A trio of men appeared on the path to the stable, running toward them. “Let go!” Lucasta shrieked. One of her flailing heels dug into the animal’s side.
The horse leapt forward with a power and speed Lucasta had never imagined possible. She swallowed a scream of pure fear as her whole body jolted. She squeezed her eyes shut again, but when she started sliding, she had to open them and clamp her legs on either side of the horse, uncaring of who saw her petticoats. The jounce of the horse’s gallop jarred her teeth.
The trio of men fell back as the horse hurtled toward them, and a flare of triumph and relief soared through Lucasta as she shot by. She was free. She would ride to the nearest house she could find, call out for aid, find some way to transport herself back to London and safety and Jem and?—
“Hi, Heller,” Gale called. “Whoa, boy! Whoa, Heller.”
One of the footmen flung himself into the horse’s path, and the animal reared. Lucasta scrabbled for purchase as the world went vertical. There followed an extraordinary weightless sensation, a feeling of being completely untethered, and an astonishing euphoria that washed through her even as her body froze end to end with fear.
She slammed into the ground, her head bouncing off the gravel, and the air left her lungs. A great weight fell onto her chest. She couldn’t breathe.
She was going to die here, die in this driveway, without ever hearing her foundlings perform, without ever telling Jem how much she loved him.
Dimly, as through water, her cousin’s face appeared above her. “Lucasta!” he exclaimed. “You could have killed yourself!”
I did, she tried croaking, but only her mouth moved, not her lungs. She tried sucking in air.
“Here now, that’s a high price for your freedom,” he scolded, bending toward her.
It isn’t, Lucasta wanted to say. Miss Gregoire’s girls fought until there was nothing left in them. Then Gale bent to lift her from the ground, and she realized that she was not numb after all. A pain she had never felt plowed through her body like a burning comet, and Lucasta Lithwick, who had never been delicate in her life, fainted in her cousin’s arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jem strode into the parlor of the Pevensey house without waiting for the footman to announce him.
“I’ve finally heard word of Lucasta,” he said before he was fully in the room. He waved the brief, mysterious missive in the air.
Trevor was the only one present, and he tossed his newspaper onto a stack beside him as he rose. “One of your men found her?”
“No, a letter from herself. Or something like it.” Jem held out the sheet of parchment, feeling a surge of possessiveness as the other man plucked it from his hands.
Trevor’s brows lifted. “It’s a poem.”
For him. She had written to him. Jem could not check the feeling of jubilation that had filled him since the butler at Arendale House brought the post.
Trevor had, like him, been searching for days, and all her friends were frantic, writing letter after letter to everyone they knew, wearing down the Baron with their pleas to frank each missive in search of Lucasta. But she’d contacted him. Jem.
Though the letter held no information of her whereabouts, it was the first contact they’d had since she disappeared. The first clue.
A poem, by one Richard Lovelace, a poet he’d never heard of, with a brief introduction scribbled above it:
Milord Payne: you asked once the provenance of my unusual name. It was invented by a poet my father loved, one of those they called the Cavaliers, who fought for King Charles in the civil war. I found it among my cousin’s books and thought of you. –L.
The poem was titled “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars.” It was a strange, brief little ballad about a man who was leaving his sweetheart for the honor and glory of battle, and informing her that, rather than lonely or bereft, she ought to feel pleased by his choice and think the better of him for it.
“Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,” Trevor read aloud, his brow furrowing, “that from the nunnery / Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind / To war and arms I fly’—” He looked up. “Have you been corresponding in rubbish poetry, then?”
“No, I’m certain it’s a hint. A code of some sort. She’s trying to tell us what happened, but she isn’t at liberty to speak freely.”
Jem paced the parlor, which held the damp chill of the day, a fire not being laid. A poorly painted fire screen, not yet finished, stood in one corner. Jem clenched and unclenched his hands.
“If only his man would let us into the Frotheringale townhouse. I don’t believe for a moment that your cousin has been indisposed all this time. I’m sure we could throttle information out of him, if we could only get inside.”
“But the men we have watching the house have only seen servants coming and going,” Trevor replied, returning to the note. “‘A new mistress now I chase’— If it’s code, I think she’s breaking it off with you, old boy.”
A lump like cold pudding quivered in Jem’s gut. Lucasta had good reason to fly from him.
He’d behaved abominably when he discovered the agreement she’d made with Judith behind his back. His grandfather the Marquess had suddenly descended on the household, ill and quarrelsome, and the hours of grating lectures from the old man had left Jem so raw that he’d unleashed his unhappiness on Lucasta, punishing her as if she’d been conspiring against him when she’d done nothing but bring tenderness and light and joy to his family. To him.
