Chapter Six
THEY RAN THROUGH the woods in such a way as to leave Veronica with no sense of direction at all.
They followed no path; in fact, he pulled her across two trails without hesitation.
They dodged trees and bushes, then scrambled up a section of rock and pressed forward again.
It seemed as though Geoffery knew exactly where he was going, and somehow, she managed to keep up.
Finally, when Veronica was gasping for breath, he led her to a clearing within a particularly thick band of trees and dropped her hand.
She immediately bent over at the waist, only then realizing she was still gripping the heavy coat to her chest. Once she managed to take even breaths, she stood and held the coat toward him—she wasn’t yet able to form words. She’d never run so hard in her life.
“Oh, my apologies,” he said, putting the canvas-covered bundle down before taking the coat from her. He surveyed the area until his eyes landed on a fallen log along one side of the clearing. He laid the coat over the log and then waved her to sit.
She gratefully sat on the coat-covered log and took the deepest breath she could manage, feeling as though it was the first whole breath she’d taken since they’d left the carriage.
Once she felt recovered but for the continued thrill running through her veins, she reached up and began pulling the pins from her disheveled hair.
She’d fastened a simple twist that morning, not expecting anyone to see it, but it had been falling out since she’d hit her head on the carriage rail after stepping out of the box for the first time.
She could only imagine what she looked like as she deposited the pins into her lap and combed her fingers through her wet tangles of pale yellow hair.
She felt him watching her and tried to keep from showing how embarrassed she was to be seen this way.
She removed her wet and dirty gloves and set them in her lap.
She couldn’t put them in her pocket because they would ruin the peppermints.
Her fingers were thick with cold as she began to tightly plait her hair.
The rain was not abating, but she was spared the worst of it from the branches fanning out above the log.
Geoffery, however, was standing in the center of the clearing as though it was not raining at all, also trying to catch his breath.
The exertion had warmed her, though she knew she’d get cold if they stayed here too long.
“You promised you would explain,” she said, hoping to turn his attention away from her unkempt state and back to their current circumstance.
“I did,” he agreed, but instead of offering an explanation, he pulled something from his pocket and slowly turned his body a step at a time in between glances toward the trees and the device he held.
A compass, she realized. The man carried both a compass and a knife?
“Mr. Meyers?” she said after several more seconds.
He snapped the lid shut and slid the compass back into the front pocket of his waistcoat as he turned to face her. The smile on his face was decidedly false, which she found rather insulting after the trust she’d put in him thus far.
She paused her plaiting and straightened her back.
“You had better have no expectation of coddling me or giving me any measure of untruth right now, Geoffery Meyers. What is all this about?” She held the plait with one hand and waved her hand above her head to indicate the trees around them with the other.
He stared at her and blinked as though debating how much untruth he could get away with. “I can only tell you the truth if you can give your word that you will not share it with any other person, at any time.”
“Who would I possibly tell about all of this?” She waved her hand around the clearing again, then went back to her plait without looking away from his face. “Of course you have my word that I shall not share whatever you tell me, so long as you do not insult me with fables. I am not a child.”
His eyes moved over her before he quickly looked at the ground at his feet. Was he noticing exactly how grown up she was? Was he seeing her differently, just as she’d been seeing him?
She considered this as she weaved the final length of her hair, and her eyes trailed back to the open V of his shirt. She did not allow herself to be distracted by the heaving breaths of his chest. “Are you going to retie your cravat?”
“Wh-what?” he asked, looking down at the loops of fabric lying on his chest like a child’s necklace in a game of dress-up. He reached up to pull one of the loops, which shortened the other ones.
“If not, I could use a length to secure my hair.”
“Yes, of course.” He un-looped the fabric, which was several meters long, and pulled the knife from its sheath, then cut off a two-foot section of the cloth and handed the section to her.
While she knotted the fabric around the end of her plait, he used what was left to secure his collar in a basic knot one might use for rope, not clothing.
