by Mary Balogh
Diana sometimes thought that Bridget must have been born talking and not have stopped since. It was easy most of the time to be entertained and even amused by what the maid said, and it had become a habit to confide in her. But the whispering on this particular evening was more irritating than a repetition of the screeching in the pantry the day before would have been.
Bridget had come to the parsonage to cook for Teddy before his marriage. When he had brought his wife there, the girl had confided to Diana her lifelong ambition to be a lady's maid. Since her cooking left something to be desired, Diana had quickly promoted—or demoted—her to the position of her own personal maid and had done the cooking herself. Teddy could not afford to hire another servant, though his parents constantly pressed him to allow them to hire a whole contingent for him.
Diana refused Bridget's suggestion that she take some laudanum to help her sleep. She hated to take any medicine except when absolutely necessary.
"I have to be up early," she explained. "I don't want to have a thick head, Bridget."
"A thick head might be better than a sore head, mum, Lord love you," Bridget whispered. "But there, you was ever stubborn. Wouldn't take a thing when the poor dear reverend passed on, you wouldn't, though everyone else about you was having the vapors and dosing up all week before the funeral."
' 'I wish I didn't have to go." Diana pressed a warm hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. "They are so very kind, Bridget. So very affectionate. And so very overbearing. They were never reconciled to the Reverend Ingram's taking a country parsonage when they had hoped for something much grander for him. Now they want to make it up to me. They want to arrange a splendid match for me. I don't
want another husband—not yet anyway. And when I do, I want to be free to choose him myself."
"But it is time you was enjoying yourself again, mum," Bridget whispered. "You so young still and so pretty. And always so quiet and so dull at the parsonage. P'raps there will be somebody there for you, mum—some handsome gent what will sweep you off your feet."
Diana groaned. "Sometimes, Bridget," she said, "you are no help at all."
But she did want to marry again, she thought after her maid had finally tiptoed from the room and slammed the door firmly behind her. She was three-and-twenty and burning for some gaiety in her life. It was just that the feeling seemed so disloyal.
She had been exceedingly fond of Teddy. She had married him for all the wrong reasons—she had acknowledged that long ago, soon after their marriage. She had been so very young and naive when her parents had taken her to London for a Season, and quite alarmed by her own success. She had not known what to do with it. Fashionable gentlemen had terrified her. She had never known how to look at them, what to say to them, how to behave toward them. So she had frozen up and watched
in dismay as they became worshipful and even more ardent in their admiration.
Teddy had been different. Unworldly, unfashionable, bookish, unhandsome. She had felt very safe with him, very comfortable. And so she had accepted without hesitation his offer when it came.
It was not a good reason for marriage. But she had made it work. She had often been bored at the parsonage, and she had often looked at Teddy and wished he could be more romantic, more amorous, more—something. But he had been kind and affectionate and she had grown to love him. Not in the way she dreamed of loving a man, perhaps, but dreams were never reality anyway.
She had grown to love him dearly and had concentrated all her energies on making him comfortable. She had resolutely shut her mind to the boredom and tedium of her life.
Her world had been shattered by his untimely and quite unnecessary death. For a few months she had thought she would never stop crying. She had thought that the sun would never shine for her again, that nothing would ever happen again to give her the energy to live. Despite the invitation to make her home at Rotherham Hall, she had returned to her papa's house, taking Bridget with her, and had lived there
ever since.
If living were the right word. It had been a suspended life. She had worn black for Teddy inside and out. And somehow it had become a comfortable way of life. While part of her yearned for gaiety and a renewal of life, the other part clung to its cocoon. It was safer to remain inside it. It was less likely that she would have to experience again the pain of losing someone around whom her life had come to revolve.
But tomorrow she would be leaving for Rotherham Hall. She was to spend three weeks there with other members of the earl's family, celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday. It should have been safe. They were all family. But the countess had a strange definition of family. It consisted of far more than children and brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and cousins. People of quite remote connection
were considered family.
This house party was not safe at all. And the countess had openly admitted in a letter inviting—or summoning—Diana that she was going to find her a new husband.
It should have been laughable. After all, Diana had chosen her own first husband without any help from anyone at all, and had clung to her choice even when her parents had tried to talk her out of it. And she was three-and-twenty, a quite adult woman with a mind of her own.
But she knew the Countess of Rotherham. She was fond of her. How could she not be? Both the earl and the countess had doted on Teddy, and their love had extended to her when she had married him. But she knew that the countess was an incurable matchmaker. She had seen her in action on more than one occasion, but had never thought to be a victim herself one day. It was the countess's boast that she had never failed to bring together two people once her mind was set on a certain match. It was also her boast that not one of those marriages had ever turned out unhappily.
