Chapter 10
When they returned to the post-chaise at the coaching inn, the vehicle had a cat in it.
It crept out from beneath Matilda’s bench after they’d settled themselves, and then leaped up to sit beside her.
Their trunks had been reloaded, and a new pair of horses shifted eagerly at the front of the carriage. If all went as planned, Christian thought—though with Matilda Halifax involved, that seemed rather optimistic—they would arrive at Bamburgh the following evening.
Two more days in the carriage across from her. One more night with an adjoining door between them.
He was glad of it. He told himself he was glad. He needed to put as much space as he could between his body and hers, between himself and the memory of his arms around her.
He carried it with him, of course. That memory. His body still felt the impression of hers. He could still smell the floral scent of her hair. When he closed his eyes, he could see her: rounded cheeks pink, her lips parted, the tip of her tongue darting out to lick his thumb.
Right now, though, desire was briefly forestalled by perturbation as she buried her freckled face into the fur of the dirtiest, ugliest feline Christian had ever seen.
It was a monstrous gray thing, its face a trifle squashed, and its long fur was snarled and matted with grit and leaves in all the places where it did not stand on end like the bristles of a broom.
Were cats not meant to bathe themselves? This one appeared to have an almost porcine interest in mud.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
She lifted her head. “I haven’t even—”
“Whatever you are thinking. The answer is no.”
She reached up to the roof of the post-chaise and rapped it with her knuckles, indicating to the postboy that he should set off.
He did. Christian felt the wheels of the carriage begin to turn beneath him, the post-chaise rumbling out onto the track that would take them from the coaching inn to the Great North Road.
“What,” he asked, his voice a threat, “are you doing?”
Oh, she looked guilty as anything, his milkmaid. Even the tops of her ears were pink. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You don’t know what I mean?” he demanded incredulously. “You have just told the postilion to drive off from Darley Dale without removing this monstrosity from the carriage.”
“Have I?” She looked back down at the creature in her lap. “I had not noticed.”
“You cannot mean to take it with us.”
She nibbled delicately at her lower lip. “Not precisely. I certainly did not mean to do anything with it. It found its way here all on its own.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I should stop the bloody post-chaise. I should make you throw that animal out on the side of the road.”
Now she looked up at him, blue eyes wide with alarm. “Oh, you cannot! It must have been cold—it must have come into the carriage for warmth! It can’t have anywhere better to go.”
Christian looked the cat over. “It’s enormous. It’s been eating fine. No doubt someone in Darley Dale has been feeding it.”
She tangled her fingers into the cat’s long fur.
The beast had curled up in her lap now, and he could hear the sound of its purring over the rumble of the carriage wheels.
“She’s probably been eating scraps and you know it.
Look at her, the poor thing. No one’s been caring for her.
She’s had to do for herself. That’s why she found her way into the carriage. ”
She? Christian did not want to know how Matilda had come to that conclusion so rapidly.
But he could not deny the plausibility of the rest. The more he looked at the animal, the more pathetic it seemed. The cat shoved its flat pink nose into Matilda’s hand, and Christian noticed that one of its ears was ragged, an old, healed scar.
“It is malodorous,” he said.
“Do you think your sister would like a cat?”
Christian directed his most terrifying expression at her. He had made grown men cower with that glare. “No.”
She tickled the cat under its jaw. It leaned its matted, grimy body into hers, its charcoal bulk covering her entire lap. “I think she could use a friend, don’t you?”
“I do not.”
The cat laid its squashed face down onto its front paws and appeared to settle in for their journey. “I meant your sister,” Matilda said, “but the cat too. They will be good for each other, I think.”
Christian put his head back against the cushions behind him and shut his eyes.
She was a runaway carriage, stampeding over his objections.
She was a scythe, cutting down any protestations at the root.
Her sweet little milkmaid face was an utter lie—she was made of iron and sheer willpower, and he could no sooner remove the cat from her lap than the heart from his own chest.
Though he wanted to.
He sneezed. And then, two or three silent minutes later, he sneezed again.
Matilda smuggled the cat into her room that night.
She thanked a friendly star for ensuring that they had separate bedchambers once more for this, the final evening of their journey.
