Page 64 of The Truth About Dukes
“That sounds very formal, Your Grace. Perhaps I wanted to arrive at Fendle Bridge after dark to ensure we create the least possible stir.”
Constance turned her head to gaze out the window, but of course, the shades had been drawn before Rothhaven had handed her up into Stephen’s traveling coach. Rothhaven had given orders to have the crests turned, and the grooms and coachman were not in livery.
“We will create a stir nonetheless,” Rothhaven replied, taking off his hat and setting it on the opposite seat. “The quality of the horses alone will draw notice.”
Matched blacks, not a white hair upon them, the leaders full of fire, the wheelers bristling with muscle. Stephen knew his horseflesh.
“We’ll change at a posting inn,” Constance said.
“The inn, recognizing the coach, will put a Wentworth relief team in the traces.”
Rothhaven’s argumentative mood put Constance in mind of his behavior on the way into York. “Do you feel a seizure approaching?”
“No.”
“Has the prospect of a coach journey out onto the Dales put you in such a foul humor?”
He swiveled his gaze to regard her, and by the dim light of the single coach lamp, Constance could see that her beloved was in a foul humor indeed. He might have been Quinn attempting to quell a sibling insurrection, so glacial was his expression.
“Constance, we might well fail.”
Was heworried, then? “I’ve been failing my daughter since the day I put her into Etta Wilson’s arms, Rothhaven. I expect Ivy will be wroth with me—if I’m ever introduced to her—and that more failure awaits me in the mothering department. She’s my daughter, though, and I hope she will eventually see the advantages of attaching herself to a ducal household. In any case, her well-being must come first. I simply want to see her.”
“You long to see her, though you hope for much more.”
The coach was barely past the village, and the journey would last for hours. Perhaps rolling along in the dark, spatting and sparring, was a metaphor for marriage, but Constance believed in beginning as she intended to go on, even with the man she loved to distraction.
“If you cannot conduct a civil conversation, sir, I will ride up with John Coachman.”
Rothhaven guffawed, the first such expostulation Constance had heard from him.
“You’d do it too, and probably take the reins from him before another mile’s progress. Has it occurred to you, my love, that in addition to the fact that you and I are the aristocracy Mr. Shaw so detests, I am also afflicted with the falling sickness?”
“And why is that detail relevant?”
Rothhaven kissed her cheek, for no reason Constance could think of. “Some consider the falling sickness a curse, evidence of divine judgment, a mark of the devil.”
“Someare ridiculous.” Constance took off her bonnet and put it on the opposite seat next to Rothhaven’s top hat. “I was poor, Rothhaven. Grindingly, wretchedly poor. I picked oakum, I carried hod, I ran errands all over York in my bare feet in wintertime and was glad for the coin. The same ignoramuses who think the falling sickness is a sign of God’s disfavor think the poor are lazy and stupid. You never saw a harder-working, more resourceful, wily, self-disciplined, and determined batch of people than the nearly destitute. Before the hope gets kicked out of them, they are unstoppably ingenious and tireless in their efforts to survive.”
“Is that why you were so determined to thwart Soames’s awful treatment of his patients? Because you’d experienced oppression firsthand?”
“I had certainly been on nodding terms with despair by then. Soames was evil, treating people who should have been guests in his home like specimens or livestock.”
Rothhaven turned down the lamp so the coach was all but dark. “I fault my father for many, many things, but he at least did not give Soames guardianship of me. I later learned that Soames was legally in no position of authority over any of us.”
“He was confident that your families would not trifle with his experiments. Vile man. Is obtaining guardianship complicated?”
“That depends. If Shaw consented to give me guardianship of Ivy, that would simply be a matter of paying the lawyers and waiting for a judge to sign an order.”
“And if he refuses to consent despite clear evidence that Ivy wants to be with me and would flourish in my care?”
“I do not kidnap minor females, Constance, and you cannot either. That is precisely the sort of eccentric behavior that will attract all the wrong notice.”
The horses stretched into a canter, meaning the swaying of the coach grew worse even in this exquisitely engineered vehicle.
“I am compelled to agree with you,” Constance said. “Those who go around kidnapping children are precisely the sort of people society looks upon unfavorably. Let’s get comfortable, shall we?”
“I beg your pardon?”
