Page 73 of How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days

‘Have you tried turning the handle and pulling at the same time?’ Lydia asked.

Ashford stepped back and gave sarcastic little wave. ‘By all means, try this magical technique.’

‘There is no need for that tone,’ she said, muscling him out of the way, and giving it a go herself.

It didn’t budge.

‘It’s stuck,’ she said.

Ashford reached round her and began pounding his fist on the door.

‘Stop making a hullabaloo,’ Lydia said crossly. ‘We don’t want people to find us.’

‘Don’t we?’

‘Not alone, behind a locked door – they’ll think you were after my virtue.’

‘Believe me, I want nothing less in the world than your virtue,’ Ashford muttered.

‘And then we’ll have to marry, which neither of us want in the slightest.’

Ashford let his hands drop. ‘It would appear dreadfully improper,’ he admitted. ‘Unless it is someone we could trust to remain discreet …’

‘If Pip were to pass by – or my lady’s maid,’ Lydia agreed. ‘Then we might attract their attention without concern.’

She laid her ear against the door, listening hard. But then, of course, Pip was not going to be walking down to dinner yet – by now, he would be trying to sneak into Dacre’s rooms, and she was meant to be keeping all the lords and ladies safely downstairs. She had to escape this room, and quickly.

‘This is utter nonsense.’ Ashford took an irritable turn about the room. ‘A pointless exercise.’

‘And do you have any bright ideas?’

Ashford paused, thinking, and then made his way over to the windows. They were very large, beginning just above his knee and running right up into the ceiling. Ashford unhinged the latch and pushed both panes open, and Lydia leant round him to stick her entire torso out – or at least she tried, but she had no more stuck out her head, when Ashford had looped a hasty arm about her waist and tugged her back.

‘Do you mind?’ she demanded. Distinctly flustered, she began slapping at his arms.

‘Do you have a death wish?’ he said tightening his hold. ‘We are three floors up!’

‘We are two,’ she said, hands pressing his chest away. Her heart had begun to beat rather quickly and she had the absurd fear he might be able to feel it. ‘I’m just looking.’

He relaxed his hold, though reluctantly, and Lydia briskly stepped out of his arms and leant out again, to review the distance between the window and the ground – glad to be away from him and his … silly arms. She was correct – they were on the second floor, ten feet above the ground if her eye was correct – far enough that one could certainly not jump.

‘Perhaps we could tie some sheets together,’ she said, recollecting a plot from one of her favourite books. ‘In a rope of sorts, and one of us climb down.’

‘There are no linens in this room from which to make rope.’

She looked out once more, peering down to the long tresses of lilac flowers cascading down the walls below – wisteria, Sir Waldo had called it, boasting that the twining vines had been imported all the way from Canton.

‘I think this would hold a person,’ she said, giving the wooden trellis beneath the blooms an experimental tug.

‘You are not climbing out of the window,’ Ashford said, and he had his hands half held out again to prevent her.

‘Of course, I’m not,’ she said. ‘I’m wearing satin.’

She turned and gave him a winning smile.

He heaved a sigh, raising his eyes to the heavens.

‘It does have a certain sort of inevitability about it, doesn’t it?’