The Taming of the Rake (22 page)

Beau took hold of Chelsea’s shoulders. “You promised,” he reminded her.

“I promised,” she answered quietly, her complexion having gone so pale he was afraid she might faint in sheer terror. But he should have known better, as she confirmed with her next words. “I’d given this possibility some thought last night, since you seemed to think we might have to face something like this. I told you, Oliver, each time I thought I could do the noble thing, I’d remember Francis Flotley’s wet mouth and fall into a near panic. So I formulated a plan for if we were caught here somehow.”

“What did she say?” Puck asked as he handed Beau his jacket. “Beau, I beg you, don’t listen to her. The last time she had a plan, I missed my dinner and ended up sleeping with you.”

H
E WAS IN A BOX
. He needed to keep thinking of it that way. A box. Not a coffin.

But he was in a coffin.

He had nearly become accustomed to the total lack of light—and probably diminishing air—when Chelsea lifted the lid and looked down at him, the unexpected shaft of sunlight coming into the room through a window nearly blinding him. “Are you sure you’re all right, Oliver? You look rather pained.”

He blinked a few times and then looked up at her. She looked stunning in black. It would be very nearly a pity to cover her golden hair and beautiful features with a thick black veil, but needs must when the devil—or, in this case, Chelsea—drove.

“He’s not pained, Chelsea,” Puck said affably, also peering down at him now. “He’s dead. Passed beyond all earthly woes. And have I told you enough times how brilliant you are? She’s brilliant, isn’t she, Beau?”

“Don’t encourage her,” Beau said, looking up into the concerned yet rather jubilant face of the widow Claridge. “As it is, I’ll probably be racked with nightmares
for the next decade. If we were already married, I would have refused this, you know. I want that on record.”

“Duly noted. By the way, Brean and his small entourage are having luncheon downstairs even as we speak,” Puck said and then unceremoniously slammed down the lid of the coffin, and Beau was cut off from sight and sound once again.

Chelsea had explained that it was the memory of his aunt’s recent demise that had served to also spark memories of the deaths of her parents, which had most probably served as further inspiration. People looked away from death, or at least she knew she did. They turned their backs on death or bowed their heads, which was rather like turning their backs so that they wouldn’t have to see, but seemed more polite and pious.

There was no need to tie strips of bedsheet into a crude ladder in order to escape detection by Thomas, and no need for violence. They would leave the White Swan as they had entered it, through the front door. Well, except for Beau, who would be carried out.

All she would need would be for Puck to sneak out and find some widow’s weeds for her, so that she might cover her face in a heavy black veil. Oh, and a doctor and an undertaker both willing to be convinced to partake in their little farce.

She’d suggested he take a large, heavy purse with him on his quest.

That, and to help her convince Beau that there was nothing in the least cowardly in what she considered to be her brilliant subterfuge. Beau didn’t know why
he had fought her so hard on that one point; probably because he would be unable to defend her if Brean saw through their charade. It certainly had nothing to do with her mention of becoming aware of her father’s nose and ear hair as he lay in his coffin…but that thought had occurred to him.

Within the hour, Puck had wrought a miracle, and Beau’s purse had been lightened by fifty pounds, a small price to pay, according to Chelsea, who’d dismissed the sum with the wave of one hand.

Puck had just come back to the room to happily announce that the entire hotel was most probably soon to be in an uproar, as someone—that someone quite possibly being himself—had put it about in hushed tones that there may be a case of plague in the hotel, that one man had already died. That particular twist had been Puck’s own, and he was much too proud of himself, Beau thought.

He felt himself becoming slightly lightheaded, and pushed up the lid of the coffin. “Much as I’m loath to point out even one small flaw in your plan, Mrs. Claridge, I think I might truly be a corpse by the time you get me out of here. Puck, use your knife to poke a few holes in this thing, won’t you? It would seem I’ve become accustomed to breathing.”

“Always a complainer,” Puck told Chelsea as he withdrew a knife from his boot. “This box cost five pounds, just for the hour, you know, our undertaker being a greedy sort. Now we’ll probably have to buy it. Not much call for air holes in coffins, I don’t think, and
lovely as it is with those soft cushions and all, I doubt you want to keep it.”

“Some people have bells attached,” Chelsea told them, at which point both men looked at her, waiting for her to expand on that statement. “Don’t look at me as if I’ve said something outlandish. They attach them to the
coffins,
not the corpses, for pity’s sake. I read about them in a book.”

