Elisabeth Fairchild (5 page)

The horn sounded.

Beau ducked out the door, and scrambled to his place beside the coachman, even as the wheels began to move. Almost on a level with them, one of the windows of the inn flew open and the girl leaned out, waving a straw bonnet.

“Sir, catch, sir!”

Snatching up the bonnet as it sailed out of the window, Lord Brampton Beauford, seventh Duke of Heste, graciously presented it to Fanella Quinby.

With a look of astonished appreciation, Nell promptly placed the bonnet on her head and tied the pink ribbon beneath her chin. “I shall see you knighted, Mr. Ferd,” she said gratefully. “Thrice in one day have you rescued a damsel in distress.”

Nell was touched by the consideration she received. A gentleman gave her his place on the bench behind the driver’s, where the swaying of the coach would not be so uncomfortable as at the hind end of the roof, and gallant Mr. Ferd had cleverly seen to the last minute delivery of a bonnet. She began to think that she would never be able to repay this young man ’s repeated kindnesses, and that bothered her. She did not like to remain beholden to anyone, most especially not handsome young men with dancing blue eyes.

An opportunity for restitution presented itself when something behind them in the road caught the attention of most of the topside passengers, as well as the postboy and guard, who perched on the very hindmost bench of the coach, above the back boot, gun in hand.

“Stupid creature.” The guard said to the postboy. “Looks as if he means to follow us.”>

“Shoot at him,” the postboy recommended. “That will turn him away.”

The guard lifted his blunderbuss to his shoulder, ready to oblige.

Nell craned her neck to see what it was the men meant to shoot. A flash of black and white fur caught her eye. “Stop!” she shrieked. “Bandit!”

The blunderbuss jerked up, discharging harmlessly into the air, but the explosion of shot, coupled with the words  ’stop ’ and  ’bandit ’, unsettled all of the passengers. Even the baby and the enormous woman inside the coach, immediately voiced their distress, the one by bawling at the top of its lungs, the other by rattling off a stream of invective that grew in volume to compensate for the full scale howl that the baby eventually attained.

Mr. Ferd, who had been handed the ribbons, slowed the team, all the while fending off the original driver, who urged him to, “Whip ’em along, man! We can outrun any highwayman in England with four fresh rare ’uns ’tween the shafts.”

“I am sure we can,” he agreed calmly. “But, a-a-as I’ve no wish to outrun this particular Bandit, we shall spare the horses. Gates!” He called.

“Yes sir,” Gates murmured, with an agreeable grin. As the coach slowed and Beau Ferd called out firmly, “Up, Bandit, up boy!” Gates stretched out over the side of the coach top, caught hold of the leaping dog by the scruff of his thickly furred neck, as, nails scrabbling on canvas, it valiantly attempted to board.

“See. The scamp holds us up again.” Beau leaned back to share his amusement with Nell, the sparkle in his eyes an unexpected intimacy.

Before she could so much as nod, Gates called out, “Got ’im, your grace,” and Mr. Ferd leaned forward, to touch up the team.

Chapter Three

The dog, Bandit, eyed Nell from beneath his master’s seat, from the moment he settled there. To be sure, he kept his ear cocked in the direction whence he might hear the coachman’s voice or whistle, but his great tawny orbs stared at her with that hopeful look most dogs fasten on someone they think might offer them attention, affection, and a scratch behind the ear.

Nell had a fondness for animals, rooted in a deep, spiritual reverence for life, a reverence intensified by the unexpected death of her father. Death pointed up the tenuous gift that life was. To Nell, animals represented the very essence of that gift. They offered labor, food, clothing, transport and companionship to man. They were living, breathing, thinking creatures possessed of a spark just as vital, in its essence, as that within man. Life was precious and all too brief. It should not be wasted.

Animals sensed her affinity for them. Mr. Ferd’s dog was no exception. It was Bandit, and not the bleak and treeless course through the gentle hills of the North downs, that received the majority of Nell’s attention. She scratched the battered ears, and stroked the eager nose, and wondered what had taken such a toll on the animal at her knee.

