With a cry of triumph, the highwayman stooped to retrieve his pistol. But before he could do so, Nell shot him.
Bellowing in surprise, pain, and fury, Jack in his turn clutched his shoulder, but he managed to grasp the gun. Maera, her snarl rising to a bloodcurdling growl from deep within her chest, leapt forward. Her jaws closed on his wrist.
Jack dropped the pistol. “Call it off!” he pleaded.
“Not bloody likely,” said Nell, taking profound pleasure in the vulgarity. She seized his gun. “Good girl, Maera. On guard.”
“I’ll bleed to death!”
“Good.” She was already out in the yard, where Ben struggled to sit up.
“I strained my shoulder climbing through the window,” he explained in a shaky voice, “and now I think I’ve sprained my ankle. I’m sorry, I’m not much use as a rescuer.”
“You were simply splendid,” she said warmly. Kneeling at his side, she put Jack’s pistol in his good hand and pocketed her own. “I’d be dead by now but for you, and you were positively heroic, rushing in with an injured arm. You need a sling first, I think. Your neckcloth will be perfect.” She untied the neat, unobtrusive knot, unwound the rectangle of muslin, and quickly fashioned a sling. “That’s better. Can you rise?”
“If you will give me…a hand.”
Not
your
hand, with its echo of his proposal, she noted sadly, helping him to stand. To cap her many ineligible habits, she had used shocking language and she had shot a man.
“Heavens, I must try to stop Jack bleeding to death. I confess I was aiming for his heart, but all the same, I should not like to have his death on my conscience.”
She supported Ben into the stable. When he was seated on the manger, the pistol trained on Jack, she called off Maera and started to bandage the highwayman’s shoulder and wrist with strips of her desecrated petticoat.
“Don’t know why you bother, miss,” he said gloomily. “I’d as soon bleed to death as end up on the nubbing cheat.”
“The nub—the gallows? Oh, I hope it won’t come to that. Purely for your sister’s sake,” Nell added severely. “She was kind to me. I shall discover who is the local magistrate—I daresay I am already acquainted with him—and ask him to inform me if any more highway robberies take place in this district. If they do, I shall tell him where to find you. If you reform, he shall learn nothing from me.”
“What about the gentry cove?”
She followed his gaze to Ben, who appeared stunned by her forbearance.
“After all,” she defended herself, “Maera and I have done Jack far more damage than he ever did us. But, oh dear,” she added guiltily, “I believe
you
are going to have a perfectly dreadful black eye!”
Benedict, Viscount Clifford, stiffest and starchiest member of the Ton, burst into helpless laughter and laughed till he cried.
* * * *
Ben did not dare let Nell return to the house for his boots. There was no knowing what the Quicks might do. In any case, his ankle was swelling and he’d be no better off with one boot than none. As for his hat, if she had no bonnet, why on earth should he feel the need of a hat?
She found an oaken staff to support him. She had to lead all three horses, but they followed her willingly. They left by the side gate and Maera took them straight to Grenadier’s saddle.
“I need not have sacrificed my lace,” said Nell with forced lightness, “though after bandaging Jack’s shoulder, not much is left of my petticoat anyway.”
Her frank mention of the intimate garment no longer had the power to shock him. “I wager Maera will lead us back to the dog-cart, too,” he responded in the same tone.
“Oh, Ben, I’d forgotten, Nimble Jack cut the harness. I’ll have to cobble together a makeshift rig.”
“I’m sure I’ll be able to give you a hand with that, but I fear you will have to drive.” To her friend’s house, he thought dismally. “I’m more of a hindrance than a help to you.”
“Not at all. I need you right now, to hold the horses while I retrieve the gear.”
Nell muttered unladylike curses as she ploughed through the stinging nettles and reached into the thorny hedge. Nor was saddling her brother’s restive fifteen-hand hack an easy task. Not until it was done did Ben realise the real problem.
“I think I can mount, but I doubt I can control Grenadier with one arm and one leg. You will have to leave me after all, and go for help.”
“Fustian! I shall ride in the saddle, and you shall sit behind and use your one arm to hold onto me.”
“It’s not a side-saddle,” he reminded her.
“Riding astride is much easier.”
“Astride!”
“No one will see. It’s dark,” she said stubbornly, then wailed, “Ben, I don’t
want
to go on alone in the dark.”