There was nothing about style to it, but it held his shirt closed, which inspired mixed feelings for Veronica.
All of this had taken on a sort of dream quality—not quite real, except for the physical discomfort and sharp awareness of her companion.
“All right,” she said, tossing the plait over her shoulder so that it hung down the middle of her back like the country girl she would prefer to be. She layered her hands in her lap and looked at him. “What is all this?”
He took off his hat long enough to comb his wet hair off his face with his fingers, then replaced it. “Suffice it to say, you chose a very inopportune day to escape London, Miss Veronica. I hardly know where to start.”
“Let us start with the road back there,” she said, pointing behind them, though she wasn’t certain that was the direction the carriage was. They’d gone every which way in the woods, it seemed. “It was not the London to Bristol road one would take to Andover.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head and shifting from one foot to the other. “It was not.”
“What road was it, then?”
Geoffery took a breath. “Miss Veronica,” he said in a serious tone, “you will think I am being patronizing, but I must impress upon you that sharing details of what you have now become a part of could truly put you in danger. The less you know, the better for all of us. Are you sure you want to take that risk?”
“Who is ‘all of us’?” she asked.
He took another deep breath and released it. He muttered something under his breath and put his hands on his hips. “I had to make a delivery outside of London; it was supposed to be quite simple. We are north of where you expected to be, near Ruislip on the way toward Harefield.”
“North,” she repeated, looking around herself at the dense trees surrounding this clearing.
She’d never been to this part of the country at all, then.
Andover was due west of London, and she’d not traveled much beyond that route to and from.
She looked back at him and presented a summary of the next part she could piece together by herself.
“Then the wheel splintered on the way to your destination, the carriage driver abandoned us, and we were set upon by highwaymen, interfering with your plan.”
“And my friend’s sister was hiding in my carriage box.”
Veronica scrunched up her nose as she considered this, attentive just as he’d instructed her to be.
“I do not think it fair to blame any of these complications on me, Mr. Meyers. I was but an unwitting passenger. The only part I think would have been different, had I not been in attendance, is that you would have had to carry your own coat; my presence had very little impact on this outcome.” She delivered the words with sincerity equal to his, but then smiled to soften the reprimand.
What he already shared was exciting, and she did not want to give the impression that she was not open-minded enough to hear more.
To her relief, he seemed to accept her invitation for them to stay on the same side of this issue. “You may be correct about that, Miss Veronica. You are far more astute than I gave you credit for.”
“Oh, well, that is the second kind thing you’ve said to me thus far, though I did not miss the fact that it was layered within an insult of having given me such low expectations at some earlier point.
” She straightened her wet and muddy skirts so that the hem did not stick to her ankles.
There was an array of wet leaves and grasses already stuck to her boots and skirts.
What a mess she was. She looked away from the state of her person and met his eyes once again.
“Still, I will allow it to boost my confidence as I ask what sort of delivery brought you all the way out here?”
“A sensitive sort,” he said.
“To do with a woman, perhaps?” It was the only sort of sensitivity she could imagine that would require such discretion. She hoped saying it out loud would make her seem like a woman of the world who knew how such things were managed, rather than a simpering girl scandalized by such things.
He narrowed his eyes at her and cocked his head to the side. “Because the only sort of situation that could possibly be sensitive must involve a woman?”
She did not miss that his response was similar to the one she’d made about him assuming she was leaving London because of a man waiting on her in Andover, and she felt her cheeks heat up. His willingness to banter felt like another sort of compliment, however.
“Touché,” she said with an acquiescing nod. “What is the exact sensitivity, then?”
He shifted his weight again and shook his head while prodding a clump of sodden grass with his boot. “We have recovered from our run, and the rain is ebbing. Could we make additional progress while I explain?”
“Only if my agreement to such terms means that you promise to give that very explanation,” she said, but she also stood and began to gather up the coat she’d been sitting on. She stuffed the gloves into an inner pocket; her fingers would likely stay warmer without them.
