“I’ll get even with him!” he was sobbing as they pushed him out the door. “I’ll get even with that gray-eyed devil if it’s the last thing I do!”
The tall gentleman in gray never heard the threat. He had turned his attention to something more to his liking—the locked private dining room and the little wench who waited for him there.
He wondered what she’d have to say to him when he poured into her dainty hands all the gold she’d lost— and all her winnings too!
His hawklike face wore a wide smile as he unlocked the door—and then he hesitated, and knocked before he opened it. For his brief encounter with the silvery-haired wench had told him she was a lady born, and something deep inside him wished her to recognize in him a gentleman born and bred.
He couldn’t have defined it, but the feeling was deep and compelling. And so his hand fell away from the tempestuous entry he would have made had she been a tavern wench, and he rapped twice on the door.
“Are you awake?” he called, with a trace of humor in his deep pleasant voice. “For I’ve come to let you out.”
When there was no answer, his impatience overcame him. Asleep with her head on the table, or awake and about to brain him with an uplifted chair, he would still confront her.
He swung the door wide.
An empty room greeted him. The window was open. The bird had flown.
And the tall gentleman in gray knew a stabbing disappointment such as he had not felt in years.
She was gone, the little silver wench who had so intrigued him.
Chapter 11
Left alone in the locked private dining room upstairs in the Star and Garter, and sure after drumming on the door until her knuckles were bruised that no one was going to come to her aid, Carolina had begun to pace the floor as restlessly as any caged animal.
How dare he lock her in? she thought indignantly. Oh, that insufferable—! If he was going to be on her side, why hadn’t he insisted that the dice be broken once she had demanded it?
It had completely escaped her—but not the tall gentleman in gray—that Twist had managed a bit of sleight of hand with the dice just before he had vaulted the table to seize Carolina. The first dice they would have found on his person, had they searched him, might even—when broken—have proved to be honest dice. Or so the tall gentleman had speculated.
Besides, Carolina was not to know that the tall gentleman had made this trip to London especially to seek out Twist and wrest from him the money Twist had won from his brother. Carolina’s move had been premature; the tall gentleman had had other plans— and the tall gentleman rarely let anyone or anything stand in the way of carrying out his plans.
Knowing none of this, Carolina had little charity in her heart for the tall gentleman’s actions. She yearned for nothing so much as to slap his altogether too attractive face.
And in her heart was a wail: Lord Thomas could be coming through the inn door right now and she would not be there to greet him!
Tired—indeed worn out from the excitement of the evening and from pounding on the door and pacing the room—she sank down upon a chair and disconsolately let her head fall onto her arms at the table. Downstairs the clamor of voices that penetrated even the thick door ebbed and flowed. She thought she caught herself falling asleep and lifted her head quickly—she was unaware that she had been sleeping the better part of two hours while below her the game went on.
But that bit of sleep had refreshed her and she began to consider her situation from a new angle. If she waited here quietly until the tall gentleman let her loose in the morning (or worse yet, he might insist on escorting her back to the school!) she would become a scandal. Indeed she might be sent home forthwith, and then she might never see Lord Thomas again.
Such a possibility was not to be borne!
She must make her escape from here.
She studied the heavy door, considered trying to crash through the panels with one of the chairs. But she decided against it. Even if she did manage to break through' one of the panels—which wasn’t likely—the noise of rending wood would probably be heard downstairs and excite attention. No doubt the tall gentleman would be standing with crossed arms at the foot of the stairs even as she started down from the top!
The window seemed a better possibility—but this time she had no rope, no group of friends eager to lower her down from the second floor. She went to the window and pulled aside the curtains.
And saw what would have made her eyes sparkle if she had looked out before: a low sloping roof that slanted down from the window. If she slid down that roof (which was now covered with snow), she might be able to cling to the edge and so avoid much of a drop. Certainly it was a chance!
A chance she must take.
There was a disturbance down below, some kind of shouting and uproar, but she ignored it—she could not know that Twist had just had his hand slammed down upon the table by the man in gray who had locked her in. And as she hesitated by the window there was the thunder of feet on the stairs as the company from the common room crowded upward, dragging Twist along to make him pay off his lost wager.
She heard the commotion as if in a dream. She was concentrating on the slant of the roof, on her chances of breaking an ankle if she could not hold on at the end and fell off awkwardly.
The clamor outside her door mounted. Whatever was happening there she did not wish to be involved in it. Any scandal might see her expelled from school and sent home in disgrace.
No longer hesitant, she sat upon the sill, threw her legs over onto the roof, and pushed off. She slid downward through the snow, trying to slow her descent, but beneath her the icy surface was too slick, the incline too steep. Carried irresistibly forward, she skidded down the roof to go zooming over the edge and made a wild but silent landing into a deep pile of snow that had been shoveled up to allow patrons and their coaches and horses to have free access to the inn.
It was that heaped up snow that saved her from injury, for she might well have suffered broken bones if she had landed awkwardly upon the icy cobbles. But as she came up out of the white mound, gasping and brushing the snow away from her eyes, she saw something she had missed in her swift descent.
