Chapter 17 #2
“Dante.” Her gaze went straight to him, and she could not disguise the flash of emotion in her eyes—triumph, and eager delight.
He hated to see it, and likewise to hear the betraying softness in her voice when she said his name.
Whatever this woman had done to Cerys, she had done so thinking if her rival were out of the way, Dante’s attentions might turn back to Bathsheba.
She had no ability to understand that, having his heart shattered by her once, he had hardened it forever against her.
She was too accustomed to manipulating whatever she wanted from men.
“Cerys,” Dante said before anyone else could begin with explanations.
“Ah. The little actress.” She smoothed the bands of silk scalloping the low neckline and tiny sleeves of her velvet evening gown. Bathsheba was dressing for an evening of entertainment, and Cerys was—where? “She didn’t leave a note?”
“A note saying what?” Dante ground out the words, hating himself for having to play her game, but it was the only way Bathsheba would deliver the information he wanted.
Unless he seized her by her plump arms and shook her until her hard head rattled free from its fixation on him. He considered this.
“Hmmm. Well, you see, she asked me to set her down at the turnpike house. Said she was meeting someone there and was going away. Was very coy about it, you know how young girls are, but she was dying to tell someone about her intrigues.” Her ladyship smoothed one ungloved hand over her arm.
“Seems she met a dashing young man. He came to one of her plays, she said? Wanted to carry her away, and she meant to let him. I tried to dissuade her, of course.”
She made a small moue with her lips. “Told her at least to send word to her friends, so they would know her whereabouts. She didn’t send word, then?
Ah, the carelessness of youth.” Her lips turned up in the slightest smirk.
“It seems you have been jilted, Dante. I am sorry to be the one to tell you.”
Dante growled and stepped forward. The most feral and uncharacteristic rage was overtaking him. “Cerys did not run away.”
Bathsheba widened her eyes slightly. “But she did. Perhaps you said something to frighten her?”
He froze then, strangled by the old fear.
He was too large, too dark, too brooding.
Too foreign, too clumsy, too much. He had declared his heart, after his own fashion, and she didn’t want it.
And instead of telling him gently to his face, and facing his wrath, she had decided simply to scupper off.
Without leaving a direction with her friends, so he could not pursue her.
He stood racked with humiliation, unable to speak.
At least when he had learned of Bathsheba’s perfidy, he had been in the company of one good friend who had told him the news of her marriage and taken him straight out to get drunk after.
This time he stood in a room full of strangers with his cracking heart exposed to the raw wind.
“Which turnpike house?” asked the knight, Sir Hewitt.
“And which direction was she headed?” asked Penrydd, his voice as cold as a snowbank. Neither of them were taken in by Bathsheba’s tale.
“Oh, dear, I couldn’t say.” Bathsheba bit her lip, affecting distress.
“Was it the lower? Near the boarding school?” Andover demanded.
“Or the upper, by the Gallows Oak?” Dutton asked.
Bathsheba shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t know. I get so turned about in this town, I couldn’t tell you which end is which. Miss Evans did share the name of the town where her lover lives. Tewkesbury.” She paused with a small frown. “Or was it Prestbury?”
Dante growled again. The towns lay in different directions. “We’ll have to split up and canvas all the major roads. Ask if someone has seen her.” He wanted to howl. It could take days to track her down, and when he did— “At least there are five of us. We can cover a great deal of ground.”
Bathsheba shook her head. “Oh, Dante. Why pursue a woman who doesn’t want you?”
Because she did. He would swear she did.
When she kissed him, she held nothing back.
She was only worried that she would have to give something up to marry him, her acting, her dreams of being seen and admired.
But he would take nothing away. He wanted to give her everything. He would convince her of that.
“I—” Had offered her everything. All of himself. What if she didn’t want him? His throat was gravel, drying out the words on his tongue.
“Cerys didn’t run away,” Penrydd said coldly. “She is young, and I grant you she’s headstrong, but she is not careless, and she is not fickle. You wrote the Viscountess that you feared for her reputation with the way she was carrying about with Manelli here.”
Dante felt a rope had been twisted around his neck and hoisted. “She—what?”
“Wrote my lady,” Penrydd said, “to tell us she thought Cerys was risking her reputation with you. And now her ladyship claims our girl has gone off on a whim, making no proper parting with her friends.”
“Well.” Bathsheba stroked her own arm again, as if reveling in her soft beauty. “Did she last time, when she left Newport? Make a proper parting, that is.”
