Chapter 12
Miss Doubleday hurried towards the house, and Beau couldn’t look away from her retreating form, an unusual mix of anger, annoyance, and concern churning within him. The immediate fury he’d felt after discovering she had followed him had abated after he’d seen her features twisted with fright. He wasn’t a brute.
‘You can’t kill her,’ said Saunders.
At his side, Beau’s hands clenched, and his mind filled with all the ways he could punish anyone who tried to hurt her. He watched until his ward disappeared through a side door before glaring at his valet.
Saunders, with an impish look on his face, jerked a shoulder. ‘You two are little better than cats and dogs. Forgive me for thinking you might see this as an opportunity. All teasing aside,’ the valet continued, the levity from a mere moment ago gone, ‘this presents a problem.’
A low groan growled out of Beau as he dragged a hand over his face. The valet was right, of course. ‘Have you a solution?’
‘Not a viable one, unless you wish to leave again, but even that won’t replace her memories of tonight. Poor girl looked as though she was being bundled onto a ship bound for the Antipodes.’
The muscle in Beau’s jaw tensed at the mention of leaving—retreating, as it were in this case. ‘No, tonight’s business aside, we can both agree I’ve been gone too long, let too many others shoulder my responsibilities.’
‘Aye, I’m sure it’s only your responsibilities keeping you here.’
Beau refused to consider the role his ward played in tying him to Oakmoss. He could not act on his attraction nor did she seem to wish him to. He and Saunders fell into silence as they neared the stables. It was no easy task returning three horses without making much sound, but Saunders moved with such graceful stealth that sometimes Beau wondered if the man had been raised by a pack of cats. He hadn’t appreciated how much easier it was to spy for the Crown when he wasn’t also dodging his mother, sister, ward, and a veritable army of servants. The small staff in his London townhouse were accustomed to his odd habits and odd hours when he was there. More often, he and Saunders were abroad, letting rooms in whatever part of whatever town necessary to complete whatever assignment had been given to Beau.
He stabled Arion and left Saunders to his and Miss Doubleday’s horses, sneaking back to his room and stirring the crackling embers of the dying fire while he waited. Beau glanced at the clock when Saunders entered—it was nearly four in the morning—and poured them both a snifter of brandy.
‘And here we thought it was just a bit of smuggling,’ Saunders opined, taking the glass handed to him.
Beau released a long breath. ‘If we take what we heard about him channelling Mr Fawkes at face value, the questions in need of answers are how will he procure the explosives to blow up Parliament and when is he planning to do so. I’ll write Duffy in the morning.’
‘If we can get closer during the next delivery?—’
‘We might hear more of the details. It’s worth a try,’ agreed Beau, and after a pause, asked, ‘What do you think he’s bringing in on moonless nights?’ The overheard comment continued to disturb him.
Saunders shrugged. ‘Can’t be worse than massacring the House of Lords.’
They lapsed into silence. Several minutes ticked by before Saunders broached the subject of Miss Doubleday once more. ‘As for the other concern, I daresay you may just have to speak with the miss.’
‘Saunders.’ The tone Beau used was all incredulity. He and his ward barely managed to exist in the same room together, much less have civil conversation. Before she fled, he’d encouraged her to speak to him so that she might unburden herself and find some measure of composure before returning to her rooms, not so he could reveal any of the secrets living within him.
‘My lord.’ The valet tossed back the rest of his drink and replaced it on the tray atop the sideboard. ‘You may either murder her—and it feels incumbent upon me to say I vehemently disapprove of such an option—or talk to her. The choice is yours.’
Beau, leaning against the broad marble mantel, watched the brandy as he swirled it in the glass, avoiding his valet’s astute stare when he replied, ‘I could do neither.’
‘You may remove the man from the aristocracy…’
Saunders appeared unbothered when Beau flicked an annoyed glance in his valet’s direction. ‘Yes, yes, fine. I’ll speak to her.’
The valet nodded once, pushed away from the sideboard against which he’d been leaning, and left the room in wordless satisfaction.
