Page 21 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Twenty-One

Bess’s world crashed to a halt.

Lucy is missing.

With three words, Nathaniel had blown apart everything.

Those three little words were confirmation that they both knew exactly who they were. Because if Bess were truly the stranger she’d assumed he thought her, some explanation for who Lucy was would’ve been necessary.

He knew. He knew who Bess was.

He must have overheard Lord Phillip at the masquerade.

And there was no time to deal with any of that because Lucy. Was. Missing .

“What do you mean, missing?” she demanded sharply. “Close the door so I can get dressed, if you please.”

Nathaniel conferred quietly with Rufus for a moment and handed him a small pouch before complying. When he turned back to her, his face was very grave. “This is a note from someone named Charlie. It says he and Lucy’s maid have been searching for us all evening. Apparently, Charlie had some reason to believe you might be here.”

“He was the one who first told me about The Nemesis,” Bess said, yanking on her petticoat and doing up the tapes with fingers that trembled. “Charles Truitt, Lucy’s friend. The young man she saved by the Thames that day.”

“The young man you saved,” he corrected, shrugging into his shirt and tucking it into his breeches. It was such a domestic thing to witness, Bess felt her throat clench. “I seem to recall you were the one with your hands in his wound, stopping him from bleeding out on the riverbank.”

Bess waved that away as she struggled to lace up the corset she’d needed with the beautiful pink damask dress. “But what does Charlie say?”

God, what she wouldn’t give for one of her old gowns right now, simple and plain and designed for a simple, plain woman with no fancy lady’s maid or anyone to help her with stays and fastenings.

Already dressed, Nathaniel came over to help lace her back into her corset and gown.

“Apparently it was the maid’s half day. She came home rather late to find Lucy gone. My terribly clever sister had stuffed pillows under the bedcovers to make it look as if she was sleeping, but evidently the maid was suspicious when she found several of Lucy’s gowns and things missing while tidying her dressing room.”

“Pillows!” Bess whirled. “She took to her bed yesterday afternoon with a headache! I checked on her before I left to meet you, but all I could see in her darkened bedchamber was…a still, unmoving form under the covers. Oh God. It wasn’t her. It was the pillows. Lucy was already gone by then, wasn’t she? That was nine o’clock last night! Has she been missing that long? Does the note say if she left anything behind, like a message or, or, some indication of where she’s gone? Perhaps she’s only slipped out to see a bit of London night life on her own!”

A grim expression had set Nathaniel’s jaw while Bess spoke. “No message. But the fact that she seems to have packed a bag argues for a much more serious intent to run away than to merely gallivant about town without her chaperone.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” Bess wrung her hands together, hysteria bubbling unpleasantly in her belly. “But how are we to track her?”

Another knock at the door jolted her out of her rising anxiety.

“Carriage is here,” came the clipped announcement from the hallway, and then everything was in motion.

They rushed down the stairs and out through the front door of The Nemesis to find the Ashbourn coach waiting for them. Someone must have paid a boy to run straight to Ashbourn House for it. Nathaniel bundled Bess into it and sat on the bench facing her, calling out, “Take us to The Swan With Two Necks, Lad Lane. Near Milk Street. Make haste, man!”

Taking him at his word, the coachman whipped up the horses and pulled away with a jerk that threw Bess back against the squabs. Her hair, already far beyond disheveled and well into disaster territory, tumbled from its last remaining pins to fall about her shoulders.

The knock had also loosened the ribbons that tied her mask, and she reflexively darted a hand up to secure it—but then she stilled.

She could take the mask off.

There was no earthly reason to keep wearing it. She had no secret to protect any longer.

Hands shaking, Bess untied the mask’s ribbon and let it drop.

Nathaniel’s gaze fell on her so heavily, it was almost a blow.

She sat there across from him and tried not to flinch. Fully dressed and feeling more vulnerable than she ever had when naked in his arms.

