A Breath of Scandal: The Reckless Brides (10 page)

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“Come along, Will, and stop yawning. Good God, man, the night is young. You’ll be glad you came. You’ll see.”

“My apologies,” Will said to his older brother, James, as the coach rolled out of Downpark’s gates and back toward the town of Petersfield, having deposited his mother and sister at home at the family estate. “It’s been a long night already, in ways I’m not sure I yet understand, and I’m not used to staying up till all hours without the benefit of a good four-hour nap.”

“Lazy fellow, if that’s all you did in the navy—take naps.”

Will didn’t bother to correct his brother’s impressions of naval life with a lecture on timekeeping and the watch system of four hours on duty, followed by four hours off, or the reasons he often couldn’t sleep when he tried, and accepted the teasing gracefully. Their lives were different, that was all.

“So where are we headed?” he asked as the carriage left Downpark.

“A friend’s. You’ll see,” was all his brother would say.

So Will turned his mind to navigation. Hampshire hadn’t changed tremendously in the years he’d been away at sea. Everywhere he looked, he could still recognize the scenes of his youth. The stone walls over which they had once jumped their ponies. The orchards where he and his brother had stolen apples, and gotten into windfall fights, winging rotten fruit at each other’s heads.

And his old habit from ten years of constantly needing to know his position at sea died hard, so he tried to keep track of their progress with the map in his head as their father’s coachman, Broad Ham, took them through the warren of lanes and byways northwest toward Petersfield.

Will could hear Broad Ham up on the box coaxing his team, carefully picking his way down the moonlit paths at this advanced time of the morning. But as they passed into Petersfield and headed north along the Portsmouth Road, Will grew more interested. He had taken the Portsmouth Road north just last week, when he had been obliged to present himself to the Admiralty in the vain hope of securing a new position. He had also taken the road south any number of times over the past ten years, as it led south to the Royal Navy dockyards in Portsmouth, whence he had routinely set off to see the wide world.

But tonight they weren’t going so far as the ends of the world. The coach turned off to enter a better-heeled residential neighborhood where Broad Ham drew up with an assortment of other carriages in front of a prosperous-looking, red-brick house.

James didn’t wait for the footman, but bounded out of the coach. “Come along, Will. I can promise you there will be no dancing,” he teased, and went up the steps and through the door of number 6, the Spain.

From the out-of-the-way address, the amount of traffic, and from the fact that nearly all the entrants to the snug house were males, Will could only conclude that the house must belong to some high-flyer—a courtesan or mistress who opened her salon for conversation and entertainment.

And strangely enough, Will found he wasn’t in the mood.

Instead he found himself turning up to Broad Ham, poised on the box. “How long do you reckon we’re in for, Ham?”

“Can’t rightly say, Master Will. Can’t rightly say. Though his lordship, your brother, do say Mrs. Swan keeps a fine house.”

“Mrs. Swan, is it?” He looked again at the gaily lit house. Through the gap in the curtained front windows, he could see a room full of mostly men, talking and smoking. It looked crowded and hot.

“Plumage not to your likin’ then, Master Will?” the big coachman asked with his robust laugh.

“I suppose not, Broad Ham. Nothing to tempt me here.” As little as he wanted to pass his time in the company of chits and their mamas, he was equally done with the sole company of men. The wardroom on a frigate was a very small, male world.

“Elsewhere then? I can keep ’em in harness, and take you somewheres else in no time if you’ve another destination in mind, young sir.”

“I thank you, no, Ham, no need. It just looks too damned hot in there for me. We’ll let James take his pleasure as he will, but I’m afraid my mind is elsewhere, on a different sort of lady than the Mrs. Swans of this world this evening.” Will let himself out of the carriage, to stretch his legs. The rain had abated somewhat, leaving them in a fine-misted drizzle, but weather had never bothered him. The years at sea had made him impervious.

“Right then.” The big coachman called to the groomsmen who had clambered off the back. “Walk ’em for a bit.” He waited until two fellows had come around to take first the leaders’ and then the wheelers’ heads, and unharness them to walk the animals slowly down the lane to keep them from getting too cool and chilled in the still-raw wind.

“Lady, though?” Broad Ham took up the earlier thread of conversation, as he set the brake and screwed his big body around to check behind the coach, before he began climbing down. “Taken with a chit then, are ye? Never thought I’d hear
you
say that! And when are we to wish you happy, young sir?” he ribbed jovially.

