by Jane Feather
He went to the door, continuing, “You and I will start out in your curricle in half an hour. We’ll take a turn around Hyde Park to give the impression that we’re just going for a drive. We’ll make the first change at Potters Bar, so we’ll wait there for the chaise.”
“Why must it look as if you’re going for a drive?” asked poor bewildered Maria.
“It’s a little complicated,” Emma replied. “When we’re at Doddington, then I’ll tell you about it. But there’s no need for you to worry.”
“Well, I own I’m thankful that Alasdair is with us,” Maria said, giving him a grateful smile.
Alasdair bowed low. “I could wish you were in company, Maria.” He left the breakfast parlor.
But the minute he was outside the door, his expression darkened. Something had happened to change Emma’s attitude since yesterday at Richmond. But he couldn’t for the life of him think what. He hadn’t done anything to upset her. He always knew when he had, and he knew categorically that he had done and said absolutely nothing.
So what in the name of Beelzebub was going on?
He went back to the street and told Jemmy to take his curricle and horses back to the mews. “Give order that they’re to be exercised every day, then ride Phoenix to Potters Bar and lead Lady Emma’s Swallow. We’ll meet you at the Black Gull.”
“You’re not takin’ them bays with you?” Jemmy was stunned, his eyes wide in his wizened face.
“Apparently not,” Alasdair replied wryly. “Put my valise in Lady Emma’s curricle and stow the pistols under the seat.”
Jemmy, muttering, obeyed and sprang into his master’s curricle, taking up the reins and whip.
Alasdair watched his favorite equipage disappear around the corner onto Audley Street with glum resignation. Emma was going to have to make the next round of concessions, he decided.
However, it was not to be.
Emma appeared fifteen minutes later in a severely cut driving dress of a brilliant flaming orange broadcloth edged with black braid. She looked like a bird of paradise, Alasdair thought with something akin to despair.
“If I was hoping to smuggle you out of the city, I can forget it,” he said as she came down the steps to the street. “That flagrant display of color is going to attract attention for miles around.”
“Oh, but I have my veil,” Emma responded with an innocent smile. She adjusted the little black hat that was perched upon the stripey braids encircling her head.
The veil was a mere ornamental wisp, any potential for discretion completely counteracted by the flourishing black plume that curled onto her shoulder. The effect was striking; in fact, Alasdair reflected, it was magnificent. Once seen, not easily forgotten.
“Anyway,” Emma continued in the same innocence as she took the reins and whip from Sam and prepared to climb into her curricle. “I understood we wanted everyone to see us taking a drive through the park. While the chaise leaves unnoticed from Mount Street, I shall be lionizing in my curricle.”
She cast him a sharp look as she quoted Julia Melrose in less than dulcet tones. But Alasdair showed no reaction. It was almost as if he hadn’t heard her.
“Making a vulgar exhibition of myself, even,” she elaborated pointedly.
A frown crossed Alasdair’s expression. “Why would you do that?” he said, and then, without waiting for an answer, turned to give John-coachman instructions for the first stage of the journey.
Emma reflected with derision that he’d probably forgotten what he’d said to his mistress. He probably chattered on without regard for his words in the full flood of lust….
Sour bile rose in her throat and she swallowed bitterly, turning her head away from Alasdair, contemplating the street as if it seethed with interesting sights. Not that she’d have been able to take them in if there had been any. Her eyes were clouded with angry tears.
“Right. Let’s get moving.” Alasdair sprang into the curricle beside her. “Sam, let go their heads.”
The chestnuts, as if released from a trap, sprang forward. Emma checked them, feeling their mouths with a delicate tug on the reins. They responded immediately.
“Nice,” Alasdair said.
“Very,” Emma agreed and was about to launch into an enthusiastic commentary on the chestnuts’ responses when she realized that once again that infuriating amnesia had overcome her anger at Alasdair. One minute she could be hating him with the most profound and hurtful detestation, and the next she’d find herself completely absorbed in a discussion about one of the many experiences and enthusiasms that they shared with such passion.
