Page 149 of The Ladies Least Likely
“You’re saying my eyes are the second best blue,” he said.
Instead of amusing her, as he’d hoped, her face turned gloomy and she sat back with a sigh. “My book,” she said. “It’s so close I can practically feel the vellum and the pinpricks the scribe used to rule the pages. I can smell the leather binding.”
She inhaled, and her small moan of longing scored straight to Mal’s gut. He didn’t blame her if the book was rather more on her mind than the condition of her cousin’s wife. From what he had gathered in their conversations on the road, the baronet and his lady had treated Amaranthe like an unpaid servant when she’d lived in their household, expecting her to tend to their needs while having no regard for her own.
He couldn’t help but resent, however, that he was further from her mind than both her cousin’s wife and her manuscript. She confused him to no end. The way she watched him sometimes suggested she liked what she saw. Very often their eyes met in shared understanding or a secret joke, even when other people were about them. But every time he drew near, she stiffened and pulled away.
It was not alone the innocence of a maid; he sensed some caution or fear. It was not dislike, he knew. She sat next to him as easily as she would have one of the children, or her brother. But if he tried to touch her, even in the smallest fashion, he sensed she would bolt. It was frustrating and bewildering and arousingall at once, and she had him as intent on her as a cat watching a moving string.
Oliver had been highly mistaken to suggest a wife steadied a man. Amaranthe Illingworth was driving him to distraction.
“Hi now,” the post boy called cheerily as he rode the team up the road, the farmer’s cart fastened behind him and the farmer in it. “I’ve borrowed us a wagon that gets us to the Queen’s Head, and father here will bring it back when we’re finished, and all for a fair price, aye?”
Amaranthe reached into the stuck chaise for her small valise, then watched from the side of the road as Mal transferred the luggage. When he turned he caught her appreciative expression as she watched him work, but when he met her eye, questioning, she looked away. The warm imprint of her gaze left him with a different kind of frustration. She wasn’t a woman who played games or affected coyness, and he sensed she didn’t mean to toy with him, either. He would have to ask an honest answer of her, and soon, because he didn’t think he could take much more of her hungry looks. And what would it mean for a marriage if she avoided his touch?
They received glares from the ostlers and drivers in the cobbled yard of the Queen’s Head when they rolled beneath the arched entrance in their humble wagon, blocking the way of faster and more important vehicles. A quick consultation with the landlord revealed a different problem.
The rain and mired roads had left several travelers at the inn awaiting a drier day, and the host had only one private room available. They could share accommodations in a common room, men in one bed and women in another, but Mal saw the look of quiet horror on Amaranthe’s face at the thought of having to bunk with strangers in linens not her own. He drew her aside to confer in a corner of the noisy office while passengers bustled past to and from the coffee room, the bar, thesitting rooms near the front of the inn that overlooked a quieter street, and the drawing room above.
“We can look for another inn in town,” he said as she worried her lip with small white teeth. “I’m sure there are several, and many quieter than a noisy coaching inn.”
“But what if they are full as well?” she asked. “We should have to travel further yet to reclaim our coach tomorrow, even granted we can pull it out of the muck.”
“We could take the private room together if we say we are married,” Mal said slowly.
A tightening around her eyes said she’d already considered it. “I’ll be a gentleman, of course,” he hastened to assure her.
“I believe you would. But all the same—the impropriety of it. What would Joseph say? Or Mrs. Blackthorn?”
He spared a smile for the notion that a self-sufficient woman like Amaranthe went about in fear of a scolding from her strong-minded servants. “You might stay here while I look elsewhere, and?—”
“My word, the hubble-bubble of this place!” A woman’s voice carried across the traffic and chatter. “I was told this was one of the finer inns. George, see that there is a private room secured for me, and a private sitting parlor for our dinner. I do not think I can bear more of this common press.”
Amaranthe whirled to watch the imposing lady marching down the hall to the office. A tailed Pierrot jacket with military style buttons, an expansive skirt over panniers that nearly touched each wall, and an enormous hat atop a tall, powdered wig proclaimed her wealth and importance. A pale, skinny boy, no doubt her George, trotted ahead of her dutifully.
Before Mal could say a word, or George for that matter, Amaranthe darted to the counter and the red-faced landlord behind it. She pointed over her shoulder at Mal, passed ahandful of coins to the landlord, and in return received a metal key.
Mal didn’t try to contain his smile as she rejoined him. “Mrs. Illingworth, I presume?” he said at her guilty, triumphant expression.
“Mr. and Mrs. Delaval,” she muttered, taking his arm and pulling him out of the way of the great lady still bearing down on them. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to use my name, and to take yours?—”
Would seem too much like they were truly married. He understood. “Which room have we, then, Mrs. Delaval?” he asked. Just her pretending to be his wife filled him with a ballooning sense of satisfaction. It made her his, for a time, in the smallest way.
“Well, I never heard of such a preposterous thing!” the great lady sputtered when George made his inquiries and was presumably denied. She turned to glare at Amaranthe and Mal when the landlord gestured in their direction, obviously indicating that they had claimed the last room. “George, we will go to the Duke of Bedford’s inn and find rooms there. I hear it’s on the grounds of the old abbey. Monastics know how to show better hospitality to weary travelers, I should hope!”
“She does know that Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, including Tavistock Abbey?” Mal whispered in Amaranthe’s ear. Her hair, coming loose from its twist, tickled his cheek. “I thought much of the green stone used around the town came from villagers dismantling the abbey after it closed.”
“I lied to that man,” Amaranthe said, looking stricken, and holding her valise as if she had the leash of a recalcitrant pet. “But she was about to claim our room, and I’m too weary to continue on today. I want a wash and a cream tea.”
“Whatever my lady desires,” Mal promised, taking the key with a small bow.
If she detested lies, then she couldn’t be a liar, could she? Mal felt considerably lighter in the chest area as they took turns freshening up.
After his own wash and donning a fresh cravat, Mal looked for Amaranthe in one of the small private parlors on the first floor. Their window looked out on the spired tower of St. Eustachius church and, beyond, the green bogs and stony tors of Dartmoor.
Mal paused to appreciate the view. He had grown up around dramatic scenery, climbing the Avon Gorge with friends and hunting for bilberries in Leigh Woods. But there was something lonely and haunted about the bare, wild moors dotted with the occasional longhouse and standing stones. It was a pocket of ancient myth lying, mouth open, beside the modern world, and he relished it.
He savored also the sight of Amaranthe presiding over tea, pouring him a dish and adding the one lump of sugar she knew he liked. He had seen her habit hanging in the room, neatly brushed, when it was his turn to change and freshen. She wore a simple open robe of blue silk with a saffron stomacher, a gown of Sybil’s that he had seen her wear for dinner at home, and though her hair was unpowdered and arranged quite simply, her quiet loveliness and the intimate domestic arrangement drew a thread around his heart and pulled it tight.
