Page 28

“How are the turnips?” asked Georgie, too heartily.

He grunted. “I had to sow my field all over again on account of them sheep running amok.”

Elfreda met Georgie’s eyes. No blaming a steward for that .

The farmer tugged on his blue neckerchief. “How’s the young missis?” His tone was grudging, but his gaze grew intent as he waited for Georgie’s reply.

“Recovering well,” said Georgie. “Thanks to your timely intervention.”

The farmer grunted, with a fraction less animosity.

“Are you going that way?” Lord Phillip pointed at the bridge. “So am I. Lord Phillip Winston. And your name?”

The two men crossed the bridge and took the turning that would lead into the village. Lord Phillip was talking animatedly, and the farmer kept shaking his head, as though beset by a mosquito.

“Hmm,” said Georgie, staring after them. After a long moment, they glanced at her, eyes bright, brows arched.

She could hear the low rush of the river as it slipped along between its banks. The sun was climbing in the sky. The warming air smelled of honeysuckle.

And Georgie. Georgie looked like spring itself. Beautiful, and new, and familiar, all at the same time.

You’re in love.

“This way.” She forced her feet forward, perpendicular to the bridge, cleaving to the river’s western bank.

No distractions. No secluded dells. Or yes, secluded dells, if caves figured among the topographical features. No roses, posies, buttercups, violets. Those were to be avoided.

As she walked, briskly, she explained to Georgie about her evening’s research. Reverend Cruttwell had identified one cave on a walk through the parish that led him past a lime kiln.

She was heading now to the only lime kiln in the vicinity.

Georgie’s stride was longer than hers, and so they gave the impression of strolling in a leisurely fashion, even as she began to puff and sweat.

It was always so cold inside Marsden Hall that she wrapped herself in shawls and wore her warmest woolen garments, and sometimes she went out overdressed. Like this morning.

She stopped abruptly and unbuttoned her pelisse.

“Are we stripping off our clothes?” Georgie had stopped too and was leaning against an oak, that cocky grin splitting their face. “To swim? Or to do something wickeder?”

She shrugged out of the pelisse and hung it carefully on a branch. Sweat was still collecting near her hairline. Georgie’s grin, and the idea of doing something wickeder , had sent heat pouring through her, and it quite negated any relief she might have derived from shedding layers.

What did having one’s wicked way entail exactly?

She wasn’t sure. And it seemed a dangerous line of questioning. She took learning seriously, and to understand fully she would need a demonstration. And where was the line between demonstrating, for educational purposes, and simply doing ?

Doing because she wanted to. Because the long grasses on the riverbank looked deeply green and inviting, and threaded between the grasses, buttercups glowed like the softest gold.

Georgie’s narrow gaze was traveling over her.

“Does Lord Phillip hope to find a girl with whom to elope in the village?” She blurted a different question, resuming her hurried walk.

“I doubt that’s on his mind at present.” Georgie fell into step with her. “He was too taken with Charles Peach.”

“It should be easy, though. He’s a lord.” More trees closed in around the bank, and finally, the air was cooling her. “Can’t he elope with almost anyone?”

“Not anyone he’d actually want to marry” was Georgie’s dry response.

It made her blush. Of course.

“He wants to marry a man,” she said. Did Georgie want to marry a woman? She kept her eyes on the ground, necessary given all the tree roots.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have generalized.” Georgie sighed.

“Everyone feels so much pressure to perform according to expectations, who can even imagine what they’d want?

What they’d really want, if it were up to them alone?

Given that Phipps must marry, and can’t marry a man, I do know that he wants to marry someone who, like him, wants a marriage in name only.

And it’s nothing easy to negotiate such a thing. ”

“Doesn’t he require an heir?” She avoided a clump of nettles. “And doesn’t the production of heirs require…”

A memory of rabbits in the garden transitioned into a mental image from The Canterbury Tales , a young woman meeting her lover in a pear tree. The bit she’d found most interesting concluded thus: He pulled up her smock, and in he thrust.

