by Jane Ashford
She did not pretend to misunderstand him. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
The baron glanced at her face. She was grinning mischievously but seemed sincere. “See that you don’t,” he finished.
Susan nodded. “Now that that is settled,” she added, “could I take the reins for a little while?”
Ellerton stared at her as if she’d gone mad.
“I am a famous whip,” she assured him. “I drive a great deal in the country. I’ve even handled a team.”
“No one drives my horses but me,” he replied in his most repressive accents.
“But I—”
“Miss Wyndham! We have just discussed your behavior. I tell you now that this is absolutely beyond the line. You cannot drive my cattle!” To himself he was marveling at her effrontery. No man in London would have asked this, but she did so without the least sign of constraint.
Susan’s elfin features set in lines that would have warned anyone better acquainted with her, and she began to look about the park as if plotting strategy. Actually, she didn’t understand the gravity of what she’d asked. Her brothers had let her try their horses. William was a bruising rider but lacked finesse in driving, and Nicholas preferred scholarly pursuits to a neck-or-nothing gallop. Their teams were far gentler than those Baron Ellerton bred, leaving Susan with an inflated idea of her own competence. To her, Ellerton’s refusal seemed simply a punishment for her earlier behavior. “I suppose I should be going home now,” Susan declared in a deceptively mild tone as they approached the gate of the park once more.
“Certainly,” the baron agreed, only too pleased to cut his drive short if it meant ridding himself of her. He maneuvered around a dawdling barouche and turned into the street.
Susan leaned over and fingered the lid of Daisy’s basket. As she opened it a crack, the cat’s broad ginger head thrust out, his yellow eyes glittering with malice. Daisy was not fond of carriage rides, but if forced to ride, he much preferred sitting up where he could see, or at the very least being free to move about. Shut in his stuffy basket, which he at all times hated, and bounced about by the vehicle, he’d been roused to a towering rage. At the first sign of rescue, he was out of the container and standing rigid on the floor of the phaeton. Susan, who might have been expected to know his predilections, merely gazed at him speculatively.
“Your cat must stay in the basket,” ordered Ellerton, glancing briefly down, then up again. The busy London streets required his attention.
With the look of a dispassionate experimenter, Susan advanced one kid-shod foot to prod Daisy’s stomach sharply.
The cat went up like a rocket, teeth bared, claws outstretched. The latter sank into the immaculate yellow pantaloons that sheathed the baron’s knee and held there while Daisy yowled defiance.
Ellerton swore, his hands dropping for a startled instant. The team increased its pace, barely skirting an overladen cart slowing before a greengrocer’s. “Get that creature off me!” he commanded through gritted teeth.
Susan bit her lower lip. “Oh dear,” she said in an insincere voice.
“I said…” Daisy reached the baron’s thigh, paused, digging in his claws, then leapt for his chest. Ellerton gathered the reins in one hand and sought to capture the animal with the other.
“Look out for that gig,” cried Susan.
The baron attempted to pull up the phaeton, collar Daisy, and glare furiously at Susan all at once. The cat, fighting, as he thought, for life, limb, and freedom, wrapped himself about Ellerton’s neck and tried to shred his very elegant neckcloth. The baron cursed fluently.
Susan, seeing the opportunity she’d been waiting for, seized the phaeton’s reins from its owner’s momentarily slack grasp, slapped them across the team’s glossy backs, and laughed as the carriage began to race through the cobbled streets.
The baron shouted something incoherent, but Susan’s unexpected move had thrown him back in his seat and driven Daisy to a frenzy of rage. As Ellerton tried to regain his balance, the cat swarmed about his face, hissing and scratching and requiring all his attention.
Susan realized almost at once that she’d made a dreadful mistake. The baron’s team was more powerful than any she’d driven before. Indeed, it took all her strength merely to keep hold of the reins. Any thought of controlling the chestnuts had to be abandoned. The phaeton raced at a dangerous speed through the streets, eliciting angry shouts and leaving a wake of shaken pedestrians and, in at least one case, scattered vegetables. Holding on with all her might, Susan soon began to be truly frightened. She dared a glance at the baron. He was trying to corral Daisy, who was fighting back with all his strength. “Daisy, stop it!” she cried. But the cat was too far gone to hear by now.
They hurtled out into a broad highway, the team turning of its own accord and racing along it. Susan’s wrists and forearms ached, and the wind of their passage had whirled away her beloved sunshade and pushed back her hat to dangle from its ribbons. The buildings were thinning, she noticed. They must be near the edge of town.
With a jerk, Ellerton got both hands round Daisy’s squirming body and threw the cat from the carriage into a tree beside the road. At once he turned to grasp the reins, and Susan gave them up without protest. Indeed, she was only too glad to relinquish responsibility for their disastrous race.
But this new disturbance was too much for Ellerton’s high-spirited team. Never in their pampered lives had they endured such treatment. They’d always been driven with impeccable skill and received in the city streets or country lanes with deference and admiration. These violent jerks on their guiding lines and shouts and curses from all sides had upset their high-bred equilibrium. As the baron strove with all his strength to pull them up and stop the phaeton, they rebelled, galloping even faster than before.
