by Abby Ayles
“You never thought it prudent to tell me?” Edmund demanded, towering over her.
There was a feeling inside of him that he was entirely unfamiliar with: a rage towards Miss Warrick, who had only ever disappointed him once thus far.
“I’m sorry,” Miss Warrick said miserably, seeming to diminish in stature. “I wanted Miss Patience to trust me. She swore to me it was nothing, only a daydream. She told me they had not been in contact.”
“Your job here is not to be liked and trusted, Miss Warrick,” Edmund thundered, using his full height above her. “Your position is to protect and educate the children who have been placed in your care. This foolish pride of yours has cost my sister her virtue!”
Miss Warrick covered her face with her hands, weeping. “I have failed her, I know. And… and there was more.”
“More?” Edmund shouted.
He was not full of pride to see Miss Warrick flinch at his voice, but he had more urgency to know the truth than to comfort her.
“The ball… you told her she was not to attend. I… I discovered her room empty that night as well. Lieutenant Hardwicke had taken her. They bade me not to tell you a word, my lord. He… he promised nothing untoward…”
Miss Warrick broke off into sobs, her shoulders heaving.
Edmund’s heart was thawed much by the sight of her distress, and another picture was forming in his mind of the truth.
It was Christopher’s friend who had captured Patience, the friend he himself had brought to the house.
It was Christopher who took her to a ball without permission, and no doubt beetled poor Miss Warrick into covering it all up.
It was Christopher, Edmund saw, who was to blame.
“There is an answer to this somewhere,” Edmund said. “Miss Warrick, find your composure. We must discover those letters. Please, begin a search of her room. I will speak to Christopher.”
“He is quite useless at this moment, my lord,” Miss Warrick said, gasping for breath as she sought to restrain her tears. “He is drunk. I asked for his assistance and he was… I do not want to say too much, but I fear he was amused.”
“I see,” Edmund replied. A muscle in his jaw clenched so tightly that it was painful. “Then there is but one thing I need to discuss with him. Begin your search. I will join you shortly.”
Miss Warrick hurried to Patience’s room, where the door already stood ajar, wiping her face with her hands as she went.
Edmund waited for her to disappear, then turned and kicked Christopher’s door hard enough for it to rattle in its frame.
Three times he kicked before he heard a groan and a rustling noise from inside the room.
“Edmund,” Christopher said, rubbing his face. “My head is a fresh hell this morning. Please, do not wake me again.”
“This will be my left hand, Christopher, since my right is incapacitated. Thus, I am sure it will not provide the full force with which it is intended,” Edmund said, regarding his brother coolly.
“What?” Christopher asked, scrunching up his eyes against the sun.
He was still holding that face when Edmund’s fist flew towards him, which was lucky indeed, since it landed precisely on the radius of his left eye.
When Edmund entered Patience’s room, Miss Warrick was already shifting through a pile of letters scattered across the bed. An upended keepsake box was left by them, clearly emptied of its contents.
“The most recent,” she said, brandishing it aloft as she saw him.
She seemed quite recovered, enough to have remembered her drive and responsibility, though her face was still pale. “It mentions something of an inn with a sign of a white horse.”
“I know it,” Edmund nodded, darting back into the corridor. “Come. We must waste no time!”
He took the stairs two at a time, shouting orders at Jenkins and the driver on the way down. In the end it was Jenkins, Miss Warrick, and he that piled into the carriage, leaving instructions with Mary to distract the children sufficiently when they awoke.
“It is a three-hour drive from here to the inn,” Edmund explained as they set off, the carriage rattling down the long driveway at a swift pace. “I believe our man can do it in two, if he pushes the horses fast enough. I do not know how far we are behind her.”
“There was certainly no coach or carriage noted last night, my lord,” Jenkins informed him. “The driver told me he retired late, and there had been nothing. There may be perhaps only a four-hour window in which Miss Patience left her room.”
“I do not believe they would have brought any coach to the house,” Miss Warrick put in. “They would have tried the utmost secrecy. The letter speaks of a walk. Perhaps she met the coach in the town.”
“So, our window is smaller still,” Edmund noted. “It would have taken her perhaps an hour to walk there.”
“With those odds, we are but a short distance behind,” Miss Warrick said. “We can catch them yet.”
Edmund thought on these reassuring words, but his heart could not absorb them.
s
He hit out, knocking his fist hard against the side of the carriage. “Damn it all!” he exclaimed.
Jenkins and Miss Warrick were silent. They kept their own thoughts.
Edmund lowered his head into one hand, uttering a swift prayer in his mind that his sister was not ruined yet.