“Consummation,” provided Georgie. “Indeed. But Phipps has a younger brother liable to spawn. That’s good enough, so long as Phipps can appear to play his part.”

“But you won’t play a part beside him.” She gave them a sidelong look. Shadows sifted over their face as a breeze tossed the leaves on the treetops.

They returned her look, more shadows pooling in their eyes.

“I agreed to the betrothal impulsively. Harry wouldn’t let me live alone in London.

I had to share the town house with my cousin, Mrs. Morris.

She tried to make me drink vinegar at breakfast to improve my complexion and swore she’d see me married to a duke.

I was at my wit’s end. She stopped with the vinegar—and the dukes—when I got engaged.

It was a blessed relief. Marriage to Phipps seemed like the shortest road to the broadest freedom.

But he’s under his father’s thumb, and I realized I would have been too.

That I was hazarding my whole life for want of patience. ”

Elfreda bit her lip. Georgie would inherit this estate at five and twenty.

She had no such guarantee. A vague sense that Papa would never send her away, that she’d live on at Marsden Hall after he was truly gone, and discover then how much, or how little, money remained—that was her security.

He did mutter darkly on occasions that he would donate the house and the collections to the nation, so it could all be preserved as a museum dedicated to his legacy. But he muttered all sorts of things.

Was she hazarding her whole life, and her sisters’, by refusing Lord Phillip’s proposal? Had he even been serious? His father didn’t sound as though he’d approve of a woman archaeologist.

“So.” Georgie shrugged. “I broke things off.”

“And then there was a duel.” She blinked against the sun as the trees thinned. The river was meandering through meadows again, and the banks were low and well grazed. Several cows stood knee-deep in the river. One was drinking. Elfreda watched her flick away flies with her tail.

“A duel,” she repeated, although it was hard to imagine anything so dramatic in such placid environs. “A curricle crash.”

“Anne Chatterbox Poskitt.” Georgie sounded amused. “I suppose you heard the whole story.”

“None of the details. And we’ve at least a mile to go.”

It was an invitation, and they took it.

“Where to start?” They looked at the blue sky, theatrically.

“All right. To set the scene. I break the engagement. Phipps is miffed. Hartcliffe is murderous. Harry comes heroically home, to shake some sense into me. One maudlin night, I try to patch the situation. I was sleepless, sitting up in my bedchamber, feeling I’d really thrown a rub in Phipps’s way, and he didn’t deserve it.

I had the idea to atone with a gift, something he’d coveted: my father’s gold snuff box, with Apollo and Adonis on the lid.

I couldn’t rest—my brain wouldn’t stop spinning.

I changed into trousers, put the snuff box in my pocket, and went out the window.

I had to wear trousers—Phipps resides at the Albany.

Bachelors only. I hailed a hackney in my bachelor garb, and I was off.

So far, so good. But unbeknownst to me, Harry was on the street, and he’d caught sight of my exit, or rather, an unknown bachelor’s exit.

Of course, he gave chase. When I arrived at the Albany, I went around to the Rope Walk, because Phipps’s set is in the back.

Harry mustn’t have arrived in time to note my exact route.

He marched in the front door, and Phipps happened to be in the entrance hall.

Which rather confirmed Harry’s suspicion.

By the time I heard the shouting and doubled back, the entrance hall was packed with onlookers.

Harry was storming off, and Phipps was shouting after him, and pistols at dawn was on everyone’s lips. ”

Elfreda’s mouth had dropped open.

“Your brother thought Phipps had been leaving your bedchamber, but it was you leaving your bedchamber?”

“That’s it, yes.”

“Why didn’t Phipps deny it? Or say he’d marry you? Isn’t marrying you what he wanted?”

“Phipps didn’t grasp the charge. Harry isn’t very articulate when his blood is up, and Phipps was taken by surprise and more than a bit bosky.

