Pam Rosenthal - The Slightest Provocation

“Yes, it’s our best.” The landlord beamed and then patted the pocket of his coat. “Ah, but I’d almost forgot the message I’ve got for you, my lord. Brought by just now by the Misses Raddiford’s footman.”

Kit accepted it casually, waiting to open it until the man had taken his leave of them. He tried not to tear the paper while Mary made a noisy, unconcerned show of stirring sugar into her coffee.

“Well, don’t you want to hear what he says?”

“Only if you choose to tell me.”

He hadn’t called her a hypocrite yet anyway. But then, it was still distressingly early in the day. Morrice wouldn’t be coming round to call upon them until two.

Not a badly worded response. Or so it seemed upon his first hurried reading. Difficult to get all its meaning with Mary’s eyes fixed upon him in that brimmingly sympathetic way.

“Perhaps I’ll ride over to Campsall this morning,” he said. “Talk to the man in charge of the militia. General Byng-I knew him in France.”

She nodded too quickly. Bravely even, to demonstrate her understanding that he might want to be away from her for a bit. Lives of saints and martyrs. Until now he’d forgotten that aspect of the wedded state.

But was he sure, she asked now, that he could be back by two?

Of course he was; why the devil wouldn’t he be?

Damn, the little pocket watch told him otherwise.

They dragged themselves up the steep stairs to their bedchamber.

He’d have a smoke instead, he told her; take a walk about the town.

“Oh, and by the way,” he added, “Morrice is bringing his wife with him. Making a domestic affair of it, I guess.”

She smiled, quite as though he’d meant that to be a good thing.

Still, it might be useful to have the other lady about. Give Mary someone to talk to while he and his erstwhile friend said or did whatever the hell two gentlemen were supposed to say or do when both parties had been wrong and time had passed and it wasn’t a question of revenge or reparation. His experience in war and diplomacy didn’t yield many useful examples. Make it up as one went along, he expected.

And where the bloody hell were those cheroots anyway?

She shrugged her shoulders and turned her back.

“Well, why don’t you know?”

He escaped the bedchamber just before whatever it was she’d chosen to toss at him came crashing against the door he’d slammed behind him.

Jittery on tobacco, he marched purposefully about the town, pausing at unpredictable intervals to stare at nothing in particular, one time gazing blankly through the window of a local bookshop until Mary raised her head from whatever she’d been perusing and he had to duck away.

He grew hungry. A pasty from a pork butcher helped clear the foul taste of breakfast from his mouth. He walked more aimlessly now. The time crawled by, only to speed up calamitously around half past one when he lost himself in a tangle of alleyways. Willing himself to get his directions straight, he ran all the way back to the George.

No harm done. The clock tower in the square agreed precisely with his pocket watch; the Morrices weren’t due for another five minutes. He smoothed his waistcoat, caught his breath, straightened his cravat, and grinned at the knowledge that he’d outrun his anxiety.

The street he’d come from adjoined the coaching inn. He’d entered the square across the way from the George. Yes, there was Mary, seated on a bench some fifty yards away from him. The pink of her dress made a pretty splash of color in the dusty, bleached-out light of early afternoon. Perhaps he had been needlessly savage with her.

She raised her head from whatever she was reading; he thought he could see a glint of her spectacles, but it might have been his imagination. He waved and so did she. He had the impression she was smiling. The Morrices would be arriving any minute. Too late to be nervous. And anyway, Mary’d see him through it. Buoyed by this thought, he hurried forward to join her.

Only to find himself amidst a crush of hurrying people, bags and parcels and the bustle of travel.

Leeds, the coachman was calling, the Leeds Charger, boarding here directly. So intent had Kit been on his own affairs that he’d stumbled, first into a knot of disembarking travelers, and then the people clambering to take the vacated places aboard the coach.

“Sorry,” he muttered to anyone who might hear him, perhaps the young man in a green coat, or the taller, stouter gentleman in brown…

Brown coat, reddish beard, Wellington boots bright under a hazy midday sun. Vital, energetic, somehow a bit bigger than life-sized, now at last that Kit was seeing him for himself.

The man who’d flirted with Peggy. The featured player in the theater of Kit’s dreams.

But was this really the first time Kit had seen him in the flesh?

Nonchalantly biding his time until the last moment to board, Mr. Oliver had finally taken a seat by the window. He was looking out now, his eyes scanning the square.

I’ve seen him before. I’m sure of it. But where?

To hell with it. I’ll confront the blackguard myself.

Unfortunately, that proved impossible. For at that moment, Mr. Oliver (or Hollis, or whatever the rabble-rousing London delegate’s name might truly be) was attending on someone else.

A footman in livery had rushed forward to doff his hat to the red-bearded man, addressing him with what looked like great deference, while Kit (and several people around him as well) stared in uncomprehending wonder.

A footman in livery, so humbly respectful to a workingman? Or at least to a man revered by workingmen all over the countryside. A man who’d spent the last fortnight orating and bullying, exhorting them to tear down the established order and take London as well. It was all too contrary. Kit lost a minute while he gaped and tried to puzzle it out; by the time he’d made his way forward, the coach was rolling in a cloud of dust onto the road to Leeds.

The dust settled. And here was Mary, arm in arm with a small, neat lady in a quietly elegant gown, with a lanky, diffident-looking gentleman at her side.

Changed and yet unchanged: a decade ago Morrice had appeared uncomfortably older than his years; now he wore his shy seriousness with ease. Kit took the tremulous hand held out to him, the grasp not as tight as it had been. I ought to be better able to hide my emotion, he thought. No matter. The moment passed willynilly. He and Morrice got through the handshake and a mumbled greeting, even some clumsy, random touches on the arm and shoulder.

“Been so long, too long… Egad, just look at the both of us. Not boys any longer, eh?”

It would go all right. Well, it would have to, Kit told himself, now that he’d been presented to the lady with the blue eyes and decided chin. He knew a reasonable, formidable creature when he saw one; Mrs. Morrice would make sure it went all right.

But what in the world had Oliver been up to, and how would Kit find it out?

Unbearable, to have to go through all the motions of civility right now. A lucky thing that Mrs. Morrice was determined to take the lead. Well, someone had to.

Still, he needed to speak to someone-Mary, or perhaps even Richard-about what he’d just seen transpire at the coaching inn.

“Shall we all take some tea at the George,” Mrs. Morrice was asking, “or go for a drive in the barouche?”

“A ride in the barouche, I think,” Mary said, when it had become clear that Kit and Richard were each too absorbed in their separate thoughts to be able to answer Anna’s question.