Page 24 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
That was rich, coming from a man who had confessed to having two criminals for parents. “Do I need to remind you for the second time in an hour that I spent the past ten years in the army, not flitting between tea parties and soirees?” He kept his voice easy, as if that distinction were of no import to him at all.
Jack grumbled incoherently.
Now that they were well north of London and the road was clear, Oliver decided to give the horses their heads and see what they were capable of. He kept the ribbons light in his hands and let the horses do the rest. Before long they were practically flying down the straight country road, and Oliver didn’t regret a penny he had spent on them.
He realized Jack was sitting bolt upright, his ornery expression gone and replaced by something Oliver never thought he’d see in Jack Turner’s face: bewilderment.
“I’ve never gone this fast,” Jack said after a minute.
“Do you want me to rein them in?” He hoped not, but he’d do it anyway.
Jack seemed to be considering that option. “No.”
“Do you want to hold the ribbons for a bit?”
Jack shuddered. “God no.”
Oliver laughed. Well, well. Jack didn’t like horses, or traveling, or some combination of the two. This was the first time in their dealings that Oliver felt he had the upper hand. He wasn’t sure what he would do with this sense of power, but the possibilities seemed very promising indeed.
“Look at that sheep.” Rivington gestured with his chin. “It looks like it hasn’t been shorn in two years.” He had one arm slung along the back of the curricle bench and was using the other to hold the ribbons.
“Don’t you think you ought to keep both hands on that thing?” Jack didn’t know which had him more disconcerted, the proximity of Rivington’s arm or the apparent disregard he had for either of their lives.
The problem with travel—apart from the fact that it took you increasingly farther from London, which was bad enough, really—was the horses. Horrible animals. They could kill you as fast as a pistol and with less warning, too. All it took was for the beast to hear a clap of thunder or catch wind of smoke and it would lose all sense, and the next thing you knew you were in a ditch, or kicked in the head. Or at least that was Jack’s understanding of the situation.
“Bugger the sheep,” Jack grumbled, which caused Rivington to burst into a riot of laughter.
Jack had been born and raised—in so far as a child who was left up to his own devices from the age of mobility can be said to have been raised—in London. As far as he cared, there was little that he wanted to see that wasn’t within walking distance of Charing Cross. He hired a hackney if absolutely necessary and if a client was paying for it, because while his pockets weren’t totally empty, he still wasn’t going to pay for the privilege of being killed by a mad horse. No, if he were going to meet an untimely end there were plenty of people who would gladly stick a knife in his back or unload a pistol in his general direction—the way of his forefathers, as it were.
A little after midday they arrived at an inn. While Rivington set about hiring a fresh pair of horses and arranging for his own animals to be sent back to London, Jack stumbled into to the taproom and ordered a tankard of ale. He was halfway done when he heard Rivington come up behind him—the sound of the walking stick always gave him away.
“Did it ever occur to you, Rivington,” Jack asked without turning his head, “that the world would be a better place if we could use dogs to pull carriages?”
Rivington slid into the seat next to Jack’s. “I can’t say that it has.”
Jack would give Rivington credit for not treating him like an escaped bedlamite. “Dogs are reasonable, predictable creatures.” He tried to sound very sane. “Give them some meat, scratch them behind the ears, refrain from kicking them, and you have a friend for life. Horses, on the other hand, are a roll of the dice.”
There was a lengthy silence, during which Jack supposed Rivington was deciding whether to summon the authorities. “Are you afraid of horses, Jack?” His voice hovered in that careful middle ground between merry riposte and gentle query. Rivington was no novice at dealing with men who were out of their heads, then.
He supposed he had Georgie to thank for this “Jack” business, but there was no unringing that bell. “It’s not fear, Rivington.” He deliberately used the man’s surname, glad to score a single point that day. “I see horses every day. I’m not a hermit, nor do I live on some desert isle. Horses are a fact of life. It is, however, an objectively terrible idea to let yourself be dragged around the country at breakneck speeds by an animal that can’t be trusted to behave reasonably.”
“Ah,” was all he got by way of response.
On the next leg of the journey, Rivington was evidently feeling chatty. He talked as if under a spell in the sort of fairy story you told to only the naughtiest of children: the sad tale of a child who couldn’t hold his tongue and was subsequently put under a witch’s hex, to the effect that the brat could never stop talking unless he wanted his tongue to shrivel and fall off. Except in this case, Rivington produced easy chatter with the same effortless composure with which he did everything else.
The man seemed to have an endless supply of anecdotes about far-flung parts of the world. Cairo and Argentina and New Orleans, to say nothing of all the places in Spain and Portugal that Jack had read about during the recent war. At first all Jack could think was that there were so many places in the world that were Not London, an observation he did not say out loud, knowing that Rivington already likely thought him weak in the head after this morning’s fit of nerves.
But then something changed—perhaps it was the easy cadence of Rivington’s speech, or the obvious fascination the man had for all these foreign parts, or the way he made those places come to life with a few words. Hell, maybe it was the two pints of ale Jack had consumed on an empty stomach, or the fact that Rivington’s neatly tailored clothes and handsome face were covered in a healthy layer of dust from the road, giving him an unexpectedly raffish look. But whatever the cause, Jack started asking questions, and it changed from a monologue to a conversation.
“Do you think you’ll visit any of those places again?” Jack asked, almost without realizing what he was doing.
“I hope I do.” Rivington kept eyes fixed on the road ahead of them. “And without war to get in the way of seeing things properly this time.”
Jack would rather not travel so far as Greenwich, let alone anyplace he’d be hard-pressed to find on a map. “When I think of the world as being as big as it truly is, I feel like I’m going to be sick,” he confessed, which was likely the stupidest statement ever made by a man who relied on his wits to earn a living.
But Rivington only blandly agreed, and, as if sensing Jack’s discomfort, launched into a description of a meal he had eaten in the ruins of a fort in some place Jack had never heard of and would likely never hear of again.
There were worse companions for this sort of voyage than Rivington—that much was obvious. That was something else Jack couldn’t stand about travel, the endless stretches of time with nothing to do but chatter. But with Rivington it was no burden. On the contrary, he was better company than you’d think the son of an earl would be. It was almost . . . pleasant to sit next to him on the curricle bench, occasionally catching a whiff of that pricey laundry soap, sometimes stealing a glimpse at his perfect profile.