She compressed her lips tightly and gave all her concentration to her horses.
Alasdair shot her a puzzled glance. Something was definitely amiss. Maybe it was a nervous reaction to the robbery. He’d first noticed her distance when he’d walked into the house after Maria had sent for him. He understood that she’d been annoyed that Maria had sent for him. But her companion’s somewhat foolish insistence on the necessity of a male pilot through life always annoyed her, although usually she laughed it off.
In normal circumstances, Alasdair would have looked to his own behavior to find the cause of Emma’s coldness, but he knew he had nothing for which to reproach himself. There was no possible way he could have angered or distressed her between yesterday at Richmond and now.
She could reasonably be upset and maybe even frightened about being pursued by spies with distinctly evil intent, but her distance had been there before she’d understood the real situation.
So what in hell was it?
“I’m glad to see that you’ve recovered from whatever ailed you last evening,” he said, as they turned into Hyde Park. “I’ve never seen you so sleepy. And it was so sudden.”
Emma said nothing. The only explanation she could produce for that strange turn was her shocked misery at what she’d overheard in the retiring room. She wouldn’t have expected herself to react in such a missish fashion, but the body could play strange tricks on occasion.
“But then, we did have a somewhat energetic afternoon,” Alasdair murmured with a smile. His hand for a second rested on her thigh. She went rigid beside him, her eyes fixed on the path ahead. He let his hand fall away, his puzzlement turning to a familiar frustration.
If there was something the matter, why didn’t she just tell him?
Paul Denis, from the seclusion of a shrubbery just a little off the path, watched the curricle bowl past along the tan. That damned Alasdair Chase seemed to stick to her like a fly to honey. It wouldn’t be possible to take her here in the middle of the park, but a carriage accident, a diversion of some kind, in the busy streets outside the park, would give them the opportunity.
He and the two useful men Luiz had found for him would be an easy match for the ugly looking tiger on his perch at the back. But adding Alasdair Chase to the equation changed the numbers.
Paul had been waiting for her to enter the park. Luiz had stationed a boy at the mews where her horses were kept. As soon as the curricle had been sent for, the urchin had delivered his message, received his sixpence, and gone whistling on his merry way.
The plan was beautiful in its simplicity. Once he saw Emma, Paul had intended to waylay her. He would ask her to take him up for a turn around the park. An utterly ordinary request and one she could not refuse without grave discourtesy. They’d parted amicably the previous evening at Almack’s. She would have no reason to be rude to him.
He would ask her to drop him off at Fribourg and Treyer’s, where he wished to freshen his snuff. Again he didn’t think she could refuse such an innocent request. And his men would be waiting in the street outside the shop to create the accident.
His fingers curled over the small piece of lead piping in his pocket. A blow to the base of the skull would render her insensible. It would appear she’d been injured in the accident. In the diversion and the inevitable milling crowd, it would be simplicity itself to hand her up to Luiz, who would be waiting in
a gig.
A foolproof plan—except that it didn’t take into account Lord Alasdair. However, it would not be unusual either for Paul to ask Chase to yield his place in the carriage. Lady Emma was still on the marriage mart as far as society was concerned. She still had her choice of suitors. Sharing her attentions was part of the game they all played.
Paul stepped out of the shrubbery and resumed his casual stroll along the path, watching for the curricle’s return circuit. But he watched in vain. The curricle did not return.
It took him the better part of fifteen minutes before he was certain he was now on a fool’s errand. Swearing under his breath, he left the park and hailed a hackney.
He turned onto Mount Street just in time to see Maria Witherspoon climb into a laden post chaise. A maidservant followed with a jewel case. Of Emma there was no sign.
Paul rapped on the wall behind the jarvey, and the man pulled in his horse. He leaned back to shout through the window. “You want out ’ere, gov?”