Though she had occasionally harbored hopes, on previous nights, that they would be forced to bed down together, such an event had not occurred even once.
Truly, were the coaching inns on the way to Northumberland so flush with rooms?
There was not even one that featured a full house and a single remaining bed that she and Christian would have to share?
Evidently not. It had been something of a disappointment.
But this night, she was thrilled by the surplus of rooms, because she could not have bundled the giant feline into the inn in secret had she and Christian been in close proximity.
The cat needed a bath. Desperately. Matilda had asked one of the chambermaids to arrange for one and had tipped her generously from her own reticule. Once the steaming copper tub was in order, Matilda had stripped down to her chemise, pushed up her sleeves, and stared at the dirty gray animal.
The cat stared back.
Matilda had to admit that her new companion was an interesting-looking creature.
She was not only large, but rather fat as well, though it was hard to discern the shape of her feline body under all her muddy fur.
Her nose was squished up into her face as though she’d run straight into a wall.
One of her ears was crinkled, the other torn, and her eyes were an alarming flat pale yellow color.
They were not the color of any cat’s eyes Matilda had ever seen. Not precisely a warm amber or a springlike green-gold.
More like jaundice, really. Old, fermenting straw, if one were being generous.
“All right,” she said to the cat. “Let’s get you cleaned up. It’s important you make a good first impression on Lady Bea, you know, if you are to win her over.”
She did not mean that advice for herself, of course. She did not.
“And,” she went on, “I suspect that Lord Ashford will warm to you as well if you look a trifle less disreputable. And perhaps if you are cleaner, he will be less, er, afflicted by your presence.”
The memory of it made her want to laugh, and she pressed her lips together.
Goodness, she had never seen anything like it. She could not have counted on all her fingers and toes and all of Christian’s digits as well how many times the man had sneezed. By the time they’d arrived at the coaching inn, his nose had been quite strawberry-colored.
At first she’d been concerned he had taken a chill from their adventure by the waterfall, but after her repeated inquiries, he had ground out, “I am perfectly well. It is the bloody cat. They always take me this way.” And then he’d flung open a window and proceeded to glare out of it into the fading evening light.
She hoped the bath for the cat would help. It would not do for her to laugh at his misery. It was unfortunate that she liked him so much in all his stern forbidding grumpiness and when he began to unravel as well.
She had been so bloody disconcerted by what had happened by the waterfall. Not only seeing Margo and Henry in—in—
Truly, she could not think of it! Her brain rebelled. She had never once seen starchy, buttoned-up Henry Mortimer with a wrinkle in his coat, let alone covered in mud and—
Ah, hmm, no. She still could not think about it.
But more than that, her conversation with Margo had shaken her. She had always imagined the two of them in their own distinct roles—Matilda the protector, Margo the one who played and laughed with abandon. But now she had cause to wonder if perhaps by thinking that way she had limited them both.
And in her dizzy confusion and disarray, Christian had been there. He had held her until the world started to make sense again.
She looked down at the cat and stroked one torn-off ear. “All right,” she said. “You are not going to like this, I imagine, but it’s necessary.”
She picked up the animal, who leaned trustingly into her chest, and then plopped the enormous creature into the tub.
All hell broke loose.
The cat let out a wail of outrage—Matilda had never heard such a sound from a cat—and started to scramble for the side of the tub.
Matilda gasped and clutched at the animal, her fingers slipping across wet fur as she struggled for purchase.
Water sloshed over the sides of the copper tub and across the floor, and Matilda’s feet slipped.
“Bloody—hell,” Matilda choked out, her fingers catching the cat by the scruff of her neck. “Hold—still.”
The cat whimpered, her paws churning the water. Matilda snatched up the cake of soap in her free hand and began to wash the animal as briskly as she could. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, “so sorry, so sorry, oh—God—”
The cat was trying to shake her off now, wet body slippery with soap and smelling strongly of roses.
Matilda scrabbled at the animal’s tail, trying to hurry without letting the poor creature loose before she was finished.
More water splashed, soaking warmly into her chemise and then growing rapidly unpleasant as it cooled.