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 notmeanto 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 utterlie—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 evenonethat featured a full house and a single remaining bed that she and Christian would have to share?
