Anna Campbell - Regency Rogues and Rakes

He heard a wobble in her voice. It was very slight, but he was acutely attuned to her voice, in all its changes. Sometimes, in a crowd, he knew her by her voice alone, even when she adopted one of her provincial accents.

He looked at her. She had her hand to her forehead. The veil was in place, making it impossible to read her expression, yet even he could tell she was upset.

“Now what?” he said sharply.

“She doesn’t know anything,” she said. “Even for a girl of one and twenty, she’s lamentably naïve.” She took in a deep breath and let it out.

He watched the rise and fall of her bosom. It was crass in the circumstances, he supposed, but he was a man, and it was nighttime and she was dressed like a fashionable impure.

They passed the Westbourne conduit and approached the Rural Castle Inn. The mail coaches’ horns sounded. They were sending the Portsmouth coach on its separate way, down the Brompton Road. Where he’d soon follow.

“She has three brothers,” he said. “She’s not that innocent. She knows what men are like. She should have known better than to encourage any of that lot of loose screws.”

“A woman might think she knows about men, but until it happens—until a man touches her, she doesn’t know. ”

He remembered this woman’s reaction when he’d breathed down her neck.

Was it possible she didn’t know what he’d assumed she knew?

But that was ridiculous. She was no schoolroom miss. She’d grown up in Paris. She was a milliner. And she walked the way she walked.

He passed Sloane Street and turned into Brompton Road. No parade of mail coaches now. Only the lone one, not very far ahead.

“Maybe that’s it,” she said.

“What is?”

“Maybe she’s had even less experience than other girls her age. It’s—what?” She counted on her gloved fingers. “A month since she told my brother-in-law to go to the devil. Only think what it’s been like for her. Imagine spending most of your life assuming you’ll marry one person, and then realizing he or she isn’t what you want. I’m sure she felt liberated and exhilarated after rejecting the Duke of Clevedon—but afterward … She had to find herself. She had to do what other girls do at seventeen or eighteen, in their first Seasons.”

“Yer worship!” Fenwick’s high-pitched voice broke into a very difficult piece of cogitation. “I say, your highness!”

“Your lordship ,” Sophy corrected. “I explained that to you. How hard is it to remember?”

“Yer lordship!” Fenwick said more forcefully.

“You better close up the front the best you can. East wind coming about.”

“What is he, a weathercock?” Longmore said.

That was when the rain started pelting down.

“Better hurry, yer majesty,” the boy said. “Weather’s going to turn ugly in a minute.”

On Putney heath, to the south of the village, is an obelisk, erected by the corporation of London, with an inscription commemorating an experiment made, in 1776, by David Hartley, Esq., to prove the efficacy of a method of building houses fire-proof, which he had invented, and for which he obtained a grant from parliament of £2500.

—Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of England, 1831

The weather did turn extremely ugly, very quickly. The wind picked up speed, driving the rain sideways at times, so that even the apron couldn’t fully shield them.

Still, any driver could manage a team in rain. This weather wouldn’t slow the Royal Mail, let alone stop it. Mail coach drivers continued through thunderstorms, floods, hailstorms, sleet, and blizzards. At present Longmore had only a bad rainstorm to contend with. No thunder and lightning to agitate the horses.

He drove on.

The storm drove on, too, with increasing intensity, the rain pouring straight down sometimes and at other times pelting sideways at them, depending on the gusting wind.

Though the waxing moon wouldn’t set until the small hours of morning, the storm swallowed its light. Rain poured off the hood, obscuring Longmore’s view of the horses as well as the road ahead. It dimmed what little light the carriage lamps threw on the road. The farther he drove, the darker grew the way ahead. He slowed and slowed again, and finally settled to a walk.

By the time they passed Queen’s Elm he was driving half blind and trusting mainly to the horses to keep to the road. Luckily this was a major coaching route, wide and smooth, which lowered the odds of his driving into a ditch.

Still, he needed to keep his mind on driving. Talking was out of the question. In any case, with the rain thumping on the roof and the wind whistling about their ears, they’d have to shout to make themselves heard.

They drove on through villages distinguishable mainly thanks to the lights in a few windows. Not many lights. It was bedtime in the countryside. The inns and taverns were awake, but not much else.

He glanced to his left. Only Sophy’s gloved hand, clenched on the curved arm of her seat, hinted at fear.

Though he quickly brought his gaze back to the road ahead, a part of his mind marveled at her. He couldn’t think of another woman who wouldn’t be shrieking or weeping right now, and begging him to stop.

He was starting to argue with himself about whether he ought to stop.

Though their creeping pace made it seem they’d been on the road for hours, he knew they hadn’t gone far. They hadn’t yet crossed the Putney Bridge, and that was only four miles from Hyde Park Corner.

Through the lashing rain he made out flickering lights ahead. Gradually, he began to discern the rough outlines of houses—or what seemed to be houses. Finally they reached the quaint old double tollhouse, with its roof spanning the road. The roof diverted some of the downpour while they waited for the gatekeeper to collect his eighteen pence and open the gate. Though he wasn’t inclined to prolong the encounter, he did answer Longmore’s question.

Yes, he remembered the cabriolet. An exceptionally fine vehicle and a prodigy of a horse. Two women tucked under the hood. Couldn’t properly make out their faces. One had asked for directions to Richmond Park.

When pressed for more detail, the gatekeeper said, “I told them to keep on this road up to the crossroads, then watch for the obelisk at the corner of Putney Heath, and go that way, rightish. I told them what to look for. It’s not hard to keep to the main road, but for some reason, there’s them that go astray there, and end up in Wimbledon.” He hurried back into the shelter of his tollhouse.

“Richmond Park,” Longmore said. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the wind and drumming rain. “What the devil’s there?”

“I read that Richmond Park was beautiful,” Sophy said.

“You think she’s gone sightseeing ?”

“I hope so. It might calm her.”

He had to stop talking to negotiate the bridge. An old, narrow, uneven structure, it bulged up unexpectedly here and there. At this time of night, in this weather, the only way to proceed was cautiously.

Caution wasn’t Longmore’s favorite style.

He was grinding his teeth by the time he got them safely to the other side of the Thames. Thence it was uphill to Putney Heath and the obelisk, about two miles away.

The horses trudged up the road while the rain went on thrashing them, torrents cascading from the hood’s rim. The wind, howling occasionally to add atmosphere to the experience, blew the wet under the hood. It dripped down Longmore’s face and into his neckcloth.