His eyes were dark as he took her in, the bleak, colorless gray of a winter storm. Bess bit her lip, and all at once, he pulled off his own mask, revealing his handsome face.

They sat in the carriage, two people who had bared so much of themselves to each other, fully bared at last.

Somehow, though, it didn’t feel like a new beginning to Bess. It felt like an ending.

Aching, she asked, “What’s at the…Swan With Two Heads?”

“The Swan With Two Necks.” He looked carved from stone, his face the cold, implacable Roman marble of the Duke of Ashbourn. But his eyes were still the eyes of the man who had kissed her and held her and whispered anything you want in the dark. “It’s a pub near the General Post Office where the mail coaches go to pick up passengers for several of the largest routes out of London.”

Bess’s heart sank like a stone. Dismay pitched her voice high. “You think she’s caught a mail coach?”

“That is what I hope to ascertain. If we have no luck there, we’ll have to try the Gloucester Coffee Shop in Picadilly.”

“Why those two, in particular?” Bess asked, desperate for details to keep the howling of her fear at bay.

What might befall a young woman, unaccompanied and beautiful, dressed in clothes of very fine quality? She shuddered to think, and yet she must think it, because it was Bess’s own complacency—her own neglect and selfishness!—that had exposed Lucy to this danger.

If she had only paid more attention to her charge than to her own hedonistic wants and desires…

“Both send coaches west.”

“Along the Bath Road,” Bess breathed, comprehending. “You think she’s running home to Little Kissington.”

“It seems the most logical place to begin searching. Unless you know of some other goal she might have in mind.” His lips twisted. “You know my sister far better than I do.”

A chill swept down Bess’s spine. “God in heaven. You mean, could she be off up the Great North Road, on her way to Gretna Green with some unsuitable beau? I would like to say of course not, but I feel I can’t claim to be any sort of expert on Lucy these days!”

“I’m sure that’s not the case.” He looked a little alarmed; it was possible the threat of imminent tears had thickened Bess’s voice. “Her lady’s maid would know about it, surely, if Lucy had developed a tendre for some rogue, and I believe in these circumstances Jenkins would tell us all even if it meant breaking her mistress’s confidence. No, it’s far more likely that she has tired of London and impulsively decided to take herself home, as she has often expressed a wish to do.”

The painful knot in Bess’s throat broke on a choking sob. She covered her face with her hands. “I should have been there! I should have stopped it, I should have helped her. I knew she was unhappy, I should have offered to suspend the trip and take her home early!”

“You would have left?” he said sharply, and Bess began to cry in earnest, swamped with despair and remorse.

“I was always going to leave,” she wailed. “We both knew that.”

“I meant, leave sooner. Bess. Please, stop.” He switched seats so that he sat beside her instead of across. Then, as if deciding that wasn’t close enough, he pulled her into his lap.

Taking her face between his big palms, he used his calloused thumbs to wipe away her tears while pressing kisses to her forehead, her cheeks, her nose—any part of her he could reach. “Bess. Elizabeth. My queen. Don’t cry. I know I said you could be a mess, but I can’t bear your tears.”

Guiltily, Bess sank into his warmth and soaked up the comfort of his touch like lemon syrup drizzled over a pound cake. “Why should I not cry? This is all my fault, and I ought to feel terrible about it. Stop making me feel better!”

“I would, but we’re nearly to the Swan. May I offer you my handkerchief? No, no, keep it. There’s my Bess.”

Against her will, the words lifted her heart. My Bess. She shook her head, swamped with regret and self-recrimination.

“I’ll take care of this, don’t fear,” he said firmly. “Here we are. Ready to ask some questions?”

But the first dozen people they approached at the bustling pub either hadn’t seen anything useful or wouldn’t speak to them at all until Nathaniel produced a few coins to tempt them.

