by M C Beaton
“You could plead a headache and join me. Put on those riding clothes I gave you, and we could ride out of London and be free.”
Her heart beat hard. “You will not do anything like… like…?”
“Kiss you? No, my sweeting. I will lead that Arab you liked so much to Hyde Park toll and meet you there. Now what time?”
“Ten,” said Mira. “At ten in the morning. They are not due to return until late.”
“Make sure the servants do not see you leave!”
“Be assured. I will tell them not to disturb me at all. I will lock the door of my room behind me.”
“Will you leave by the back door?”
“No. As soon as they have all left, our servants will go to their own hall for tea. There will be no one about. I can slip out by the front door.”
He looked at her doubtfully. “I fear I am leading you astray.”
“Just one day of freedom will not matter. No one will find out, and after it I will be an even more correct young lady than before. Tell me, if Mr. Danby is such a bad prospect, whom do you recommend?”
His eyes roamed about the room. “There is Mr. Jessop, who is young, wealthy, and has already had two dances with you.”
“I did not notice him particularly. Which is he?”
“The tall young man four seats away from your sister, with thick brown hair and a plum-colored silk coat.”
“Ah, yes, he pressed my hand rather hard in the promenade. I fear he is too forward.”
“The devil he did!”
“Who else?”
“There is that young baronet, Sir Giles Parry. He is quiet and good.”
“And dull.”
“You have become hard to please, Mira Markham.”
“Perhaps I shall be a spinster after all. That would not please my father.”
“From what you have told me, your whole young life has been devoted to trying to please your father.”
“I think he has become fond of me,” she said wistfully. “I hope so.”
The marquess stopped himself with a conscious effort from saying that he thought Mr. Markham a most unnatural parent.
“Be very careful you are not seen,” he warned.
After supper Mira’s next dance was with Charles. It was a waltz. She wondered as she danced with him why it was that she should no longer feel anything for him. Perhaps it was because he had chosen the role of cross elderly brother. She was dreamily looking forward to her day of escape on the following day and hoping the ball would not go on very long so that she could get a few hours’ sleep when Charles interrupted her thoughts by saying, “You are looking very beautiful tonight, Mira.”
She looked up at him, her eyes glowing with simple pleasure at the compliment. “Why, thank you, Charles!”
“If I had known… but no matter. You seem to be close to Grantley.”
“He is a friend, as you once were, Charles.”
“You hurt me, Mira. I am still your friend.”
Mira laughed. “Pooh, you think I am a silly little girl.”
His hand holding hers tightened. “You have become a woman, Mira, an intriguing and attractive woman.”
“Thank you,” she said, looking every bit as uncomfortable as she felt. “You are holding my hand too tightly, Charles.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said miserably.
Mira wondered what had come over him. Then she thought he had probably drunk too much. Gentlemen behaved strangely in their cups.
But she was glad when the dance was over.
The marquess was dancing with Lady Jansen, a fact that made Mira cross. Lady Jansen had spread gossip. The marquess should ignore her, not dance with her as if she were the only woman in the room!
But she comforted herself with the thought of that outing tomorrow and then realized that if she was to pretend to be ill and have a headache, she should start pretending right away.
Mrs. Markham was sympathetic. She wanted to leave the ball herself, also anxious to get some sleep before such an indecently early start in the morning. Drusilla was glad to leave as well. She was disappointed in Charles. She expected adoration from him—uncritical adoration at all times.
Mira was glad to pretend she was feeling unwell because it saved making conversation on the road home. But when Mrs. Markham came to see her as she lay in bed and showed rare signs of motherly concern, Mira felt a pang of guilt but assured her mother if she could forgo the barge trip and have a quiet day in bed, then she would come about.
Mrs. Markham agreed, not only because she believed Mira to be ill but because she was increasingly worried about Lord Charles’s manner toward Drusilla and his evident growing interest in Mira. A romantic day on the river was just what Charles and Drusilla needed.
As soon as her mother had left, Mira got out of bed and searched in a trunk at the bottom of the press, where she had hidden the riding clothes. She would lock the door and take the key when she left, just to be safe.
She slept and woke and slept and woke, listening all the time to the harsh voice of the watchman marking off the hours.
Then she heard the house come awake and Drusilla’s voice raised in complaint as she berated the maid. Mrs. Markham came in, dressed for the expedition. Mira pretended to be asleep and lay with her eyes closed until her mother had left. Then she got out of bed, washed, dressed in the riding clothes, and sat down in front of the mirror on the toilet table to tie her cravat. It was rather tired-looking, not having been laundered or starched since the last time she had worn it.
