Had he intended this? Surely not—he had no way of knowing the Thibodeaux would take that particular coach at that particular moment. He must have been searching the vehicles’ interiors, looking for the Thibodeaux’s belongings, and been forced to hide himself when they arrived.
She stood frozen with fear and indecision as the coach rolled away. As she watched, she saw the pale shape that Arthur had dropped, which resolved into something that made sense to her eyes as the rear wheels of the carriage passed beyond it.
It was the straw hat from the milliner’s. Half of his disguise. She supposed he’d meant it as a message to her: so she would know what had happened, grasp why he was not there when she returned.
He would want her to go back to Georgiana and Huw, she knew. To scurry off to safety like a mouse to a bolt-hole. But as she stared at the battered hat, some kind of insane courage rocked her. Set her back on her heels.
Arthur was in danger, and it did not matter if she was afraid.
To hell with mice and bolt-holes. She would not do it.
She ran back out to the courtyard. There was a reddish roan mare saddled and bridled near a mounting block, a man holding the reins while the horse placidly lipped at a bit of hay fallen between the cobblestones.
She plucked up her skirts, launched herself at the mounting block, and took the reins out of the man’s flabbergasted grip.
“Och, what the devil—” he began, but she yanked open her reticule to forestall him.
“How much for the mare?” she said breathlessly. “Forty pounds?”
His mouth gaped open. He had enormous black eyebrows, between which a prominent nose declared itself.
“Fifty?” She shoved one foot into the near stirrup and flung herself into the saddle. Her reticule tilted perilously, and she spared a moment to wonder if a waterfall of fresh-minted sovereigns would make her appeal more persuasive or less. “I’m in a great tearing hurry and would rather not haggle.”
His mouth snapped closed. His eyes fixed on the reticule. “Two hundred quid.”
Oh for heaven’s sake. It was an outrageous sum for the stocky mare. She ought not have said that bit about haggling.
“A hundred sovereigns,” she said. “That’s the whole purse.” Slightly lighter, after the visit to the milliner, but close enough. She held the reticule out to the black-browed man, letting it dangle temptingly from her fingers.
He reached out his hand and took the purse. He nodded.
Relief made her limbs light, her fingers almost numb where they gripped the reins. She squeezed her knees into the horse’s flanks, ducked her head, and urged the mare, as fast as she dared, down the street and after the Thibodeaux’s coach.
Chapter 19
… You cannot conceive with what joy I embraced the hopes thus given me of seeing the delight of my heart again.
—fromFANNY HILL
Her rescue, as it turned out, did not take long.
There was no little congestion of vehicles on the Great North Road, particularly here in the immediate environs of the Scottish capital. The Thibodeaux could not travel too quickly, and Lydia managed to stay far enough back that they did not mark her.
She was certainly remarked by everyone else who passed her, a woman riding astride a red horse with a black silk bonnet upon her head and a mourning veil trailing behind her like a very long and diaphanous flag.
She was perhaps twenty yards behind the Thibodeaux, the sun just beginning to tip toward the tree line, when she noticed the first splinters of wood in the middle of the road.
The first few pieces were small, perhaps the size of her longest finger. They were dark with age, almost black, their color the onlything that distinguished them from the general brush and debris that found its way onto any well-traveled highway.
The next few pieces were larger. As she rode on, settling her mare in the lee of a mail coach, she noticed them every few feet: fragments of wood, like broken-off bits of planking, jet-black and roughly the size of her fist. Some were still and others were rolling, bouncing slightly in the wheel-worn channels of the road.
A sudden presentiment came to her mind. She brought the roan around the side of the mail coach, tugged her veil down over her face, and watched the Thibodeaux’s carriage.
Within moments, another chunk of wood appeared between the rear wheels, tumbling and spinning along the road before coming to a rest just before her mare’s hooves trampled it. A second emerged beneath the carriage as she watched, as if the vehicle had begun disgorging splintered wood fragments from its belly.
Which of course it had. Somehow, from inside the carriage, Arthur was slowly dismantling the vehicle’s wooden floor.
She was torn between sheer delight at his cleverness and instantaneous terror.
