Page 29 of To Tame the Wild Rake
He nodded, reluctantly. “I do not like it. But you are right, Your Grace. We cannot let this touch Lady Charlotte.”
“He will go into exile, Aldridge. It will be enough.”
It would have to be. Charlotte came first.
13
The cramps bit hard, but Charlotte could not rest. She ensconced herself on a chaise in the window of a parlour that looked out over the street, hugging a hot brick wrapped in a towel and cursing herself for being unable to join the rescue.
She cautioned herself to be patient. They had to go all the way to Clerkenwell and who knew where else after that. But still, time should not be moving so slowly. The minute hand of the clock on the mantel took aeons to creep from one mark to the next.
A carriage stopped at the front steps. From her vantage point, all she could see was a foreshortened view of two top hats and two sets of shoulders in overcoats, one black and one navy. She had told Grosvenor, the butler, that she was not home to guests, and everyone else in the house was off rescuing Sarah, so she waited for these two to be turned away at the door.
However, they disappeared under the portico and did not reappear. After a couple of minutes, a knock on her door heralded Grosvenor. “Forgive me, my lady, but Mr Wakefield is here with a Mr Beauclair. I told them I would enquire whether you would receive them, my lady, since everyone else is out.”
Beauclair was Nate’s family name. Was this the cousin who had witnessed that long-ago wedding? “Bring them up, Grosvenor, and arrange for refreshments, please.”
Arthur Beauclair was a thin man with nothing distinguished about him: medium height, fair hair in a neat cut, light blue eyes, neither particularly handsome nor decidedly plain. Undistinguished, that was, until he smiled. It was no mere polite movement of the lips. His face lit, and his eyes warmed, and he was suddenly quite beautiful.
Charlotte, unsure of how much Mr Beauclair knew, had intended to keep the conversation to polite nothings, but he preempted that intention as he took her hand and held it for a moment in a firm clasp. “Lady Charlotte, I am so pleased to meet you at last. Your sister spoke of you so warmly when I knew her. But are you ill, my lady? There is something wrong, is there not? Or you would be in bed where you belong. Is it my cousin? Your sister, who is also my cousin by marriage?”
Charlotte found herself telling him and Mr Wakefield about the message from the seamstress and Aldridge’s discovery of the plot. “They were not much behind her; not more than half an hour. And they would have been faster through the streets than the town carriage. But if they caught up with her at Wilton’s, I would have expected them back by now.”
Mr Beauclair bowed his head, shut his eyes, and moved his lips in silent speech. It took Charlotte a moment to realise he was praying.An unusual sight for a Mayfair parlour. Charlotte’s relationship with God, for all that half thetoncalled her Saint Charlotte, had been distant since the incident, but prayer seemed a good idea, and she shut her own eyes.
Please, bring her home safe.
She opened them as the maids brought in the makings for tea. Mr Beauclair enveloped her in another benign smile. “They have her,” he said. “She is on her way home.”
Charlotte returned the smile, hoping hers didn’t show too much of her disbelief. She had to suppose the man meant well. She busied herself making the tea. She had barely finished when an excited buzz of greetings in the hall alerted her to another arrival, and in moments, Sarah entered on Nate’s arm.
Nate leapt forward to greet his cousin, and Sarah watched them, smiling. She was pale. Her clothes were crumpled and marred with dirt. She looked ready to drop. But she was whole and safe! “You look as if you could do with a cup of tea,” Charlotte said to her.
“I could murder a cup of tea,” Sarah agreed. She came to sit beside Charlotte, and took off her bonnet. Her hair tumbled down and she looked ruefully at her garments. “Oh dear. Perhaps I should go up and make myself tidy.”
Charlotte was about to suggest that they both go up, and Charlotte would organise a bath for her, when Nate turned from his cousin and took over. “I need to see to my wife,” he said.Which is quite right, and his place.Charlotte nodded when Nate asked her to organise accommodation for Mr Beauclair, and managed a smile for Sarah as she let her husband set aside any objections she made and sweep her off upstairs to bed.
Sarah and Nate had each other, now, and Charlotte was really happy for them.Truly, I am.
Only Aldridge’s rank and his previous association with the Duke of Richport prevented the butler from shutting the duke’s door immediately after announcing that the duke was not at home. Faced with the marquis’s insistence on knowing Richport’s whereabouts, he capitulated to the extent of allowing Aldridge into the grand entrance hall while he went to fetch ‘his grace’s man of business, who is overseeing the packing’.
Aldridge paced the length of the hall, noting through doorways that ornaments and paintings were being crated and furniture wrapped in covers. The man of business found him peering into what would have been a parlour in a household run along more sedate lines. In his youth, he had attended a few wild parties in which that room had featured. He shook his head.What fools we were.
“Lord Aldridge?” The man at his elbow was short, serious, and bespectacled. “Lord Aldridge, his grace left a message for you. Now let me see. What is the tide, my lord? Do you know?”
Aldridge brought to mind his glimpses of the river on the ride from his home. “It is close to full now, I think. What does it matter?”
The man frowned. “I suppose I had better give you both messages, then, my lord, since by the time I have sent to find out whether the tide has turned, the first may be irrelevant.”
The packing. The turn of the tide.Richport is leaving England. “Hurry, then, man.”
The little man intoned, “Message one,” and then puffed out his chest and deepened his voice into an excellent imitation of Richport’s drawl. “Well done, Aldridge. You were quick. If you hurry to Flinders Wharf, where I moor my yacht, you may be in time to wave me goodbye. I am leaving these shores for a space. One jump ahead of several scandals that would have amused you before you became so sober and so righteous. Come and wave to me for old times’ sake, my once-upon-a-time friend.”
He blinked earnestly at Aldridge, and added, in normal tones, “Those were his precise words, my lord. Message two.” He stiffened again. “You are too late, Aldridge. I have gone. If you are receiving this message, I am alone, sadly. If my plot to capture my lovely intended had been successful, my faithful Watkin would have been told to have you refused the house, and to answer none of your questions when you insisted, as I know you would. I apologise for attempting to take what you wanted, but you have been too slow. She is too delicious a fruit to wither on the vine, no matter what happened to her before she was ripe. She would have made me an excellent duchess, and taming her would have entertained me in exile. I doubt I’ll be back. My son’s guardians will do a better job of making a duke out of him than I could, and England has become boring now that my old friends are all either dead or sober.”
Aldridge nodded his acceptance of the message as the man fell silent. “Thank you. Flinders Wharf, you said?”
But when the hire carriage reached the wharf, those lounging around its vicinity told him that the Black Arabella, the yacht Richport said was named for his deceased wife’s heart, had left its mooring thirty minutes before.