Mr. Ferd leaned back. “I must warn you. Bandit steals hearts, as frequently as he holds up coaches.”

In leaning back, the ear lobe of the young man whom Gates had addressed as “your grace” was, for an instant, very close to Nell’s nose. There was something disconcerting about being in such proximity to a stranger’s ear. Nell could smell the clen, masculine tang of sweated neck. Her lashes swept downward, shutting out for an instant, the distraction of eyesight. She longed to lean closer, to breath deep. Mr. Ferd was not a smoker or drinker. There was no taint of the horrid weed about him, no reek of the tap either. There was instead, a pleasant, manly odor that was uniquely his own.

Nell opened her eyes with a sigh. The movement of her breath across his ear, visibly affected Mr. Ferd. He sat forward swiftly, as if pushed by a hand, and a flush of red color stained his neck and swept up into his face, into the very tip of the ear on which her breath had played.

Nell’s eyes rounded. How exhilarating to cause such a reaction, no matter how unwittingly. “I shall do my best not to allow this fellow to seduce me with his very speaking eyes.” She patted Bandit on the head, voice hovering on the edge of laughter.

The original driver, the graying gent who sat beside Mr. Ferd, turned in his seat. “This is the Weald,” he said to all of the topside passengers, indicating the land about them. “It were once a great oak forest that stretched as far as a man can see and beyond. One hundred and twenty miles it went. The Romans, when they marched through, called it Anderida, for so awe-inspiring was the sight of the woods, that it required a name all to itself.” His voice flattened. “What were once a wall of trees is fallen to the woodsman’s axe, and the charcoal makers’ fire-- felled to stoke the furnaces of the Sussex iron foundries. There’s pockets left. You’ll see some of old Anderida in Ashdown Forest once we’ve stopped for horses in East Grinstead. You’ll see there, what all this once was, before progress,” he used the term derisively, “changed the face of things.”

As he spoke, huge hands gesturing in highly worn and work stained gloves, Nell noticed how very different those gloves were from Mr. Ferd’s. The more she looked from the one set of hands to the other, the odder she found their differences. These were coachman’s gloves-- these stiffened things, dark with use and weather, molded to their owner’s hands. stitches rubbed through, seams loose between every finger that held a leather line. These were unmistakably the gloves of a man who drove a coach on a daily basis.

Mr. Ferd’s gloves, by contrast, the very gloves that had touched upon the bareness of flesh beneath her skirts, looked completely out of place. They were fairly clean, unusual in an item of clothing used daily in the proximity of dusty, sweaty horseflesh. The leather was thinner, softer, more supple. The gloves seemed strangely at odds with the rest of Mr. Ferd’s attire. All else spoke of thrift and long use.

Nell wondered if she made too much of a simple thing. The hands within the gloves behaved like coachman’s hands. They handled the lines with comfortable finesse.

Mr. Ferd seemed to sense her interest. He turned to look her way. Feeling prettier, and more feminine and more interesting merely by having met such a look, Nell promptly forgot all about gloves, and fell to contemplating just what it was in a pair of pale blue eyes, that could make her feel so warm and quavery inside.

At East Grinstead, a lively market town, the passengers were informed they had time enough to stretch their legs and relieve bruised and jostled kidneys, as the horses were changed. Nell was the first to step down. She went in search of the innkeeper’s wife, rather than its facilities, to obtain permission to pluck a handful of pinks from the garden.

Returning to the coach, to mount the steps to her seat, she was met by her Aunt Ursula, who was only then disengaging herself from the interior of the coach. Without really understanding her own inclination to be secretive about the flers, Nell hid them behind her back.

“I do not know how I shall survive this trip, my dear,” her aunt confided wearily. “For while I am not chewing dust, as I’m sure you must do topside, I am smashed in beside the baby basket, with nothing to look at between a dirty window, and that snoring gargantuan. And, while I was most relieved when the baby’s mother offered up her breast in order to quiet the infant’s cries, I could not feel altogether comfortable for a stranger to so expose herself. I do hope you are having a better time of it, my dear.”

