Then, and only then, did she remember that he had said they would return to Thunderhill “tomorrow.” The memory shook her, but she could scarcely blame him for his decision. After the scene she had caused, there wasn’t a tattlemonger in Brighton who would not be in possession of all the distasteful facts by dawn. One of the faces she had seen most clearly when Joshua dragged her from the ballroom had been Sally’s, and already that young lady had achieved a notable reputation as a gossip. “Silence” they called her, and her friendship with Adriana would no more stop her tongue than her even closer friendship with Emily Cowper had stopped her from talking about that young woman. No doubt Joshua would wish to put as much distance between himself and the gossips as he possibly could.
At last, she sat up and blotted her tears, knowing she would have to apologize and knowing, too, that the apology this time must be sincere, not a sop to soothe a gentleman’s temper or to ease tension. Thus, the sooner it was done, the better it would be. Suiting thought to action, she disentangled her headdress from her hair and flung it aside, blew out her flickering lamp, and without taking time to wash her face, went to find him.
When she opened his door, it was dark inside. “Joshua?”
“I’m here.” There was the sound of flint against a tinderbox, then sparks and the glow of cotton, and in a moment the candle on the table by his bed was lit, casting a glow over the little room with its lavender curtains and spread, and its polished floor. Joshua sat on the high bed in his shirt sleeves. He had taken off his coat, waistcoat, neckcloth, and boots, and it was clear from the resulting disarray that Miskin had neither waited up for him nor been awakened.
Now that she was with him Adriana didn’t know how to begin. She picked up his embroidered waistcoat from the floor and put it on a chair, collecting her thoughts, determined not to let him put her out of countenance again.
Joshua said nothing, but he watched her through narrowed eyes. Instead of disconcerting her, this time his silence gave her courage, and finally, blurting the words, she said, “You were right, sir. My behavior has been reprehensible, particularly tonight, but I shall endeavor to do better in the future if you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”
He still said nothing, but the hard glint disappeared from his eyes, and taking courage from this sign, she moved to stand before him, clasping his large hands between her smaller ones, looking at him with her heart in her eyes. “Please, Joshua, won’t you help me put this night behind us? I’ll try very hard not to flirt anymore, and I’ll learn all there is to learn about my duties at Thunderhill, and I’ll never associate with smugglers again, and I’ll be as obedient as I know how to be, and—”
“Would you repeat that last part, please?” he asked gently.
“I said—”
“I know what you said.”
To her vast astonishment, she realized he was amused. She stared at him, wide-eyed, then said indignantly, “I meant every word, Joshua. Truly!”
“I believe you,” he said more seriously, pulling her nearer so that she stood between his open thighs. “At least, I suppose you must believe this affecting apology of yours, but I don’t believe for one minute that you will be able to make it good. You can no more stop flirting than you can fly, and I very much doubt that you have the least notion of obedience. The minute someone is foolish enough to give you an order, you set about determining the quickest, most effective means of flouting it.”
“I don’t!”
“You do,” he said, reaching for the diamond fastenings to her robe and beginning slowly to undo them, “and you are, despite what you believe to the contrary, just as accustomed to ordering your life to suit you as I am to ordering mine to suit me. But I shall say no more on that head. Indeed, I have said all I mean to say tonight and probably a deal that I did not mean.”
She looked at him. “Truly, Joshua?”
“I store things up,” he confided, bending his head to kiss her neck. “When I get really angry—which fortunately is a very rare occurrence—I blow up and everything comes out all at once, the large and the small. By then they all seem the same size, and even though the storm nearly always blows over quickly, I have been known to say more than I ought to say.”
“You were very angry with me,” she said softly, drawing her finger provocatively along his jawline. “You frightened me.”
His hand moved inside her robe, caressing the soft breast beneath, making her gasp with pleasure. “You deserved to be frightened, sweetheart,” he murmured. “Did you not?”
