The Duchess Hunt. Elizabeth Beacon
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we going?’ Jess asked, clutching her best bonnet, then tying the ribbons a little tighter as he set the restless team to as fast a pace as was safe in the London traffic.
‘Somewhere they can have a half-decent run and we can breathe in clean air for once,’
he told her rather distractedly as he skirted a wagon and restrained his high-spirited team as they took offence at a lady’s parasol in a virulent shade of green that would have made Jess do the same if she had to stare at it for long.
‘Won’t there be gossip?’ she protested half-heartedly.
‘Isn’t there always gossip?’ he said cynically.
‘About you, yes,’ she agreed, but not very often about lame and respectable Miss Pendle. A rebel voice within whispered it was about time she gave them a little fodder for their ever-more-ridiculous tales, so she might as well sit back and enjoy it.
‘I doubt even the tabbies will believe Lord and Lady Pendle allowed me to abduct their ewe lamb in front of their eyes, so you can relax, Princess. I promise to get you home in one piece with your name relatively unsullied before anyone even notices you’re gone.’
‘Since this is my last foray into society, I suppose it doesn’t matter what they say about me any more,’ Jess replied half to herself.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I should have thought it perfectly plain.’
‘Not to me.’
‘I am on the shelf, your Grace—not that I was ever truly off it—and I have no intention of taking part in any more social Seasons as I don’t particularly like London at this time of year. It always seems absurd to me that we all up sticks and move to town, when the countryside is at its most lovely and busy with new life, so we may spend that precious time of year being overheated and bored in a city that can’t help but be malodorous in the wrong weather—which seems to be most varieties of an English spring and summer so far as I can tell.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but you’re far too young to be at your last prayers. Not that you ever made the slightest push at being a successful débutante when you were younger and I can’t help but wonder why.’
‘Isn’t that perfectly obvious as well?’ she asked exasperatedly.
‘Again, not to me, which means that either I’m being particularly stupid, or you’re wrong. How to walk the fine line between arguing with a lady when she says black is white and I know it to be otherwise, I wonder?’ he mused as if his interpretation of events must be right, just because it always was, presumably.
‘You could try silence.’
‘Is that how you do it, Jessica? Use that quiet, sceptical manner of yours to frighten off all the sprigs of nobility who don’t comply with your high standards?’
So now he thought her a snob, incapable of finding any man fit to be her ideal pattern-card of a husband?
‘What a very high opinion of me you do have,’ she tried to joke.
‘It can’t be any lower than the one you appear to have of yourself,’ he said impatiently and finally gave his team more rein as the traffic thinned at last.
‘I am a realist,’ she stated bluntly.
‘If that were the case, you would be Lady Something or the Countess of Somewhere by now,’ he scolded as if her single status actually mattered to him.
‘And Lord Something or the Earl of Somewhere would simply overlook the fact they’d saddled themselves with a lame wife, I suppose?’ she asked caustically.
‘Yes, the only person who refuses to do just that is you, Jessica Pendle, and I’m weary of the whole tableau of the brave beauty, meekly accepting that her role in life is to make others feel pleased they are more fortunate than she is. It’s almost an insult to those of us who value you as you are, rather than as you think you should be.’
‘I’m lame, that’s how I know myself to be,’ she sparked back and tears she told herself were of temper threatened to undo her under his sceptical gaze.
‘You limp a little, that’s all,’ he argued. ‘It could have been so much worse, considering you spent a day and a night out in the pouring rain lying injured. You could have died, or been seriously crippled for life,’ he said, the passion in his voice making his now-calm team jib again.
‘I have never denied it was my own fault,’ she offered a little too meekly for her own taste.
‘Yes, it was, in so far as you took a horse you were forbidden to ride and dashed off on him into weather you should have known would terrify the poor beast. You had a quick temper and a wayward heart in those days, but none of us thought you set out to do yourself and that unfortunate animal injury. We would have been fools if we had, considering how well we all knew your fiery temper and tomboyish ways. No doubt you thought such an impulsive and ill-considered exploit would prove to the world you were every bit as good as any of your brothers at the time. Us Seabornes and your own doting family were only relieved you were alive, so why can’t you accept it as a minor miracle you survived relatively unscathed as we all did at the time?’
‘I had no idea you even knew I had gone,’ she said faintly.
‘I always notice your absences, Princess,’ he said with exaggerated patience, as if preventing himself from physically taking hold of her and shaking her until some sense had been driven in by force. ‘In those days it was mainly because I was on pins to know what mischief you were in whenever you were gone, but that time we searched all night, then half the next day for you. I’ll never forget how it felt to look in vain for a child lost in the darkness. Rich and I tramped the hills round Winberry Hall so fanatically I could probably guide a party round them, day or night, without pausing to get my bearings even now.’
‘I didn’t know any of that. When I recovered from the fever I got from being so wet and cold you and your cousins were all long gone, so I thought you must have already left Winberry Hall by the time I was found to be missing.’
‘Not us, and just as well since your father was in such despair when you were not to be found that night and your brothers not much better, that if my Uncle Henry hadn’t organised a systematic search of the area, we might not have found you until it was too late to help you.’
‘Then why wasn’t I told?’ she asked faintly.
‘The doctor said you were not to be reminded of your ordeal and would need all the peace and quiet you could get to recover when the fever broke and you were out of danger at last. So we took ourselves off, certain you would soon be your usual irrepressible self after giving us such an almighty scare, but you never really recovered your old spark, did you, Princess?’
For once she didn’t argue with that nickname, too busy re-aligning events in her head to bother about small details. ‘No,’ she admitted at last.
‘Why not?’ he asked as if he was truly interested in her answer. ‘You were the most intrepid female Rich and I ever came across and then you became a paper saint.’
How to explain that it was plain to her by then that none of her dawning hopes for the future could ever be, now she was imperfect and he was not? Impossible when he would think her still in love with him or some such nonsensical notion, she decided, and cast about for an excuse for losing interest in the things she’d once loved so much, like riding for hours about the Northamptonshire countryside, running like the wind and climbing every tree on her father’s estate, then most of his neighbours’ as well.
‘As a way of preserving my dignity, I suppose,’ she said finally with a shrug.
‘It was a retreat—no, worse than that, a refusal to give battle in the first place,’ he condemned sternly.
‘How can you sit there and lecture me on cowardice when you have no idea what you’re talking about?’ she accused. ‘You never suffered