by Laura Parker
Unfortunately, Sabrina mused, she had not been allowed to pen her own opinion of the incident. She would have liked to entertain Lady Charlotte with the droll tale of her brush with Jack Law.
“Such things as ink and foolscap be costly,” Mrs. Noyes had answered in denial of the request.
Sabrina suspected the hand of her guardian in the plot to deny her paper and quill, which effectively cut her off from the outside world.
At least the incident had left her armed. The highwayman’s pistol lay together with her pearls under a loose floorboard in her room. If need be, she could rescue Kit by force.
Her winsome smile turned guileful. She rather liked the idea of dressing up as a thief and brandishing a pistol about. She had certainly learned how to swagger by having observed the cocky, self-confident marauder. Insolent and contemptuous of the very ancestry rumor gave him, Jack Law rebelled against the prevailing order. In that, she found a sympathetic heart.
Jack Law had been much in her thoughts these last days. She told herself it was because her life was dull and idle. She was confined in cramped quarters with nothing more to occupy her than cross-stitching, which she hated, and bible study, during which she invariably nodded over the psalm she was daily set to read and memorize. Little wonder she preferred to ruminate over a pair of wicked silver eyes!
The memory of those dawn-reflected eyes haunted her as surely as the touch of his hard arms and the effortless power of his kiss.
Sabrina turned her face from the doorway, overcome by a sudden shyness she could not account for. Jack Law was not the first handsome man she had ever encountered. Why, for all she had seen of his face he might not even be handsome. He might have teeth as bad as Sean’s, her father’s groomsman, or a nose like a cauliflower.
Yet she could not quite believe that. His voice had been too persuasive, too confident of its charm. By his manner, he was not accustomed to being denied by women, even aristocratic ones. He had handled her familiarly and lifted her out of the coach without a thought for her supposed august personage.
“Even if he were as handsome as Adonis, I should not have been moved,” she whispered to herself.
Yet she had been. With his extraordinary manner and his civility sleeved in the threat of violence, Jack Law had touched her, made her tremble, and desire more. The moment he released her she had instantly missed the warmth and strength of his touch.
What if he had not released her, what if he had gone on kissing her, holding her, turning her bones to aspic?
What if he had then pulled her down onto the ground with him, and lifted her skirts and … she had not resisted?
Instead, he had laughed at her. She burned even yet with the memory. He had found her ridiculous in her passion. How lowering! How mortifying!
“There you be, Miss Sabrina!”
With a guilty start, Sabrina turned to the doorway and found Mrs. Noyes had entered the room.
“What folly be this, miss? You’ve the morning’s full light and yet are neglecting your study.”
Though broad of face the woman’s features were squeezed into its middle by nature’s sly hand. When her expression registered disapproval, as it did now, her eyes and nose and mouth seemed to disappear into fleshy puckers. “The reading of a psalm would benefit to pass the time while you serve at your observation post.”
The muscles in Sabrina’s throat locked. It was hard to assume humility when gall was all she felt. To disguise her struggle, she lifted her handkerchief to her lips and coughed delicately into it.
“A cough!” Mrs. Noyes’ cry was clear in its accusation of displeasure. “You have a cough!”
“ ’Tis nothing,” Sabrina answered. “ ’Tis the wretched air. The street reeks.”
“Do not deny it. You’ve brought a London disease beneath my roof,” the woman continued as she waved Sabrina away with a hand while she took a step back, the folds of the loose gray flannel gown she wore billowing about her like a thunder cloud.
Among Mrs. Noyes’ dislikes, and there were many Sabrina had quickly learned, there was nothing she abhorred more than illness. The constant fear in her life was that she could run afoul of some noxious affliction that would carry away her life.
“I’m perfectly fine,” Sabrina maintained with a spurt of temper. “I am never ill.”
Mrs. Noyes shook a plump finger at the younger woman. “Sir Holly’s theory is that those in robust health are the first to succumb to illness. He would treat your affliction with severe measures.”