The journey was uncomfortable and far too long. Every uneven piece of road made the carriage jolt up and down at high speed, making Edmund’s bones ache and sending pains through his arm.
The physical discomfort, however, was nothing compared to the turmoil inside his mind.
He stared out of the window and watched the countryside roll by.
Jenkins and Miss Warrick, for the most part, did the same. Occasionally Jenkins would mutter something or point out a landmark as they passed, no doubt with the intension of providing reassurance that they were racing on towards their goal.
Edmund could only find the fortitude to nod silently at these interjections, wishing all the while that they could be further on in their chase.
Two hours passed this way, and at last Edmund felt the motion of the carriage begin to slow. He thrust his head out of the window to converse with the driver, looking at the landscape around them.
“Why do you slow?” he asked.
“Right ahead, my lord,” the driver said, gesturing with the whip in his hand. “The coach. We are not far from the inn, and should see ahead of us as soon as we crest this hill. But the coach, I believe it is a private vehicle.”
Edmund leaned out further, looking past his own horses to examine the coach which was just reaching the summit of the hill itself.
It was a plain black affair, with a bend to one of the back wheels that creaked precariously with each rotation. Even from this distance, it was audible. It was moving slowly.
“Catch it,” Edmund said, decisively.
The driver cracked the whip, and Edmund pulled himself back into the interior of the carriage just as it lurched forward at high speed again.
“Brace yourself, Jenkins,” he said, loudly, over the new rattling of their vehicle. “We are in pursuit!”
It took only a matter of a few minutes to catch up with the coach and then draw alongside. Edmund peered closely towards it, but there were curtains drawn tightly over the windows.
Even so, just beyond one sliver of a gap at the edge, he made out a slice of hair and a portion of a woman’s face.
A face he knew very well indeed.
He hammered quickly on the roof of the carriage, a signal meant for the driver. They pulled ahead in front of the coach, and then slowed once more, forcing the other driver to gradually bring his steeds to a halt.
At the last minute, Edmund’s driver turned his horses at an angle, blocking the road almost completely with their length and that of the carriage.
Trapped, the coach stopped only a short distance away, with the driver swearing at the interruption.
; Edmund wasted no time in disembarking from the carriage, allowing Jenkins to help Miss Warrick down behind him. He marched to the coach and flung the door open, finding with a grim satisfaction his sister’s pale and shocked face staring back at him.
“What is the meaning of this?” Jasper Rivers asked from the opposite seat.
As Edmund leaned inside the coach and made himself known, Rivers, too, paled.
“You, sir, had best hold your tongue for the entire length of my presence here,” Edmund warned him, with the quiet certainty of a man who does not made an idle threat. “If you do not, I shall not be held responsible for what happens to it.”
Rivers opened his mouth, looked at Edmund’s face, and then closed it again with a gulp.
“Patience, were you seen by anyone?” Edmund asked, turning his attention back to the other side of the coach.
“Leave us alone,” Patience said shrilly. “I’m not coming back.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. Did you meet anyone on the road? Or were the curtains kept closed for the journey?”
“We’re in love,” Patience declared, though there was a tremulous edge to her voice.
“No one saw us,” River said, quietly.
Edmund turned and lifted a finger, holding it up as a warning. He had told the idiot boy not to speak, but since it was useful information, he moved on with only a dark look in his direction.
“Then you are coming home, and you are doing so immediately,” Edmund said, grasping hold of Patience’s arm.
“No!” she squeaked, pulling her hand back out of his grip. “Jasper, tell him! I’m not leaving.”
Jasper made no noise at all, even though Patience looked at him beseechingly.
Edmund offered his hand again, but she jerked away from him, turning her nose in the air and shuffling across to the far door so that he could not reach her without stepping inside the coach.
Edmund sighed in exasperation. He wanted to hit something again, so he climbed down from the step and took a deep breath of the morning air instead. The fields around them were deserted, and there was not so much as a bird on the road in either direction. The inn was just visible ahead, though it seemed quiet at this early hour.
“May I?” Miss Warrick asked quietly.
Edmund looked up, at Jenkins and Miss Warrick standing patiently by.
They both wore the same solemn expression, with their hands clasped formally in front of them. Edmund almost wanted to laugh. Jenkins had been with the family since before Patience was born, and yet here was Miss Warrick, showing the same level of concern after less than a year.
“You may,” he said, curtly.
He was willing to attempt anything to take her home; if she would not be persuaded, he had no qualms about picking Patience up over his shoulder and carrying her kicking and screaming to the carriage.
