With that, the baron straightened her bonnet and retied her bow. When he’d finished, he nodded at his handiwork.
“As well done as any lady’s maid, I dare say.”
She smiled. “Then I am ready.”
He offered her his arm, which she took, and they proceeded along the main road, which went from Carlisle on the English side all the way up to Glasgow many miles north. And of course, just a little way on, a few hundred yards, was the small village of Gretna Green. A cluster of clay houses met Miranda’s gaze.
But they turned right onto a footpath with a sign toward Springfield.
“I don’t understand,” she said, hurrying to keep up as the sun was dropping quickly toward the horizon, and Philip increased his pace.
“I think the inn up ahead is closer than the blacksmith’s at the Headlesscross.”
“The what?” she asked.
“Where the five roads meet in Gretna Green.”
Before she could ask anymore, a collection of buildings that didn’t amount to enough even to warrant the designation of a village came into view. With only one large structure, the white-washed, two-story inn proclaimed itself “The King’s Head” by its sign. Apparently, thirty paces from the road, they’d arrived in Springfield.
Miranda had expected something a little merrier, but the inn had no flowers, nor a blade of grass out front, not even a shrub or a tree. The only welcoming signal was the smoke pouring out of its two chimneys, one on either end of the roof.
“It’s not as pretty as last night’s inn,” she pointed out.
Regardless, Philip didn’t hesitate to draw her toward the single door between two sash windows with three more over the top.
“We’ll try here first,” Philip said. “I have no doubt I shall be able to hire a wainwright and send him back to fix our carriage.”
Inside the hostelry, however, they were met with disappointing news.
“A wainwright I can send to your coach, and no problem,” said the manager, a middle-aged man who was as round as he was tall. “I even have a nice room with a good view of the Solway for your night’s stay, but our anvil priest, as we call him, Mr. Elliot, has already left. You missed him by a quarter of an hour.”
“The devil!” Philip muttered. Then he looked at the man again. “Can’t you perform the ceremony, such as it is?”
The manager’s cheeks reddened. “That’s not the way we do things in Scotland.”
Philip sighed with exasperation. “That is exactly the way you do things in Scotland, my good man. That’s why we’ve come.”
Miranda waited for the man to be insulted, but instead he began to laugh. He laughed so hard he had to wipe his eyes on a handkerchief he pulled from his sleeve.
“You’ve got me there, sir, and no mistake. But I mean to say is we have an understanding here in Springfield and with the next village over, Gretna Green, as to who will do the honors and who takes the money, and then—”
“We have no time for the entire workings of this dodgy arrangement,” Philip said. “Will the blacksmith still be open?”
The inn’s manager made a great show of looking out the window and then even lugging his impressive girth outside to stare west toward Bowness and beyond where the River Esk spilled out into bay known as the Solway Firth.
Finally, he proclaimed, “The sun be going down fast.”
“Blast it all, man! We know that,” Philip said.
Miranda couldn’t help the nervous laugh that escaped her.
“You’d best hurry then,” the manager said. “You don’t have to go back on the path, just go up that way and then take the first turning.”
Philip was already tugging her along. “We can see it from here,” he snapped. “It’s less than half a mile. I don’t even know why you call it another village!”
“Thank you,” Miranda called behind her. After all, they might be spending the night in that establishment, graceless as it was, and she didn’t want to be given soiled sheets for her baron’s churlishness.
“I’m sorry about this,” Philip said, striding even more quickly than before.
