Earls Trip

4 - Go Ahead and Panic

4

Go Ahead and Panic

The room erupted into a frenzy of feminine alarm as the Morgan sisters, after a beat of staring at Archie as if he were their own dead mother back from beyond the grave, started shrieking. They descended on him like a pair of vultures, and the relief that had slammed into him when he’d burst into the room and found them both well was replaced by annoyance. Ignoring them, he tore off his coat and cravat and yanked his shirt down from the collar to examine his wound, which felt like it was on fire. Using the cravat, he cleaned it sufficiently to confirm his sense that it wasn’t a dire injury. It hurt like the devil, though.

“Hush!” he snapped as he put his shirt back to rights—the Morgans were still in an uproar—and he was downright shocked when it worked. He had to take a moment to adjust to the silence and to think about what came next. “We have your Mr. Bull in hand, and I daresay that with a bit of strategy we can get out of here undetected, but only if no one causes a scene.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Olive said at the same time that Clementine said, “But I shot you!”

And then Olive said, “That’s true; she did shoot you” at the same time that Clementine said, “He’s not my Mr. Bull.”

“’Tis merely a flesh wound,” Archie said, choosing to address first the unfortunate circumstance of Clementine having shot him. He winced as he gestured behind him. “The ball, I believe, is lodged in the paneling of the corridor outside.” Archie was an accomplished hunter now, but he hadn’t always been, and as a boy, he’d hit enough trees in error to know the sound of lead embedding in wood. “It only grazed me.” His shoulder hurt like the devil, but the wound was nowhere near mortal.

“She thought you were Mr. Bull,” Olive said weakly.

“What in God’s name are you doing, Clem?” he shouted, forgetting for a moment his own directive that they should keep their voices down. But for Heaven’s sake, Clementine was disrobing.

“I am disrobing.”

He rolled his eyes. “I can see that. In case you have failed to grasp what is happening, I am attempting to salvage your reputations, but you have discharged a weapon that has surely been heard by everyone downstairs, and—”

“I have several yards of muslin beneath this shirt that I was using to bind my . . . apple dumplins.”

“Your what?”

“I’ll thank you to turn your back for a moment, Arch.”

“Don’t call me that,” he said automatically, but he turned as instructed, his face oddly hot.

“I say, Clementine,” Olive said, “your disguise is ingenious. I recognized you, of course, but that’s because I’m me and you’re you. But if I remove that familiarity, you look remarkably like a boy.”

“You may turn, Arch,” Clementine said.

“Don’t call me that,” he said peevishly, though he turned back and registered that Clementine Morgan was wearing gentlemen’s clothing. Plain buff knee breeches, scuffed but serviceable Hessians that appeared absurdly too large, and a wrinkled white shirt she was finishing buttoning back up.

She did not look like a boy whatsoever.

Clementine made a shooing motion at Olive, who said, “Oh, yes!” and hurried over to him with Clementine’s muslin in her hand and said, “Archie, take off your shirt.”

“I will do no such thing.” There had been quite enough public disrobing for one day.

“If you want to escape without drawing attention to ourselves, we’ve got to stop that bleeding,” Clementine said, looking reproachfully at him.

He followed her gaze to his arm and had to admit that his wound, while superficial, was doing a rather impressive job of bleeding through his shirt.

Archie sighed and shrugged out of the bloody sleeve. The muslin Olive wrapped around his arm was still warm. From Clementine’s body, he supposed. It was damp, too. He eyed her. It was an unseasonably hot September. She must have been quite warm with her . . . self wrapped in so much fabric beneath a shirt, waistcoat, and coat. And now that she was no longer thusly wrapped, he was confronted by the fact that there was an awful lot of her . . . self there. More than he remembered noticing in the past, anyway. How . . . discomposing.

The sound of footsteps jolted him back to the task at hand. “Clem,” he said urgently, “look at me.” She did, and he noted, as he always had when they were young, that her eyes were the exact color of an old thruppence. He shook his head. That the color of her eyes was unchanged was unremarkable. “Someone is coming. Probably to investigate the noise from your having shot me.” She winced. Good. She should wince. “If anyone knocks, Olive and I are going to hide behind this door. You open it and profess to have heard the gunshot but say you are certain it came from the floor below, from the other end of the building.” He pointed. “Do you understand?”

She nodded, and though he feared she wouldn’t be able to pull off the subterfuge, especially now that she had de-muslined her . . . self, he needn’t have worried. A knock came, and she opened the door a few inches and conferred with the innkeeper in a voice Archie would have recognized as hers in the middle of a ballroom full of nattering masses, but he supposed she was doing a decent enough job lowering it that she sounded credibly mannish to a stranger.

