CHAPTER TEN

July 17th, 1812

Hamptonshire

MORDECAI LEANED BACK in his corner of the coach. Salisbury was fifty miles behind them, Exeter fifty miles ahead. He stared out the window and pondered how best to find a godly woman who took in fallen women. Would it be quicker to ask at the churches or among the prostitutes? The prostitutes, he decided. He’d venture out this evening, find some whores, ask questions. By tomorrow, Miss Wrotham might be reunited with her sister.

The coach swung around a bend—and stopped so abruptly that Mordecai was almost thrown from his seat.

“Is it highwaymen?” Bessie cried.

Mordecai wrenched open the door and jumped out. Not highwaymen, but an accident. He took in the overturned phaeton at a glance. “Walter,” he snapped. “Run back and stop any carriages, else the next one will run into us.”

The footman obeyed, his coattails flapping.

Miss Wrotham climbed down from the carriage. “Someone’s overturned?”

“Yes? Are you afraid of horses? No? Then I need you to hold ours. Phelps, give me the reins and run up ahead, see what you can do to help them.”

The coachman obeyed, handing Mordecai the reins, jumping down from his box.

Mordecai spent a moment explaining to Miss Wrotham how best to hold so many reins, then he hurried ahead himself. Phelps was trying to soothe the panicked horses, so Mordecai turned his attention to the phaeton’s passengers, two young bucks who’d been cast into the ditch. One had a copiously bleeding nose, but it was the second man, white-faced and wheezing, his face twisted with pain, who snagged Mordecai’s attention. He went down on one knee. “What it is? Ribs?”

Ribs and an arm and quite likely a collarbone, too, in Mordecai’s opinion. A farm cart trundled up, and a gig. He sent the gig for the nearest doctor. When he turned back to the injured men, he discovered that Miss Wrotham was staunching the bleeding nose with the victim’s neckcloth. He glanced at his traveling carriage; Bessie sat on the box, clutching the reins, a look of nervous determination on her face.

Mordecai turned his attention to the phaeton’s horses. Phelps had managed to untangle them from their traces. “The gray has a strained hock,” the coachman said. “Otherwise they’re all right.”

“Good man.” Mordecai crossed to the farm cart. “Give me a hand getting this phaeton off the road?”

It was easier said than done, but they had the road cleared by the time the gig returned with the doctor. Five minutes after that, Mordecai was back in his carriage. He looked at his pocket watch. “We should still make Exeter by dark.”

His words were not prophetic. At Crewkerne they were held up by a funeral procession, just past Chard they were delayed by a farmer moving his sheep, and five miles short of Honiton, one of the leaders went lame.

They proceeded the rest of the way to Honiton at walking pace, arriving as the remnants of sunset were fading from the sky. Fortunately Honiton possessed a posting-inn. “I’m sorry,” Mordecai said, when he handed Miss Wrotham down from the carriage.

“It can’t be helped. Are we putting up here for the night?”

“If there’s room for us.”

Thereafter, the day improved, because not only did the landlord have room for them all, he also had an excellent wine cellar.

Mordecai dined with Miss Wrotham in a private parlor that was rustic, rather than modish. The beamed ceiling was so low he had to duck his head when he stood.

“How shall we find the godly woman?” Miss Wrotham asked, once they’d eaten.

“Ask at the churches,” Mordecai said. The chestnut wig and spectacles that had so disconcerted his eye yesterday had become familiar today. He was able to see past them, to see Eleanor Wrotham beneath Mrs. Trussell-Quimby.

“If she helps fallen women, should we not ask among them?”

“We will not ask any fallen women anything,” Mordecai said firmly. “I will ask them—if we fail to learn anything at the churches.”

Her eyebrows lifted slightly, and Mordecai remembered the accusation she’d made in London. Dictatorial. He gritted his teeth and prepared for an argument, but Miss Wrotham said nothing.

Relieved, Mordecai reached for his wineglass. “Do you wish to leave at dawn again?”

“Exeter’s only three hours from here, isn’t it?”

“Less than that. Unless another horse goes lame.”

“Eight o’clock, then.” Miss Wrotham folded her napkin and laid it beside her plate.

