Chapter 10

As soon as they drew to a halt outside the Hungry Boar, Belle dived out of the carriage and ran away, surprising Sir Horley not at all. Having left the horses in the care of the coachman and the ostler—a very nice man but not likely to Bonny’s tastes—he gave pursuit. If strolling after someone into an inn could, strictly speaking, be termed pursuit .

She was in the taproom, looking quite the part, with her cloak and hair streaming, and her hands clasped to her bosom.

“—for I am being abducted,” she was saying, “spirited away from the protection of my friends and family, by a wicked man who wants my fortune.”

“Good evening.” Sir Horley gave a slight bow to the assembled guests. “Did my fiancée mention I am a knight of the realm?”

The only answer was a nervous murmur.

“Well,” he went on, “I am. I also happen to be well connected and influential. So while I am not myself wealthy, I know many wealthy men. Many titled men. Many men who have seats both in Parliament and in the countryside. I take tea with the gentlemen to whom the whole country pays homage and to whom, more pertinently, you all pay rent. The most powerful of my friends are dukes, the least powerful are magistrates. Propriety, society, and the law give me let and license to do what I like, when I like, to whom I like, and permit no common tavern-goer to stop me. Now, I have an abduction to carry out. I trust that meets with nobody’s disapproval?”

Not a soul stirred. A lot of beers were being stared deeply into. Walls gazed fixedly at.

“I know a duke too,” Belle tried, rather piteously. “The same duke. He’s practically family to me.”

Once again, the room was still.

Sir Horley smiled. An easy untroubled smile that felt like a crack upon his face. “I see we all understand each other.” He turned to the innkeeper. “We’ll take your best room, and a bath, and dinner, to be served in a private parlour, if you have one.”

After the slightest of pauses, the innkeeper nodded. “Right this way, m’lord.”

“Come along, dear.”

Not trusting, entirely reasonably, that she wouldn’t bolt, Sir Horley caught Belle’s arm and steered her firmly after the innkeeper. He felt the tension in her, but clearly she was not of a mind to fight him in the middle of a pub, although perhaps only because she recognised she would lose. She did, however, mutter “One star” quite viciously as they made their way upstairs.

The parlour, with its unfussy furniture, wood panelling, and open fire, would actually have been a pleasant room. Unfortunately, Sir Horley was not given much opportunity to appreciate it.

“I hate you,” Belle announced, two seconds after the innkeeper had left them. “What you did downstairs? That was horrible .”

Sir Horley, unsure whether hours upon hours spent in a carriage meant he needed to sit down or definitely didn’t, shrugged. “I warned you I wasn’t Valentine.”

“Is that truly how you see the world?”

“It’s how the world works.”

“Perhaps,” Belle conceded, looking unexpectedly shaken. “But there is no need to contribute to it.”

The day was catching up with Sir Horley hard and fast. Very few of the experiences it had offered had been experiences he would have described himself as needing. But crowning them with a discussion of power, fear, and injustice was perilously close to the last straw in an already straw-limited situation. “I would not say I contributed. So much as took advantage.”

“That’s the same thing, and you know it.”

“Do I? Very well. Let us assume I do. But like the man who pisses in the ocean, I remain safe in the knowledge that my contribution is utterly meaningless. Given that, what can you do in return?”

“I can . . .”

“Make a scene?” he asked. “Be terribly, terribly spirited? Valentine was comfortable with his power over you, Arabella. That’s why he never felt the need to use it to the fullest. But I, my dear, am a small man. And small men are dangerous.”

Stalking over to a chair, Belle sank into it contemptuously. It was, frankly, a wonder she still had the energy for stalking and contempt. “So dangerous you cannot even liberate yourself from your own aunt?”

“My aunt has taught me nothing but shame my entire life, and that is precisely why you have no hope of defeating me. All your theatrics and your dramas and your tantrums are effective only against someone who has pride that you can injure. I have none.” The words came so easily, when once, he was sure, he would have hated even the thought of uttering them. “You will never embarrass me into acceding to your wishes, so you must accede to mine.”

“I shall do no such thing.” It was the expected rejoinder. But Belle offered it with fading conviction. And Sir Horley wasn’t sure if he was wearing her down or if she was as tired as he was.

“You have no choice,” he said, pressing the advantage regardless. “Besides, it’s for your own good.”

Belle’s eyes were dark in her pale face. “Even if it is, you’re not doing it for me. You’re doing it for you.”

“I am not—”

“Yes you are,” Belle insisted. He would have preferred the words to be thrown at him with typical Tarletonian passion. Instead, they came with a dull certainty he told himself it was not reasonable to be hurt by. “You can pretend that you’re protecting me or teaching me harsh truths about a cruel world, but really you’re just ... you’re sad and lonely and afraid and—”

A knock on the door interrupted what could have become a well-nigh endless litany of Sir Horley’s failings. It was a recitation he was extremely familiar with, but it felt different—sharper, truer—offered in a new voice. In any case, given the events of the previous day and a half, he was fully expecting to find yet another complication waiting for him in the hallway. Valentine and Bonny, perhaps. His aunt, with or without dogs. A Bow Street Runner. Wellington himself. Thankfully, it was only the innkeeper and his wife, who had come to serve dinner. A process that, between the number of dishes brought up and the fact they both gave Sir Horley a wide berth, took a while and felt unnecessarily cumbersome.

