Alice’s answer was a rather guttural, heaving noise, followed closely by a few startled male curses…which was when Julia realized that Chance Becket had dismounted and come to see why the coach had stopped.
“God’s teeth, woman, you could give a man a little warning!”
“Or I could wish little Alice’s aim were better,” Julia muttered, but very quietly.
Alice had more than emptied her small belly now, and Julia once more eased her against the seat, handing her a clean handkerchief. “Stay here, sweetheart, and don’t cry. I’ll handle—speak to your papa.”
Grabbing the brass pot with one hand, Julia kicked down the coach steps and made her way, pot first, out of the coach and onto the ground. She spied the coachman, a small, painfully thin man of indeterminate years who, she had noticed, walked with the same rolling motion of a seaman more used to ships than dry land. If he were to apply to her for her opinion on his choice of employment, she would be more than pleased to tell him leaving the sea for a coachman’s seat had not been an inspired one.
“Billy,” Chance said. “You have a reason for stopping, I’ll assume?”
“I’ll answer that, Mr. Becket. Deal with this, Billy, and go to sleep tonight blessing your guardian angel that I haven’t dumped its contents over your head,” she said, biting out the words, all but tossing the pot at the coachman, who was suddenly looking a little green himself.
“Why is Alice ill?”
Julia had to unclench her teeth before she could answer what had to be one of the most ignorant questions ever posed by a man. “The pitching of the coach, Mr. Becket. A child’s stomach isn’t always up to three full hours of such motion. And my stomach has expressed a similar wish as Miss Alice’s, so if you’ll excuse me?”
Chance stepped back as Julia looked rather wildly toward the line of trees, then all but bolted into them until he could no longer see the blue of her cloak.
“This is why women are not welcome aboard ship,” he said in disgust to Billy, who heartily nodded his agreement, then went off to deal with the contents of the pot.
“Papa?”
Alice. He’d forgotten Alice. There had to be a special hell for fathers such as he. “Alice, poppet,” he said, climbing into the coach, leaving the door open behind him, as the interior smelled far from fresh. His daughter looked rather pale and somehow smaller than he remembered her, as if she’d shrunk in both size and age, as she hugged her stuffed rabbit to her chest. “How are you feeling now?”
Alice sniffled, her bottom lip trembling. “I want to go home, Papa. Buttercup doesn’t like coaches. Coaches have too many bounces.”
How could he have been so oblivious? Good weather, fine teams, a brisk pace and Becket Hall by ten that night. He’d been thoroughly enjoying himself up on Jacmel. And all without a single thought to his daughter’s comfort. He most certainly hadn’t thought about Miss Carruthers’s comfort…although he hadn’t been able to completely put the infuriating woman out of his mind.
“I’m afraid we can’t return to London, poppet,” he said, cudgeling his brain for some explanation the child might understand. Being rid of her would not have been a good starting point for that explanation. “But I promise that the coachman will drive much more carefully so there aren’t so many bumps. And tonight you’ll sleep in your own bed at Becket Hall.”
“You can’t possibly mean that. Not now. You really intend to drive all the way to the coast with this child?”
Ah, and here she was again, the woman who either didn’t know or didn’t care about her proper place. “Yes, Miss Carruthers, I still intend exactly that—and last night sent a message to Becket Hall saying exactly that,” Chance said, exiting the coach to stand on the ground beside her. Her pale complexion had gone positively ashen. “You look like hell.”
“Compliments are always so welcome, especially when one is considering death to be a viable alternative to one’s current condition,” Julia said, looking back down the roadway, longing for her portmanteau and her tooth powder. “We’ve so outstripped the second coach? Alice’s clothes are in that coach.”
“The coachman knows the way. Or are you worried that my daughter’s cases might disappear forever, Miss Carruthers?”
“No, those worries are for my own cases,” Julia said almost to herself. Then she took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I refuse to allow Alice to travel this way. There, I’ve said it.”
“And meant it, too,” Chance added, looking back over his shoulder. Alice’s small head had disappeared from sight below the opened window. “Very well. Do you believe we can agree on Maidstone?”
“We’ll stop there for the night?”
“We will stop there for the night, yes. But for now we must push on. Agreed?”
“Grudgingly, yes,” Julia said, then squared her shoulders and climbed into the coach. She carefully eased the now-sleeping Alice aside so that she could sit on the front-facing seat—the rear-facing seat had been an unfortunate choice for her stomach—then pulled the child half onto her lap.
Looking out the opened window, she said, “She’ll need a bath, fresh clothing and a good night’s rest, Mr. Becket. She’s a small child and fragile and should be handled accordingly.”
Chance nodded, knowing the woman was right, hating himself for being so selfish. “You’ve made your point, Miss Carruthers. No need to drive it home with a hammer.”
“No need but definitely a strong desire,” Julia muttered as the man slapped his hat back on his head and returned to his mount. Moments later the coach lurched forward once more, never reaching the killing pace set earlier. She then spent the next hour stroking the sleeping Alice’s curls and looking out the off window while ordering her stomach to behave.
“Coming into Maidstone ahead!”
Julia blinked herself awake at the sound of the groom’s shout and looked out the off window yet again, happy to see the beginnings of civilization once more.
Within an hour she and Alice were settled in a lovely large room at one of the many inns along the water. Alice had been washed, slipped into a night rail, had gingerly nibbled on buttered bread and milky tea and was once again sound asleep, now between sweet-smelling sheets.
And Julia was hungry. This surprised her, but she trusted her stomach to know best, so she washed her face and hands, frowned at her no-longer-neat hair, tucked Buttercup into the bed beside Alice, locked the door behind her and took herself downstairs to search out the common room.
“Not in there, Miss Carruthers. Lord knows the grief you could come to if you were to encounter my coachman again while you’re still of a mind to boil him in oil,” she heard Chance Becket say just as she was about to step across the threshold into a low-ceilinged room sparsely peopled with farmers and travelers. “I’ve arranged for a private dining room.”
She turned about to see that he had changed out of his hacking clothes and into a finely tailored dark blue jacket over fawn pantaloons. His hair, damp and even more darkly blond, had been freshly combed and clubbed at his nape. He looked fresh and alert and entirely too handsome to be smiling at her, to even know her name. “It was not the coachman who ordered us to all but fly to the coast. And I doubt, sir, that it is customary for the nanny to break bread with the employer.”
Chance laughed, doubtful that anything so mundane as convention ever gave this woman much pause. If it did, she wouldn’t have taken a step out of her chamber before doing something with that thick mop of hair that looked as if she’d spent the day scrubbing floors. “Perhaps you require a chaperone?”
“Oh,