She melted against him, encouraging his kisses as she wriggled to free herself from the last folds of her clothing. Clearly, though the worst was over, it was still going to take some time to placate him; however, if she did the job thoroughly, perhaps by morning he would change his mind about returning immediately to Thunderhill.
13
ADRIANA DISCOVERED THE ERROR of her thinking late the following morning when she returned to her own bedchamber to discover Nancy packing her things. Joshua had wakened before her and, according to her abigail, had given orders for their departure at one o’clock. She dressed quickly and went in search of him, finding him in the breakfast parlor, discussing a large underdone beefsteak, grilled kidneys, and potatoes.
Sarah, sitting opposite him, was watching with wonder approaching awe. “Good morning,” she said to Adriana. “I have just suggested to your husband that he ought to arrange for the demise of his breakfast before it comes to table. I shouldn’t be at all amazed to see that animal get up and walk off the plate.”
“Don’t be vulgar,” Adriana said, nodding when the footman preparing her plate indicated a bowl of sliced fruit. “Muffins, too, William,” she said, taking her seat. “Instead of condemning Chalford’s eating habits, Sarah, you ought to help me convince him that it is quite unnecessary for us to return today.”
“I hope,” said the marquess, giving his wife a direct look, “that she won’t try to flog a dead horse. I’ve already explained to her that we must leave soon if we are to catch the tide.”
“But, surely—”
“No, Adriana.” There was an implacable note in his voice that she had come to recognize, but she was feeling unaccountably carefree that morning and would have pressed harder had not a spark of amusement lit his eyes when he added, “’Tis as well we did not make any wagers last night, is it not? You’d be run off your legs mighty soon, sweetheart, if you had to pay a forfeit every time you proved me right.”
She bit her lower lip, then looked up to thank William and to ask him to bring her a pot of tea. When the footman had gone, she grinned at Sarah and said, “I promised to be obedient, and Joshua said I’d never manage to do it. Foolish of me to make his point for him so quickly, was it not?”
“I wish you could both stay with us longer,” Sarah said wistfully. “It won’t be the same without you.”
“Quieter,” murmured Chalford, “no juicy scandal to delight your neighbors and set the tabbies twitching.”
“Oh, fiddlesticks,” Sarah said, laughing. “What scandal? Nothing happened last night that won’t be eclipsed within a day or two by some incident of greater interest. Now, if you had knocked Adriana to the floor instead of poor Mr. Dawlish—”
“Poor Mr. Dawlish!” exclaimed Adriana. “Well, I like that. Let me tell you, Sarah Clifford—”
“The less you say about what passed between you and Dawlish, the better I shall like it,” Joshua said quietly.
She smiled, in charity with him again. “I confess, sir, I hope no one else was close enough to hear what he said to me.” Then, noting the look of interest on Sarah’s expressive face, she said, “You needn’t think I’m going to tell you now, for I won’t. Joshua,” she added, turning abruptly back to him, “if we must return today, can we take Miranda with us? She can be ready in a trice, and she would very much like to go. She does not wish to wait until Christmas, and neither do I.”
“Your brother will never hear of it,” he said.
“Perhaps not, but we shan’t know if we do not invite her.”
“Very well, but don’t be cast into gloom when Alston says she may not come.”
Pleased though she was to find him so reasonable, Adriana had no more expectation than Joshua did that her brother would allow Miranda to escape his protection, so no one was more surprised than she was when at a quarter-past noon, Viscount Alston’s carriage drew up before Clifford House and deposited the Lady Miranda Barrington and her maid upon the doorstep.
“Can you credit it?” demanded Miranda the moment she crossed the threshold. “Nothing was ever more providential. That odious little bounce, Claude Ringwell, has been making the most absurd advances, and dear Alston, having observed his attempt to fondle my backside on the stair this morning, was actually moved to agree that I shall be safer at Thunderhill.”
“And how long,” Sarah asked sweetly, “did you have to wait on the stairway for your victim to present himself?”
