“Have you ever met your sister?” Catherine retorted. “Have you ever tried to talk to her when he is in the room? Do not play ignorant now, John. We have discussed it ourselves.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” John said, but with the distinct air that he wasn’t being wholly truthful.
Trem shook his head. Catherine was right. He didn’t have time for John’s nonsense.
“I’m leaving,” he said, striding to the door and mentally preparing the instructions for his coachmen. “I need to find my fiancée.”
“And don’t you dare,” he said turning back in the doorway, catching the gaze of both Catherine and John, “interfere. Henrietta is mine now.”
Then, turning on his heel, he began his journey to Dorset.
Chapter Twenty
When Henrietta had returned from her outing with Cassandra and Mrs. Seymour, she hadn’t been at all sure of what she would do next. While she affected calm and happiness with her best friend and her mother on her ride back, she had felt outside of herself.
Therefore, when she had reentered Breminster House, she hadn’t known what to do with her alienation or her bone-deep sadness. When she passed through the entryway, the portrait of her father caught her eye. In this portrait, he looked handsome and relatively happy. Here, he was young and whole. Arrogant, too. You could see it in the set of his mouth. It was the same expression that John got when he knew he was right. Or, she hated to admit, that her mouth curled into when she knew something was a bad idea and she had decided to do it anyway. In short, in the picture, her father looked certain that his story would, somehow, come out right in the end.
She had never known her father when he looked like that. Her brother had. But Henrietta had only met the man after he had lost Mary Forster for good. When he had only Henrietta to remind him of his biggest mistake.
As she gazed at her father, another thought came to her mind. John had shown her the letter he had written to his son and heir to explain her parentage. He had written the words: Henrietta deserves to know that she has one parent living.
Her father had loved Mary Forster with his whole being. He had ruined John’s mother and their family over it. He had wanted her until the day he died. And he had wanted Henrietta to know her. Even though she had never known her father when he was young and arrogant, she had spent plenty of time with the man he had become. He had been a melancholy man but not a bad one. He had always treated her with kindness. He had loved her.
Perhaps, Henrietta had thought, she needed to meet Mary Forster and talk to her. She kept telling herself that she had no mother, but she did in fact have a mother. Maybe, then, she could shake this sadness, this sense of wrongness, that hung over her, if she went to the source herself. Mary Forster couldn’t be all bad if her father had loved her so much. And then she could marry Trem without this feeling of dread, of feeling unmoored, hovering over her consciousness.
All at once, she had decided to go to Dorset to see her. Suddenly, the urge to leave, to go, had become irresistible. She wanted to marry Trem with a clean soul. And the moment this path appeared before her, going down it seemed the only way to accomplish that goal.
However, when Henrietta Breminster had left London, it hadn’t been raining.
Furthermore, now that she had been in the carriage for a few hours, it occurred to her that she should have left Trem a note telling him she planned to come back soon. In her haste to leave, she had forgotten that they were supposed to go to the Brightley ball that evening and she worried that Trem would be alarmed when he discovered that she was gone. In retrospect, she contemplated, she almost certainly should have informed him—not to mention Catherine and John—that she was traveling to Dorset.
She would be back in only a few days, she rationalized. She would send Trem a letter once she reached Dorset. Catherine had told her where Mary Forster lived, but she planned to go to Edington Hall first and then set out from there. And she should be in Edington by tomorrow morning.
Still, there was no denying that she had not thought out every part of her plan. She had not considered, for instance, that it might rain. Nor had she considered the threat of highwaymen on a dark road alone at night with only old Percy the coachman for protection.
The carriage gave a horrible lurch. Christ, she thought. She also hadn’t considered how rutted the roads between London and Dorset could be in the spring. Especially in bad weather.
And then her stomach dropped.
Because she heard hoofbeats.
And hoofbeats on a dark, wet road at night only meant one thing.
Highwaymen.
“Oy!” she heard a male voice call. “Stop!”
Her blood ran cold. No, rather, she could practically feel icicles of terror forming in her blood.
The voice had a rich, sure timbre, with a familiar lilt. No, she thought, her mind was playing tricks on her. Why would the voice of a highwayman sound familiar?
A gunshot pierced the air and Henrietta truly froze. She heard a grunt and the sound of a man falling from his horse to the ground. The carriage slowed and then came to a stop. Whatever Henrietta had felt before, she thought, did not deserve the name of terror. This full-bodied paralysis was terror. Dear God, they’ve shot Percy, she thought, and now I’m going to be killed next.
Trem’s face floated into her mind. His hazel eyes and umber hair. The sly grin he gave her when he was about to pull a wicked maneuver—erotic or otherwise. All of a sudden, the sadness of earlier today that had inspired her to go on this ill-fated jaunt seemed very far away. What had been so wrong with her life twelve hours ago that she had thought such a measure necessary?
“I shot ’em, my lady!”
The head of Percy, the coachman who had worked for her family for decades, appeared through the doors of the carriage.