“Oh, no, Ham. Not bloody likely, is it?” Will laughed a little uncomfortably at his own inadvertent admission. “Can’t ever figure them out. They’re a funny breed, those chits.”

“Ha-ha!” Broad Ham stooped down to make sure the blocks were set correctly behind the wheels to keep the coach from rolling. “That’s the way of it then. Lead you a merry chase, did she?”

“I’ll tell you, Broad Ham, I don’t rightly know who was doing the leading, and who was doing the chasing.”

“Oh, you ne’er know with them girls,” Broad Ham opined sagely. “They be different creatures, Master Will, different kinds of creatures, entire. Be better off with one o’ them high-flyers.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the snug house across the lane. “Cheaper in the long run, too!”

Will could only agree. “Damn my eyes if you aren’t right, Ham.”

“Be that why you was sneaking out of my Lord Barrington’s side door earlier in the evening?”

“Damn your canny eyes, Broad Ham,” Will said without rancor. His father’s coachman had always had a knack for seeing what went on in a place. “It was too damn hot there, too. In more ways than one.”

“If you say so, Master Will. If you say so.”

“I do. And there’s an end to it.”

“Ah, well, I imagine you could still do with a bit of a wet, young sir. I’ll send Robby there—hoy, Robby—down the lane for some ale, if you’ve a taste for it.”

“That’ll do nicely, Ham.” Will always made it a point to drink whatever was on offer, with whoever was doing the offering, and to be quick to reciprocate. The practice had always stood him in good stead with both his superior officers, and with his men. “Thank you.”

“Robby.” Ham took a coin out of his pocket, and handed it to the groomsman who had come running at his summons.

“Here, now,” Will interrupted. “Your money’s no good here, Broad Ham. I’m at high tide, and will stand the round,” he said as he dug the requisite coins out of his waistcoat pocket.

“Ah, Master Will, thank you. You always did have a fine touch for it. A fine touch, indeed. Off you go, lad.” Broad Ham clapped a big paw on the footman’s back to propel him off toward the public house on the corner. “And get us a pitcher or three of something good and dark and bitter.”

“That your order for beer, or a barmaid?”

“One and the same.” The big man laughed jovially. “Coffee, beer, and women—all better when they’re good and dark and bitter. Makes a man feel alive, it does.”

But once Robby had set off at a trot, Broad Ham’s attention shifted away from drink and women, and away even from his cattle—as Corinthian blades like his brother, James, were wont to call high-bred horses. Will turned to follow Ham’s gaze to a young lad standing apart on another high-bred horse.

“Is something amiss?” he asked Broad Ham.

“Sure enough,” the big man said. “Something’s amiss with that mare and the hobbledehoy with her. Just can’t put my finger on exactly what. Ah, well. Let’s get blankets on ’em, lads,” he instructed as he moved back toward the coach.

Each of the four horses soon sported a spotless blanket in the buff and blue colors of the Sanderson livery, and each had a feedbag of dry oats to keep them contented while they waited in the cold night air.

Will made a leisurely circle of the large, convivial group of coachmen, footmen, grooms, and tigers milling about while their masters whiled away the small hours with claret, cards, and whatever else number 6 might have to offer. In the meantime, however, the servant class weren’t going without. They lit braziers on the cobbles to ward off the raw damp, and sent more boys down the lane to the tavern on Sheep Street for pails of beer. The publican was glad of the patronage and even sent out barmen to ply the crowd with mugs of ale and steaming punches. Among the horsemen, flasks of various sizes and contents were passed about freely.

Will felt more comfortable around such men—men who worked and toiled to earn their bread—than he did around his brother, or his circle of aristocratic, privileged friends. While he had of course been an officer of some rank and privilege, men such as these had made up his crews, and carried out the work of the ship day after day. They were the backbone of the service. There was a saying in the navy that came from the late Admiral Nelson—
Aft the higher honor, but forward the better man.
Without disparaging any of his fellow officers, Will had always found it so.

Robby came back with his share of ale, and Will took the proffered tankard with relish. His eyes ran over a group of dicers gathering along a curb playing for penny odds.

“Game o’ dice, young sir?” Ham offered affably.

