Captain Corcoran's Hoyden Bride

‘I most definitely do not want to return to London. I just want to reach The Lady’s Bower before nightfall!’

The landlord’s patronising expression hardened into a sneer.

‘On your own head be it, then,’ he said, eyeing her in a way that made her even less inclined to sample the dubious quality of his lodgings. ‘T’aint more than three, mebbe four miles across Sir Thomas Gregory’s lands. Course, a stranger to these parts, taking the direct route across his land would like as not run foul of his gamekeeper …’

‘You expect me to believe this area, being so far from London, is so savage that people go around taking potshots at strangers?’ she scoffed.

‘Poachers, aye …’

‘Do I look like a poacher?’ she exclaimed, indicating her neat little bonnet, deep green travelling dress and serviceable cloak. She had chosen each item carefully, from second-hand dealers that stocked a better class of cast-offs, so that the entire outfit made her look exactly what she thought a governess ought to look like.

‘Or an imbecile?’ It had suddenly dawned on her that her outfit actually made her look fairly well off, as well as eminently respectable. The man was obviously trying to scare her into giving him her custom. Just because she was a stranger to the area, he thought he could hoodwink her into staying the night, then hiring some overpriced conveyance from his stables in the morning to take her on a journey that would probably turn out to be hardly any distance at all!

He sucked air through his teeth again, running his eyes over her slender frame with a decidedly hostile expression.

‘You could go by the roads, I dare say. If you’re so set on going there.’

‘I am,’ she snapped, her initial plan, of asking if he could provide some form of transport evaporating in the heat of her increasing irritation.

The directions he then gave her were so complicated, with a couple of left turns by the corners of beet fields, followed by right turns after blasted oaks, and making sure to take the right fork after Sir Thomas’s beech plantation, that she was half-convinced she was going to go round in a great big circle and end up right back where she started.

In this benighted inn yard.

Having left instructions as to the care of her trunk, she strode off with her head held high, her overnight bag gripped tightly in her left hand, and a confirmed dislike of the inhabitants of Yorkshire simmering in her breast.

She eyed the fields to either side of the lane, wondering if the funny-looking reddish leaves within them belonged to beetroots. If they did, then she had to turn left at the end of the next one, then left again once she had crossed the little footbridge over the stream.

That she found a stream, complete with a footbridge, did not encourage her as much as it might have, had she not suspected the innkeeper was sending her on a wild goose chase. She had annoyed him, by not immediately falling in with his suggestions, and surely this was her punishment! She ought to have been more conciliatory, she supposed.

Her mother always used to say that there was never any excuse for forgetting her manners. Or surrendering to displays of emotion in front of vulgar persons.

How right, Aimée sighed, her mother had been. Vulgar persons did not waste time in getting their own back. Vulgar persons took great delight in sending you out on six-mile hikes. When rain was on the way.

She hefted her bag into her other hand, and glanced warily at the sky. When she had set out, the clouds had not looked all that noteworthy, but now they were building into a decidedly threatening mass. And there were no other buildings in sight. She was right out in the countryside now.

But she could, at last, see the woodland that the innkeeper had told her belonged to Sir Thomas Gregory. A stone wall delineated the boundary of his property, but if it really came on to rain hard, she would have no trouble nipping over it and seeking shelter under the trees.

She could only hope that the gamekeeper was the type who stayed at home on wet afternoons.

She shrugged down into her travelling cloak, flicking up the large shawl collar over her bonnet, forming it into a hood, as it began to rain. The shopkeeper had promised her that the cloak, though lightweight, would keep out the wet.

And had she been walking back to her lodgings from the shops, through city streets, it might well have done so. But the kind of rain that gusted across open fields, building up speed and force by the acre, could not be halted by one layer of merino wool, no matter how finely woven.

She eyed the wall uncertainly. And the trees on the other side. They did not look, now she was up close, as though they would offer that much shelter after all. Every time a gust of wind shook the branches, great cataracts of water flowed from the leaves, as though a million tiny housemaids were emptying buckets out of invisible upstairs windows. And the wall that from a distance, when it had been dry, had looked so easy to climb, looked positively treacherous up close, now it was slick with rain.

She had no wish to turn up on the first day of her new job looking like a drowned rat. But it would be far worse to look like a drowned rat in torn and muddy clothes. The only thing that could have been worse was to have stayed huddled on her trunk, in the inn yard, looking like the kind of helpless female that required the services of a nursemaid to so much as wipe her nose!

She stayed on the road. It was not as if she could get much wetter, anyway. The unmannerly Yorkshire rain sneered at cloaks fashioned for city dwellers, using its playmate, the wind, to flick it aside so that it could soak her dress directly. And because she was having to clutch her makeshift hood to her throat, to keep it in place, it also managed to trickle down her cuffs. Not to mention the way it alternately splashed up under her skirts, and dragged her hem down into the mud. And although her sturdy brown boots were watertight, it did her feet no good, because her stockings were soaked, which meant that the water oozing down her legs had no means of escape. She should have purchased a coat, she sighed, that buttoned fast all the way down the front. Had she had more experience of weather in the north of England, she would have known that labelling the season between June and September ‘summer’ was no guarantee that light clothing would suffice.

