Peters offered to teach her to whittle. Egg and Love, the former boxers, feinted sparring at one another and showed Rosalind how to throw a punch. In one of her high-necked colorful gowns and with her bonnet ribbon untied, she looked every inch a lady and every bit a gleeful member of the party.
She hadn’t wanted to join him on this trip. He was glad she had. He hoped that she was glad now too.
As they re-saddled the horses and rearranged themselves to travel onward, Nathaniel heard a bark. A somehow familiar bark.
“Damn,” he muttered. They were near Sawbridgeworth, weren’t they? Which meant these were Joe’s fields.
Indeed, a sheepdog soon followed the sound of its barking, ducking under some fence and bounding up to Nathaniel, who stood next to Bumblebee. The leggy bay’s ears flicked forward with curiosity as he eyed the dog.
Joe fell flat to his belly, the patient, waiting posture of a well-trained dog. He had long, shaggy white-and brown-and-black fur, eyes like little black currants, and a wet black nose he liked to poke into everything.
Rosalind walked to Nathaniel’s side, one hand on Farfalla’s bridle. “Nathaniel, you have made a new friend?”
“Met an old one again. Rosalind, meet Joe.”
“Hello, Joe.” She handed her mare’s reins to Nathaniel and crouched before the dog. “You are a sheepdog, aren’t you?”
“He is. Not that I know his real name. But every time I pass this way he comes to greet me, so I have to call him something.”
Rosalind squinted up at Nathaniel. “You fed him once, didn’t you.” It was not a question.
He sighed. “I should have known better. But he was so friendly, running alongside me.” Since that first encounter—complete with petting, playing, and a piece of beef sandwich—Joe seemed to have caught Nathaniel’s scent. Now every time he passed these fields, the dog darted from its herd to greet Nathaniel with wagging plumed tail and pricked ears.
“He can come along with us for a little way today, can’t he?”
“He probably will whether we like it or not.” The dog was too well trained to run off entirely. But this time of year, the lambing ewes were in sheepcotes, so he must be bored and missing part of his flock.
The problem with Joe was that he treated everything as his flock. This was fine when Nathaniel was riding alone. But in a large group? Joe would be the canine equivalent of a milkmaid, causing delay on delay.
And yes, as soon as Dill and Button rode forward to take their usual positions ahead of the party, Joe trotted to their side. Weaving inward to nudge the pair of horses closer together and darting in front to halt their progress until the rest of the herd could catch up.
“Oy!” shouted Dill, reining in his black gelding to avoid trampling the dog. “Chandler, call off the creature! We ain’t his sheep!”
Nathaniel boosted Rosalind into her saddle, noticing the spasm that crossed her features—that always crossed her features—when she moved her right side quickly.
But rather than comment on this, which he knew she wouldn’t welcome, he asked, “Any ideas for convincing a sheepdog not to drive horses into a herd?”
She settled herself, taking up Farfalla’s reins. “Even if I had almonds in my pocket, I don’t think a sheepdog would be interested.”
Nathaniel looked toward the outriders. Button had drawn his bay to one side of the road, and Joe trotted in quick circles around the pair of horses. White paws were a blur, as though the speed of his short strides would draw them closer together.
“He’s going to spook the horses,” muttered Nathaniel. “Or win himself a trampling.” Already, the bay was beginning to bob his head and paw at the earth.
The drop of perspiration returned, tapping at Nathaniel’s collar and threatening to slide between his shoulder blades and itch. Damn. One little dog, so eager to please, was keeping them from getting on their way.
To recall Nathaniel’s notice, Rosalind tapped him on the shoulder. She grinned down at him from her saddle. “Why not give Joe some way to help in the way he wishes? Look, Pale Marauder is starting to wander again.”
This was true. At the end of Lombard’s lead, the cream-colored colt was pulling and winding as usual. He never traced a straight path when he could coil and backstep and yank with nervous energy.
