An Unlikely Duchess (14 page)

“Pardon me, sir,” he said, “but are you traveling south?”

“I have been for a few days,” Sir Thomas said. “Not today, though.”

“Have you by any chance in the past day or so set eyes on a curricle driven by a gentleman with a young lady passenger?” the young man asked.

Sir Thomas thought for a moment and shook his head. “One does not see many curricles on this road,” he said. “Certainly not with lady passengers.”

The young man looked disappointed.

“Anyone you know?” Sir Thomas asked politely.

“My sister,” the young man said. “And a Mr. Paul Villiers”

Sir Thomas pursed his lips and looked keenly at the young man. “Describe them,” he said.

“I cannot describe Villiers,” the other said. “And nobody else seems able to do so either. Everyone seems agreed that he is a very ordinary looking man. My sister is very small, with hair the color of mine. It is imperative that I find her as soon as possible.”

Sir Thomas raised his eyebrows. “An abduction?” he asked.

The young man flushed. “Not exactly,” he said warily. “I do not care to give details, sir. Have you seen them? If not, I must ask inside.”

Sir Thomas Burgess was really quite a close friend of the Duke of Mitford. He continued to look keenly for a moment at the anxious young man beside him.

“I did not see the curricle,” he said. “That was why I said no at first. But I have seen the couple you describe. They stayed here last night. The lady was small and fair. And I overheard part of their conversation at dinner. I was not eavesdropping, you understand, but I was seated at the next table, and I was alone. She called him, er, what you said. Vil—?”

“Villiers,” Bartholomew said, his face lighting up. “They are still here?”

“No,” Sir Thomas said. “They were planning to leave early. I noted their destination because it was the same as my own. I suppose that hearing that, I should have introduced myself to them, especially as my carriage has met with an accident, but it seemed forward to do so.”

“And the destination?” Bartholomew asked eagerly.

“Lord Parleigh’s,” Sir Thomas said. “Deerview Park. East of here several miles. There is a house party gathering there. He invited me several weeks ago when I was passing through on my way to Scotland. I have decided to spend a few days there.”

“And you are sure that is where my sister and Villiers are going?” Bartholomew asked.

Sir Thomas shrugged. “That is what they decided last night,” he said. “They seemed quite certain of their plans at that time.”

“How do I get there?” Bartholomew asked.

“Very easily,” Sir Thomas said, “if you are willing to take me up with you. I have a broken axle. I would be delighted to show you the way and at the same time avoid having to spend a tedious day here.”

“Then we may be of service to each other,” the young man said with scorn eagerness. “Will you be ready to be on your way, sir, as soon as my sister has breakfasted? I wish it might be sooner, but our coachman insists that Susanna eat frequently. She suffers from travel sickness, you see.” He grinned apologetically. “And Sam is a tyrant one does not care to argue with.”

Sir Thomas pulled on his leather gloves and flexed his fingers after the young man had rushed eagerly into the inn. He was not at all sure he was proud of his lie. The brother of Paul’s lady seemed a decent sort, and he would be taking the travel- sick little beauty miles out of her way. But his friendship for Mitford must come first. At least the pursuit would be delayed and Mitford, if he was not a dreadful slowtop, would be married right and tight to his lady before the brother had recovered from his error and caught up to her.

He would just have to hope that the brother would not think to check the story with some employee at the inn who might have seen Mitford leave along the road north that morning.

But Bartholomew and Susanna joined him in the innyard before ten minutes had passed, all eagerness to resume their journey. Sir Thomas presented himself and discovered at least one piece of information about Mitford’s intended bride in the ensuing courtesies. She was a Miss Middleton.

And if he had thought Milford’s Miss Middleton pretty the evening before, he considered this other Miss Middleton—her sister—quite the most beautiful creature he had clapped eyes on in many a day. She smiled full at him with shy gratitude as he settled himself in the seat opposite hers. And he felt uncomfortably villainous.