The man who came once a week to physic her hostess with nostrums and pastilles said to ward off everything from the pox to the gout was, in Sabrina’s opinion, a quack. Yet Mrs. Noyes lived by his every whim. “I do not wish to see Sir Holly.”
“And so you shan’t!” the woman retorted. “I’ve not the means to afford the care.” The woman peered suspiciously at the healthy swelling of Sabrina’s bodice as though she might spy out some symptom through the corsets and gown. “ ’Tis naught to be done but to the Pump Room for you, my girl.”
“The Pump Room?”
“Aye, a dose of the waters is said to cure consumptive chests, a touch of the flux, even the rheumatic fever. To the Pump Room with you, today!”
Sabrina nearly laughed aloud, amazed at her own lack of shrewdness. Being a healthy young woman it had not occurred to her to fake an illness, until now. Half of the visitors to Bath came for the healing properties of its hot springs while the other half came for conversation and entertainment and play. Both could be found mingling together at the famous Pump Room. If she were allowed to visit there regularly she was certain to meet a London acquaintance whom she could persuade to introduce her into the card salons about town.
“You are absolutely right, Mrs. Noyes. We must go to the Pump Room this very day.” She coughed deliberately this time, hiding her smile behind her handkerchief.
The woman’s face registered alarm as she backed up yet another step. “I cannot go with you. My health requires strict adherence to a regimen, a bath in thermal waters then an hour in bed to sweat out the noxious properties which Sir Holly is persuaded are the cause of my bilious stomach.”
Even better, thought Sabrina. “I suppose it is not unheard of for a young lady to take the waters alone, if it were a matter of her health,” she surmised aloud. From the corner of her eye she saw the older woman blanch at the suggestion.
She coughed again, a little more heartily this time. “Of course, I will do as you think best.” She stopped to catch her breath, as if the effort of speech had winded her. “I will try my best not to sicken further for I would not want Cousin Robert to learn I’ve become ill while in your care.”
“The cost of taking the waters is excessive,” Mrs. Noyes, responded doubtfully, staring at Sabrina as if she thought she might detect a deterioration of the young woman’s constitution as they conversed. Then her expression cleared. “You are Robert’s responsibility and ’tis therefore only right that he should incur the expense.” Her face became a quilt of smiles as she added, “I see no need for hiring a sedan chair. A brisk walk is good for the lungs. Sophie will accompany you.”
She swung away from Sabrina, the gray flannel she wore billowing out about her like sails caught by a freshening breeze. “So-phie! So-phie!” she called in the very timbre used by the local pig men when summoning their hogs to trough. “So-phie!”
Sabrina briefly closed her eyes against the shrill note in the summons, more than mollified by the promise of the immediate escape about to be hers. A morning, an hour even, on the town and she would find some way to make good on it. She must.
“Yer chair be waitin’, mistress,” the maid said as she appeared, unexpectedly, in the front doorway.
“Dawdling in the lane!” Mrs. Noyes cried, her features recomposing into the more comfortable expression of disapproving tyrant than that of benefactress. “We’ll just see about that. But first you must accompany Miss Sabrina to the Pu
mp Room. She is sickening with some retched disease.”
She turned a doubtful eye on Sabrina, whose struggle with her laughter had turned her complexion quite pink. “Aha! You are flushed.” She hurried to the doorway, which she had to turn sideways to exit through. “It must be a fever coming on! I knew it! You must go the Pump Room at once! If the waters do not have the desired effect, you will be bundled back to London in the morning!”
That threat stiffened Sabrina’s determination. The only place she would be going when she left Bath was to Scotland, for Kit.
Chapter Seven
Jack Laughton suppressed a sigh and drained the third of the three glasses prescribed as a dose of the waters. As he did so the faint aroma of hard-boiled eggs assailed his nostrils, the notorious odor of the spa waters.
“Must be good for one,” remarked Lord Healy, a viscount of the Irish peerage, before sipping more tentatively at his third glass. “Shouldn’t think a fellow would drink it elsewise.”
