Chapter Four
“Talkative, was she?” Cillian asked.
“Talkative?” said the ostler at the coaching inn in Bridgwater, with the expression of a man revisiting an ordeal.
“My lord, that young lady could have talked the sign off the post. Soaked through, limping, carrying a travelling-bag half split at the seam, and still found breath enough to tell me the rain had made several personal remarks about her hair.”
Cillian stood in the coaching yard at Bridgwater, hands clasped behind his back, cataloguing the intelligence as he had once tracked French supply columns across forty miles of Portuguese scrubland on three hours’ sleep and a strip of dried beef.
“Did she say where she was going?”
“West,” the ostler said. “Then Bath, when the driver told her that was where the mail was bound. Said something about visiting her aunt, though she looked as if she had invented the aunt on the spot.”
“What was she wearing?” Cillian asked, his eyes on the cobbles rather than the man, because direct attention tended to make witnesses self-conscious and slow them down.
“Something brown. Wrinkled. She’d been in the rain a good while before she came here. Limping on her left ankle, too, and carrying a travelling-bag that was coming apart at the seam. There was a shoe sticking out of it. A fancy one. Blue.”
Cillian filed this away.
Westbound mail. Bath. Limping. Travelling-bag. Blue shoe.
The ostler scratched his jaw. “I’ll tell you something else, my lord, since you’re asking. Whatever that girl is running from, she had good reason. I’ve seen young ladies with cold feet before. That wasn’t cold feet. She was afraid.”
The assessment aligned with the narrow sliver of knowledge Cillian possessed about Molly Granger, which was that she was constitutionally incapable of concealing anything, fear included.
A girl who would talk to strangers about anything was a girl whose inner life passed across her face like weather over an open sky.
If the ostler had seen fear, fear was there.
He thanked the man, mounted his horse, and rode west.
The road from Bridgwater to Bath ran through Somerset’s rolling green country, and Cillian covered it at a steady pace.
There was no sense in questioning every yard of road between the two places.
A mail coach did not wander. It took its road, changed horses where it must, and kept its time as ruthlessly as weather allowed.
If Molly Granger had remained aboard, she would be in Bath by morning.
So, Cillian rode for Bath.
He arrived well into the afternoon, the city rising in pale stone terraces that caught the westering light.
He had been here once before, on leave before his final posting, and had found it pleasant in the honest, unconsidered way he had found most things pleasant then.
He looked at it now and registered architecture: handsome, orderly, irrelevant.
He stabled his horse at the White Hart and found the mail-coach driver in the yard, leaning against his stationary vehicle in the manner of a man who had survived a natural disaster and was still considering the extent of the damage.
“Talked the whole way,” the driver said. “Four hours. Possibly five. I know more about that girl than I know about my own daughters, and I have three of them.”
“Did she say where she meant to go once she reached Bath?”
“Not in any useful sense. She said Bath after she’d said visiting her aunt, which was a lie, and after she’d told me about a Turkish prison escape novel and a pony named Buttercup.
Truth is, she couldn’t tell you where she was headed because she didn’t know herself.
She was making it up as she went, and making it up at considerable volume. ”
“Did she have money?”
“Sixpence. I gave it to her.” The driver paused, examining Cillian’s face for judgment and finding none. “She needed it more than I did. And I’ll tell you the same thing I’d tell any man asking after her: she was afraid. Whatever sent her here, it was no girlish fancy.”
Cillian filed this too.
The driver’s testimony confirmed the ostler’s and supplied the rest. Molly Granger had arrived in Bath that morning alone, frightened, injured, and in possession of sixpence, a travelling-bag, and no apparent plan beyond not going back.
He continued his enquiries.
In the army, tracking a target through hostile territory required patience, local knowledge, and the ability to construct a pattern of conduct from limited information.
Tracking Molly Granger through Bath turned out to be considerably easier than tracking French supply columns.
She had spoken to approximately every human being in the city, and each one remembered her with the vivid clarity people reserved for unusual weather.
The baker near the Abbey recalled a damp young lady who had praised his stale Bath buns as if they were jewels in a royal collection, then accepted a roll with the expression of someone receiving a reprieve.