Diana had the feeling that her mother-in-law would be a formidable adversary.
And tomorrow it was all to begin. Out of her cocoon and into her mother-in-law's clutches.
Hence the headache.
She burrowed farmer under the bedclothes and tried to shut her mind to what might be facing her. She must get some sleep. She had to be up early, and the day would be a long and tedious one of travel.
But sleep could not be willed. She shut her eyes tight and tried to lose herself in one of the fantasies she had begun indulging in quite soon after her marriage while she lay beside her quietly snoring husband trying to get to sleep. She had pot encouraged them very much since his death—they had made her feel too guilty and too empty.
And they would not serve now either. Her mind was just too addled with the knowledge that the next day she was going to have to step out of her mourning—though she had given up wearing black and even gray a month before—and into life again.
She tried to find some cool part of her hands or wrists to set against her throbbing forehead, and turned restlessly onto her side.
She wished she weren't going to Rotherham Hall.
She wished her headache would go away.
She wished Teddy were there and snoring at her side.
She wished that somewhere in her future there could be a man who would make the world an exciting place in which to live.
Teddy. Teddy.
2
Since the Earl and Countess of Rotherham were expecting eighteen guests—not including the two infant children of their eldest son—to arrive all within a few days of one another, it was no particularly strange occurrence that two groups of them should be travelling along the same stretch of road ten miles from Rotherham Hall at the same time.
Even so, it was probable that the two groups concerned would have remained totally unaware of one another's presence had the clouds that had been hovering threateningly over them for several hours not chosen to empty their contents on their heads and on the roadway toward the middle of the afternoon. They were quite reckless clouds. There was no thought to reserving some of their moisture so that they could rain merrily down for the next several hours. They emptied their load all in on
e glorious downpour. It was over in less than an hour.
The road became a glistening and oozing quagmire. Impassable, one might have said, except that there were a closed carriage, a gentleman's curricle, and a horse and rider who had to pass somewhere or huddle in misery beneath a hedge.
The Marquess of Kenwood, who was on the horse's back, would gladly have huddled. His horse's hooves were generously spattering him with mud, a steady waterfall from the brim of his hat was obstructing his line of vision, and an equally steady and cold stream was finding its way down the back of his collar. Who would have known it was June? He shivered.
However, he looked up and unhunched his shoulders at a shout from Lester Houndsleigh, a passenger in Ernie's new curricle, followed the direction of Lester's pointing finger, and saw a blessed sight indeed. A squat and ugly inn, sitting smugly almost on the road a few hundred yards distant, looked good enough to be heaven's gate. Images of a dry taproom, a warm fire, and a spicy glass of ale took his lordship's mind off the lesser comfort of a hedgerow.
Lord Crensford, inordinately proud of his new curricle and equally new pair of matched grays, purchased from Tatter-sail's only two days before, was not to be deterred by the small matter of a little mud on the road. Or by a great deal of mud, for that matter. The inn must be reached and disembarked at, of course—the cloudburst was deucedly inconvenient. But with such a splendid new vehicle to tool along
in, there was no reason whatsoever for caution. And it would be quite, quite demeaning to slow down behind the large, plain carriage that moved at a cautious snail's pace along the road ahead of him.
The marquess watched through the curtain of the waterfall before his eyes as his mad relative pulled his curricle across the roadway, quickened his pace—actually quickened it!—and swayed and slithered past the carriage.
And drove on blithely, totally unaware of the drama unfolding behind his back.
Lord Kenwood took a firm grasp of his horse's reins and drew it to a cautious halt as he watched, tense and helpless.
The carriage slid sideways, slithered, rocked, spun, and slid some more. The horses slid and squealed and reared. Probably no more than a few seconds passed before the coachman, with consummate skill and marvellously profane language, succeeded in halting carriage and horses, all of them upright and unharmed, though by the time he had completed his task the carriage was facing one hedge, and the horses were facing back in the direction from which they had come.
And such an unholy caterwauling was issuing from inside the carriage that the marquess—reason not taking much of a hand in his thinking at such a moment of crisis—was convinced that there must be at least a dozen maidens in distress locked up inside.
Ernie should be strung up by his thumbs, he thought grimly as he threw himself from his horse's back, landed with a loud splat in the mud, and raced to the door of the carriage. He had flung it open almost before the final oath of the coachman had drowned in the rain.
"You are quite safe now, ladies," the marquess announced as if he were personally and solely responsible for saving them from the horrors of hell.
His brain soon registered the fact that there were only two of them. A buxom maid, who might be passably pretty when she finally got around to closing her mouth and allowing the blood to flow from her face to some other part of her body, and when she lifted her mobcap back on top of her head where it belonged instead of down over her eyebrows where it had slipped, was screeching as if demented. It was a shame she had had the misfortune to be born female, the marquess thought irrelevantly. The army had thereby lost an excellent sergeant major.