Indeed, Nell was having a better time of it. The weather was fine, the dust not too choking, and through the eyes of an intriguing coachman she had been made to feel beautiful. Hoping that she might slip past her aunt without the flowers being noticed, or questioned, she said bracingly, “Three changes to come, and we shall have you happily home again, Auntie. It is so very kind of you to have me down to the seaside for a fortnight, when it was Aurora you originally meant to have back with you.”

Ursula gave her head a little shake. “But of course. How were we to know that she was to be offered a Season in London, and an introduction to the new Duke of Heste and his set?”

“Lady Cowper is exceedingly kind to Rora.”

“I have every hope your sister will catch herself a good match, with such sponsorship,” Ursula said. “She has got all the looks in the family, that girl, and worth her weight in gold if she should only put them to good use.”

“If anyone can marry well, it will be Aurora,” Nell said with unruffled certainty.

“And perhaps you too, my dear. All of the Prince of Wales’s set does come down to Brighton, on occasion. You may meet someone who will do well by you.”

Nell laughed, “I have not come husband hunting, Auntie, but only to keep you company while Uncle is away, and to forget for awhile Papa’s passing, and our fallen circumstances. I trust in Aurora’s beauty to save our bacon, for I’ve neither intention, nor inclination to marry into money. There is some comfort being born without all the looks of the family, you see, for then one is not expected to sacrifice oneself up on the alter of matrimony on everyone else’s financial behalf to some well-heeled young man who requires a wife for no other reason than to get him an heir, or some dour old pinchpenny in need of a housekeeper.”

“Shush Fanella! It is unnatural in you to say such things. Your parents had not such a marriage.”

Fanella laughed. “I am a most unnatural creature, Auntie. Has not mother told you so? I’ve little appreciation for marriage at this moment. Father loved mother, but because she did not see fit to produce him with an heir, his property is willed away from her, and we are as good as thrown into the street like unnecessary baggage, by my Uncle Andrew, who has been unkind enough to insist that we vacate before poor father was even grown cold. What is the sense in forsaking love for money if the money is so easily taken away from a widow?”

“But, Fanella, a man’s real property must remain in the family line. It is the law. Your mother retained all of her personal property, and a jointure. You are not in danger of Dun Street.”

“Such a law is a contradiction in terms, for what are a man’s wife and daughters, if not family? Mother has sold off all of the furniture, the horses, the carriage and her jewelry and even with all that gone, she speaks of needing more money, with three daughters to support, and a new household to set up. So, Aurora must find herself a wealthy husband to save us from the predicament one is placed in when a woman survives her husband. Is it not ludicus?” She gestured emphatically with her posy.

Ursula gasped, and shook her head with vigor. “Fanella! You are far too young to entertain such cynical thoughts.” She blinked at the bouquet. “Do you mean to choke those flowers? They will only wilt if you continue to abuse them in such a manner.”

Nell frowned at the flowers. “Oh! How stupid of me. These are for our coachman. To replace the ones I flattened.”

Ursula frowned, and looked about her to be sure they were not overheard. She even thought to look up, for they stood next to the door to the coach, and started when she discovered two bright eyes fixed on her with great interest. They were of the canine variety. She flapped a hand in Bandit’s direction, and went on with what she meant to say.

“I do not recommend such an action, Fanella. It will not do for a young lady of your class to mix with a mere coachman. The young man will be getting ideas in his head if you offer up favors.”

“Nonsense!” Fanella said stoutly, even though such a thought had crossed her sensible mind. She argued to convince herself as much as her aunt. “He was kind enough to procure me this bonnet, which must have cost him dearly, on a coachman’s salary. A handful of flowers is merely a gesture of similar kindness. Besides, I am no longer certain what class it is that I belong to, for while father was knighted, his title will not be carried on to any of his daughters. We no longer have land, so I cannot say that I am a member of the gentry, and mother insists that we are neither smart enough to qualify as intelligentsia, nor trade wise enough to be classed as
buorgeoisie,
so just what is it that I am these days but a poor relative that has been foisted onto you, dear Auntie, I do not know.”