“No, I thank you.” Will shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to disturb their sport.” The navy had taught him the only way for a rich man to play politely with those poorer than himself was to lose. And just as at Lord Barrington’s, Will had no desire to squander his hard-earned fortune away, even a penny at a time. Life—especially life in the navy—was chancy enough as it was, without using up one’s luck on card games.

He turned away from the knot of young men and tipped back his beer, strolling slowly through the assembled coaches. Broad Ham ambled along in front of him, greeting old friends and professional colleagues, until they came back upon the lone lad Broad Ham had been eyeing earlier.

The boy looked like any other his age, dressed in an old, out-of-date redingote that looked like it had seen better days, not livery like most of the others assembled about. Lean, gangly, and obviously in the last stages of boyhood—a hobbledehoy, Broad Ham had called him—too young to be a man, but too old not to already be accustomed to hard work and late hours.

Still, something nagged at Will’s brain, though he hardly knew what. The boy must be a local, given the lack of livery and the fact that he was holding an enormous, showy, dark black mare—some Corinthian’s mount—apart from the others while his master amused himself in the Spain.

The lad had his back turned, busy pulling a blanket to cover the mare out of the saddlebag, when Broad Ham spoke.

“You’ve a beauty ’ere, by the looks of ’er.”

The lad nearly jumped out of his skin as the huge man loomed up beside him, but he managed a garbled, “Oh, aye,” as he ducked his head, and tugged on his cap in deference to Broad Ham’s superior position and consequence as coachman, easily deduced by the multiple capes on his livery.

“Name’s Ham, short for Hamborne,” he told the boy. “Broad Ham they calls me.” He stuck one meaty fist out in greeting.

“Mr. Hamborne.” The lad acknowledged the coachman with another tug at his cap, hiding his bright eyes, and drawing back into the shadow of his horse, shy of their company.

The hair on the nape of Will’s neck lifted.

God’s balls. It couldn’t be.

No. The glimpse of something recognizable in the blue gaze must be the product of his overactive imagination. Just because he was thinking of her, and wanting it to be her, didn’t make it so.

“Broad Ham’ll do, lad.” The coachman pulled in his hand without comment. “Saw you was looking at my four.” Broad Ham kept up his gruff interrogation. “And why was that?”

The lad—if indeed it was a lad and not Will’s appalling, adventurous young friend—stymied Will’s closer inspection by ducking beneath his horse’s neck. “Prime movers, they looked to be.”

“Those are the Earl Sanderson’s beasties, those grays. Raised ’em from yearlings and trained them to harness with the earl myself.” Broad Ham’s voice was full of his pride in his team. But he had a generous eye, as well, and looked critically at the mare, walking around her and running his hands professionally down her withers. “You’ve a good one ’ere, as well.”

“Thoroughbred, she is,” the presumptive boy offered, his own voice tinged with that same horseman’s pride.

“A rare beauty,” Broad Ham concurred.

The adolescent ducked his head again and stammered, “Thank ’e, sir.”

The boy moved to turn the restive mare away, swinging the animal’s large rump, and even larger, by Will’s estimation, hooves, toward him. Will instantly jumped back, out of range.

“Mind telling me what yer doing out here at this time o’night?” the coachman asked calmly, even as he tried to stall the boy’s progress by reaching to take a hold of the bridle at the horse’s head.

The mare reacted instantly to the contrary forces at her mouth, prancing strongly sideways and tossing her head violently enough to dislodge Broad Ham’s grip.

“Your pardon, sirs,” the damned imp apologized as he deftly controlled the sidling mare and vaulted up into the saddle. “My mare is shy of strangers.”

Will was having none of it. For a long moment there, he had doubted himself, and been hesitant to give in to his instincts. But instinct had kept him safe and alive for ten long, hazard-filled years at sea, and he had learned to listen to it, and listen well. He had known deep in his gut something was not as it should be, but when he saw the “lad” throw his long leg over the saddle, he knew.

There was nothing masculine about the arse seated astride that mare. Whatever else Will felt he knew—and he’d forgotten more than he’d ever learned about the subtle distinctions within society and its confounded rules, or ways to make insipid conversation to marriageable chits—he knew his derrières. He had instinctively known the instant she had thrown her impossibly long legs over the saddle, that the distinctive roundness of the arse in question belonged to a female A female whose lovely derrière he had perused all too enthusiastically in Lord Barrington’s library not three hours ago.