A boy emerged from the stable, clomping through the white up to his knees. The coach leaned as Mr. Pen jumped off the box, snow descending from his coat in chunks.
“Poor man.” Kitty pulled her hood over her hair arranged into elegant plaits that morning by her superior maid. At some point during the day of increasingly slow travel, Emily’s first coachman had outstripped the servants’ carriage on the road, declaring his determination to achieve his master’s estate before the storm set in.
Alas, no such luck. They were here, in the middle of nowhere apparently, and now the servants’ carriage was also nowhere, but a rather different nowhere.
“Do you think this will persist?” Emily shouted into the wind, linking arms with her to press through the snowfall toward the door.
“The night through, to be sure, mum!” The stable boy, all teeth and elbows, tugged at his cap.
“Settled in right snug.”
In a flurry of ice and powder they entered the inn.
“Good eve, ladies!” A man approached, of middling age, whiskered salt-and-pepper, garbed in a simple coat and abundant red neck cloth. “Welcome to the Cock and Pitcher.”
“Mr. Milch,” Emily said in the forthright manner Kitty admired, “I came through here with my mother and father, Lord and Lady Vale, a year ago. Your wife served us an excellent roast and pudding. Will you have the same for me and Lady Katherine tonight, and bedchambers?”
“Of course, miss.” He smiled amiably and reached for their cloaks. “My missus will send your girls right up to prepare the chambers.”
“Our maids are behind, still on the road,” as well as Emily’s companion, the formidable Madame Roche. London gossips had made Kitty’s unwed state a happy topic for five years now; she deserved spinsterhood after flaunting her love affair with Lambert Poole, they tittered. But as yet those gossips had little for which to criticize Emily, except of course her friendship with Kitty. Not that Emily would give a fig for it. Content in her books, she didn’t even care that the highest sticklers considered Kitty unfit company for a maiden.
But Kitty cared for Emily’s spotless reputation on her friend’s behalf. It seemed, however, that an unchaperoned night on the road could not be helped.
Mr. Milch clucked his tongue. “Well, then make yourselves comfortable.” He gestured them from the foyer. “I’ll fetch my Gert to see after you while Ned and I arrange matters with your coachman. I hope he’ll be all right sleeping at the pub a’ways. We’re all filled up here.”
Emily nodded. “I don’t suppose Pen shall mind over much if he has good woolens.” Good woolens, good books, and good conversation—Emily Vale’s only needs. A practical girl, she was unconcerned with a person’s wayward past. It made her a lovely friend, one of Kitty’s few and cherished.
The ground floor of the inn was a modest chamber divided into two parts by the stair to the upper story. Two square tables flanked by benches and laid with plain lace coverings adorned the right side, and on the left a sofa and a pair of threadbare chairs crouched before a hearth. On the walls hung quilted samplers and an impressive rack of antlers, the windows draped with unadorned wool. The place smelled of onions and mutton stew and coffee.
“Kitty,” Emily said flatly, looking about the chamber, “I suspect you’ve never been in such a place in your life. You will never forgive me.”
“Don’t be absurd. It is delightful.” Rustic and shockingly simple.
The rug before the hearth shifted. Kitty leaped back. A gray shaggy head lifted from the floor and stared at her with great, deep eyes. Smiling, she removed her muffler and hat, and stepped to the fireplace, taking care not to tread on the dog’s tail and holding her palms out for warmth.
“I suppose it cannot be helped, as you say.” Emily dropped her slight form into a chair without any grace whatsoever, threw her damp bonnet onto her lap, and ran her fingers through her short locks in a manly gesture. For eighteen, she lacked every female grace and was a thorough relief from the rigidly cool femininity Kitty had perfected over the past five years.
She chuckled. “Really, you needn’t fret. But where exactly are we?”
“I daresay quite near Shrewsbury. Pen said we came to the Severn hours ago. But Kitty, I cannot help being concerned.” Her fingertips scratched at the bonnet’s brim.
“Emily—” Emily’s bow-shaped lips pursed.
“Marie,” Kitty corrected. “You mustn’t worry. Even if the snow does not persist long enough to hold us from Willows Hall while Mr. Worthmore remains there, I will devise a plan to dissuade your parents from this unsuitable match. I promise.”
Emily’s fine features set in earnest lines. “That is why I asked you to come, Kitty, because you are terribly clever with this sort of thing. This situation my parents have devised entirely befuddles me, but I know it shan’t pose any problem for you. After all, if you could rout a lord from Britain so successfully last summer, you can surely chase a mere mister from my parents’ house.”
Kitty’s throat caught.
Emily’s green eyes went wide. “Oh, I am terribly sorry, Kitty,” she rushed. “Madame Roche told me I should not mention it, but I am horrid at remembering such things, you know.”
None of her acquaintances had yet spoken of it aloud. Leave it to Emily.
Three years earlier, after a masquerade ball at which she had told Lambert Poole she no longer cared enough to even hate him, she had locked away all the sensitive information she’d collected on him. For two and a half years that file sat untouched in a drawer. But six months ago, as the season was drawing to a close, Lambert had threatened her brother Alex, accusing him of criminal activities to disguise his own. And Kitty finally unlocked her files. Along with information provided to the Board of Admiralty by another source, her knowledge of Lambert’s untoward activities had damned him.
Of course, no one was supposed to know the part she’d played in his banishment. But the information leaked out, and for months now gossips had made a feast of the spinster Lady Katherine Savege’s astounding involvement in bringing to justice a criminal lord, those same gossips who even now still snubbed her because she had given her virtue to that very man.
“You mustn’t allow it to concern you, Marie. I am quite—” Boots scuffed on the stairs. In sticky relief, Kitty looked up. Her stomach turned over.
On the landing above stood a gentleman of considerable height, broad-shouldered and loose-
limbed, yet without particular merit to those estimable masculine qualities unless one were enamored of natural beauty of form wholly lacking in companion beauty of mind. Or character. Or education. Or taste.
Good heavens. She had wanted to escape London, but not to eschew civilization altogether.
No. This was not the entire truth. Yet only now, as her hands went damp, did she realize it. She wanted to escape a great deal more than London. She wanted to escape the gossips, the association of her name with Lambert’s in drawing rooms across town, her misguided past that clung no matter how she wished to escape it.
The presence of this man in the middle of nowhere abruptly made all of that impossible.
Lord Blackwood smiled, a lazy curve of his mouth amid a veritable forest of whiskers, his gaze fixed on her. She curtsied.
The smiled broadened. It was, in point of fact, quite a dashing smile. Despite the outrageously barbaric beard, she had noticed this once before. The streak of white running through his dark hair lent him a comfortably roguish air as well. Then he opened his mouth, and out stumbled that which ought to have remained on the battlefield with Robert the Bruce six hundred years earlier.
“Maleddy, ’tis a bonnie surpreese tae meet wi’ ye here.” The rough words lumbered across his tongue like a flock of black-faced sheep running from wolves. A massive blur of gray streaked around his long legs and leaped down the stairs. Kitty braced herself.