In the fireplace, the revived flames flicked and hissed as they undulated around the dry oak wood. Beau had long been accustomed to relying on himself, his judgement, his instincts. Miss Doubleday’s appearance in Broadstairs had put him in a position as unfamiliar as it was uncomfortable. There was a twinge of emotion deep in his chest accompanied by an unusual longing for his father. Despite all their differences and disagreements, Beau had always been able to depend on the man’s counsel.
All at once, Beau dropped the glass onto the thick rug and sprang across the room. His assumption when they returned had been that she’d retired, exhausted from the night, but what if she’d gone to his mother or roused his sister in a wild state of panic and fear? With a quiet hand, he opened his door. Silence greeted him, and he looked down the hall one way and then the other. Holding his breath, Beau slinked along the wall, pausing first at his sister’s door, and when no noise was forthcoming, moving down to Miss Doubleday’s. He paused. The edge of the door kissed the plush carpet, making it impossible for him to detect candlelight. Then he heard a sigh, the sound so faint anyone else might think it was only the house complaining of old age. Beau’s trained ear knew better.
With his ward tucked away safe in her rooms, Beau was at leisure to stew in all the fury he had initially felt with her for doing something so stupid and dangerous. Except it wasn’t only ire thrumming through his veins. As a rule, Beau didn’t live in the past; he couldn’t afford to in his line of work. But when he had seen her cowering in the alley, felt her shaking against him all the way home, his chest had tightened and an odd pain had pricked the back of his throat. He’d felt helpless, incapable of easing her distress, and he couldn’t stop the what-ifs that’d followed him all the way home: What if she’d got lost while trailing him? What if she’d fallen off her horse? What if she’d been hurt? What if he hadn’t found her when he did?
What if he’d lost her?
He smoothed his fingers over his furrowed brow and expelled a troubled groan, the soughing sound heavy with longing, exasperation, and the burgeoning agony of worry.
The other question he couldn’t answer was how to reprimand her behaviour without accounting for his own. As a rule, he lied for work, but he hated the idea of not being truthful with her. Until he could reconcile himself to doing what he must, Beau would avoid her.
The day after,he turned down the corridor approaching his study just as she entered the room with a footman on her heels.
‘He was not at breakfast, and I’ve already tasked Gwen with searching the family wing, so you may begin elsewhere. When you find him,’ she was saying, ‘send him here. Enlist the other footmen and Buddle, too, if need be.’
Beau tossed himself into an alcove covered by a large tapestry near where he stood, chiding himself for his spinelessness. The footman walked by, and no doubt several more would in their search for him. He waited, and waited; the rumbling of his stomach was sure to give him away. More than an hour later, she emerged.
‘I’m sorry, miss,’ Buddle said. ‘’Tis odd. No sign of him inside, but his horse and curricle are both in the stables still.’
Her growl of discontentment surprised a smile out of him.
When he was certain they’d moved off, he slipped out from his hiding place and into a passageway that would take him to his rooms.
Another time, she caught him up in the hall outside the orangery; the quickness of her appearance in the doorway as he passed came with the heavy suspicion she’d been watching for him. In the two days since he’d seen her, she’d grown even more lovely, her dark features set off by the angry fire shining in her eyes. They were mercifully interrupted by the housekeeper. The gritted smile she gave Mrs Marshall, and the very black look she gave Beau as she walked off with the woman, caused Beau to worry for the dear old lady.
After that, she’d almost found him in the library. He’d heard her kid boots making a soft shushing sound on the marble floor, and had flung himself right over the back of the claret-coloured couch, landing on his healing elbow in a graceless heap of wool and superfine and praying she wouldn’t do more than glance in the room before moving on to the next.
Beau went so far as to invent a cold that kept him from dining with the ladies.
‘How unfortunate the English clime does not agree with you,’ Saunders had said, straight of face but sharp of tongue, when he turned up to help Beau dress for dinner only to be dismissed.
In truth, Beau was revolted by his own cowardice. Furthermore, his recovering elbow had not appreciated the manoeuvre in the library and felt quite tender to the touch. After taking a tray in his room for breakfast for the fifth day in a row, he made his way to the study, coming up short on the threshold when he discovered Miss Doubleday in the high-backed chair behind the desk, which appeared larger than normal when contrasted with her slender frame.
