Page 51 of The Lady Who Said No to the Duke
Hal kept his voice low.‘Have you seen Lady Thea?’
‘Why?’Porchester demanded.
‘Get off your high horse.I’m worried.I can’t find her.She’s not up here, the right-hand wing is full of nattering matrons and the left-hand one is becoming cold and gloomy.I was going to check it when I saw you.’
Porchester, a tall man, promptly stood on the nearest bench and scanned the upper room.‘No sign here.I’ll look in the right-hand side, you check the left.’
They split up.Hal ran down the steps into the lower conservatory and began systematically checking, looking down and under benches in case Thea had fainted and was lying there.
He had almost reached the end when Porchester joined him.‘No sign of her there.Surely she would not have gone out into the garden?’
‘Not in the shoes she must be wearing, no,’ Hal said as he scanned the last few feet of conservatory.Something was knotting in his gut and he made himself ignore it.There was probably a perfectly simple explanation—and if there wasn’t, then what would be needed was a cool head.
‘What’s that?’
He picked up the crumpled sheet of paper and smoothed it out, swore and handed it to Porchester.‘She must have thought it was from me.’The knots were back, along with a wave of something close to fear.
He ignored the other man’s raised eyebrows at the assumption that Thea would know that a note signedLwas from himself and that she would follow its instructions.‘Someone has taken her.’
The Dowager was another of his godmothers and one hecould trust.Hal fought his way through the guests to her side.‘Something serious has happened,’ he told her, low-voiced, and she promptly steered him into a side room and closed the door.
‘Worrying,’ she said when he had told her about the note.‘Ring the bell.’
When the butler appeared she simply said, ‘Send all the staff on duty in here now.And hurry, Gibson.’
Through his anxiety Hal was aware that the Dowager would have made a good general.Within twenty minutes she had established that Thea’s pelisse, bonnet and umbrella were still with her mother’s things, that she was not in the ladies’ retiring room and, unless she was very cunningly concealed, not in the rest of the house or garden either.
None of the staff recalled seeing her after Lewis, the under-footman, had delivered the note and that had been given to him by a gentleman he had hardly glimpsed and didn’t know.A thin, dark man and quite young, was all he could recall.
Gibson had begun been sending the staff back into the conservatory after their allocated search had been completed when one footman came in to report that Lady Wiveton was asking if anyone had seen her daughter.
‘Ask her to join me if you please, Gibson,’ the Dowager said.‘This has now become serious,’ she added to Hal as the door closed behind the butler.
‘I agree.Porchester, we should check the mews.It seems certain that she had been removed from the house.’
The Dowager’s head groom was located easily.Yes, he had seen a strange carriage draw up beside the gate into the garden, but had assumed it belonged to one of the guests who had perhaps been taken ill.He’d had no instructions from Her Grace to interfere, so left it alone, being busywith one of the horses that had gone lame the day before.There had been a driver on the box and a groom up behind and he thought that perhaps one or two men had gone in through the gate.
No, he couldn’t describe the driver, nor the carriage, other than it was an ordinary travelling coach, black with no crest on the door, but the team did make an impression.
‘Not well matched, that I’ll say.Very untidy it looked,’ he said with professional disdain.‘One bay, two blacks and a chestnut with a white face and three white socks.’
Hal and the Earl returned to the house to find Lady Wiveton pacing about the drawing room in great distress and insisting that her husband be sent for at once.The Dowager was seeing off the last of the departing guests, none of whom had realised anything was amiss, Hal hoped.
A few minutes later she swept in.‘Wiveton has been summoned.Have you discovered anything?’she demanded of the two men.
‘A description of the unknown carriage that left your mews at about the time Lady Thea was missed and, more usefully, information about the horses, which are distinctive.I suggest we send out grooms and footmen armed with coin to question crossing sweepers in the streets around to see if any of them saw that team and which way it was heading.The fact that it is a coach and four suggests that he is heading out of London.’
‘But who could have taken her?’Lady Wiveton demanded.‘Or has she eloped?’
‘Not unless the note we found luring her to the conservatory wing was an elaborate hoax on her part,’ Hal said, which caused the Countess to sink down on a sofa and close her eyes.
‘Oh, my heavens.Which is worse?’
Worse?All that mattered if Thea had eloped was that she might face social disgrace, and that could be managed.But if she had been taken… He made himself stop being practical and absorb that fully for the first time.She might be hurt, and she would be terrified, even though, knowing Thea, she would fight not to show it.And who had taken her?And why?When he got his hands on them—and he would—he was going to make them wish they had never been born.He would—
Gibson’s entrance jerked him back to the present.Act, then worry.
‘Your Grace, excuse the interruption, but under the strange circumstances, I wonder if this is related.’
