“To Gretna Green?”
He put his arm about her again. “To our new home—Carlisle Keep.”
Katie lurched toward the window again. “Excuse me. I feel ill again.”
*
Katie understood whyHenry had instructed his men to set a punishing pace. It was several days’ travel to Scotland, and they could ill afford to stop in case her father was close behind them. The carriage would obviously travel more slowly than a man on horseback, and if the marquess wanted to catch them, he’d travel light.
Katie was no longer feeling constantly nauseated at what she’d done. The queasiness would come and go, becoming especially potent when she thought about how she was running away to marry a man who didn’t even love her. Not that she had anything to complain about. Carlisle was easy to get along with. He could hold a conversation on anything from novels to celestial navigation. He’d traveled all over England and the Continent, seemed to have met (and gambled) with everyone who was anyone, and had an amusing story to tell about each person he’d met.
When she became tired of staring out the window, she’d give him a name. Carlisle would twist his mouth, look up and ponder, then respond with an anecdote.
“Byron,” she said now.
Carlisle didn’t seem to even need to think before answering, “He owes me a horse.”
“A horse?”
“Yes. We were at an affair together a couple of years ago, and the crowds began to press him. You know how everyone wanted to hear him recite his poetry after he publishedChilde Harold’s Pilgrimage. I was in the card room with some of the other gentlemen, and Byron bursts in and says we must hide him else he’ll be crushed.”
She sat forward. She had heard of Byron but hadn’t been allowed to read his works. She might have stolen one of herbrothers’ copies of his poems, but her brothers didn’t read poetry. Or much else. “Really? The crowds would have crushed him?”
“He’s a poet, Katie. He is paid to exaggerate. In any case, the ladies were knocking on the door, and it’s deuced difficult to focus on a game with pounding and the sounds of swooning.”
“I see. I read that he is handsome. Is that true?”
Carlisle shrugged. “If you like the dark, brooding, poetic sort.”
“Not at all,” she said. “I like men tortured by their past misdeeds and haunted by their fears of falling back into their wicked ways.”
Carlisle gave her a long look. “As I was saying, I offered Byron the loan of my horse Galahad so he might escape. He took the horse and never returned him. Galahad was Gawain’s brother, and I’m still angry at the loss. Never trust a poet. That’s what I say.”
“What about an artist? Can you trust them?”
“Not a whit. They paint your nose all wrong and refuse to correct the error. That awful portrait of me is still sitting in my mother’s drawing room. If your father kills me, everyone will believe that is the last image of me and whisper at my funeral about my monstrous nose.”
“I had no idea you were so vain.”
“What else do I have left? The witch took my land and the bulk of my income with it.”
Katie did not want to talk about the witch or the curse. That topic was sure to make her stomach roil. “But you were a gambler even before the witch cursed you. You told me before that your sister Edith loved horses, Jane loved embroidery, Michael loved… You never said what your brother’s passion was.”
Carlisle sat back, crossing his arms and looking very much the broody sort. “His passion was being the perfect son. Truth be told, he should have been the heir. He would have managed everything far better than I. If my father could have done away with me and passed Michael off as the eldest, he would have done it in a snap.”
“I’m sure your father loved you.”
“No, he didn’t. If he’d loved me, he wouldn’t have sent me to Scotland to be beaten bloody once a week or more and cursed by a witch.”
“Oh, Henry,” she said, and crossed the coach to sit beside him. She put her arms about him. “I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “It was my own fault. Every time I was expelled, he would come to the school, take me home, and spend the entire carriage ride telling me how disappointed he was. Even though he was berating me, I relished the attention. I’d misbehave at the next school, and we’d start all over again. Finally, at St. Andrew’s my father found a place where it didn’t matter what I did.Expulsion is failure, was the headmaster’s motto. And he never failed.”
“Didn’t your mother try to help you?”
“She insisted I come home at breaks, and I heard her arguing with my father against sending me back more than once, but what could she do? You see her as she is now, a force to be reckoned with. But that’s because she’s a widow. When my father was alive, he had all the power.” Carlisle tilted his head, a sign he was thinking. “If your father does shoot me, let’s hope it’s after we wed. Then you can be a powerful widow.”
“My father will not shoot you. I won’t let him.”
