Elisabeth Fairchild (2 page)

The duke’s dapper friend stared at the counterfeit coachman in the mirror with something less than admiration firing his gaze. Beau found the look refreshing. There were too many frivolous, fawning admirers fighting for his favor since he had assumed his new title. Needle-sharp wit and unabashed sarcasm was what he had been in the way of needing. Charley always provided ample supply.

True to form, Tyrrwhit touched two fingers to his brow in ironic salute. “You are kitted out, from head to toe, in unremarkable and unbecoming mediocrity.”

Beauford took the verbal jab with unruffled composure. Mediocrity was exactly the effect he had set out to achieve. There was an undemanding levelness to mediocrity, a mind-numbing narrowness. Such a state, was inordinately soothing to a man who had, of late, known nothing but extremes.

“You will not abandon this mad scheme?” Charley enquired. “A-A-Absolutely not!” Beau stammered. “I a-am fed up with always being depended upon to do what is quiet and respectable, pr-proper and pr-predictable. Life is too brief.”

Charley nodded. As close to Beau as any family, he had to understand. Two days past had been the anniversary of the late Duke’s death, and the rattling, great house called Thorne yet echoed with emptiness. The ghost of stale tobacco and a pomade no longer in use, still haunted the place. The former duke’s hunting trophies, disembodied heads; fox, stag, boar and wildcat, room after room of them, fangs bared, beady eyes staring down at one, could not fail to remind the new duke of his father’s death, which the former duke had gone hunting too, in goading a green horse into a flat out run over heavy ground, after a fox.

Beau felt that the footsteps he had to follow, the boots he had to fill, fit him no better than the hat that perched upon his head. He was not the neck or nothing rider, the brash, outspoken politician his father had been. His stammered eloquence would never hold the House of Lords spellbound. What kind of Duke would he make? The concept overwhelmed him.

And yet, today he need not worry over such a question. Today, he was nothing but a coachman, his greatest concern getting the Queen’s Mail to Brighton on time. Beau smiled, his lips quirked upward in the extraordinarily attractive smile that his sisters claimed, never failed to turn heads. The coachman smiled back at him.

“Shall I enquire after the readiness of your vehicle, Mr. Tyrrwhit?”

When Charley nodded, Gates left them. Smoothing an imaginary wrinkle from the eye-catching yellow and blue kerseymere waistcoat that marked him as a member of the Whip club, Charley said, “Can ’t understand why you refuse to wear Club colors. Folk along the post road are accustomed to seeing the fellows doing the London to Brighton run.”

Beauford’s smile faded. Despair dragged down his spirits. By what right did he stand here quibbling over hat and coat? What did it matter? They were all worm fodder in the end. As the new Duke of Heste, he should be seeing to the disposition of his properties and the wellbeing of his servants, not play-acting coachman. And yet, he clung to the idea of carrying off this temporary escape, as tightly as his father had clung to his hand as he lay dying.

“Spots and stripes seem a trifle much, a-a-after the sobriety of so many m-months in black. I should feel frivolous in the very rigging that a-a-always made father blanch.”

Charley glared at the hat on Beau’s head. “Well, the old man would sit up in his coffin were he to see what’s taken its place.”

Beau laughed. No one but Charley would risk such a remark. “Your managing baggage of a sister, is at the bottom of this mad masquerade, isn’t she?”

Beau feigned ignorance. “Beatrix?”

“Yes, I hear the interfering minx meant to present one of her school chums for your examination and approval.”

Beau whirled on him. “However did you hear of that? We left town before they a-a-arrived.”

“Did we?” Charley’s eyebrows rose. “Ludd! Bea will be livid.”

Beauford sighed ruefully. “They’re p-probably p-peeling her off the ceiling even now. She’s been lauding the p-praises of her beautiful Miss Au-Aurora Quinby, for m-months.”

“Beautiful, is she? Were you not curious even to see what Beatrix considers beautiful in a woman?”

“A-A-Absolutely not. My sister is m-miserable in her own m-marriage. Why should I trust her to play m-matchmaker for me?”

“But, why flee the beautiful Aurora? You had only to meet her, not marry her. Who knows, you might have liked the beauty.”

