Chapter Two
An hour later.
The Fiddler’s Roost Inn: the taproom and yard.
Sometimes it was not in a lady’s best interests to follow any dictates but those of her own heart. Because Lady Charlotte Ascot, daughter of the Earl of Ware, had discovered this at a young age—eight, to be precise, during a footrace against boys with considerably longer legs than she—when faced with a challenge to her courage at the age of twenty-one, she did not hesitate to set out from London alone for Kingstag Castle, where all of her friends were gathering for a holiday party.
For in fact the gathering was not really a holiday party. It was an emergency. Charlotte’s dear friend Lady Serena Cavendish had recently been jilted by her longtime betrothed, the Duke of Frye, mere months from the wedding. It had shocked the ton. According to a letter from Serena’s sister Alexandra, it had sent Serena into a spiral of distress.
Serena needed all of her dear friends around her now, and Charlotte was one of them. It mattered nothing that Charlotte had only just returned from a two-and-a-half-year trip abroad; friendships cemented in childhood and matured in young womanhood could never be undone, even across an ocean. Also, Charlotte and the Cavendish sisters had written letters to each other constantly since she had left England.
None of those letters had ever hinted that the wedding of Serena and the Duke of Frye had been in jeopardy. Betrothed to Serena since childhood, the duke had always been gorgeously attentive to Serena, everything that a lifelong fiancé should be. Despite the fact that he was the only person in the world whom Charlotte had literally climbed a tree to avoid, she had always particularly admired that about him.
The jilting was as much of a surprise to her as to anybody.
So when the invitation to Kingstag arrived in London, Charlotte did not wait before instructing her family’s coachman Fields to ready the team for travel or her maid to pack her clothes. That was how Charlotte found herself running through a curtain of snow from the carriage and into a little roadside inn in the midst of a blizzard.
And it was how, shortly afterward, she was sipping hot tea in the taproom—for the inn was so small there were no private parlors—and becoming acquainted with a pair of modest gentlewomen who had arrived on the Mail Coach.
“How do you come to be traveling alone, my lady?” Miss Mapplethorpe inquired. At least sixty, with pale eyes and an air of fragility, she smiled gently. Maiden aunt to the orphaned Miss Calliope Jameson, she was accompanying her niece to a distant relative’s home for the holidays.
“Lady Charlotte is not precisely alone, Aunt.” A shy, sweet girl of seventeen, Calliope Jameson shared the same pale eyes and slender frame as her aunt, but to great advantage. She was a beauty. “For she has come with her maid.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” her aunt said. “Dear Niece, you are so much cleverer than I.”
“Most of my family are still at my family’s home in Devon,” Charlotte explained, letting the heat of her teacup burrow into her palms. “They planned to join me in London for Christmas, but I suspect they have been delayed from that anyway.” And a good thing that was. While she missed them dreadfully, her father’s last letter to her in Philadelphia had made clear his intentions: she must return to England and marry. Since she had taken up her aunt’s invitation and fled to America two and a half years ago to avoid marrying, she was hardly eager to see her father anyway.
“My younger brother, Henry, is staying at a house quite nearby,” she added. “Although I don’t suppose the snow will allow me to see him this holiday either.”
“Oh dear, my lady,” Miss Mapplethorpe said with a shake of her head. “How dreadful to be far from family at Christmastime.”
“Perhaps not so dreadful,” Charlotte replied with a smile at both of them. “I shall have you two as company, after all.”
It was at that moment that they were roused from their cozy tea by a ruckus just outside. Miss Mapplethorpe went to the window to investigate.
“Good heavens,” she said. “I believe there is a brawl taking place in the yard.”
Calliope leaped up and went to her side. “It is those young men from the coach!”
The other guests were streaming out into the snow.
“Who can resist a brawl between two toffs?” one of them said excitedly.
Miss Mapplethorpe and Calliope hurried in that direction. Possessed of a natural curiosity, Charlotte followed.
And so it was that in the snow that still fell in thick curtains, Charlotte discovered the jilting Duke of Frye engaged in a flagrant bout of fisticuffs only moments before his opponent got the best of him.
Horace Chesterfield Breckinridge Church, the eleventh Duke of Frye, was not a Gargantua. He never had trouble finding boots that fit, and neither his tailor nor his valet ever bemoaned the width of his shoulders or thickness of his thighs. Rather, those inestimable persons praised said shoulders for the muscle that made buckram padding unnecessary, not to mention his flat, narrow waist. And they often exclaimed in glee over his marvelously well-toned legs, which made their labors so satisfying.
But Frye was not a particularly small man, either. He was, in fact, of average-to-tall height and average-to-wide shoulder breadth, and under normal circumstances he had no difficulty matching punches with Freddie, who was his same size (in truth an inch taller, but Frye never admitted it, at least not aloud).
Under normal circumstances was when Frye was not throwing a fight.
Barreling toward him at perfectly timed speed, Freddie’s fist made an arc meant to appear haphazard to the crowd that was streaming into the inn’s rear yard to watch, despite the snow.
As planned.
The speed of Freddie’s punch allowed Frye precisely the seconds he required to dodge to the side. The knuckles only grazed his jaw before he pitched onto his elbow in the snow.
“Cur!” He allowed the epithet to roll over his loose tongue in a tone suitably garbled to sound drunken. “I’ll ge’sshu now!”
