Games of Pleasure (11 page)

The earl laughed, a bark like a startled dog. “If she'll have you! She's a professional whore. You're Blackdown's son and heir. Of course she'll have you. She'll take the first man that offers.”

“Then you can recommend her company?”

The earl leaned back in his chair, but his fist closed on the newspaper, crushing it. “She's a vixen between the sheets, of course. When you find her, ask her to try that little trick she does with a ribbon. Something rather thrilling about being tied up like that, don't you know?”

The impulse to kill and do a little dismembering of his own washed hotly through Ryder's blood, yet he stood up with studied unconcern.

“There's also the small matter of some damage to duchy property—some furnishings, the minor defacement of some plaster. Trivial, but annoying.”

Hanley threw aside the paper and rose to look the younger man in the eye. “I'm sure you can understand that no gentleman appreciates being made to look the fool by a harlot. She's a gutter creature, Ryderbourne. Corrupt as a rotten peach. If you can find her, take her. Meanwhile, if you wish to dabble in home repairs, pray send a statement to my man of business. Now, if you'll excuse me?”

The newspaper slipped to the floor as the earl bowed and stalked out.

Ryder inhaled several deep breaths. He was a St. George. He stood at the heart of the world's greatest empire. He was as helpless as the most pitiful of the king's subjects in his search for this one woman.

Yet if Hanley had beaten her and discarded her in that boat, the man had better start practicing his aim with a pistol.

He strode out onto St. James's Street and walked blindly across the park. The Houses of Parliament bulked beside the Thames. At Westminster Bridge he stopped and gazed at the span of white arches over the river. Every week some poor wretch ended a miserable existence in those fast-flowing waters.

But not Miracle! Surely life burned too brightly, too vibrantly, in her soul for such a desperate step? Yet she was obviously not in London, and meanwhile he had learned this single clue about where she might have gone.

If she rode as much as forty or fifty miles in a day, she could be halfway to Derbyshire by now, but at some point she must have crossed the London to Bristol road. If he could once pick up her trail there, he could follow it. It was his only hope.

Ryder spun about and stalked back to his townhouse.

As dawn rose hazily over London the next morning, Ryder's fastest carriage drove him west out of town. Once he passed Marl-borough, he would ask after the chestnut gelding at every tollhouse and inn where she might have been seen. If it took him the rest of his life, he would find her.

THERE was solace in the night sky, but she could not eat stars. There was comfort in Lord Ryderbourne's cloak, but it was not a warmth that soothed her heart. The imprint of sea and man disturbed her like a haunting shadow that she could not quite focus on.

It was foolish. Fatal. Wrapped in his scent every night, she could not forget that one encounter with this one man. A duke's son! Had she at least also given him a night to remember? Or had he already dismissed her from his mind and his life, and returned undisturbed to his daily round?

There had been a time when she would have leaped at the chance to take such a powerful protector. Yet something had happened between them that she could not afford. The thought of it terrified her. Something that threatened her almost as deeply as the threat of Hanley's revenge.

But life had surely taught her to have courage and faith and perseverance. She would not give up now.

The next morning Miracle struggled through endless fields and along boggy lanes that ran into quagmires of mud. Farm workers shot curious glances at her as she passed, but no one harassed her or asked where she was going. At last she climbed up a small rise and sat down on a fallen tree trunk to survey the countryside ahead.

Beneath her lay a broad stretch of road, busy with travelers: the main Bristol turnpike from London. Carriages and coaches were turning in and out of the arched entryways to several grand inns on the edge of a sizable town.

Several miles farther west a green path crossed the road. A drover's track, running northwest. Another building, small and low-slung and fenced about with animal pens, lay beyond the crossroads between the turnpike and the green track. She shaded her eyes and stared. Though she couldn't see it, she could guess the name of this smaller, shabbier inn: the Drovers' Arms.