He infused his voice with all the cheerful encouragement he could muster. “Then somehow we shall manage it,” he vowed.
Somehow they managed it. His ankle throbbed; his shoulder throbbed; his eye throbbed; but he was far more conscious of his arm about her supple waist, her back pressed to his chest, her silky hair tickling his chin, the lavender scent of her. As Maera led the way, the white tip of her tail bobbing ahead, Ben was happy.
Though reality had shaken him when Nimble Jack’s fist sent him flying, Nell’s bandaging of the highwayman had assured him that he was still dreaming. Anything could happen in dreams, couldn’t it?
“Nell, will you marry me?”
She stiffened. An endless pause, before she replied, her tone strained, “I do not consider myself compromised, I promise you. My reputation—except as a jilt—is quite safe.”
“To the devil with your reputation!” He buried his face in her hair and groaned, “Oh, Nell, Nell, see what you have brought me to: swearing before a lady, dismissing her reputation as irrelevant. If you won’t have me, I shall spend the rest of my life only half alive.”
“But I’m not at all the sort of female you thought you were offering for, the sort of wife you want.”
“The sort of wife I
thought
I wanted. Why should only women be privileged to change their minds?”
Still Nell hesitated. He was kind, gallant, brave, sensitive, forgiving, and only a man with a lively sense of humour could have laughed as he had in the stable. And yet…
“If I say yes, you will not mind having Maera in your house?”
“Our house. Certainly not. I have met many a dowager with less acceptable manners.”
“You won’t stop me driving by myself?”
“As long as you take a groom along—or me—to guard against highwaymen.”
“You will let me play Beethoven?”
“I’ll buy you everything he ever wrote for the pianoforte, and take you to hear his symphonies and concertos in London.”
“You will not insist upon directing my reading?”
“I venture to say you will find my library a considerable improvement over Brantwood’s.”
“Neither Papa nor Bertie was ever fond of books,” Nell admitted. “You will not try to change my opinions?”
“Oh yes I shall, but I shall respect them, and you for holding them.”
“And I may visit the poor?”
“Unless there is danger of contagion.” His voice thickened. “If I should be so lucky as to win you, you cannot expect me to risk losing you.”
“Oh.” She wished she could see his face.
“Have you any other shocking habits I should be warned of?” he teased.
She guessed at a valiant effort to subdue his emotions, to put her at ease, but his query had the opposite effect. “I have never done anything really shocking before,” she said penitently, “nothing scandalous…except running away from you.”
“I don’t want you to marry me for fear of scandal!” He straightened, drawing away from her. “All my life, I have sought to avoid being a subject for tattlemongers’ tongues, but I had rather suffer ridicule for being left in the lurch than have you wed me to save me from that fate. Which leaves you with no possible reason to want me. I’m quite useless to you.”
“Oh Ben, I don’t want a man who won’t let me do things for myself, who won’t let me hellp him. You
are
a perfect gentleman. If I agree to marry you it would be because…” She hesitated.
“Because?”
After all her other questions it was going to sound petty, but she had to know whether she had misinterpreted the warm light in his eyes up there in their shared bedchamber. “Benedict, you truly don’t object to red hair?”
“Object! My dear, my dearest Eleanor, if you had not kept it hidden from me, I’d have fallen in love with you weeks ago instead of proceeding in my dispassionate way. I doubt I am so perfect a gentleman I’d not have shown you…my passion.”
His arm tightened about her waist as once again he buried his face in her hair. His lips found the nape of her neck and his kisses sent a glowing tremor through her entire being. She forgot the night, the dog in the vanguard, the patiently plodding horses, the predicament awaiting with the dawn.
“Because?” he whispered in her ear.
“Because I love you.”
* * * *
Maera led Grenadier to the dog-cart. Nell and Ben emerged from their dream to repair the harness with knotted strips of Nell’s abandoned, ruined clothes, and they set out again. Vesta and Vulcan, now patchily black, pulled them at a steady trot eastward into a sparkling sunrise perfumed with honeysuckle.
And as she drove, Nell’s apprehensions returned.
Ben’s acceptance of her quirks was all very well in the middle of nowhere with none but a highwayman and his accomplices for witnesses. How would he feel when the moment came to appear before the Ton?