When she shut the door again, he said, “That will buy us a little time, but we must make haste.”

“What did you mean when you said you had Mr. Bull in hand?” Olive asked, tucking in the end of the muslin to secure the bandage she’d been fashioning around Archie’s upper arm. “Where is he?” She tilted her head at him in the exact same way Clementine used to. “What are you even doing here, Archie?”

He started on her first question as he pulled on his coat. He’d merely been winged, but good God, the wound smarted. “I threatened Mr. Bull with a rifle—quietly, without actually shooting him.” He looked pointedly at Clementine, and she winced again. Good. “He’s currently outside, being held discreetly by two friends of mine.”

“Oh, yes, it’s September!” Clementine exclaimed, her serious demeanor undergoing a sudden reversal. “Are Lords Marsden and Featherfinch with you? How wonderful.”

“You sound as if you’re commenting on a musicale we all happen to find ourselves at and not the potential ruination of yourself and your sister.” He turned to Olive to answer the latter of her questions. “I’m here because your father bade me come after you.”

He watched both girls absorb the fact that he had been dispatched by Sir Albert. After a beat, they said in unison, “I can explain.”

Clementine shifted her attention to her sister. “Don’t you think you owe me an explanation as well?”

There had been a distinct note of . . . something in that question. Not quite anger, but certainly some sort of heightened sentiment. Was Clementine hurt by the loss of this Bull character? Had she not cried off her engagement to the man before he ran off with Olive?

Olive’s expression was uncertain, as if she, too, were unsure of Clementine’s state of mind. “Oh, Clemmie, I’m sorry. I—”

“There will be time for that later,” Archie interrupted. “For now, we must get out of here before someone calls a magistrate. We’ll make our way down the back stairs. The only question is what we should do with Mr. Bull. I’d like your thoughts on the matter before we make our escape.”

“What do you mean what we should do with him?” Clementine asked warily.

Archie huffed a frustrated sigh. He had no doubt Clementine’s flight after her sister had not included any plans for how to manage the aftermath of her wild scheme, should it actually prove successful—which, he had to admit, it had, at least insofar as she had managed to locate her sister and separate her from Mr. Bull. “I came here prepared to call out Mr. Bull and to marry one of you if need be, but I’d really rather not do either of those things if they can be avoided.” Clementine’s eyes widened in a fashion he would have found amusing had the circumstances been less dire. “Do you think if I extract a promise from him to leave England and to never speak to—or of—either of you again, that would be sufficient?”

“Yes!” Olive cried. “You can’t die on our account, Archie!”

“I concur,” Clementine said. “Please, no dying on our account. Or, nearly worse, please, no weddings.” Her scrunched nose jolted him back in time. She used to pull exactly that face—she looked like she’d smelled something distasteful—when he’d bait her by claiming he could climb a tree faster than she could. Or when she wasn’t convinced by one of his lies about why Mother hadn’t been able to attend a dance at the Chiddington assembly rooms. “But how will you extract this promise?”

Instead of answering Clementine’s question with words, he cracked his knuckles and shot her his own wide-eyed look. She would remember his many youthful pursuits. Archery. Slingshots. Hunting, his particular favorite.

“I see.” Yes. She remembered. “Please try not to kill, maim, or otherwise disable Mr. Bull. He is a complete and utter knave, but I think it vastly preferable we not get caught up in a criminal investigation.”

“He’s bound for the Continent next week anyway,” Olive said, “so I don’t know that you need threaten him at all, Archie.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Archie said mildly, but he was turning his mind to the grim task ahead. He hadn’t been lying before: he did want to avoid murder. But perhaps only just. A man did not bring such harm, such potential ruin, down on not one, but two Morgan sisters and escape without consequences.

It was now time for Mr. Bull to face those consequences.

* * *

As Clementine finished changing into her wrinkled dress, she started to feel poorly. Her head ached something awful, her hands were shaking in a manner she wasn’t entirely sure she could attribute to the ale she’d drunk, and something in her chest felt . . . not right.

“Perhaps I ought to change my bonnet?” Olive, who was studying her reflection in the mirror, asked. “If it’s better for you to look like someone else, perhaps I should endeavor to alter my appearance as well? To look different from when I arrived?” They had decided that Clementine should transform herself back into a girl in order to lessen the likelihood that anyone would connect her boy incarnation with . . . whatever Archie was going to do to Theo. He was being maddeningly vague on that topic.

“A good idea,” Archie said.

