Pam Rosenthal - The Slightest Provocation

“I expect”-she was pressing her belly and thighs against his quite shamelessly-“that you want to go to Wakefield this morning.”

He laughed and buried his mouth in the curve of her throat.

But what was that crackling? Over there on the path, behind that stand of pines?

So absorbed had they been in each other, it took them a moment to absorb the fact that they’d been spied upon, the interloper running quickly and lightly away toward the east, where the low morning sunbeams glared through the trees, obscuring their vision.

“Not that it matters, I expect,” Mary said. “I’ve already told Jessie about our journey, and didn’t insist that she keep it a secret either.”

He laughed. “The only person I told was my mother.”

“She’s back?”

“With Gerry and Georgy. The delay was all their fault. The poor lady was hard-pressed to gather up the pair of irresponsible rapscallions…”

“Just listen to the very serious and solemn Lord Christopher…”

“Better keep your hands to yourself, my lady, if you expect him to do his serious and solemn best later today…”

“Why do I expect that he’ll manage quite splendidly no matter where I put my hands at this moment? But of course,” she added, “you’re right that I shouldn’t be pawing you as I am in this venue. We’ve gotten overconfident, when we’re really quite public here-well, our intruder of just a few moments ago proves that. I expect it was Lord Ayres, making his long-threatened poetic ramble through the forest…”

“You haven’t been flirting with that pomaded ninny…”

Her face changed; she stopped him short as a new thought struck her. “But if the dowager marchioness has returned home, that must mean that Thomas… Kit, you should have told me sooner. I must go… yes, come get me in an hour and a half. That will be perfect.”

For although she hadn’t always been the most patient of employers-nor by any means the easiest to keep neat and well-dressed or to clean up after-there were certain basic demands of human decency and loyalty to her sex.

She’d gotten a stitch in her side, walking so quickly and sometimes breaking into a run on the way back to Beechwood Knolls-on the same path that once she’d skimmed so lightly, not even noticing the first raindrops.

I must look a fright, she thought, waving hastily to the group just starting out for the Halseys’. Lord Ayres ignored her completely, his eyes trained upon a flirtatious Miss Fannie Grandin, looking very pretty and composed with her hands on the reins of the dogcart. Yes, it must have been the pomaded ninny who’d stumbled into the forest, perhaps to prepare himself for this morning’s conquest… Well, at least he’d had the tact to run away rather than show himself.

It didn’t matter. “Have a lovely, lovely time,” she called out to them, and to Fred, conferring with the groom about the horse who’d be pulling the curricle, and Elizabeth, hugging Jessica good-bye at the side of the carriage.

She threw open the door to the house. “Peggy,” she called, as she thundered up the stairs.

“Peggy, where are you?”

Panting on the landing now. But wait. This needs to be done with some tact.

Well, as best I can anyway.

The girl had just finished strapping the trunk shut. She looked up now from where she was kneeling beside it. Pale, anxious.

She knows he’s returned. And she hasn’t seen him yet.

“Peggy, I’ve been thinking. Well, you know, it’s rather selfish of me, going off so suddenly like this to Wakefield with… um, Lord Christopher, though in fact, he, well, we are rather obliged to… ah… but with all the preparations for the midsummer party, and leaving Mrs. Grandin alone here, and you know how imperious Mrs. MacNeill can be, not that she isn’t very dear and good in her own way…

“Well, in any case, Peggy, I’ve rather been thinking that perhaps I should leave you behind these few days, here, you know, at Beechwood Knolls, well, in the neighborhood, I mean… So as to… um, to be of assistance to my sisters…”

Mama would have done it with genuine tact and grace. But the slow, serious, anxious, but also resolute smile taking form on Peggy’s wan face was proof enough that Mary had succeeded well enough.

Her little trunk was packed; her portable writing desk sat on top of it, next to her folded dark red traveling cloak. A miscellany of necessaries-lavender water, her all-important drawstring bag, even her spectacles-were knotted up in a large India shawl.

She sat alone on a bench built round a large beech tree near the front door. To wait. For half an hour? Half a year? The better part of a decade? Or merely an instant. She couldn’t tell if time were rushing by or stopped forever. How odd, when her pocket watch was ticking so evenly and objectively. She tried to set her breath to it.

But at least she needn’t be alone. For here was Jessica, carrying a covered wicker basket.

“The inns between here and Wakefield won’t give you an edible luncheon, and so I thought… well, there’s a bottle of wine, another of cold springwater, some pretty good Stilton, sliced cold meat, bread, and-careful, they’re delicate-a few strawberries from the kitchen garden, wrapped in cheesecloth.”

Arthur Grandin had particularly loved the strawberries that grew at Beechwood Knolls. Mary took her sister’s hand, and together they listened for the jingle of traces, the crunch of wheels. The path from the main road was screened by dense hedges, ancient elms and beeches. They’d hear the Rowen coach before either she or Jessica caught actual sight of it making its stately way over the gravel.

Their meeting in the forest-her very unladylike hands, not to speak of the guilty frisson of being spied upon-had inflamed his imagination again.

He grinned, quite forgetting that he was being shaved at the moment.

“Careful, my lord.” Good luck that his valet hadn’t been holding the razor a quarter inch nearer his cheek, or Kit would finally have something like the dueling scar he’d once coveted, when he was too young and stupid to know better.

“Sorry, Belcher. My fault entirely.”

Neat and decent at last, dressed and shaved for a day’s travel. A pity, he thought, to disturb the excellent knot in his cravat-or to crease his linen or possibly to tear a button from his waistcoat. A pity, and the sooner the better too.

He was still grinning while he helped himself to a quick breakfast and bade good-bye to the family group around the table.

But in the unwieldy, inevitable way of these things, his mood took a precipitous shift in direction during the minutes it took him to quit the house. And now that he stood poised to step up into the traveling coach, his thoughts were a muddle of obscure anxieties and simple annoyance.

Must they have that grinning idiot Frayne up there on the box? Alas, it seemed that they did. Kit had requested the other, politer coachman, but the man had gotten a cold.

Frayne would have to do.

“We shall be taking the north road to Wakefield,” Kit told him. Blandly, patiently. “But first we shall be stopping at Beechwood Knolls.”

A gleam stole into the coachman’s eye.

No need to speak a warning-just to look one was quite good enough; Kit had learned that much, at least, from the old Eighth Marquess of Rowen. Gratifying to watch the coachman shrink down into his multiple capes, shivering in the chill of Lord Christopher’s glance, even as his brow grew moist in the morning sunlight. Sometimes one needed to manage one’s coachman, rather as one’s coachman managed the horses.