“Rosalind, you are a genius.” Nathaniel took a moment to admire her. Her worry of a few days ago had melted off, and she was every inch the tidy horsewoman from gloves to beribboned hat. “Where’s that hamper?”
Without waiting for answer, he sorted through the packed-up belongings in the carriage with Noonan’s help. Finding the leftover rind of a ham, he strode with it next to Lombard—currently grappling with Pale Marauder’s lead line—and whistled.
Joe came lolloping back from the nervous pair of horses, drawn by the whistle and the scent of meat. Nathaniel dangled the bit of ham before him, then let Joe snap it up with his panting doggy grin.
“All right, Roddy. Do your worst,” he said to Pale Marauder.
“He thinks it’s his best.” Lombard rolled the straw he was chewing from one side of his mouth to the other, then spit. “C’mon, Rod. On we go.”
Instead of stepping forward, Pale Marauder stepped sideways. Joe sprang into action, bounding to the grassy edge of the road and curving beside Pale Marauder’s front hooves. The colt’s next step was forward, and the next too, until he was walking in a neat line beside Epigram on Peters’s lead.
Nathaniel chuckled, shaking his head, and swung up onto Bumblebee’s back. Dill and Button rode forward, the Thoroughbreds walked, and he took his own preferred place at Rosalind’s side as the carriage began to roll behind them.
“What a good dog,” Rosalind commented with a nod toward Joe. With effortless energy, the sheepdog weaved to nudge Pale Marauder back into his place in the procession. “He so wanted to be useful. All we had to do was determine how he could be.”
“Good old Joe,” Nathaniel agreed. He couldn’t fault the sheepdog for that. How often had he felt the same, figuratively running in circles for want of something to do?
Joe stayed with them until the rolling grassland at one side of the road was broken by a few houses, then changed to a tree-bounded village. As if recalling him to his post, a distant baaa sounded. Joe loped back to Nathaniel, barked up at him—Job done, thanks for the ham, have to go now—and ran back along the road in the direction from which they’d come.
Within one minute, Pale Marauder was tugging and winding all over the road again. “Wouldn’ mind having that dog join us all the way to Epsom,” Lombard tossed over his shoulder. Spit.
Nathaniel laughed.
He liked being on the road, free and unfettered, matching his wits against the weather or circumstance. Or even a friendly sheepdog that adopted them as his own.
With Rosalind Agate at his side, everything seemed fresher and brighter. He didn’t have to solve problems alone—and that meant, for now, there seemed to be no problem the travelers couldn’t solve.
* * *
The next day contained no sheepdogs, only the everyday milkmaids of carts and carriages for which to make way, heat and dust, water and grass to find. By agreement, the travelers again set off during the early-morning coolness, then spent the baking hours of midday resting in shade. They used the time to clean tack and tell stories.
Then, to Nathaniel’s dismay, Lombard suggested a spitting contest. “Ever’one take part!”
“Mr. Nathaniel has a medal he could offer the winner,” Rosalind mentioned. That rogue.
“I never had a medal before,” Lombard said cheerfully.
And if the contest had been judged by volume, victory would surely have been his. But the contest favored distance—and Rosalind, who demanded a chance to try, proved to be the winner.
“Coo! She hit that tree,” said Love. His craggy face bore an expression of great admiration.
“I have seven brothers,” Rosalind explained. “Three older and four younger—plus on
e sister. Sometimes I think my whole childhood was spent spitting and learning boys’ tricks.”
“Never seen such a lady,” commented Noonan in his gentle brogue. He began applauding, and Nathaniel had to join in, smiling.
“If you’re all finished here,” he said, “then we’d best get on the road again. But Miss Agate, you’ve won the medal fairly, and it’s yours.”
“Oh, I couldn’t take it for that,” she said. “I was only teasing about making you give it up. You received it when you helped someone. I spit on a tree. Really, you must keep it.”
So he did. But he thought of it as hers after that, and the shining bit of metal felt warm in his coat pocket.
On that third day after the fete—the fifth since they had left Newmarket—when Nathaniel made to leave for the stables after the party had shared their evening meal, Rosalind informed him that her daily letter to Sir William included the phrase “no one could do better leading this company.”