Beau had prepared himself to see her, but only when he decided to summon her and not a moment sooner. Having previously dismissed every possible start of conversation as unsatisfactory and every lie as insubstantial, with the moment prematurely pressed upon him, he said exactly what he was thinking.
‘How fortuitous to find you here. Perhaps I may have a word with you?’
She replied, without so much as a glance his way, ‘Perhaps after tea. I’m quite busy.’
‘With what?’ He stepped further into the room, all but closing the door behind him, torn between maintaining propriety and wishing to keep the conversation private.
‘Work.’
He watched her pen scratching away in the ledger in front of her. ‘We’ve spoken of this before, have we not?’
Miss Doubleday still refused to meet his eyes. Her pen shook a trifle, her shoulders had inched up nearer her ears, and redness creeped up her neck and over her sharp cheekbones. His eyes fell to her chest and the heavy rise and fall of her breasts. He admonished himself and knew he ought to look somewhere—anywhere—else, but his gaze dropped further, and he meditated on the exact rosy shade of her nipples. Her voice recalled him not a moment too soon. Beau willed away the burgeoning swell in his breeches.
‘Perhaps it’s true other young ladies prefer not to sully themselves with such a word.’ She blew on the wet ink for several seconds before dipping her pen into the pot to her right. ‘I find having some occupation rather stimulating.’
‘Then let me recommend a long walk around the lake or perhaps some time refining your accomplishments. You have some, I assume? Netting purses? Speaking a smattering of French? Watercolours, perhaps?’ Beau had taken up a post behind one of the two chairs facing her, putting something physical between them. He was being ridiculous. He knew very well he owed a great deal to the probity and strength of character of a girl hardly out of the schoolroom—or so she was when she stepped in after his father died.
A mocking sigh preceded her response. ‘Sadly, no.’
‘If you have time to sneak out of the house in the advanced hours of the night, you have time to apply yourself to other, more appropriate endeavours.’
Setting down the pen and ignoring the ink spot forming beneath it, Miss Doubleday finally brought her gaze to meet his own. ‘Is there something you require, sir? Maybe directions to the library or some other part of the house?’ Her words were sharp, but there was caution in her eyes.
Beau set his mouth in a firm line. His fingers twitched, pressing into the leather of the chair they were resting on. ‘I require a few moments of your time.’
She tilted her head and smiled in a way one might when speaking to a young child. ‘How surprising, given you’ve been avoiding me for several days. Allow me to return the favour. At present, I’m occupied compiling the order for the rooms needing to be refurbished. New paper for the walls in the green salon, drapes in the billiard room, fabric for the chairs in the yellow morning room?—’
‘No.’
The only thing that gave away her surprise at his interruption was the quick fluttering of her lashes. But when she repeated the word she drew it out as if she didn’t understand the language. ‘No?’
‘Hang the refurbishments.’
‘Yes, the drapes, certainly, and the paper for the walls, but the chairs…’ She cocked her head, her eyes drifting upwards, as if her mind was grinding through what he said.
His patience dwindled, and he felt that tell-tale muscle in his jaw pulse. ‘You purposefully misunderstand me.’
‘Whatever do you mean, my lord?’
There was an odd tightening in his throat when the last two words rolled from her mouth, sarcastic, disdainful, distrusting. She came out from around the desk, her hands wrapped tight in the fabric of her dress. ‘How about a friendly wager?’
His eyebrows went up.
‘I’ll race you to the folly. If I win, I send my order. If you win, you may have my undivided attention for the ride back.’
Beau’s head jerked a little as he worked to understand what was happening. ‘You want me to race you?’
‘On horseback, yes. I certainly couldn’t best you on foot.’
He blinked, astonished to discover she had not been speaking in jest.
‘Fine. Set the date and time.’
‘Now.’ She was already moving towards the door but paused to throw over her shoulder, ‘Well, a half hour. I need to change.’
