Page 17 of The Book of Lost Stories

Bruising Encounters

‘Simon de Lombard,’ said a tall, dark-haired man of forbidding aspect, stepping forward and bowing. His eyes rested on her in a way she could not quite like, with a familiarity and almost contempt for her person.

Ravish’d by Cruel Fate by ORLANDO brOWNE

Alys found herself grasped rather familiarly about the waist, swung down and set on the ground next to her rescuer, dishevelled and conscious that she had lost her bonnet and her hair hung down her back.

She looked up into a dark, sardonic, hawk-nosed face that lightened into amusement as he recognized her. A smile curled his lips.

‘We meet again, Miss Weston.’

‘Lord Rayven!’

‘Yes, it is I, the wicked villain of the piece,’ he declaimed rather melodramatically and she stared at him with large, startled grey eyes.

Then her wits returned and she realized he was referring to their Knaresborough encounter rather than his role in her novels.

‘Pray, unhand me, sir!’ she said, recovering herself to find she was the cynosure of all eyes in the busy inn yard.

‘I beg your pardon, I thought you might feel faint after such a shock,’ he said, removing his supporting arm.

‘Allow me to introduce my friend, Mr Stavely, lately Captain Stavely of the Rifle Brigade. Harry, this is Miss Weston, whose entirely delightful acquaintance I made some years ago in Harrogate, where I took the waters … and even took to the waters. You will find her refreshingly different from other young ladies of your acquaintance, I assure you.’

The slight, sandy-haired man standing next to her rescuer smiled and bowed. ‘Delighted, Miss Weston.’

‘You are, still, Miss Weston?’ said Lord Rayven. ‘Now, why does that not surprise me?’

Alys gave him an indignant glare and Stavely looked with amusement from one to the other of them.

‘I do not aspire to the married state, sir,’ she said coldly, and he bowed.

Miss Grimshaw’s voice called plaintively, from the depths of the coach, ‘Alys?’

‘Oh, how could I forget poor Letty?’ Ignoring Lord Rayven, she instead turned to Mr Stavely. ‘Pray, could you assist my companion, Miss Grimshaw, out of the coach? And perhaps if she were to pass up my little dog first? He is too small to jump out.’

Pug, yapping excitedly, was handed to Alys, who tucked him under her arm. She was disappointed to see that he did not show any desire to bite Lord Rayven, or she might have put him down.

‘Strange, I had not thought you the type to have a lapdog, Miss Weston.’

‘He was Lady Basset’s.’

‘ Was? ’

‘She has been dead these three years.’

‘I am sorry for your loss. You are still in mourning?’ He thought how well black became her, setting off her pale skin and chestnut hair to perfection.

‘I have since also lost my father,’ Alys said shortly. ‘I believe Mr Stavely requires your assistance in helping my companion from the coach.’

A few moments later, Miss Grimshaw, set down on the cobblestones, smoothed down her skirts in a flustered way. ‘Oh, thank you! So kind, I declare,’ she gasped, looking up gratefully at her two rescuers. ‘Such a mishap!’

‘Mr Stavely, allow me to introduce Miss Grimshaw,’ Alys said, then added meaningfully, ‘And this, Letty, is Lord Rayven.’

Miss Grimshaw stopped smiling and took a step back, blanching. ‘Lord Rayven ? N-not the Lord Rayven who—’

‘Just a misunderstanding,’ he said defensively, taken aback by her horrified expression. ‘I am not the Devil incarnate, I assure you.’

‘Misunderstanding? Hah!’ Alys said.

‘Why, what have you been doing to render your name so odious to these ladies, Serle?’ enquired Stavely, highly amused. ‘I had not thought it of you.’

‘I am afraid Lord Rayven has no great opinion of my character, nor I of his, Mr Stavely,’ Alys said. ‘More than that would be pointless to relate. I must thank you both for your assistance, but believe we need not trouble you further. Good day.’