“No, just wait here until I tell you to move on.”
The jarvey shrugged and leaned back on his seat, shaking out an old copy of the Gazette. Paul rested his arm on the window and watched the scene outside Emma’s house.
Postilions, outriders, a mountain of luggage—all the signs that a long journey was contemplated.
But there was no Emma, only her companion and the maid.
Emma was driving her curricle in the park with Alasdair Chase.
Paul pulled at his sharp chin. If she was going on a journey, why would she go for a drive in the park first?
To throw anyone interested in her movements off the scent, of course.
He had shown his hand by taking the writing case last night. They would reason now that while she was riding in the park, no one would be interested in the house. If they managed to leave London undetected, then they’d be well nigh impossible to trace. The roads out of London were numerous at all points of the compass. Possible destinations were as varied as the colors of a rainbow.
The post chaise started to move. Paul leaned farther out of the window. “Follow the chaise.”
“Where to?” The jarvey folded his newspaper again.
“If I knew that,” Paul snapped, “I wouldn’t need you to follow it.”
Emma took the curricle through Cumberland Gate at the northern end of Park Street and headed north to the Holloway road. At the toll gate before Islington Spa, Sam sprang down to get the tickets that would open the next three tolls for them.
Alasdair had finally had enough. “Is this silence going to continue until we reach Potters Bar, Emma?”
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“Yes, you do,” he asserted. “You are bursting with something to say. Something is eating you alive, and I think you’d better get rid of it before it consumes you completely.”
Sam jumped back on his perch and Emma started her horses again. On the one hand, she wanted to accuse him. She wanted to see his confusion and embarrassment. She wanted to hear him stumble over an explanation, or a denial that he couldn’t possibly make convincing.
But on the other hand, she couldn’t bear to risk hearing him shrug it off … laugh at her for being a naive chit for caring a harlot’s curse what he said to anyone. She had almost persuaded herself now that that was how he would react. He would chastise her for such an unrealistic, unsophisticated concern. They were all grown men and women with no illusions. It was the way of the world.
And she couldn’t endure to hear that.
Alasdair waited for an answer. He waited through the pretty village of Islington Spa, up the hill into Highgate and down the northern side. He waited until they were on Finchley Common, where the lonely track stretched ahead of them across the heath under a steely gray sky.
He waited as they passed the gibbet at Fallow Corner. The rotting corpse of an erstwhile highwayman swung in its chains, creaking as the wind blew off the flat heath. The silence in the curricle was profound until Sam, holding pistols at the ready in expectation of an extant highwayman, began to whistle half under his breath as if to dispel his own discomfort.
They came off the heath without encountering sight or sound of danger and stopped for the toll in the village of Whetstone. Alasdair by now had lost his far from limitless patience, but nothing could be done while Sam was sitting behind them. They might quarrel in front of Jemmy, but Sam was a newcomer.
“Stop at the Red Lion,” he instructed curtly as they drove into the busy town of Barnet two miles after Whetstone.
“I thought we were stopping at Potters Bar.”
“I need a drink, and the horses need watering.”
Emma pulled into the courtyard of the Red Lion. Ostlers were racing to change horses for a trio of post chaises heading out on the Great North road.
Alasdair sprang down to the cobbles. “Come.” He held up a hand to assist Emma to alight.
She hesitated for an instant, then took the hand and stepped down herself. She knew Alasdair was now angry and she knew that in her typically perverse fashion she had engineered the scene that was about to unfold. Despite her dread of his reaction, she needed the confrontation. They had never been able to conceal their emotions from each other, rocketing from one tempestuous peak to another. Maybe it wasn’t the most mature way of going on, but neither of them seemed able to help it.
Alasdair released her wrist the instant she had touched ground. “Go into the inn and bespeak a private parlor,” he said, adding with frozen courtesy, “And a jug of ale for me, if you please.”
