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“You think she’s gone sightseeing?”
“I hope so. It might calm her.”
He had to stop talking to negotiate the bridge. An old, narrow, uneven structure, it bulged up unexpectedly here and there. At this time of night, in this weather, the only way to proceed was cautiously.
Caution wasn’t Longmore’s favorite style.
He was grinding his teeth by the time he got them safely to the other side of the Thames. Thence it was uphill to Putney Heath and the obelisk, about two miles away.
The horses trudged up the road while the rain went on thrashing them, torrents cascading from the hood’s rim. The wind, howling occasionally to add atmosphere to the experience, blew the wet under the hood. It dripped down Longmore’s face and into his neckcloth.
Though he knew her glorious monstrosity of a traveling costume involved layers and layers, the wet would eventually penetrate to skin, if it hadn’t already.
He threw her a quick glance. She’d turned her head aside so that the back of her hat took the brunt of the wind-driven rain. That was the only sign of discomfort. Not a word of complaint.
He went on wondering at it, even while he watched the road and argued with himself what to do.
When at last they reached Putney Heath, the wind abruptly died down. In the distance a bell tolled. An ominous rumbling followed. He turned his head that way in time to see the crack of lightning.
The wind picked up again, coming from the same direction.
It was driving the thunderstorm straight at them.
* * *
Sophy was petrified.
Her heart had been pounding for so long that she was dizzy. She was terrified she’d faint and fall out of the carriage and under a wheel. If she fell, Longmore might not even notice at first, between the darkness and the rain’s incessant hammering.
Safe at home, the sound of rain drumming on a roof, even as fiercely as this, could be soothing.
This was not soothing.
She was city bred. If she’d ever spent time in the country, it must have been in her early childhood. She vaguely recalled traveling across the French countryside when she and her sisters had fled cholera-ravaged Paris three years ago. But they’d traveled in a closed vehicle, and not at night in such hellish weather.
Intellectually, she knew she wasn’t in any great danger. While a famously reckless man, Longmore was a highly regarded whip, too. In a carriage, one couldn’t be in safer hands. He drove with the magnificent calm the English deemed de rigueur in whipsters. The horses seemed tranquil and absolutely under his control. Traveling on the king’s highway, she knew, one could count on smooth, well-maintained roads. Hostelries lined them at short intervals. Help was rarely far away.
All the same, she didn’t feel very brave.
She’d started out concerned mainly about Lady Clara. The difficulties of travel, even at night, hadn’t crossed Sophy’s mind. For one thing, at this time of year, a sort of twilight prevailed rather than full darkness. For another, this evening had promised to be a pleasant one: When she set out from home for the Gloucester Coffee House, she’d assumed the moon would brighten their journey.
Instead, within minutes they were pitched into a streaming Stygian darkness, which feeble lights here and there only seemed to emphasize. The world about her felt too empty.
Breaking in on an unexpected silence, the crack of thunder, distant as it was, made her jump. Longmore’s head turned sharply that way, and in the faint glow of the carriage lights, she saw his jaw muscles tighten.
He turned to her. “Are you all right?” he said.
“Yes,” she lied.
“The horses won’t be, in a thunderstorm,” he said. “I’ve decided not to chance it. With a broken neck you won’t be much help to my sister. We’ll have to stop.”
She was only half relieved. As alarming as she found it to travel at present, she was impatient at delay. Back in London, after Fenwick had reported what his friends had told him about the cabriolet, she’d looked up Richmond Park in a road guide. It wasn’t very far from London. Still, near as it was, if even Longmore didn’t want to risk traveling on, no sane person would try it.
Though they seemed to be crossing an endless uninhabited wilderness, it wasn’t long before he turned into the yard of an inn. White flashes lit the sky, and the thunder rumbled oftener and more loudly, nearer at hand.
While the ostlers rushed out to take charge of the horses, Longmore practically dragged her from her seat and swept her along under his arm to the entrance, calling over his shoulder, “Look after the boy. If he isn’t drowned, dry him off and see that he’s fed.”
A short time later, she was shaking off the wet from her carriage dress, and Longmore was treating the landlord with the same imperious impatience he’d shown Dowdy and her accomplice: “Yes, two rooms. My aunt requires her own. And you’d better send a maid to her.”
“Your aunt?” Sophy said after the landlord had hurried away to see about rooms.
Amusement lit Longmore’s dark eyes and a tiny smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “I always travel with my aunt, don’t you know? Such a dutiful nephew. Luckily, I’ve scads of them.”
That was all it took: one rakish glint in his dark eyes and a ghost of a smile. Her heart gave a skip and pumped heat upward and outward and especially downward. She had to fight with herself not to rush to the nearest window and pull it open, storm or no storm. She needed a sharp dose of cold water.
She told herself to settle down. He’d used that look on hundreds of women, probably, with the same effect. And she was a Noirot. She was the one who was supposed to slay men with a glance.
In any event, she supposed she ought to be glad he owned at least a modicum of discretion.
