Chapter Nineteen

O liver was snoring. Ysella pulled the bedclothes over her head and tried to shut the sound out, but failed. Papa used to snore in the drawing room of an evening, or in his study, when he was in his cups, and after all that wine followed by the brandy, Oliver had definitely followed in Papa's footsteps. Which was a tiny bit disappointing in someone you thought loved you.

Unable to sleep, uncomfortable and sore in a place she hadn't realized could be so battered, and far too aware of the proximity of Oliver's naked body, Ysella cried quietly into her pillow. Was this how all girls felt on their wedding night? Not that this was her wedding night at all. She had the increasingly terrifying suspicion that she'd done a very silly thing in letting Oliver have his way with her before their wedding. And his words after he'd finished had added another layer of misgiving. Perhaps he was right though. Perhaps giving herself to him had been the thing to do to prevent Kit from undoing everything. It was certainly far too late to go back on this now. Anything other than marriage to Oliver would ruin her in the eyes of society, possibly in the eyes of her family as well.

From outside somewhere she heard a clock striking. Midnight. Was she never going to get any sleep? She wiped her eyes with one hand and tried closing them. But that only brought up images of Mama and home and little George. Would Morvoren be terribly upset that she'd left? She'd certainly be shocked at what she'd just done. Images of her own comfortable bedroom, of Lochinvar snug in his stable eating his hay, of Kit standing by the library fire, and rather absurdly, and for no reason she could put her finger on, of Sam in his office, flashed through her head. Images of safe normality. She gripped the pillow until her knuckles whitened. No, she did not feel either normal or safe here.

*

At cockcrow, Kit and Sam were in the stableyard mounting their horses, food for the journey provided by the innkeeper and packed in Sam's saddlebags. They clattered out onto the as yet quiet St Giles and set off heading north towards the Banbury road. At least the rain had stopped and, in the east, a watery sun was rising over the hills. Abelard and Hercules seemed none the worse for their fifty-mile ride yesterday, snatching excitedly at their bits and skittering across the cobbled road like a pair of two-year-old racehorses.

"They can't be far ahead of us," Kit said. They'd discussed riding on in the darkness last night, having decided that the runaways couldn't be more than thirty miles ahead of them. However, thirty miles on tired horses would have taken them until after midnight, and they had no way of knowing where Oliver would have decided to spend the night. As they couldn't have gone banging on every inn door they came to and rousing who knew how many innocent people from their beds in the early hours, with reluctance, they'd had to wait until first light.

Once out of the city, they pressed their horses hard, cantering wherever they could, but the road was not good. Spring should have been well established by now, but this year winter was hanging on by its icy, wet claws, and potholes caused by the weather wouldn't be filled until the weather looked up. But that would slow down the gig Oliver was driving more than it would two riders, and Sam had high hopes of gaining ground on Featherstone. However, he'd not allowed for the time it took to stop at every hostelry along their route and ask if Featherstone and Ysella were in residence. As Kit pointed out, slow as it made them, anything was better than overtaking them by negligence.

At just before ten o'clock in the morning, they rode up Banbury's high street, passing the famous Banbury Cross of nursery rhyme fame. With a heavy heart, Sam saw just how many hostelries they would have to approach before they could move on.

"Largest ones first," Kit said, with a long sigh. "I don't think even that cad will have taken my sister to a common inn."

Sam wasn't so sure. At the first inn they came to, they left their horses in the stables with instructions to the grooms to unsaddle and rub them down. Then they strode inside the inn and approached the landlord, a skinny fellow in a long apron who was supervising the cleaning of the taproom as the hour was still early to be expecting customers.

"Good day to you, my man," Kit said, laying his hat and gloves on the wooden bar. "We're in search of a man driving a gig. Tall, dark haired, a bit of a dandy, with the bearing of a soldier about him. He has a young woman with him. Slight, dark haired, and very pretty. Have you seen these two at all?"

The landlord's eyes shifted from Kit's face to Sam's, and he fidgeted with unease. "Aye," he mumbled. "I might have done. What's it to you, I have to ask, before I give out information on my customers? They seemed as nice a married couple as any I get here."

Sam shut his eyes for a moment. Had he just heard the man correctly?

"A married couple?" Kit exploded. "Tell me they didn't share a room?"

The landlord's hands gripped a corner of his apron. He must know already from their faces that whatever his guests had been up to, it wasn't anything good. "I'm sorry to say, they did." He eyed Kit up and down, assessing his status. "Milord."