A man and a woman were just hurrying toward a waiting coach whose driver was muffled to the ears and whose snow-laden hat was pulled down over his eyes. The horses were stamping and tossing their manes, their breath making white clouds in the cold night air. The couple had obviously just come from the inn. Indeed, they had left the inn hurriedly for the same reason that had propelled Carolina to make her instant decision to descend via the roof—the commotion. Downstairs it had appeared that murder might be done at the dice table and neither the lady nor the gentleman hurrying toward the coach relished being caught up in yet another scandal.
Carolina saw that the woman had a very feline walk and an enormous amount of golden orange hair from which her fur-trimmed hood had fallen back, allowing the moonlight to burnish it. Her clothes were very elegant. She was wearing a fox-trimmed dark blue velvet cape. And the man beside her had a wealth of sandy hair and was wearing a velvet suit laced in gold of the same unusual shade of orange that Thomas—!
Carolina’s breath caught painfully in her throat. Just then the woman gave a high tinkling laugh and said something in a mocking voice. The man flung out his arm in an expansive gesture and Carolina tensed as she saw the distinctive fleur de lis embroidered on his wide orange velvet cuff gleam suddenly gold in the moonlight.
That was Thomas striding toward the coach, and clinging to his other orange-clad arm was the famous Mistress Bellamy. She recognized that back, that feline walk—she had seen Mistress Bellamy once in a play.
They were leaving the inn, not arriving! It was even possible they had been here before she arrived, making love in some comfortable upstairs room!
“Thomas!” she choked.
The fellow in orange turned and she was startled to see that it was not Thomas’s face that looked back at h
er. Just a man who, from the back, looked like Thomas.
“I’m—sorry,” she stammered. “I thought you were—”
“Lord Thomas Angevine?” The strange gentleman in orange gave her an engaging grin. “No, I’m Lord Frederick Bates. I don’t wonder you thought it was Thomas for ’tis Thomas’s suit I’m sporting. Won it from him over a game of whist.” He chuckled and turned to the sparkling lady beside him. “You were a witness to that game, weren’t you?”
There was laughing agreement from the lady, who said, “But your friend is covered with snow, Freddie. Why don’t we take him with us? He’s but a lad and you have a coach waiting and how is he to find a hackney coach or a chair at this time of night?”
Lord Freddie frowned and peered at Carolina. “Do I know you?” he wondered.
Carolina hesitated. “Not exactly,” she admitted. “But Thomas swished me past you very fast once at a music hall—and once at Drury Lane.” For now she remembered him very well as one of the friends Lord Thomas had been anxious to avoid. “Where is Thomas?”
“Gone to Northampton, I suppose. At least he was headed there.” Lord Freddie squinted his eyes to give her a closer look. Suddenly he slapped his thigh. “You’re not a lad! You’re Carolina Lightfoot! You’re Thomas’s schoolgirl! I remember you now. You were at that music hall but Thomas waved me away. He was determined not to introduce me—afraid I’d try to cut him out, I suppose. But what are you doing here dressed like that?”
Carolina explained reticently that she was there on a ridiculous wager—that the girls had bet her a small fortune she wouldn’t dare go out on the town alone disguised as a man. They seemed to believe her, which cheered her, for she wouldn’t want Thomas to hear that she’d been out scouring the town for him! And the actress, whom Carolina took an instant liking to, found it all a wonderful joke.
“I wonder,” she asked wistfully, “could you take me by the school? It is rather late and—”
“Late?” said Lord Freddie in surprise. “Egad, it’s almost morning!”
“Of course we’ll take you to the school!” By now they were in the coach and Mistress Bellamy pulled aside her velvet skirts to make room for Carolina’s satin-breeched legs. “But not, I take it, to the front door?” she twinkled. “I presume you’d rather we stopped the coach a few doors away?”
“Yes, I would,” Carolina said, smiling. “The headmistress is not to know I’m out and I’ll thank you not to noise it around!”
Her heart felt very light. Clemmie was wrong! Thomas had been true to her, he had gone to Northampton after all! It was his friend Freddie, wearing clothes he had won from Lord Thomas, who was escorting Mistress Bellamy about the town!
Seeing that Mistress Bellamy had taken a fancy to Carolina, Lord Freddie not only directed his coachman to drive directly to the proximity of the school, he insisted on walking Carolina back there himself and making sure she got in all right.
Carolina would have preferred to make this last leg of the journey without him and was about to say so when—Lord Freddie having already sprung down from the coach—Mistress Bellamy leant forward and touched Carolina’s arm.
“Never trust a man,” she murmured.
Carolina gave a slight start. Did Mistress Bellamy mean Freddie or—?
“Not even Lord Thomas?” she asked in a level voice.
“Oh, especially not Lord Thomas!” Mistress Bellamy went off into peals of laughter.
Feeling slightly nettled, Carolina let Lord Freddie help her down from the coach, and shushed him all the way to the school for he was very noisy and bent on carrying on a merry conversation.
“All the girls will be asleep but if I go around to the back, I can tap on the kitchen window and if Angie is back, she’ll let me in,” she told him, noting uneasily that by now the sky was pinkening with dawn.
They went around back.
