by Kate Moore
“Wait,” she cried to the highwayman.
He turned to look down at her from his black horse. He was nothing like the highwaymen in her stories. His gaze was like ice, like the grave. There was no lace at his throat, no plume in his hat, and not a mark on his horse. The dark brim of his hat hid his features. The moon touched only the black gleam of his pistol.
“Take us with you,” she pleaded.
“I beg your pardon, miss. You wish to be kidnapped by a gang of desperate men.”
Miranda heard amusement in the toffee voice. Miranda knew her gentlemen’s voices. No question this man was a gentleman. “The guard shot my...husband. Please don’t leave us with them.” She shuddered.
“Curious.” The highwayman leaned forward in his saddle. The pistol in his hand never wavered. He turned to the coachman again. “Taken to shooting the passengers, have you, Cole?”
“Go on, man. Ye’ll be paid, same as always. We can take care of the rest.”
“I think not, Cole. I’ll handle this problem myself.” The highwayman turned in his saddle and spoke again in the strange tongue. Apparently, he issued orders, for two of his accomplices sprang forward and lifted Nate from the ground.
“Careful,” Miranda cried. “He’s bleeding!”
“Cuidado!” said the highwayman.
A third man pulled Miranda up. “Señora, ven,” he said. The highwayman reached down a black-gloved hand, and his companion seized Miranda by the waist, and she found herself hoisted through the air onto the great horse. A strong arm came around her waist.
“Hold on,” said that voice in her ear. The horse stood perfectly still under them. Around them the shadowy figures disappeared into the woods. “Cole,” the man behind her said, “tell your master our deal is off. Can’t have your lot shooting the passengers.” The highwayman fired his pistol. The guard gave a yelp and tumbled back from the coach, and the highwayman turned and galloped into the woods.
To find the true happiness she seeks in marriage, the husband hunter must distinguish between the attentions of two very different suitors. Both gentlemen depend on keen observation for the success of their wooing. The first is the courtier, the man who has made a study of pleasing his company. He knows how to flatter delicately and how to please the husband hunter’s tastes and preferences. He knows that she prefers the lemon tart to the macaroon, the violet to the primrose, a country dance to a quadrille. The other is the man of action. He never flatters. He appears indifferent to her preferences. He simply procures an umbrella in the rain or a chair when he sees her fatigued. He checks the girth of her saddle and makes sure that she has an escort to the supper room.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter 13
Harry put on his scarlet regimentals and returned to the inn early for Nate Wilde’s report. He had a few moments to himself in the coffee room over Mrs. Vell’s eggs and weak coffee to think about Lucy Holbrook and her missing cat.
The long-case clock sounded the hour, and the bench sitters arrived, but not the Rocket. In a few minutes a man brought the news that the Rocket had been robbed again. The thieves had taken the horses and shot the guard. Cole had abandoned his passengers. A wagon had been sent for them.
As Harry waited for the inn wagon to bring the stranded passengers, he listened to heated talk of sending for troops to patrol the woods and break up the gypsy encampment. He had little doubt that the blame was misplaced.
When the passengers arrived, neither Nate nor Miranda appeared. Harry could not have mistaken Nate’s express. He looked the passengers over for someone who might give a reliable account of what happened.
Most of the passengers were consumed with their own inconvenience and united in their abuse of thieves and coachmen alike. Except one fellow with a military set of whiskers, who, Harry guessed, had more sense than the rest. He sat drinking his ale and helping himself to rolls and bacon, without needing to shout or complain. When the surgeon arrived to tend the wounded guard, Harry sought the quiet man.
“First Royals, were you?” the man asked, looking at Harry’s uniform.
Harry nodded.
“Jeremiah Frost,” the man said, extending a hand. “Formerly of the Thirteenth Light, myself. Do you have any interest in this affair?”
“It concerns a friend of mine,” Harry replied. “The innkeeper.”
“Well,” said the man, “I can’t help thinking that this lot has got it all twisted round.”