Miranda chuckled. “Nearly half an hour, and then I had to shriek like a banshee to be certain Alston would hear me, but he simply erupted from his bookroom, and there was Claude, looking as guilty as a fox with feathers stuck in his whiskers. I thought,” she added sagely, “that you might decide to leave today, so I decided it would behoove me to be ready, just in the event, you know, that you should ask me to go with you.”
“It seems to me,” said Joshua thoughtfully, “that in such a case, Alston would have been more likely to have banished young Ringwell from the house than to have allowed you to leave.”
“Oh, he could not do that,” said Miranda airily. “Sophie, for some reason known only to herself, quite dotes on Claude. Besides,” she added with a wicked grin, “Alston thinks me a paragon at the moment, compared to Dree. I have never sunk so far beneath reproach as he now thinks she has.”
Adriana grimaced and glanced at Joshua, but when he smiled at her, she smiled back, finding it impossible in the face of her sister’s cheerful teasing to be as downcast at leaving Brighton as she had thought she would be. Their return journey aboard the Sea Dragon was uneventful, and once they were back at Thunderhill, Adriana had the odd feeling that she had never left it. Almost immediately, the excitement of life in Brighton faded into memory, like a dream, as though she had never gone.
The aunts were there to greet them, Lady Hetta full of news and her sister as stately and awe-inspiring as ever. Adriana, replying to Lady Adelaide’s request for news of some of her friends in Brighton, hoped silently but nonetheless fervently that her ladyship would never know about the voyage on the smugglers’ ship or the incident at the prince’s birthday ball. If Lady Adelaide had heard a word about either one, she did not say so.
“Only think of it,” Lady Hetta was saying indignantly to Chalford when Adriana paused in her own account to draw breath. “To have been taken captive and borne off to France, then simply abandoned there. The poor man!”
Chalford, noting Adriana’s bewildered look, explained, “She has just been telling me that Petticrow has come to grief again.”
“Mercy, what now, ma’am?”
“Those detestable smugglers—not ours, I think, but the others, the new ones—carried him off to France and left him there without any identity papers or food or anything. He could have been killed by those dreadful French or starved or goodness knows what. It was an appalling thing to do to the poor man.”
“Indeed, it was, ma’am,” Miranda agreed, “but how do you know that is what happened?”
“Why, he told us so! Mr. Braverstoke rescued him, you see, and Mr. Petticrow came here at once to tell us all about it.”
“Braverstoke rescued him!” Chalford repeated.
“Pure foolhardiness,” pronounced Lady Adelaide in measured tones of disapproval. “The man had no business to involve himself in so dangerous a venture.”
“Indeed, it was no such thing,” said Lady Hetta. “It was the most fortunate circumstance.”
“Encroaching,” insisted Lady Adelaide. “He and his father.” Encountering a look from her nephew, she added, “Perhaps you will say I ought not to speak so, Joshua, but you know it is perfectly true. The son is a ne’er-do-well and the father a bumptious little man, the last person one expected to inherit Newingham Manor or to have the impertinence to come courting at Thunderhill. What, a fourth cousin with a title for life and not a penny to bless himself with, if the truth be known, for the stipend accompanying such titles is never princely. I do not like for him or that young man to be running tame here, and I devoutly hope you will not continue to encourage them to do so.”
Chalford waited politely until she had finished, then turned to Lady Hetta. “Pray continue your tale, ma’am.”
She smiled gratefully. “You know how dear Mr. Braverstoke enjoys taking that yacht of his out, Joshua, and sailing as near as the devil himself to the French coast—really, a most dangerous pastime, I agree, but very brave of him, Adelaide, not foolhardy at all. Well, someone from shore carried word to the Golden Fleece—no doubt some of the French smugglers, if the truth of the matter were known, since our people must deal with someone over there, after all. In any event, someone did, and Mr. Braverstoke’s people were able to collect him.”
“That was fortunate, certainly,” Chalford said. “How long ago did this occur?”
“They brought him home yesterday afternoon. We gave him a good meal, and he is sleeping in his old room right now. I insisted upon that. The poor man simply could not go home alone in the state he was in. He hadn’t slept for three days!”
