Helen placed her hat upon the seat and climbed down to the cobbles, arching her back and sighing with the stretch of cramped muscles. She watched as the Duke drove the curricle through the narrow archway, the older ostler also looking up from his work to watch the show of skill.
‘I’ll check the tack,’ the coach driver said. He gestured to the hoof. ‘You’ll take care of this?’
‘Aye,’ the ostler said, taking a file from his leather apron. ‘Won’t take long.’
The driver walked to the coach’s two lead horses and inspected the harness.
The inn door opened and a waiter approached. ‘Refreshment for the Duke and yourself, sir?’ he asked. ‘Claret? Rum? Ale?’
Helen’s mouth and throat were parched and she was sure she had swallowed at least three insects. What she really craved was the tart slake of lemonade, but Mr Amberley and the Duke of Selburn would hardly order such a mild beverage.
‘Ale,’ she said.
The waiter bowed and hurried back across the cobbled yard to the inn.
Helen walked over to the older ostler. The man looked up from the hoof and dipped his grey head. ‘Sir.’
‘Cracked hoof, is it?’
‘Aye, but not bad.’
‘A lot of coaches on the road,’ Helen commented. ‘Do you know Lord Carlston by sight?’
‘Aye. Came through a while back driving his bays; all but blown. Looked like he had the devil on his back.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He usually has a kind word for me an’ the boys, but not this time. He was wild, pacing up an’ down. In a right state.’
A worrying description.
At the corner of her eye, she saw the Duke emerge through the archway. A loud chatter of voices, female, turned her head to the inn door. A waiter held it open as three women and a gentleman, all in evening dress, departed the inn and headed across the short distance to the coach. The familiar squarish figures of two of the women registered first, sending a sweep of foreboding across Helen’s skin. Then she heard the loud voice of Pug Brompton declare, ‘The last team were absolute bone-shakers. I hope this lot are better matched.’
Helen felt her heart punch against her chest. Pug and her mother, on their way back from the Olivers’ ball. Lord, if they recognised her … If she were found alone in the company of the Duke …
She searched wildly for an escape. The four coach horses prevented any retreat over the white post fence; the ostler, bent over the wheeler’s hoof, blocked the path to the archway. Pug and her party were only a few steps away. She did not even have her hat to pull down low over her eyes. Her best chance was the archway.
She turned her face away from Pug and launched herself past the old ostler. The wheeler caught her sudden movement at the edge of its blinker and shied, wrenching its hoof from the man’s grip. The ostler jumped back, straight into Helen’s path as the horse heaved upward in the traces. Its back legs kicked out. One hoof slammed into the driver’s box with a booming thud, the other clipped Helen’s hip. She staggered, the horrified faces of Pug and her companions blurring as her hands and knees hit the cobbles, the impact jarring through her bones. More painful than the glancing kick. In reflex, she rolled away from the sound of squealing horses and the scraping shift of hooves.
‘Helen!’ the Duke yelled. She heard his running footsteps, felt him grab her under her arms, her body hauled backward away from the distressed team. ‘Are you hurt, Helen?’
The aching pain had already peaked and settled. She heard a loud, familiar female gasp of recognition. Oh, no, Pug had heard her name. Her untitled name.
‘Get me out of here!’
She wrapped her hand around the Duke’s strong forearm, her urgency cutting through the shock in his face. He pulled her upright.
‘For goodness’ sake, get another ostler to their heads,’ Lady Dunwick commanded as the driver and the old ostler ran to the lead horses to calm them.
All attention was upon the coach and team. A chance to slip away. She took a limping step, the Duke supporting her arm.
‘Lady Helen?’ Pug’s voice.
Helen hunched her shoulders, but Pug was not one to give up. She circled in front of them, peering into Helen’s face.
‘That is you, isn’t it? Why I didn’t recognise you until —’ She stared at the Duke, still with his hand supporting Helen’s arm. ‘Your Grace.’ She bobbed into a curtsey, her gaze darting from Helen to the Duke and back again, the story complete in her face. ‘Holy heavens above, you are eloping, aren’t you? How wonderful!’