“How do you see it?” Harry asked.
Jeremiah spread the fingers of his left hand, ticking them off with his right thumb. “First, Cole and his guard are in on what happens. Second, Cole directly told the highwayman he’d be paid. Third, the fellow was no ruffian, had a voice like a velvet cushion. Fourth, the rest were speaking Spanish, not some Romany tongue. Don’t I know my Spanish from five years on the Peninsula!” Jeremiah paused to take a long draught of ale. “Fifth, they never bothered the passengers for a purse or a watch, but took the worthless horses. And lastly, it was the guard who shot the boy.”
“Boy?” Harry asked.
“Young fellow with the whitest teeth, traveling with his pretty wife.”
“Where are they?”
“The highwayman and his gang took ’em.”
“Took them?” Harry swore. He was used to bad news. Equipment got lost. Foul weather descended. Orders were garbled. One soldiered on. He hadn’t wanted a new partner, but Wilde was one he didn’t want to lose.
“The wife begged the fellow. She didn’t trust the guard at all.”
“Frost, thank you. Your account of the robbery is most helpful.” It was the guard Harry needed to talk with, preferably now when the fellow was still in pain.
He found the man sitting in Lucy’s private dining room. He had been neatly grazed by someone who was obviously a good shot and had suffered more from tumbling backward off his seat. At first he refused to talk with Harry about the robbery, but agreed when Harry suggested that the doctor wait to snap the collarbone into place until a constable could be summoned. When the doctor finished, Harry handed the fellow a pot of ale and encouraged him to talk. This time the fellow had quite a lot to say.
* * * *
Miranda was having a second stay in a grand house, and not in the housekeeper’s room either. She had been shown to a blue-and-white lady’s room with the most cunning dressing table piled with silver boxes and china scent bottles. Frothy lace draped tall windows.
The strange men who spoke in that foreign tongue had carried Nate into the grand house with its marble entry and sweeping staircases. Then English people, country people with recognizable English faces and voices, had taken over and carried Nate up to this grand room. He’d been stripped to his smalls, so that his wound could be cleaned and dressed. A doctor had come and praised Miranda for holding her gloves to her husband’s shoulder. She’d likely saved his life, she was told. Somehow the lie about being his wife stole the pleasure from the praise.
A stout maid with a hardy, unsentimental manner took Miranda away while the surgeon probed for the bullet. The woman found Miranda a gown to wear and a shawl for warmth and promised to try what she could to save Miranda’s blood-soaked skirts.
When Miranda returned to the pretty bedroom, pale morning light was coming through the tall windows and the doctor had given Nate a draught of medicine to make him sleep. He lay still and white as death in the grand bed, his beautiful shoulder wrapped in bandages.
His other shoulder, smooth as an ivory brush handle, peeked out from the bedclothes. She remembered when he’d been injured the year before. He’d kissed her then. He wouldn’t want to kiss her now. He’d left her alone in their room at the inn, he’d hardly looked at her, and he’d slept on the floor. She had stolen glances at him while he shaved, but he had been cool as ice under her gaze, never looking her way.
It
made her think again about why he’d brought her with him. She’d thought he still fancied her, but now she saw that he had been intent on the work for Captain Clare. The whole adventure had been a mission to him. He’d been using her as his cover, so that he could ask his questions about Adam without anyone suspecting he was working for a spy. Well, she wouldn’t be foolish over Nate Wilde.
She’d been ever so foolish over Lord Hazelwood. She saw that now, and in her folly, she’d done the really unforgivable thing that caused the club to close. Nate wasn’t sweet on her anymore, and he didn’t even know what she’d done. If he knew... She shook herself. She wouldn’t think about that. She had to help him get back his strength, and she had to figure out how they were to get back to London.