Undeterred, Nathaniel said to Bess beneath his breath, “The mail coaches all left about their business hours ago, around seven o’clock last night. When they lined up here in the courtyard, nine or ten coaches ready to go, there would’ve been a great crowd; it’s a sight to behold. We are looking for someone who was there and saw it—probably the most inebriated individual propping up a table and making a nuisance of himself to the barmaids.”

But Bess’s fears had begun to take over once more, preying on her mind. “What if we can’t find anyone who knows anything? What if Lucy did not, in fact, make her way here to catch a mail coach, but was set upon by footpads in the streets, or, oh God, you don’t think that Lord Phillip could have found her, or done anything to her in retaliation for his humiliation this evening?”

Nathaniel shook his head at once, “She had already run off, hours before that scene with Lord Phillip?—”

But Bess clutched at his arm, irrational with terror and guilt. “No, you must listen! You didn’t hear him before, he knew all about us! I think he has been following me for days, perhaps weeks, ever since I called him a pup that day in front of the Duke of Thornecliff. Nathaniel, he hates me, truly—I’m not at all sure what he might feel driven to do, but he would certainly know that hurting Lucy would drive both of us wild with fear and what if he stumbled across her, somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, with no one there to protect her?—”

Before Nathaniel could respond, a ragged urchin crept up and tugged at Nathaniel’s sleeve.

“You lookin’ for a lady, guv? Only I heard you was passing out coin for word of what happened to a Long Meg of a girl, and I seen her! Got the last spot aboard the coach heading west, she did, strapped into the rumble-seat atop.”

Nathaniel squeezed Bess’s arms and she felt a desperate sort of hope bubble up inside her.

“Lucy is on her way home,” she breathed, hardly daring to believe it. “To Five Mile House.”

Things began to happen very quickly. Bess wrung her hands while Nathaniel arranged to leave his town coach in the capable hands of his coachman and hire a light, fast curricle and two horses from the landlord of the Swan. He would drive it himself, planning to change horses every ten miles down the road so they could make the best possible time.

“Bess,” Nathaniel said quietly as they clattered out of the innyard. Just her name, only that, but the low, solemn sound of it in his deep voice cut through her hysteria like thunder drowning out a whimper. His eyes burned into hers, the light blue-gray-green of frost-tipped grass. “We will find her. I swear it to you.”

“She wouldn’t be lost at all if I had never gone to The Nemesis,” Bess said through numbed lips.

A terrible noise clawed at the inside of her chest; she genuinely didn’t know what would happen if she let it out. A laugh? A sob? A scream?

Nathaniel’s brow drew down. “You are not to blame for Lucy’s misconduct?—”

“Yes, I am!” Bess burst out, striking her own chest, right above her frozen, calcified heart with a fist. “It was meant to be my only purpose in staying in London—to look out for Lucy and guide her. But I was weak. Selfish. I thought I could have something for myself, I told myself I wasn’t hurting anyone else, and now Lucy. Is. Gone.”

“If you must blame someone, blame me. You were staying in my house; I am the head of the family. I am the only male relative Lucy has left. She should have been able to look to me for guidance, and instead I hemmed her round with tutors and lessons and suitors, and pretended that was enough to discharge my duty as her elder brother.”

Bess shook, unconsoled. “You’re right. We’re both terrible.”

“You’re not terrible,” he said, a flat denial. “You’re perfect.”

The noise in her chest resolved itself into a scream she caught behind her teeth. “You must not say things like that to me.”

His brows drew together. “Why not?”

God, he would break her. Into a hundred jagged pieces.

“Because,” she explained painfully, “there is a very great danger that I will start to believe you. And that, I cannot afford. So if you have any care for me at all, you will stop saying and doing things that tempt me to believe there is some sort of future for us when there is not.”

He stared down at her, hands clenched into fists at his sides and storm clouds darkening his eyes to gray-blue. “What if there could be?”

