Last Night's Scandal (The Dressmakers 5)

“I’ve other boots,” he said. “Up.”

She disguised her sigh of relief as a huff of irritation, took hold of the reins, and set her booted foot on his linked hands. She gave a little bounce, and up and into the saddle she went.

Brisk and businesslike, he helped her adjust the stirrups, then tugged her skirts down.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said.

“People can see everything,” he said.

“How puritanical you’ve become,” she said.

“You are abominably careless,” he said, “showing all that—all that femininity to all the world.”

Ah, well, then, it bothered him, did it?

Good. He’d bothered her.

She smiled, and with a soft cluck, signaled the mare to walk on.

The ladies were asleep when Olivia returned, and didn’t wake when the carriage set out again.

While they snored, Olivia opened Paterson’s Roads and, to while away the journey, read to Bailey the information about the towns and villages they passed, the names of the important personages who lived nearby, and descriptions of said personages’ abodes.

A slowish drive uphill took them to the change at Buntingford. The road continued uphill to the next change, at Royston. After that, the horses’ pace increased, as they crossed a stretch of galloping ground. They continued over the River Cam, and on to Arrington. Here they stopped at the Hardwicke Arms, to be greeted by the landlady herself, unsurprisingly. She’d recognized the dowager’s traveling carriage and, like any other innkeeper on the king’s highway, knew the crest was a sign that properly read: Money, Pots of It, Freely Spent.

At this stop, the ladies came wide awake. Declaring themselves parched and famished, they sprang from the carriage the instant the footman put down the steps.

Olivia was about to disembark when Lisle, on foot this time, came to the open door of the vehicle.

“I know you said you were taking charge, but we must stop to eat,” she said. “We’re all starved.” Thanks to the furor at the Falcon Inn, she hadn’t eaten breakfast there. At Ware, she’d been too aggravated to think of eating.

“I wasn’t intending to starve you,” he said. He offered his hand and she took it casually enough, ignoring the entirely unnecessary flurry within her, while she quickly climbed down the narrow steps. As soon as her feet were firmly on the ground she let go and started toward the inn.

She couldn’t get ahead of him, though. His long strides easily caught up with hers.

“I should have stopped sooner, had you reminded me that you hadn’t had time for breakfast,” he said. “You’d better not rely on me to pay attention to such things. If I hadn’t been hungry, I shouldn’t have thought of food at all. In Egypt, when we travel, I don’t think about meals, because the servants do. Moreover, we’re usually traveling in the dahabeeya, with a cook and provisions and cooking facilities. We don’t have to stop at inns for meals—not that there’s much in the way of inns outside of Cairo. Sailing on the dahabeeya is like traveling in a house.”

Images crowded her mind’s eye, vivid enough to make her forget her inconvenient feelings. “How wonderful it must be,” she said. “The graceful boat sailing up the Nile, the crew in white robes and turbans. Completely different from this.” She waved a hand, taking in the courtyard. “You glide along the river. Beside you on either side stretches a great vista. A swath of green, rich with vegetation. Where the green ends, the desert and mountains begin, and there among them, the temples and tombs appear, the ghosts of an ancient world.”

They were inside by the time she’d finished describing her vision. She found him studying her as though she were an unfamiliar squiggle on a bit of stone.

“What?” she said. “What now? Am I showing too much neck?”

“How easy it is for you,” he said, “to imagine.”

It was as natural to her as breathing.

“In this case, it’s like remembering,” she said. “You’ve sent me drawings and watercolors, and we own heaps of books.” Most of which she’d purchased, in order to follow the journeys he wrote of, too briefly, in his letters. “I can’t see it as you do, but I can understand how you’d miss it.”

“Then why . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head. “But no. We’ve declared a truce.”

She knew what he wanted to ask. Why, if she understood how he longed for Egypt, had she snared him into this ghastly journey to one of his least favorite places on earth, to appease parents who cared nothing about his happiness and didn’t understand him at all?

She understood, better than anybody, the longing to have another sort of life, to pursue a dream.

She wanted him to have that life.

She wanted to have such a life, too, but that, she’d realized ages ago, was next to impossible for a woman.

Not that she’d completely given up hope or had stopped trying to invent a way to make it happen. Next to impossible wasn’t the same as impossible.

But until she did find the answer—if she ever did—she’d have to live vicariously. If Lisle ended up stuck in England—but no, that didn’t bear thinking of. He’d probably hang himself, and she’d hang herself in sympathy—if she didn’t die of boredom first.

He ought to know that, but he was a man, and thick.

And being a man, and thick, he was sure to fail to grasp the brilliance of her plan.

He would probably run away screaming in horror at what she’d done. No, he’d throttle her.

But that was because he lacked imagination.

The George, Stamford, Lincolnshire, eighty-nine miles from London

Shortly before midnight

The shouting jolted Lisle from a sound, badly needed sleep.

“Carousers,” he muttered. “It only wanted that.”

Shepherding three troublesome ladies over four hundred miles of road was not a task for the fainthearted. Like the horses, they had to be fed and watered. Unlike the horses, they couldn’t be traded in for a fresh set. Unlike the horses, they couldn’t be put in harness. This meant one must be vigilant about stopping times. One mustn’t let the women dawdle, else they’d dawdle forever, and the longer they remained in one place, the greater the likelihood of trouble.

Happily, by half past nine that night they’d reached the George without further mishap. Here the other two carriages joined them. With all the servants and luggage, they’d taken over most of the rooms along one corridor. To his vast relief, all three ladies promptly took themselves away to their rooms—after Olivia told him she needed a bat

h.

“The ladies said I smell like a farmyard,” she’d said. Doubtless that pair of bawds had said a good deal else: lewd suggestions about horses and women riding astride and, generally, everything he’d been thinking and wished he could scrape out of his brain.

He did not need, added to this, mental images of Olivia in her bath.

He turned over and pulled one of the pillows over his head. The shouting was still audible, though he couldn’t make out the words.

Sleep gave a mocking wave and ran away.

The voices, accompanied by angry footsteps, came nearer.

“I saw you do it!”

“You’re imagining things!”

“You were making sheep’s eyes at her!”

“What about you? I saw you flirting with him.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk and I’m not blind.”

Lisle gave up, threw off the pillow, and listened—as everyone else in the corridor must be doing, whether they wanted to or not.

“You’re disgusting!” the female cried. “What were you doing behind the wagon?”

“Taking a piss, you stupid woman!”

“I’m not stupid and I’m not blind, either. I saw you, the pair of you, in the stable yard.”

“Then you were seeing things. Damn you, Elspeth, don’t make me chase you down this passage.”

“That’s right, Elspeth,” Lisle muttered. “Make him chase you down another passage.”

“Damn me?” the woman screamed. “You vile, coarse, wicked, false brute!”

“Come back here!”

Another shriek. “Take your hands off me!”

“You’re my wife, curse you!”

“Oh, yes, curse me. You betray me—and you curse me? I hate you! Why didn’t I listen to Papa?”

Then someone pounded on a door. Lisle’s door?

“Sir?”

Lisle sat up. A thin shadow in the shape of Nichols emerged from the adjoining sleeping closet. “Shall I open the door?” the valet said softly.

“Gad, no,” Lisle said. “Stay clear of lovers’ quarrels. No predicting what—”