Seeing blood beginning to fleck the froth at the corners of the horses’s mouths, Ellerton eased his grip, letting them run. “I won’t ruin them,” he snapped at Susan. “They will have to run it out.”
She simply nodded, white and ashamed, but less frightened now that he’d taken over.
The chestnuts strained in their harness for nearly fifteen minutes, pulling the tossing phaeton through ruts and dust, heedless of anything but their need to flee. Ellerton held the reins with iron wrists, gradually reestablishing control and very slowly moderating their pace. They were outside London when it at last appeared that he would be able to stop the carriage, and he felt free to glance at Susan and open his mouth for a blistering setdown. At that moment, a pair of sparrows erupted from the bushes at the right of the road and hurtled across under the very noses of the leaders. The chestnuts shied violently, and one of them reared, then plunged into the foliage. The phaeton rose perilously on one wheel, hanging there for an endless instant, then slammed to the ground, flinging both passengers from their seats into the leaves.
Susan landed on a thorn bush, the breath quite knocked out of her. As she strove for air, thorns prickled her from all sides, but the pain was nothing to her apprehension about what the baron would do to her when he found her. He was furious, and she had to acknowledge, he had every right to be. Her dreadful temper had gotten the better of her again.
Susan considered trying to crawl away through the bushes and make her own way back to London, but her sense of responsibility at last forced her to struggle out of the thorns, leaving a good many scraps of sprigged muslin behind her, and return to the road. She saw the phaeton at once; it lay on its side and would not move again without repair. The team was still harnessed to it. They were standing still, sweating and trembling in the traces. She should try to cut them loose, Susan realized, but when she ventured closer, the more nervous leader shied again and looked as if he would lash out with his hooves. Better leave them to the baron, Susan thought, backing away again. And she frowned as she looked for him. Surely he would have gone directly to his horses?
Frightened again, Susan returned to the bushes and began to search, calling Ellerton’s name. There was no response, which shook her further. She plunged through the undergrowth, oblivious of lashing branches and thorns, until at last she came upon him, on his back under an elm, white and unmoving.
With a cry, she sank to her knees at his side. There was a great gash in the side of his forehead. It had bled all down the side of his face and dyed the fallen leaves beneath him crimson. Too, one of his legs lay at an odd angle.
Some girls might have fallen into a fit of the vapors then and there, but Susan was made of stronger stuff. She had seen a number of hunting accidents, and knew something about treating such injuries. Cuts to the head always bled heavily, she knew. Nonetheless, her hands were shaking as she groped in the baron’s pocket for a handkerchief to bind up the wound. She felt for his pulse, conscious of an almost unbearable relief when she found it, and ran her hands along the bent leg. Ellerton groaned when she touched it, and she snatched her hand away.
“Baron Ellerton,” she said urgently. “Baron!”
He groaned again but did not wake. Susan sat back on her heels, still trembling, and wondered how best to find help. She would have to leave him, she decided, while she walked along the road to the closest house or village. She ran back to the phaeton, and after a rapid search, found a rug, which she hurried to spread over him. The horses shied again as she passed. Then, hair wild and bleeding from numerous thorn pricks, Susan set off toward town.
Eight
At nearly the same time, Georgina Goring went in search of Susan’s brother. She found him in the library, dozing over a book in the hour before dinner. “William,” she said softly, and he started awake.
“Uuh! What? Oh, Georgina.” He straightened in the brown leather armchair.
“William, do you remember you said I should ask for your help if I needed it?”
Her tone made him rub the last drowsiness from his eyes. “Of course. Is something wrong?”
“I hope not.” She hesitated. “I’m worried about Susan.”
He groaned. “What’s she done now?”
Georgina sighed and sank down on the sofa nearby. “Perhaps nothing. But I can’t help but be concerned.” She told William the maid Lucy’s story. “It is nearly two hours since then, and she is not back,” she finished. “I don’t know what can have happened.”
Some men might have doubted the baron’s motives or suspected him of treachery. William Wyndham exclaimed, “She has kidnapped him!” and put his head in his hands.
Georgina was torn between laughter and outrage. “William! Why should she do any such thing?”
“Why does Susan do anything?” he retorted, raising his head again. “He probably gave her a well-deserved setdown for pushing herself upon him, and she decided to make him sorry.”
This sounded disturbingly plausible to Georgina. “But how could she—”
“Susan would find a way,” interrupted William positively.
Once again, Georgina could not muster convincing arguments, and her spirits fell even further. She had failed in her duties as a chaperone, she thought, just as she feared she would. But she also felt a spark of resentment. That Susan should disappear in the company of Baron Ellerton seemed to her unfair, though she would have been hard put to explain what exactly that meant. She pushed these thoughts aside. “We must look for her,” she told William.
He nodded wearily. “I’ll get my horse and ride through the park. Of course, they can’t still be there.”
“I’ll speak to Lucy again. Perhaps she will remember something Susan said, or…” She trailed off, and they gazed at one another, each feeling that their suggestions were weak. Then William shrugged and went out.