“There can’t,” Bess cried, squeezing her eyes shut and wrapping her arms about her own ribs to hold in her wild, runaway heart. “Nathaniel, you cannot speak of your stepmother without resentment, decades after she married your father. One day, if we stayed together, you would resent me in the same way. You would look at me, and I would be able to see it, the way the fire in your eyes had died out, leaving nothing behind but contempt.”

He stiffened beside her, his profile cast in stone as he watched the road ahead of them. “I would never look at you that way.”

Bess felt cold, all the way to the heart of her. “I am nothing more than a cook in a coaching inn. A servant, like Henrietta. Your good name is everything to you. Would you really endanger it for a tumble with a servant?”

“Stop it,” he said through gritted teeth. His hands were clenched on the reins as if he would destroy them.

But Bess couldn’t stop now—though it was too little, and far too late. She forced the words through her raw, constricted throat.

“Once we find Lucy and deliver her safely into her mother’s arms, you will go back to London, and we will never see each other again. Whatever this is, this all-consuming thing, it is over. Don’t you see? The price of this passion has already been too high.”

* * *

There was not much chance of catching up with Lucy’s mail coach, Nathaniel knew. The Royal Mail coaches were the fastest way to travel—no tolls, new horses every two hours and changes accomplished in five minutes or less, no stops or delays.

A Royal Mail coach could make the run all the way to Bath in a matter of fifteen hours, with great discomfort and hardship to the passengers, who would not be offered the chance to rest or eat or even alight from the carriage for long enough to refresh themselves.

He pictured his youngest sister clinging to the outside of the coach, not even afforded the safety and comfort of an inside seat. What was she thinking? Had she truly been so miserable in his care?

What sort of man was he, that he couldn’t keep one innocent young woman safe and happy for the length of a single Season?

With effort, he put aside the self-recriminations to focus on the task at hand. Lucy had a good ten hours’ head start. She would almost certainly reach Little Kissington long before he and Bess did. He would not subject Bess to such a breakneck pace. But they would not be far behind.

It took most of Nathaniel’s concentration to handle the high-spirited pair of geldings as they wended their way out of London to the Bath Road. Whatever he had left to spare was focused entirely on the rigid, upright form of the woman sitting beside him on the box.

She had not spoken one word since they left town.

Nathaniel cast yet another quick glance at her white, drawn profile. He didn’t like the dark shadows beneath her eyes, which were fixed on the road before them as though sheer will could make the miles go by more quickly.

The curricle was not as comfortably sprung as his spacious coach; they felt every rut in the road with jarring, jostling force. Bess did not complain, simply clung grimly to the bench seat and left Nathaniel plenty of space to handle the reins and keep the horses to the swiftest pace they could steadily maintain.

They would reach the tollhouse at Maidenhead before long, and he would ensure that Bess took a brief respite while the horses were changed and he procured them some provisions for the hours of travel still ahead.

The drumbeat of the horses’ hooves on the well-maintained road drowned out everything but Nathaniel’s thoughts, which circled relentlessly around what Bess had said back at the Swan.

I thought I could have something for myself, I told myself I wasn’t hurting anyone else…

He feared that Lucy running away had only confirmed everything Bess ever thought about her purpose in life being to care for others before herself. But that wasn’t what tore at him the most savagely.

I told myself I wasn’t hurting anyone else.

Anyone else . As in, anyone other than herself? Because doing what she’d done, with him, had been something Bess did knowingly that hurt her .

It tormented him.

The chestnut on the right shook his head restively, pace faltering for an instant, and Nathaniel deliberately relaxed his grip on the ribbons.

He could not afford a moment’s inattention. The light, open design of the curricle was intended for speed above all else—considerations like stability and safety had not been taken into account.

If they broke an axle or a horse went lame, or worst, if they overturned, it could be hours before anyone happened along to help them.

Even if Nathaniel knew what to say, he could not begin another conversation with Bess that might result in more of her tears.