Everything he shouted was terrifically slurred, although I could make out very clearly the phrase backbiting hyena as applied to myself.

I think he wanted to shoot Harry as a proxy for me.

And Harry wanted to shoot him also as a proxy for me, but in a different sense.

It was like a farce, but with the very real threat of bloodshed. Not anyone’s finest hour.”

“You didn’t try to explain?”

“I tried .” Georgie made a face. “But I was surprised too. It took me several minutes to piece it all together. Harry was already gone, and Phipps was thronged with volunteer seconds. I couldn’t get near him, and then he was gone.

A bevy of bachelors hustled him through the courtyard and into a coach.

I spent all night between the town house, the Albany, and every other establishment I could imagine either of them frequenting.

I found neither. Just before sunrise, I returned to the Albany to beg a ride to the duel itself.

A fellow drove me in his curricle, drove far too slowly, and to the wrong spot.

He jumped down to poke among the trees, but we were alone, I could tell.

Dawn was breaking. The sudden light in the sky pulled a trigger inside me.

I seized the reins and drove wildly across the heath, and I finally spotted them, my brother and Phipps.

They were halfway through their twenty paces.

I urged the horses to a gallop, aiming right between them, but a wheel hit a rock, and I flew the final yards.

I saw Harry’s face as he turned, and that was the last thing I saw for several hours. ”

Elfreda shook her head. “And he sent you here? I can’t believe he didn’t pack you off to St. Helena, with Napoleon.”

“Where’s your fellow feeling?” Georgie shot her a look of mock offense. “I could have been killed.”

“My fellow feeling is for your brother, and the horses.”

“The horses were fine. I inquired.”

She was still shaking her head. “It must have been terrifying.”

“It was.”

“I mean for the people who care about you.” She imagined Georgie crumpled on the ground, face blanched, body broken. Her heart clenched.

Georgie was observing her closely and raised an intrigued brow.

“Would you have been terrified?”

She looked away. There was smoke in the air.

“The lime kiln is over there.” She gestured. “We should search in earnest now.”

Not far from the kiln, the river flowed around a bend, and the banks rose in brambly hillocks. Georgie insisted on wading across so they could search the other side.

Elfreda focused all her attention on the bank before her. She crawled up and down the sloping terrain, parting ferns, patting the moss, feeling around the edges of every large stone.

At last, she came to a shelf of rock in the hillside, and as she pushed aside the vegetation, she saw the void beneath. A cave. A den. A lair. From the dark came a hoarse cry.

“Stand and deliver! Your money or your life!”

Her pulse exploded. She sprang forward, crashed into the bandit charging out of the cave, and went down, hard. The breath left her lungs. She was sprawled across the bandit’s wet body, struggling for the pistol, a vibration beneath her transforming, unmistakably, into laughter.

A laughing bandit.

A laughing, wet bandit.

She lifted up. Through the murk, she saw blue eyes sparkling with mirth, a wedge of luminous white teeth.

“My God, you’re bold.” Georgie’s voice was appreciative. “ I wouldn’t attack a bandit.”

Her hips were flush against theirs, and her thighs, and the wet was seeping into her skirt, the cold shocking against her overheated skin. She wouldn’t have been surprised if steam billowed up. She’d already begun to go foggy, her heart beating everywhere, her eyes on their smile.

“That wasn’t funny.” Her breathing was unsteady.

“No,” they agreed, mirth fading. They had hold of her hips.

“We must search the cave,” she whispered.

“I already did. It only goes back a few feet.”

“We must search elsewhere, then.”

“Right now?”

Slowly, she nodded, which had the unfortunate effect of bringing their faces into closer proximity. She stilled, every muscle in her body locked.

“Aye aye, captain,” they murmured, and tightening their hold on her hips, tipped her off them.

For the rest of the day’s fruitless search, she worried that, if it had been up to her alone, she’d still lie pressed against them at the mouth of the wrong cave. And what would that mean, for her, for them, for the days to come?