A terrible noise clawed at the inside of her chest; she genuinely didn’t know what would happen if she let it out. A laugh? A sob? A scream?
Nathaniel’s brow drew down. “You are not to blame for Lucy’s misconduct?—”
“Yes, I am!” Bess burst out, striking her own chest, right above her frozen, calcified heart with a fist. “It was meant to be my only purpose in staying in London—to look out for Lucy and guide her. But I was weak. Selfish. I thought I could have something for myself, I told myself I wasn’t hurting anyone else, and now Lucy. Is. Gone.”
“If you must blame someone, blame me. You were staying in my house; I am the head of the family. I am the only male relative Lucy has left. She should have been able to look to me for guidance, and instead I hemmed her round with tutors and lessons and suitors, and pretended that was enough to discharge my duty as her elder brother.”
Bess shook, unconsoled. “You’re right. We’re both terrible.”
“You’re not terrible,” he said, a flat denial. “You’re perfect.”
The noise in her chest resolved itself into a scream she caught behind her teeth. “You must not say things like that to me.”
His brows drew together. “Why not?”
God, he would break her. Into a hundred jagged pieces.
“Because,” she explained painfully, “there is a very great danger that I will start to believe you. And that, I cannot afford. So if you have any care for me at all, you will stop saying and doing things that tempt me to believe there is some sort of future for us when there is not.”
He stared down at her, hands clenched into fists at his sides and storm clouds darkening his eyes to gray-blue. “What if there could be?”
“There can’t,” Bess cried, squeezing her eyes shut and wrapping her arms about her own ribs to hold in her wild, runaway heart. “Nathaniel, you cannot speak of your stepmother without resentment, decades after she married your father. One day, if we stayed together, you would resent me in the same way. You would look at me, and I would be able to see it, the way the fire in your eyes had died out, leaving nothing behind but contempt.”
He stiffened beside her, his profile cast in stone as he watched the road ahead of them. “I would never look at you that way.”
Bess felt cold, all the way to the heart of her. “I am nothing more than a cook in a coaching inn. A servant, like Henrietta. Your good name is everything to you. Would you really endanger it for a tumble with a servant?”
“Stop it,” he said through gritted teeth. His hands were clenched on the reins as if he would destroy them.
But Bess couldn’t stop now—though it was too little, and far too late. She forced the words through her raw, constricted throat.
“Once we find Lucy and deliver her safely into her mother’s arms, you will go back to London, and we will never see each other again. Whatever this is, this all-consuming thing, it is over. Don’t you see? The price of this passion has already been too high.”
There was not much chance of catching up with Lucy’s mail coach, Nathaniel knew. The Royal Mail coaches were the fastest way to travel—no tolls, new horses every two hours and changes accomplished in five minutes or less, no stops or delays.
A Royal Mail coach could make the run all the way to Bath in a matter of fifteen hours, with great discomfort and hardship to the passengers, who would not be offered the chance to rest or eat or even alight from the carriage for long enough to refresh themselves.
He pictured his youngest sister clinging to the outside of the coach, not even afforded the safety and comfort of an inside seat. What was she thinking? Had she truly been so miserable in his care?
What sort of man was he, that he couldn’t keep one innocent young woman safe and happy for the length of a single Season?
With effort, he put aside the self-recriminations to focus on the task at hand. Lucy had a good ten hours’ head start. She would almost certainly reach Little Kissington long before he and Bess did. He would not subject Bess to such a breakneck pace. But they would not be far behind.
It took most of Nathaniel’s concentration to handle the high-spirited pair of geldings as they wended their way out of London to the Bath Road. Whatever he had left to spare was focused entirely on the rigid, upright form of the woman sitting beside him on the box.
She had not spoken one word since they left town.
Nathaniel cast yet another quick glance at her white, drawn profile. He didn’t like the dark shadows beneath her eyes, which were fixed on the road before them as though sheer will could make the miles go by more quickly.
The curricle was not as comfortably sprung as his spacious coach; they felt every rut in the road with jarring, jostling force. Bess did not complain, simply clung grimly to the bench seat and left Nathaniel plenty of space to handle the reins and keep the horses to the swiftest pace they could steadily maintain.
They would reach the tollhouse at Maidenhead before long, and he would ensure that Bess took a brief respite while the horses were changed and he procured them some provisions for the hours of travel still ahead.
The drumbeat of the horses’ hooves on the well-maintained road drowned out everything but Nathaniel’s thoughts, which circled relentlessly around what Bess had said back at the Swan.
I thought I could have something for myself, I told myself I wasn’t hurting anyone else…
He feared that Lucy running away had only confirmed everything Bess ever thought about her purpose in life being to care for others before herself. But that wasn’t what tore at him the most savagely.
