There would be a full moon tonight—Madelaine was sure Lady Frances had timed her picnic for it—but the servants had lit torches too. They would be clearing away and packing up long into the dark.
Madelaine glanced back as the landau pulled away. The torches smoked and glowed, making new, shifting shadows on the tent’s canvas walls. It looked quite medieval. Henry VIII’s ghost wouldn’t have felt out of place.
She sat back against her seat, the view being quickly lost. The landau’s covers had been pulled up, enclosing them in their own, dim, moving tent, the scent of sun-warmed leather and dye strong in the small space.
The tired commentary the other three ladies shared soon wore out, and within fifteen minutes everyone was drowsing in their own corner.
Despite her own fatigue, Madelaine was too tense to fully close her eyes. She sat looking through the open slice of window, watching the passing silhouettes of tree and hedge against the darkening sky. Lord Cotereigh rode somewhere close behind them. His horse was black, entirely black, she’d noted with a hidden snort of amusement. Ofcoursehe chose his animals to match his fashions.
Several other of the gentlemen rode nearby too, and though it was 1812 and not 1712, and the highwaymen had long been hung into oblivion, there was comfort in that. Lord Cotereigh wouldn’t be an easy mark. Lord Cotereigh was—
She cringed. Why had she done that? Overflowed like a broken tap, all that…that pain and nonsense spilling out. What did he care? She was only a chess piece, something to be moved around his gameboard at will. What strange ways they thought up to entertain themselves, all these people who had too much and cared too little.
Peacocks. All of them. Dragging their consequence behind them, even if it wearied them to death.
“I liked hearing you talk…”
There were better things to think of. She gave herself a shake. The journey back to London could be more usefully spent. She would take a mental catalogue of everyone she had met today, commit their names and personalities to memory, and work out which of them could be useful, which it might be worth approaching, and how.
But she must have dozed herself. It seemed only a moment later when she jerked awake to the clatter of hooves on cobbles. Lady Frances woke too, yawning widely, only belatedly covering her mouth with the back of her hand. She leant forward, blinking sleepy eyes, and looked out of the window. When she turned back, smiling, her energies appeared to have been fully restored.
“Is it about nine, do you think?”
The two other ladies woke at her voice, the dark-haired one groping for her reticule, which, she promised, contained a watch.
“Certainly it’s no later than ten,” Lady Frances said. “Plenty of time to get changed before Lady Lloyd’s ball this evening. It does seem a little greedy havingtwoengagement balls, but her father was still in India at the time of the first one.”
The watch being discovered, the time was discovered also. It was twenty minutes past nine.
“Plenty of time,” said Lady Frances, pleased. Then, to the younger woman at her side, “Are you still planning on lavender?”
“Mama said cream. And my pearls.”
Whatever Lady Frances’s expert opinion of this might have been, Madelaine would never know. There was the sudden piercing cry of a child in pain.
It was faint but clearly recognisable, the shrill anguish making her heart skip and her blood run cold. Looking anxiously from the window, she thought she saw an alleyway flash by; she thought she saw two figures in the lantern-lit shadows, one large and one small.
“Please, mister, stop, stop, please…”
There and gone in an instant, a young boy’s sobbing voice. The carriage bowled on, the alleyway already behind them.
“Stop!” she called. “Stop the carriage.”
“Whatever—”
But she paid no heed to Lady Frances or the surprised exclamations of the others. “Stop!” She leant out of the window, calling to the postillions. “Driver! Stop!”
The nearest rider glanced back then called ahead. “Woah, woah, halt.”
Her hand was on the latch before the carriage had lurched to a stop. She stumbled getting out, but, picking up her skirts, ran back the way they’d come.
“Mrs Ardingly!”
A man’s shout. Lord Cotereigh, somewhere up high on his dark horse. She ran past him too.
There, there, that was the alleyway. And yes, there were the sobbing cries and a man’s voice, rough, angry, cursing.
“Let that boy go this instant!”
