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‘Right.’ It was a strangled squeak.
‘And do you know what I will do if you lose to our friend Mr Latymer?’
‘No.’ That was a gulp.
‘Never let you drive one of my horses again, as long as you live.’ Max imbued his smile with all the menace he could muster and felt the bony shoulders under his arm quiver. ‘Are you allowed passengers?’
‘No. Just a guard to carry the yard of tin.’
‘Right. I’ll do that.’ He felt the relief run through the young man. ‘When is it for?’
‘Midnight, tonight. Leaving from here. I wanted to send round to your mews and get them harnessed up….’ Nevill’s voice began to trail away.
‘Just ask next time before you lay the bet,’ Max said mildly, creating major disappointment amongst the audience as they realised the anticipated explosion was not going to happen.
But, damn it, he had taught the boy to drive, starting with a pony cart, graduating through curricle and phaeton until he could manage a drag, the heavy private coach drawn by four horses, and a match in size, weight and speed for the Mail or the stagecoaches. If he could not trust Nevill with his team now, it was to mistrust his own teaching.
‘Send to the mews. And, Nevill,’ he added as his cousin made for the door, enduring amiable joshing as he went. ‘Bespeak dinner—I’m damned if I’m waiting until we get to the Bell!’
‘Have you had any dinner yet?’
Bree Mallory pushed back her chair and saw Piers standing in the doorway, a pint tankard in his hand. ‘No. What time is it?’
Her brother shrugged. ‘Nearly eleven. I had the ordinary in the snug an hour past.’
Bree got to her feet, stretched and glanced out of the window overlooking the main yard of the Mermaid Inn. The scene outside in the glare of torches and lanterns would have struck most people as chaos. To Bree’s experienced eye it was running like clockwork and the whole complex business of the headquarters of a busy coaching company was just as it should be.
Pot boys were pushing through the crowd with tankards and coffee pots; at least three women appeared to have lost either children or husbands, and in one case, a goose, and through the whole turmoil the grooms leading horses to coaches or to stables wove the intricate pattern that sent out a dozen coaches in the course of the night, and received as many in.
A coach, the Portsmouth Challenge, was standing ready, the porters tossing up the last of the luggage and a reluctant woman being urged on to a roof seat by her husband. Over her head Bree could hear the grinding of the clock gears as it made ready to strike the three-quarter, and she glanced towards the door of the tap room in anticipation. A massive figure in a many-caped greatcoat strode out, whip in hand, jamming his low-crowned hat down as he went. It was Jim Taylor, the oldest and most cantankerous of all the Challenge Coaching Company’s drivers.
As the clock struck Jim swung up ponderously on to the box, arranged the fistful of reins in his left hand without glancing at them and shouted, ‘Let them go!’
‘You could set your watch by him,’ Piers commented, strolling across to join his sister at the window.
‘You can by all of them,’ she riposted, ‘or we wouldn’t employ them.’
‘You’re a hard woman, Bree Mallory.’ He gave her a one-armed hug round the shoulders in passing, grinning to show he was only teasing.
Bree smiled back. ‘I have to be. This is a hard business. And why haven’t you gone home to bed?’ He might look like a man, her tall, handsome, baby brother, but he was only seventeen and, if he hadn’t been recovering from a nasty bout of pneumonia, he would have been at school at Harrow. ‘And my excuse, before you ask, is that the corn chandler’s bill is completely at odds with the fodder records again and either he is cheating us, or someone is stealing the feed.’
‘I was finishing my Latin text.’ He grimaced. ‘It’s enough to put me into a decline, the amount of work the beaks have sent me home with.’
‘If you hadn’t spent most of the day hanging round the yard, you’d have been done hours ago,’ Bree chided mildly. Piers was itching to finish at school and come to start working at the company. It was his, after all. Or at least, he owned half of it, with George Mallory, their father’s elder brother, retaining his original share.
Bree had a burning desire to protect the company for Piers. Uncle George, with no children of his own, would leave his half to his nephew eventually and then there would be no stopping her brother.
He already knew as much as Bree about the business, and rather more about the technical aspects of coach design and the latest trends in springing than she ever wanted to know. ‘Where are my journals?’ he wheedled now. ‘I have finished my Latin, honestly.’
‘They look even more boring than the grammar texts,’ Bree commented, lifting the pile of journals dealing with topics such as steam locomotion, pedestrian curricles and canal building off the chair by her desk. ‘Here you are.’
‘I am giving up on the mystery of the vanishing oats for the night.’ Bree blotted the ledger and put away her pens. ‘Come on, let’s go and find some dinner—I expect you can manage to put away another platter of something.’
They rented a small, decent house in Gower Street, but the sprawling yard of the Mermaid seemed more like home for both of them and they maintained private rooms up in the attic storey for when they chose to stay overnight.
