Page 5 of To Seduce a Stranger
Her anxious gaze settled on Jane, pouring tea at a table nearer the hearth, clad in one of the better dresses Charlotte had given up for mourning. Jane was so similar in size and shape to Charlotte, the spotted cambric had required almost no alteration.
“I’ll be glad to get back to London, Your Grace,” Jane said. As Charlotte took the steaming cup she offered, the spoon rattled in the saucer. “Gracious, ma’am! You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“No.” Charlotte clamped the silver against the china with her thumb. “Not a ghost.” She felt certain her vision had been all too real. “Have you a sweetheart in town, Jane?”
“No, ma’am.” The girl reinforced the denial with a vigorous shake of her head, but a blush pinked the apples of her cheeks. “Not to say so.”
“Family, then?”
A nod this time. “My sister. Married to a butcher in Clerkenwell.”
It is not as if I am sending the girl into the abyss, Charlotte tried to reassure herself. Jane was eager to return home. Charlotte, on the other hand, had no real home to which she could return.
She stood and studied their paired reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece. Jane was prettier than she, with her plump cheeks and upturned nose. The veil would hide those features, though, and the coif of nearly black hair behind might have been Charlotte’s, but for its tendency to curl.
“Jane, I wish you to change dresses with me.”
Dark brows shot up her forehead. “Ma’am?”
“I want you to go on to London, alone. We shall switch clothing before we return to the carriage, so anyone who saw us enter may think I am you, and you are I. Before the carriage leaves, I shall slip out and away.”
Jane’s eyes grew wider still. “Why on earth would you do such a thing, Your Grace?”
“Because I wish—” The answer was easy enough, really. Nothing more nor less than she had always wished. Charlotte had often been lonely. But she had never been left alone. Widowhood, for all its sorrows, had held out the promise of independence to her. Langerton, and whatever mischief he planned, threatened to take even that away. A challenge to the will, scandalous aspersions heaped upon her, a watcher at every window? She would be little better than a fish in a bowl. “I wish some time out of the public eye. To—to grieve. And I hope in that time, the new duke will come to his senses.”
“But where will you go?”
“I don’t know.” North—a little cottage in the Lake District, perhaps? Or south, back to France? The possibilities were limited only by the number of banknotes she had stashed away. “But even if I did, I would not tell you.” When Jane looked offended, she explained, “So if anyone asks, you may say honestly that you haven’t any idea where I’ve gone.”
Jane shrugged and began to unpin her dress. “If you wish it, ma’am,” she said in a tone that quite clearly communicated her suspicion that Charlotte had gone round the bend.
When the innkeeper announced their carriage was ready, two women departed exactly as they had come: one all in black, drawing surreptitious glances of sympathy even as her own expression remained hidden behind her dark veil; and another, a servant, equally invisible to the eyes of the other travelers, carrying two small bags.
Once inside the carriage, Charlotte strained her ears to hear over the patter of rain on its roof, waiting for the sounds of the postilion mounting, the rattle of the whip in its socket. Then she gave Jane’s hand a squeeze, picked up her valise, and slipped out the door opposite just as the carriage rumbled into motion, intending to disappear into the anonymous bustle of the inn yard.
At almost the same moment, two other carriages started away, a lone rider arrived, and all was in chaos, but one sweeping glance revealed no sign of the man in the dark clothes. He must have fallen for their deception and followed the coach. Now she needed only to board the next stage, wherever it was bound. Any direction, that is, but the one in which the Duchess of Langerton was believed to be traveling.
With fumbling fingers, she tugged the hood of Jane’s cloak more securely into place, then reached into her bag for the book, for her money. Nothing but fabric met her touch. She dug deeper, up to her elbow in the satchel’s meager contents, before opening it wider and forcing herself to look, to confront the truth her fingertips had already revealed. No book. No black crape. Just her second and third best dresses and Jane’s underthings.
In her haste to escape the coach, she had picked up the wrong valise.
Even as she groped frantically for her reticule, she remembered slipping it around Jane’s wrist to complete the costume. She had nothing with which to complete her journey to a new life. No money for coach fare, not even a coin for dinner at the inn.
Growing wetter and colder by the moment, she stumbled blindly back in the direction of shelter. There would still be a way to go on, there must be a way, if she took just a moment to think—
She saw the valise fly up and heard the side-seam of her dress rip almost before she felt the hand on her arm jerk her to safety. A mail coach thundered through the place where she had been standing a moment before, spraying her with mud and the driver’s curses as it passed.
“Look sharp!” someone shouted from his place at the rear of the coach, and just as quickly as it had come, the danger was past.
“Are you harmed?”
A man’s voice, low and close—accompanied by the realization that the wall against which she had been thrown was actually a man’s chest, that the pounding in her ears was his heart hammering beneath her cheek.
Although her knees shook with the exertion, she forced herself upright and away from his support, determined not to draw more attention her way. “No,” she said.
Or at least, that was what she had meant to say. But the word curved in her throat and left her lips as “Non.”
In these days of revolution and war, most people seemed to be alarmed, even repelled by her French heritage, but on at least one memorable occasion, it had been an excuse for unwelcome familiarity. Would the strong hand still cupping her elbow drop away or grip her harder?
