy, Hastings could understand and sympathize.

Alex stalked out to his carriage, absolutely calm. He gave the coachman the address for his solicitor, and sat back in the carriage. Thankfully, he felt nothing. A reasonable voice in his head reminded him that such a scandal was only to be expected, and he agreed. Still, he felt as if someone had poured cold steel through his veins. He didn’t even feel bitter, he thought, a little surprised. He must have known, all along. If anything … he felt a little pain that Patrick would do this to him. Patrick was his other arm, his boyhood companion, his twin. How could he betray him? Yet even this, the grossest of the betrayals facing Alex, didn’t really bother him.

On the other hand, Mr. Jennings of Jennings and Condell found himself bothered indeed. Normally nothing flustered Jennings. No matter what disaster—forged wills, foolish lawsuits, illegal duels—was recounted to him, Jennings maintained a tranquil front. In fact, to his mind the law had the remedy for anything. But surveying the huge, dispassionate earl standing before him, Jennings felt an unfamiliar tremor of panic. If only his father were still alive; his father was so good at handling irate peers and irascible earls. He could talk them out of their bluster and fury in about twenty minutes, blending his soothing voice with large draughts of the very best port. But every instinct cautioned against offering this particular earl a glass of port. He looked murderous, in Jennings’s opinion.