At last they departed, leaving Belle at the head of an impressive spread and Sir Horley lingering uncomfortably before the fire. For all his bluster downstairs, it seemed rather gauche to be dining with a woman you were also abducting. Even if she had abducted you first.

“Belle,” he tried, not sure if he was coaxing, commanding, or pleading. “Can we call a truce? If you think about it, nothing has materially changed.”

She glared at him across the plates and dishes. “What do you mean, nothing has materially changed? ”

“Well, you started the day with the intent of marrying me. And you’re ending the day in very much the same position.”

“I started the day,” Belle clarified furiously, “under the impression that if we were to be married, it would ... help. Perhaps help us both. I have ended the day having been convinced that you will always see our union—and me—not as giving you something you might need but taking away something that you want. That is not the future I wish for you, and certainly not the future I wish for myself.”

“We can—” he began.

“And moreover”—now Belle was back on her feet—“I have once again made the mistake of thinking better than I ought of a man who, the moment a lady defies his will or fails to accede to his wishes, brandishes his authority like he’s displaying his member as he pisses up a tavern wall.”

“That is not—”

“God,” Belle cried, half-distraught, half-incensed. “Why are you all like this? Why can’t you ... why can’t you ever ...”

She seemed to run out of verbal capacity. Which was, perhaps, why she seized up a roast chicken and hurled it at Sir Horley in a shower of its own trimmings. It was confusion, rather than any especially developed poultry-catching skills, that allowed Sir Horley to grab the bird before it struck him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m throwing a chicken at you. What does it look like?”

It did, indeed, look very much like Belle had thrown a chicken at him. A chicken that had left a chicken-shaped splodge upon his shirt and waistcoat. “I mean, why.”

“I don’t know.”

He placed the somewhat-worse-for-wear chicken back on the table. “Are you sincerely claiming that you threw a chicken for no reason whatsoever?” A potato sailed over his head. Followed by a second. “Can you please stop throwing food at me?”

“I’m annoyed,” Belle said.

“That”—Sir Horley ducked another potato—“I can work out for myself.”

“And hurt.”

“I’m truly sorry I hurt—”

She dug a spoon into the mustard pot and used it as a makeshift catapult to impel mustard in Sir Horley’s general direction.

“Though”—he managed to catch the glutinous yellow missile on the outside of his wrist—“I’m getting less sorry by the second.”

“I’m just so tired of being made powerless. Of having my feelings discarded and my choices deemed irrelevant.”

“I understand this is difficult, but ...” A carrot arced into the air and then nosedived to the floor. “This isn’t the way.”

“What is the way, then?” She cast about listlessly for something else to throw, her gaze finally settling upon a rack of lamb. “I have tried theatrics. I have tried reason. I have tried sincerity. Each and every one of them has proven broadly pointless.”

“If you so much as touch that rack of lamb, I shall empty the gravy boat over your head.”

Her hand hovered. “You would not.”

“I absolutely would. I warned you not to fuck with me, Arabella.”

As soon as he’d spoken, he knew he’d overstated his case. At best, he was fifty-fifty on pouring gravy over another human being, irrespective of how tired he was and how infuriating they were. Unfortunately, it did not do to show weakness before a Tarleton. And so, to prove his point, he was obliged to snatch up the gravy boat and advance with it.

Belle darted to the other side of the table. “Remember, I have grown up with a twin brother. You should not fuck with me either.”

“Did you often get into food fights?”

She blinked. “How else were disagreements to be settled?”

“Consideration? Discussion? Negotiation?”

“You’re the one holding a gravy boat.”

“I will put the gravy boat down the moment you return first to adulthood and, secondarily, to your chair.”

“And if I don’t?”

Sir Horley didn’t, in all honesty, have an answer for that. But he made the mistake of taking a decisive step forward. Which drew a shriek of mingled fury and alarm from Belle and led to her hurling an entire bowl of trifle directly into his face.

He had never had an entire bowl of trifle hurled directly into his face before. Abstractly, he rather admired the technique. It required speed, skill, and commitment. There were so many ways it could have gone wrong. The layers of jelly, cream, and custard separating mid-flight, for example, and plopping harmlessly to the floor. Or, worse, rebounding upon the hurler. In less abstract terms, however, the trifle had connected with a kind of cold, wet force and was now dripping off his eyelashes and down his nose.

The mostly empty dish fell, with a clunk, from Belle’s fingers. “I ... I panicked,” she said. “I may have overreacted.”

“Sit down,” he told her.

She sat down.

“Give me your hand.”

She gave him her hand.

Dragging the somewhat dessert-splattered cravat from his neck, he secured one of Belle’s wrists to the leg of the chair, low enough down that she couldn’t just reach over and untie herself. “I’m going for a bath.”

“That’s ...” Some trifle had slid from his hair and landed in her lap. “That’s probably for the best.”

“And when I come back, if I find you climbing out the window, or roping some poor fool into some outrageous shenanigan, I swear to G—”

“When you come back, I’ll be right here.”

“I mean it, Belle.”

“I mean it too.”

He didn’t trust her, because how could you trust someone you were abducting? But he had passed the point of caring for much beyond the fact he was covered in trifle. It was an oddly clarifying situation. By the time he came back, not covered in trifle, Belle would likely have fled. And then he would—

Actually, he didn’t care about that either.