“Thank you, Pottson. We needn’t worry about Sir Archibald, I don’t think. If he misses her at all, he will merely believe that she accompanied me to Thurston Hall. Yes, I’ll pen him a note from my sister. It will serve.”
He clasped Pottson’s hand and shook it. “Don’t worry. I’m leaving now. I’ll fetch her home.”
Chapter Thirty-four
The marquess sat on the edge of a ditch and raised his voice to the heavens, his curses fluent and loud, despite the fact that he was quite alone. A curricle wheel was still spinning just beside his elbow, and his horses were stamping and whinnying. He pulled himself to his feet and soothed his horses as best he could, all the while searching out the scurrilous, half-hidden rock that had so arranged itself just beyond the turnpike entrance past Hatfield that it had ripped a curricle wheel cleanly from its axle and sent both the curricle and the marquess off into the ditch. He wondered without humor if the elements were conspiring to script a farcical play with him as the bumbling, ill-fated hero.
It didn’t help matters when the bay hack he was forced to hire in Hatfield proceeded to throw a shoe not many miles beyond where his broken curricle still lay at odd angles in the ditch. Leading his horse some five miles to the village of Davondale did nothing to improve his temper, and it was only after three mugs of strong local ale that he was finally able to review the day’s events with a modicum of good humor. The marquess was slightly foxed when he finally made his way up the old winding staircase of the Gray Goose Inn to fall in between the none-too-clean sheets of a rather rickety, too-short bed. He found that he could not long nurture his sense of ill-use, for images of Hetty, perhaps courting the same types of minor disasters that had befallen him, made his stomach knot with cramps. The shrill, off-key cuckoo chirped one o’clock in the morning before he was finally able to squelch his more dire imaginings and make peace with the lumpy bed.
The following morning, after an indigestible breakfast of watery porridge and rock-hard toast, he strode out of the inn and gazed grimly at both the slope-shouldered mare and the gray sky. He had no doubt that before the day was out, he would be drenched to the skin. Damn, he thought, if he caught a chill from this escapade, he would force Henrietta to wait upon him hand and foot for at least five years. He smiled at the thought of what he would have her do. He smiled more widely at the thought of what he was going to do with her. When he caught up with her. When he made her come to peace with herself and with him.
It wasn’t until midafternoon of the following day that the marquess drew up his sweating horse in front of a set of rusty iron gates just off the main road from Briardon and read the deeply etched sign, BELSHIRE MANOR. He was so certain that Hetty had reached her birthplace before him, for whatever else she was, she was endowed with an overabundance of ingenuity, that he began to picture their meeting. He couldn’t believe that she would really be surprised to see him. What would she say? He couldn’t wait to see. However, he knew that deep down there was such pain in her that he wouldn’t be able to trim her sails for leaving him. Ah, her pain. He didn’t know how he would deal with it, but he knew that he would have to. He still couldn’t believe that a father had sought his own son’s death. All because of politics, all because Sir Archibald had convinced himself that Damien was a traitor not only to the family but to England. It boggled the mind. He couldn’t begin to imagine how Hetty was dealing with it.
He led his horse through the creaking iron gates and found himself facing a three-story pink brick house, dating, from the looks of it, from the Stuarts. It was set amid a small park. The grounds showed only superficial signs of care. There was a general air of a long absentee master about the manor, and, he thought, of a less than sterling staff in attendance. He drew up his horse in front of deep-set flagstone steps and looked about for a stable boy. No such luxury, he thought, and tethered the mare to a bedraggled yew bush.