by Mary Balogh
Frances glared at him. She would bet a month’s salary that not one whisper of cold could penetrate that greatcoat he wore, with its dozen capes, or that one speck of snow had found its way down inside his top boots.
“Ready to move on, then, guv,” his coachman called, “unless you prefer to stand admiring the scenery for the next hour or so.”
“Where is your maid?” The gentleman’s eyes narrowed.
“I have none,” she said. “That should be perfectly obvious. I am alone.”
She was aware of his eyes sweeping over her from head to foot—or to just below the knee anyway. She was dressed in clothes that were perfectly good and serviceable for her return to school, though it would be quite obvious to such a fashionable gentleman, of course, that they were neither expensive nor modish. She glared back at him.
“You are going to have to come along with me,” he said ungraciously.
“I most certainly will not!”
“Very well, then,” he said, turning away, “you may remain here in virtuous isolation.”
She looked about her, and this time panic assaulted her knees as well as her stomach, and she almost sank into the snow never to be heard from again.
“Where are we?” she asked. “Do you have any idea?”
“Somewhere in Somersetshire,” he said. “Apart from that I have not the foggiest notion, but most roads, I have learned from past experience, lead somewhere eventually. This is your last chance, ma’am. Do you wish to explore the great unknown in my fiendish company, or would you prefer to perish alone here?”
It irked her beyond words that really she had no choice.
The two coachmen were exchanging words again, she was aware—none too gentle words either.
“Take an hour or two in which to decide,” the gentleman said with heavy irony, cocking that eyebrow again. “I am in no hurry.”
“What about Thomas?” she asked.
“Thomas being the man in the moon?” he asked. “Or your coachman, perhaps? He will bring the horses and follow us.”
“Very well, then,” she said, glowering at him and then pressing her lips together.
He strode ahead of her to the blue carriage, sending up showers of snow as he went. Frances picked her way more cautiously after him, trying to set her feet in the ruts made by the wheels.
What a coil this was!
He offered his hand again to help her up into the carriage. It was a wonderfully new carriage, she saw resentfully, with plush upholstered seats. As soon as she sat on one of them she sank into it and realized that it would offer marvelous comfort even through a long journey. It also felt almost warm in contrast with the raw elements outside.
“There are two bricks on the floor, both of them still somewhat warm,” the gentleman told her from the doorway. “Set your feet on one of them and cover yourself with one of the lap robes. I will see about having your belongings transferred from your carriage to mine.”
The words themselves might have seemed both kind and considerate. But his clipped tone belied that possible impression, as did the firmness with which he slammed the door shut. Frances nevertheless did as he had suggested. Her teeth were literally chattering. Her fingers might have felt as if they were about to fall off if she could just feel them at all—she had abandoned her muff inside her own carriage.
How long was she going to have to endure this insufferable situation? she wondered. She was not in the habit of hating or even disliking people on sight. But the thought of spending even half an hour in close company with that arrogant, bad-tempered, sneering, contemptuous gentleman was singularly unappealing. Just the thought of him made her bristle.
Would she be able to find some other mode of travel from the first village they came to? A stagecoach, perhaps? But even as the thought flashed through her mind, she realized the absurdity of it. They would be fortunate to reach any village. Was she expecting that if they did, there would be no trace of snow there?
She was going to be stranded somewhere overnight—without any female companion and without a great deal of money since she had refused what her great-aunts had tried to press upon her. She would be fortunate if that somewhere did not turn out to be this carriage.
The very thought was enough to make her gasp for air.
But it was a distinct possibility. It had seemed to her eyes just a couple of minutes ago that the road was all but invisible.
She countered panic this time by setting her feet neatly side by side on the slightly warm brick and clasping her hands loosely in her lap.
She would trust to the skills of the strange, impertinent Peters, who had turned out not to be hunchbacked after all.
Now this would be an adventure with which to regale her friends when she finally reached Bath, she thought. Perhaps if she looked more closely at him, the gentleman would even turn out to be describable as tall, dark, and handsome—the proverbial knight in shining armor, in fact. That would have Susanna’s eyes popping out of her head and Anne’s eyes softening with a romantic glow. And it would have Claudia pursing her lips and looking suspicious.
But, oh, dear, it was going to be hard to find any humor or any romance in this situation, even when she looked back on it from the safety of the school.
2
His mother had warned him that it would snow before the day was out. So had his sisters. So had his grandfather.
So indeed had his own common sense.
But since he rarely listened to advice—especially when offered by his family—and rarely heeded the dictates of common sense, here he was in the midst of a snowfall to end snowfalls and looking forward with less than eager zeal to spending the night at some obscure country inn in the middle of nowhere. At least he hoped he would spend it at some inn rather than in a hovel or—worse yet—inside his carriage.
And he had been in a black mood even before this journey began!