Bree stopped and looked back over the yard, seized with a sudden uneasiness, as though things were never going to be the same again. She shook herself. Such foolishness. ‘You weren’t born when Papa bought this—I can only just recall it.’ She smiled proudly. ‘Twenty years and it’s turned from a decaying, failed business into one of the best coaching inns in the capital.’
‘The best,’ Piers said stoutly, cheerfully ignoring the claims of William Chaplin at the sign of the Swan with Two Necks, or Edward Sherman’s powerful company with its two hundred horses, operating out of the Bull and Mouth.
From small beginnings, with his own horses and a modest stage-wagon service, William Mallory had built it into what it was today, and Bree had grown up tagging along behind him, absorbing the business at his coat tails.
It had worried her father, a decent yeoman farmer, that his daughter did not want to join the world of her mother’s relatives, but Edwina Mallory had laughed. ‘I was married to the son of a viscount, my eldest son is a viscount and I am delighted to let him get on with it! Bree can choose when she is older if she wants a come-out and all the fashionable frivols.’
And perhaps, if Mama had lived longer, Bree might have done. But Edwina Mallory, daughter of a baron, once married to the Honourable Henry Kendal, had died when Bree was nine, and her relatives seemed only too glad to forget about the daughter of her embarrassing second marriage.
‘What does Kendal want?’ Piers asked, hostility making his voice spiky. He had picked up the letter lying on her desk, recognising the seal imprinted on the shiny blue wax.
‘I don’t know,’ Bree said, taking it and dropping it back again. ‘I haven’t opened it yet. Our dear brother is no doubt issuing another remonstrance from the lofty heights of Farleigh Hall, but I am in no mood to be lectured tonight.’
‘Don’t blame you,’ Piers grunted, handing her the shawl that hung on the back of the door. ‘Pompous prig.’
She ought to remonstrate, Bree knew, but Piers was all too correct. Their half-brother, James Kendal, Viscount Farleigh, was, at the age of thirty, as stuffy and boring as any crusted old duke spluttering about the scandals of modern life in his club.
As soon as Bree was old enough to realise that her mother’s connections looked down on her father, and regarded her mother’s remarrying for love as a disgrace, she resolved to have as little as possible to do with them. Now, at the age of twenty-five, she met her half-brother perhaps four times a year, and he seemed more than content for that state of affairs to continue.
‘I don’t expect he can help it,’ she said mildly, following Piers out into the yard. ‘Being brought up by his grandfather when Mama remarried was almost certain to make a prig out of him. You won’t remember the old Viscount, but I do!’
Bree broke off as they negotiated the press of people beginning to assemble for the Bath stage in less than hour.
‘Hey, sweetheart, what’s a pretty miss like you doing all alone here in this rough place? Come and have a drink with me, darling.’
Bree looked to her left and saw the speaker, a rakish-looking man with a bold eye and a leer on his lips, pushing towards her.
‘Can you possibly be addressing me, sir?’ she enquired, her voice a passable imitation of Mama at her frostiest.
‘Don’t be like that, darlin’—what’s a pretty little trollop like you doing in a place like this if she isn’t after a bit of company?’
As Bree was wearing a plain round gown with a modest neckline, had her—admittedly eye-catching—blonde hair braided up tightly and was doing nothing to attract attention, she was justifiably irritated. But it was the rest of the impertinent question that really got her temper up.
‘A place like this? Why, you ignorant clod, this is as fine an inn as any in all London—as fine as the Swan with Two Necks. I’ll have you know—’
‘Is this lout bothering you?’ At the sight of Piers, six foot already, even if he had some growing to do to fill out his long frame, the rake began to back away. ‘Get out of here before I have you whipped out!’
‘Honestly, Bree, you shouldn’t be here without a maid,’ Piers fussed as they pushed their way into the dining rooms and found their private table in a corner. ‘You’re too pretty by half to be wandering about a busy inn.’
‘I don’t wander,’ she corrected him firmly. ‘I run the place. And as for being too pretty, what nonsense. I’m tolerable only and I’m bossy and I’m too tall, and if it wasn’t for this wretched hair I wouldn’t have any trouble with men at all.’
The waiter put a steaming platter of roast beef in front of them and Bree helped herself with an appetite, satisfied that she had won the argument.
Half an hour later she sat back, replete, and regarded her brother with fascinated awe as he dug into a large slice of apple pie.
‘This is your second dinner tonight. I think you must have hollow legs, else where can you be putting it?’
‘I’m a growing boy,’ Piers mumbled indistinctly through a mouthful of pastry. ‘Look, here comes Railton. I think he’s looking for us.’
