Page 75 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
“My lord,” the footman inquired uncomfortably. “Are you quite well?”
“No,” he said, and he heard the devastation laden through the single word. She would never forgive him, and she would berightto do so.Hewould never forgivehimself. And now she was out there somewhere in London in the dead of night, because he had driven her from her home.
At the very least, she could not have gotten far.
“Ready the carriage,” Luke said. “I’m going to bring her home.”
Chapter Twenty Eight
Lizzie walked. Her slippers pinched her feet, but they had been made for dancing, not walking—and she had not had the presence of mind to find a pair of sensible walking boots. Or her pelisse. It was not yet full winter, but there was a decisive chill in the air which whisked right through the delicate silk of her ball gown.
The height of fashion, Susan had assured her. And that was quite possibly true. But it was also the height ofstupidityfor the weather, and now, as the wind whipped through the trees and prickled the fine hair on her arms, she regretted the mad impulse to dash from the house.
And now—now she didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know how long she had been walking; only that her feet hurt terribly and it was growing colder by the minute. Chill bumps chased along her skin, and she chafed her arms with her hands in an effort to warm them, taking stock of her situation.
She was alone. On a street sparsely furnished with lamps. In the early hours of the morning. Her legs ached—oh. At some point she had run pell-mell through a park, and the scrubby twigs of bare shrubs had seized at the skirt of her gown, tearing her skin through it. How far back had the park been? Had she turned left? Right? She couldn’t remember.
Get out of my sight.
A sob froze itself in her throat, sticking there like an unformed lump of clay, and she could neither swallow it down nor release it. It should not have hurt so badly, she knew—but it did, just the same. And she would have to gobackto that house.
There was nowhere else for her to go. Nowhere shecouldgo. She could not leave Joanna alone in the care of such a man. Papa had been bad enough.
Papa.Another sob, stuck beneath the first, and her chest hitched in ragged wheezes. The rough stone of the building beside her scraped her palm as she braced herself against it and fought only to breathe. Every muscle trembled as tears burned her eyes, and she dashed them away, but they just kept coming and coming—
“Lady Ashworth?”
Lizzie went stiff with humiliation, drawing in as deep a breath as she could muster, and turned at last to see a small blond woman standing perhaps ten feet away, in the company of a gentleman, her arm threaded through his. “Mrs. Knight,” she said, though it came out more of a croak than anything else. “How lovely to see you.” It wasn’t, of course. But it was the sort of meaningless thing one said when one met an acquaintance on the street. Especially if that acquaintance happened to have the management of an exclusive ladies’ club at which one was a member.
She could only imagine how she must look. Dressed for a ball, without a carriage or escort, shivering with cold and probably looking like she’d been crying a great deal. With any luck, the light of the nearest lamp was too dim to pick out some of the more humiliating details. Perhaps she would only seem daft—a woman who had gotten herself lost in the streets of London at an inopportune hour.
“Sebastian—your coat, if you please,” Mrs. Knight murmured to her companion, with a tiny nudge of her elbow. “Lady Ashworth, do forgive me, but you seem to be in some distress. Might I be of assistance?”
A hard breath that rattled in her lungs, past the tightness in her throat. “I must seem terribly foolish. I—I seem to have lost my way. If you could direct me toward my home—”
“You don’t want to go home,” Sebastian said brusquely, shoving his discarded coat into Mrs. Knight’s outstretched hand. “You’ve clearly just come from it, no doubt in quite a hurry.”
Lizzie listed back in surprise. How was it possible he had known that?
“Sebastian,” Mrs. Knight chided gently with a mild shake of her head, and she shook out his coat, offering it to Lizzie.
“Well, it was obvious enough to me,” Sebastian said, with an absent little gesture. “She’s got no pelisse, her skirts are full of tears and briars, and her face has gone quite blotchy. Women don’t generally flee fromdinner parties. Do take the coat, Lady Ashworth. I’d be glad of the excuse to be done with it.”
“Lady Ashworth, this is my husband, Sebastian,” Mrs. Knight said as she draped the coat about Lizzie’s shoulders. “One does grow accustomed to him,” she added,sotto voce.
Lizzie’s fingers clutched the coat around her. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m so very sorry to have interrupted your walk.”
“As it happens, you haven’t interrupted anything, when one considers that we were out looking for you,” Sebastian said.
“Forme?”
“Well, not you in particular,” Mrs. Knight said gently. “Every Saturday evening we walk, Sebastian and I, after Ambrosia closes. You happened to stumble into our route. London is full of women in impossible positions. Sometimes, there is a woman in distress, in need of assistance.”
“And youarein distress,” Sebastian said, as if he felt that that particular observation deserved an underscoring. And then to his wife, “Don’t glare so, Jenny. It’s the truth.”
“And you—youhelpthem? These women in distress?”
“If we can. Sometimes it is only a bed for an evening. Sometimes it is employment, or…escape.” Mrs. Knight laid a hand upon her elbow. “Will you not come with us, Lady Ashworth?”