The mysterious highwayman had vanished almost as soon as they entered the grand house. Now that she had time to think about it, she realized that the house belonged to him. For a few minutes in the tall wide entry there had been a flurry of activity, of a butler and liveried footmen, all taking orders from the highwayman. As he strode toward a pair of paneled oak doors, he had tossed his hat and black coat into the hands of a waiting footman. Another footman dashed to push open one of the doors. Miranda saw a book-lined wall.
The highwayman had turned to her. Even in the blaze of lights in the hall, what she saw was darkness. His tousled hair was inky black. His brows and eyes and the shadow of his beard were equally dark. He was as tall and wide as old Goldsworthy, but younger and leaner than the spymaster, not much older than she and Nate.
“You and your husband will be safe here, madam, until we can figure out what’s to be done with you.”
She did not find the remembered words encouraging, and she reached for Nate’s still hand and gave it a squeeze. “Sleep now, Nate Wilde, because I need you to wake up tomorrow ready to act,” she whispered.
* * * *
Harry’s conversation with the guard had made several things clear. The robberies were a distraction. Everything about them was calculated to summon a figure out of legend—the wooded place, the man in black, the band of supposed gypsies. It was all a bit of theatre designed like a magician’s sleight of hand to mislead the authorities. Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe appeared to be the victim of robbers, but the stolen horses were actually no loss.
The guard believed Sir Geoffrey had picked the place for the holdup and paid the highwayman. He was less forthcoming about why he’d shot a passenger, claiming the coach had moved and wobbled his gun hand. And he had no idea who the highwayman was. He spoke of the man in the aggrieved tones of one who felt himself wronged. “Some toff on a lark. Disappears every time with the horses and that lot of rabble speaking their gibberish. He had no call to shoot me.”
Harry doubted that the highwayman went far after the robbery. If he really was a gentleman on a lark, he had a place nearby. Radcliffe’s weary coach horses would slow any escape, and a man would need a place to conceal them. He would start his search for Nate and Miranda with the country estates bordering the Aylesbury road. But first he would pay Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe a visit.
Sir Geoffrey’s place of business in London’s bustling Church Street had a prominent sign declaring that the business had been established in 1806 and a ground floor devoted to the carriage trade. The vast lower room housed six carriages of various designs leading up to the famous Rocket. A sign proclaimed, Ride a Rocket Today! The carriages on display stood on platforms, each with a designation of its year and make. Great maps on two walls showed the routes Radcliffe’s Rockets traveled. A third wall was devoted with cruel relish to a display of coachman’s whips, including the murderous tommy.
A beefy clerk with the battered nose and ears of a former pugilist manned the display room, while another clerk asked Harry his business.
“Tell Sir Geoffrey that I heard that his Aylesbury Rocket is troubled by robberies. I wonder, can he use an armed escort on the night run?”
“You?” said the clerk with the pugilist’s battered face.
“Old soldiers find work where we can,” Harry said.
“Sir Geoffrey pays a guard,” the second clerk said.
“And yet a bold thief continues to steal his horses,” Harry replied. “At least tell him I offered.”
“Keep an eye on him,” advised the first clerk. He turned and disappeared through a door in the wall of whips.
“Mind if I look at a coach or two?” Harry asked.
A grunt was the only reply. Harry took his time walking around the coaches under the hostile gaze of the big fellow. He studied the maps on the wall. Each of the Rockets’ several lines converged on Dover, and Harry realized he had seen Radcliffe’s routes before on a map in Goldsworthy’s office at the club.
A canvas-draped vehicle at the rear of the room caught his eye. Its size and shape and the wheels visible below the canvas drape suggested a private rather than a commercial vehicle.
“You’ve got a coach that’s not on display.” Harry took a step in the direction of the shrouded carriage, and his path was immediately blocked by the substantial personage of the pugilist clerk.
“That ’un’s not restored.”
The second clerk returned. “Sir Geoffrey says to leave your name.”
“Captain Harry Clare.” Neither man wrote the name down.