Lady Dunwick whirled around from inspecting her vehicle, her protuberant eyes even wider than ever. ‘What did you say, Elizabeth?’ She stared fiercely at Helen, the moment of identification arriving with a small gargle of horror. ‘Lady Helen!’ Her gaze came to rest upon the Duke and his hold upon Helen’s arm. She inclined her head, her voice thick with disapproval. ‘Your Grace.’
‘Are you hurt, Lady Helen?’ Pug asked.
‘No, not at all. It was my own fault.’
‘Oh, now I see — it is Lady Helen Wrexhall!’ the other woman exclaimed; a thin, hawk-nosed woman wearing girlish curls and an expression of scandalised delight. She leaned closer to the rotund man at her side, presumably her husband, and said in a loud whisper, ‘Viscount Pennworth’s niece.’ Her eyes raked over Helen. ‘Look, Albridge, you can see the whole length of her leg!’
The man, his thick lip curled in disdain, raised his quizzing glass. ‘Quite,’ he said.
‘A jade, just like her mother,’ the woman added.
Helen closed her eyes. Now she recognised her. Mrs Albridge, Lady Dunwick’s best friend and one of the nastiest gossips in England. Everything that transpired in the next few minutes would be broadcast to the whole of Brighton by tomorrow and London by the next post.
She opened her eyes in time to see Lady Dunwick wave the woman back. ‘Be quiet, Amelia.’ She turned her stout indignation back to the Duke. ‘What is happening here, Your Grace? You are obviously travelling with Lady Helen. Are you indeed eloping with my daughter’s friend?’
The Duke glanced at Helen, the moment between them stripped back to the awful realisation that her future lay within his next words.
She curled her fingernails into her palms. Only she was in peril — a man’s reputation did not turn upon the axle of purity. Yet only his answer had any bearing upon the course of her life. If he said no, she was utterly ruined — a wanton lost to all decent society. And if he said yes — and he was going to, for it was in the sweet, possessive smile dawning upon his face — they would be, for all intents and purposes, man and wife.
‘Lady Helen and I are betrothed.’
She released a shaking breath, finding her hands suddenly caught within Pug’s excited hold.
‘I knew it!’ Pug squealed. ‘Oh, my goodness!’ She squeezed Helen’s hands, then stepped back and swept a curtsey. ‘Your Grace! How well that sounds.’
‘No,’ Helen breathed.
Pug frowned. ‘What do you mean? Oh, I see!’ She giggled. ‘Well, it will be Your Grace soon enough.’
‘But why are you travelling at night in such a hurried and illicit —’ Lady Dunwick stopped, her jaw tensing. Apparently a reason had presented itself. She regarded the Duke with narrowed eyes. ‘I shall be writing to Lord and Lady Pennworth at the earliest opportunity tomorrow to congratulate them upon the betrothal of their niece,’ she said, steel in her voice.
‘I am sure your congratulations will be received with pleasure,’ the Duke said. ‘Lady Helen, the horses have been changed. We are ready to go.’
Yes, she had to get away — she could not bear Lady Dunwick’s horrified stare, or Mrs Albridge’s malicious glee, or even worse, Pug’s beaming smile of congratulations.
She thrust the tankard into the hand of the old ostler, then walked stiffly across the cobbled yard. She must concentrate upon the task at hand. With every minute passing, Lord Carlston and the journal were drawing further and fu
rther away from them. They must continue. She could feel a pain building in her chest and knew that it was made of two words. Amore mio.
‘It is so romantic,’ she heard Pug say.
‘Be quiet, Elizabeth,’ Lady Dunwick snapped.
Helen stared straight ahead as they left the posting inn and turned right to take the road out of Crawley, the last pink remnants of dawn disappearing into the clear blue of the new day. She had not spoken since she had hobbled away from Pug and her companions and swung herself up into the curricle again. It was, perhaps, not fair upon the Duke to have stayed so silent — a thank you, at the very least, should have been offered — but she could not even voice that simple courtesy. All words were gone; lost in overwhelming humiliation and the awful impossibility of the situation.