* * * *
As the bridegroom’s closest relative, Juliet Lady Faulk sat in the front pew in the little church, next to the empty place where her brother ought to be. Only the calm, reassuring presence of her husband at her side stopped her pulling off her glove to bite her nails, or running out into the churchyard to question Lord Derrington.
Her doubts of Lady Derrington’s increasingly anxious excuses had become certainty. Ben and Nell were missing. Which had cried off, which had jilted the other, she could not pretend to guess. Perhaps it was mutual. In any case, it was a major disaster and it was all her fault.
She held Faulk’s hand tight as the whispers behind her turned into scandalised remarks audible above the organ’s persistent drone.
Heads turned as the sound of hooves and wheels was followed by a ragged “Huzzah!” from the village urchins waiting outside. Cheering? Jeering? A curious mixture of the two. Juliet craned her neck. Had the bride arrived at last only to be humiliated by the groom’s absence?
If so, she’d
kill
Ben.
Bertie Derrington appeared, looking stunned, and raced up the nave to speak to the vicar. Behind him, two figures stood silhouetted in the arched doorway.
The organist embarked uncertainly upon Handel’s
Arrival of the Queen of Sheba
.
The bride wore a magnificent necklace of emeralds and diamonds. Her head was wreathed with honeysuckle, from which her unbound hair fell in a fiery veil about her shoulders. Her simple gown of blue muslin was sprigged with…mud? Mud!...to match the ankle-high strip of dried mud around the hem. She walked slowly between the rows of gaping guests, very slowly, for she was supporting…
Juliet closed her eyes, unbelieving, and reopened them to the same sight.
Ben had one arm across Nell’s shoulders. His other arm was in a sling and he limped heavily as she helped him towards the altar,
in his shirtsleeves and stocking-feet!
Torn shirt, without neckcloth, and filthy stockings, Juliet noted, beyond incredulity. And one eye was red and puffy, swollen almost shut.
“Someone has darkened his daylight for him,” murmured Faulk, grinning.
Yet Ben did not look angry. He was not embarrassed, nor even self-conscious. In fact, as he bent his head to whisper in Nell’s ear, he was positively radiant. So was she.
So was the huge, filthy dog of uncertain parentage who pranced after them exuding triumph.
They stopped before the flower-laden altar. Ben’s back was caked with mud from the crown of his head all the way down to his heels. Nell’s face, now turned up to him, was a curious, uniform scarlet quite unlike a maidenly blush.
The organ music ceased. Before the flustered vicar could pronounce his “Dearly beloved,” Ben once again bent his head. To the aghast amazement of the noble congregation, his lips met Nell’s in a long, loving kiss.
THE AUNT AND THE ANCIENT MARINER
Dearest Aunt Chloe,
I am in the greatest Despair. Papa grows ever more determined to see me wed and off his hands by the end of June so that he need never endure the Trouble and Expense of another Season in Town. Now he vows to marry me to an OLD MAN. Sir Lionel Tiverton is the richest of my suitors and the only one with a title, though he is no more than a Baronet. Papa would have preferred a Marquis, or at least a Baron. But in spite of our grand Connexions, I am not pretty enough to catch a Nobleman, as did my sister, without a larger portion as bait than I possess. Dear Aunt, you know I care naught for wealth or title. I could be perfectly happy with a country Squire, or even a Clergyman, if he were but amiable and young.
Indeed, I have written to you of the several agreeable, perfectly unexceptionable, young gentlemen I have met here. Though I am not madly in love with any of them, I should willingly wed Papa’s choice among them if only he will not force me into the arms of an Elderly Husband. He will not hear me, but rants and raves and swears I shall have Sir Lionel.
So you see, my dearest Aunt, I am in desperate straits. Pray come to London at once and persuade Papa to listen to reason.
Your affectionate, afflicted Niece,
Georgina.
Chloe dropped the tear-blotched letter in her lap. Persuade Edgar to see reason? As well ask her to persuade the Emperor of China to fly to the moon. The most she had ever managed was to divert her brother’s easily aroused wrath from his children’s heads to her own.
Poor Georgie! She was suffering because of the beautiful Dorothea’s marriage to Lord Welch. Catching the heir to an earl for a son-in-law had set up plain Edgar Bannister, Esquire, in his own conceit. Now nothing would do for his younger daughter but a title and a great fortune.