Page 12 of The Secret Love of a Gentleman
‘I will find my own way back,’ she said to the shop woman.
As soon as the assistant left her, Caro ran to the gate at the back of the shop yard. It was unlocked as it had been the day she checked this escape route. She opened it.
Drew waited there, as he promised he would.
‘Caro.’ She shut the door. He took her hand. ‘Come. Did the modiste query your exit?’
‘No, I asked if I might use her convenience, but there is a footman waiting in the shop.’
‘Then we must hurry.’
He led her into a run across the uneven cobbles of the narrow alley.
‘I hired the carriage in a false name. We will change to another when we are out of London and go the opposite way. Then change again, so we cannot be easily followed. Where was Kilbride when you left?’
‘In the House of Lords. They will be sitting for hours and none of the servants will be able to speak to him there.’
The carriage stood at the end of the alley, the door ajar. Drew pulled it wide and held it while she climbed in. ‘Go!’ He called up to the driver, as he followed her in and shut the door.
‘Pull down the blind,’ he told her as he pulled down the one on his side, covering the small window in the carriage door.
Caro’s hands shook as she opened her reticule and showed him the jewellery she had brought.
Drew smiled awkwardly. ‘I will sell them for you, they will help you live for years.’ She hoped for that. He needed his wife’s dowry to find his own happiness.
He lifted the edge of the blind, peering around as the carriage drove along the street past the modiste’s.
When the servants discovered her gone there would bebedlam. They would fear Albert’s response. She did too. She could only hope he never found her.
Drew held her hand, offering reassurance.
She held his hand as firmly, trying to offer reassurance to him too. He had told her his wife left him, his fledgling marriage was failing already. They were both flawed, scarred by an unpleasant childhood, and on top of that Drew had the curse of male pride. He would not plead his case and try to persuade his wife to forgive him.
When the last of the carriages on their higgledy-piggledy route rocked to a halt, they had been travelling for a couple of hours. ‘We will walk from here,’ Drew said. Their route had avoided the busy roads and toll houses, and so her bottom was sore from bouncing along rucked mud tracks.
He opened the door and knocked down the step, handed her down and shouted up to the driver, asking him to rest the horses and wait for him at the coaching inn.
‘Our aunt shall be so pleased to see us!’ he said in a loud voice to Caro, and held up his forearm, pretending to anyone in the stable yard this was a casual event. She lay her hand on his coat sleeve, her heartbeat fluttering.
They strolled past a shallow ford across the River Medway, and past a large ornate building, the Bishop’s Palace, as though this was a day out. She looked everywhere for any sign of someone following but no one around them was behaving unusually, and how could Albert have followed her when his servants had not known she left? A cold shiver in her told her she would be looking over her shoulder for someone forever. They continued until they reached a row of whitewashed thatched terraced cottages. Most of the square front gardens, tucked behind a long stone wall, were filled with vegetable plants, butthe middle garden was a beautiful muddle of blooming flowers. Drew opened the gate.
They walked up the path. This was the entrance to her new life.
Drew knocked. The door opened. A middle-aged woman clothed in unrelenting black stood there.
‘Go in.’ Drew hurried Caro on and shut the door behind them.
It was a dark cottage, with small windows and low ceilings, and cold, with its thick walls and stone flags on the floor. But it was clean and the woman had made it homely. The scent of baking bread filled the air, and rag rugs lay on top of the stone paving slabs. But Caro had come from wealth and it was a long way to fall to this – and all because she could not carry a child.
She often wondered what her life would have been like if the first child had been born healthy. Would the beatings have never begun?
‘This is Mrs Martin,’ Drew introduced the housekeeper. ‘She is a widow. She will live in the second bedchamber so you will never be alone.’ He looked at the housekeeper who bobbed a curtsy. ‘This is my sister, Mrs Caroline Smith, as I told you, she has also recently been widowed.’
‘Hello. May I use your given name? I would prefer that we were not formal but lived more as friends.’ Caro proposed, if they were to live on top of one another it would be better.
‘My name is Beth, ma’am.’
‘Mine is Caroline.’