He stared at the door, dumbfounded by the rapid turn of events, and struggled against her audacity and his better sense. She was his ward, and he could compel her to talk to him without something so ridiculous as a horse race she was bound to lose. Nevertheless, forty minutes later he found himself beside her as she stepped onto the mounting block at the stables.
‘Oh, you’re here,’ she said with what he knew to be feigned surprise. She was baiting him, so rather than respond, he asked her the rules of her little race.
‘Quite straightforward. No short cuts. No cheats. We’ll go across the down, over the creek, and the first one to reach the folly at the top of the hill wins.’ She looked him over in mocking assessment. ‘If that’s acceptable to you?’
She’d asked such in a way that made him think she’d prefer him to disagree.
‘Certainly. Who?—’
‘William, there,’ Miss Doubleday cut him off, gesturing with her crop to the groom walking a short way down the drive. ‘He’s got a white handkerchief ready when we are.’
Without speaking, they rode to where William was standing, arm in the air, and positioned their horses shoulder to shoulder. When both were satisfied with the placement of the other, she nodded to the groom.
‘On yer marks,’ William called louder than necessary. ‘Get set. Go!’ On go, he dropped the hand with the handkerchief and the two of them dashed off.
Beau almost felt bad for his immediate, easy lead. Almost. His concern had slipped into frustration, and he enjoyed charging the down on Arion, knowing Miss Doubleday was trailing behind. He’d ridden and raced about this countryside more times than he could ever count when he was just a boy. He may not feel at home within the walls of Oakmoss, but outside…
His thought was cut short by the sound of a second set of pounding hooves thrumming in his ears. A little to his left a flash of colour caught his attention, green as the wet grass they raced upon, and for one confounding moment he wondered how she could’ve possibly caught up to him. In the next, he realised she was going to jump the creek at full speed and shouted out at her, although he was certain she couldn’t make out his words.
Miss Doubleday glanced over her shoulder, the devil’s own smile on her face, before she folded low to her horse’s neck and sailed over the waterway.
Beau kicked his mount after her, but it was only a moment before he knew it was useless. He’d somehow ended up several lengths behind her, and he watched, his nostrils flaring in anger, as she bolted up the hill, slowing only once she passed the folly. By the time he reached it, she was coming round the other side, leaning to pat her horse’s shining neck, and, by the movement of her mouth, congratulating it on a job well done.
‘If you’d like anything added to the order, perhaps for your own rooms, you need only say so.’
Her smug look, her flippant attitude, sent a swell of irrational fury through him. Or perhaps it was her flushed cheeks, the satisfied shine in her eyes, the regal way she sat upon her horse, and his inability to take her in his arms.
‘What were you thinking jumping the creek like that?’ Beau hadn’t meant to raise his voice, but it sounded loud among the birdsong and swish and swill of leaves in the wind.
‘Like the hundreds of times I’ve done before?’ Her eyebrows raised in challenge, daring him to push her.
‘Don’t gammon me, Miss Doubleday. My father would never let you do such a thing.’
‘And he’s been gone above four years now. Although I understand how you may not keep track of time the same way as the rest of us.’
A sharp pinching sensation spread through his chest. She’d known exactly where to land her thrust for maximum impact. He ignored the guilt and let indignation guide him. ‘You could have fallen. You could have hurt the horse or killed yourself.’ Beau’s voice shook the air around them like a clap of thunder.
She looked a little stunned by his outburst, but her shock was soon replaced with scorn. ‘And then what? You’d have to inform my family?’ The last word slipped from her mouth like something distasteful she’d rather spit into a napkin.
It happened lightning fast, the flash of pain he saw in her eyes. He was caught off guard and could see the exact moment her mask slipped back into place.
‘Your father never encouraged my jumping—it was more of a hop anyhow—but he showed me how to do so. He considered riding part of my education, particularly as the estate can only be covered in its entirety on horseback. I’ve jumped that creek more times in the last few years than you have in the whole of your life. Now,’ she said, turning her horse in the general direction of the house, ‘you’ll excuse me. I’ve an order to place.’
Beau watched her go, not bothering to urge his own horse forward. He was out of temper, with her, with his father, and most of all with himself.