Okay, okay, so she missed cars, and taxis, and buses, and maybe even Harleys.
Chapter 19
The footman flirted with her. The guy couldn’t be a day over eighteen and might even be jailbait. But Chloe didn’t want to waste a minute, no matter how flattering the situation.
Finally he slid her muddied pink ballroom slipper into the stirrup.
Shaking, Chloe hoisted her gown up to her knees and flashed her silk stockings at the footman as she swung her leg over the horse.
The cameraman came closer to her, and she knew she was breaking every rule in the book by riding western style in her ball gown, but—Mrs. Crescent was having her baby! Her gown had ripped, but she clenched the reins and squinted, barely able to make out the torchlights in front of Bridesbridge. She brought the horse to a gallop as she hunched down low, near the horse’s warm neck.
The horse seemed to go nowhere, like in a nightmare in which you’re running and running but not moving at all. She had to get to Mrs. Crescent. She had to! Her hands sweated in her dance gloves and her calves cramped up as they squeezed the horse’s sides.
The moonlight cast an eerie glow on the muddied road, and the dark trees seemed foreboding. When she finally arrived, she patted the horse on the neck with her quivering hand. Her reticule and fan, intact, swung from her wrist.
“You did it, boy. Good job. Good job.” There was no footman, nobody at Bridesbridge, so she tied the horse to a tree.
Her hair and ribbons had tumbled to her shoulders and she wiped sweat from the back of her neck as she took the steps at Bridesbridge Place two at a time. Even the night watchman was missing in action.
A single candelabrum, with stubs for candles, burned in the dark foyer. How was that for a fire hazard? Did the place even have smoke alarms? Why didn’t Chloe see these hazards before?
She scampered out of her totally ruined slippers, chucked them under the neoclassical credenza in the foyer, and grabbed the candelabrum. She slid a hand along the mahogany railing, padded up the staircase, and stopped at the landing, where, if it weren’t dark as hell, she could see the lineup of casement windows.
Okay, so if Mrs. Crescent was giving birth, why was it so quiet and dark?
The soles of her feet flattened against the warm Oriental carpet at the top of the stairs. She felt her way to Mrs. Crescent’s door and opened it a crack. A flicker of candlelight leaked out and spilled onto the threshold.
“Mrs. Crescent?” Chloe knocked on the doorjamb.
“Come in.”
Chloe nudged the door open with her hip. Mrs. Crescent, propped up with plum-colored pillows in her great sleigh bed, dropped her nineteenth-century newspaper on her nightgowned belly like a tent. The headline read: HUNDREDS OF BRITISH SOLDIERS FALL IN FRANCE.” She wiggled her bare toes. “Can the ball be over already?”
Panic seared through Chloe. She thought about Fiona, in her gold gown and white plume as she urged Chloe to leave. “You’re not—having the baby?”
Mrs. Crescent was petting Fifi, scrunched on the edge of the bed. “Oh, I’m having the baby all right. Just not right now, dear.”
Fiona had lied to her.
Chloe steadied herself with a hand on the Chippendale bookcase, sending her reticule and fan swinging. But why? Was she after Sebastian?
“Did you know that Lady Grace finished her fireplace screen? You’ll have stockings to mend tomorrow. And how did you rip your gown?”
Chloe fingered the rip in her dress, took a step back into the dark hallway, and creaked the door closed.
“Miss Parker?” Mrs. Crescent struggled to sit up in her bed. Her voice sounded muffled, as if Chloe were hearing her from deep underwater. Her reticule and fan slid off her wrist to the floorboards. She swooped up both, grabbed her walking boots from her room, yanked them on, and headed for the front doors, where she swapped the candelabrum for an oil lantern abandoned by the night watchman.
“Miss Parker! Chloe!” Mrs. Crescent called after her.
Chloe finally stopped running when she felt the ground under her rise up in a mound. Then wham—she stubbed her toe on what felt like a huge rock.
“Ouch! Damn flimsy boots!” She dangled the lantern at a brick chimney capped with a wooden hatch door protruded out of the ground in front of her. Last week she might’ve thought the chimney was part of a picturesque little summer home with an earthen roof, but now she figured it was probably a smokehouse. Pig carcasses hanging from meat hooks flashed through her brain.
Flat-footing her way down the slippery side of the earth mound, she breathed deep and held back the tears. She should’ve known that Fiona was conspiring against her. That line about her fiancé being on military duty was, no doubt, a lie. Her pelisse trailed in the mud behind her while the moonlight sparkled kaleidoscope-like in her teary eyes. Fiona couldn’t win any of the money, though. Only the contestants could. What would Chloe do without that cash infusion? She and Mrs. Crescent needed that money more than anyone. And just because Fiona was after Sebastian didn’t mean the feelings were reciprocated.
Down at the bottom of the mound, wooden double doors stood tucked into the earth, each with great iron hinges pointy as daggers. She pressed up against the doors and buried her face in her arm. The wood felt cool against her shaky hands.
Back home it was seven hours earlier, and it was the Fourth of July. Abigail would be in the bicycle parade and everybody was playing badminton and croquet and packing the lemonade and buttermilk-fried chicken in picnic baskets for the fireworks. Here—there were no fireworks to speak of. Not even a spark.
Something crunched on the forest floor behind her.
“Miss Parker, is that you?”
The lantern almost slipped from her hand. Henry swooped down from his horse as if out of nowhere. “I didn’t mean to startle you. What are you doing here?”
“That’s a very good question. Good question!” She sniffled. “I suppose I might ask you what you’re doing here! Anytime I’m where I shouldn’t be, you show up.”
He smiled. “The footman at Dartworth informed me you’d taken one of my horses to Bridesbridge. When I got to Bridesbridge, Mrs. Crescent told me you thought she was having her baby, and stormed out. I saw the lantern light from the road.”
He guided her over to an old tree stump and she sat down, unable to talk. In the flickering light of the two lanterns, he looked concerned. Worried, even. “Are you quite all right?”
“Not really.” Chloe looked down at her ripped gown, collapsed in the middle like a popover that didn’t pop. The tips of her boots pointed in at each other. She clasped her hands between her knees and squeezed her fingers against her knuckles as if that would stop the tears. She and Henry shouldn’t be here together unchaperoned in the dark, but nobody else seemed to be playing by the rules, why should she?
“Well, for one thing, I’m a little homesick. Today is—” She bit her lip and looked up at the stars. Red, white, and blue stars.
“Your Independence Day.”
Another chunk of hair fell from her updo. “Ha! My Independence Day. Hardly.” A white star shone brighter than the rest. “I hardly feel independent.”
Henry gathered stones into a circle and marked the beginnings of a fire. “I disagree.”
“Please.” Chloe stood up and picked up sticks for the fire. “I’m in a gown I didn’t even put on myself, chasing around some guy I thought I knew, thinking he’s going to be my happy ending and solve all my problems. When am I going to learn?” She tossed the sticks into the stone circle.
He lit a fallen branch with the flame from Chloe’s lantern. The dry branch sputtered and sparked. “I think you’re quite independent. Here you are halfway around the world. On your own. In another culture—and navigating another time really.” With the flame on the stick, he lit the fire in the stone circle and flames danced up all at once. “All this during a national holiday that marks your country’s break from ours. It’s got to be difficult.”