“Cochon,” Freddie replied soberly. Freddie was, after all, the hero in this make-believe scenario. “A gentleman never allows an insult to a lady to pass unpunished,” he said in English better than the King’s. Lord Frédéric Alexandre Fortier had, after all, received higher marks than Frye in the study of Rhetoric and both English and French Literature—although only a bit higher, Frye occasionally reminded his old friend.
“Was only flirting,” Frye slurred, swinging a loose left at Freddie’s shoulder, which his friend nimbly sidestepped. “She didn’t mind.”
“The next time, chien,” Freddie said, his eyes narrowing with stalwart menace—for Freddie always played stalwart menace particularly well—“flirt with your words, not your hands.” Boots braced in a foot of snow, which their pugilistic theatricals were swiftly packing into ice, Freddie jabbed at him again.
Tilting madly, arms windmilling, Frye hurled himself to the ground.
It was shameful.
But they had played this scene to excellent effect many times before: Freddie accused a drunken Frye of insulting a lady, they fought, Frye got banished belowstairs or to a stable, and was then able to ask manservants or coachmen all sorts of questions they would never answer to a duke or to even a proper mister. Meanwhile, the dashingly heroic and intriguingly foreign Freddie would be inside encouraging polite company to raise toasts to honor integrity and good manners. Lots of toasts.
Violence and spirits both tended to loosen men’s tongues.
Now the group of coach passengers and others huddled in the inn’s doorway were casting Freddie looks of guarded admiration. He was obviously defending a woman’s virtue from his drunken friend.
In fact, Frye had not drunk a drop in years, though he’d splashed a bit of whiskey on his cravat to lend to his general aroma of dissoluteness.
On the other hand, there was in fact an insulted woman: Serena Cavendish.
But Frye had excellent justification for that.
Freddie, however, still thought fences required mending with Lady Serena. The punches he was throwing now, and the taunts, were not entirely make-believe.
“Someday you will meet a woman whose good opinion you will want,” Freddie said, the snow falling all about them. He swung again.
Frye dodged the blow, intentionally stumbling over his own boots.
“An’ you know all there’s to know about women, I s’pose?” he mumbled, landing a weak left on his friend’s shoulder.
“I know a fine woman when she stands before me.” Freddie jabbed, pulling the punch just enough to make it look like a near miss. “What is your problem, friend?” His narrowed gaze slipped sideways for an instant.
“You’re my problem, friend.” He threw a sloppy right.
“You’re blind, man!”
Blind?
What was Freddie telling him?
There. At the doorway. That man must be their quarry. He fit the description perfectly: fifty or so, narrow cheeks, pale gray hair, and a complacent smile that masked a mind bent on nefarious gain.
Then he saw her.
Framed in snow and haloed in firelight from inside: a woman.
The woman.
Full pink lips. Pale cheeks stained with pink from the cold. Dark curls tumbling over her brow. And gray eyes fixed on him, snapping with vexation.
The world abruptly glittered all about. Then tilted.
Charlotte Ascot.
Here.
Everything slowed—the snowfall, Frye’s heartbeats, Freddie’s voice coming to him as though through a tunnel.
Oh, no.
No, no, no.
Not here. Not now. Not when he had a job to do. Not in front of so many people.
Not in front of her.
But he felt no pressure in his chest, no numbness in his hands, and there was no light glowing across his vision, only the aura of bemusement caused by a pair of snapping gray eyes.
“Do you need to be hit over the head with it?” Freddie exclaimed.
Then Freddie’s fist slammed into his jaw.
Frye was sitting in the snow, shaking his head, and blinking hard when his friend grasped his hand.
“Mon Dieu,” Freddie whispered as he hauled him off his arse, his dark brow pleated and eyes full of worry. “What in the devil?”
Stumbling to his feet, Frye snatched his hand away and managed to mumble, “Damned slippery— Think you’ve broken my jaw, ol’ friend.” He tested it back and forth and cut a glance toward the doorway.
The man was gone.
But she still stood there. And the daggers her smoky eyes were throwing hit him like little jolts of lightning straight to his groin, with predictable effect.
Then again, Charlotte Ascot had always been able to make every part of him lose control.
“Sir,” the innkeeper said to Freddie as he came toward them from the doorway. “This is unacceptable.”
“A friendly disagreement, my good man,” Freddie said pleasantly. He offered the innkeeper an easy smile, grasping Frye’s shoulder.
Frye obligingly staggered anew.
“S’a friendly bout,” he muttered, struggling not to look toward the doorway. Toward her.
Blast, his jaw hurt.
“Bring us a pot of your strongest coffee,” Freddie said, pushing Frye toward the door.
“Begging your pardon, Mr. Fortier,” the innkeeper said. “My missus and I run a respectable establishment. There are women and children within, you see. This gentleman,” he said with a frown. “Well, Mr. Church here isn’t welcome inside till he’s fit for decent company.”
“Sir!” Frye let his mouth hang open a moment, then lifted his fisted hands up before him. “I’ll beg your pardon with my fives here!”
“Enough, mon ami. You have made your bed. Now you must sleep in it—a straw bed,” Freddie said with a chuckle and a placating smile for all. “Monsieur Innkeeper, point my friend to your stable where he can sleep away this unseemly inebriation.”
Which is how Frye came to be stumbling toward the stable, where he would seek out their quarry’s coachman and commence the next stage of their mission, and stumbling away from the lady with the smoky gray eyes whom he had once thought never to see again.