Page 9 of Lady Mary's May Day Mischief
More shouts met their ears.
The horses added more of their objections to the din.
“Look!” Welles pointed toward the road. “Another coach.”
“Thank heavens.” Mary peered out but had not the same angle of visibility as her maid. “More help, the better. Fifi, if you could not dig your nails into my—” She shot a glance at her friend who sat, her face pressed to the dingy leather upholstery. “What’s wrong?”
“My…foot,” Fifi managed, her face ashen.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Hurts.” She gulped.
“Don’t move, Fee.” Alarm swept through Mary. The sounds of men shouting to their horses gave her some comfort. “Stay still, both of you. We’re out of here in a thrice. You’ll see.”
She licked her lips and leaned toward Welles. Another coach, a private one, glistening ebony with gilded trim, pulled abreast of their damaged one. She stretched up to view the escutcheon of the owner and something about the standing, growling griffin set her startled mind galloping. The shield sparkled in the sunlight, its field awash in tiny ermine symbols, covered by a huge griffin, rampant, claws out. She’d studied heraldry as a child and she’d once known the family who owned this shield. But in the chaos, the identity escaped her.
Two men, tall and dark and in the finest tailoring, jumped down from the black carriage and ran toward theirs. Their coachman, two footmen and a tiger followed. Trees obscured her full view.
But one man she knew. Shadows of the past told her this man was…oh my. One of the Lindsey brothers. Not the oldest, Frederick Lindsey. No. Not Fred. Dead of fever. Three years ago. Not Fred’s younger brother either. Charles had died in Toulouse, in a battle as hot and ugly as Badajoz.
This was Blake! Her stomach did a thump. The youngest son of the Baron Lawton-Bridges was this large and dashing creature, not the lanky fifteen-year-old who’d left home for school in Woolwich. This man before her was no boy. But the older, bolder man who led infantry into the terror of assaults upon enemies of Britain.
Her eyes scanned him. Her heart remembered him from that last time she’d seen him, laughed with him and kissed him. He was handsome then. Irresistible in his uniform, resplendent in gold, red and white. Taller, broader in the shoulder, more agile and fit than she remembered him ever being. With wide, flat cheekbones, a Roman nose and a shock of golden brown hair that ruffled in the breeze, here before her was her childhood friend, her confidant, her correspondent. The one who no longer wished to be any of that.
It had been two years since she’d seen him after his father died. Two years since she’d bid himadieu, to send him back to his post with Wellington in Paris. Many lonely months in which she eagerly awaited the mail. She’d found nothing there from him save a note of sympathy after her parents died. Oh, she could understand he was a busy man. He was one of the few Royal Engineers, a soldier responsible for so much success of the British Army on the Continent. He’d been away for more than a decade, packed off to Woolwich and Royal Military Academy at fifteen. He’d been awarded a position because he could add a column of numbers in his head in a blink. Could look at acreage and the health of a crop and estimate the yield.
Now Mary would bet her monthly allowance that if anyone could right a coach, precariously balanced on the side of …what? A ditch? A stream? It was Blake.
“He’ll get us out,” she told her companions.
Blake Lindsey, home from the killing fields of Spain and France and Belgium, jumped up, balanced precariously on a rock or the runner and caught her gaze.
“My god,” he murmured.
The jarvey jumped up and grabbed at his shoulder. “Milord! Milord! My reins broke.”
“What?”
“Not my fault, milord. Please, tell ‘em.”
“Are you mad?” he barked to their hapless driver. He shook the man off. “Secure your horses!”
“The reins of the leaders broke!”
“Well calm them all then, leaders and wheelers. Come on, Charlton. Grab this.” Blake’s voice was a strident baritone. To hear the deeper notes sparked Mary’s memories of his younger pitch, their youthful escapades and silly, experimental, melting kisses. “Let’s get the ladies out of here.”
There was much cursing and ordering about among the coachmen and Blake’s and his friend’s servants.
When his handsome face once more appeared in the open window, she bubbled over with joy. Memories washed over her in a flood—and she blurted her childhood greeting for him. “Lawton-Bridges falling down!”
“Birdie!”
This had always been his name for her, an endearment no one else had ever used.
“God’s nightshirt! Don’t rock this carriage, my girl!”
“Happy to—Whoa!”