Beau regardthe worn toes of his borrowed boots. “M-Might have, but I find m-myself too cynical since father’s passing. I have the sudden feeling that a-any woman who is a-attracted to me, is reeled in by the lure of title and fortune.”

“Oh! There’s the rub of inheriting.” Charley’s words were oily with sarcasm. “Too many beautiful women falling at one’s feet. I knew there had to be some drawback involved.”

Beau shrugged. "”Will this beauty, or a-a-any other female who flocks to me, willingly a-accept a poor stuttering fool simply because he has enough m-money to blunt her ears?”

Charley’s lip curled with characteristic cynicism. “Do you seriously believe that any woman who suffers your company must do so merely because you have come into your title?”

Beau smiled. Tyrrwhit came as close to complimenting him as he was able. “Through m-my sisters, I’ve m-met a whole parade of females who suffer me for no other reason.”

Charley extended an elegantly grey-gloved hand, palm up. “You could always hand over the problem. I should not turn my nose up at a fortune and title and a parade of prospective wives.”

Laughter exploded from Beau’s lips, slightly uncontrolled laughter. It felt good to laugh. There was release in it. He had not laughed like this since his father’s passing.

“Not willing to go that far, are you?” Charley deduced sarcastically. “Well, don’t come crying to me when this Quinby creature turns her pretty nose up at you for so rudely snubbing her.”

Chapter One

A high-perch phaeton stood dead still in the middle of the fog-shrouded lane that led off the main post road to the White Hart Inn in Godstone. A gentleman sat the high seat, arm rising and falling as he brought his long whip cracking down across the backs of his team. The horses, flinching under the whip, would not go.

Clutching the straw hat that did not want to stay on her head, Nell heard the whip’s crack over the rattle of the dogcart as her nine-year-old sister, Catherine, guided their pony into the lane, going fast, in a hurry to meet the post coach due within the quarter hour. The pony shied. The dim morning light revealed the looming phaeton. The whip cracked again.

Behind them, Aunt Ursula shrieked in dismay. “Look out!”

Nell exhibited no such display of nerves. “Steady Cat.”

Intent on keeping the pony, the cart, and its contents on the road without ramming the stopped vehicle, Catherine wasted no breath in responding. The only words that passed her clenched teeth, were soothing ones, meant for the pony’s ears, which swiveled back to listen.
Safely, she navigated the dogcart to a standstill on the road’s fog-shrouded shoulder.

There, Nell could more clearly see and hear the driver, who continued to lash his team with both the tip of his whip, and the equally wicked whip of his tongue.

“Make him stop, Nell!” Catherine insisted, outraged.

Nell was already out of the cart, a look of grim determination in possession of her jaw. She paid no heed to her aunt’s imperative command to, “Stop, Fanella!  ’Tisn’t safe.”

Hitching up the long, curricle cloak that shielded her skirts from road dust, she ran, a flurry of blue velvet. The recalcitrant bonnet flew off the knot of brown hair and into the lane. “Shame, Mr. Deets! Shame!” she shouted. “St at once.”

The florid, whip-wielding gentleman who sat so high above her, did stop when she reached the animal’s heads, not out of obedience to her cry, but because in his inebriated state, he had succeeded in wrapping the whip’s lash around a low-hanging branch above his head. He tugged, showering dew.

“Out of my way, Mish Quinby,” he insisted, weaving a bit on the high seat. “These horshes are no longer yours, and I’ll not coddle them when they trifle with me. They need to be taught a lesshon.”

Reasoning with the belligerent lack of good sense that comes with too much brandy, he gave the whip handle another terrific yank and was rewarded with a good slap in the face by a frond of wet leaves, and a crashing blow in the forehead from the branch itself.

Whip and wits momentarily incapacitated, Nell ignored him. Dark eyes liquid with concern, she concentrated on the horses. Lips pursed when the near side bay flinched back from her, afraid of being struck as she lifted her hand to grasp his headstall.

“Easy there, Tandy. It’s only Nell,” she crooned, her anger growing as she examined a number of bleeding weals along the horse’s sweat-slick neck. Why were fools like Deets granted the means to own creatures like Tandy?