Miracle pulled a little knife out of her pocket, one of her small remaining treasures purchased so dearly at the Merry Monarch, and hiked her skirts up over her knees. Her boots were mired in mud, but the meadow in front of her glimmered with wildflowers. She would cut ribbons from her petticoat to tie posies to sell to travelers. Her heart ran cold at the risk if she was discovered, but she had to buy food now, or starve.

 

 

RYDER'S coach pulled into the yard of the White Swan. Ostlers looked with envy at his outriders' smart livery and his splendid team of horses. Wherever he stopped, the business of the inn was deformed by his arrival, like tiny satellites falling under the gravitational sway of a large planet. Once again he stepped down into the center of a whirlwind of service and repeated the litany he had been intoning since London.

“A lady in a brown habit riding a bald-faced chestnut gelding. The horse has a white patch like a map of Ireland on its rump.”

Grooms shrugged. Servants tugged at forelocks. The host hurried out to wait in person on such a distinguished traveler. Ryder swallowed brandy while the horses were changed. No one had seen her. No one had seen the horse.

He had just spun about to step back up into his coach, when another traveler stepped forward. The stranger glanced at the crest on the coach panels—the writhing dragon dying beneath the spear of St. George—and saluted him.

“Kenneth Blake, my lord, at your service! I was unable to avoid overhearing your inquiries. You will forgive my presumption, I'm sure? It may be another animal altogether, of course, but I could swear that I saw just such a gelding earlier this afternoon at the horse market in the next town, some ten miles farther up the road.”

Ryder's heart began to pound. “Ridden by a lady, sir?”

“Alas, no, my lord. Offered for sale by a couple of ne'er-do-well characters—out-and-out ruffians, I would say—but the horse carried a sidesaddle and was marked exactly as you describe. I took a quick look at the nag for my daughter, but the man selling it didn't seem to know much of its history. I thought it rather odd at the time.”

Rank fear made Ryder physically ill for a moment, as if steel pincers had closed inside his gut. He thanked Mr. Blake and issued orders. His coach swung from the inn yard. The fresh horses plunged on toward Bristol at a gallop.

 

 

EVENING was closing in, cloaking the overhanging balcony in its gray veils. The painted swan on the sign curled its head back over one wing, as if to wink at passing travelers.

Miracle swallowed hard and walked up to stand in the arched entry to the inn yard. She curtsied and kept her head down as she offered her flowers to everyone going in and out. “For your lady wife, kind sir! For your daughter.”

She had already sold enough to buy a supper and a length of ribbon. Tomorrow she would make more posies. Perhaps wildflowers would take her all the way to Derbyshire. Meanwhile, she had only a few bunches left for sale and it was getting late.

“Odd thing that,” a man said to his companion as he strolled out into the street. “One wouldn't think that any member of the peerage would go to such lengths to hunt down such an ordinary animal.”

His friend grinned. “Unless the peer in question was Irish, with a sentimental attachment to an animal with a map of his homeland on its rump—”

“—or an even deeper attachment to the missing lady in the brown habit?”

Both men laughed and walked on.

Her last few bunches of flowers fell at Miracle's feet.

Another gentleman had walked out of the inn door. Tall and blond, he stopped to pull on his gloves as he glanced up at the gathering darkness.

“My horse,” he said to a passing groom. “I fancy a ride before supper.”

“Very good, my lord.”

She did not need to see the face beneath the gilt hair. The sound of his voice was enough. Backing rapidly into the shadows, Miracle slipped out into the street and walked fast out of town. A stile took her from the main road onto a footpath. Terror beat hard, robbing her of breath. She could not risk traveling so slowly any longer. Whatever it cost her, she must secure another horse. Then she must disappear completely, before Lord Hanley caught up with her.

 

 

RYDER'S horses steamed as four fresh animals were run out, ready to take His Lordship wherever his whim might demand next. His servants stood stoically as Lord Ryderbourne told them to take their supper in the inn, then strode off alone into the town.

The Market Square was littered with dung and straw, where horses had been bought and sold earlier that day.