“Do you think so?” As they faced each other at the base of the inn’s staircase, he wished they had stopped in full daylight so he could study every shading of her face.
“Of course I do. I wouldn’t lie to your father.” She sounded shocked, which amused him.
For a moment. “Thank you. But you’d better moderate your language or he’ll assume you’re being satirical.”
“Secretaries,” she began, and he knew what was coming next. He finished the sentence with her: “are never satirical.”
He caught her grin, reflecting it back. “What about women with green ribbons? Or red flowers in their hair?”
She shook her uncovered head. “They might manage a bit of satire if something suitable comes to mind. But I am just a secretary for now, Nathaniel.”
“You are never just a secretary,” he replied.
“Right now I am.” She caught the newel post in one hand and turned to mount the stairs. “But I think…I will not always be. Don’t you?”
Today he didn’t dare watch her walk away from him. After a comment like that, he just might try to follow her.
Thirteen
Nathaniel would have liked to avoid London entirely on the journey south, but the city was too large. To swing wide of it would add impossible days to their travel. From Newmarket to Epsom was a long arrow-shot through London’s heart.
The following day, then, their quiet rural road began to change. London began long before one expected, the peaceful treed lanes and quiet roads giving way to wagon traffic, to inns and houses and shops, the blue skies smoke-smudged in inky thumbprints. Soon enough the blue would become gray, and the buildings would cluster and press more tightly. The crowds would thicken; the noise would swell.
He kept his pistol always primed now, though he had never had any difficulty traveling during daylight hours. With Rosalind riding Farfalla next to him on Bumblebee, he chatted and knew all was well with her. And with the help of the outriders, there was no reason to fear for one’s safety from criminals.
Nathaniel had not accounted for fashionable fools, though.
In late afternoon, when the sun was at its most insistent and Nathaniel began to drowse in the saddle and dream of iced wine, a burst of shouts split the air.
Then a panicked whinny. More shouting. The crack of a whip and a rumble of wheels—all so quick upon one another that almost before Nathaniel had taken in the first of these sounds, a phaeton barreled around a gentle curve in the road. It weaved and bumped over ruts, tilting and teetering on one of its great glossy wheels.
“Make way! Make way!” The driver’s face was hardly visible between the fluttering capes of his greatcoat and the high crown of his silk hat. He lashed his lathered gray with a whip, and the horse jerked to one side. On his precarious perch, the driver was nearly unseated. He caught himself only by tugging hard at the reins. Pulled up short only feet from Dill and Button, the horse reared up, pawing the air, before returning to earth with a jolt that made his driver whoop.
Nathaniel held trembling Bumblebee still, quite still, until the fool driver and his poor lathered beast had passed by, their hubbub and panic receding. “You’re all right, my good fellow.” He rubbed the cob’s withers. “I would never treat you thus.”
It had been a near scrape. Had they been farther around the bend in the road, the reckless driver might have barreled right into them.
Wheeling Bumblebee, Nathaniel studied the party. Rosalind gave him a nod; both she and Farfalla had kept their heads. The others looked well too, though a few yards away Pale Marauder was making a temperamental nuisance of himself. Lombard had his hands full but managed a reply to Nathaniel. “He’s all right. He just doesn’t want to see another horse causing more trouble than he is.”
“True enough.” Nathaniel was about to call for them to proceed when he noticed the coachman clamber down from his seat in the carriage. “Come about,” he called instead. Dill and Button cantered back to join the others, both cursing the phaeton driver.
In a knot of puzzlement, they made their way to the carriage that held the tack and baggage. The wiry coachman was crouching beside one of the front wheels, shaking his head.
“Felt a right jolt when I set them horses to walking again. Thought it might be a rut, but I hate to say it’s more.”
“More than a rut? Is the carriage stuck?” Nathaniel swung down from Bumblebee’s back and handed the reins to Peters. The big redheaded groom also held Epigram’s lead as the dark colt wandered to the side of the road to crop whatever grass he could reach.