‘What is it, Railton?’ The Yard Master was looking grim as he stopped by their table.
‘We’ll have to cancel the Bath coach, Miss Bree.’
‘What? The quarter to midnight? But it’s fully booked.’ Bree pushed back her empty plate and got to her feet. ‘Why?’
‘No driver. Todd was taking it out, but he’s slipped just now coming down the ladder out of the hayloft and I reckon his leg’s broke bad. Willis is taking the Northampton coach later, and all the rest of the men are spoken for too. There’s no one spare, not with you giving Hobbs the night off to be with his wife and new baby.’ His sniff made it abundantly clear what he thought of this indulgence.
‘Are you sure it is broken?’ Bree demanded, striding across the yard, Piers at her heels. ‘Have you sent for Dr Chapman?’
‘I have, not that I need him to tell me it’s a break when the bone’s sticking through the skin. You’ve no cause to go in there, Miss Bree. It’s not a nice sight and Bill’s seeing to him.’
Even so, one did not leave one’s employees in agony, however much of a fix they had left one in through their carelessness. Bree marched through the hay-store door and was profoundly grateful to see there was no sign of blood and Johnnie Todd was neither fainting nor shrieking in agony.
‘He’ll do.’ Bill Potter, one of the ostlers and the nearest they had to a farrier on the premises, got to his feet and walked her back firmly out of the door. ‘Doctor will fix him up, never you fret, Miss Bree.’
That was good, but it didn’t solve the problem of the Bath coach. ‘I’ll drive it.’ Piers bounded up. ‘Please?’
‘Certainly not! It’s one hundred and eight miles.’ Bree knew the mileages to their destinations, and all the stops along the way, without even having to think about it. ‘The most you’ve ever driven is twenty.’
‘Yes, but I don’t have to drive all the way, do I?’ Piers protested as they walked back to the office.
‘What?’ Bree broke off from wondering if she could possibly send round to one of the rival yards and borrow a driver. But that put one in debt…
‘Johnnie would only have driven fifty miles, wouldn’t he? Whoever the second half-driver is, he’ll be ready and waiting in Newbury.’ Piers banged through the door and started rummaging in the cupboard for his greatcoat.
‘Fifty miles is too far. I’ve driven thirty, and that was hard enough, and I wasn’t recovering from pneumonia.’ Thirty miles. Thirty miles with Papa up beside me, in broad daylight and with an empty coach coming back from the coach makers. Even so, can it be that much harder to do it with passengers up and at night? There’s a full moon.
‘I’ll drive,’ she said briskly, trampling down the wave of apprehension that hit her the minute she said it. ‘The Challenge Coach Company does not cancel coaches and we don’t go begging our rivals for help either. Shoo! I’m going to get changed.’
Chapter Two
Bree thrust the whip into the groom’s hands and used both hers on the reins. Behind her the passengers were screaming, the inner wheels were bucking along the rough rim of the ditch and branches were lashing both coach and horses.
Thank God she had never followed the practice of so many companies and used broken-down animals for the night runs, she thought fleetingly, as the leaders got their hocks under them and powered the heavy vehicle back on to the highway. The lurking menace of a milestone, glinting white in the moonlight, flashed past an inch from the wheels.
The coach rocked violently, throwing her off balance. Her right wrist struck the metal rail at the side of the box with a sickening thud. Bree bit down the gasp of pain and gathered the reins back into her left hand again, stuffing the throbbing right into the space between her greatcoat buttons.
Hell, hell and damnation. Ten miles gone, another forty to go. Her arms already felt as though she had been stretched on the rack, her back ached and now she had a badly bruised wrist. I must have been mad to start, but I’m going to do this if it kills me. It probably will.
The team steadied, then settled into a hard, steady rhythm. ‘Slow down, Miss Bree,’ Jem the groom gasped as she took the crown of the road again. ‘You can’t spring them here!’
‘I can and I will. I’m going to horsewhip that maniac the length of Hounslow High Street, and we’ve lost time as it is,’ she shouted, as the sound of another horn in the distance behind them had the groom staring back anxiously. ‘If they can catch us up before the inn, they can wait,’ Bree added grimly. And if they didn’t like it, they had one very angry coaching proprietor to deal with.
‘You won. Congratulations.’ Max fetched Nevill a hard buffet on his back as the young man climbed stiffly down from the box.
‘I…Max, I’m sorry. I nearly crashed it.’ He stumbled and Max caught him up, pushing him back against the coach wheel. The others would be here in a moment; he wasn’t having Nevill showing them anything but a confident face. ‘If you hadn’t told me when to go, shouted at me…I was going too fast on a blind bend. I’ll understand if you never let me drive your horses again.’