Clementine motioned toward Olive’s portmanteau, though she felt as if she were watching her arm move under water. “If you’ve another bonnet in there, put it on and give me the one you’re wearing.”

She regarded the monstrosity Olive handed her, hoping her trouble focusing on it was due to it and not her. Like most of her sister’s attire, the hat was a riot of overadornment. Pink feathers competed with a cascade of flowers fashioned from blue tulle. There was even a bird perched in the center of one of the flowers. Clementine found herself unaccountably irritated by the fact that it wasn’t a specific sort of bird, but rather some overpriced milliner’s idea of improving on what nature had already perfected. She grabbed it and pulled.

“What are you doing?” Olive cried.

“Making this bonnet less obtrusive.” Clementine took a strange pleasure in freeing the bird from its bondage, and, in fact, the act grounded her, made her feel more herself. For good measure, she ripped the tulle off, too, ignoring her sister’s wail of protest.

“Enough,” Archie said, and Clementine couldn’t begrudge him the annoyance in his tone. They really oughtn’t to be bickering about hats at a time like this. “Follow me,” he said, “and for God’s sake, be quiet.”

They encountered no one on their flight from the building. A cacophony of voices rose from the other end of the corridor below as they rounded the landing, no doubt thanks to Clementine’s false account of the gunshot having come from there, but mercifully, their escape went unnoticed.

Outside, Archie’s friend, Edward Astley, Viscount Featherfinch, was waiting for them in the muddy yard, looking like a Gothic hero from one of the novels Clementine secretly enjoyed. He and Archie undertook a kind of silent communication via raised eyebrows and nods as Archie handed off Clementine and Olive and turned on his heel.

“Where is he going?” she whispered as Lord Featherfinch hustled them over to a boy waiting with five horses. He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. She knew. Archie was off to “extract a promise” from Theo. Archibald Fielding-Burton, the Earl of Harcourt, could be very forceful in defense of his friends. She considered herself fortunate he apparently still counted her among them.

“Harcourt says you ladies are skilled riders?”

“We are,” Olive was speaking to Lord Featherfinch but looking at Clementine. Her eyes narrowed as if she did not like what she saw. Clementine pressed her hands to her cheeks. They felt colder than they reasonably ought to given the heat of the afternoon.

“We were bound for Cumbria,” Lord Featherfinch said. “We thought it best to leave the coach here and hire fresh horses to ride—it will be much faster and”—he looked in the direction Archie had gone—“given what is likely happening even now, we thought it best to prioritize expediency. Though it is a hard two hours’ ride. We could stop somewhere along the way if need be, but given your precarious situation, we thought it better to go directly there, rather than to be seen at a nearby posting inn, if you ladies can manage the ride.”

“Are you up to the task?” Olive asked Clementine.

“I’m a better rider than you,” Clementine snapped, forgetting for a moment that she was meant to be reserving most of her ire for Theo. “Of course I’m up to the task.”

In truth, though, she wasn’t sure. Whatever had begun to afflict her upstairs was worsening. She felt increasingly light-headed, and her hands were shaking something awful.

“Clemmie,” Olive said, and Clementine had to look around as her sister’s voice suddenly seemed farther away, as if she were speaking from the far end of a long tunnel. She was surprised to see Lord Featherfinch in the process of handing Olive up onto one of the horses. “When did you last eat?”

“I . . .” Was that what this unsettling sensation was? Hunger?

Clementine’s attention was drawn by the approach of Archie. It wasn’t that he made any noise, but she somehow knew when he was near. She always had.

He and Simon Courteney, the Earl of Marsden, were striding purposefully toward them. The blood at Archie’s shoulder was now showing through his coat, and she observed with dismay that he was also bleeding from a cut on his face. Lord Marsden was cradling one fist in the opposite palm, as if it pained him.

They had extracted their promise, and it had cost them.

Clementine was hungry, but she was also . . . overcome. By all she had lost—no, by what she had given away, she corrected herself ruthlessly, and she didn’t just mean her maidenhood. She had surrendered that, but also her regard, her careful attention, her loyalty. She was overcome, too, by the nearness of the fate her sister had so narrowly escaped. And by the goodness of her old friend coming to her rescue.

Her knees started to wobble.

“She’s going down!” she heard one of the men—not Archie—yell.

Strong arms caught her. She tilted her face to the sky. It was still there. Still blue. It would not be this blue in London. She needed to look her fill now.

“We’ll have to double up on one of the horses.” That was Archie speaking.

One of the other men said, “Hand her up here.”

“I’ll take her,” Archie said gruffly.

“But your arm,” the other not-Archie male voice protested.