Ryder accosted the first man that he met. “Good evening, sir. I'm looking for a bald-faced chestnut gelding—”

The man scratched at his head and shook it. Ryder asked three more strollers and a lad with a dung cart and shovel. In vain. Yet the fifth man nodded and pointed with one finger.

“Why, Mr. Pence, our apothecary, purchased that very nag this afternoon, my lord, along with a saddle and bridle. Said he needed a good mount for his wife. . . .”

Ryder shook the man by the hand and strode off in the direction he had pointed.

Mr. Pence came to the door in person and immediately insisted that His Lordship step into his humble parlor. The knife in Ryder's gut twisted again as the man only confirmed what Ryder had already learned at the White Swan. Ghostly in the twilight, the gelding's white face peered over the apothecary's stall door. A lady's saddle hung in his tack room.

“I also purchased some saddlebags and their contents, my lord. If Your Lordship would care to come back inside to take a look?”

A brown riding habit, a fresh petticoat, all the little bits and pieces that Miracle had taken with her from the Merry Monarch. The fabric moved softly under Ryder's fingers. Grief and anger surged in a floodtide. The apothecary's face seemed to disappear into a dark mist.

“Thank you, Mr. Pence,” he said at last. “I'm most obliged to you, sir.”

“You wish to recover the horse and these things, my lord? Did I purchase them in error? Alas, I'm afraid the men who sold all this to me are long gone by now.”

“No,” Ryder said. “It doesn't matter. Keep the horse. You bought him in good faith.”

He strode blindly back through the town to his coach. She had been robbed. The horse. The saddle. Even the riding habit she had been wearing, and the pitiful little necessities that she had carried in the saddlebags.

There was little doubt what must have happened to her.

The bitterness of his grief filled his mouth with ash.

NIGHT was falling by the time Miracle arrived at the Drovers' Arms. Fatigue rang in her bones from her tramp over the fields, climbing stile after stile, occasionally losing the path in the dark, only to stumble into the edge of wheat fields, or startle a lumbering cow.

A gaggle of boys crouched outside the inn, keeping watch by the light of wavering torches over herds of sheep and cattle and pens full of ponies. Bulky shapes shifted, permeating the night with their animal odors. The boys glanced at her without interest as she passed, then huddled back inside their coats.

She hesitated for only a moment on the doorstep, listening to the dull rumble of men talking and their occasional laughter as she unpinned her hair. Then she looked up one last time at the pure night sky, before she pushed open the door.

It was even darker inside the inn, the air thick with the reek of tallow candles, oil lamps, and tobacco. In the few islands of light, men in travel-stained coats stood about or sat on benches, tossing back tankards of ale and eyeing each other, some with camaraderie, some with veiled suspicion.

Many of them were no doubt armed. In spite of their shabby clothes, some of the drovers might be carrying large sums of gold in the deep pockets of their coats, though most would have bought and sold their herds on credit. Yet they were all working men, far from home after weeks on the road.

And there were other travelers here—drifters, old soldiers, men hunting for work—less honest than the sober Welsh drovers, and less faithful to wives and families left behind.

She took a deep breath. Lord Hanley was already at the White Swan. She could not walk any farther in the dark. So instead she must risk this: a room full of rogues and traveling men, some of whom might simply take what she had to sell before parting with a penny.

Heads turned as she entered. Miracle slipped her cloak from her shoulders to let it drape from one finger. Every eye in the room focused on the low neckline of her gown. Only one kind of woman would enter here alone dressed like this.

“Is this a merry company,” she asked, “that might like a song for the road? Name your ditty, gentlemen, and if I don't know it, I'll throw in another for free.”

Booted feet shifted in the sudden silence, then a man laughed.

“Keep your ditties, sweetheart,” he said. “How much for a private moment with me?”

“More than you can afford,” Miracle shot back, “and if a moment is all that it takes you, I'm surprised you would boast of the fact before all these jolly fellows.”

Some of the men laughed, but the tension remained as thick as smoke in the foul air.