‘Oh, yes, excellent,’ Miss Beaumont said. ‘Are you a nervous traveller, Mr Cassian?’
‘I’m very well.’ Cassian didn’t want to talk about the crash, and hoped Daizell wouldn’t. He looked out of the window instead at the landscape jolting by, and took comfort from Daizell’s hand resting gently on his knee.
They didn’t crash. Mr Marston’s furious but competent driving got them to Stratford-upon-Avon in good time. It was a small town, rather low, with a mix of some fine new houses, and some marvellous older ones, black-beamed in the Tudor style.
It shouldn’t take long for them to learn if Mr John Martin had travelled through, but first they had a promise to fulfil.Accordingly, he and Daizell took a room at the White Swan on Rother Street, and then Daizell and Miss Beaumont trotted off to carry out the motions of a wedding. Mr Marston set out to find a way up north that might evade pursuit, and Cassian was left to his own devices.
It felt rather flat, and he realised he would rather have been an actor in the drama. It was of course best that he should stay out of the business. The Duke of Severn could not involve himself in what was, frankly, troublemaking, and Daizell was better suited and placed for the work. And yet—
Maybe, next time he faced a challenge, he would think how to address it himself, before he asked for help.
He filled the time as best he could. He wandered around the town between the various coaching inns, enquiring about John Martin without success, and commanded luncheon at an ordinary with an ease that amazed himself once he was addressing his food. It had only been a few days, but he was becoming used to doing these things already. Or possibly he had so much on his mind that he didn’t have room to worry about trivialities.
He certainly had plenty to think about. The crash. Miss Beaumont’s problems, which were in no way his, but in which he was nevertheless tangled. His quest to track down his missing ring, which was starting to seem very unlikely indeed, and the question of why that didn’t seem to matter as much as once it had. Daizell.
Daizell. He could still feel a phantom hand on his knee, offering silent support for his unreasoned fear, and a phantom arm over his shoulder, close and comfortable in sleep. He wanted those touches to be real.
This was foolish. Daizell was a wastrel who came of bad stock, and attempted to elope with heiresses, and wascurrently making a mockery of the sacrament of marriage. He needed to remember that those were bad things.
He trudged on around the alehouses in the centre of the little town till late afternoon, then returned to their inn, where he sat in the snug with a book, recuperating his energies after a frustrating day. As the many churches reached a loose consensus on six o’clock, Daizell reappeared.
‘Cass.’ He looked bright-eyed, hair chaotic, buzzing with energy, and Cassian’s moral resolutions were swamped like a sandcastle in the tide. ‘Good evening. What a day. Have you a drink? New book?’
‘There’s a bookseller here. I couldn’t find the new novel by Mrs Swann that you mentioned but I picked upNightmare Abbey, which I had not read.’
‘How is it?’
‘Terrible.’
‘Excellent, excellent. Let me just command a drink, I’m parched.’ Daizell waved at a barmaid. ‘What have you been up to?’
‘Nothing as exciting as you, by the look of things.’
Daizell grinned. ‘I have been enjoying myself, I will admit. Miss Beaumont has a remarkable turn for skulduggery, and an alarming ruthlessness. It was most entertaining. We purchased a common licence, and had a conversation with the vicar which I am quite sure he will remember. Miss Beaumont discussed our intention to marry and her flight from a wicked guardian with astonishing invention, and confided in his housekeeper that she intended to evade pursuit by dressing as a man. I understand the vicar has no power to forbid the banns from being read, or to refuse to marry us on grounds of disapproval alone, but good Lord, he looked like he wanted to.’
‘I imagine he did.’ Hoaxing vicars was not a respectable way to go on, and Daizell seemed to have enjoyed it a great deal. Cassian was torn between very natural disapproval, the fear that he would not be able to hoax a vicar with any sort of aplomb, and a lurking regret he hadn’t tried. ‘Do you think it will help?’
‘If Vier manages to follow her tracks here, it’s quite possible this will throw him off. And if it does, and they can get ahead, they may be able to lose the pursuit altogether.’
‘Worthwhile, then. I hope it doesn’t become common knowledge that she proposed to go about in breeches.’
‘I don’t think she’ll care, as long as she gets away with it. And, as she remarked, once she has her money, nobody will worry about how she got it. I hope she succeeds,’ Daizell added thoughtfully. ‘I’m glad I met her. I rather resented our last encounter, but she made me a very frank apology today and I feel better about it now.’
‘What happened?’ Cassian asked. ‘The elopement, I mean. You didn’t seem to be very, uh . . . That is, were you awfully fond of one another?’
‘Do you want to know? It’s not terribly edifying.’
‘I should like to. If you don’t mind.’
‘Ah, it’s the truth, so you might as well. It was not a Romeo and Juliet affair,’ Daizell said, with a smile that wasn’t quite as sparky as before. ‘There was a very tedious party, in a house where I was staying. Vier was there, and Miss Beaumont with him. She accosted me and proposed an elopement.’
Cassian blinked. ‘Just like that?’
‘More or less. We spoke briefly and she said she intended to get out from under Vier’s thumb by any means necessary. That was, apparently, me. I was in rather a bad situationmyself so a rich bride falling into my lap seemed a stroke of luck. As it turned out, she was using me to get out of the house, and intended to send me off separately by some ruse, with pursuit following in my direction while she fled with her swain – I assume Marston, since he clearly lacks the brains to arrange his own elopement. All’s fair in love and war, I suppose. But Vier caught up with us very quickly. He retrieved her, and I had to leg it over a wall to get away.’
Cassian blinked at that. ‘You left her behind?’
‘Vier is her legal guardian, and he had four men with him including one carrying the much-mentioned horsewhip. Of course I left her behind: what else could I do?’
