Page 10 of The Virtues of Christmas
Lucille took the basket as the girl scampered back to the kitchen.
Michael handed the women into his coach, which boasted heated bricks and velvet upholstery, then climbed in and confronted a dilemma. Lucille had taken the backward-facing seat, while Miss Whitlow sat on the forward-facing bench.
A gentleman did not presume, but neither did he willingly sit next to a maid glaring daggers at him. Michael was on the point of taking the place beside Lucille anyway, when insight came to his aid.
To eschew the place beside Miss Whitlow would be to judge her, and for Miss Whitlow to sit on the backward-facing seat with her maid would have been to assume the status of a servant.
What complicated terrain she inhabited, and how tired she must be of never putting a foot wrong on perpetually boggy ground.
“May I?” Michael asked, gesturing to the place beside the lady.
“Of course.” She twitched her skirts and cloak aside, and Michael took his seat. At two thumps of his fist on the coach roof, the coach moved off.
The vehicle was warm and the road reasonably free of traffic. One of the advantages of winter travel was a lack of mud, or less mud than during any other season, and thus the horses could keep up a decent pace. Michael’s objective was simply to learn where Miss Whitlow would spend the night, so that he could steal a certain object from her, one she might not even value very highly.
He considered asking to purchase the book, but coin carried the potential to insult a former courtesan, particularly one whose decision to depart from propriety had made her wealthy.
Fortunately, Miss Whitlow had failed to notice that the trunks lashed atop Michael’s coach were her own.
A soft snore from the opposite bench sounded in rhythm with the horses’ hoof beats.
“Poor Lucille is worn out,” Miss Whitlow said softly. “She does two things when we travel any distance. Swill hot tea at every opportunity and nap.”
“What of the highwaymen?” Michael asked. “Who guards you from them?”
“I guard myself.”
Michael mentally translated the words into Latin, because they had the ring of a battle cry. “My barony needs a motto. That might do.”
“Better if your family can say, ‘We guard each other,’” Miss Whitlow replied. “My grandmother certainly tried to guard me.”
Where were her father and brothers when she had needed guarding? “My grandmother was the fiercest woman in County Mayo, excepting perhaps my great-grandmother. Grannie lived to be ninety-two, and not even the earl upon whose land her cottage sat would have gainsaid her. You put me in mind of her.”
The coach hit a rut, disturbing the rhythm of Lucille’s snores and tossing Miss Whitlow against Michael’s shoulder.
“In mind of her, how?”
“She was independent without being needlessly stubborn, and she judged people on their merits, not their trappings. Could quote Scripture by the hour, but also knew poems I doubt have been written down. You and she could have discussed books until the sun came up.”
Michael’s recitation purposely mentioned no aspect of Miss Whitlow’s appearance, though Gran had been ginger-haired in her younger days.
“My grandmother was rumored to be part Rom,” Miss Whitlow said. “My father denied it, which only makes me think it more likely to be true.”
For a woman who’d been self-supporting for nearly a decade, Miss Whitlow mentioned her father rather a lot. Josiah Whitlow lived in Oxfordshire, not five miles from Michael’s property, which was what had given Beltram the idea of sending Michael after the damned book in the first place.
Three months ago, Beltram had invited himself to tea with Henrietta and had seen the tome tucked among some risqué volumes of poetry in her sitting room. With any luck, she’d tossed Beltram’s scribblings into the fire when dissolving her household.
“Was your grandmother a lover of books?” Michael asked.
“She was passionate about literature, in part because she taught herself to read after she’d married. She stole out of bed and puzzled over her son’s school books, then got the housekeeper to help her. She loved telling me that story.”
“I learned by puzzling over my younger brother’s books too, then an uncle whose fortunes had improved stepped in and off to public school I went.”
Public school had been awful for an Irish upstart with no academic foundation, but Michael had guzzled knowledge like a drover downs ale at the end of a long summer march.
Miss Whitlow studied the snow intensifying beyond the window. “Will you tell me the same lie all titled men tell about public school, and claim you loved it?”
Titled men probably told her worse lies than that. “I learned a lot, and also came to value information in addition to learning. Did you know that James Merton, heir to the Victor family earldom, wet his bed until he was fourteen?”