Across the street Harry waited behind a beer wagon. As he expected, Sir Geoffrey’s clerk emerged from the office and summoned a hack. Harry followed the man to a fashionable address on Curzon Street, an address Harry knew well, the lodging of a Frenchman with long ties to the Foreign Office. Goldsworthy had explaining to do, and Harry had friends to recover, but first, he had a picnic to attend.
As she begins her Season, the husband hunter may feel that her matrimonial aim is so well known to those around her when she arrives in London that she can do nothing to achieve it. She may imagine that every rival miss, every eligible bachelor, and every sharp-eyed mother of marriageable sons or daughters has anticipated her intention and her tactics and is working to achieve a contrary aim. But if our husband hunter will consider the behavior of true opponents meeting in battle, even opponents as well acquainted with each other’s tactics as rival generals who have met in the field before and studied the ground well, she sees at once how fatal it would be to assume that her rival’s victory is inevitable.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter 14
The day’s weather favored a picnic. Cassandra and Cordelia had decided that in spite of the apparent gaiety of such an outing, a picnic was more proper to a true state of mourning than endless rounds of calls on slight acquaintances. In their opinion the tranquility and simplicity of the natural scene, the buds and shoots of spring, and the opportunity for quiet reflection away from the noise and confusion of London would certainly do Lucy’s spirits good.
Accordingly a gown in a shade of gray the sisters called “cloud” with black ribbons for her bonnet was to be Lucy’s outfit, and the high open ground of Parliament Hill in Hampstead four miles away was to be their destination. A flurry of messages from the Brook Street house brought round nine people for the affair. A pair of barouche-landaus set off by noon with the five ladies, a pair of footmen, and a handcart with a hamper, a basket of drinks, and blankets. Four gentlemen on horseback accompanied the ladies. Lucy tried hard not to be disappointed that Harry Clare was not among the men. The inescapable Miss Throckmorton and her mother were of the party. Miss Throckmorton wore a day dress and matching spencer and bonnet, in a yellow that any dairymaid would be proud to see emerge from the churn.
In their carriage Miss Throckmorton began at once the subject of mothers. “I appreciate how fortunate I am in my mother now that I’m out. In the schoolroom one hardly realizes the advantage or disadvantage one’s parent may prove to be in society.”
Lucy murmured that it must indeed be a comfort to have a mother’s guidance for the Season.<
br />
“What have you discovered about your mother since we last met?”
Lucy conceded that she had no new information to offer.
Miss Throckmorton looked grave. “Well you must pursue it, you know.”
Lucy nodded. “I intend to.”
“Now, my mother, even at her age, with her appearance and figure, and of course, with her lineage, is the perfect chaperone. It would be dreadful to have a mother who looked a fright. Gentlemen might suppose that one was headed down that path oneself.”
For a few blessed minutes this stream of self-congratulation was interrupted by Cordelia bringing up the history of Hampstead, the benefits of its waters, and the many famous personages who resided there.
Lucy managed to avoid further discussion of mothers during the remainder of the drive. The carriages halted at the entrance to the heath, and they descended to climb a rutted wagon track through faded grasses, picking their way between hard frosted ground and softer, boggy patches with Cassandra exhorting them to mind where they stepped, and the footmen stoically pulling the handcart. Lucy thought she would chide her lady about those laboring footmen when she returned to the inn.
The view from the top of the hill was worth the effort. The ladies held their fluttering hats in the breeze, while Lucy’s friend Thomas Bickford, the barrister in their Back Bench Lending Library group, pointed out the distant dome of St. Paul’s and the spires and roofs of other famous London edifices.
A thick rug was spread on a relatively dry patch of ground, and they sat to enjoy sandwiches, cakes, and hothouse strawberries. Is this what you wanted for me, Papa? The question popped into Lucy’s head unbidden, and for a moment she could not taste her sandwich. Miss Throckmorton began to speak, but Cordelia cut her off, bringing the conversation round to books. Lucy smiled to herself as the Back Bench group dove into their usual talk about the latest novels they’d read. They were a comfortable group.
