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source clearly, except that a great deal of it seemed to be concentrated in his head. It seemed to him not so much that he was in pain as that he was pain. There was light beyond his closed eyelids, turning them uncomfortably orange. There was too much light. He turned his head to escape from it, and pain shot at him like a bullet entering his brain and shattering into a thousand shards of metal. Only some blind instinct of self-preservation stopped him from screaming and making matters even worse.
    "He is coming around," a voice said. A female voice.
    "Should I fetch some burnt feathers, do you think, Bridge, and hold them under his nose?" another female voice asked.
    "No," the first voice replied. "We don't want to jolt him awake, Phyll. He is going to have a giant of a headache as it is."
    There was nothing future about it, Alleyne thought. And a giant would look like a pygmy if it were to stand beside his headache.
    "Is he going to live, then?" a third female voice asked. "All last night and today I have expected him to die. He is as pale as the pillow. Even his lips are white."
    "Only time will tell, Rache," a fourth voice, husky and sultry, said. "He must have lost a lot of blood with that head wound. They are always the worst for bleeding. It is amazing he survived at all."
    "Less talk about blood, if you please, Gerry," one of them said.
    He was close to death? Alleyne thought in some surprise. Even now he was in danger of dying? Were they really talking about him?
    He opened his eyes.
    The room was flooded with light painful enough to make him wince and then squint. The space above his head was rimmed by four heads bent over him and examining him closely. Hovering closest to him, a foot or so above him, was a heavily painted face, the lips and cheeks brightly rouged, the eyes outlined with some black substance that also made the eyelashes spiky, the eyelids shaded sky blue. It was the face of a woman trying to appear ten years younger than she was and failing dismally. The face was framed with elaborate curls of burnished copper highlighted with dashes of scarlet and orange.
    He moved his gaze to another woman, a Latin beauty vivid in emerald green silk, her black hair swept into lavish swirls, her eyes black and bold in a handsome face made more alluring with subtly applied cosmetics. She wore an old-fashioned black patch in the shape of a heart to the right side of her mouth. Beside her was a smaller, voluptuously shaped woman with a heart-shaped face surrounded by luxurious masses of short blond ringlets. She gazed frankly back at him from large, pure-blue eyes enhanced slightly with paint. The fourth face, plump and pretty and also sporting cosmetics, was rimmed by shining light brown hair. He was half aware that someone else was standing at the foot of his bed, holding onto the bedpost, but he dared not move his head to bring her into focus. Besides, he had seen enough to have been able to draw a startling conclusion.
    "I have died and gone to heaven," he muttered, closing his eyes again. "And heaven is a brothel. Or is it really a cruel hell since, sadly, I seem to find myself incapable of taking advantage of my good fortune?"
    The sound of appreciative feminine laughter was such excruciating agony that he retreated thankfully into unconsciousness again.
     
    T HEY HAD BEEN RIGHT-HE REALLY WAS A GENTLEMAN, Rachel thought as she sat by the unknown man's bedside again during the night, having slept for much of the day at Bridget's insistence before helping in the kitchen and then assisting Geraldine in changing Sergeant Strickland's bandages. It had not been for the squeamish, that task. The sergeant kept wanting to get up, but as Geraldine had explained to him, he was not with his men now, able to get his way over every little thing by barking and blustering. He had five women to deal with, and they were far more formidable than a company of soldiers. The sergeant had lain meekly-and probably gratefully-back on