A woman in Gay Street remembered a girl who had carried her parcels all the way from a public house, talking the entire distance and leaving, apparently, with an invitation to tea.
The Pump Room attendant recalled a young woman who had pressed her face to the window that morning and waved at him through the glass.
Then the Abbey, where a verger remembered a girl who had complimented the stonework and asked whether the building ever grew lonely at night.
The bookseller on Milsom Street produced the most detailed account, describing a limping girl who had spent twenty minutes examining his window display and had offered suggestions for arranging the novels by colour rather than by author, which was impractical but, he admitted, visually superior.
At every stop, the same portrait emerged.
Molly Granger moved through the world like a stone through water, sending ripples in every direction, impossible to miss and impossible to forget.
She was the least discreet fugitive in the history of England.
A blind man could have tracked her, and a deaf man could have followed the trail of people smiling in her wake.
By the time three separate people pointed him towards a quiet side street off Westgate, the afternoon had given way to early evening.
A boarding house.
Mrs Bramble’s.
Cillian found the building, studied it from across the street for a moment in the manner of a man assessing a position before advancing, and then crossed and knocked.
The door opened.
A woman of about sixty stood in the frame, square-shouldered and sharp-eyed, her apron clean and her expression suggesting that she had opened this door to a great many men over the years, and that the vast majority of them had been found wanting.
“Good evening. I am looking for Miss Granger.”
“And you are?”
“The Earl of Harrowden. Her father sent me.”
Mrs Bramble took him in with a thorough look that began at his boots and ended at his expression.
She noted the quality of his coat, the military straightness of his posture, the held-still bearing of a contained man.
She studied his face, tired and closed, and Cillian had the unsettling sensation of being read by someone who was very good at reading.
“She didn’t mention an earl.”
“She doesn’t know I am coming.”
“That much is clear.” Mrs Bramble did not step aside. She remained in the doorway with her arms folded, her chin slightly raised, and the full weight of her authority deployed in the narrow gap between the door and the frame. “What does her father want?”
“He wants her home.”
“Does he?”
“The young lady left without notice. Her family is concerned.”
“Her family should have been concerned before she felt obliged to flee her home in the middle of the night.”
Cillian absorbed this.
Mrs Bramble, it appeared, already knew enough. Molly Granger’s talent for telling her entire life story to strangers had evidently extended to her new landlady.
“I agree with you,” he said.
This seemed to surprise Mrs Bramble, slightly. She recalibrated.
“She is upstairs. I warn you, though. She will not go quietly.”
“I did not expect her to.”
Mrs Bramble stepped aside.
Cillian entered the boarding house, noting the clean floors, the fire in the parlour, and the ginger cat on the windowsill, regarding him as a cat regards an intruder.
The house smelled of bread and soap and something floral, lavender perhaps, and it was warm in the particular way houses are warm when someone has made them so deliberately, as a policy rather than an accident.
He climbed the stairs.
The staircase was narrow, the walls papered in a pattern of small blue flowers, and from somewhere above he could hear a woman’s voice: a steady stream of words directed, as far as he could tell, at no one in particular.
Or possibly at the cat, who had abandoned the windowsill and preceded him up the stairs with the air of an advance scout.
He reached the second door on the left and knocked.
From inside came a small silence, then the uneven shuffle of a foot favouring an ankle.
The door opened.
Molly Granger stood in the doorway, and the sight of her struck him with a precision he had not anticipated and could not explain.
Her hair was half pinned, the rest escaping in loose curls about her jaw and neck, suggesting both recent washing and a profound objection to hairpins.
Her dress was wrinkled. Her ankle was bound with a clean linen bandage, wrapped with the earnest incompetence of a person who had been given proper materials and very little idea what to do with them.
She was eating an apple, which she held in one hand while the other rested on the door frame, and she looked at him with the expression of someone trying very hard to place a face she had seen before.
He watched her arrive at it.
Recognition moved across her features like a lamp being turned up in a dim room. Her brows lifted, her lips parted around the apple, and her chin rose.
“Oh. You are Lord Harrowden. We met at the Michaelmas fair. You knocked over my father’s punch bowl.”