Читать книгу The Society Catch - Louise Allen - Страница 10

On the thirtieth of June, two days after Mrs Fulgrave had arrived distraught at the Tasboroughs’ house, her errant daughter sat up in bed in the best chamber in the White Hart inn at Stilton and decided that, just possibly, she was not going to die after all.

It had been the meat pie she had so incautiously eaten at Biggleswade that had been her downfall. She had known almost at once that it had been a mistake, but she had been so hungry that when the stage had stopped she had eagerly paid for the pie and a glass of small ale.

Up until then the entire undertaking had seemed miraculously easy. She had packed a carefully selected valise of essentials and had donned the most demure walking dress and pelisse in her wardrobe. Her hair was arranged severely back into a tight knot, she had removed all her jewellery and her finished appearance, as she had intended, was that of a superior governess. And governesses were invisible; young women who could travel unregarded on the public stage without the slightest comment.

Finding the right inn from which to depart had taken a little more initiative, but careful study of the London map in her father’s study showed her which area the Lincoln stage was likely to leave from, and a shy governess enquiring at six in the morning for the right departure point for Lincoln was apparently an unremarkable event.

In fact, she had felt remarkably pleased with herself and her tactics. Giles would have been proud of her, she caught herself thinking before that fancy was ruthlessly suppressed. Her only worry was how to get from Peterborough to Wisbech and Georgy, but that would doubtless become apparent once she had reached Peterborough.

Joanna pressed her arm against her side, feeling the reassuring bulge of the purse tied to her belt under her pelisse. She had only just received her quarter’s allowance and still had, quite unspent, her birthday present from her generous godmother. Of all her worries, how to pay for her journey was the least of them.

Then she had eaten that wretched pie. Goodness knows what it had been made from, or how long it had been sitting in a warm kitchen before she had eaten it. By St Neots she was feeling queasy, past Eaton Socon she knew that at any moment she was going to be violently sick.

The stage had drawn up at the White Hart and she had staggered off, just finding enough voice to request the coachman to throw down her valise before she dived behind the shelter of a barn and was hideously ill. When she emerged shakily some time later the coach was gone, but thankfully the landlady proved motherly and kind to the white-faced young governess who explained that she was travelling back to her employer in Lincoln and had been taken ill.

‘I am sure it is something I have eaten,’ Joanna explained weakly, ‘but I cannot travel like this. Fortunately Lady Brown does not expect me for another week so she will not worry. Is there any possibility of a room?’

The landlady was impressed by the genteel appearance and cultured accents of the young woman before her, and even more reassured by the sight of her guinea-purse. Such a pity that a young lady like that had to demean herself as little more than a superior upper servant.

‘You come along, my dear,’ she had urged. ‘By good luck the best bedchamber is free and I’ll have the girl see to you.’

The girl in question was kept more than a little busy over the next night and day. Joanna was thoroughly sick and at one point the landlady considered sending for the doctor, but by the following morning she was pale but recovering and could manage a little plain bread and a glass of water without it promptly returning.

She sat up and considered her situation. It was a setback, for she felt uneasily that until she turned off for Wisbech she was in danger of detection, but otherwise her plan was still holding together. But the delay had made Joanna think, and for some reason a particularly dry and academic book on strategy she had once tried to read came to her mind. She had cast it aside after a few chapters, unable to read further even to impress Giles. What had struck her as so idiotic about it was that the author propounded all manner of cunning manoeuvres without once considering that the enemy would be doing whatever they decided was best, thus overthrowing all the plans of their opponents.

It was just what she had been doing: planning her life with Giles without thinking for a moment that he might be doing something entirely otherwise. All at once it dawned on her that she hadn’t been thinking about the real man at all, only the object of her dreams, her innocent, ignorant fantasy. Did the man she loved really exist at all?

Giles Gregory meanwhile was finding a perverse pleasure in the hunt. He had never been an intelligence officer, unlike his friend Alex, but no army officer could rise through the ranks without knowing how to hunt down and track the enemy through hostile or strange county.

And this was a foreign country to him, he realised, shouldering his way into the bustling inn yards of London. To a man used to command, and used to the least of his commands receiving instant obedience, the experience of being out of uniform and on the receiving end of the London working man’s tongue was instructive.

‘Move yer arse!’ he was abruptly ordered when he stood too far into the yard of the Moor’s Head as the stage swung in through the low arch, then, as he sidestepped out of the way, he was buffeted by a swaggering postilion with his iron-shod boots and aggressive whip. ‘Shift yourself, bloody swell cove!’

He swung round to meet the man eye to eye and the postilion backed off, hands raised defensively, muttering, ‘Sorry, guv’nor, no offence meant.’

Giles looked him up and down without speaking until the man was reduced to stuttering silence, then said with a hint of steel in his pleasant voice, ‘You will oblige me by telling me the inn for the Lincoln coaches.’

‘This one, guv’nor. Let me show you the office, sir!’