He looked hard at his woman passenger after he had climbed inside the carriage with her, everything that needed tending to having been accomplished. She was huddled beneath one of the woolen lap robes, the muff he had rescued from the other carriage and tossed in a couple of minutes ago under there with her, and he could see that her feet were resting on one of the bricks. Huddled was perhaps the wrong word to describe her posture, though. She was straight-backed and rigid with hostility and determined dignity and injured virtue. She did not even turn her head to look at him.
Just like a dried-up prune, he thought. All he could see of her face around the brim of her hideous brown bonnet was the reddened tip of her nose. It was only surprising that it was not quivering with indignation—as if the predicament in which she found herself were his fault.
“Lucius Marshall at your service,” he said none too graciously.
He thought for a moment that she was not going to return the compliment, and he seriously considered knocking on the roof panel for the carriage to stop again so that he could join Peters up on the box. Better to be attacked by snow outside than frozen by an icicle inside.
“Frances Allard,” she said.
“It is to be hoped, Miss Allard,” he said, purely for the sake of making conversation, “that the landlord of the next inn we come to will have a full larder. I do believe I am going to be able to do justice to a beef pie and potatoes and vegetables and a tankard of ale, not to mention a good suet pudding and custard with which to finish off the meal. Make that several tankards of ale. How about you?”
“A cup of tea is all I crave,” she said.
He might have guessed it. But, good Lord—a cup of tea! And doubtless her knitting with which to occupy her hands between sips.
“What is your destination?” he asked.
“Bath,” she said. “And yours?”
“Hampshire,” he said. “I expected to spend a night on the road, but I had hoped it would be somewhat closer to my destination than this. No matter, though. I would not have had the pleasure of making your acquaintance or you mine if the unexpecte
d had not happened.”
She turned her head then and looked steadily at him. It was quite obvious to him even before she spoke that she could recognize irony when she heard it.
“I believe, Mr. Marshall,” she said, “I could have lived quite happily without any of the three of those experiences.”
Tit for tat. Touché.
Now that he had more leisure to look at her, he was surprised to realize that she was a great deal younger than he had thought earlier. His impression when his carriage passed hers and again on the road outside had been of a thin, dark lady of middle years. But he had been mistaken. Now that she had stopped frowning and grimacing and squinting against the glare of the snow, he could see that she was only perhaps in her middle twenties. She was almost certainly younger than his own twenty-eight years.
She was a shrew, nevertheless.
And she was thin. Or perhaps she was only very slender—it was hard to tell through her shapeless winter cloak. But her wrists were narrow and her fingers long and slim—he had noticed them when she took the muff from his hand. Her face was narrow too, with high cheekbones, her complexion slightly olive-hued, apart from the red-tipped nose. Put together with her very dark eyes, lashes, and hair, her face invited the conclusion that she had some foreign blood flowing through her veins—Italian, perhaps, Mediterranean certainly. That fact would account for her temper. Beneath her bonnet he could see the beginnings of a severe center part with smooth bands of hair combed to either side and disappearing beneath the bonnet brim.
She looked like someone’s governess. Heaven help her poor pupil.
“I suppose,” he said, “you were warned not to travel today?”
“I was not,” she said. “I hoped for snow all over Christmas and was convinced it would come. By today I had stopped looking for it. So of course it came.”
She was not, it seemed, in the mood for further conversation. She turned her face firmly to the front again, leaving him no more than the tip of her nose to admire, and he felt no obligation—or inclination—to continue talking himself.
At least if all this had had to happen fate might have provided him with a blond, blue-eyed, dimpled, wilting damsel in distress! Life sometimes seemed quite unfair. It had been seeming that way a great deal lately.
He turned his attention back to the cause of the black mood that had hung over him like a dark cloud all over Christmas.
His grandfather was dying. Oh, he was not exactly at his last gasp or even languishing on his deathbed, and he had made light of the verdict his army of London physicians had passed on him when he had gone to consult them in early December. But the fact of the matter was that they had told him his heart was fast failing, that there was nothing any of them could do to heal it.
“It is old and ready to be turned in for a new one,” his grandfather had said with a gruff laugh after the news had been forced out of him and his daughter-in-law and granddaughters were sniffling and looking tragic and Lucius was standing deliberately in the shadows of the drawing room, frowning ferociously lest he show an emotion that would have embarrassed himself and everyone else in the room. “Like the rest of me.”
No one had been amused except the old man himself.
“What the old sawbones meant,” he had added irreverently, “was that I had better get my affairs in order and prepare to meet my maker any day now.”
Lucius had not had a great deal to do with his grandfather or the rest of his family during the past ten years, having been too busy living the life of an idle man about town. He even rented rooms on St. James’s Street in London rather than live at Marshall House, the family home on Cavendish Square, where his mother and sisters usually took up residence during the London Season.
But the shocking news had made him realize how much he actually loved his grandfather—the Earl of Edgecombe of Barclay Court in Somersetshire. And with the realization had come the knowledge that he loved all this family, but that it had taken something like this to make him aware of how he had neglected them.
Even his guilt and grief would have been quite sufficient to cast a deep gloom over his Christmas. But there had been more than that.