"Are they still here?" Sam blurted out, his hand going to his hip, almost as though he expected to find a weapon there. But they'd left their pistols stowed in their saddlebags.

The landlord shook his head. "They left about an hour and a half ago. Heading north." The wariness in his eyes deepened. "I'd no way of telling they weren't what they said they were." He'd taken on an apologetic tone, no doubt fearing blame being apportioned in his direction.

Sam couldn't keep quiet. "How did she seem? This morning? Was she… happy?"

The landlord shrugged. "My wife saw her more than I did. She went in to help her dress as the young lady had no maid with her. I'll fetch her for you. Agnes!" A shout brought a stout matron at least twice her skinny husband's width into the taproom with such alacrity that surely she must have been listening at the door.

"Young Mrs. Wainwright, this morning, how did she seem to you when you helped her dress?"

Mrs. Wainwright? Sam bristled with fury, his fists balling by his sides. Oh, to give that despicable man a good hiding. He'd pull his cork, plant him a facer, rearrange his physiog, break every bone in his wicked, lust-filled body. He'd make it so the man could never seduce a girl again. He'd…

Agnes, a redoubtable woman with her gray hair scraped back into a tight bun and topped with a small lacy mob cap, set her hands on her hips and looked from Kit to Sam and then back again, interrupting Sam's increasingly violent thoughts. "Runaway, is she?"

Kit nodded.

"Under age and eloping?"

Sam's turn to nod.

"Well, you're too late."

"What d'you mean?" Kit asked.

The woman shook her head. "Quiet and kind of withdrawn, she were this morning, when I went in to help her. Mr. Wainwright, he'd gone down to take breakfast in the taproom. Got an eye for the ladies, that one. Caught him pressing my girl Meg up against the scullery door, his hand up her dress. Soon stopped him doin' that. Not that Meg minded any. She's a soft spot for a pretty face, and that Mr. Wainwright's got one for sure."

If Sam had his way, he wouldn't be keeping that pretty face for much longer.

"Get to the point, woman," her husband snapped.

"I got her dressed and her hair done, but she didn't want no breakfast. When she went downstairs to the taproom, I stripped the bed to wash the sheets. I know that mark of blood on the sheets when I see it. Your girl's not a girl anymore. He's had his way with her."

"The bastard!" Sam burst out, unable to control himself any longer, fisting and unfisting his hands.

"I'll kill him," Kit said, his voice icy cold. "I'll kill the blackguard."

"You'll have to be quick," Sam said. "Because if I get to him first, there'll be nothing left of him for you."

Kit banged his fist on the bar. "They have but an hour and a half on us. We'll catch them today. Innkeep, fetch us some porter and bread and cheese. We'll eat it while our horses are attended to and then we'll be on the road again. He'll not have another night with my sister nor another night on this Earth, if I have my way."

Sam swallowed. If, as seemed likely from the evidence of Agnes, Ysella had already lost her maidenhead to the fellow, what was to become of her after the death of her seducer? Was Kit even thinking straight? Despite his own boiling fury, Sam had to keep a clear head. Someone had to, because Kit clearly wasn't.

The innkeeper fetched them sustenance and he and his wife retreated. Sam managed to eat only a small portion of the food, but downed the porter and took a refill. After the second tankard, a modicum of common sense came over him. "We can't kill him," he said. "If we kill him, it's us who'll be in trouble for it. You especially."

Kit scowled. "He's defiled my sister. Snatched her from her family, run off with her and debauched her. What else should a man do? It's a matter of honor."

"If you hang for killing him, what's Morvoren supposed to do? And Ysella as well. She'll have lost her place in society and have no protector." Although in that dire situation, Sam would himself stand by her as protector if allowed.

Kit banged his tankard down on the bar. "Are you saying we can't exact punishment?"

"I am. We just have to get her back. If we do that, he can go rot." Much as it rankled to say this, common sense had to take precedence here over the longing for revenge. Easy to see Kit and Ysella were related—both of them hotheaded and impulsive.

Kit bit his lip. "I shall challenge him to a duel. It's the least I can do in defense of Ysella's honor."

"I don't think that's a good idea, either. They're illegal."

"Only a little. I know for a fact, most duels go unremarked."

"If you have to do something like that, then of course I'll be your second, but who will be his? If you go challenging him to a duel and hope to get away with it, you have to carry it out correctly. I don't see how you can do that. A duel is not a good idea. And didn't you say he's already killed a man in a duel? He must be a good shot. He is a soldier, after all. Suppose he kills you? Ysella and Morvoren would be alone in the world. And so would little George."