“I’m going to have to start monitoring your reading choices, I see,” Beau said, sitting up in the coffin. “But do go on. Please.”

She rolled her eyes, which made him want to kiss her, and then explained. “It’s in case they aren’t really dead, you understand. The bell is put up on a pole of sorts that is stuck into the ground with a chain or something attached to it and running straight down and into the inside of the coffin. That way, if the person is not dead, and wakes up, he or she merely reaches for the chain and pulls it, alerting everyone to dig them up. Although I did wonder if you would have to pay someone to linger in the graveyard for a day or two, or else who would hear the bell?”

Puck grinned at his brother as he went about desecrating the coffin. “Would you perhaps want to rethink that decade of nightmares, Beau? Make it two rather than one? Ah, and that knock tells me our escort is here. Don’t have time to finish the holes, got only the one small one, sorry. You might want to hold your breath. I’ll be slipping out the window once I’m certain everything is in place. So until we meet again in heaven—or
the undertaker’s establishment—rest in peace, brother, or at the very least, in silence,” he said as Beau quickly lay back, and then the lid came down and darkness descended once more.

But at least he could breathe marginally better. And even hear. The dark wasn’t so bad. As long as he could keep forgetting that there was a heavy wooden lid only a few inches above his nose. He was all but stuffed in this damn box. Didn’t they come in
sizes?

“There’s word downstairs that the plague is running rampant in this hotel. I must protest, Mr. Blackthorn. I never said anything of the kind. If the truth were to come out, I’d be ruined.”

Ah, the doctor.

“Now, now, nothing to fret about. Have another five pounds.”

Very free with my money, aren’t you, Puck? You could have had him for two.

“Well, if you insist. Thank you. It will be only a few minutes now,” the doctor said. “I’ll watch at the window.” But it was nearly ten minutes before he announced in some relief, “Mr. Hayes and his hearse await us just outside the hotel.”

Hayes, hearse, hotel. Hayes’s Hearses. Hmm, hmm. Hayes’s Happy Hearses, since the man’s pockets had already been fattened by ten pounds. More, when he catches sight of the hole in his coffin. Hmm, hmm, hmm…perhaps one wasn’t enough…

“Oliver? Can you hear me?”

She was whispering. Why was she whispering? The
Whispering Widow. Hayes’s Happy Hearty Hearses…with bells on. Hmm, hmm, hmm—
Hmm? That is, yes. Yes, I can hear you. Was just…napping.”
Happy Hearty Whispering Widows…

“Good. The men are coming now to pick you up, so continue to lie still. I would have opened the lid, but the doctor’s assistant only left us alone just now, to show the men the way up to the room. And stop humming. Why are you humming? Never mind, don’t answer me. Here they come.”

Beau felt the coffin being lifted and had a sudden vision of the rather long, steep flight of stairs that led down to the lobby. It was one thing being carried to bed on six men’s shoulders, but something entirely different if he ended up being dropped halfway down the stairs.

He had a sudden vision of the coffin sliding down those stairs the way he and Puck and Jack used to sled on the hills around Blackthorn when the snow was thick on the ground, and then skidding to a halt in the middle of the foyer, perhaps even knocking down Thomas Mills-Beckman and his sister and Francis Flotley,
bam,
like so many ninepins.

The urge to laugh became almost overpowering, but the knowledge that whoever was carrying him believed they were carrying a corpse stopped him. If he laughed, they wouldn’t just drop him, they’d probably launch him down those stairs.

Ah, they were down, they’d made it. Now to get through the lobby and into the hearse.

Hayes’s Happy Hearty Hearses Hopping…

Someone was weeping.

Chelsea. She was crying for him. Wasn’t that nice…

“Hold there! I will say a prayer over the deceased, for the peaceful repose of his immortal soul.”

Beau’s eyes shot open in the darkness.
Francis Flotley. It had to be. Damn!

Beau tried to throw off his strange, happy lethargy, without much success.

“Reverend, come away. I just this moment heard it could be plague.”

Brean. Wonderful. All we need now is Madelyn. Puck, Jack, him. Chelsea, Thomas, Madelyn. Family reunions all round. And Flotley can say grace…

“Not plague,” Beau heard Chelsea say, her voice altered somehow, and slightly muffled, as if she had a handkerchief pressed to her mouth beneath the heavy veil. “Mumps.”

“God’s teeth, Reverend, did you hear that? Get away, man. Save yourself!”

