Anna Campbell: Regency Rogues and Rakes

Though he knew her glorious monstrosity of a traveling costume involved layers and layers, the wet would eventually penetrate to skin, if it hadn’t already.

He threw her a quick glance. She’d turned her head aside so that the back of her hat took the brunt of the wind-driven rain. That was the only sign of discomfort. Not a word of complaint.

He went on wondering at it, even while he watched the road and argued with himself what to do.

When at last they reached Putney Heath, the wind abruptly died down. In the distance a bell tolled. An ominous rumbling followed. He turned his head that way in time to see the crack of lightning.

The wind picked up again, coming from the same direction.

It was driving the thunderstorm straight at them.

* * *

Sophy was petrified.

Her heart had been pounding for so long that she was dizzy. She was terrified she’d faint and fall out of the carriage and under a wheel. If she fell, Longmore might not even notice at first, between the darkness and the rain’s incessant hammering.

Safe at home, the sound of rain drumming on a roof, even as fiercely as this, could be soothing.

This was not soothing.

She was city bred. If she’d ever spent time in the country, it must have been in her early childhood. She vaguely recalled traveling across the French countryside when she and her sisters had fled cholera-ravaged Paris three years ago. But they’d traveled in a closed vehicle, and not at night in such hellish weather.

Intellectually, she knew she wasn’t in any great danger. While a famously reckless man, Longmore was a highly regarded whip, too. In a carriage, one couldn’t be in safer hands. He drove with the magnificent calm the English deemed de rigueur in whipsters. The horses seemed tranquil and absolutely under his control. Traveling on the king’s highway, she knew, one could count on smooth, well-maintained roads. Hostelries lined them at short intervals. Help was rarely far away.

All the same, she didn’t feel very brave.

She’d started out concerned mainly about Lady Clara. The difficulties of travel, even at night, hadn’t crossed Sophy’s mind. For one thing, at this time of year, a sort of twilight prevailed rather than full darkness. For another, this evening had promised to be a pleasant one: When she set out from home for the Gloucester Coffee House, she’d assumed the moon would brighten their journey.

Instead, within minutes they were pitched into a streaming Stygian darkness, which feeble lights here and there only seemed to emphasize. The world about her felt too empty.

Breaking in on an unexpected silence, the crack of thunder, distant as it was, made her jump. Longmore’s head turned sharply that way, and in the faint glow of the carriage lights, she saw his jaw muscles tighten.

He turned to her. “Are you all right?” he said.

“Yes,” she lied.

“The horses won’t be, in a thunderstorm,” he said. “I’ve decided not to chance it. With a broken neck you won’t be much help to my sister. We’ll have to stop.”

She was only half relieved. As alarming as she found it to travel at present, she was impatient at delay. Back in London, after Fenwick had reported what his friends had told him about the cabriolet, she’d looked up Richmond Park in a road guide. It wasn’t very far from London. Still, near as it was, if even Longmore didn’t want to risk traveling on, no sane person would try it.

Though they seemed to be crossing an endless uninhabited wilderness, it wasn’t long before he turned into the yard of an inn. White flashes lit the sky, and the thunder rumbled oftener and more loudly, nearer at hand.

While the ostlers rushed out to take charge of the horses, Longmore practically dragged her from her seat and swept her along under his arm to the entrance, calling over his shoulder, “Look after the boy. If he isn’t drowned, dry him off and see that he’s fed.”

A short time later, she was shaking off the wet from her carriage dress, and Longmore was treating the landlord with the same imperious impatience he’d shown Dowdy and her accomplice: “Yes, two rooms. My aunt requires her own. And you’d better send a maid to her.”

“Your aunt?” Sophy said after the landlord had hurried away to see about rooms.

Amusement lit Longmore’s dark eyes and a tiny smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “I always travel with my aunt, don’t you know? Such a dutiful nephew. Luckily, I’ve scads of them.”

That was all it took: one rakish glint in his dark eyes and a ghost of a smile. Her heart gave a skip and pumped heat upward and outward and especially downward. She had to fight with herself not to rush to the nearest window and pull it open, storm or no storm. She needed a sharp dose of cold water.

She told herself to settle down. He’d used that look on hundreds of women, probably, with the same effect. And she was a Noirot. She was the one who was supposed to slay men with a glance.

In any event, she supposed she ought to be glad he owned at least a modicum of discretion.

As fille de joie euphemisms went, “aunt” was probably more useful than “wife.” Half the world would probably recognize him, and that half would know he wasn’t wed or likely to be anytime soon, if ever.

He took out his pocket watch. “This is ridiculous. We haven’t covered eight miles and it’s nearly half past ten o’clock.”

“She wouldn’t travel in this weather, surely?” Sophy said in a low voice, though they were alone in the small office. “If she did visit the park, wouldn’t she stop at an inn nearby when it grew dark?”

“I hope so,” he said. “But who knows what’s in her mind?”

“She has Davis,” Sophy said. “She wouldn’t let her mistress endanger herself.”

“Clara can be obstinate,” he said. “My hope is the horse. Wherever she tries to go, she’ll have the devil of a time changing horses. The cabriolet only wants one, but it needs a powerful one. Inns reserve those for the mail and stage coaches. She’ll probably find it easier to keep the one she set out with. Which means she’ll need to stop at intervals—and stay for a good while—to give the creature food and drink and rest.”

Sophy knew little about the care of horses. She and her sisters had had enough to do in learning not only their trade but a lady of leisure’s accomplishments as well. This was no small feat for girls who had precious little leisure. But it was unthinkable merely to learn a trade. While the DeLuceys and Noirots might all be greater or lesser rogues and criminals, they never forgot they were blue bloods. Too, they knew that refined accents and manners vastly improved the odds of luring unsuspecting ladies and gentlemen into their nets.

Learning dressmaking and learning to be a lady—not to mention acquiring other less virtuous Noirot and DeLucey skills—left no time for the finer points of horsemanship. Sophy could distinguish general types of vehicle, and she could appreciate a handsome horse, but for the rest she had to trust Longmore’s judgment.

“I think I’ll send Fenwick to insinuate himself among the stablemen,” he said with a glance at the door through which their host had departed. “They’ll have noticed the cabriolet if it passed, or they’ll have heard about it from post boys. We’ll get more detailed gossip from them than from any tollgate keepers.”

The innkeeper reappeared then, a plump maidservant following. While she led Sophy up to her room, Longmore stayed behind, talking to the landlord.

Meanwhile, less than ten miles away, in Esher’s Bear Inn, Lady Clara sat by the fire, studying her copy of Paterson’s Roads.

“Portsmouth,” she told Davis. “We’re already on the road, and it’s only a day’s journey.” She calculated. “Not sixty miles.”