Page 19 of The Runaway Duchess

A bachelor and a widow, unobserved together in the night. The bed was close enough to touch.

She wasn’t a widow, of course. She was a married woman. If she hadn’t fled Bodmin Station, she’d be in Fowey with the Duke of Cranbrook. She’d be lying on a mattress as soft as a cloud in an elegant bedroom. Lying beside—lying under—that foul old goat. A miracle that she was here instead. That she would sleep undisturbed, alone.

She didn’t want to sleep alone. The admission widened her eyes. She wanted the warmth of this man pressed against her, the protection of his body, a shield against the terrors of the night. When she closed her eyes, the painful memories would crowd out pleasant dreams. The abyss of the future would open and swallow her. Neal looked strong. He looked safe. A bulwark. Dear God, she wanted to curl against him until morning. To take comfort in his solidity. She sensed that he would hold her if that was what she asked. That he would hold her without making demands of his own. How odd that he inspired such trust and so quickly.

Did the candle cause her face to flicker as well? What did he see when he looked at her? Her dry throat cracked as she drew breath.

“Let’s get you to your room,” he said.

When she’d shut her door behind her, she listened for his footsteps. They began after a pause—giving her time to wonder if he stood, as she did, with fingers on the door handle—then faded down the hall. She put Mrs. Pendrake’s manuscript on the little table and tore through the contents of her trunk, lifting out the newest notebook, only a few pages covered with her scribbles, romantic stories begun and just as quickly abandoned. She used to entertain herself for hours, writing romances at her well-appointed, cunning little desk, thinly veiled fantasies of her life with George. First, these fantasies concerned their life to come. Later, their life that might have been.

At the Rossell Hotel, she’d stopped. Even fantasy had felt fragile. It couldn’t support the weight of her attention but disintegrated into so much fairy dust.

The wind moaned outside the window and rain pattered the glass. Her fingers trembled as she undressed and they trembled as they closed on the pencil. She drew up her knees on the bed, curled on her side, notebook open, trying to write the line that would help her imagination take flight, lift her out of this desperate predicament.

One fateful day, she wrote, the duchess decided she’d get on so much better as a pirate.

She closed her eyes. There, she could see her, the beautiful blond duchess stealing away from her boor of a husband, running into the trees, where brigands had made their camp, a turf fire burning, their leader with his wild locks and craggy nose keeping lookout.

She’d expected to cry herself to sleep, but before the first tear could fall, she was falling herself and knew nothing until the sun rose red above the moor.

Chapter Four

Cornwall, like any affliction, simply took some getting used to. When the fleas chased Lavinia from the bedroom, she repaired to the bar. When Mary harried her away, she found a seat in the back garden. When rain threatened, she ducked around the building, sheltered in the entranceway, then repeated the cycle. By late afternoon, she’d found her rhythm. The sun had become more certain, and she’d established herself in a corner of the back garden under an arch of flowering vines. Such delicate clusters of blossoms, white and palest purple. Why not let them alone, let them stay innocent and nameless? Scientists were horrible busybodies, sticking their noses into everything, imposing Latin where it didn’t belong.

Sighing, she bent her head over Mrs. Pendrake’s interminable “Recollections.” The woman had marched the Roman alphabet all over China, giving no quarter.

Focus. A bird hopped along a water trough beside an outbuilding. Poor little bird. It, too, had probably had some Latin slapped all over it.

Focus. She bent her head lower, but her straw bonnet cast a shadow on the type, which strained her eyes. She angled her head this way and that. Sighed again. Her skin had finally calmed. She couldn’t remove the bonnet and risk exchanging hives for freckles. Varnham’s Ointment soothed well enough, but it didn’t lighten spots. She looked up and saw, with a start, that Neal was returning across the great expanse of moorland. His figure was still a dot in the green vastness, almost as distant as the black hills with their sinister rocky peaks.

