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“I’m sorry!” Elspeth wailed. “I was so tired of being in that carriage. I just wanted to go to bed.”

“I know,” Jane said, trying once again to dull the sharpness in her tone. The maid was young and in many ways naive. How was she supposed to know what Jane had learned over ten years of teaching Lady Margaret—that the girl was crafty as a Whitechapel street urchin and just as slippery.

“Why didn’t we take the train?” Elspeth cried.

Jane didn’t have time to explain—yet again—that Lord and Lady Rawson felt traveling in a private carriage with no family crest through tiny villages would be far more anonymous than parading their daughter through the middle of Euston Station with her governess, maid, and a footman in tow. It would be too hard to maintain the pretense that Lady Margaret had fallen ill and was confined to her Yorkshire home for her convalescence if she was seen healthy and traveling on one of the country’s most trafficked railways.

“Elspeth.” Jane gripped the girl by the shoulders. “I need you to dress.”

“Where are you going?” Elspeth asked, her sobs replaced by a hint of panic.

“To see if anyone saw Lady Margaret leave. If we’re lucky, she might not have too much of a head start.”

The maid sniffled but nodded before withdrawing.

Jane turned on the hard heel of her boot and swept down the passageway, trying her best to rationalize the situation as she went. Lady Margaret had always been the sort to push boundaries before pulling back and smoothing ruffled feathers with cooing words and sweet smiles. Several times she’d run off from Jane while they’d shopped on Bond Street, only to be found a few hours later enjoying a cup of tea with an equally willful friend in the back of a tearoom, chaperoned by the well-meaning but far too indulgent Elspeth. But Lady Margaret’s latest stunt—well, that had been a step too far for Lord and Lady Rawson.

Jane hadn’t been in the room two weeks ago when Lady Margaret announced to her mother and father that she’d secretly become engaged to Mr. James Lawrence, but she—and no doubt the rest of Mayfair—had heard the ensuing row. Lady Margaret had made a vast miscalculation if she thought that the earl and countess would allow their only child to attach herself to a man with no prospects, no title, and no fortune who’d engaged himself to two heiresses in as many seasons before jilting the poor women for richer prey. They immediately forbade their daughter from seeing or communicating with Mr. Lawrence again.

This, naturally, only made Lady Margaret try harder to continue her attachment to the roguish and admittedly dashing young man. When, a week after the ill-fated engagement announcement, Lady Rawson had discovered a stack of letters from Mr. Lawrence stashed among her daughter’s needlework, she’d ordered the girl packed off to Yorkshire. Locked away in the great house to think about the life-changing mistake she’d nearly made, Lady Margaret would be able to do far less damage to her reputation than she could while surrounded by temptations of London. It would also give the earl time to arrange a meeting, open his bankbook, and pay off Mr. Lawrence to end the engagement discreetly. That would be that.

And Jane? She’d simply been collateral damage in the war between daughter and parents—the governess caught up in the middle of a family dispute. She was going north as well, away from the few friends she had in London. She’d always wanted to travel, to see the world outside of the confines of a governess’s restricted, disciplined life, but this wasn’t what she’d had in mind.

On the ground floor, Jane pushed open the door to the inn’s public dining room. It was empty except for the innkeeper’s daughter, who’d served them the night before.

“The young lady I was traveling with,” Jane called out to the girl. “Have you seen her?”

The girl started but dropped her gaze to the counter she was wiping down. “I haven’t seen anyone today, ma’am.”

The girl was lying, not that it was surprising. Lady Margaret had a way about her that drew people in, and those she couldn’t win over were usually more than happy to put their loyalty up for sale.

“What’s your name?” Jane asked, trying to keep her voice light and friendly.

“Sally,” the girl mumbled.

“Sally, Lady Margaret isn’t in her room. That means that she has to have come downstairs at some point. Since I doubt she would have thought to go through the kitchen, I assume she walked through here. Now, I want you to answer me honestly this time. Did you see Lady Margaret this morning?”

“My horse!” A man’s voice cut through the quiet of the morning. “Someone’s stolen my damned horse!”

Jane groaned and picked up her skirts. Only Lady Margaret could stir up that sort of frustration in a person before breakfast.

She rushed outside to find a tall, imposing man standing at the door of the inn’s large stable. He was gesturing wildly with a riding crop, a long lock of his blond hair falling into his eyes as though a rake of his hands had knocked it out of place.

“Excuse me, sir,” Jane called as she forced herself to put one foot in front of the other, striding toward the avenging god while keeping a close eye on the crop. It wasn’t as though she thought the man would use it on her, but it made her nervous nonetheless.

“What?” the man snapped, whirling around. As soon as he discovered who had addressed him, he sucked a breath in and said, “I’m sorry, madam. You’ve caught me at a disadvantage.”

“Your horse has been stolen.”

Instead of starting to yell again, as she expected, the man offered a crooked grin and whacked the crop sheepishly against the top of one of his muddy boots. “Is it that obvious?”

Jane blinked, caught up in his smile. “I—I did manage to overhear something about it.”

“I also apologize for that. I don’t usually make a habit of yelling curses in public before breakfast.”

“And after breakfast?” she asked.

The man’s eyebrows jerked up. “Only on special occasions, of course.”