Page 59 of Unmasked by the Marquess
He sat up in bed and retrieved his spectacles from the bedside table, taking his time polishing them and putting them on before padding across the room to where the single sheet of paper lay folded by the door sill. He eyed it suspiciously for a moment, as if it were a half-dead bird brought in by an overzealous dog. There was no possibility that a note slipped under an inn door at daybreak could signify anything pleasant.
With a sigh of resignation, he bent and picked it up. The paper was the cheap, flimsy stuff the inn provided, and the handwriting was Gilbert’s messy schoolboy scrawl.
Dear Alistair,
I know this is dashed havey-cavey for all of us to run off like this but Miss C says it’s the only way, and I hope you’ll forgive me. I’ll send word as soon as Louisa and I are married.
P.S. We’ll take Mrs. P home.
P.P.S. Miss C has your horse.
He supposed he ought to be grateful that he had any note at all, even such an afterthought as this one. How long had they been planning to abandon him here? Had Robin known last night that she would disappear on the morrow? Had Gilbert known as they dined that it would be their last meal together? Exactly how thoroughly had he been conspired against?
For God’s sake, Gilbert was now in possession of the special license Alistair had sent for. If acquiring the license wasn’t enough to prove that he supported this marriage, what else was there? Was Alistair not to be granted the chance to see his brother married? Was he such an ogre, as Robin had called him, that his nearest and dearest didn’t trust him to keep his peace at a wedding, and instead ran away to get married in secret?
Evidently so.
An even worse explanation occurred to him: perhaps Robin, whose presence was required at the marriage as Miss Selby’s putative guardian, simply never wanted to see him again. Was that the reason for his shunning?
She had told him that last night was their farewell. She had made no secret of it. But it hadn’t needed to be like this, fleeing in the dead of night. It hadn’t needed to be so immediate.
As he stared at this sorry letter—shabbily done, Gilbert—his sense of loss slowly ebbed away, replaced by a tide of much more palatable anger. Good. Anger he could work with. Too bad he knew it for the temporary reprieve it was. It would soon burn off and leave him bereft of even the comfort of his righteous indignation.
But for now he was livid with rage, and he welcomed it.
He rang for his valet to pack his portmanteau and have the curricle readied, all the while pretending that he had planned all along to leave this godforsaken inn and was merely a few hours behind his companions. He had no idea where he ought to go, but he knew he couldn’t stay here, stewing and seething.
He mustn’t have done a very good job at pretending, though, because his valet and groom took one look at him and declared as one that they would ride back to London in a hired cart with the baggage.
On the way out of Little Hatley, Alistair stopped at the Trout farm on the chance that Mrs. Trout could give him any indication of where the women had gone. But the farmer’s wife only told him what he already knew: the ladies had left at daybreak, Mrs. Potton and Miss Selby riding in the carriage with Gilbert and the now-recovered coachman riding outside, and Miss Church on Alistair’s horse.
He had nearly forgotten that detail in Gilbert’s letter. Robin was a horse thief now, in addition to her manifold other crimes. And why that ought to make him want to smile instead of curse was a mystery for the ages. He would give her a dozen horses, each finer than the last, if that was what she needed. Even if he never saw her again, even if he never so much as heard her name again, if only he could be assured that she was safe and well.
Thanking Mrs. Trout for all she had done during Miss Selby’s convalescence, he counted out enough coins to pay the maid’s wages through the end of the quarter. Then he thought better of it, and added a few more sovereigns, enough to pay the girl for the next twelvemonth.
There was something about having lost his heart and having been prepared to lose his respectability that made him free with his spending. He had, even with the constraints imposed by his father’s profligacy, more money than he needed. With a few coins that meant little to him, he could grant this woman who had been kind to Charity and her daft sister-in-law the luxury of a maid for a year. He didn’t know what precisely that meant for a woman in Mrs. Trout’s circumstances—probably nothing more than a set of hands to churn the butter or rock the cradle, which, by the looks of the lady, was to be required this summer. For Alistair, those same coins wouldn’t even buy a new waistcoat.
Turning his curricle onto the London road, he recalled that his father had used much the same rationale to justify spending absurd sums of money. If the flowers he sent his favorite opera dancers cost less than a mere tin of hair powder, then how could it be an extravagance? Of course, he had then proceeded to buy the hair powder as well as the bouquets, and a good many other things besides, and that was why Alistair’s ledgers had only recently started to add up properly.
Still, it was disconcerting to find that there was any common ground he shared with his father, and it had been happening more and more lately. Ever since he met Robin, he had behaved in a way that a few months ago he would have considered reckless, shameful, wrong. It was more than reckless spending and condoning Gilbert’s lack of career and improvident marriage. Christ, if Alistair had gotten his way, the next Marchioness of Pembroke would have been a foundling housemaid turned felonious impostor, a woman who declared she wouldn’t give up her breeches and waistcoats.
If another peer behaved in such a way, Alistair would have thought the poor fellow belonged in a lunatic asylum. But even now, angry and betrayed, he felt no regret, not even an inkling of shame. If he saw Charity riding up towards him—onhishorse, which she had stolen, he reminded himself—he’d marry her in a heartbeat, propriety and respectability be damned.
There were, he reluctantly acknowledged, matters his father hadn’t gotten entirely wrong. Love carried a weight that was heavier than honor or prudence or any of the other things he had valued.
A damned uncomfortable realization, but not one he could shy away from.
By the time he reached London, every trace of his anger at having been abandoned, deceived, and robbed had slipped through his fingers, leaving him empty of everything but a dull pain.
Chapter Nineteen
It would take over a week to reach Scotland at this rate, traveling slowly so as not to jostle Louisa’s head or Gilbert’s arm. Every hour or so Mab would attempt to canter, but Charity reined her in to this tedious pace. It was anybody’s guess which of them was more bored. At least she was out of her gown and back into her breeches, so she had that going for her at least.
Before they had traveled fifty miles, Charity was forced to conclude that a third person was decidedly de trop on an elopement, or a marriage trip, or whatever this hellacious journey was. Gilbert and Louisa flirted, they exchanged tender glances, they discussed hopeful plans for the future. They were revoltingly blissful. Even worse, they went out of their way to politely include Charity in all their conversations. She might have been roused to discuss famine or pestilence or any other of life’s miseries, but she didn’t feel at all equal to happy chatter. So she kept her horse—Alistair’s horse—well out of earshot of the carriage.
Hourly, she regretted not having stayed another day or week or month with Alistair. But every moment in his company weakened her resolve; she loved him more with each passing second, and the pain of their eventual parting would only be harder for both of them to endure. So she had persuaded Louisa and Gilbert to leave at once, avoiding painful farewells and recrimination.
What she would have given for Keating’s company. She could have relied on him for acerbic commentary and a shared sour mood. But she had received no word from him since he left for Fenshawe, even though the London letters were forwarded to her at Trout farm. She took this to mean that Keating had discovered nothing amiss at Fenshawe and was this moment returning to London. He’d find out soon enough that she was gone.
