Page 22 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Twenty-Two

Bess was not a swooner. That was something fine ladies did, not sturdy country lasses.

But it was a nearer thing than she would have liked to admit.

“A highwayman,” she said faintly, everything inside her drawing tight and terrified. A horrible premonition had seized her. “Attacking a Royal Mail coach and actually injuring the guard!”

“Oh, as to that,” Mr. Peabody temporized, “the injury weren’t caused by the Gentle Rogue, as such. The guard, Mr. Danforth, took a strong knock to the shoulder when the coach went athwart a branch in the road—what has since been removed, have no fears on that score, Your Graces!—and the coach nearly turned over.”

Bess’s heart was galloping faster than the horses. Lucy had been sitting on top of the carriage, on one of the outside seats, she recalled. “Was anyone else hurt? Are the passengers still here?”

God, was Lucy just inside the pub? Bess was torn between the need to see for herself, and the need to hear the rest of this story at once.

“Nay, nay, my lady.” Mr. Peabody leaned on the doorjamb, blocking the way into the Pelican, and visibly settled into having a good chin-wag while standing on the back doorstep. “Once the carriage accident was discovered, all the passengers were conveyed here to my humble establishment. My wife personally checked over the passengers of the female persuasion and not a scratch on ’em, bless their souls, though it’s an experience they shan’t forget in a hurry, I’ll warrant you. For the accident…was only the beginning.”

Mr. Peabody pulled a pipe from his waistcoat pocket and tapped it thoughtfully against the doorjamb, clearly enjoying the rapt attention of his audience. Bess congratulated herself on not leaping forward to strangle him.

“Please, continue,” she begged through a clenched jaw.

“Well, I’ve had the story now from several of the passengers, as well as Mr. Danforth, the guard, and they all agree that what happened next as they all sorted themselves out from the luggage falling about and their limbs, begging your pardons, getting jumbled and tumbled about in the near-overturning of the carriage, was that they heard a horse walking up the road behind them, and a voice. Singing.”

“The Gentle Rogue,” Nathaniel said grimly.

Lucy’s favorite fairy-tale hero, come to life.

“So the highwayman happened upon the carriage accident, where the guard had been wounded,” Bess summarized impatiently. “Then what?”

“He robbed them, didn’t he?” Mr. Peabody said, clearly a bit disgruntled at having his narrative hurried along. “Tied up the guard and took every ring, necklace, hair comb, wallet, and purse from the passengers and left—but not before binding up the guard’s shoulder in that sling you see there before you, that Mr. Danforth is still wearing! A bandage from the Gentle Rogue himself!”

As bidden, Nathaniel and Bess both turned to look at Mr. Danforth in his Royal Mail livery and white shoulder sling. Someone had brought him out a pint of ale, and he was gesturing with it as he spoke to the assembled group of potboys, serving maids, and locals, brown liquid sloshing over the sides of the glass.

“Where are the rest of the passengers now?” Nathaniel asked.

“Most are inside, taking their ease and enjoying Mrs. Peabody’s stew. A few left straight away, of course, the ones who could afford to hire one of my chaises.”

“A tall girl,” Bess said again, more urgently. “Slim and brunette, with very blue eyes. Quite pretty, you would remember her. Was she with them? Did she leave again?”

Genuinely aggrieved, Mr. Peabody cried, “Now, who’s been a-telling the story before me? Did you meet someone on the road who’d already heard it?”

“Heard what?” Bess wanted to pull out her hair.

“Why, the exciting conclusion of the tale. There was a tall young lady with the mail coach, pretty as a flower, they said, and with a lot of spirit.”

“She’s here,” Bess breathed, turning for the door of the pub at once, desperate to find Lucy and put her arms around the girl, and perhaps shake her until her teeth rattled.

“No, no, she isn’t inside.” Mr. Peabody shook his head.

“So she hired one of your chaises to continue her journey,” Nathaniel concluded. “Tell us where she was headed.”

“I’m afeared you’ve got the wrong end of the stick, begging your pardon, Your Grace. The girl was with the coach, but she never was here at the Pelican. You see, when the Gentle Rogue was done with his robbing and swung back up on his big black stallion to leave…the blue-eyed beauty went with him.”

There was a whistling in Bess’s ears, like standing in a cave, looking into the inky black nothingness and hearing the wind blowing out from a crack in the stone.