Which was why Oliver Le Beau Blackthorn went to his grave without benefit of prayer, or would have if he’d really been dead, which he wasn’t, and didn’t plan to be for at least another four decades, all of which he would live happily as long as Chelsea was by his side.

Mumps? The girl was a genius! Hayes’s Happy Happy Hearty Hear…

Beau hummed the alliterative ditty as he slipped into unconsciousness.

T
HE WELL-SPRUNG
Blackthorn coach tooled smartly, far ahead of Brean, Puck had assured Chelsea, before Beau
finally not only opened his eyes with every indication of them remaining open this time, but even asked if there was any reasonable chance they might stop to eat something any time soon.

“And you’re quite sure you’re all right now, Oliver?” she asked him, still concerned. Her plan had seemed so complete. Except for allowing the poor man enough air. At this rate, their grandchildren would be entertained with stories for all of their childhoods.

When they’d finally been left alone in a horrid little room at the back of Hayes’s Funeral Parlor and Puck raised the lid on the coffin, it was to find Beau unconscious, so much so that Puck had been forced to slap him awake—something Puck seemed to have enjoyed rather much once Beau had uttered his first, faint moan. Which had sounded rather like
Hayessssss.

“I told you, I’m fine. Sleepy, but fine. Although I do now see the flaw in that bell contraption you spoke about. Mr. Hayes, at least, fashions a fine, tight coffin. If you aren’t dead when they plant you in the ground, you will be very soon, simply for lack of air.”

“Meaning you’d still wake up dead,” Puck said from his seat across from them. “Do you think we should tell anyone? In the interests of—would that be science? Somehow I don’t think so. Are you recovered enough to ride? Not that your horses aren’t doing fine with the groom riding one and dragging the other back there—but if I were a horse, I’d want to do more than lope along in the dust behind a coach. Seems to be ill-treatment, of the horses, not to mention the groom. And not that I’m
against having your company, either, but Brean will be looking out for a coach. You said so yourself.”

“All this concern, Puck. You really just object to riding backward,” Chelsea told him, joining in with his banter, wishing she could shed herself of the horror she’d experienced when they’d removed the lid to the coffin. Puck hadn’t fooled her, either, for the look he’d shot her at that moment had only redoubled her fear.

“And the two of you object to being the three of us,” Puck responded, giving her a wink. “I’d be insulted, if not for the fact that you’re right, I loathe riding backward. I know where I’ve been. I want to know where I’m going.”

“Many would,” Beau said silkily. “Are you still planning to return to France once we’re done here, to continue your career as a fribble?”

“Being the youngest sibling is never easy, is it, Puck?” Chelsea said sympathetically. “Everyone else seems to believe they’re in charge of you. You don’t have to answer him.”

“That’s a comfort, but I believe I actually have an answer. I’ll probably return to Blackthorn for a space, as I had promised, and our mother has likewise promised to remain there for the summer, and then head back to Paris until the spring. Jack said something about being accepted in London—it was rather a dare, I think—and I believe I may take him up on it. I’ll probably start by visiting his two coconspirators, who we saw last night. I think I might be able to trade my silence for a few introductions, don’t you, Beau? I pride myself on being
an affable enough fellow, but first I need at least one door opened for me.”

“You’ve got a devious mind, Robin Goodfellow,” Beau told him, stretching out his long legs and slapping at his thighs a few times, as if to rouse them from some sort of slumber. “I know, because that’s just what I’d do.”

“Bastards all,” Puck said happily. “I can’t imagine how boring it must be to have the world simply handed to you.” The coach slowed a bit, encountering a crossroads, and Puck leaned his head out the open side window as the coach turned to the left, to read the fingerposts. “Ah, it would appear we’re about to enter some rustic and benighted village. I told Jenkins to find a small inn, off the main roadway. We’ll soon have your belly full, and you can be on your way.”

Chelsea felt a momentary rush of panic at the thought of leaving Puck. They’d been doing well on their own, she and Beau, but now that they knew Thomas was so close behind them, she had reconsidered the idea of splitting up their small group, finding their own ways to Gretna Green. Giving up the extra pistol, if it came to that.

But she couldn’t say this to Beau.

“Oliver, can’t we stay with the coach? I’m so weary of inferior inns and horseback.”

He reached over and took her hand. “One more night, Chelsea, and then you’ll have the coach and the best inns, all the way back to Blackthorn. I promise. Your brother is too close.”