The Duke glanced across at her now and again, but made no comment as the shops and houses gave way to high-edged banks covered in dense tangles of hazel. He was keeping the fresh team to a smart trot, partly because the winding route out of Crawley hid the oncoming road, but mostly, Helen knew, to hear her response. She twisted her fingers together. She had too many responses, none of them coherent.
‘I could not see any other way forward,’ he finally said.
She summoned her voice. ‘No.’
‘It was presumptuous, but that Albridge woman will have the whole affair across society by tomorrow evening.’
‘Yes.’
‘Will it be so bad?’ he asked.
She heard the note of injury in his voice and could not ignore it.
‘Your Grace —’
‘Selburn now, I think,’ he said with a brief smile. ‘Or perhaps even Gerard.’
She stared down at her hands, twisting her fingers tighter together. The offer of his first name was too much. Too intimate. ‘Selburn, what you did was most gallant, but you know I am not a normal woman. I cannot live a normal woman’s life. Besides, marriage is forbidden by the Dark Days Club’s oath.’
He dismissed the oath with a wave of his whip. ‘That will not apply to us.’
‘You do not understand. I cannot be a wife, especially not the kind of wife that your rank requires. In truth, I can barely be a woman. I must dress as a man, go into places that no lady would even know existed let alone visit, and fight unearthly creatures. I have killed a man with power that I do not understand.’ She stopped for a moment, the enormity of that statement squeezing all of the air from her lungs. She gulped for a breath, pushing past the sob in it. ‘Yes, I have killed a man. He was a horrible man, but I killed him and — merciful heaven — I think I was glad.’
He regarded her, face drawn tight with shock. ‘Then all the more reason for me to be at your side. You cannot do this alone. You should not do it alone — it is too much to ask of a young woman.’ He checked the off-side leader, bringing the horse’s gait back into line with its partner, then glanced across at her again. ‘We have friendship and respect, Helen, and now a mutual purpose. Many successful marriages are built upon much less. Besides, you will be at the pinnacle of society. What could be better for a Reclaimer?’
He was right: most marriages of their rank were financial transactions with not even a basis of friendship. He made it sound so reasonable. So useful. So inevitable. Yet she could feel herself resisting, as if something deep within her was curling away from him.
Apparently he could feel it too, for he said curtly, ‘You are thinking of him, aren’t you?’
She rubbed at her forehead. ‘I do not know what I am thinking. Right now it is all too much.’
‘I will tell you what you should be thinking. He is mad, he killed his last wife, and he is still considered married.’
She gripped the edge of the seat. ‘He did not kill Lady Elise.’
‘Even if that were the case — and I assure you it is not — he is definitely the other two.’
They stared ahead again. Helen rubbed her chest. It was as if her heart hurt.
‘Beyond Carlston and your own obvious hesitation, a hard truth remains,’ he added. ‘Our betrothal has been witnessed by Lady Dunwick and her companions, and will be advertised to the world in short order. If you want to have any currency within decent society, if you want to save yourself and your family from further ignominy, then we must be married.’
He sent the whip over the team, springing them into a gallop.
Chapter Thirty
They reached Streatham at around seven o’clock — five miles from London — the road already clogged by carts, herds of cattle for Smithfield, and carriages heading into the city across Westminster Bridge. It was a relief to finally take the turn for Mitcham; a shorter route, the Duke assured her, to Barnes and the Comte d’Antraigues’s country residence.
‘I have only been there once, for a rout, so my memory of it is sketchy,’ the Duke warned as he whipped up the pace from the new team that had been changed at Croydon. ‘As far as I recall, the house is upon the riverbank.’
She heard the croak of fatigue in his voice. He had managed almost six and a half hours of driving with only brief respites at the tollgates and posting houses. She felt it in her bones too, alongside the ever-building dread of what they were hurtling towards. The keeper of the Croydon tollgate had reported that just twenty minutes earlier Lord Carlston had passed through — looking like death himself, the man had said cheerfully — and still driving at relentless speed. She squinted along the road, eyes scratchy with grit, hoping to see a plume of dust that would indicate his lordship’s curricle. But twenty minutes translated into at least three miles between them, and the view was obscured by bends in the road and dense copses of trees.
