“There is no such lady for you.” Nor was there any such lady forhim. There wasnolady for him at all, come to that. If he’d briefly thought otherwise, it had only been very briefly, and that madness had thankfully passed—
“What the devil is that?” Barnaby was peering over Miles’s shoulder.
“What are loins? I’d think you’d know that by now.” Barnaby had gone to Eton, after all.
Barnaby blinked, then swiped his arm across his eyes. “It looks like—”
“I know what loins look like, cousin. There’s no need for an anatomy lesson.”
“For God’s sake, Cross, not loins!That!” Barnaby pointed toward a thick grove of trees at the edge of the field. “Do you see those tracks in the mud?”
“I see them.” The long, jagged furrows cut deep into the soaked ground were the exact shape and width of carriage wheels, and they led to a wide gap in the tree line that was surrounded by broken branches.
A carriage had slid sideways off the road and into the trees.
Miles stilled, but the only sound was the ceaseless pounding of the rain. Steely gray clouds had massed to the east, bleak shadows against the backdrop of a foreboding sky, almost like a warning, a sign of bad luck to come. “Quickly, Barnaby. There’s a hill on the other side of those trees. If the carriage slid too far, they may have gone over the edge.”
He jerked on the reins, harness jingling as his horse gave a protesting toss of her head, and then he was off, Barnaby charging after him.
ChapterTwo
Juliet Templeton didn’t believe in bad luck.
Black cats had never troubled her. Downturned horseshoes didn’t give her palpitations, nor did she fall into fits of despair over cracked looking glasses. At the advanced age of twenty-one—an age at which a lady was said by some to be hovering on the verge of spinsterhood—she’d yet to experience an honest-to-goodness harbinger of doom.
Dire forebodings, ill omens and threatening signs were for the feeble-minded, not for ladies who could recite every word of Shakespeare’sRomeo and Julietfrom memory.
But if shehadbelieved in such things, she might be a trifle worried right now.
“I don’t like to be grim, dearest, but I can’t help but think we made a dreadful mistake leaving Fowler behind at the Fox Inn with the carriage. He… oh, my goodness!” They pitched sideways, and Lady Fosberry was obliged to grab Juliet’s arm to keep from tumbling off the bench. “Now this other scoundrel has run off, and left two defenseless ladies alone in the wilderness to face whatever tragedy befalls us!”
Defenseless? Hardly, but poor Lady Fosberry had gone rather shrill, so it didn’t seem an appropriate time to quibble over adjectives. “Nonsense, my lady! Why, I’m certain he’s on his way back to us even now.”
Hewasn’ton his way back. Not now, and not ever.
He being their hired driver, who’d leapt from the box of the disabled carriage hours ago, swearing he’d find his way to Steeple Cross and fetch help. Instead, he’d released the horse from its traces, mounted it, and promptly vanished into the night like an apparition.
“Fowler told me he was well enough to make it another ten miles, and I daresay I should have listened to him. He never would have left us in such a dreadful predicament.”
“Oh, come now, my lady. It’s not as dreadful as you make it out to be.”
Itwasas dreadful as her ladyship made it out to be, and worse besides.
The trip from London had begun delightfully enough. They’d passed the time in pleasant chatter, interspersed with an occasional snooze on Lady Fosberry’s part.
If Juliethadoccasionally been troubled by a pang of misgiving about what might await her at Lord Cross’s house party, it was easy enough to dismiss it while the sun was shining, and endless green hills were rolling by outside the carriage window.
But as soon as they ventured into Oxfordshire, the heavens had opened with a vengeance, battering the roof of the carriage and pummeling Fowler, Lady Fosberry’s driver, with such unrelenting fury the poor man had been feverish by the time they’d reached Chipping Norton.
So, they’d gone on, entrusting themselves to a hired driver for the last ten miles of their journey, leaving Fowler at The Fox to rest until he felt well enough to come to Steeple Cross with the carriage.
That had been their first mistake, and rather an egregious one, as it turned out.
Since then, the calamities had multiplied with alarming rapidity, until they were beset on every side. One of their wheels was sunk deep in the mud, the rain had reached biblical levels of fury, dark was descending upon them, and the wind was threatening to tear the doors right off the carriage.
Really, it was enough to make a lady doubt her decisions.
But it wasn’t as if some hulking villain had come lurching out of the darkness, pistol in hand, and threatened their lives. As bad as their predicament was, it couldn’t properly be termed a harbinger of doom without a highwayman, could it? Unless a highwayman appeared, she refused to believe the elements had conspired to punish them.
