The driver moved the carriage adeptly back into the flow of traffic down the street, then nimbly moved to go back in thedirection they’d come, as Letitia’s budget did not extend to the high-quality shops on Bond Street, which had taken them away from Aaron’s Mayfair home.
They were nearly all the way back to the shop where she had met that needlessly difficult gentleman—why couldn’t handsome men just, for once, notruinthe pleasure of looking at them with all the irritating things they had to say?—When Clio heard the scream of horses, followed by the shriek of a woman.
That was her only warning before the carriage jolted hard enough to throw her to the ground and then, almost lazily, tipped over until it came to a bone-rattling stop on its side.
For a moment, Clio just lay there, checking to confirm that she was still alive.
When her breath returned to her in a stabbing jolt, she accepted that she was, in fact, alive––and indeed, relatively unharmed. Death had to either hurt less or much, much more.
She was, however, in a very ungainly heap at the bottom of the carriage.
Or, rather, the side of the carriage. Which was now, as she could see through the cracked window glass, pressed against the cobblestone of the street.
“Ow,” she said, pushing herself up to a seated position.
After that, she registered all the yelling.
People in the street were shouting, the noise seemingly coming from all around the carriage. Through it all, one voice pierced through, more familiar than it ought to have been.
“What the hell is going on here?”
She couldn’t mistake that rough Northern accent. She made a face, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue, even though nobody could see her, and it made the faint ringing in her ears worse.
Somebody else, clearly cowed by the furious way the gentleman made his demands, murmured an inaudible reply.
“Well, no surprise,” growled the man from the toy store. “Look how much weight you put on this one side? No wonder the wheel went off its axle.”
He thumped a part of the carriage—Clio could no longer properly tell up from down—that was near to her ear. To her humiliation, she let out a shriek.
There was an ominous pause outside, then?—
“Is someone inside here?” the gentleman demanded. The cowed voice sounded even more nervous this time around. “What the hell are you standing around for, then?” the gentleman snapped. “Who is in there? Are you all right?”
Clio assumed that this last question was for her sake, and she tried to summon her voice. The noise and the shouting were starting to fray at her nerves, however, and she was getting a cramp in her leg from crouching awkwardly on the floor, and all of this came together to remind her that she was trapped in here, in this tight, closed space.
Alone.
“Ah, yes,” she said, her voice coming out thin and high. “Yes … I’m unharmed.”
There was another pause.
“Princess? Is that you?”
Clio’s humiliation was complete. Bad enough that she was trapped, bad enough that she was feeling anxiety clawing at her throat–but nowthis manknew it, too?
“Don’t call me that,” she ventured, but her voice was even thinner, even higher. She sounded like a bloody mouse in a children’s pantomime, for goodness’ sake.
There was some more pronounced rattling and shaking during which Clio couldn’t decide if it was better or worse that she couldn't see what was happening. Then the face from before, the handsome face that went with the irksome personality, appeared at what was now the top of the carriage.
For a moment, she was shocked enough that her fear vanished.
“Did youclimbup the side of the broken carriage?” she asked incredulously. Good Lord, how devilishly risky. He could have tipped the whole thing right back over, with her inside getting rattled about like an egg meeting a whisk.
He was determined to be difficult, however, so of course, he mistook her.
“I told ye, I dinnae need your pity because of my leg,” he snapped. “Now, do ye want me to help you out of there or not?”
He must have grown up near the Northern border, she realized; hints of a Scottish accent crept into his voice, putting his origins even more remote than those of her cousin, Helen. It was odd for a gentleman, as he had implied himself to be. Most men of his class would have had tutors who schooled any regional accents out of their voices long before they left for school.
