The big grey suddenly surged ahead of them, crossed between their team and the rear of the Masters’ carriage in front and was brought round to canter close beside Julia.
‘What the devil!’ Fordyce exclaimed.
‘Miss Tresilian, do you need assistance? You sounded distressed.’
Julia glared up at Hal, suddenly completely out of charity with the entire male sex. ‘I am perfectly fine, thank you, Major Carlow. Will you please go away?’ I would be as calm as a millpond, if it were not for you, she wanted to throw at him, confused at her own anger.
‘Ma’am.’ He spurred the horse ahead without looking back, leaving Julia fulminating beside an equally furious driver.
‘He has the nerve to ask if you are all right when you are driving with me?’ Charles Fordyce demanded. ‘That hell-born blood thinks you need protection from me?’
‘Mr Fordyce!’ Julia grabbed the side rail as the carriage lurched. ‘Will you kindly look to your horses and stop lecturing me and ranting about Major Carlow?’
‘Certainly, ma’am,’ he said between gritted teeth. ‘I apologise for boring you.’
‘Not at all,’ she replied, equally stiffly as they drove on in seething silence.
Well, at least I know he has an unpleasant jealous streak. Better to know now than after I have agreed to marry him, Julia thought, wondering how she was going to explain the disappearance of one of her handful of suitors to her mother and Lady Geraldine.
Chapter Five
Hal woke with a thundering hangover. He lay flat on his back trying to work out why, when he could recall no party. He was still in shirt and trousers and was wearing one boot; his mouth felt as though a flock of pigeons had been roosting in it overnight and his head was splitting.
When he sat up with a groan, keeping his stomach in its right place with some difficulty, he saw the bottles on the floor and realized why. There had been no party. He had been drinking brandy—his foot knocked against a black bottle that rolled away and crashed into the others with nerve-jangling effect—and claret, all by himself.
‘What the hell?’ he enquired of the empty room as he squinted at the clock. Ten. He wasn’t on duty until the afternoon, thank God.
Julia. He had kissed her. Oh God, he had more than kissed her. He had almost debauched her, right there in that glade.
Hal got to his feet and lurched for the bell pull. Trying to think was damnably painful, and he didn’t seem to be doing very well. Keep going, he told himself. It will make sense eventually. But why? What came over me? There was only one answer to that: lust. Then he had seen Julia in the carriage with that smug secretary of Ellsworth’s so he had ridden alongside, just to keep an eye on her. And she had been upset, he could hear it in her tone as she talked to the man, even if he could not hear her words. So he had asked her if she was all right, because no-one was going to distress Julia while he could help it—except, obviously himself—and something had gone wrong…
And then he’d been angry and…He couldn’t recall anything else. But whatever had happened, it had not involved either Julia or any other sort of satisfaction, otherwise he would not be ankle-deep in bottles.
‘M’sieu?’ The waiter flung the door back with his usual enthusiasm.
‘Silence!’ Hal started to shout, then dropped his voice to a hiss. ‘Coffee. Strong, black. Lots of it. Toast. Dry. And is Captain Grey in his room?’ The man nodded nervously. ‘Then ask him if he will come here, will you? Quietly.’
‘Headache?’ Grey asked with a cheerful lack of sympathy five minutes later, picking his way through discarded bottles and clothing.
‘You might say that.’ Hal sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the room to stop moving.
‘I thought you had the hardest head of any man I know,’ Grey observed with a grin. ‘How gratifying to find you are human after all.’
‘I do have the hardest head. And just now, the most painful. Will, did I challenge anyone last night?’
‘What? To a duel? No.’
‘Thank God for small mercies.’ So, he had ridden away, not challenged Fordyce for whatever quarrel he and Julia had been having. Such restraint surprised him.
It was not until he had drunk three cups of coffee, forced down two rolls and stuck his head into cold water that he remembered that Julia had told him to go away in a voice icy with anger, and he had gone, because, much though he wanted to quarrel with her companion, he wanted her to forgive him. And she was angry with him, not just with Fordyce.
‘There’s post.’ Will Grey strolled back in and poured himself some coffee from the second pot that Hal was working his way through. He tossed the heap onto the table, ignored Hal’s wince, and sorted through it.
‘Who’s that?’ Hal pulled the top one in his pile towards him. ‘Don’t recognize the writing.’
‘Open it,’ Grey suggested as he broke the seal on one of his, scattering wax shards all over the table. A waft of heavy perfume filled the air, revolting Hal’s stomach. ‘Ah, the divine Susannah.’
Hal opened it and glanced at the signature. Your obedient servant, Mildenhall, the strong black signature said. What the devil was Monty, Viscount Mildenhall, doing writing to him? He’d been at Monty’s wedding to Midge Hebden, back in February, but they were hardly regular correspondents, despite having both served together before Monty left the Army.
Despite his aching head, he grinned at the memory of the most chaotic wedding he had ever attended. The groom had dragged his bride up the aisle of St George’s, Hanover Square, and demanded that the vicar marry them, the vicar had protested that the bride was obviously unwilling, her relatives were swooning from mortification or glowering like thunderclouds, depending on their sex, and the bride was arguing with almost everyone. At this point Hal had been forced to stuff his handkerchief into his mouth and duck under cover of the pew in order to stifle his laughter.
Monty, a man of quiet determination, had not been an effective officer for nothing. He overcame both bride and cleric, and the couple were duly wed. It was not until Hal and his brother Marcus were back at the wedding breakfast that Rick Bredon, Midge’s stepbrother, drew them to one side to explain the chaos.
Hal’s reminiscent grin faded. Midge had been stopped on the steps of the church by a man claiming to be her half-brother, Stephen Hebden. Midge, affectionate and impulsive as ever, had wanted him to come into the church, only for him to be violently rejected by her uncle until Monty, marching out to find his bride, had stopped the argument. By which time the man had gone.
Rick, whose father had tried to find Midge’s half-brother for years and believed him dead, was adamant that the man was an impostor, but Hal had known better. Stephen Hebden, also known as Stephano Beshaley, was the illegitimate son of Midge’s father and his Gypsy lover and a sworn enemy of the Carlow family, and of the family of Marcus Carlow’s wife, Nell Wardale.
The reason for his hatred was a mystery that they were only slowly unravelling. All they really knew was that it reached back twenty years to the days when Hal’s father, the Earl of Narborough; Nell’s father, William Wardale, the Earl of Leybourne and Midge and Stephan’s father, Kit Hebden, Baron Framlingham, had worked together to unmask a French spy at the heart of government.
Hebden, the code breaker, had been murdered, apparently by Wardale, who went to the gallows for the crime while his best friend George Carlow, Lord Narborough, stood by, convinced of his culpability. His father, Hal knew, had never recovered from his sense of guilt over that. With their title and their lands attaindered, the Wardale family had slipped into poverty and lost contact with each other. Midge’s mother had remarried.
And