“Well,” said Chalford, “Petticrow does seem to be prone to adventure. We must hope he will tell us all about it.”
The riding officer was only too willing to comply with this request when he joined them that evening for supper. His clothes had been brushed and pressed, and he was fully refreshed, but his temper was not entirely mended. He cast a sidelong look at Joshua when Adriana and Miranda began to pelt him with questions.
“’Twas the most damnable thing, m’lord,” he said, looking squarely at Joshua, then turning back again to apologize for the intemperance of his language. “It would try a saint, m’ladies, in truth it would. I was taken like the veriest amateur. They came up behind me when I was watching Strawberry Cove—north of Hythe, you know. There are cliffs there, so the lads don’t attempt to unload cargo, as a general thing, but there are caves in the cliffs, so when things get hot, they sometimes unload there until the coast is clear again. I spoiled a run a sennight past, so I expected they’d be wary for a time. There I was, waiting for them, and they must have known I was, for the next I knew, I’d a sack over my head and was trussed up like a bag of hops ready for the oasthouse. They rowed me out to the ship and stowed me in the stern hold. All the way to France they took me, and all the way I listened to the damned sound of their blasted stern mast above me, creaking and wailing in the wind like fingernails on a slate. Like to drive a man to Bedlam.”
“How dreadful,” said Miranda, “but how fortunate Mr. Braverstoke was able to rescue you and bring you home again.”
“Aye,” the riding officer agreed, but there was a note of doubt in his voice, and after a moment’s silence, he looked at Joshua again and said, “I’d know that ship again, I believe, m’lord. Got free of the trussing before she’d cleared the French harbor, and it was dawn by then. Only saw her from astern, but I could hear the screeching of that stern mast, so I know it was the right ship, and she’d got a pair of carved wooden panels mounted on the stern bulwark in the same place as the Golden Fleece has those garish gilded medallions.”
“But nearly every ship has some decoration of that sort, sir,” Adriana protested. “Why, the Sea Dragon has heraldic devices in exactly those same places, though neither she nor the Golden Fleece can be the ship you describe, of course, since both are sloops and have but a single mast. But even if you identify the ship, how would you catch your men? The owner may know nothing of the use to which his boat is being put. W
hy, it could be a situation exactly like when—”
“That’s a point,” Chalford said, cutting in. “You know as well as I do, Petticrow, that the Gentlemen tend to ‘borrow’ what they need. They’ll leave a keg or a sack of tea to pay for what they borrow, but they have no scruples against taking a prize horse right out of a man’s stable if they need it for a run.”
“And you know, m’lord, that that don’t excuse anyone,” Petticrow said severely. “A man’s boat being used without his knowledge don’t mean the revenuers won’t hold him to account if the boat is seized with contraband aboard. Not,” he added, “that that signifies for much when we don’t know the man or his boat.”
“If you could identify the ship beyond a doubt—”
“Ah, but that’s what I can’t do, m’lord. Only seeing her from astern, I never saw her lines clear. And if I was to keep an eye on every private yacht I suspect of taking part in nefarious doings,” he added with a sharp look, “I’d need a hundred eyes just for my own five-mile bit of coast, and no mistake. What with the Sandgate gang moving in on the locals hereabouts, as they are, I’ve enough on my plate without seeking more trouble, and that’s the nut with no bark on it.”
When the ladies left Joshua and Mr. Petticrow to enjoy a glass of port after supper, Miranda said, “’Tis the drollest thing, you know. I have never before sat down to supper with a riding officer. Only think what Alston would say, or Sophie, with all her bourgeois gentility—how she would stare!”
“I am sure I cannot think why,” said Lady Hetta, looking quite as bewildered as she sounded. “Mr. Petticrow’s antecedents are perfectly respectable, you know.”
“Are they, indeed, ma’am?” Adriana shot her a twinkling look. “I must say, one doesn’t expect a riding officer to speak like an educated man, as he often does, although I never knew a riding officer before, so perhaps I am being unfair about that.”
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