And to cap it all, she could hear a distant rumble that sounded as though a thunderstorm was approaching. She shivered. The way her luck was going today, that probably meant hailstones.

But then she spotted the fork in the road that the innkeeper had mentioned about halfway through his convoluted directions. Hopefully, that meant she was geographically halfway to her destination.

She changed her bag to her left hand, clutched her hood to her throat with her right and strode out a little faster.

The sound of thunder grew steadily louder; in fact, so steadily it began to sound more like carriage wheels.

She glanced over her shoulder, and, sure enough, cresting the brow of the undulating lane behind her came a carriage and pair at a spanking pace. Such a spanking pace that she had to leap nimbly over the ditch that flanked one side of the road to escape being run down.

She managed to stay upright, even though the stubby crops made for a most uneven surface. Though naturally, given the way her day was going, she landed ankle deep in mud. She looked up from the quagmire in which she stood in some surprise when the driver hauled on the reins, drawing the carriage to a halt abreast of her, and shouted, ‘Miss Peters?’

When she nodded, he pointed his whip at her and bellowed, ‘Do you have any idea how long I’ve been driving up and down these lanes attempting to find you?’

His words sent a shiver of dread coursing through her. Surely he could not be a Bow Street Runner? Not after she had taken such pains to cover her tracks. Nobody could possibly know she was in Yorkshire.

Though how could he know her name, if he was not a paid investigator of some kind? She eyed him with trepidation, rapidly taking in the many-caped coat and tricorne hat of a typical coachman. His appearance was no consolation. A really good thief taker would naturally be a master of disguise. If he was masquerading as a coachman, then he would take care to handle the ribbons nonchalantly, as well as dressing the part so convincingly!

With the tip of his whip, he pushed back the hat that had been pulled low down over his forehead, sending a shower of water cascading over his broad shoulders, and revealing the fact that he wore an eyepatch. It gave his harsh, weatherbeaten features such a sinister touch that she promptly abandoned all thought of either begging him for mercy, or offering him double whatever he had been paid to capture her to let her go.

Then he tugged down the muffler that had covered the lower half of his face, and said, ‘What the devil do you think you are doing out in this weather?’

She had been cautiously feeling her way backwards with her feet, but the incongruity of the question halted her. Why on earth would a man paid to hunt down fugitives care what kind of weather she was out in? Unless it was on his own account. That must be it. He resented having to be up on that exposed box, in such foul weather.

Well, it served him right! As she surreptitiously tried to ease one foot out of the mud that held it fast, she glared right back at him, the villain! What kind of man took on such work?

He watched her freeze, then frown up at him in bewilderment. And felt as though somebody had reached into his chest and squeezed hard. It was as though somebody had cast a spell on the figurehead from The Speedwell, bringing her to life and casting her ashore in that muddy beet field. Dripping wet, confused and somewhat afraid, she still had sufficient spirit to lift her chin and square her shoulders, as though daring him to do his worst.

‘Mr Jago!’ he bellowed. Behind him, he heard the coach window come rattling down. Miss Peters tore her eyes from her appalled perusal of his wreck of a face. He saw the moment she recognised Mr Jago, then closed her eyes, her whole body sagging with what looked like profound relief.

Just who the hell had she thought he was? And what was she doing out here anyway?

He half-turned, and roared over his shoulder, ‘Did your letter not specify that we were coming to fetch Miss Peters from the King’s Arms?’

Aimée wanted to kick herself. Of course this vehicle and its driver were the transportation arranged for her by her new employers. It was just because her nerves were in tatters that she had immediately jumped to the conclusion that Bow Street Runners or thief takers must have caught up with her.

Thank heaven she had honest work now! She was not cut out for a life of crime. Her guilty conscience had left her fearing arrest every minute these last couple of weeks.

Perversely, the stupidity of her mistake made her absolutely furious with the coachman for giving her such a fright.

‘Don’t you yell at him!’ she yelled at the piraticallooking driver. ‘The letter offering me this job did say someone was coming to fetch me, but I had been waiting for an age in that filthy inn yard, and assumed that my arrival must have been forgotten. So I decided to walk.’

‘In this weather?’

‘It was not raining when I set out,’ she replied tartly. ‘Besides, I am not made of spun sugar, you know. I will not melt.’

Mr Jago opened the carriage door fully and clambered down. ‘Well, never mind who thought what,’ he said, crossing the road. ‘The thing is to get you out of this rain now.’ He extended his hand to her across the ditch.

A fleeting look of chagrin flickered across Miss Peters’s face as she regarded Mr Jago’s outstretched hand. Then her mouth compressed into a thin, hard line. She looked as though she wished she could consign the pair of them to perdition. But in the end, he saw a streak of practicality overcome her pride. He nodded to himself in approval as she reluctantly took hold of Mr Jago’s outstretched hand. The former bosun had come back from London telling the rest of the crew that he’d found a woman who boasted she had a backbone of steel. Which was just as well, considering what lay in store for her. But even better, her swift suppression of that little flash of temper showed him that she was sensible enough to know when to bow to the inevitable.