She attacked “Recollections” with new vigor. Neal had not exaggerated about the detail. Mrs. Pendrake was launched on an exhaustive catalogue of the trees and shrubs of northwest Hupeh. Lavinia found the prose as wooden as the subject. She thumbed through a dozen pages. More shrubs. She flipped to the middle. A chapter on the latest techniques of bulb collection and carriage. Lethal book! She slammed it down beside her on the bench. She should bury it in the garden. Let it mingle with the roots and the seeds and the soil. Clearly, humans formed no part of the intended audience. Hardly a human received mention! And when humans did appear—the occasional diplomat, servant, villager, French missionary, fellow collector—did they receive the same consideration as the Berberis verruculosa? No, they did not. Mrs. Pendrake, so copious in her description of flora, fauna, and geology, couldn’t conjure more than a solitary adjective for the “friendly” members of a mountain tribe or the “charming” wife of the British consul. Even the dearly departed Esmé Pendrake remained a colorless outline.

What kind of people were they, the Pendrakes? What was their provenance and breeding? What were the conditions of the soil from which they sprang? Mrs. Pendrake wrote nothing of interest, nothing relevant.

Exasperated, she pulled off her gloves and dropped them on the manuscript, a makeshift paperweight. No more. Tying the velvet ribbon more tightly beneath her chin, she struck off down the grass bank to meet Neal. The turf looked dry enough. It wasn’t. As the ground leveled and began its slow, immense roll toward the oddly shaped hills, water seeped up over her slippers with every step.

“Hallo!” Neal called a greeting that the moors stretched so it sounded mournful. Dark birds lurched into flight between them. Ravens, or buzzards. Crows. Did it matter? She decided to wait, the wind shuddering her skirts. She’d dressed in her plainest gown but she’d no intention of letting the hem drag through weeds and slime.

“Couldn’t resist after all.” He drew near, offered her an impish grin. He wore the same brown canvas coat and gaiters, but framed against the sea of rock and heather, the rough outfit seemed less laughable. He himself was composed of rough features and natural tones, as though meant to blend with hills, forest, or field. George had startled the senses. Eyes of unlikely jewel blue. Hair like beaten gold. Striking pallor. But an untrained gaze could sweep over Neal Traymayne, all shades of brown. Bark-brown hair, honey-brown eyes, sun-browned skin. Humble as a hummock.

Her gaze clung to him as his stride halved, then quartered the yards between them. He didn’t look humble. He looked a ruffian, of the moor but not bound by it, entirely unowned, as free as the wind.

“I wish I’d time to show you the marsh, and the tor,” he said, pausing before her. “But I saw Tomas’s carriage on the road. He stopped at the Jenkinses’ farm is my guess, but he won’t be long.”

She turned to look at the ribbon of road running past the big gray inn, winding through the patchwork of fields.

“You can’t mistake Tomas’s carriage. It’s cream colored, for one thing. Cream with sky-blue. No one wants a doctor rolling up in a black coach like Death himself come calling. Or that’s what Tomas says. My theory? He likes a bit of flash. I sometimes think those Traymaynes would have done better in London than our branch.”

He started walking again, more slowly, inviting her to fall into step.

“He’s taking us to Kyncastle?” she asked. “Where you’re from?”

“Where my father was from.” He shaded his eyes, looking down the road. No cream-colored carriage as yet. She could make out a house on a ridge and dozens of pale specks ranging up the slope. If she were a betting girl, this time she’d go with cows. “We lived in Penzance, near my mother’s family. But we visited the Kyncastle cousins every summer when the pilchards started running. We children were meant to help, bringing buckets of fish and salt to the women in the cellar, but all we did was add to the confusion.”

He laughed. What a talent he had for gaiety. Mirth without malice. There was always something a bit cold, a bit cutting, about laughter in London, at least among her set. Former set. Oh, they’d smiled her half to death during Papa’s trial.

This morning, Neal had not looked quite so gay. She’d descended the stairs at half ten to discover him leaning against the wall by the inn’s massive front door, arms folded, brow cocked. Everything about his posture communicated restlessness. At that moment, half-asleep, stiff from a night of myriad discomforts, she could have stamped her foot at the injustice. She hadn’t known plant collectors kept such shocking hours! In London, she’d just be ringing for the breakfast tray. How dare he make her feel that she’d delayed! The certainty that Mrs. Pendrake would have bounded out of bed at dawn sharpened her tongue.