Dangerous or not, he knew he would have to drop the reins or pull the curricle off the road to take her in his arms and stop the crying. He would not be able to stand it, and they didn’t have the time.

So they sat side by side in a tense silence that was filled with the echoes of everything they’d ever said to each other, and Nathaniel kept driving. And thinking about the question of what sort of future he and Bess could have together.

The charge she’d leveled at him, that he would endanger his “good name” for a tumble with a servant, choked him with a dense mix of anger, denial, and shame.

For wasn’t that exactly how he’d thought of his father’s liaison with Henrietta? And didn’t Nathaniel blame the decline of his family’s standing on that?

Somehow, the thought rang hollow to him now. Was it really his family name—his father’s name—that mattered?

They crossed the Maidenhead bridge in the sullen gray light of dawn, horses blowing hard and lathered with sweat. Nathaniel’s shoulders burned, his back a solid wall of tension, as he steered the curricle into the courtyard of The Bear.

An ostler ran to hold the horses’ heads, potboys already beginning to unbuckle the harnesses while Nathaniel jumped down and rounded the carriage to help Bess.

He reached up for her, but she didn’t move, only stared down at his outstretched hand with a blank expression. Nathaniel’s heart was a lead weight against his ribs.

“Come rest, Bess. Please. It will take a few minutes to change the horses and purchase a hamper of food. You should stretch your legs.”

“I’m fine,” she dismissed him. “I don’t need a break. Let us keep going as soon as may be.”

“Bess. I know you’ve decided our affair is over.” Not that he agreed, but this was neither the time nor the place to launch his campaign of re-seduction. “But we are here together now, and you will let me help you. You have hardly slept. You haven’t eaten in hours. You will do Lucy no good by driving yourself to a collapse.”

“I’m not doing Lucy any good, no matter what I do,” she pointed out, lips white and pinched. “But the faster we find her, the better.”

“The Bear is reputed to have some of the best pork pies in the county,” he tried. “Won’t you help me choose a couple, and some other things to put in a hamper, to sustain us while we search? I’m famished.”

She bit her lip, clearly torn. Nathaniel didn’t like to use her caretaking tendencies against her like this, but needs must. It would be worth it to get her down off the box, out of the wind and into the relative comfort of the inn for a few minutes. To let her use the necessary and splash some water on her face to wash away the travel dust. To unbend her spine before it shattered from stiffness.

“As long as we’re quick about it,” she allowed, and Nathaniel handed her down gladly. He was just grateful she was speaking to him again.

After a brief few minutes inside the inn, Nathaniel gently bullied Bess into taking a turn about the courtyard to get her blood flowing, then handed her back up into the curricle. While she was arranging herself, he accepted a heavy hamper from the innkeeper, a rotund little man with a bow-legged stance and a wide smile.

“Here you are, Yer Grace, and all the best of everything from the supper my missus made last night, with our compliments, and best wishes, and hoping very much that you and your lady wife enjoy the food!”

Your lady wife . The words ran through Nathaniel like electricity.

The innkeeper thought Nathaniel and Bess were married. Of course he did. It would be the height of impropriety for an unmarried gentleman and lady to be traveling together, even in an open carriage. They would do better to keep up the pretense than they would to disabuse this man of his assumption.

Bess had averted her face, pretending to fuss with her skirts, but Nathaniel could see the pink shell of one ear.

“My wife and I thank you, good sir,” Nathaniel heard himself saying, as if from a distance. Shaking himself, he tipped the innkeeper liberally and vaulted into the driver’s seat.

Taking the reins from the potboy, Nathaniel got them back on the road. The whole stop hadn’t been more than half an hour, but there was a bit of color back in Bess’s cheeks. When she bent to rifle through the contents of the hamper at their feet, Nathaniel watched with one eye and a great deal of satisfaction.