“And no one stopped him,” Nathaniel was saying when Bess could hear again. “Not one person lifted a finger to keep this criminal from abducting a young woman?”

“He had a gun,” Mr. Peabody pointed out, alarm widening his eyes at the harsh accusation in Nathaniel’s tone.

“What has been done to recover them?” he demanded.

“N-nothing! We didn’t think—because the way Mr. Danforth tells it, why?—”

He stopped, looking back and forth between them, uncertain in the face of Bess’s horrified shock Nathaniel’s cold, towering fury.

Bess couldn’t ask. Her throat was too dry to allow for speech. Nathaniel said it for her, in a voice silky with rage. “What does Mr. Danforth say?”

“Why,” Mr. Peabody faltered, “Only that the highwayman seemed to recognize the lass, like, or at any rate he spoke to her as if he knew her. And when he left…she went with him willingly. It weren’t no abduction.”

From bad to worse. Bess wavered. Her knees didn’t want to hold her up anymore, they wobbled like jelly in a trifle. Nathaniel clamped an arm around her back and kept her upright, but he never took his attention off Mr. Peabody.

“It would be most unfortunate if that opinion was bandied about,” he said, in his full Duke of Ashbourn voice. Authority personified. “I trust you and your wife will have a care for the reputation of the young lady involved, and will refrain from spreading rumors—or indeed, from allowing these slanderous lies to be spoken in your pub.”

“I, I, I,” Mr. Peabody stammered, blanching up to his bushy brown eyebrows. “Why, certainly, of course, I would never wish to besmirch, that is…”

Nathaniel let go of Bess to take Mr. Peabody firmly by the elbow and march him over to Mr. Danforth. Pulling the injured guard away from his audience, Nathaniel loomed over the two shorter men and spoke very seriously and quietly to them while they seemed to shrink smaller and smaller with every word.

She suddenly remembered the way Nathaniel had faced down a reprobate duke and his gaggle of wealthy, privileged followers to protect Lucy’s reputation.

Poor Mr. Peabody and Mr. Danforth didn’t stand a chance.

But Bess was less concerned with Lucy’s reputation, especially given that no one here seemed to know her name, than she was with her whereabouts.

“They could be anywhere by now,” she realized aloud, sick with worry. “He could do anything to her.”

As if sensing her despair from across the courtyard, Nathaniel lifted his head and found Bess’s gaze. He left the quivering innkeeper and guard with a final word of warning and strode back to Bess’s side just as she staggered and put a hand out to catch herself against the side of the curricle.

Nathaniel was there to catch her hand and bear her up. She knew there was no time and she shouldn’t indulge herself, but she could not seem to resist the urge to lean into his broad chest. She hung there a moment, mind blank, and breathed in the green, herbal scent of him.

“What are we going to do?” she asked, hating how much she needed him—and how abjectly grateful she was for his presence.

“We’re going to go to Five Mile House and tell her mother what has happened. Because she deserves to know.”

Bess’s heart cracked in two. “Oh, God. How will I ever face Henrietta and Gemma?”

Nathaniel tucked a hand round the back of her neck and gently tilted her face to his. She ought to be accustomed to the overwhelming sensation of being the sole focus of Nathaniel’s attention, but she was stunned anew by the naked intensity of his stare.

“You don’t have to. I will take full responsibility. Lucy was under my protection, in my house. I am the head of the family. I am to blame.”

“Henrietta entrusted her daughter to me,” Bess argued. “I should be the one to tell her what’s happened.”

She could see he wanted to refuse, by the tightening of his jaw. But instead, he said, “We will face her together. You won’t be alone.”

For some reason, a sob choked the back of her throat for the first time since they discovered Lucy gone. Only now, Bess’s overriding emotion was relief.

To not be alone in this. To have someone to lean on. It was a gift she, who had always been the one others leaned on, would never take for granted.

“All right,” she breathed, overcome. “I know I can face her. I can face anything, if we are together.”

Something flared, deep in his diamond-bright eyes, but all he said was, “The horses are ready. We should depart.”

Dusk fell around them like a cool, sheltering blanket as they returned to the Bath Road and pointed the curricle in the direction of Little Kissington. With several hours still to go, Bess meant to keep a watchful eye out for a large black stallion carrying a villain and a young woman, but she knew very well they would be long gone by now.