Mordecai sipped slowly, savoring the wine, and thought of the marriage license in his breast pocket. And then he thought of Miss Wrotham’s refusal yesterday, and her refusal the day before. How many times should I ask before giving up?

“Good night, Mr. Black.” She pushed back her chair and made as if to stand.

“Miss Wrotham, will you marry me?”

She paused, then sat again. “Why do you keep asking me that?”

Because I have to.

“This isn’t one of Beaumont’s faerie tales, Mr. Black. I’m not Beauty and you’re not the Beast.”

Mordecai disagreed. Miss Wrotham was a beauty—even with the red hair and spectacles—and he’d always been an outsider, an outcast, and what was the Beast if not an outcast? He summoned a smile and a careless shrug. “That’s a matter of opinion.”

Miss Wrotham didn’t smile back. She frowned. “Why do you wish to marry me, Mr. Black? And don’t tell me it’s because of one dance!”

Mordecai fumbled for an answer, and came up with, “Because I do.”

She rolled her eyes—actually rolled her eyes—and Mordecai’s heart missed a beat and he almost said, That’s why I want to marry you. Because beneath that cool exterior existed a kindred spirit.

“Please be more specific,” Miss Wrotham said, with her perfect, clipped diction.

Mordecai sipped his wine again, stalling. He couldn’t tell her that he thought of ballrooms as hen yards, filled with débutantes clucking and pecking and jostling for the best places, and that Eleanor Wrotham had stood out as if she was a hawk with clipped wings, watching the fuss but not part of it, distant and aloof. He couldn’t tell her that if her wings weren’t clipped she’d fly far and wide. He couldn’t tell her that he wanted to be the person who set her free. Miss Wrotham would laugh at him, think him a fanciful fool, a besotted idiot.

“You were kind to Arabella Knightley,” he came up with, because that was one of the things he liked about her: her kindness to someone who was as much of as outcast as he was.

Her eyebrows lifted. “Arabella Knightley?”

“You didn’t talk about her behind her back. At least, not that I heard.”

“Of course I didn’t!”

“Most people did,” Mordecai said. “They were polite to her face—she’s an earl’s granddaughter after all—but what they said behind her back was . . . not nice.”

Miss Wrotham snorted, and the sound made Mordecai’s heart skip another beat. See? Kindred spirit. “Not nice?” she said tartly. “It was cruel. Especially after what that idiot St. Just said about her!”

Miss Smell o’ Gutters. Yes, a cruel epithet to attach to a débutante.

Miss Wrotham leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms, and eyed him through the gold-rimmed spectacles. “That’s why you wish to marry me? Because I was kind to Arabella Knightley?”

Mordecai shrugged. “Why not?”

“I didn’t notice you being kind to her.”

“Me?” Mordecai put down his glass. “Good God! Can you imagine what people would have said if I’d paid any attention to her?” Like calling to like. The soiled heiress, the bastard son. “She would have been crucified.”

Miss Wrotham gazed at him for a long moment, her eyes narrow, as if she looked inside him. “It must be lonely,” she said slowly. “To be notorious through no fault of your own, people talking about you instead of to you.”

Very lonely. Mordecai shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “She had a difficult début.”

“I’m not talking about Miss Knightley,” Miss Wrotham said. “I’m talking about you.”

What? Mordecai froze.

“Is that why you don’t hide your affairs? You want to give people something to talk about other than your parentage?”

Mordecai felt like a moth skewered on a pin. No, not merely skewered; cut open, his innermost self bared to the world. “Of course not!” he said, with a laugh.

Miss Wrotham looked as if she didn’t believe him.

Eleanor Wrotham’s intelligence was one of the reasons he wanted to marry her, but at this moment, Mordecai wished she wasn’t quite so perceptive. He groped for another topic, something to head her off. “Do you know why Roger offered for you? Because of your face.”

Her eyebrows lifted.

“He told me once that you had the face of a duchess.” Mordecai remembered the smug pride in Roger’s voice—and the almost overmastering urge he’d experienced to hit him.

“A duchess? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Patrician,” Mordecai said. He reached for his glass again. “Roger thought you’d be the perfect Society hostess. He said you had a most pleasing reserve.”