Bartholomew listened to Sir Thomas’s directions to Sam without feeling even a qualm of uneasiness, the landlord of the inn had confirmed the gentleman’s information that Mr. and Mrs. Villiers had indeed turned east with the intention of calling upon Lord Parleigh.

Mr. and Mrs. Villiers! He had kept that detail from Susanna. He was going to kill a certain very ordinary looking gentleman when he caught up to him. Not to mention what he was going to do to Jo.

***

The Hennessys lived in the same direction as Lord Parleigh, by some happy coincidence. Hawthorn House was a bare four miles from Deerview Park.

Josephine was very relieved. It would be good to stay in a house again for one night and to eat regular food at a regular table. And she liked the Hennessys for all that Mr. Hennessy had a disconcerting habit of saying embarrassing things and roaring with laughter at his own rather risque jokes. Grandpapa would call him vulgar. But his heart was in the right place. It would certainly be good to see Caroline again and to have the services of Caroline’s maid. And perhaps to borrow some more clothes and have her own washed and mended and ironed.

What she wanted more than anything else in this world was a bath and a hair wash. It was three days since she had had all her clothes off.

She sat atop Mr. Villiers’s curricle, clinging to her usual fistful of his coat sleeve as they swayed alarmingly along narrower, more curving roads than the one they had traveled in the previous two days. She felt almost happy again and guilty for doing so.

“Do you suppose Mr. Hennessy really will send out in search of our missing coach?” she asked. “But they will be glad to see us again, will they not, sir? And perhaps we will be given two adjoining rooms instead of just one and you will not feel obliged to sleep on the floor again as you did last night, though there was no reason to do so. And I was quite comfortable there before you picked me up . ” But she blushed as she remembered that particular incident.

“What we will do,” he said, “is get you established at the Hennessys’, where you will be safe while I call upon Lord Parleigh. I imagine our man will have something of a nasty shock to see me there. And doubtless he will relinquish the jewels to avoid a public scene, and then I can bring them to you.”

“But they are my jewels,” she said. “I am the one who must get them back.”

“You will get them back,” he said. “From me. Do you think I am going to make off with than too?”

“No,” she said. “I would trust you with my life, sir.” She did not stop to look into his surprised face. She was too busy clinging to his arm with both hands—somehow his arm seemed far steadier and safer than the rail at her other side—while they negotiated a corner that had the road almost doubling back upon itself. “But your plan will not do, anyway. We have been married for only three days.”

“Eh?” he said.

“The Hennessys think we have been married for only three days,” she said. “How can I descend on them for a visit while you go off alone to a house party? We would have to invent a dreadful quarrel, and I would feel obliged to weep oceans and have the vapors all over the place and refuse my food.”

“Would you?” he asked with a frown.

“Certainly,” she said. “We are very deep in love, remember? I could not quarrel with you and separate from you after three days of marriage without suffering dreadful dismals.”

“Separate from me?” he said with a frown. “I will be gone from you for but a few hours in order to visit a—ah—former acquaintance. You will stay with your former schoolfriend. What could be more natural?”

“Except that we are in love and newly married,” she said. “I could not be separated from you for a single hour without going into the mopes. I am coming with you.”

“You are not going to be difficult, are you?” Mitford asked, looking down at her with suspicion. And he wondered immediately why he was wasting breath on such a redundant question. Of course she was being difficult.

And then he was hauling back suddenly on the ribbons and with consummate skill avoiding a collision with a herd of cows that were ambling along the road ahead of them—perhaps the same herd as the one Mr. Porterhouse had come to grief with the day before.

Josephine clung harder and hid her face against one cape of his greatcoat, expecting every moment to be tossed into oblivion and choosing to be tossed with her companion.

“I do beg your pardon,” he said. “I was driving carelessly. Are you all right?”

Josephine peeped up at him. “Yes, I am,” she said, “and feel foolish for being so frightened. I might have known that you would keep me safe. It is just that I am not used to traveling in a curricle, you see. Though I should be used to it after two whole days, should I not?”

She smiled, though her face felt suddenly colder than a late October breeze would account for, and the buzz in her ears was not caused by the wind, either.