Emma did as he asked. The landlord, bowing in the doorway, assured her that he had a private parlor overlooking the street. He would send refreshments immediately. He snapped his fingers at a maidservant, instructing her to show the lady up.
Emma followed the girl upstairs and into a square, wainscotted apartment. She was standing at the mullioned window overlooking the street when Alasdair came in.
“The landlord is sending up ale and coffee,” she said tonelessly, drawing off her gloves. “Also some cold chicken and a game pie. I didn’t know if you were hungry.”
“Not particularly,” Alasdair said. He stood with his back to the fire, lifting the tail of his driving coat to warm his backside.
“I suppose Maria must be well on her way by now,” Emma observed, not turning from the window.
“All right, Emma, that’s enough!” Alasdair declared. “What the hell’s going on here! You’ve been sulking ever since I arrived in Mount Street this morning and—”
“I have not been sulking!” Emma cried, swinging round on him. “I never sulk.”
“Until this morning, I might have agreed with you,” he retorted. “Just why am I getting the cold shoulder?”
Emma dropped her gloves onto a gate-legged table. “As it happens, I don’t care to hear …” she began, then broke off as the maidservant returned with food and drink. Emma turned back to the window.
The girl looked curiously at the two occupants of the parlor. The tension between them was so thick you could cut it with a knife. She laid out the contents of her tray, making more of a bustle than the simple task warranted, but the silence in the room was so noisy that she felt an overpowering need to fill it.
“Will that be all, sir?” She bobbed a curtsy in Alasdair’s direction, since Emma still had her back to the room.
“Yes … yes,” he waved her away with a brusque gesture. She curtsied again and hastened from the room with her empty tray.
“Let’s begin again.” Alasdair poured himself ale. “What is it that you don’t care to hear?” He took a deep draft from his tankard and regarded her through narrowed eyes. He was conscious of his own anxiety, the apprehension flickering beneath his annoyance, and it didn’t do anything to make his demeanor more conciliatory.
“I do not care to hear myself discussed by the likes of Lady Melrose,” Emma said, her color now rather high, the faintest tremor in her voice. “Discussed in disparaging terms that a
re attributed to you!”
Alasdair stared at her for a moment in complete bewilderment. He set his tankard back on the table. “I don’t understand you.”
“Don’t you?” Her voice shook with anger now. “Perhaps you don’t remember giving your opinion of me to Lady Melrose, in terms that I understand had to be heard to be believed. Vulgar as Letty Lade, I believe was one of them. Perhaps you don’t recall saying to her that you couldn’t wait until I found a husband and you could be free of your odious responsibilities as trustee.”
She caught her breath on an angry little sob and pressed her fingers to her mouth, fighting for control. She would not give way in front of him.
“What else did you discuss with her?” she continued, taking advantage of his momentarily stunned silence. “My skills at bedsport, perhaps? Do you enjoy comparing your mistresses, Alasdair?”
Alasdair paled. “That’s enough!” he declared, his eyes ablaze in his white face, a muscle twitching in the corner of his rigidly set mouth. “Let me just get this right. You are accusing me of discussing you with other women?”
“Not just discussing,” she fired back. “Disparaging me to your other women, so that they can repeat what you’ve said to their friends and acquaintances and anyone else in society who cares to hear … so that your words are on the tongue of every old cat and gossip in the entire town!”
She whirled away from him, unable to look at him, swept away on the hot crimson tide of her hurt and her anger, and unsure which emotion was now uppermost.
“How dare you!” Alasdair spoke with a quiet ferocity that was merely intensified by the softness of his voice. “How dare you, Emma!”
“How dare I what?” she flung over her shoulder. “I am merely repeating what I heard. And heard in the most public place.”
“You dare to believe I would do such a thing? That I would be so blind to decency, to propriety, that I would discuss you in personal terms with anyone?” “I heard it,” she said flatly. “I believe what I heard.”