She turned her back and enquired of the coachman what the damage was.

‘A wheel to be mended, miss.’ He shot a darkling look at his lordship, still standing observing them. ‘If the gentleman’s curricle hadn’t dashed through the arch in front of me, I wouldn’t have caught the corner stone.’

‘Nonsense! Do not blame me for your poor driving,’ Lord Rayven said, then he added, looking at the antiquated coach more closely, ‘although from the look of it, you have not had much practice in driving such a vehicle for a considerable number of years, and so perhaps may be excused your cow-handedness.’

‘I believe I have made it plain that I no longer require your assistance, or your advice,’ Alys said icily.

This time he took his dismissal and the two gentlemen walked into the inn where, she sincerely hoped, they were not also to spend the night. Her coachman went off to discover where the nearest wheelwright might be, while the horses, now released and calmed, were led into the stables.

As she entered the inn with Letty, the coach was being set back on to three wheels and heaved into the inn yard, so as not to block the entrance further. They were shown to a bedchamber, in which Letty insisted they sup, for fear of meeting Lord Rayven if they dined below.

But it appeared that his lordship and his friend stayed merely to refresh themselves, for she had the doubtful felicity of seeing them drive off in a very dashing way sometime later from her window, whither the bustle of departure and a familiar, deep voice ordering the ostlers to bring round his curricle had drawn her.

‘It is Lord Rayven,’ she said to Letty, who was half dozing in front of the fire with Pug. ‘They surely cannot mean to drive back to London now, for it will be dark very shortly.’

‘There should be a good moon,’ Letty said drowsily, then sat up a little straighter. ‘Come away from the window this instant, Alys, in case he should see you.’

But it was too late: Lord Rayven said something to his friend, then looked up directly and laughingly saluted her with his whip before gathering up the reins.

She stepped back, cheeks aflame, muttering ‘Show-off!’ as the curricle bowled out of the archway, turned on a sixpence and vanished from sight.

‘Has he gone, Alys? If so, it would be safe to take Pug for a little airing.’

‘Yes, he has gone.’

‘He did not appear quite the monster I imagined, although his face looks forbidding until he smiles.’

‘“One may smile, and smile, and be a villain”,’ quoted Alys darkly.

‘Well, if you say so, my dear … and of course, if he is the man who so grossly insulted you in Harrogate, then he must be!’

‘Shakespeare. I forget which play,’ explained Alys, thinking not for the first time that had she not been such a voracious reader, a governess hired for her cheapness rather than her educational attainments would have left her sadly lacking in knowledge other than that of how to induce her hens to lay, or the art of providing a good table on a limited income.

‘Lord Rayven’s friend Mr Stavely seemed a very pleasant young man,’ Letty said.

‘Yes, I wonder if he is any relation to Nell’s Cheshire neighbours? But I suppose Stavely is not an uncommon name.’

‘I can see how like all your villains Lord Rayven is, now I have set eyes on him, Alys, right down to that sinister scar. Let us hope he has not read any of your books, for he could not fail to recognize himself.’

‘Oh, I don’t suppose anyone ever does recognize themselves in books, and I should not think him the type of man to read a novel, let alone a Gothic romance, would you?

’ she said, although it had given her a jolt, she had to admit, when he had called himself a villain.

‘And anyway, even should he have heard of the likeness, it would never cross his mind that I should have written them.’

‘No, of course not.’

A servant scratched at the door, with a message to say that the last stage of their journey must be put off until midday tomorrow, while the wheel was mended. This was better than they had hoped, for they would still reach London in daylight.

‘I think I will just jot down a few notes, while our mishap is still fresh in my mind,’ Alys said, looking around her for her travelling desk with a purposeful light in her eyes.

Simon de Lombard might have mysteriously recast himself as the hero, but she felt in the mood to have him suffer a little torture before rewarding him with Cicely’s hand.

‘And I, when I have walked Pug, will see if I can find the arnica, for I am bruised all over, especially my ribs.

