“Any sign of him?” said Lady Cooper.
“Oh, no, it’s far too soon,” Olivia said. “We’ll be well upon our way by the time he catches up. Too far to turn back.”
“It would be dreadful to have to turn back,” said Lady Withcote.
“This is the most exciting thing we’ve done in ages.”
“So dull, these modern times.”
“Not like the old days.”
“Oh, that was a time, my dear,” said Lady Cooper. “I wish you could have known what it was like.”
“The men dressed so beautifully,” said Lady Withcote.
“Peacocks, they were, truly.”
“But for all their fine silks and lace, they were wilder and rougher than the present generation.”
Lisle excepted, Olivia thought. But then, he’d grown up among the Carsington men, and they weren’t tame, even the civilized ones.
“Remember when Eugenia quarreled with Lord Drayhew?” said Lady Cooper.
Lady Withcote nodded. “How could I forget? I was a newlywed then, and she was the most dashing of widows. He’d become too dictatorial, she said, and she wouldn’t tolerate it. She bolted.”
“He hunted her down,” said Lady Cooper. “She’d gone to Lord Morden in Dorset. What a row there was when Drayhew found them!”
“The men fought a duel. It went on for an age.”
“It was swords in those days.”
“Real fighting. None of this twenty paces and shooting off a pistol. All that wants is aim.”
“But a sword, now: That wants skill.”
“The trouble was, the two gentlemen were equally deadly with the blades. They scratched each other well, but neither could finish the other and neither would yield.”
“They finally collapsed, the two of them. Couldn’t fight to the death but they fought to exhaustion.”
“Those were the days.” Lady Withcote let out a nostalgic sigh.
“Oh, they were, my dear. Men were men.” Lady Cooper sighed, too.
Men would always be men, Olivia thought. The outer trappings changed, but their brains didn’t.
“Never fear,” she said. “We don’t need men for excitement. With or without them, I know we’ll have a great adventure.”
Meanwhile in London
Lisle arrived at Ormont House as a carriage heaped with luggage and servants was making its way up the street.
With any luck, that would be the advance carriage, not the last one.
He didn’t count on having any luck.
He paid the hackney driver, ran up the steps, and slammed the door knocker.
The dowager’s butler, Dudley, opened the door. As his gaze took in Lisle, his blank expression soured into annoyance. Undoubtedly he was on the brink of summoning a footman to throw the intruder into the street.
Though the Earl of Lisle’s other scrapes and bruises were fading quickly, his black eye had grown more colorful: green and red and purple and yellow. In his wild haste, he’d left his hat and gloves at the club. Nichols would never have let him out of the house in this condition, but Nichols had not been about to tend to him.
Wise and experienced butlers, however, did not leap to hasty conclusions. Dudley took a moment to better scrutinize the deranged male standing on the doorstep at an hour when drunkards, vagabonds, and housebreakers began their rounds.
The butler’s face smoothed into the usual blank, and he said, “Good evening, Lord Lisle.”
“Here already, is he?” came a cracked but clearly audible voice from behind the servant. “Send him in, send him in.”
The butler bowed and stepped to one side. Lisle strode into the vestibule. He heard the door close behind him as he continued to the great entrance hall.
There stood the Dowager Countess of Hargate, leaning on her cane. She was dressed in an elaborately ruffled and laced silken robe of a style already long out of fashion when the Parisian mob stormed the Bastille.
She eyed him up and she eyed him down. “Looks like someone ruffled your feathers,” she said.
She might be a thousand years old, and everyone in the family, including him, might be afraid of her, but the art of saying what he didn’t mean didn’t come naturally to him. At the moment, he had no patience with mannerly niceties.
“You’ve let her go,” he said. “You must be completely besotted with that awful girl to let her do this.”
She cackled, the wicked witch.
“When did she leave?” he said.
“At the stroke of midnight,” she said. “You know Olivia. Loves her dramatic entrances and exits.”
Midnight had struck more than an hour ago.
“This is mad,” he said. “I cannot believe you let her set out for Scotland on her own. In the dead of night, no less.”
“Hardly the dead of night,” said her ladyship. “The parties are only starting. And she’s hardly on her own. She’s got Agatha and Millicent with her, not to mention a brace of servants. I’ll admit that the butler is a featherweight, but her cook weighs sixteen stone. She’s taken half a dozen sturdy housemaids and another half dozen footmen with her as well, and you know I like big, good-looking fellows about me. Not that I can do much these days but admire the view.”
Lisle’s mind started down the path of wondering what she’d done to or with footmen before old age got the better of her. He hauled it back to Olivia. “A motley assortment of servants,” he said. “Two eccentric old ladies. I know you dote on her and indulge her in everything, but this is beyond outrageous.”
“Olivia can take care of herself,” said her ladyship. “Everyone underestimates her, especially men.”
“I don’t.”
“Don’t you?”
He refused to let the unwavering hazel gaze disconcert him. “She’s the wickedest girl who ever lived,” he said. “She did this on purpose.”
She knew he’d feel guilty and responsible, even though she was clearly in the wrong. She knew he couldn’t tell his parents she’d gone to Gorewood without him, and he was staying home.
Staying home.
Possibly forever.
Home. Without Olivia to make it bearable, though she could be unbearable herself at times.
Curse her!
“I can’t believe that there isn’t one person in this family who can control her,” he said. “Now I must turn my life upside down, drop everything, and race after her—in the middle of the night, no less—”
“No hurry,” said the dowager. “Remember, she’s got those two beldams with her. She’ll be lucky to reach Hertfordshire before dawn.”
Meanwhile on the Old North Road
Olivia had known that, traveling with an entourage, one couldn’t match the speed of the Royal Mail. Still, when the dowager had said it would take a fortnight to reach Edinburgh, Olivia had thought she was joking, or referring to the last century.
She was revising her thinking.
She’d known they’d stop to change horses about every ten miles, and at shorter intervals during uphill stretches. While the best hostlers could change a team in two minutes, to accommodate the strict schedules of mail and stage, that didn’t apply to her and her retinue.
Now it dawned on her that elderly ladies would require longer pauses at the posting inns. They’d disembark more often than mail or stagecoach travelers were allowed to do and spend more time, visiting the privy or walking about to stretch their legs or fortifying themselves with food and drink. Especially drink.
The ladies had made short work of the large basket Cook had prepared. Now empty, it rested on the carriage floor at Bailey’s feet.
Looking on the bright side, though, one couldn’t ask for more entertaining company for a long journey.
They traveled on, the two older women telling hair-raising stories about their younger days until, at last, at Waltham Cross, they reached Hertfordshire.
Given the easy pace, the same team probably could have taken them another ten miles, to Ware. But the coachman would stop here, at the Falcon Inn, to change horses. The Carsington family made the same stops, at the same posting inns, every time, the selection based on many years’ traveling experience. On Olivia’s copy of Paterson’s Roads, the dowager had marked the stops and written down the names of favored inns.