Bess was more critical of the food than Nathaniel had expected, her usual kindness slightly eclipsed by her scandalized dismay at the toughness of the pork pie’s hot water pastry crust. Picking through the hamper with a jaundiced eye, Bess set aside the pies and instead offered Nathaniel a packet of bacon sandwiches.

He glanced at the thickly sliced white bread, toasted and smeared with butter and brown sauce, piled high with rashers of salty, fatty bacon. “Perfect. One for me and one for you.”

“I’m not hungry,” Bess insisted, “But you must eat.”

“I’ll eat one if you do.”

Glaring down at the grease-spotted paper wrapped around the sandwiches. “I feel as if I couldn’t swallow a bite.”

Nathaniel shrugged, watching her from the corner of his eye. “Then neither will I.”

She made a sound almost like a little growl. Nathaniel struggled not to find it adorable.

“Fine,” she said, opening the packet and handing him one of the sandwiches before taking a small bite of the other.

Nathaniel waited for her to take a second, grudging bite before devouring his sandwich as quickly and tidily as he was able. Bess didn’t finish hers, but she made a dent in it and Nathaniel let it go.

She went back to the hamper and pulled out a jug of cider, faintly fizzy and with a distinct musty funk that cut the apples’ sweetness.

After the sandwich and cider, Bess somehow managed to fall into a fitful doze slumped against Nathaniel’s side. He kept his left arm as steady as he could, so as not to jolt her awake.

The hours rolled by like the verdant meadows and grassy hills of the western counties, through the prosperous towns and villages that had sprung up along the Bath Road. They passed through Twyford and Thatcham, stopping only to refresh the horses.

As the sun began to slip below the horizon, shadows lengthening along the hedgerows, it was time to change the horses again and Nathaniel girded his loins to try to force Bess to take another short rest.

“At the next coaching inn, we will stop and have dinner,” he declared, snapping the reins decisively. Bess had finally broken down and allowed him to feed her a pork pie for lunch, and now the hamper was empty.

“Must we?” Bess asked instantly. “I would rather push through.”

“Oh, look,” Nathaniel pointed up ahead to the very welcome sight of a two-story brick building with a sign hanging out front that looked like it sported some sort of bird. “Here, this will be perfect.”

Bess sighed but didn’t protest further. And when they pulled into the courtyard of The Pelican Public House, they were surprised to find the entire place in something of an uproar.

Potboys and ostlers milled about excitedly, and there was a fellow in the black and scarlet livery of the Royal Mail with his shoulder bound in a white sling sitting on a barrel by the stables, holding court.

Nathaniel tensed, all his senses alert.

With the unerring instinct of his kind, the landlord came out into the courtyard in person to greet his illustrious, ducal guests. Barrel-chested and ruddy-cheeked, he twinkled at them with real pleasure.

“Your Graces, you are most welcome! Yes, yes, welcome to the humble Pelican. I am Arthur Peabody, the landlord of this public house. We have the cleanest beds, a lovely private dining room, and my wife has done a roast that melts in your mouth, so it does!”

“Much obliged, Mister Peabody,” Nathaniel said, helping Bess down from the box, his gaze still on the Royal Mail employee. “Tell me, what has happened to that fellow over there? Has he been injured?”

“Oh, quite the to-do, quite the to-do, Your Grace,” Peabody said, bustling around them in a pleasantly officious way, his chest puffed out in pride at having such an interesting event to relate. “For that is Mister Danforth, the armed guard who was sent along with the Royal Mail Coach to Bath, and last evening, well, what do you think?”

Here, Peabody paused impressively. Bess’s fingers were thin bands of iron around Nathaniel’s arm.

“I cannot imagine,” Nathaniel said curtly, willing the man to get to the point.

“Oh,” said Peabody, in the booming tones of a man used to speaking loudly enough to be heard over the din of a bustling coaching inn. “What it is, is that the Royal Mail coach on its way to Bath last evening…was set upon by none other than that most famous highwayman, The Gentle Rogue!”