‘Well, you would sew my jewellery into your stays, although I told you there was not the least need.’

‘The pendant, the golden pendant,’ whispered Miss Grimshaw, with a nervous look at the door.

‘Oh, that . Yes, I suppose we must keep it safe until I can return it to the Hartwoods, but I am sure locking it into a trunk would have done just as well,’ Alys said.

But Letty declared her willingness to suffer any discomfort in order to protect her charge’s property or virtue, in a heroic manner quite suited to the pages of a Gothic novel.

*

‘Come, this is hopeful!’ Harry Stavely quizzed his friend as they drove away from the inn. ‘It is the first sign of interest I have seen you show in the fair sex since I sold out.’

‘I don’t know how you can say so, Harry, when you know very well I have only recently parted company with as pretty – and avaricious – an opera dancer as ever graced the boards.’

‘Oh, opera dancers!’ exclaimed Harry. ‘You know very well that is not what I meant.’

‘No, but if you are waiting for me to fall head over ears in love with one of the society chits that are paraded for my notice, you will wait for a very long time.’

‘But you must marry soon, for you are the last of the Rayvens, just as I … I am now the last of the Cheshire Stavelys,’ Harry said, a pang of loss twisting his face as he thought of his brother.

‘So I must, and I mean to cast the handkerchief this very season, to some placid creature of good birth and beauty, who will be content to stay at Priory Chase and breed while I amuse myself elsewhere, and not, I assure you, to Miss Weston, who has none of the qualities necessary in a wife!’

Harry, who over dinner had been regaled with all the details of his friend’s Harrogate acquaintanceship with Alys and her very vulgar aunt, grinned. ‘Your placid creature sounds a dead bore to me. And Miss Weston is very taking, even if she is not precisely beautiful. Such expressive grey eyes!’

‘Expressing loathing every time she looked at me, you mean?’

‘But that was all a mistake. An unfortunate one, of course, but nothing you could not put right. I am sure you could win her round with a little address.’

‘Are you? She was decisive enough at eighteen, but now she is a self-opinionated spinster of three or four and twenty, that might be a challenge quite beyond my capabilities, Harry. But I don’t suppose our paths will cross, for the friend she is going to stay with is most likely to be as shabby-genteel as herself. ’

‘Aha! So you were interested enough to make enquiries?’

‘I greased the coachman in the fist, once he had come down off his high ropes about the slur on his driving,’ admitted Rayven.

‘He told me she’d been living in Yorkshire with her widowed father, in a cottage on her uncle’s estate, but now she has her own way to make in the world.

I expect she is seeking a post as companion or governess. ’

‘Did you get her direction?’

‘No, for I am not in the market, yet, to employ either of those,’ he said drily, but all the way to London he kept thinking of a pair of large and indignant grey eyes … intelligent eyes.

The suspicions he’d once briefly entertained about the authorship of a certain novel, which at the time he had immediately dismissed as ludicrous, now crossed his mind again.

She had said in the letter he had found at Knaresborough that she was writing a novel, and that he was the perfect villain.

It had to be admitted that the villain of The Travails of Lady Malvina bore a striking physical resemblance to himself.

Could the dowdy and country-bred Miss Weston be the notorious Orlando Browne, whose books strait-laced mothers had forbidden their daughters to read?

Surely it was quite impossible!

*

Alys took it as a good omen that she finished off the very last page of Ravish’d by Cruel Fate just as their coach approached the great City of London, so that she could fully enjoy the astonishingly crowded and busy series of tableaux that passed the window.

As some revenge for having her hero turn out to be the villain, she had dispatched the fair but black-hearted Lucius by the expedient of having his carriage topple into a ravine.

This was very satisfying, although being fond of horses she had found herself unable to allow the team pulling it to hurtle to their doom too.

It had severely taxed her brain to find a solution, but in the end her ingenuity had, of course, been equal to it.