“You are really quite safe now,” he said as the world darkened rather pleasantly around the edges of her vision.

And she believed him, even though what she was experiencing was remarkably like the faint her friends had described to her—she had never fainted before. And she was safe, quite perfectly so, for was not the curricle now still and the cows still ambling onward, quite unperturbed by the near disaster that had happened behind their waving tails? And was not Mr. Villiers at the ribbons and would not have allowed the accident anyway? And was not his arm about her and her head comfortably on his shoulder?

“I am fainting,” she announced in some surprise, and her voice sounded rather far away. “I have never fainted in my life. What a goose you must think me.”

“Not at all,” he said, and his hand was loosening the strings of her bonnet. “I was driving carelessly. I never drive carelessly.”

Well, Josephine thought as consciousness began to return without ever completely disappearing, perhaps three nights ago she could not have said in all honesty that Mr. Villiers had kissed her since she had been the one to do all the kissing, and anyway it had not really been a kiss but merely a way of avoiding being seen by Papa. And last night’s kiss had not really been a kiss. It had been on the forehead. But now she would be able to say in all truth that he had kissed her, for she had not initiated it at all. She had been in a strange faraway land, her head on his shoulder.

But he had definitely kissed her. Or rather, he was definitely kissing her. For his head was bent to hers and he was murmuring things that were so soothing that she did not bother to listen to the actual words, and his lips were at her temple and then—oh, yes, definitely; she was not so far gone into the faint that she could not be sure—on her lips. As warm and comforting as the words he was murmuring.

Perhaps it was not a kiss in the strict sense of the word, but then she had never been kissed in the strict sense of the word and so would not for sure recognize it if she had had it. That is, he seemed less concerned with depressing her lips with his own than with murmuring those soothing sounds against them.

But she called it a kiss to herself. She had been kissed. By Mr. Villiers. And she would dearly like him to do it again, but she would have to faint again if she was to expect him to do so, and it was too mortifying to know she had fainted even once in her life.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Oh, quite perfectly so,” she said, pushing herself upright and knocking her bonnet to the road with one careless elbow. “I did not really faint, you know. That is, the world did not go completely black and silent as I am told it does when you really faint. I just came over strange for a moment and all on account of being unfamiliar with curricles, you see. I feel remarkably foolish.”

“But we will remember that you did not quite faint,” he said, vaulting down into the roadway to retrieve her bonnet. “And that I was not quite reckless.”

He looked up at her and smiled—that all-over grin that ruined the balance of his features and made him quite adorably attractive. Oh, dear, Josephine thought, taking the bonnet from his outstretched arm and beginning to tie the ribbons beneath her chin again, he was not a tall man or a large man or a very, very handsome man. Some girls she knew—indeed, many girls she knew—would not afford him a second glance.

But he was nice. Very nice.

She could not for the moment imagine why so many other young ladies she knew sighed for tall and dark and handsome men. Like Mr. Porterhouse, for example. Mr. Porterhouse gave her the shudders, for all he was a paragon of masculine beauty.

She would take Mr. Villiers any day of the year.

Except that she must not think so, or even let him know that she was thinking so. For he had already done her a great kindness and she had been a great nuisance to him and he would doubtless be very glad to be rid of her within the next few days.

But she would look for someone like Mr. Villiers. If Papa would ever countenance her marrying anyone else after the scandalous loss of that horrid duke, she would choose someone like Mr. Villiers.

Except, she thought with a flash of insight into her own future, there could not be anyone
like
Mr. Villiers. There could only
be
Mr. Villiers.

Oh, dear. She had better not pursue that line of thought. It made no great sense, anyway.

“You were quite right, you know,” he said, “we are too deep in love and have been married far too short a time to separate for any length of time. Not that a visit of a few hours is a very long time. But it is true that the Hennessys may wonder at the fact that you do not accompany me if Parleigh is supposed to be an acquaintance of mine. You will just have to make some convincing excuse for not coming.”