Of course, now that she could see him from close up, there was a touch of the disapproving schoolmaster about the set of his mouth. She wondered if he thought her fast for travelling alone. Not that he had any right to cast aspersions. When he had first entered the carriage, he had brought with him a cloud of gin and had fallen rather heavily into his seat as though his legs would be taking him no farther for quite some time. But he had been nipping regularly from his flask and had refilled it with brandy at the last stop.
She held the book of sermons before her, wondering if he was more in need of it than she. If he was a clergyman of some kind as she’d suspected, then he had best see to his own weaknesses before correcting others. He had fallen in with her lie quickly enough, when he could just as easily have defended her with the truth. A liar and a drunkard, then. But compared to the coarseness of the other man, he seemed quite harmless.
Yet when she’d almost fallen to the floor of the coach, his response had proved that his reflexes were excellent and his arm strong. He had sorted her back into the other seat as though she weighed nothing. And the thighs on which she’d accidently sat had been hard from riding.
It was a conundrum. She’d have expected him to forgo the saddle for a pony cart, as would befit someone of his nature. The physical prowess he seemed to possess was wasted on a man of letters. And there was something about his eyes, when he had removed his glasses in that moment when he’d cleaned them. The clarity of the colour in them was quite handsome. They were a strange, light brown that shimmered protean gold in the lamplight. They were the eyes of a man who had seen much, balked at little and feared nothing.
But the man of action she’d imagined, who would ride like a centaur and fight like a demon, was just a trick of the light. He was gone with the return of the spectacles, leaving a drunken cleric in the seat beside her.
At the next inn, the guard shouted for them to leave the vehicle. And they alighted, meaning to stretch their legs and twist the kinks from their backs, only to step down ankle deep into the puddles in the courtyard. The wings of the inn sheltered them from the worst of the wind, but gusts of it still tore at their clothes, making the short scurry to the front door a difficult trip. But her unwilling protector raised his topcoat over their heads to offer some shelter from the worst of it and shepherded her quickly into the public room. In the doorway behind them, the driver was deep in conversation with the innkeeper. When she glanced out of the window, the team was being unhitched from the coach and led away, but there were no replacements stamping eagerly on the flags, waiting to be harnessed.
‘What—?’ she said to the man who might be called Hendricks.
He held up a hand to silence her, clearly eavesdropping on the conversation of the guard with some other drivers who were gathered at a table by the bar. Then he turned to her. ‘It is too bad to go on. I might have known, for it has been growing worse by the hour. Our driver fears that there may be downed trees ahead of us, and does not want to come upon them in darkness. If the mail gets through at all, I am afraid it will be without us, at least until the morning. We will set out again, at first light, if the storm has abated.’
‘That cannot be,’ she said firmly, even though she recognised the futility of it.
He gave her a disgusted look. ‘Unless you have some arcane power that allows you to change the weather, you are stuck here, as we all are.’
Glancing around the room, she could see that the place was crowded even though the hour was late, for many other coaches on the road had used this town as safe haven. She scanned the faces for the only two she wished to find. But they were not there, probably farther up the road, clear of the storm and still travelling north. ‘Never mind a little rain. I must get to Gretna Green before—’ Then she shut her mouth again, not wanting to reveal too much of the truth.
He gave her an odd look and said, very clearly ‘Nonsense, Sister. You are going to Edinburgh.’ He glanced at the fat merchant who had bothered her, then gave her a significant look. ‘With me.’
‘Not on this coach we are not,’ she answered. ‘If you notice, we are in Newport, headed for Manchester. If you wish to travel to Scotland on this route, a more logical destination would be Dumfries.’
The man next to her narrowed his eyes and pulled the coaching schedule out of his pocket, paging hurriedly through it. Then he cursed softly, turned and threw the thing out the door and into the rain, glaring at her, as though geography were somehow her fault. ‘Dumfries it is then.’
‘You do not care about your destination?’
‘There are many reasons to go to Scotland,’ he said cryptically. ‘And for some of them, one destination is as good as the next. But in my experience, there can be only one reason that a young lady would be rushing to such a rakehell destination as Gretna.’ He looked at her sharply, the schoolmaster expression returning. ‘And what kind of brother would I be, if I encouraged that?’
True enough. She knew from experience that when one’s sister had chosen to rush off for the border, one must do their best to put a stop to it. And to share as little of the story as possible with curious strangers. So she looked at the man beside her, doing her best at an expression of wide-eyed innocence. ‘Do we have family in Dumfries, Brother?’ she asked. ‘For suddenly I cannot seem to recall.’
He gave a snort of derision at her inept play-acting and said, ‘No family at all. That is why I chose it. But perhaps I am wrong. I did not know until today that I had a sister.’
‘And you took that well enough,’ she said, unwilling to offer further thanks, lest they be overheard. ‘In case anyone enquires, would it be too much trouble for you to have a sick aunt in Dumfries?’
‘I suppose not.’ He gestured to a table at the fireside. ‘As long as you do not mind sitting in comfort, while we have the chance, instead of hanging about in the doorway.’
When she hesitated, she noticed that behind his lenses, there was a twinkle in his eyes that might almost have been amusement. ‘It is marginally closer to Scotland on the other side of the room,’ he said, as though that would be enough to pacify her. After he had seated her, he procured a dinner for her, adding, in a perfectly reasonable voice, that there was no reason not to take nourishment while they had the chance.
There was one perfectly good reason, she thought to herself. The contents of her purse would not stand for many stops such as this. She thought of Priss, halfway to Gretna by now, and carrying her allowance for the month, because, as the note had said, she had greater need of it than you, Silly.
Without thinking, she sighed aloud and then came back to herself, relieved that her new, false sibling had gone back across the room to get himself a tankard of ale. Now that she could compare him to other men, she found him taller than she had estimated, but powerfully built. The timidity of his demeanour did not carry to his body when in motion, nor did the liquor he’d drunk seem to affect him. There was strength and surety in his gait, as though a change in circumstances did not bother him a bit. He navigated easily back to her through the crowded room without spilling a drop of his drink, then slid easily on to the chair on the other side of the small table they shared.
She looked at him apprehensively and wet her lips. And then she stared down into the plate that had been placed before her, as though she had not used his absence to make a detailed examination of his person. She really had no reason to be so curious. While she might tell herself that it was a natural wariness on her part, and an attempt to guard herself against possible dishonour, she was the one who had come on this journey alone and then sought the protection of this stranger, based on necessity and assumptions of good character.
She took the first bite of dinner though she had no appetite for it, and found it plain fare, but good. She vowed that she would finish it all, hungry or no, for who knew when she might eat again? As long as he showed no signs of troubling her as the other man had, she would allow Mr Hendricks to pay as well. If he complained, she would inform him that she had not requested to be fed and that it was sinful to waste the food.
But the man across the table from her