Dear God. She had run mad. She could not do this.
She opened her mouth to say something—I take it back, I was merely jesting, ha ha ha, what a lark!
And then she closed her mouth again.
She was going to help. Shecouldhelp. She had ridden astride and cut her horse free before they were all trampled by zebras. Shehad helped Arthur solve the puzzle of Davis’s whereabouts. She had gotten herself and Georgiana toScotlandwithout alerting her mother or brothers, for heaven’s sake.
She could do this too.
She hoped.
Chapter 10
… I’ve decided to extend my stay with the Stanhopes a trifle. We are having such a pleasant visit!
—from Lydia to her eldest brother, enclosed in a letter to Selina along with a note: “Would you please post this from Sussex? No sense in alarming Theo just yet.”
By the following morning, they were in a carriage together: Lydia, Georgiana, and Arthur, with Huw up front, holding the reins.
Lydia had been startled to discover that the Strathrannoch stables possessed a carriage at all—but when she saw the vehicle, it made rather more sense. The coach-and-four was a great, ugly thing that groaned and creaked as the horses pulled it into motion. Its style had been popular a generation ago, as the ancient hazed glass of the windows suggested. And it was decorated, all along both sides, with an enormous version of the Strathrannoch crest, inlaid in a little mosaic of multicolored wood. The crest appeared to be a giant boar, mouth agape, each of its tusks larger than Lydia’s forearm.
“There was no way to sell it,” Arthur explained when hecaught her staring at the coach in stupefaction. “The design could not be removed or scraped off without damaging the box. Both gaudy and impractical—a Baird family specialty.”
Fern and Rupert had seen them off, the boy waving furiously whilst one of the rescued macaws tried to retain its purchase on his shoulder. Bertie had promised to pass along any information from Belvoir’s the moment it arrived.
And though the carriage had seemed perfectly capacious when she, Georgiana, and Arthur had piled into it, after an hour’s progress toward Haddon Grange, Lydia was starting to revise that impression.
It was just that the earl was so… substantial. She and Georgiana sat together on one bench, Arthur opposite them, and Lydia found that her eyes were drawn again and again to the man’s thighs and shoulders, which seemed to take up nearly as much space on his side as she and Georgiana did together on theirs.
This was, obviously, the fault of his shoulders. Not her eyes. It was notherfault there was nowhere else in the carriage to look.
He had at least worn a coat and cravat for their journey, though he still had not shaved and his beard was growing thick with curls, like his hair. She wondered if it would be soft to the touch now—no longer a rasp of stubble but something she could put her fingers into.
She realized the direction of her thoughts with no small horror, and tried to make herself stop.
Of course, the man immediately made this resolution impossible by addressing her directly.
“Does your family know what you came here to do?” he asked. “Your brother—the one who’s a politician?”
“Ah,” she said. “Er. No. Not precisely.”
Georgiana squeaked as she smothered her laugh. Lydia pretended not to hear her.
“I told my mother and brothers that I wanted to spend the month with my friend Selina Kent, the Duchess of Stanhope, and her husband at their country estate in Sussex. I chose a week when everyone was busy with their own affairs”—her mother parading debutantes in front of several recalcitrant sons; her eldest brother, Theo, deep in legislation; the next eldest, Jasper, away on holiday in Venice—“and met Georgiana at the Stanhope estate. And then we, er—”
“And then the duke and duchess pretended not to notice when we fled the country,” Georgiana explained.
“I… see.” Arthur looked slightly alarmed by her machinations.
“They did not know,” Lydia said, torn between a desire to defend herself and the knowledge that her plan had, in fact, been a complete failure from top to bottom. “My family. They did not know about my correspondence with Davis, and I thought… I thought…”
She had thought to shock them with her triumph, she supposed. She loved her family, powerfully and without reservation, and yet they treated her like a fragile child half the time.
For God’s sake, Theo, meet with your mates at the club, not at home. You know Lyd can’t dine with strangers.
Mother, let Lyddie alone this Season, won’t you? She doesn’t have to marry; there’s no sense torturing her.
She had envied her brothers—the way they seemed to move through the world so easily. And she’d wanted them to think her brave and strong. An equal, not a doll to be perpetually safeguarded.