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

“It was, coming from him.”

Miss Wrotham eyed him while he sipped, and she did look patrician. It was stamped on her face, something she had no control over. There was aloofness in the curve of her nostrils, hauteur in the set of her eyelids. Her father had had the same cast of feature, and it had matched his character. But in Miss Wrotham he thought the aloofness went no deeper than her skin.

“A perfect Society hostess.” Her tone gave the words a caustic inflection. “Is that why you wish to marry me, Mr. Black?”

Mordecai almost choked on his wine. “Me? Good God, no.”

“Then, why?”

Mordecai put down his glass. He took a deep breath and told the truth: “Because I think that beneath that face is someone who doesn’t want to be a duchess. Because I think that given half the chance you’d be as unconventional as your aunt, Lady Dalrymple.”

Miss Wrotham stiffened. Her expression became utterly blank.

Mordecai plowed on. If he was going to burn his bridges, why not do it thoroughly? “I think there are times when you want to pick up your skirts and run, even if it isn’t ladylike. I think you’d like to ride ventre à terre and laugh loudly and do a great number of things that a lady shouldn’t do.”

Miss Wrotham said nothing. He’d shocked her, that was evident. She was gazing at him with the cold hauteur of a thousand duchesses.

“But I may be wrong,” Mordecai said. “I may have misjudged your character.”

Her gaze lowered. She subjected her table setting to an intense, frowning stare that should have made the plate and cutlery cringe.

Mordecai sat silently, and hoped.

Finally, Miss Wrotham looked up. Her expression was unsmiling, somewhere between stern and perturbed. “You’re not wrong.”

Mordecai released his breath. He felt muscles in his shoulders and chest uncoil themselves.

She eyed him warily. “How did you know?”

“I saw you in Richmond Park once. You were riding with the Dalrymples, not quite ventre à terre, but close.” She’d been flushed and laughing and vividly alive, and she hadn’t looked at all like the cool, aloof débutante he’d seen at Almack’s the night before.

She grimaced faintly. “I remember. I shouldn’t have ridden like that.”

“Why not?” Mordecai said. “Why shouldn’t you gallop if you want to? Although personally I think it would be easier if you rode astride.”

Shock flashed across her face. “Astride?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

She stared at him for a long moment, and then said, “I couldn’t possibly use a man’s saddle.” Resolute words, but her tone was uncertain, doubtful.

Mordecai let the silence grow, let her words drift there, then said, “Not in London, perhaps, but on a private estate you could do whatever you wanted.”

She looked away. “I don’t have a private estate.”

“I have four of them,” Mordecai said. And if you marry me you’ll be mistress of them all. He didn’t say the words aloud, but Miss Wrotham seemed to hear them. She colored faintly and pushed back her chair and stood, not haughty and aloof, but almost flustered. “Goodnight, Mr. Black.”

Mordecai stood, too. The marriage license seemed to burn in his pocket. “Will you marry me, Miss Wrotham?”

She halted, her head turned away from him.

“Your sister and her child would live with us,” Mordecai said. “That goes without saying. Our home would be their home.”

Miss Wrotham turned slowly and looked at him, no longer flustered, but wholly serious. No, more than serious; frowning.

Mordecai reviewed his words in his head. “That wasn’t a bribe,” he said. “Absolutely not! I just . . . want you to know how it would be.”

The frown faded. Miss Wrotham surveyed him silently, her gaze searching. Mordecai experienced the same sensation that he’d had a few moments ago, that he was an insect split open for inspection, helpless and exposed. Seconds ticked past in his head. He discovered that he was holding his breath.

“If you took Sophia into your home, you would lose your entrée to Society, Mr. Black.”

She was almost certainly correct. Liaisons with members of the ton were one thing; taking a fallen woman into one’s household was quite another. Doors that were open to him now would probably slam shut in his face.

Mordecai shrugged. “If that happened, it wouldn’t bother me.”

More seconds ticked past. Miss Wrotham’s expression was troubled. “Perhaps it would bother me,” she said at last.

“Miss Wrotham—”

“Thank you for your offer. You’re very kind, but I cannot marry you. Goodnight, Mr. Black.” She turned and almost ran from the room.