The maid had no more information, and William returned as the sky was darkening toward evening with no news, though he had ridden along all the streets leading to the park and even gone to inquire at Baron Ellerton’s house. He had been turned away with some hauteur by the butler, whose icy reserve was such an effective mask of his concern that William never suspected it.
“What shall we do now?” he asked when he and Georgina had left the dinner table, having eaten very little.
She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know. I suppose I must speak to Aunt Sybil, but…”
“It might make her worse. I could go and fetch Christopher, but that would take three days.” He frowned.
Georgina found his confidence in his stepfather touching, but unhelpful. “No, we have to think of something ourselves,” she concluded.
They looked at each other, their feelings very similar. Georgina was scolding herself for her inadequacy as a guide to Susan, and William was deploring his poor showing as head of the Wyndham family. Both had a strong sense of responsibility and a hatred of failure.
“I could go back to the baron’s house and tell the truth,” ventured William, sounding far from eager.
“No. We must keep this a secret as long as we can. I even managed to fob Lucy off, for a while. It mustn’t get out.”
“What mustn’t?” inquired a cheerful voice from the drawing-room doorway, and they turned to find Tony Brinmore and Marianne MacClain standing there.
Their surprise and chagrin were so obvious that Marianne said, “A footman let us in, and told us you were here. We were passing by on our way home from the Wigginses’, and Tony wanted to speak to William.”
“What mustn’t get out?” repeated Tony, throwing himself into an armchair and gazing at William with cheerful curiosity.
“Tony, we should go,” responded Marianne.
He looked startled. “We just got here. What’s the matter with—?”
The maid Lucy rushed in, wringing her hands. “Oh, Miss Georgina, the cat’s come home,” she cried, oblivious of the presence of visitors. “All dusty and draggled, he is, with a cut on his leg. It’s footpads, or highwaymen, I’ll lay my life. Miss Susan’s killed. Or worse!” She began to blubber noisily.
“You mean she took the cat with her!” exclaimed William, astounded.
Lucy was incapable of speech. Georgina closed her eyes and prayed for strength.
“What’s Susan done now?” asked Tony, clearly intrigued and amused.
Marianne tugged at his arm. “Tony, come. We’re in the way here.”
He shook her off. “Nonsense. William needs my help.”
Marianne looked at Georgina, who had gone to deal with Lucy. “I do beg your pardon,” she said.
Georgina simply shook her head. She succeeded in quieting Lucy enough to guide her out of the room and down to the kitchen, where the cook again took over ministrations. When she returned to the drawing room, she found William completing the tale of the day’s events. “So we don’t know where she’s gone. But now that I hear about Daisy, I have a good idea.”
“Where?” Georgina exclaimed, too eager to scold him for spreading the tale.
William turned. “Ellerton’s killed her,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Throttled her and left her under a bush in the park. Daresay he tried for Daisy, too, but that animal is devilishly clever.”
Tony burst out laughing. Marianne, throwing him an indignant look, went to Georgina. “I am terribly sorry. I…”
“It’s all right. I know you won’t talk of it.” Georgina turned to Tony. “And if you do, you will—”
“What do you take me for?” Tony was still fighting a smile. “I mean to help.”
With a deep sigh, Georgina went to sit on the sofa again. Marianne joined her. “I don’t see what any of us can do. We don’t know where to search.”
“Perhaps the cat can lead us to them,” suggested Tony, grinning.
“Oh, stop it!” responded Marianne. “This is no joking matter.”
“Do you suppose there’s been an accident?” wondered Georgina. “Lucy said it was a high-perch phaeton. T
hey don’t look very safe.”
“Ellerton is one of the finest whips in the country,” said Marianne. “I can’t imagine him taking a spill.”
“Susan would,” declared William. “And she’d be wild to take the ribbons.”
“Ellerton would never allow it,” Marianne assured him.
“No.”
They sat in glum silence for a while, each trying to think of some plan, and none succeeding. Georgina was growing desperate when the butler entered with an envelope. “For you, miss,” he said. “A boy just brought it.”
They all clustered around as she opened it and scanned the message. “Oh, my God!” said William then, collapsing into a chair.
“She’s killed him,” crowed Tony. “Or half-killed him, anyhow.”
Marianne was silent, but Georgina crumpled the paper in her fist and said, “I must go to them at once,” her voice shaking.
No one disagreed, but Marianne surveyed the other woman with deep concern. She could see that Georgina was dreadfully upset, and she understood at least some of the reasons. “I will go with you,” she offered.
“We’ll all go,” said Tony, not quite able to hide his excitement at the adventure. “You’ll need someone to, er, run errands and, er, that sort of thing.”
In the end, despite William’s protests and Georgina’s firm denials, they all set out together, Marianne and Georgina in Lady Goring’s carriage and the young men riding. By the time they had gathered their things and sent word to Marianne’s mother, it was full dark, and they had to travel very slowly. Gradually, even Tony’s high spirits were dampened by the dismal drive, and conversation dropped to nothing.