Chapter 3
The stowaway did not shrink. “I am—no one. I mean—I am no one important. But I will leave at once if you let me.”
Henry placed one hand on the carriage frame. “I am not in the habit of offering charity to trespassers. You will answer, and you will do so now. Name, origin, and reason for occupying my carriage.”
The girl’s mouth compressed into a thin, stubborn line. She wore boy’s clothing, but it did not become her. Judging by the way she held her chin high, she had been born into privilege. And when she spoke, Henry thought she sounded educated—her vowels clipped and southern.
She blinked rapidly, looking everywhere but his face. “If you turn me in, my father will be furious. He will. I do not wish to go back.”
“You should have considered that before you absconded.”
She opened her hands, showing her empty palms. “I had no choice.”
“There is always a choice.”
“Not for me.” Her tone was tart.
“How did you get in here?”
“The door was unlocked, and it was raining.”
“You could have taken shelter at the Swan.”
“For a man who appears intelligent, that is a rather poor suggestion,” she countered. “A youth in ill-fitting clothes with empty pockets walking into a bustling inn parlor attracts immediate scrutiny. An empty coach in a dark yard does not.”
Henry ignored her jab. “And you did not think to check whose coach it was?”
She lifted her chin. “In the dark and the rain, inspecting coat-of-arms on door panels was rather difficult. My primary concern was my survival.”
Her jaw was set and her eyes were entirely awake. She held herself very still as if she were pretending not to be afraid. “I am not sending you back,” Henry said, “until I know who you are.”
“There is no need to know who I am for am I never going back.”
“That is not how this works.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Henry said with great patience, “I cannot hide an unknown woman in my carriage. Not without consequences. Not without—” He stopped and heaved an annoyed sigh. “Who are you?”
“Someone who would like very much not to go home.”
“That is not a name.”
“No,” she said, “it isn’t.”
He glanced behind him. The inn yard was noisier now, forcing him to climb into the carriage to prevent a scene.
As he moved and tugged the door behind himself, the young lady shifted so that she took up only a small bit of space on the cushioned seat.
“You entered uninvited into a stranger’s carriage, spent several hours hiding, and now you will not tell me your name. I want you to hear how that sounds.”
“It sounds desperate,” she said. “Which is accurate.”
“It sounds like a problem I did not cause and do not intend to inherit.”
She folded her arms. “You are cold-hearted.”
“I am rational. There is a distinction.”
“From where I am sitting, the distinction is difficult to locate.”
“From where you are sitting,” Henry said, “you are in my carriage without invitation, refusing to tell me who you are, and demanding I assist you in whatever scheme you have arranged.” He paused. “The cold-heartedness, if present, is entirely warranted.”
She looked as though she wanted to argue and was selecting her best argument before deploying it. “At least tell me,” she said, “who you are. Since we are sharing a carriage.”
Henry blinked. In twenty years of navigating London Society, no one had ever demanded his credentials as though they were exchanged on equal footing. He opened his mouth, then closed it.
“You seem surprised,” she said.
“I am,” he admitted. “Mildly.”
“Is it so unusual a question?”
“For someone in your position? Yes.”
She waved a hand. “My position is temporary. Yours presumably is not. So—who are you?”
He straightened. “Henry Kingswell,” he said. “Duke of Sappherton.”
There was silence.
He had learned, over the years, that the announcement of his title produced a fairly predictable effect.
People went still. Some bowed even when already seated.
Some apologized for whatever they had been doing in the previous thirty seconds.
Once, a young lord had knocked over an entire dinner service.
This young woman looked at him as though he had told her the carriage had lost a wheel.
“A duke,” she said flatly.
“Yes.”
“Of course you are.” She pressed her fingers to her temple. “Of course. Of all the carriages in all the inn yards in all of England—”
“You chose mine.”
“I chose this one because I heard the driver telling the groom it’d be heading north.” She dropped her hand. “I did not stop to check the crest.”
“That was careless of you.”
“Yes,” she said, with feeling. “I see that now.” She stared at the window, at the blurry shapes of the yard outside, and something shifted in her face. She did not look frightened, exactly. She looked like someone recalculating a sum and not enjoying the answer.
Henry gave her a moment. Then, he prodded, “Your name.”
She turned back and looked at him for a beat. “Lady Charlotte Ashford.”
The name landed. Henry turned it over.
Ashford.
Ashford’s family seat was in Bedfordshire, he knew. He had driven through the county last night.
Henry looked at the carriage door, at the latch, at the boards of the floor, and then back at her. “You are Lord Ashford’s daughter?”
“Guilty,” she said without humor.
He said nothing for a moment. The carriage yard was fully alive now; he could hear the driver’s boots on the gravel, the rattle of the water trough. If anyone came over—if anyone glanced inside and recognized either of them—
The consequences assembled themselves in his mind. An unmarried Earl’s daughter. A bachelor Duke’s carriage. A night spent inside it. He did not need to calculate further. The math was ruinous.
He kept his voice level. “How old are you?”
“Three and twenty.”
“And you left your father’s house last night dressed as—” He gestured.
“A valet,” she said. “In training.”
“Without a chaperone.”
“As you can see.”
“Spent the night alone in a gentleman’s—”
“I am well aware of the situation,” she said. “You do not need to remind me by making a list of my misdeeds.”
“I am listing them,” Henry said, “because I want you to understand exactly what I am dealing with here.”
“You are dealing with one person who does not wish to return home. That is all.”
“That is not all. That is the smallest possible version of what this is.” He sat forward. “Lady Charlotte. I will return you to your father at the next reasonable stop. I will arrange—”
“No,” she refused quickly in a flat tone.
“I am not asking for your agreement.”
“Then you should not have explained your reasoning,” she said. “Because now I can argue with it.” She sat up straighter. “You cannot send me back. Not until you understand what I am running from.”