“Are you disappointed in what I shared thus far? I have been very forthright.”
“As you have,” she acknowledged. “Yet I have learned very little.”
He crossed the small glen once she stood and took the coat from her hands.
The briefest brush of his bare hand against hers brought them to meet one another’s eyes a moment before they both looked away.
Rather than bundling the coat up once again, he held it out by the edges of the triple-caped collar and nodded for her to step into it, which she did.
He settled the coat across her shoulders, and she shifted so that it was evenly distributed while he fastened it at the neck.
It was a very heavy coat, and far too large for her, but also warm.
“Did you bring this coat for me?” she asked, impressed that he’d have that sort of forethought.
He didn’t meet her eyes as he stepped back and pulled a watch from yet another pocket of his waistcoat—not the one already holding the compass. The pockets were almost unnoticeable, something she could appreciate.
“You’ll find a small revolver in the outside left pocket,” Geoffery told her, waving toward that pocket of the coat.
“A pair of dry socks in the inside right, six pounds in the inside left, a flint and steel in the right outer pocket, and a secret pocket beneath the second cape, accessible from the underside of such, where a cipher is inked upon nearly translucent silk. That cipher is my delivery.”
Veronica’s eyebrows lifted with surprise at his condensed confession.
He smiled, seeming to enjoy taking her by surprise as he replaced his watch in the secret pocket of his waistcoat. “I thank you for carrying such important supplies, and I apologize for not helping you put on the coat when we first left the carriage; I was too focused on making distance.”
“It’s no trouble,” she said, keeping to herself the irony that the rain had all but stopped now that she was wearing the coat.
He picked up the canvas-wrapped bundle, shifted it so that it was under one arm, then turned and flourished a hand in a direction she could only guess at. West?
“After you,” he said. “I shall explain as we make our way.”
“All right,” she said, stepping past him, though she had no idea where to go until she saw the thinnest path, not more than a deer trail between the trees. “This?” she asked, pointing at the slightly balded area of ground.
“For approximately half a mile, at which point we’ll reach a rather rude shelter where we will wait.”
“Wait for what?” she asked.
“Whom,” he corrected. “A man it would be best you don’t know. In fact, you’ll need to wait out of sight; it’s best for everyone that you remain unseen.”
“Goodness, Mr. Meyers,” she said with a light laugh.
She moved as quickly as she dared upon a path so faint that she could only see a few feet ahead of her.
When she looked farther into the distance, it was made invisible by the foliage ahead.
“If I did not know better, I would think you’re a cloak-and-dagger man delivering messages for some foreign office. ”
When he did not answer, she came to a stop and looked over her shoulder. He met her eyes and held them.
She blinked at him. “You are a cloak-and-dagger man for a foreign office?”
“For the home office, but secret, as you said, and nothing more than a courier. Keep walking, please,” he said, waving her forward.
“If we’re not there by 8:30, he’ll move on to the next point of rendezvous, which is some distance from here.
The sooner I make the delivery, the better for all of us. ”
“You are jesting,” she said, walking forward once more. “You would never tell me this if it were true.”
“Wouldn’t I?” he said. “I told you I would tell the truth, which I have and will.”
She paused and turned to look at him again. His expression was full of sincerity.
He waved her forward, and she faced ahead and started to walk again.
He cleared his throat before he spoke. “As I said, you picked a very inopportune day to jig a ride in my carriage, Miss Veronica. If I can’t trust you, you can’t trust me, and it’s essential that you trust me so that I can complete my task. ”
“You-you’re telling the truth,” she said in a shocked whisper, while moving a branch out of the way ahead of them.
“I am,” he said from behind her, placing his hand on the middle of her back while holding the branch with his other hand so that it wouldn’t whip him in the face when she let go. “And we really do need to be on our way. You agreed to keep moving if I explained; you need to fulfill your part.”