"He'll just have to find someone who'll stand for him. I don't care. My aim is to kill him, not let him kill me."

Sam sighed, sensing he was on a losing wicket here. "Wounding him would be better. Less likely to cause a storm afterwards. If he has any sense he'll flee with his tail between his legs."

"That's it." Kit threw down his half-eaten food. "I've had enough. I'm not waiting around here while the cad makes off with my sister. It's time he learned a few home truths about her supposed fortune. I'll wager that'll make him change his tune." He laughed, sounding and looking just like his late father again. "I can't wait to see his face when I tell him he can't get his hands on her money for another eleven years."

Sam bit his tongue. He wanted to exact revenge on Featherstone as much as Kit did, but he was nowhere near as hotheaded. It would be up to him to make sure Kit didn't do anything stupid that would jeopardize Morvoren's future happiness. Ysella would not want her brother to be jailed, or worse, hanged, because of something she'd done.

The horses were still being groomed in the inn yard when they got there. "Saddle them up," Kit almost shouted. "We're leaving."

A few minutes later they were trotting up the high street and leaving Banbury behind them.

*

Ysella sat in the gig beside Oliver with the blankets pulled up over her knees and her hands tucked underneath them. Today, he hadn't bothered to ask for hot bricks and she was already cold as he'd put the hood down which he said would help the horse to pull the gig faster. Today, he didn't seem nearly so loving as he had yesterday. Was it something she'd done? Had she not performed last night as he'd expected her to? At least he hadn't wanted to repeat the experience. He'd got dressed in a hurry in the morning and disappeared downstairs, leaving her to try and get herself ready to leave alone.

When the landlord's wife arrived to help her dress, Ysella had nearly thrown herself into her ample arms and hugged her. She'd been racking her brains about how to get dressed without the help of a maid, terrified lest she had to ask Oliver to help and he decided a repeat of last night was required.

But it had been so embarrassing. She'd been sure the landlord's wife had known every detail of her story just from looking at her face. Surely the guilt at having behaved like a common strumpet was written in large letters across her forehead, along with the words "not married" or "fornicator" or even "loose-moraled woman." Once she was ready to leave the inn, she kept her head down to avoid meeting the accusing eyes of those who must be able to read what had happened last night in the way she looked and walked.

Their horse was lively this morning after a night's rest and some good fodder, its hooves beating a tattoo on the road where the surface was reasonably firm and level. However, much of the rest of the road was in a parlous condition, being rutted and muddy, and in some places other road users had beaten a way through hedgerows and driven through the fields on either side of what was little more than an uneven track. Oliver followed suit where it was expedient.

Ysella regarded his classical profile. He still seemed handsome to her, but now she saw a certain arrogance in his features, and a hardness that she'd missed before. The thought that he'd had what he wanted from her dawned, and that she was little better than the scullery maid at Ormonde who'd given herself to the gardener's boy and found herself with child. Which had led to the immediate dismissal of both unfortunates.

Her breath caught in her throat. Supposing she were to be with child? Could it happen the first time she'd done it? Oliver had said not, in his haste to persuade her to acquiesce to his attentions, but had he been right? Morvoren, with her superior knowledge, had given Ysella quite an informative lecture, with diagrams, on how a baby was made. And she'd definitely done the thing that caused that to happen. Did it happen every time you did it? Hot color suffused her face and she looked away from Oliver, out at the drab passing countryside.

They passed through a few villages where out in the fields the men had their teams out ploughing, despite the wetness of the ground. They'd be doing that at Ormonde. A flock of gulls peppered the gray sky, settling on newly ploughed ground to search for worms and leatherjackets. If she and Oliver went to live in London, she'd never see the march of the countryside's seasons and all that involved again. A sense of fatalism descended over Ysella. She'd made her bed, and now she'd have to sleep in it. A very accurate idiom for what she'd done last night, not that it had involved much sleeping.

The gig breasted a hill and began the gentle descent towards some woodland and a river valley. From behind, there came a shout.

Ysella peered over her shoulder. Two riders were galloping towards them. One of them was waving his arms.

Oliver twisted around, the grim smile on his handsome face rendering it quite unpleasant. "So, they've caught us up at last, have they?" he snarled. "Well, they're too bloody late. You're mine, and there's nothing they can do about it."

He heaved on the reins and brought the gig to a halt.