Henry said nothing. He supposed that was tacit encouragement.
“My father has arranged a marriage,” she said. “The settlements are already signed. I was to meet my intended today—and accept him—and be married within a fortnight.” She looked at him directly. “I did not agree to any of it.”
“Daughters of the nobility rarely do,” Henry said. “And yet the institution persists.”
“I see your sympathy has bounds.”
“I have a great deal of sympathy,” Henry said, “and a great deal more common sense. Your situation, Lady Charlotte, is not unique. What is unique is that you are currently in my carriage.”
“Then let me stay in it.”
“No.”
“You have room.”
“That is emphatically not the point.”
“You are traveling north.”
“To Scotland,” he said, “on a matter of considerable urgency. A missing friend, an estate in chaos, and a situation with a child that requires my full attention. I do not have capacity to manage a runaway bride.”
“I am not asking you to manage me,” she said. “I am asking you to let me sit here and be invisible.”
“You are dressed as a boy. You have the natural poise of a lady of quality, which no cap and borrowed coat can disguise. You are about as invisible as a candelabra.”
She opened her mouth.
“At a funeral,” Henry added.
She shut it again.
He watched her think. It was an unusual thing to watch—she did it visibly, her expression moving through frustration and calculation and something remarkably close to genuine despair before settling back into composure. She was trying hard, he noted, not to beg.
He admired her courage and persistence.
Lady Charlotte allowed a small sigh. “I suppose I must find another way to escape marriage to Lord Redmont.”
Henry’s brows drew a fraction at her mention of the name. “Lord Redmont?”
Her eyes met his, and her mouth tightened at the corners, as if in disgust. “Yes, Vincent Carrington, the Marquess of Redmont.”
Henry went still.
He knew the name the way he knew the contents of a bad report—immediately, with a cold recognition that settled in his chest.
Redmont.
Beyond the perfunctory bows exchanged in the House of Lords or across crowded London ballrooms, Henry knew the Marquess of Redmont from three specific commercial negotiations over the past four years.
On each occasion, Redmont had arrived impeccably mannered and departed with an unearned advantage gained through underhanded tactics: poached contacts, a falsified ledger submitted to a shipping consortium, and a whisper that had deliberately tipped a rival venture into ruin.
Redmont was the sort of man who smiled at you while counting your silver, and by the time you noticed, he had already left the room.
Henry had not trusted him once in their entire acquaintance.
He looked at Lady Charlotte. She was watching him with that careful, waiting expression, trying to read what she saw in his face.
“You know him,” she said.
“I know of him.”
“Is that good or bad?”
Henry said nothing. He was still turning it over.
The man was wealthy, connected, influential in the right rooms. He was also—and Henry had never been able to prove it, only to observe it—entirely devoid of scruple when it suited him.
Not a monster by any visible measure. Simply a man who had decided, at some early point, that other people existed to serve his purposes.
The thought of Lady Charlotte, with her folded arms and her stubborn chin and her eyes that pretended not to care, being handed to a man like Redmont at fourteen days’ notice—
He caught himself.
“This changes nothing,” Henry said.
“Are you certain?”
“The situation remains what it was. I have obligations in Scotland that cannot—”
“He is dishonest,” she said. “Isn’t he? You know it. I can see it.”
Henry looked at her for a moment. “What I know is not your concern.”
“It is entirely my concern. I am the one being traded away to him.”
His lips parted, but before any words could form, she rushed to continue her speech.
“And the moment you return me to my father, that arrangement resumes within the week. I would be married off without a say.” She leaned forward slightly. “You know how my father is, I am sure. You know the misery that awaits me. So do not tell me this changes nothing.”
There was silence in the carriage. The noise of the yard pressed in around it—horses, voices, the groan of a wheel being greased somewhere nearby.
Henry looked at her. She stared back at him.
She did not plead. He found, against his will, that he respected her for it.
He thought about Redmont’s smile across a negotiating table. He thought about Nathan’s letter, still in his coat pocket, still cheerful, still full of jokes about the weather. He thought about a six-year-old boy who had already bitten a footman and attempted to climb out a third-story window.
This is the most ill-advised decision I have ever made.
“What I am about to say,” Henry said, “does not mean I approve of what you did. It was reckless. It was foolish. It was the kind of scheme that belongs in a novel, and not a sensible one.”
She stayed very still.
“You will remain in this carriage,” he said, “while we travel north to Scotland. You will not be seen at any coaching stop. You will not speak to the driver or the inn staff or anyone else we encounter.”
She drew a breath. He held up a hand.
“You will be a valet in training. My valet’s assistant if anyone asks.
You will remain in those clothes, keep that cap pulled low, and say nothing.
If you are questioned, let me speak.” He paused.
“I detest fabricating falsehoods, but this entire charade is the only thing standing between you and public ruin.”
“Understood,” she said. Her relief was evident in the way her shoulders fell. “Your Grace, I—”
“Do not thank me,” Henry said hurriedly, preemptively seeking to dissuade her from making the gesture. “I have not decided whether this is generosity or lunacy on my part.”
“Perhaps you have a kind heart and have no wish to see a lady ruined,” she said.
He almost said something in response to that. He did not, because she was right. Henry was only helping her because he did not want the guilt of allowing a lady to fall because he refused her help.
Instead he reached for the window strap, rapped on the roof, and called to the driver to prepare for departure.
The carriage shifted and settled. Lady Charlotte pulled her cap back on and tucked her hair beneath it, and Henry looked away at the inn yard, and at the road running north.
He tried not to think about the fact that he had just placed both their reputations on the scale and pushed them to rock up and down.
Why? he thought. Why did she end up here? Why now?
Why have I just agreed to court a scandal?