“She’s with me,” Archie said in a tone that brooked no argument, and then she was floating, up, up, up toward the sky she so loved.

She cried out involuntarily when the floating stopped, but then those strong arms came around her again. A jostling started, but somehow its effect was buffeted by the arms. It felt more like rocking.

“I’ve got you, Clem,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.” And he did. She knew he did.

* * *

Two hours later, when Archie, his friends, and the Morgan sisters—one conscious, one not—turned up the drive to Quintrell Castle, horses and humans alike run through with exhaustion, Archie had just enough pretense of mind left to note that, normally, he would be rolling his eyes at the pile of limestone ahead of them. The ancient keep looked as though the removal of one stone would cause the whole structure to come crumbling down. As they drew closer, it became apparent that the more modern house—modern being a relative term, for he guessed the house was at least two hundred years old—attached to the fortification was not in much better condition. Its slate roof was missing quite a lot of pieces, and the tower nearest them appeared ready to collapse in on itself. The forest, which had been allowed to encroach onto the castle grounds, was poised to reclaim the property. One could almost imagine beleaguered Macbeth holed up in the castle as Birnham Wood encroached. They were very near Scotland, after all.

This was what happened when Effie was in charge of planning an Earls Trip. He got some fanciful notion in his head, and lo, they’d be off to some wildly impractical spot or other. This time, Effie had been offered the use of the property by an acquaintance of his, a fellow writer who was apparently not in residence this autumn.

“It’s rumored to be haunted,” Effie had said by way of explanation when pressed as to why they needed to undertake such a long journey when any of them could offer up a country house at a moment’s notice. A comfortable country house. A house with an intact roof.

As they approached, their attention was drawn by the sudden, shrill cawing of a bird. Archie looked up to see a raven circling what he suspected had once been a guardhouse. It alit on a turret, and Effie exclaimed, “Marvelous.”

So, yes, under normal circumstances, Archie would be cursing the fact that they’d allowed Effie free rein with the holiday planning. But now, he was just so damned glad to have arrived somewhere—anywhere. His shoulder throbbed, and though Olive’s hypothesis that Clementine’s condition was due to hunger-induced light-headedness was likely correct, he was worried. He wanted to get some food into Clementine, check her for injuries—and, once he was assured she was all right, shout at her until his voice went hoarse.

They made their way past the ruined guardhouse and looked around for signs of life—a groom, perhaps? Anyone? Archie considered the notion that one benefit of this remote, run-down pile of stones might be that the arrival of three gentlemen and two unmarried women would not be quite the problem he had assumed. He’d begun to allow himself to hope, as he’d confronted Theodore Bull at the inn, that he wouldn’t have to marry one of the Morgan sisters. But as they’d ridden away as if the devil himself was on their heels, it’d occurred to him that they weren’t out of the woods. They would need a plausible explanation for the presence of unmarried women among their party when they arrived at Quintrell Castle. He’d been going to suggest he pose as Olive and Clementine’s older brother. It wasn’t that far from the truth, given how intertwined their childhoods had been.

But perhaps such subterfuge would not be necessary. Perhaps they were out of the woods.

Except, of course, for the whole forest-literally-encroaching-on the grounds bit.

“Let’s walk the horses in and see if we can rouse anybody,” Effie said.

“Dear God,” Simon exhaled as they made their approach. Archie’s sense that the forest had overtaken the grounds wasn’t entirely true, or at least it wasn’t true right here. They appeared to be in a large topiary garden. Except instead of the usual spheres and pyramids, or even swans and dragons, the entire park was populated by depictions of the male anatomy in its at-attention state. There must have been three dozen individual plants of different sizes, each painstakingly shaped into a prick and bollocks.

“Featherfinch!” Simon said censoriously, even as it was apparent he was trying not to laugh.

“Yes, well,” Effie said brusquely, “Sir Lionel did say he was a hobbyist.”

“A hobbyist of what sort?” Simon pressed. “Are we, in fact, talking about gardening, or something more . . . ?” He wagged his eyebrows and snickered.

“Gentlemen.” Archie, too, was suppressing laughter, and after the day’s events, amusement felt like a balm. But there were ladies present, and one of them was conscious. He glanced at her. Olive Morgan did feel like a little sister to him, though he hadn’t seen her in years, and it had been even longer since she’d been anything close to little. Still, he had the strongest impulse to put his hands over her eyes.

Which, of course, he could not do because his arms were full of her elder sister.

What a trip this was turning out to be.

“Yes, right.” Effie dismounted, handed his reins to Simon, and made for what appeared to be the front door, though it was hard to tell as it was nearly covered over with vines.