Companions since supper the night before, they were visiting the Pump Room on their way to bed rather than upon awakening, as were most of the room’s visitors this morning.
The Irishman twisted his lips after another taste. “Whiskey’s my preferred medicinal. Sets up a stomach after a fine meal. How’s the arm then?” He glanced with sympathy at the arm that the English viscount had been favoring since they met. “Damned unlucky, I say, to be tossed by one’s own mount.”
“ ’Twas more unlucky for the beast, I assure you,” Jack drawled as he gazed at the ruddy-faced young man whose lips were pinker than most girls’ were. “Sold him the very next day to a tanner,” he lied. “Promised me a fine purse in return for the use of the hide.”
The nonchalance of Darlington’s tone made Healy wonder whether the Englishman were joking or serious. To cover his disconcert, he chuckled. “In the market for a new prime bit of blood, are you?”
“Perhaps.” Jack’s lazy-lidded gaze continually roamed the room in search of stimulating company, company of the petticoat variety. What he had seen of the spa’s feminine population since his arrival two days earlier had only mildly affected his curiosity. None had aroused his libido.
“If that be the case, I’ve a filly—”
“Please.” Jack held up a languid hand. “I’ve heard tell of your Irish stables, Healy. May you have better fortune in the choice of a wife.”
Lord Healy choked on his water and eyed his companion with resentment, not seeing the jest in this offhanded slight of his prize horseflesh. Darlington’s genial yet unsmiling countenance offered him little assistance to move past the possible insult.
Being a peer in the lesser Irish ascendancy, Healy had not known of the English viscount before striking up a casual acquaintance fueled by mutual interests. Those interests were a desire to gamble; at faro, ombre, basset, whist, cribbage, or any other nightly variation of gambling that involved the shuffling of cards.
As a long time visitor to The Bath who had only once ventured as far at London, Healy felt much honored by the viscount’s marked attentions. So much the better that those attentions were due to the fact that as an inveterate gambler he knew where the richest hands were played and had introduced the viscount to a few of them. Yet now he wondered if he had not caught an adder by the tail. There seemed something decidedly sinister about the gentleman and the scar he bore upon his otherwise exceptionally attractive countenance.
Startled by the direction his thoughts had taken, Healy glanced quickly about the Pump Room that was continually filling and emptying through all of its five arched doorways.
At that moment an unusually attractive lady sailed in. All heads turned curiously for like the unconventional Viscount Darlington, she wore her glorious pure gold hair unpowdered. Otherwise she dressed in the height of fashion in a silk gown of pale green, the bodice and sleeves of which were lined with scarlet and trimmed with gold. Ribbons streamed from her sleeves and cascaded from her tightly laced bodice. The effect was a summation of the woman herself: stunning, surprising, and wholly theatrical.
“I’d wager the society of Bath provides as good a show as any in London,” Healy remarked. “To wit, the females.”
The lines of faint boredom did not leave Darlington’s face though he, too, watched the progress of the beautiful woman toward the well. “Alas, no lady moves me to abandon my position at the bar.”
Healy did not dare question the viscount’s sincerity only, silently, his taste in women. Then he spied another beauty and nodded ever so discreetly in her direction.
Jack turned toward the subject and smiled slightly. He knew her, quite well in fact. When last he saw her she was a French marquise’s mistress. Perhaps times had changed or her circumstances were less secure, for the bodice of her pale pink gown was cut so low that it displayed the upper crescents of her rouged nipples—an open invitation for new admirers.
“What a magnificent pair!” Healy breathed in awe.
“Agreed.” Jack inclined his head in acknowledgement of her. Immediately, she winked at him behind her fan. “Ah,” he voiced regretfully and shook his head.
“Was that not an invitation to delectation?” Healy questioned in puzzlement.