The steady drumbeat of the horses’ hooves ate up the miles. Bess’s legs were stiff and sore from holding the same position for hours while bracing against the natural sway of the curricle. Relief and exhaustion combined to compel her to slump against Nathaniel’s side, which helped a bit.

But her bottom was still bruised by the hard seat under its thin cushion. Her shoulders ached as though she’d kneaded the dough for ten cottage loaves in a row. The wind buffeted her as they raced along. Bess felt herself falling into a sort of meditative trance—not sleeping, but not truly awake, either.

Nathaniel must have been even more exhausted, but he didn’t indicate it by so much as a sigh. He only drove onward in silence, unwavering and inexorable, skillfully controlling the fits and starts of the horses as they began to flag.

A bit after Froxfield, they reached the turning that would take them north to Little Kissington. Five Mile House was not directly set upon the Great Bath Road, and therefore had not benefited as much as other coaching inns from the improvement of the roads and the increase in coaching traffic.

But Lucy’s sister Gemma and Bess’s childhood friend Hal had contrived to turn the short detour up to Five Mile House into a popular jaunt undertaken by many of the wealthy, titled, fashionable people who traveled from London to enjoy the convivially relaxed social scene at Bath.

Bess wondered if Gemma and Hal would be there too, or if they’d be up at the big house, as everyone local referred to Hal’s family seat, Kissington Manor. Blissfully unaware that Gemma’s sister was lost somewhere in the North Wessex Downs.

With a wanted felon.

God in Heaven. No, as much as Bess longed to see them, she dreaded having to tell them all what she had done. She was quite glad, actually, that she likely wouldn’t have to face Gemma and Hal until the morning.

The curricle clattered over the stone bridge spanning Westcote Brook, and suddenly the achingly familiar rooftops and gently smoking chimneys of Little Kissington came into view. Nathaniel slowed the curricle.

“We’re here.” His eyes ran over the village in that intense way he had, as though he was scanning and cataloguing every detail.

“You’ve been here before,” she reminded him, nerves jangling under her skin.

“Yes. But it looks different to me now.”

“Why?”

“This is where you come from,” Nathaniel said, in a tone she couldn’t place.

Bess’s breath hitched. It wasn’t a question, but she nodded. “Yes. My father’s farm was half a mile in that direction, on the Duke of Havilocke’s land. We passed the turning to Kissington Manor a ways back, that will be where Hal, the current duke, lives. With your sister, Gemma.”

He didn’t react to the reminder of his last, ill-fated visit to the village, only carried on driving.

“When you told me you’d had schooling on a neighboring estate, you meant Kissington Manor. My sister’s new husband was the younger son for whom you were meant to be a calming influence.”

Bess struggled not to be warmed that he clearly remembered every word she’d ever spoken to him. “That’s right. I took lessons with Hal and his tutor for several years.”

She paused, a small, hot coal burning in her chest, then burst out with, “Nothing I said to you was a lie. I wouldn’t want you to think that, though of course I did not tell you everything in our conversations at The Nemesis. But I have never outright lied to you.”

“Everything I told you was the truth, as well,” he said quietly, his eyes on the road.

Bess’s mouth was dry. She couldn’t swallow.

If the entire rest of the world burned down, I’d still want you.

That was something he’d told her, but it couldn’t be true. She knew it couldn’t. Yet still, weak as she was, she heard herself ask, “Everything?”

He looked at her, his eyes a silver gleam in the moonlight. His voice was dark velvet rubbing over her skin as he replied, “Everything.”

Her heartbeat was still racing when he turned the curricle under the arched entryway to the courtyard behind Five Mile House. Bess caught her breath at the sight of the place. It seemed…smaller, somehow. But the old building was as dear to her as her memories of the farmhouse where she was born—dearer, in some ways, for this place had seen less tragedy.

The farmhouse was where she grew up. But Five Mile House was where she became an independent woman.

The windows, the ones she and Gemma and Lucy had scrubbed until they sparkled, were dark. A lazy wisp of smoke curled from the chimney over the kitchen hearth fire, a fire that was never allowed to fully die out, but other than that, there were no signs of life about the place, though it was early for the inn to be closed. Even the chickens that normally scratched and pecked through the scattered hay in the courtyard had gone to bed.

Now that she was here, Bess found her feet itching with impatience to get inside, to find Henrietta and unburden herself of her sins, and begin to concoct some sort of plan to get Lucy back.