“Stand down, Mr. Deets,” she called up to the driver. You’re too foxed to be managing a team. Did you not examine the lines when the beasts refused to go? One of the reins is caught in the wheel!” Her voice was rife with anger, her color high, as she bent to untangle the frayed end of leather that she would have liked to use like a whip on the driver. “The horse did just as he ought in stopping--”

“How dare you presume to tell me how to drive?” Deets demanded, and as he did so, he rose, swaying, off the bench, only to fall back down again, as the horses, the line now disengaged, stepped nervously forward in response to his shouting.

Nell paid him no mind. Catherine’s high voice came shrilly from behind the phaeton. “Nell! Carriage coming! Moving fast.”

Jerked erect by the alarm, the freed bit of leather line still firmly clasped in her hand, Nell listened to the rumbling thunder of the approaching coach. She could feel the ground vibrate beneath the soles of her high-laced shoes. Dust further obscured the soft, foggy outline of the hedgerow at the end of the lane. Above her, Deets foolishly stood up again, clutching tight to the sides of the phaeton, cursing her interference, and the lack of cooperation from his horses.

Behind the coach, Aunt Ursula wailed, “Into the ditch, Catherine, else we shall be killed. ’Twill never stop in time.”

Even as her brain sorted impressions, Nell acted on instinct. Time was short, and none of it to waste. Hiking up her skirts, she used the shaft tongue as mounting block and scrambled onto Tandy’s broad back, as nimble as any postillion. The horses stepped forward. She leaned into the black mane, and chirruped, “Haw! Tandy, haw!”

The noise of the carriage entering the lane behind them, accompanied by the sudden frantic barking of a dog, spurred Tandy as much as her voice. The phaeton lurched forward, bringing a startled whoop from Deets, who fell back against the squabs, feet wind-milling. As a great cloud of choking dust rolled up over them Aunt Ursula’s wail of fear reach fever pitch. Nell closed her eyes, bit down on her lip and waited for the crashing jolt, the splintering wood, the squeal of the pony.

Tandy broke into a jarring trot. The motion warmed Nell’s legs, but her gloved fingers were cold and bloodless with the tension of waiting for certain disaster.

Disaster never came.There was no crash, no scream, no rending wood. Blinking in the dust that rolled over and past them, Nell became suddenly conscious of the steaming back of the horse between her thighs, dampening both her last good pair of silk stockings and the rumpled white skirt and petticoat that swaddled most inappropriately about her knees. Dirt soiled the only new item of clothing she wore, her so recently spotless York tan gloves.

Dust settled like a powdering of finely milled flour over everything. Her hat was gone, and her lovely hair, so carefully washed and coiffed for her trip to Brighton, was gray with dust and drooping in its pins. She sneezed. Her lips tasted of dirt. Sighing, for she knew what a scolding this stunt would earn her from Aunt Ursula’s ready tongue, Nell bunched up the hand-me-down Curricle cloak that had once been her sister Aurora’s, and her own skirt and petticoats, in order to dismount from the shockingly unladylike straddled position she had adopted.

In the great volume of cloth, came an awful tearing sound. Part of her dress had tangled in the traces. She could not jump down without risk of ripping something beyond mending and exposing all her limbs. Frantically, she struggled to disengage herself.

Above her, on the seat of the phaeton, Deets angrily righted himself. “What the devil are you doing on my horse?” he demanded with drunken curiosity.

Cat, eyes shining, came trotting around the side of the phaeton. “Saving your arse, Deets,” she said indignantly.

“Cat! Watch your tongue,” Nell insisted in a distracted manner. She continued to struggle with her cloak. It might be a hand-me-down, but it was a pretty one for all that, and she had no desire to ruin it. She would not soon get another with such a wealth of black braid and lace. The Quinby’s could in no way afford such luxury now that father was gone, and they were to survive on mother’s meager jointure.

“You should have seen it, Nell.” Cat’s eyes were gleaming. “They came within a hair’s-breadth of climbing the back of the phaeton, four chestnut geldings, perfectly matched, and driven to within an inch of wrecking Deets’s phaeton. The leaders reared up, ready to come crashing down, and as if God himself had reached out to push the wheels into motion, the phaeton moved just out of the way. It was an amazingly close-timed thing. Father would have been tickled to see such driving.”