“If you care to have your exploits gazetted to the world next morning. For her, gossip exceeds every other passion. A night in her arms will be repaid with amusing anecdotes told to your friends and enemies of the activities in which you indulged, how vigorously, and at what length.” To augment the implication, he measured a length between his hands.
An embarrassed giggle burst from Healy. “But what of that lady, the one in the lavender sack gown?”
“Ah, Lady Dahlia.” Darlington bent a jaundiced gaze on his companion. “She breeds upon mere flirtation. She has borne five children by five different lovers.”
Healy promptly dismissed the lady in question. “I don’t suppose the exquisite Venetian soprano?” he questioned hopefully.
The viscount again inclined his head with the briefest of smiles, this time at the lady of golden curls and impudent glances who had been eyeing him with equal frankness. But under his breath he said distinctly, “Poxed.”
“Poxed?” Healy’s voice faltered off key. “But there’s no sign, no—”
“There will be. She wears too much powder. The skin has begun to rot.”
The casual cruelty with which Viscount Darlington dismissed those women gave Healy a second sharp jab of trepidation. The Englishman was without sentiment or pity.
All at once Darlington’s bored expression vanished, replaced by the singular regard certain species reserve for their objects of prey. Intrigued, Healy turned his head to follow the direction of that penetrating gaze.
A young woman had entered the Pump Room. She stood inside one of the arches, her hands clasped before her, a picture of modesty in a yellow sack gown of sprigged India cotton. She was half turned away as, he supposed, she searched for a parent or an ailing relative. Though she was a charming sight he would never have supposed Darlington’s taste ran to the virginal line. Then she turned full face toward him and Healy drew in a sharp breath of astonishment. Surely it was her gaze that had arrested Darlington’s attention for it now did his own.
Raven brows winged up over wide-set eyes so vivid a shade of violet as to be noticeable from across the Pump Room.
“You will excuse me,” he heard Darlington say.
Startled back into self-awareness Healy took a step after the viscount. “I say, do you know her?”
Jack did not answer but continued purposefully across the floor toward the young woman in question.
Yes, he thought, as the heat of indignation swelled within his chest. He did know who she was. This was the obstinate young woman whom he had robbed and who had in turn shot him for his trouble!
More than that, they were not strangers. He had recognized her the moment he had opened her coach door.
Jack expelled a curse in a quick
breath of annoyance. What unfortunate luck that he had chosen to rob a coach containing someone known to him. More foolish yet was the risk he had taken in stealing a kiss. In that moment his face had been exposed. The only question remaining was had she recognized him?
Although he had been introduced to Charlotte Lovelace’s young companion months before in London, he had never taken pains to give the girl his attention. It was not until three days after the robbery that he had finally placed her face and recalled the chit’s name. It was because of her hair. She had always been powdered or bewigged in the countess’s presence. But the night of the robbery her hair was worn loose and unpowdered, a midnight curtain of cascading ebony ringlets that had struck him as somehow more suggestive than nudity.
His lip lifted in the suggestion of a sneer. Her name was Lyndsey, Sabrina Lyndsey, heiress to a merchant’s fortune. A commoner had shot him!
His gaze raked insolently over her. How could this mere girl have relieved him of his weapon and then, with only dawn’s light to guide her, had made of him a perfect target for her maidenly fury?
The wounding had so mortified his pride that he had delayed his entry into The Bath. Instead he had paused at a coaching inn to nurse his pride more than his arm. The flesh wound was healing, yet it throbbed in sympathy to his indignation over the incident.
Had the folly been any other man’s he would have laughed. However, at stake was his own very thorny pride and he saw little humor to be had in the situation. He had risked more than injury in robbing that coach, he had anted up his pride, and lost. This time she would find him a more formidable adversary than at their last encounter.
“Miss Lyndsey,” he began formally as he reached for her hand. “Well met, our happy reacquaintance.”
“Sir?” As her violet gaze turned full wide upon him and he felt a rare jolt of surprise. The arrested expression in those eyes fringed in thick black lashes seemed to touch him in a quite vulnerable spot. Did she recognize him?