Mr. Diggs was at his post in St. James’s Square early the following morning. He had been excited by the footman’s news that the marquess was prepared to let a gambling debt of five thousand pounds go in order to secure a dance with Miss Mira. He debated whether to watch the marquess’s house and then decided on the Markhams’. He knew of the barge expedition and planned to follow the family party on horseback to London Bridge and then ride to Hampton Court and study them there.
He saw Lord Charles arriving, the carriage being brought round, and then the Markhams and Lord Charles setting out. His eyes sharpened. No Mira. As they drove off, he wondered whether to follow them but decided to wait. Perhaps Mira was going to use this opportunity to slip off and see her lover.
He was just wondering whether he ought to go and try to question one of the servants when the front door opened and a slim youth scampered down the stairs. It was only when the “youth” reached the corner of the square and turned and looked cautiously back that he saw those green eyes. He had nearly missed her. Lady Jansen said she had been dressed as a boy in Covent Garden.
He swung up into the saddle and began to follow her.
At Hyde Park Corner he saw with a feeling of triumph the tall figure of the Marquess of Grantley standing beside the toll holding two horses. He eyed those horses. They were magnificent, but the marquess surely would not drive them hard along the gravel surface of the Great West Road, if that was the way he meant to go.
He saw the way the couple greeted each other like conspirators, and then Mira sprang nimbly up on the back of the Arab.
Mr. Diggs set off in pursuit, glad that they were taking an easy pace. But after Knightsbridge, the marquess shouted something, and they set off across the fields. Diggs spurred his mount, but there was no way he could catch up with them. He wondered what to do. He needed corroborative evidence. His own word would not be enough. They could both deny the whole thing.
But Mira could not be absent a whole day without the servants’ knowing. Perhaps she had pleaded sickness and locked the door of her bedchamber. So if he returned to St. James’s Square claiming to have a message for her that she must receive from him personally, the game would be up.
But would it?
All Mira had to do would be to admit that, yes, she had been lying but that she wanted to be on her own for a day.
Perhaps if they stopped somewhere, at some inn, he could catch up with them. He set off again in the directio
n they had taken.
The marquess and Mira were sitting on a grassy bank above a wind of the River Thames. “I did enjoy that,” said Mira, stretching her arms above her head to the blue sky. “I must find a husband who will let me ride ventre à terre.”
He laughed. “I will tell your future. You will become a respectable matron in no time at all with children in the nursery. You will become plump and placid and go on calls to the neighboring gentry, and you will be very strict with your daughters, always suspecting them of getting into the same scrapes you got into yourself.”
“Not I. I would like freedom.”
“I do not think you are going to get it, such is the lot of women,” said the marquess. “Or you will stay a spinster and be expected to behave until your parents die. Then the money will go to Drusilla’s son, and you will have a small competence. You will travel abroad with your sketchbook, just another English spinster with a sketchbook, lonely and awkward and unable to go for wild rides, for you will have stiffened up with genteel activity.”
“And what if I marry?”
“Your husband may admire your wildness before marriage, but after marriage he will expect you to be correct in all things.”
“Would you?”
“Ah, yes, I am as bad as the rest. I would expect my wife to be a gracious hostess and run my household for me.”
“Sad! Let us not talk of the future. There is only today. What are we going to do?”
“We are shortly going to find a comfortable inn on the river and eat and drink something, and then we shall see.”
She lay back and stared up at the sky. Her coat fell open, and he turned his eyes away quickly from the young swell of her breasts and looked out across the river. “Your family will be well on their way,” he said.
“Yes,” she said idly.
“Do you often think of Lord Charles, or has that dream gone?”
“It went, just like that. He was so very stuffy, lecturing me on my behavior. I realized we had both changed. I amused him as a child and when he, too, was younger. I thought of him romantically for only a little. He will be happy with Drusilla.”
Not while he is busy falling in love with you, thought the marquess, but remained silent. He wondered how Lord Charles was coping with the absence of Mira.
Charles was leaning gloomily against the side of the barge, watching the greenish water of the upper reaches of the Thames slip by. He thought that Mr. and Mrs. Markham had been cruel to leave their younger daughter, who was not feeling well, alone in a houseful of servants with no one really to care for her. He had demanded angrily why the physician had not been sent for and was not reassured by Mrs. Markham’s placid reply that young girls were subject to megrims occasionally and should be left in peace and quiet to recover.
The more he thought about Mira, the more he longed to leap from the barge, make his way back to London, and find out how she was. No wonder she had behaved so badly, pushing Drusilla into that fishpond. He often felt like pushing her himself. What was beauty if the character that went with it was shallow and vain? And yet he had been stunned by her beauty and willing to sacrifice his army career to possess it. Although society’s laws were very strict and all young ladies were supposed to be chaperoned at all times, a certain leeway was given to engaged couples and a blind eye turned to the stolen kiss. And so he had had a few moments alone with Drusilla. Eager to reanimate his brief love for her, he had taken her in his arms and pressed his lips to hers. She had stood there, passive and docile in his arms and totally unresponsive, and the moment he had released her, she had said severely, “There is time enough for that sort of thing when we are married. Have you written to your regiment yet?”
