Well, that was a relief. But still... ‘Then what do you plan to do? With my hat?’
‘It’s market day,’ she said, as though the statement should be self-explanatory. And then added for his benefit, as though he were a total simpleton, ‘People expect entertainers to come to town on market day.’
‘Yes. But you are not an entertainer. Are you?’
‘No,’ she said indignantly. ‘But I do have a very fine singing voice.’
‘Oh, no...’ he muttered as she made for the market cross with his hat clutched in her determined little fingers. ‘You cannot mean to perform in the street for pennies, surely?’
‘Well, do you have a better idea?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which is...?’ She planted her hands on her hips and pursed her lips again.
Dammit, nobody ever questioned his decisions. If he said he had an idea people always waited to hear what it was, with a view to carrying out his orders at once. They didn’t plant their hands on their hips and look up at him as though they didn’t believe he had ever had a plan in his life.
‘I see no reason,’ he said, affronted, ‘why I should tell you.’
‘Just as I thought,’ she scoffed. ‘You haven’t a plan. Except to pawn your watch and then go crawling back to that nasty landlord, with your tail between your legs, in order to retrieve a horse you despise and a gig that you have trouble steering.’
‘I do not!’
He was a notable whip.
Normally.
‘And I have no intention of crawling. I never crawl.’
‘Really?’
She raised one eyebrow in such a disdainful way it put him in mind of one of the patronesses of Almack’s, depressing the pretensions of a mushroom trying to gain entrance to their hallowed club.
‘Really,’ he insisted.
‘So, how do you propose to treat with the landlord?’
‘Once I’ve pawned my watch—’
‘Look,’ she said, in the kind of voice he imagined someone using on a rather dim-witted child. ‘There will be no need for you to pawn that watch. Because I intend to rectify the situation I have caused by being so careless as to lose the purse you entrusted to my keeping without informing me you had done so. If it was actually there when you draped your jacket around my shoulders,’ she said with an acid smile. ‘For all I know you dropped it at The Bull. A lot of things went missing there. Why not your purse?’
‘Because I distinctly recall paying my shot there—that’s why.’
‘Well, then. It’s clearly up to me to make amends,’ she flung at him, before mounting the steps of the market cross and setting his hat at her feet.
‘Not so fast,’ he said, striding after her and mounting the steps himself.
‘You cannot stop me,’ she said, raising one hand as though to ward him off. ‘I will scream,’ she added as he reached for the open edges of his jacket.
But she didn’t. Not even before she realised that all he was doing was buttoning it up.
‘There,’ he growled. ‘At least you no longer run the risk of being arrested for indecency.’
She clapped her hands to her front, glancing down in alarm. While he stalked away to seek a position near enough to keep watch over her, yet far enough away that nobody would immediately suspect him of being her accomplice.
Once he’d found a suitable vantage point he folded his arms across his chest with a glower. Short of wrestling her down from the steps, there was no way to prevent the stubborn minx from carrying out her ridiculous threat. Let her sing, then! Just for as long as it took her to realise she was wasting her time. They’d never get as much money from what amounted to begging as they would by pawning his watch.
And then she’d have to fall in with his plans, meek as a lamb. A chastened lamb. Yes, he’d wait until the citizens of Tadburne had brought her down a peg, and then he’d be...magnanimous.
He permitted himself a smile in anticipation of some of the ways in which he could be magnanimous to Miss High-and-Mighty Prudence Carstairs while she cleared her throat, lifted her chin, shifted from one foot to the other, and generally worked up the nerve to start her performance.
The first note that came from her throat wavered. He grimaced. If that was the best she could do they weren’t going to be here very long. He’d pull her down off the steps before the locals started pelting her with cabbages, naturally. He didn’t want a travelling companion who smelled of rotting vegetables.
Prudence cleared her throat and started again. This time running through a set of scales, the way he’d heard professional singers do to warm up.