Giles allowed himself to be shown the way. He was taking a gamble, but close questioning of a tearful Mrs Fulgrave by her niece and both men had elicited the fact that her sister Grace was the most likely refuge for Joanna. ‘Then there is her schoolfriend Lady Brandon in Wisbech,’ her mother had said, showing a greater awareness of Joanna’s correspondence than her daughter had given her credit for. ‘And, of course—’ She had broken off, looking guilty.

‘Who, Aunt?’ Hebe had probed. ‘We have to think of anyone she could have gone to.’

‘Oh, dear. You must not tell your uncle I mentioned this.’ Mrs Fulgrave took a deep breath. ‘My sister-in-law Caroline near Norwich.’

‘I have never heard of her, Aunt Emily.’

‘I know, dear.’ Emily had looked round imploringly at her audience. ‘You will promise not to tell Mr Fulgrave that I told you? His youngest sister Caroline…’ she blushed and went on bravely ‘…she lived with a married man as his wife. They fell in love, and then it transpired that he had a wife living who had run off with another man. So Caroline and Mr Faversham could never marry. It was impossible, of course, but she went and moved in with him. The family cut her off, even after his wife died, ten years later, and he married her, only to die himself within six months.’

‘Oh, poor lady,’ Hebe cried. ‘How sad!’

‘I thought so,’ Emily said stoutly. ‘And so I told Mr Fulgrave. I have written to her every year, but he would never relent because he says it nearly killed his poor father. But it is foolish of me even to consider Caro—Joanna could not know of her.’

‘Are you sure?’ Giles pressed. ‘Where do you keep her address?’

Mrs Fulgrave had removed her remembrancer from her reticule and held it out, open at the right page. Giles studied the address, then delicately lifted one long black hair from the crease in the page. Silently he held it up, dark against Mrs Fulgrave’s own light brown hair. ‘I think she knows.’ Only Hebe noticed that as he noted the address in his own pocket book he carefully laid the hair in its folds.

However, their supposition that Grace was the most likely choice for Joanna to make appeared to be confirmed at the stage-coach office. Not only did the book keeper assure Giles that this was the right departure point for Lincoln, but he remembered Joanna. ‘If you mean the young lady governess, sir? Least, I suppose that was what she was. Remarkable handsome young woman, that I do know. But anxious somehow—that’s why I recall her, sir—that and her looks, if you’ll pardon me saying so. All dressed so demure-like and those big eyes…’

‘Where did she buy a ticket to?’ Giles demanded, coming to the conclusion that if he took exception to every man who offended him that day he would not get far.

‘Lincoln, she said. At least, first she asked about Peterborough, then she looked confused and said she wanted Lincoln, sir.’

‘And what would be the town to change for Wisbech?’

‘Peterborough, sir.’

‘And what are the stops between here and Lincoln?’ Giles dug his hand in his pocket and began to sort coins. The man brightened at the chinking noise.

‘I’ll make you a list, shall I, sir? All of the stops or just the junction points, like?’

‘All of them,’ Giles had replied, tapping a gold coin suggestively on the counter.

Within half an hour his curricle, with the matched greys in the shafts and his groom left behind, faintly complaining, swung out on to the Great North Road heading towards Stevenage. Joanna had a full day’s start on him and he could not risk simply assuming she was going to Peterborough; he was going to have to check at every stopping place on the list. But then, there were French colonels—some of them still alive to remember it—who had had similar starts on Giles Gregory and who had still found themselves tracked down, outmanoeuvred and defeated. One chit of a girl was not going to elude him now.

Joanna parted with some reluctance from the comforts of the White Hart the next morning. She was anxious to be on her way and to reach Georgy, but the inn and its motherly landlady, Mrs Handley, had seemed safe; although she would never have admitted it, Joanna was feeling lonely and not a little frightened.

Still, she was taken up by the stage without any problem and Mrs Handley had come out herself to see her off and to remind her which inn in Peterborough to get off at in order to pick up the Lynn stage, which would drop her in Wisbech.

She eyed her new travelling companions from under the brim of her modest bonnet and was reassured by the sight of a stout farmer’s wife with a basket, a thin young man who promptly fell asleep and a middle-aged gentleman in clerical collar and bands who politely raised his hat to her as she got on.

‘I trust I do not intrude,’ he ventured after a few moments, ‘but I heard the good landlady directing you to the Crown and Anchor and I wonder if I might be of assistance? My name is Thoroughgood, Reverend Thaddeus Thoroughgood, and I am changing at that point myself as I do very frequently. I would be most happy to point out the stage office and so forth when we arrive.’

Joanna thanked him politely, somewhat nervous that he might want to continue talking to her, for conversation with a strange man, even a most respectable-looking clergyman, on a public stage was not what she had been brought up to regard as ladylike behaviour. However, the good reverend did not say any more and she thanked him and leaned back, feeling happier now she knew she had a guide should she need one.