‘Are you ever going to do anything that stupid again?’ Max demanded, ignoring the bustle of ostlers running to unharness his team. ‘No?’ His cousin shook his head. ‘Well, then, lesson learned. I once had the York mail off the road, although I don’t choose to talk about it. I was about your age, and probably as green. Now, get the team put up and looked over and then get us a chamber. I’m going to save your bacon by doing my best with the coachman.’
‘But I should—’
‘Just do as I ask, Nevill, and pray I don’t look at the damage to my paintwork before I’ve had at least one glass of brandy.’
The average stagecoachman would have the boy’s guts for garters—their temper and their arrogance were legendary. Max heard the sound of the horn and the stage swept into the yard: at least he wasn’t going to have to organise its rescue from the ditch. He scanned the roof passengers as they clambered down, protesting loudly about their terrible experience. No young woman—he must have been dreaming. His heart sank and he grimaced wryly; he was acting like a heartsick youth after a glimpse of some beauty at a window.
The groom swung down beside the grumbling passengers. ‘Brandy on the company,’ he said, urging them towards the door of the Bell and the waiting landlord.
He swung round as Max strode up. ‘You driving that rig just now, guv’nor?’ he demanded belligerently.
‘No, my young cousin was, but I am responsible. Allow me to make our apologies to the driver, and to you, of course.’ He slipped a coin into the man’s hand and stepped to one side to confront the other who was slowly climbing down, his back to the yard. The groom shifted as though to protect his driver’s back. Max dodged—and found himself face to face with the smallest, strangest, and certainly most belligerent stagecoach driver he had ever met.
‘You oaf!’ It was his young woman. In the better light of the inn yard she was even more striking than he recalled from that startling glimpse, her looks heightened by shimmering fury. No classical beauty, although a low-crowned beaver jammed down almost to her eyebrows so that not a lock of hair showed, did not help. And goodness knows what her figure was like under the bulk of the caped greatcoat. But her face was a pure oval, her skin clear, her eyes deep blue and her mouth flooded his mind with explicit, arousing images
‘What are you staring at, sir?’ she demanded, giving him the opportunity to admire the way those lovely lips looked in motion, glimpsing a flash of white teeth. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a woman driving before?’ She grounded the butt of her whip with one hand and glowered at him. Tall, she’s tall for a woman, he thought irrelevantly as she tipped her head, just a little, to look at him.
‘Not one driving a stagecoach,’ he admitted. Somewhere behind him the increase in noise heralded the arrival of the two rival drags. Max moved instinctively to shield her from sight. ‘Madam, I must apologise for that incident. Naturally I will meet any damages to the coach, and you must allow me to pay for whatever drinks the passengers are taking in there.’
‘Certainly. Your card for the bill?’ That was businesslike with a vengeance. Max dug into the breast pocket of his coat and produced his card case. ‘Send me a round sum, I am not concerned with detail—it was our fault.’
‘It most certainly was, and I am concerned with detail. You will get a full accounting. Now, if you please, I must see to having my next team put to.’
‘Wait. You surely do not want to be seen by the other drivers.’ She did not appear in the least discommoded by being found, dressed as a man, in the midst of a group of boisterous gentlemen.
‘Really, Mr…’ She glanced at the card, tilting it to catch the lantern light and her eyebrows rose. ‘Lord Penrith, I am in a hurry.’ If it had been a young man with that accent and that attitude he would have assumed it was some young sprig of fashion out for a thrill. But women did not drive stages, and ladies most certainly did not drive anything on public highways outside the centre of town.
‘Damn it, Dysart, if it wasn’t for that damnable stagecoach I’d have had you in that last straight.’ Latymer.
Max swung round, the flaring skirts of his greatcoat effectively screening the willowy figure of the woman. ‘Go and argue the toss with Nevill,’ he suggested. ‘But I say you lost it on the pull past Syon House. How far behind was Lansdowne?’
‘One minute, but I still maintain—’
‘I’ll be with you inside in a moment. I’ve just got to argue this blockhead down from claiming half the cost of his damn coach,’ he added, low-voiced, taking Latymer by the arm and turning him away. ‘I told Nevill to get the brandy in.’
As he suspected, that was enough to turn the grumbling man back to the warmth of the inn parlour. As usual, whenever Latymer lost something, he would insist on a prolonged post mortem, the aim of which would be to prove he had failed for reasons entirely outside his control.
When he turned back, the young woman, far from taking advantage of his efforts to shield her, was engaged in spirited discussions with the head ostler about the team he was proposing to put to. ‘And not that black one either. It’s half-blind,’ she called after him as he stomped back to the stables to fetch another horse.
‘I will not run with those broken-down wrecks they try and fob one off with at night,’ she pronounced as he came up to her.
‘Madam—’
‘Miss Mallory. Bree Mallory.’