She tapped her toe while Nathaniel secured the horses, then towed him up the steps to the back door of the taproom, and into the darkened interior of the public part of the inn.

It smelled the same as her memories—tart apple cider and honeyed hops, the yeasty warmth of fresh-baked bread and the buttery savor of shatteringly flaky pie crust, the smoke from the banked fire in the far wall.

She knew this wasn’t Nathaniel’s first view of Five Mile House; he’d been inside once before, on May Day of the previous year, the very day Gemma and Hal had finally resolved their differences and put everyone else out of their misery by admitting how deeply, madly, and adoringly they loved each other.

Into that maelstrom of emotion, Bess knew, Nathaniel had stomped. He’d blustered and thrown down an ultimatum and been told what was what, in no uncertain terms, by his defiant sister. And he’d left, without Bess ever getting even a peek at him.

She looked around the taproom now and saw it as she imagined it must appear to his eyes.

Where it looked warm and welcoming to Bess, he probably found the mismatched chairs and scarred wooden tables pitiful. The gleaming bar in the corner spoke to Bess of countless nights of friendship and laughter, families she’d known since she was a girl begging her to sing them a tune and clapping in delight when she dried her hands on her apron and launched into some well-loved ballad.

To Nathaniel? She bit her lip. It no doubt appeared quite sad and shabby.

But there was no time for this. “They must all be abed, though I cannot think why when it’s barely half six. I hope no one is ill.”

Bess tugged Nathaniel across the empty taproom and up the stairs that led to the bedrooms above.

When they got to Henrietta’s chamber, Bess hesitated for only a second before she lifted her fist and knocked sharply on the door.

No sound or movement came from within, so Bess knocked again, louder this time. Finally, she heard a thud and the slow plod of bare feet padding closer. Her stomach flipped, sweat springing damp to her palms, but when the door cracked open and Henrietta’s sleepy, bewildered face appeared, Bess nearly wept.

“Good heavens,” said the dowager duchess in a voice still thick with slumber. “Bess! And dear Nathaniel, too!”

“Oh Henrietta,” Bess cried, holding her hands out beseechingly. “I have something terrible to tell you. Oh God. Perhaps I ought not come straight out with it. I don’t want the shock to overburden your nerves!”

Henrietta was sensitive; she’d come to Little Kissington last year deeply mired in a grief it had taken months to emerge from. What was Bess thinking, dumping this news on her in the middle of the night, without Gemma there to provide support?

Panicking, Bess turned to see what Nathaniel thought, cursing herself for not having spent the past hours of their desperate flight across the downs in preparation for this moment.

When she caught sight of him, though, his face was set in marble. Carved and cold and utterly unreadable.

Belatedly, Bess realized that this was quite a fraught meeting for him. Henrietta was the woman he blamed for seducing his father and sending him away to boarding school. The woman he’d said would never set foot in his home again—that he’d rather burn the place down, in fact, than see her in it.

How would he behave toward Henrietta now?

But instead of standing in stiff silence or freezing Henrietta with open contempt, Nathaniel said, “Perhaps we ought to sit down, Your Grace.”

The distant formality made Bess wince a little, but the consideration was genuine and brought a lump of gratitude to Bess’s throat.

Opening the door wider, Henrietta said, “You poor things, you look positively done in. What time is it?”

Henrietta blinked her blue eyes, so wide and dark, the same blue as her daughters’ though somehow far more guileless, and Bess stepped forward to take the older woman in her arms.

She clutched Henrietta’s soft shoulders, crushing the ruffles of her wrapper with the vehemence of her embrace. The rows of lace that edged Henrietta’s sleeping bonnet tickled Bess’s ear.

Henrietta had been so kind to Bess, and after this, she never would be again. Bess’s throat closed over, it was too awful, but she had to get the words out.

Before she could manage to croak out the horrible truth, however, Henrietta said, “Is this about Lucy? Because I’m sure she’ll be asleep by now, tired as we all are after yesterday’s excitement, but if you’d like to wake the little scamp and see for yourselves that she’s all right, I certainly understand and have no objections at all. What a trial that girl can be, I am sure!”

Bess staggered back from Henrietta’s concerned face and would have fallen, if not for Nathaniel’s strong arms coming around her and holding her up.

“Lucy is here? She’s all right?” Nathaniel confirmed.

Henrietta blinked. “Why, yes, dear, of course.”

Bess burst into tears.