Well, it would either be a highwayman, or—
Crack!
The carriage rocked, throwing Juliet up against the door. Lady Fosberry bounced on the cushions, but managed to stay upright by clutching at Juliet as if she were a cricket bat. Three or four bone-jarring bumps followed, before the carriage at last shuddered to a halt.
“Oh, my goodness! Juliet, are you hurt, child? Dear God, what happened? I thought we were stuck in the mud!”
Not any longer, it seemed. Their carriage had just plummeted a half-dozen feet, and was now listing heavily to one side. If it wasn’tquitea harbinger of doom, it was certainly concerning.
Juliet struggled to her knees and peered out the window. It was late afternoon, but the sky was so dark with ominous black clouds it might as well have been midnight. Everything was distorted with sheets of rain, but the shadowy lumps surrounding them were presumably trees, the black pit beneath them an ocean of mud, and the edge where the ground dropped steeply away…
Oh. The hired coachman’s defection made a lot more sensenow.
They were stuck on the side of a hill, with two of the carriage wheels already over the edge. The only reason they hadn’t plunged to their doom was that the wheels were buried deep in the mud.
The hill wasn’t a terribly steep one, but steep enough that if they slid any farther the carriage would overturn, toppling them roof over axle, and theywouldslide farther, as the rain continued to wash away the mud under their wheels.
It was another disaster in the making, but she wouldn’t give it a chance to strike. Sometimes a lady had to make her own luck, and this was one of those times. “Now then, my lady. I’m afraid we’ll have to walk the rest of the way to Steeple Cross.”
Lady Fosberry stared at her, aghast. “You mean for us to go wandering about the countryside on foot?”
“The landlady at The Fox said Steeple Cross isn’t more than ten miles east of Chipping Norton, and we’ve done eight miles of that already.” Her calculations might be just atouchoptimistic, but it couldn’t be more than a three-mile walk from here to Steeple Cross.
Certainly, no more than four.
“But you just told me our driver was likely on his way back to us!”
“Yes, well, I may have been mistaken.” She hadn’tlied, of course. Nothing so dishonest as that. She hadn’t precisely told the truth, either, but this was no time to quibble over verbs any more than it was adjectives.
“Here, my lady, slide to the other side of the seat, won’t you?” Juliet helped Lady Fosberry wriggle to the middle of the bench, then crawled over her on her hands and knees to the door. “Now, I’m just going to pop out there, and then I’ll reach in and help you out, all right?”
“Out? Oh, dear.Outside, in this weather! We’ll both be soaked to the skin!”
Better soaked than tumbled head over heels to the bottom of a hill and trapped inside a wrecked carriage, but there was no need to rattle poor Lady Fosberry further by being so brutally descriptive. “I’m afraid so, yes. The carriage isn’t quite steady, you see, and I don’t like for you to be jostled about.”
Or hurled out a window like a ragdoll.
Lady Fosberry cast an anxious look over her shoulder at the opposite window, then turned back to Juliet with a nod. “Yes, all right.”
“Good. Now, keep still for just a moment, my lady.”
It took a good deal of shimmying and squirming to get the door open at such an awkward angle, and even more to wriggle her way out of it, but she managed it, and was able to hold the door open for Lady Fosberry and help her out of the carriage. “Mind the edge, my lady. We can’t have you toppling down the hill, can we? There, that’s very good.”
“Good, is it? I admire your pluck, dearest, but I confess I find it difficult to be optimistic when I’m ankle deep in mud.”
It wasn’t just any mud either, but cold, slippery Oxfordshire mud, the sort that sucked at one’s feet with every step. “I’m certain the road will be better.”
But the road—if you could call it a road at all, which she didn’t—wasn’tbetter. It was more a torrent of mud with bits of higher ground visible here and there, like lily pads atop a pond.
Except instead of a pond, it was a deluge.
Dear God, how in the world could her ladyship make her way through it?
The answer was plain. Shecouldn’t.
Yet the mere idea of the alternative, leaving Lady Fosberry here alone while she went off to fetch help was so unbearable, it made Juliet’s heart plummet.
Oh,howhad things come to such a catastrophic pass as this?