He just happened to be the earl’s heir. He was Lucius Marshall, Viscount Sinclair.
Not that that in itself was a gloomy fact. He would not have been quite normal if he had hated the thought of inheriting Barclay, where he had grown up, and Cleve Abbey in Hampshire, where he now lived—when he was not in London or somewhere else with his friends—and the other properties and the vast fortune that went with them, even though they must come at the expense of his grandfather’s life. And he did not mind the political obligations that a seat in the House of Lords would place upon his shoulders when the time came. After all, ever since the death of his father years ago he had known that if life followed its natural course he would one day inherit, and he had educated and prepared himself. Besides, even an idle life of pleasure could pall after a time. Being actually engaged in politics would give his life a more positive, active direction.
No, what he really minded was that, in the opinion of his mother, his married sister and possibly her husband too—though one could never be quite sure with Tait—his three unmarried sisters, and his grandfather, a man who was soon to become an earl also needed even sooner to become a married man. In other words, an earl needed a countess.
Lucius needed a bride.
It had been as plain as the noses on all their faces, it seemed, except his. Though even that was questionable. He knew all about duty even if he had spent a large part of his life ignoring and even running from it. But up until now he had been free to do as he pleased. No one had even objected too loudly to his way of life. Normal young men were expected to sow wild oats, provided they did not descend too deeply into vice, and he had done what was expected of him.
But now everything was to change. And if one was to be philosophical about it, one would have to admit that duty caught up with most young men sooner or later—it was the nature of life. It had caught up with him now.
His relatives had all separately expostulated on the theme throughout the holiday whenever one, or sometimes two, of them could maneuver him into what they were all pleased to describe as a comfortable coze.
He had enjoyed more comfortable cozes over Christmas than ever in his life before—or in his life to come, he sincerely hoped.
The consensus was, of course, that he needed a bride without delay.
A perfect bride, if there were such a paragon available—and apparently there was.
Portia Hunt was far and away the most favored candidate, since it was next to impossible to find any imperfection in her.
She had remained single to the advanced age of twenty-three, his mother explained, because she fully expected to be his viscountess one day—and his countess eventually, of course. And the mother of a future earl.
She would make him an admirable wife, Margaret, Lady Tait, Lucius’s older sister, assured him, because she was mature and steady and had all the accomplishments a future countess would need.
She was still a diamond of the first water, Caroline and Emily, his younger sisters, pointed out—quite correctly, as it happened, even if they did choose to express themselves in clichés. There was no one more beautiful, more elegant, more refined, more accomplished, than Portia.
Miss Portia Hunt was the daughter of Baron and Lady Balderston and the granddaughter of the Marquess of Godsworthy, his grandfather reminded him—Godsworthy was one of his oldest and closest friends. It would be an eligible and highly desirable alliance—not that he was trying to put undue pressure on his grandson.
“Your choice of bride must be yours alone, Lucius,” he had said. “But if there is no one else you fancy, you might seriously consider Miss Hunt. It would do my heart good to see you wed to her before I die.”
No undue pressure, indeed!
Only Amy, his youngest sister, had spoken up with a dissenting voice, though only on the question o
f the candidate for perfect bride, not on the necessity of his finding such a creature somewhere within the next few months.
“Don’t do it, Luce,” she had said when they were out riding alone together one day. “Miss Hunt is so very tedious. She advised Mama just last summer not to bring me out this year even though I will be eighteen in June, just because Emily’s broken arm prevented her from coming out last year and so her turn was delayed. Miss Hunt might have spoken up for me since she intends to marry you and become my sister-in-law, but she did not, and then she smiled that very patronizing smile of hers and assured me that I would be glad next year when the focus of family attention will be on me alone.”
The trouble was that he had known Portia forever—her family had frequently come to stay at Barclay Court, and sometimes, when his grandparents had gone to visit the Marquess of Godsworthy, they had taken Lucius with them, and as like as not the Balderstons would be there too with their daughter. The desire of both families that they would eventually make a match of it had always been quite evident. And while he had never actively encouraged Portia after her come-out to sacrifice all other offers in favor of waiting for him to come to the point, he had never actively discouraged her, either. Since he was not of a romantical turn of mind and had always known that he was going to have to marry one day, he had assumed that probably he would end up married to her. But knowing that as a vague sort of future probability was altogether different from being confronted now with the expectation that it was actually to happen—and soon.
Indeed, a vague sort of panic had assailed him at frequent intervals all over the holiday. It happened particularly when he tried to picture himself in bed with Portia. Good Lord! She would doubtless expect him to watch his manners.
And yet another small fact that had darkened his mood even further was that he had distinctly heard himself promise his grandfather—it had happened when they were sitting together in the library on Christmas evening after everyone else had retired for the night, and a few glasses from the wassail bowl had mellowed his senses and made him really quite maudlin—that he would look seriously about him this coming spring during the Season and choose a bride and marry her before the summer was out.