She had no clear idea of what lay ahead, and it did not make for a solid plan. Even so, whatever eventuated in that house, retrieving the journal must be her priority. It could not fall into the hands of the Comte, a Deceiver.
Even as she thought it, as she pressed her hands against her thighs to lock the duty into her bone and muscle, her mind conjured an overwhelming sense of lips upon her own, the smell of soap and leather and warm skin. She drew a shaking breath and glanced at the Duke as if he might have seen and felt the overwhelming image too, but his attention was fixed upon the road. It seemed a deeper part of her had another priority: Carlston. Save him, but from what? The Deceivers? Pike and Stokes? Himself?
She shook her head, coming to an unsettling conclusion. Any plan she made would be little more than useless. Every decision must be made in the moment; a daunting prospect.
A milestone flashed by: Barnes, two miles.
Ten minutes later they rounded a corner that brought them alongside the morning-grey expanse of the Thames. The riverbank was thick with clumps of long reeds, and a majestic willow bent over the slow-moving water. A curricle stood abandoned beneath the tree’s trailing branches, the horses still harnessed and their dark coats lathered.
‘That is Carlston’s gig!’ the Duke yelled above the grind of their velocity. ‘I recognise those bays.’
Helen felt her heart lift. He was not so lost within his madness to push his prized horses beyond their endurance.
‘He and Quinn must be on foot,’ she said, searching the grassy riverside. ‘We are close, surely.’
The Duke pointed with his whip at a two-storey white building with a thatched roof. ‘There, that public house: the Sun. I am sure it is where we must turn for the Comte’s residence.’ His whip point shifted towards the riverbank. ‘It is that red-brick house.’
They slowed as they drew up to the Sun Inn, then made the left turn and doubled back a little to enter Barnes Terrace. Helen leaned forward in her seat, searching for Carlston and Quinn as they drove alongside the river, which was already busy with long low boats piled high with goods. They clattered past a large malthouse, and an even larger estate with the name ‘Elm Bank’ emblazoned upon the iron gates. The Thames curved ahead, its wide expanse a greenish grey in the weak morning sun.
She could see no sign of two men on foot, but a coach and four stood
outside Number 27 — the Comte’s residence — with one door open, a woman half bent inside arranging something within the cabin. The Duke slowed their pace to a trot, the drum and grind of their arrival pulling the woman up from her task — a maid by her drab gown and neat white cap. She watched them pass, then ducked back into the coach.
‘Do not come inside, Selburn,’ Helen said, gripping his arm for a moment as he drew the curricle up outside the White Hart Inn that marked the end of the Terrace. Through the windows, she saw customers already inside its public room. Early drinkers. ‘This will be a fight between Deceivers and Reclaimers. You will not be able to help.’
‘You expect me to sit here while you go in there alone?’
‘That is what the future would hold.’ Now he would understand what his proposal meant. ‘You must promise not to come in. I cannot be distracted from what is ahead.’
He gave a terse nod, but she was not convinced.
‘Give me your word.’
‘You have it,’ he said roughly.
Helen swung herself down to the cobbles, smoothed down the buttoned front of her buckskins and started back the short distance to Number 27.
The Comte’s residence was a handsome double-fronted dwelling built in dark red brick on five levels. The household appeared to be in the midst of an imminent departure: the coachman up on his box, and the front door of the house standing open. Another maid stood in the doorway, her attention on a figure behind in the hallway. Helen saw a flash of royal blue silk trimmed with broad thread lace and an extravagantly plumed red bonnet: the Comtesse, no doubt.
Helen crossed the road, a little at a loss. She was not sure what she had expected, but it was not this orderly house. Had she somehow arrived before Carlston? She skirted the coach, receiving a dull stare from the plump coachman, and regarded the wide-open door.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ the maid in drab asked, looking curiously at the dishevelled, hatless young man so intent upon the house.
Helen focused her hearing inside the dwelling. Beyond the two women at the door, she heard the creak of steps, the hard rhythm of laboured breathing. Then the Comte’s voice: ‘Guillaume, what are you doing here? You look awful, my friend.’
Lady Helen and the Dark Days Pact Page 40