As fille de joie euphemisms went, “aunt” was probably more useful than “wife.” Half the world would probably recognize him, and that half would know he wasn’t wed or likely to be anytime soon, if ever.
He took out his pocket watch. “This is ridiculous. We haven’t covered eight miles and it’s nearly half past ten o’clock.”
“She wouldn’t travel in this weather, surely?” Sophy said in a low voice, though they were alone in the small office. “If she did visit the park, wouldn’t she stop at an inn nearby when it grew dark?”
“I hope so,” he said. “But who knows what’s in her mind?”
“She has Davis,” Sophy said. “She wouldn’t let her mistress endanger herself.”
“Clara can be obstinate,” he said. “My hope is the horse. Wherever she tries to go, she’ll have the devil of a time changing horses. The cabriolet only wants one, but it needs a powerful one. Inns reserve those for the mail and stage coaches. She’ll probably find it easier to keep the one she set out with. Which means she’ll need to stop at intervals—and stay for a good while—to give the creature food and drink and rest.”
Sophy knew little about the care of horses. She and her sisters had had enough to do in learning not only their trade but a lady of leisure’s accomplishments as well. This was no small feat for girls who had precious little leisure. But it was unthinkable merely to learn a trade. While the DeLuceys and Noirots might all be greater or lesser rogues and criminals, they never forgot they were blue bloods. Too, they knew that refined accents and manners vastly improved the odds of luring unsuspecting ladies and gentlemen into their nets.
Learning dressmaking and learning to be a lady—not to mention acquiring other less virtuous Noirot and DeLucey skills—left no time for the finer points of horsemanship. Sophy could distinguish general types of vehicle, and she could appreciate a handsome horse, but for the rest she had to trust Longmore’s judgment.
“I think I’ll send Fenwick to insinuate himself among the stablemen,” he said with a glance at the door through which their host had departed. “They’ll have noticed the cabriolet if it passed, or they’ll have heard about it from post boys. We’ll get more detailed gossip from them than from any tollgate keepers.”
The innkeeper reappeared then, a plump maidservant following. While she led Sophy up to her room, Longmore stayed behind, talking to the landlord.
Meanwhile, less than ten miles away, in Esher’s Bear Inn, Lady Clara sat by the fire, studying her copy of Paterson’s Roads.
“Portsmouth,” she told Davis. “We’re already on the road, and it’s only a day’s journey.” She calculated. “Not sixty miles.”
“It’s not twenty miles back to London, my lady,” Davis said.
“I’m not going back,” Clara said. “I won’t go back to him.”
“My lady, this isn’t wise.”
“I’m not wise!” Clara jumped up from her chair, the guidebook clattering to the floor. “I declined a duke because he didn’t love me enough. Poor Clevedon! He at least liked me.”
“My lady, everybody who knows you loves you.”
“Not Adderley,” Clara said bitterly. “How could I be so blind? But I was. I believed all those romantic words he’d taken out of books.”
“Some gentlemen can’t express themselves,” Davis said.
“I’d almost got myself to believe that,” Clara said. “But that wasn’t the point, was it? That wasn’t the real problem. How humiliating that I needed Lady Bartham to point out the simple fact: If he’d truly loved and respected me, he would never have done what he did.”
Her ladyship hadn’t said it quite so baldly as that. But Lady Bartham never insulted or hurt anybody plainly and honestly. She’d slither about the subject like a snake, and every so often, when you weren’t expecting it, she’d dart at you, tiny fangs sinking in, so tiny you barely felt them … until a moment later, when the poison seeped in.
There was a moment’s silence, then, “Portsmouth is a naval town, my lady. Very rough. Sailors and brothels and—”
“It’s near,” Clara said. “It’s a port. I can get on a ship and sail far away. It can’t be so very dangerous. People go there to tour and sightsee. I’m ruined. Why shouldn’t I see the world? I haven’t even seen England! Where do I ever go? To our place in Lancashire and back to London and back to Lancashire. Since Grandmamma Warford died, I don’t go anywhere. She used to take me away, and we had such fun.” She swallowed. She still missed her grandmother. No one could take her place. Clara had never felt more in need of her counsel than now.
“She used to drive her own carriage, you know,” she went on, though Davis knew perfectly well. But Clara needed to talk, and her maid wouldn’t shriek at her, as Mama did. “She was an excellent whip. We’d drive out to Richmond Park and visit her friends there.” They would go out to Richmond Park and Hampton Court for a day’s outing.
Clara had driven to the park today, hoping somehow her grandmother’s spirit would find her, and tell her what to do. She’d left the park no wiser, and gone on to Hampton Court. None of Grandmamma’s wisdom came to her there, either, and even a living person, Grandmamma’s great friend, Lady Durwich, had no advice but for her to turn back and stop being such a ninny.
Clara wasn’t sure where she was going. To Portsmouth, to start with. After that … somewhere, anywhere. But not back to London. Not back to him.
Sophy’s room was small but clean, and the maidservant was as eager to please as Sophy expected her to be. People of every social degree judged by externals. While an upper-class accent and fine clothes were sure to win attentive service, generous tips and bribes could raise the quality of service to unadulterated obsequiousness.