Behind him on the black-and-gold barge a band was playing. He should be the happiest man on earth. But here he was, wondering and wondering if he could find some way to make Drusilla break the engagement. The trouble was that despite her beauty no other man seemed to be pining for her. Certainly, were she free, she would soon find suitors, but she was not the sort to inspire passion, to inspire some man to court her while she was engaged to another.
The Marquess of Grantley seemed intrigued with Mira. Charles frowned suddenly. He had felt very uneasy about the gossip that Mira had dressed in boys’ clothes and acted as the marquess’s tiger. He had not told anyone of her visit to his lodgings. But surely it followed that dressing up and acting as a tiger was just the sort of thing Mira would have done. He suddenly wanted to talk to her about it, that minute.
She would be alone for the rest of the day. Perhaps if he was to complain of illness, he could hire a carriage and horses at Hampton Court and drive back to London to see how she went on. He persuaded himself that his motives were to protect her and to find out if she had really gone out with the marquess on that race.
Drusilla and her parents joined him. “You are very quiet, Charles,” complained Drusilla.
“I am feeling very ill,” he said, and knew as he said it that he had decided to escape.
Chapter Six
While Charles was planning his escape back to London, Mira and the marquess had found a pleasant little inn by the river. They were seated at a table in the garden, eating cold meat pie washed down with porter.
“Would it not be wonderful to live like this the whole time?” said Mira.
“Endless holiday? You would soon become bored, my sweeting.”
“I was thinking more of freedom from society’s restrictions. It does not affect you, my lord, for you are a man.”
“You noticed?” His eyes mocked her, and she said severely, “You know exactly what I mean. On the face of it the ballroom is a pleasant and romantic place, but when I am tired, I see it for what it is—a cattle market, with us, the debutantes, the placid cows, waiting for a buyer. We really have no say in our futures. We dare not choose a husband—or rather be chosen—if our parents do not consider him up to the mark. You can leave it all and go riding or forget about the whole thing and return to your estates.”
“Fretting about your lot is going to spoil the day,” said the marquess. “You eat so much! Do you plan to lie down on the grass afterward and sleep?”
She laughed. “Not I.” Her eyes fell on a rowing boat tied to a stump beside the river. “I would like to take that boat out.”
“Can you row or even swim?”
“Neither, but you could teach me to row.”
He looked doubtfully at the rapidly moving water. “The current is quite swift here, and the boat looks leaky.”
“Oh, do let us try!”
“You are an impetuous child, Mira. Finish your food and we will see.”
During the following days the marquess was to think ruefully that he must have been possessed by temporary madness. Had he not agreed to Mira’s request, then all might have been well.
But as it was, he gave in and asked the landlord if they might hire his boat, and soon Mira was being given her first instruction in rowing. At first it all seemed easy, for they were going with the current, but when the marquess suggested they turn about and head back, Mira found she could not cope with the strength of the river.
“We will need to change places,” said the marquess. Mira clumsily shipped the oars and got to her feet.
“Careful,” he warned. “Perhaps you should crawl forward.”
A barge had passed them on the river, and as Mira got to her feet, the swell from it hit the rowing boat, which lurched and catapulted her into the water. “Help!” spluttered Mira.
He dived overboard and swam to her. “Don’t struggle,” he shouted. “Put your arms around my neck.” Gasping and terrified, she retained enough presence of mind to do as she was told, and he swam with her to the shore, dragging her up the bank as soon as he had found a footing.
“Stay there,” ordered the marquess. “Let us hope that wretched boat has stopped somewhere.”
Dripping wet, Mira sat down on the bank and waited. After what seemed an age the marquess came round the
bend of the river, rowing strongly. He pulled in to the shore and ordered her to get in. “Fortunately the boat was caught under the overhanging branches of a willow,” he said. “Now let us get back to that inn and get our clothes dried. You have lost your hat. Let us hope that landlord is blind!”
At the inn Mira stood behind the marquess while he explained the accident and requested a bedchamber where they could wait until their clothes had been dried.
The landlord rushed to accommodate them, for he had heard Mira call the marquess “my lord.” It was not often that members of the Quality arrived at his out-of-the-way inn.
Rough towels were supplied, and Mira went behind the shelter of the bed hangings to take off her wet clothes and towel herself dry. She emerged, wrapped in a blanket, to find the marquess sitting in an armchair, also wrapped in a blanket. When the landlord reappeared, the marquess handed him their wet clothes.