“You can’t reach the window, it’s too high for you,” said Lord Freddie masterfully. Like his actress friend, he was thoroughly enjoying Carolina’s escapade. “Let me do the tapping.”
They were in luck. Angie, afraid of losing her job, had just got back and roused Cook, who had sent her into the kitchen to build up the fires and then gone back to bed for a few more winks.
At first Angie didn’t recognize Carolina and wasn’t going to let her in, but when she heard Carolina’s voice she hastened to unlatch the back door. Lord Freddie promptly rewarded her with a gold coin, gave Carolina a graceful bow and went away whistling. He was relishing what a story he’d have to tell Lord Thomas— how the sweet innocent little schoolgirl he’d been keeping away from wild parties and shielding from rakes like Lord Freddie, had gone out on the town on a wager, somehow got herself locked into an upstairs room at the Star and Garter, and slid off the roof almost on top of his and Mistress Bellamy’s heads! It was likely to top any tale Lord Thomas brought back with him from Northampton!
And even as Carolina made her way softly up the back stairs to let herself quietly into the room she shared with a now sleeping Reba, the tall gentleman in gray, who had bounded down the Star and Garter’s front stairs with even more speed than he had gone up them, was searching London for her. He had secured a hackney coach. Fanning out in ever widening circles, his keen gray eyes that missed nothing combed the icy streets for a slight shivering figure in ice green satin. He leaped out of the coach and peered down every alley. He saw Twist, shivering and dancing up and down on stockinged feet on the icy street, being drawn into a doorway by a woman. The man in gray snorted. It seemed to him that men of Twist’s stripe never suffered the fate of ordinary mortals. Luck had been with Twist; he had been taken in by a woman, probably some kindly prostitute. He turned away and continued his search. It was slow going, lurching along the dark icy streets. He discovered an amazing variety of drunks lurching home in the wee hours; he was set upon once by footpads and twice by dogs and subdued them all.
At last—and with a nagging sense of loss—he made his way back to the Star and Garter, took a room there and left word that he was not to be disturbed till noon. Yet tired as he was, sleep eluded him. And when he did sleep it was restlessly, with troubled dreams of a silver-haired witch who came and went on a shaft of starlight, a witch with mocking silver eyes who seemed to beckon and then as he approached, to disappear.
He awoke, sweating, and wondered uneasily if she was all right, the little wench. And then laughed at himself for a fool to be so stirred by a chance meeting.
Still, he determined that tomorrow he would go looking for her again—just to make sure she had made it safely, of course. Sternly chiding himself now for acting like a fool, he forced himself to turn over and go at last to sleep. The sun was high by then, but he managed to sleep till noon.
When he woke, the memory of the girl still troubled him, and after a hasty breakfast he found himself once again roaming the city streets, staring up at the windows, combing the alleys. He tried to tell himself that, having been so long away, he was more interested in seeing London than finding the girl but at last, chuckling ruefully to himself, he admitted that was not the case. He was lured by the memory of an impudent wench who would have turned up her dainty nose at the sight of him!
Once he was very close, for his hackney coach passed by the school, but all the girls were in class at the back of the building and Carolina knew nothing of his passing.
Even though staying in London could well be dangerous to him for his face was too well known in certain quarters, the man in gray determined to stay one more night. If he had not found her by then, he would ride north, back to the home he had seen so little these recent years.
But the evening passed and another cold night went by and still he did not find her. The great uncaring city, glistening in the snow and already ringing with bells and Christmas carols in advance of the season, seemed to have swallowed her up.
The following day the tall gentleman, still wearing inconspicuous gray, rode north.
Carolina, sitting in class
along with the other girls, being lectured on the importance of keeping household accounts precise and legible, had no idea her former “jailer,” as she was now inclined to call the man in gray, was riding by, staring out the window of a hackney coach and studying the windows as he passed.
She was aware, however, that something had happened to Reba ever since she had received a letter early this morning. Reba had read it, crumpled it, smoothed it out, read it again, and finally thrown it into the fire and burned it. Indeed the delivery of the letter had waked them up when a sleepy-eyed chambermaid had knocked on their door and told Reba the letter had come from Essex by coach.
Reba had jumped up and snatched it. When finally she had thrown it into the almost dead embers of last night’s fire on the hearth, she had kicked the still smoldering lumps of sea coal over the paper until it flared up and burned to a crisp.
Carolina, only half awake, had watched this performance in silence from her bed. She was amazed that Reba did not turn from the fire to ask her what had happened last night and how she had got back, for plain evidence of her escapade lay in full view: the ice green suit, still wet from contact with the snowy roof of the Star and Garter and the mound of snow into which she had plummeted, was spread out to dry over a chair, and the rope with which the girls had let her down the building wall to the street reposed in a corner.
She raised herself up on one arm, fully awake now. “I found out what happened to Thomas,” she told Reba. “He went to Northampton.”
“Did he?” said Reba absently.
“Clemmie saw someone eke wearing his suit.”
“That’s nice.”
Carolina stared at her friend. Could this be Reba, who had taken so much interest in helping her find Lord Thomas, who had even furnished the suit and sewed on the shirt ruffles to make it all possible? What on earth had been in the letter?
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