Fallen sideways against her by the violent swaying of the carriage, and not yet put to rights again, was a lady. An exquisitely pretty young lady, whose pale blue pelisse and dress and white petticoats and stockings made her appear startlingly fragile and feminine in contrast to the misery of the elements outside the conveyance.
Of course, the petticoats and the stockings should not have been displayed to his interested gaze. Neither should a pair of slender and shapely legs, bared almost to the knees. And her bonnet was doubtless not positioned to her liking, skewed around on her head as it was so that one side of it almost covered her right eye while the other side was pushed back to reveal a riot of shining fair curls.
"Oh," she said, pushing away from her maid with ungainly haste and appearing undecided for a paralyzed moment—a delightful moment for the marquess—whether her bonnet or her skirts were in most urgent need of attention.
She finally decided on the bonnet. "Do control yourself, Bridget. As this gentleman has just said, we are quite safe now. I thank you for your concern, sir, but do you happen to be the imbecile who overtook us just now under such shocking conditions?"
"No, ma'am." No sense of loyalty impelled Lord Kenwood to speak up in defense of his traveling companions. Not at least when the lady blushed so hotly and becomingly and looked so prettily mortified as she brushed her skirts down and realized just how much leg she had been displaying for his delight. "I cannot imagine anyone having such a criminal lack of sense. I trust you are unhurt?"
"Yes, I thank you." She sat prim and perfect. And as cold as the raindrops that were dripping down his neck. The maid beside her had fallen silent and lifted her mobcap to its more customary position atop her head.
Alas, the marquess thought, touching his hat, sketching a bow, and withdrawing his head into the storm again, there was no occasion after all to leap into the carriage in order to calm the hysterical females in his strong and very willing male arms. Only the maid had been hysterical, and one word from her mistress had had the effect of calming her.
A very disappointing encounter. It had had strong romantic possibilities. Not that he was much given to romance, it was true. It had had such . . . possibilities, he amended in his mind.
Those two idiots were probably already steaming themselves before a fire, he thought, grimacing at the sight of his boots as he mounted into his saddle again. The curricle was already being led into the coachhouse beside the inn. They had doubtless not even glanced back to see that all was safe behind them.
Well, if there was one consolation in the events of the last hour it was that the lady of the delightful legs would probably be forced to put up at the inn too. It would be suicide to try to continue. He might have another chance with her. Good fortune seemed to be smiling on him, even if the sun was not.
He frowned at an ostler who was peeping out at him from the stables, obviously afraid that he might get his cap wet if he came outside. And he watched in some disgust a minute later as the same ostler led his horse away at arm's length lest he get some mud on his breeches.
Some inn this was going to be.
* * *
Although it was an enormous relief to feel the carriage draw to a halt outside the inn, Diana was very reluctant to alight. For one thing, it seemed improbable that they would be able to continue on their way that day, and she had set out with so few servants only on the understanding that she could reach Rotherham Hall within one day. Papa would be so vexed with her if he could see her bow.
Then of course, there was her headache, which a sleepless night, a day of travel on English roads, a sudden rainstorm, and the near accident caused by the gentleman's curricle had done nothing to ease. A country inn was the very last place where she felt like resting her head.
She had not seen that gentleman turn into the inn. She had not looked out the window. But he must have done so. It would have been madness to ride on. Would he be standing there inside when she went in? She would die of mortification. Gracious heaven, he had seen more of her legs than Teddy had ever seen. And her bonnet must have looked ridiculous, to say the least. How would she ever face him and keep her dignity? And he had been so very decidedly handsome and fashionable, despite
his muddy and bedraggled appearance.
Of course, those idiots, those imbeciles, those nincompoops—she could not think of a strong enough word to describe
the two gentlemen huddled inside their coats and beneath their hats who had raced past her carriage and almost left total disaster in their wake—were probably at the inn too. She would like nothing better than to give them a piece of her mind, especially the one who had held the ribbons.
But she doubted that her head would allow her to do justice to her wrath.
"I should drop to my knees right here and now," Bridget was saying beside her, though she did not do so, "and give thanks to the merciful Lord for bringing us safely here. I thought we was dead for sure, mum. My life flashed all before my eyes, which is what they say happens when you are about to die. Most queer, mum—five-and-twenty years all in a flash. I even saw my dear mum, what died when I
was five. But she was holding out her arms to me, she was, and telling me to come. And a beatific smile on her face, mum."
Diana grasped her temples with a finger and thumb. If she had one thing to be thankful for, it was that Bridget had forgotten to whisper.