Not only was Sophy expensively dressed but she had ready money. Marcelline had made Leonie provide funds for tips and bribes, and Sophy wasn’t stingy with her coin. She wanted supper and a fire and a bath and she was happy to pay for them.
She got all three quickly, without fuss, despite the hour and the sudden influx of storm refugees.
As it turned out, she was in too much turmoil, about Lady Clara and about the shop, to do more than pick at supper. Since she was, at the best of times, a light sleeper, she knew she was in no state to attempt sleeping until after she’d had a bath. That would quiet her. Certainly she’d feel better once she washed the ghastly egg mixture out of her hair. She’d brought her favorite soap, scented with lavender and rosemary.
Though the inn servants had brought a very small tub, she’d bathed under more primitive conditions. And no, it wasn’t the easiest thing to wash her hair without help, but she managed it.
And so, in time, thanks to the hair washing and the bathing and the soothing scent of her soap—and a glass of wine—the turmoil began to abate.
She donned her nightgown, wrapped herself in her dressing gown, poured another glass of wine, and settled into a chair near the fire to dry her hair.
The old inn’s walls were thick. She heard little of what passed outside her own room. The thunder grew more distant as the storm traveled on. The rain continued, beating against the window, but now that she was safe and dry indoors, the sound soothed her. She’d always liked the sound of rain.
She remembered rainy days in Paris, and the misty rain last week, when she’d strolled up St. James’s Street to lure Lord Longmore from his lair. While pretending to be gazing elsewhere, she’d watched him saunter across the street to her … such long legs in his beautifully tailored trousers … the finely cut coat, sculpted to his upper body, emphasizing his broad shoulders and lean torso … the snowy white neckcloth tied with elegant simplicity under his strong chin … he moved with the easy grace of a man completely at home in his body and completely sure of himself … such an odd combination he was … part dandy, part ruffian … so tall and athletic … she’d like to be his tailor … oh, she’d like to fit him in something snug … no harm in dreaming …
… What was burning?
Longmore tried not to think about his sister, out in the storm.
She wouldn’t be out in the storm, he told himself. She wasn’t that stupid. Even if she was, Davis wouldn’t stand for it.
But wherever Clara was, he wasn’t likely to catch up anytime soon. And wherever she was, he couldn’t protect her.
While his mind painted ugly scenes featuring his sister in the clutches of villains, he wasn’t altogether unaware of what passed in the next room. He’d caught the muffled sound of voices when Sophy talked to the maid, and the tramp of feet in the room and a thump of something heavy being set down and then the splashing.
She was taking a bath.
That was a much more agreeable image than the ones of his sister in peril.
He told himself that worrying about Clara wasn’t going to help her, and it would only wear on his nerves, already frayed after the slog through the storm.
He had another bottle of wine sent up and he gave his coat to the inn servant for drying and brushing.
Since his trousers were still damp, he drew a chair up before the fire. There he sat, drinking.
By degrees, he grew calmer. Clara might be out of her head, but she wouldn’t endanger her horse, he reminded himself. She’d have taken shelter. She’d go to a respectable inn because Davis wouldn’t let her go into one that wasn’t—and respectable inns lined the Portsmouth Road.
The wine and more optimistic thoughts calmed him enough to make him grow drowsy. He was putting his booted feet up onto the fender when Sophy screamed.
He sprang from the chair to the door between their rooms. He yanked the handle. It wouldn’t open. He stepped back a pace and kicked.
The door flew open, crashing against the wall.
She was making little sounds of distress and dancing about and trying to pull off her dressing gown. Smoke rose from the hem. He saw a tiny flame lick upward.
In two quick strides he reached her, ripped the ties she’d been struggling with, pulled the dressing gown off her, and threw it into the bathtub.
“Oh!” she said. “Oh!”
“Are you all right?” he said. Without waiting for an answer, he turned her around, his heart racing while he looked for signs of incipient fire. He spied some brown spots and holes at the bottom of the garment, but no signs of active burning.
“What the devil were you doing?” He turned her around again. Though festooned with frills—at the neck and wrists and down the front opening—her nightdress was a flimsy nothing. Tissue-thin muslin … through which one could easily make out the outlines of her … naked … body.
A haze entered his mind. He shook it off. No time for that now.
No rushing fences. Not the time and place.
A part of his mind said, Why not?
He ignored it. “Are you drunk?” he demanded. “Did you fall in the fire?”
Someone beat on the door to the passage. “Madam! Madam!”
She ran to her portmanteau and began rummaging.
Longmore strode to the passage door and yanked it open. An inn servant stood there. “What the devil do you want?”
“Sir—your lordship—I beg your pardon—but someone screamed—and one of the guests smelled smoke.”
Sophy drew on a shawl. “Yes, I screamed,” she said. “I thought I saw a bat.”
“A bat, madam? But the smoke?” The servant sniffed. “I do smell smoke.”
The fellow was trying to peer round Longmore, who advanced to the threshold to block his ogling half-naked females who didn’t belong to him.
