him warily.
‘Hand me my purse, would you, niece? It’s in my pocket.’
She continued to stare at him in that considering way until he was forced to speak to her more sternly.
‘Prudence, my purse.’
She jumped, but then dug her hand into one of the pockets of the jacket he’d lent her. And then the other one. And then, instead of handing over his purse, she pulled out the stocking he’d thrust in there and forgotten all about. She gazed at it in bewilderment.
Before she could start asking awkward questions he darted round the table, whipped it out of her hand and thrust it into his waistcoat. And then, because she appeared so stunned by the discovery of one of her undergarments that she’d forgotten to hand him his purse, he decided he might as well get it himself.
It wasn’t there. Not in the pocket where he could have sworn he’d put it. A cold, sick swirl of panic had him delving into all the jacket pockets, several times over. Even though it was obvious what had happened.
‘It’s gone,’ he said, tamping down the panic as he faced the truth. ‘We’ve been robbed.’
‘Ho, robbed, is it?’ The landlord planted his fists on his ample hips. ‘Sure, and you had such a fat purse between you when you come in.’
‘Not a fat purse, no,’ said Gregory, whirling round from his crouched position to glare at the landlord. ‘But sufficient. Do you think I would have asked for a private parlour if I hadn’t the means to pay for it?’
‘What I think is that there’s a lot of rogues wandering the highways of England these days. And one of them, or rather two,’ he said, eyeing Prudence, ‘have fetched up here.’
‘Now, look here...’
‘No, you look here. I don’t care what story you come up with, I won’t be fooled, see? So you just find the means to pay what you owe or I’m sending for the constable and you’ll be spending the night in the roundhouse.’
There was no point in arguing. The man’s mind was closed as tight as a drum. Besides, Gregory had seen the way he’d dealt with that bunch of customers in the tap. Ruthlessly and efficiently.
There was nothing for it. He stood up and reached for the watch he had in his waistcoat pocket. A gold hunter that was probably worth the same as the entire inn, never mind the rather basic meal they’d just consumed. The very gold hunter that Hugo had predicted he’d be obliged to pawn. His stomach contracted. He’d already decided to go straight to Bramley Park rather than wait until the end of the week. But that was his decision. Pawning the watch was not, and it felt like the bitterest kind of failure.
‘If you would care to point me in the direction of the nearest pawn shop,’ he said, giving the landlord a glimpse of his watch, ‘I shall soon have the means to pay what we owe.’
‘And what’s to stop you legging it the minute I let you out of my sight? You leave the watch with me and I’ll pawn it if you don’t return.’
Leave his watch in the possession of this barrel of lard? Let those greasy fingers leave smears all over the beautifully engraved casing? He’d rather spend the night in the roundhouse.
Only there was Prudence to consider. Spending a night in a roundhouse after the day she’d had... No, he couldn’t possibly condemn her to that.
‘I could go and pawn it,’ put in Prudence, startling them both.
‘That ain’t no better an idea than to let him go off and not come back,’ said the landlord scathingly.
He had to agree. She was sure to come to some harm if he let her out of his sight. He’d never met such a magnet for trouble in all his life.
‘You do realise,’ he said, folding his arms across his chest, and his gold watch to boot, ‘that I have a horse and gig in your stables which would act as surety no matter which of us goes to raise what we owe?’
The landlord gave an ironic laugh. ‘You expect me to believe you’d come back if I let either one of you out of my sight?’
‘Even if I didn’t return you’d still have the horse.’ Which would serve him right. ‘And the vehicle, too. I know the paint is flaking a bit, but the actual body isn’t in bad repair. You could sell them both for ten times what we owe for breakfast.’
‘And who’s to say you wouldn’t turn up the minute I’d sold ’em, with some tale of me swindling and cheating you, eh? Trouble—that’s what you are. Knew it the minute I clapped eyes on yer.’
‘Then you were mistaken. I am not trouble. I am just temporarily in a rather embarrassing state. Financially.’
Good grief, had he really uttered the very words he’d heard drop so many times from Hugo’s lips? The words he’d refused to believe any man with an ounce of intelligence or willpower could ever have any excuse for uttering?
‘What you got in that case of yours?’ asked the landlord abruptly, pointing to his valise.
Stays—that was the first thing that came to mind. And the landlord had already spied the stocking Prudence had extracted from his jacket pocket.
‘Nothing of any great value,’ he said hastily. ‘You really would be better accepting the horse and gig as surety for payment.’
The landlord scratched the lowest of his ample chins thoughtfully. ‘If you really do have a horse stabled here, I s’pose that’d do.’
Gregory sucked in a sharp stab of indignation as the landlord turned away from him with a measuring look and went to open one of the back windows.
‘Jem!’ the landlord yelled through the window. ‘Haul your hide over here and take a gander at this sharp.’
Gregory’s indignation swelled to new proportions at hearing himself being described as a ‘sharp’. He’d never cheated or swindled anyone in his life.
‘It’s horrid, isn’t it?’ said Prudence softly, coming to stand next to him. ‘Having persons like that—’ she jerked her head in the landlord’s direction ‘—doubt your word.’
‘It is indeed,’ he replied. It was especially so since, viewed dispassionately, everything he’d done since entering this inn had given the man just cause for doing so.
‘Though to be fair,’ she added philosophically, ‘we don’t look the sort of people I would trust if I was running this kind of business.’ She frowned. ‘I put that very clumsily, but you know what I mean.’ She waved a hand between them.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do know exactly what you mean.’
He’d just thought it himself. Her aunt had marked him as a villain the night before just because of his black eye. Since then he’d acquired a gash, a day’s growth of beard, and a liberal smear of mud all down one side of his coat. He’d been unable to pay for his meal, and had then started waving ladies’ undergarments