Miss Warrick stepped up into the interior of the coach, sitting down next to Patience.
Edmund listened from outside, feeling impatient. He certainly did not want anyone else to come along and witness their predicament.
“Miss Patience, this must stop now,” Miss Warrick said, gently. “You must come home with us.”
“I shan’t,” Patience said. “You can’t control me anymore. I am to be Lieutenant Rivers’ wife.”
“He will not marry you,” Miss Warrick said.
There was a certainty in her voice that Edmund admired, especially given how close she sat to the very man who could refute her statement if he wished.
“He will not risk your brother’s ire. He is not going to stop you going home.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Patience laughed haughtily. “Jasper loves me. Don’t you, Jasper? We’re going on to start a new life.”
“Will you do so without a fortune?” Miss Warrick asked. “Lord Kelt will not allow you anything if you are ruined woman, nor if you marry against his blessing.”
“Don’t you, Jasper?” Patience interrupted, clearly impatient to hear the reply she was waiting for.
There was only uncomfortable silence within the coach.
“Men like him are not interested in marriage, Miss Patience, and certainly not for love,” Miss Warrick said.
“Perhaps he thought that your brother would take pity and allow you some pounds per year that you could both live on. But since he is poor himself, without such an agreement he will ruin you and abandon you.”
“That isn’t true,” Patience said, her voice becoming higher pitched still. “Jasper, tell her.”
There was a longer silence still, and then Jasper cleared his throat. “Perhaps it would be best if you returned to your family,” the man said.
Edmund could have cheered out loud. He knew, of course, that to do so would not be prudent. She still needed to be swayed.
“Come with me now, then,” Miss Warrick said. “Please. I will take you home.”
Edmund held his breath when he saw Miss Warrick begin to descend from the coach, accepting Jenkins’ hand.
When Patience followed her down to the road, he breathed again at last, full of relief.
Jenkins fetched a bag containing Patience’s luggage from the top of the coach, while Edmund returned to the interior.
“Rivers,” he said, his voice low. “I know you are aware that I am a man of considerable means and influence. Should you breathe a word of this misadventure to a single soul, your life shall become one of abject misery and poverty. I shall have you stripped of your rank and cast out of the army, and you shall be in the poor house within the year.”
“You couldn’t do that,” Rivers attempted to protest. “You haven’t a rank yourself. The army wouldn’t listen.”
Edmund leaned close to him. “If I have no influence with the army, then how do you suppose my lazy, drunkard brother managed to get himself a rank despite being disciplined so many times he ought to have been court-martialled?”
Rivers swallowed. It was clear from his eyes that he had understood the point.
Edmund stepped down then and, seeing that the others were now safely waiting inside his carriage, signalled for the horses to be turned around.
For his final act, he turned to the driver of the coach.
“How much for your silence?” he asked, getting right to the point.
The coach driver named an outrageously high price. Edmund reached into his jacket and pulled out the notes, handing them over without a moment of hesitation.
“Not one word, my lord,” the coach driver said, his eyes lighting up with joy as he held the paper.
“Do one extra task for me,” Edmund said.
“Of course, my lord, you name it,” the driver said.
“Leave your passenger on the road here and let him find his own way back to civilisation,” Edmund told him, before returning to sit opposite his sister for the long drive home.
Chapter 26
Christopher departed the day after the incident, sporting an impressively purple eye which, Joanna felt, was more than deserved.
Though Amy and Samuel were curious about what had happened, the topic was banned in the household after Edmund locked himself in the sitting room with Patience for a long, drawn-out shouting match that had everyone avoiding one another’s eyes.
Mary and Cook had been told that Patience was alone in the carriage when they found her. Only Jenkins and the driver knew the truth, and Jenkins would rather pluck out his own eyes than harm the reputation of what he saw as ‘his’ family. The driver’s silence was also assured, and so it seemed that a tragedy had been avoided.
Joanna tried to bring a sense of normalcy back for the children, resuming their lessons immediately as if nothing had happened.
It was clear to all of them that something had changed, however; Patience was quiet now, and no longer outspoken or headstrong in class. She would simply do what she was told, silently and with no complaints.
Though it made things easier for Joanna, she found herself wishing that Patience was back to her normal self.<
br />
She took the children outside for a day of reading by the lake. She had picked out important texts for all of them to read: a simple story book designed to help Amy begin her French, an account of exploration and discovery of new lands for Samuel, and a tome on running the household for Patience.
Joanna even chose a novel for herself, a gothic tale set in an old manor, and settled in to read alongside them.
She ended up watching Patience and thinking things over more than she read.