That silenced Penrydd, but not his compatriot. “We’ve always known where she is,” the knight said. “She wrote us the moment she arrived in Cheltenham.”
“You must be Sir Hewitt.” Bathsheba gave him her sensuous smile. “I don’t need to explain to you, sir, how a young woman might change her loyalties.”
“Lord Baeccon. Sir.” Evans leaned against the door jamb, crutch under his arm. He looked cool-headed where Dante was unraveling. “Where does your coachman lodge?”
Bathsheba paled.
“Eh, what’s that? We send down to the Fleece Inn when we need a man,” Baeccon said. “Our coachman peeled off on our way up from London, said he didn’t want to leave town.”
Evans turned to Dante. “Where’s the Fleece Inn?”
“I’m afraid the coachman won’t be able to tell you much,” Bathsheba said, rushing out the words. “Hostile, taciturn man. I found him very difficult.”
Penrydd pointed to the two men he’d brought with him. “Between us, we’ve survived Tenerife, Acre, and Gibraltar,” he said. “One coachman will not defeat us.” Then, to Dante’s surprise, the viscount looked in his direction. “Lead the way.”
The coachman had his lodgings in one of the narrow passages in the brewery quarter, where wooden buildings leaned against one another and the streets had not benefited from the work of the Paving and Lighting Commission.
The smell of boiled beef drifted out of the door as a young boy in ragged breeches and a dirty shirt opened it.
The smell turned Dante’s stomach. Every moment that passed, Cerys might be farther away. He didn’t know which he feared more: that he would find her fled with another, or that he would find her, and Bathsheba would have done something to turn her off him.
Or she simply didn’t want to marry him on the grounds of his own many flaws.
“Aye?” The boy squinted into the dimming evening, then widened his eyes. “Gor, Mum, they’s a clacket of genmum at the door!”
“Yer Pa’s not taking any rackety genmum out this eve’n, and he ain’t takin’ no tawdry ladies, neither,” a woman screeched from inside. “He’s been driven all day, high and low, and the man needs his rest and his denner.”
Dante found himself strangely touched by the domestic scene. A family at home, about to sit down to dinner. A wife protectively guarding her husband’s well-being. His stomach twisted again. He hadn’t known he’d wanted that, too, until Cerys.
Evans limped up the small stoop and gave the boy a crooked smile.
“You’d be the young master of the house, aye? We need your Pa to ask him about a lady he drove earlier today. Won’t be a moment.”
“Oh.” The woman charging up the short hall indoors, wiping her hand on a cloth, stopped short at the sight of Evans leaning on his crutch, her expression of belligerence faltering into dismay.
He offered a polite nod. “Terribly sorry to intrude at dinner time, Missus, but I believe your husband drove my daughter earlier today. I’ve just a quick question about where he set her down, and then I’ll leave him to his mutton.”
“Lord have mercy, he didn’t cause no trouble, did’ee? My Amos is a good man, and he s’ports this family. I can’t have him in no trouble.”
“No trouble if I can help it,” Evans said genially, but his smile dissolved as boy and mother withdrew into the house. “Steady on, man. You look like you’re about to take all of them apart at the joints, and you’re big enough to do it.”
Dante thought he had been conducting himself with admirable restraint. “He’ll know something.” His voice emerged a growl. “But Bathsheba will have bribed him. If he won’t tell us—”
“Then we’ll be searching, and I can’t have you put in the watch house for assaulting a man. I say stand down.”
Dante tried to step backward off the small stoop. He couldn’t. He flexed his hands at his sides, trying to force open his fists.
“Does she mean that much to you, then?” Evans asked softly, still not looking his way.
“I—” He didn’t have the words to explain, but he didn’t need them. “Yes.”
“All right, then.”
A man approached from inside, shrugging into his leather coat and trying to tie a neckcloth at the same time. “What’s this about, eh?”
“You drove Lady Baeccon and another woman away from the Chalybeate Spa earlier today,” Dante said. “Where did you take them?”
The coachman stepped backward, eyes flaring. “Aye, what’s it to ye, then?”
Evans didn’t shift, but Dante sensed his restraint. “The one with her ladyship is my daughter.” He kept his tone even. “Slender girl of twenty, darkish skin, clouds of hair?”
The coachman nodded. “And the prettiest green eyes I ever did see.”
“Where is she?” Dante growled.