“Someone is pleased by the stop,” Nathaniel noted. He gave each of the stolid carriage horses a pat on the neck before crouching next to John Coachman.
He cursed. More than a rut was right. John Coachman must have taken a quick turn to remove the vehicle from the mad driver’s path, and he had run over a rock. The formerly round wheel’s wooden rim, its felloes, had split and was now as lopsided as a half-cracked egg.
“Damn. Damn.” This was the same wheel that had been damaged on his way up to Newmarket, and it was the same damage too. He’d had it repaired with a metal plate, but he should have had the felloes replaced entirely. Once broken, the wheel was never as sound as it had been before.
But he had not wanted to be late reaching Chandler Hall. He had hurried, had made the quick repair instead of the right one. And then he had forgotten about making any further repair once there were sick horses to care for. A trip to prepare for.
Not the time for a poem, he told himself.
John Coachman was apologizing, but Nathaniel halted him. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I was responsible for seeing to its repair.” Pushing to his feet, he then helped up the older man. “I am relieved beyond measure that you and the horses weren’t injured.”
Lombard peered around Nathaniel, then spat into the dust. “Migh’ be you could pop that plate back on to hold the felloes together. If ye’d somethin’ to use as a hammer.”
Nathaniel would have beaten his head against the side of the carriage if it would have helped. “A hammer… No, we’ve not got anything heavy enough. Do you remember if we passed a wheelwright recently?”
Spit. “Passed a smithy ’bout a quarter of a mile back. Saw the smoke from the forge. I could ride back an’ borrow a hammer.”
Nathaniel mulled this over. He felt responsible for making the repair, and at once—but riding toward an unknown smithy would eat time he ought to spend moving the carriage and caring for the horses. “Very well. Thank you, Lombard.”
The groom took off on Bumblebee, and the rest of the party dismounted. Nathaniel and the other men put shoulder to the wounded carriage and rolled it to a stable portion of the road. They unhitched the carriage horses, and Nathaniel then pretended not to notice as the quartet of outriders and the roguish Noonan settled under a nearby shade tree with smoky pipes and surreptitious sips from flasks. John Coachman and Peters kept vigil over the horses.
And Nathaniel walked around to the far side of the carriage, worke
d open its door, then began tugging at the first trunk he could reach.
“What are you doing?” Rosalind’s voice.
He didn’t want her to look at him right now. Not when he had just failed them all. “If we can lighten the load, it will be easier to repair the wheel.” In truth, he had no idea whether this made any difference to a wheelwright. A carriage weighed more than a half ton on its own. How much could the luggage weigh?
Still, he heaved forth the trunk. It felt better to be doing something more than blaming himself. Something to help.
She reached around him to grab a smaller bag. “You’ve the look of a man berating himself.”
“And why should I not?” he grunted as he pulled at another trunk.
A light hand covered his, helping to support the weight of the heavy piece. “Because these things happen. Milkmaids exist. If anyone is to blame, it’s the wild driver of the phaeton.”
“A piece cannot break if it’s not cracked to begin with.”
“How does it get the crack, then? Doesn’t that allow for accident and chance?”
She meant well. He knew she meant well. But he couldn’t look at those green eyes, soft with meaning well. Not when this was why she was here: to make sure he, Nathaniel, did not bungle away his father’s chance at a Derby victory. To make him trustworthy, but only secondhand. She was Sir William’s secretary, Sir William’s eyes along this journey. Though he had kissed her, though he had tried to persuade them both she was not a secretary, the truth was…she was.
Nathaniel had asked her time and again to trust him. He didn’t want to see her stop, as his father had so many years ago.
Once he and Rosalind eased the heavy trunk to the ground beside the carriage, he moved to close its door. “You need not help me anymore. Please. Go rest beneath the tree like the others.”
When she did not move, he said again: “Please.” When he looked at her at last, her jaw was set.
A Gentleman’s Game Page 13