“Remind me whose place this is?” Archie asked Simon. “Sir Lionel, he said? How did Featherfinch”—he reverted to Effie’s title as that seemed to be what Simon was doing, probably on account of Olive’s presence—“make the acquaintance of a Cumbrian baronet?”

“Sir Lionel Maundy. And he’s not a baronet. The ‘sir’ is because he’s a knight.”

“Dare I ask what service to the Crown Sir Lionel performed?”

“Featherfinch said he is an essayist and an artist, though in what . . . medium I don’t know.” Simon looked around again in amusement. “What say you, Harcourt?”

The use of formal titles continued to feel strange. Especially Archie’s own on Simon’s lips. Here they were addressing each other by their proper titles instead of the given names and nicknames they’d been using since they were boys, yet they were in a positively lewd garden. The juxtaposition was amusing.

When Archie didn’t answer, Simon continued. “Apparently Sir Lionel never married, which may explain the state of this place.”

Archie rather thought it would take more than one generation of neglect to account for the state of the place, but he had more important concerns at the moment. He eyed Olive, fretting over what, if anything, to say about the garden. Thankfully, she seemed unruffled. She hardly seemed to notice the topiary at all as she turned a brow knit in concern toward Archie. “How fares my sister?”

The question sobered him. “She sleeps, but she is breathing and she is warm.” But she needed to get off this horse. He eyed Effie, who was still pounding on the vine-choked door. Just as Archie began to fear the castle was as unoccupied as it looked and that they’d have to break in, the giant slab of wood swung open to reveal a stooped old man dressed in shirtsleeves. A conversation Archie couldn’t hear ensued. Eventually, the man tottered out and announced in a thick Scottish brogue that he would see to the horses. It took some doing to get Clementine down, but eventually the lot of them limped inside, where they were welcomed by an ancient-looking woman who introduced herself—also in a brogue—as Mrs. MacPuddle.

Mrs. MacPuddle seemed not to have any idea who they were, but at the same time seemed perfectly satisfied with their explanation that the absent Sir Lionel was a friend of Lord Featherfinch’s who had offered to lend the castle to the three lords for a fortnight. “Never tells me anything, the old jolterhead,” she muttered under her breath, but to Archie’s ears it was an affectionate sort of muttering.

After being made aware of Clementine’s condition, Mrs. MacPuddle showed them directly to a bedchamber. Once again Archie was struck with the urge to laugh. The whole situation was so patently absurd, all of them crammed into this small room that looked as if it hadn’t been occupied—or dusted—in a century. There was a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing as Effie and Simon, who’d been carrying Clementine between them since Archie’s wounded arm had apparently turned to jelly, lowered their patient onto the bed. Eventually, Archie ordered the boys out, a feat he achieved only by promising that he would find them and allow them to tend to his shoulder as soon as he had Clementine settled. It was rather like having two overinvolved parents hovering.

Truth be told, he loved it.

“Hush,” he said to Clementine, who had begun to protest. Leave it to Clementine to sleep through a punishing ride only to object the moment she was being installed in a comfortable bed. To the hovering Mrs. MacPuddle, he asked, “May I trouble you to have some food brought up? Something fortifying and easy to eat? Perhaps some cold meats?”

“I think some bread soaked in milk would be better,” Olive said quickly, turning from where she was moistening a cloth from an ewer Mrs. MacPuddle had provided.

“Yes, thank you,” Clementine whispered. She smiled weakly at Archie as he laid her back against the pillows. He all but sagged forward to join her, so relieved was he by that pathetic little smile.

“Are you all right?” he whispered back, though he had no idea why he was whispering. Or why the question had come out so tenderly, given that he was so angry with her. Or why his hand floated up to brush away a lock of hair that had fallen across her face.

Archie had no idea about anything, apparently. Only that the whispered nature of his question matched the wobbly feeling in his knees. The latter was making it difficult to imagine ever rising from Clementine’s bedside, though he knew he was going to have to eventually, if only because the boys would come looking for him.

Clementine did not answer. They stared at each other for several seconds until Olive, bearing her cloth, inserted herself between them.

“You’re fine, Clemmie,” she said firmly. “Everyone’s fine. We’re all fine, and we’ll talk tomorrow and sort ourselves out.”

That seemed to be a dismissal. Archie rose from the bed.

“I am not injured,” Clementine’s voice rose in both pitch and volume as if to send her belated answer after Archie.

“Not injured” was not the same as “well,” or even Olive’s “fine,” but Archie nodded and backed out of the room. Clementine’s copper gaze held his the entire way out.