virgin?
She could not be a virgin.
It was completely impossible. With that body and that walk and—and she was a milliner!
“Speaking of virgins,” he said, “let’s talk about my sister.”
According to the note she’d sent with Fenwick, Sophy had good reason to believe Clara was traveling the Portsmouth Road. Now she gave him the details. Some of Fenwick’s associates had spotted the cabriolet at Hyde Park Corner. After that, the vehicle had been noticed on the Knightsbridge Road, heading for Kensington. But according to a post boy, some time later, at an inn in Fulham, a woman who looked like a bulldog had asked for the best route to Richmond Park.
“She made it appear that she was traveling to her great-aunt’s house, then turned about and headed, apparently, southwest,” she said. “Does Richmond Park hold any significance for her?”
“None I know of,” he said. “If I’d had to guess, the only place I’d have thought of would be Bath. As a girl, Clara traveled with our paternal grandmother to Bath sometimes. The were very close. Grandmother Warford died some three years ago, and Clara took it hard. She’d always liked the old ladies, my grandmother’s friends.” He shook his head. “I can’t think of anybody she might take refuge with in Richmond Park.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know where she’s going,” Sophy said. “Something happened and she couldn’t bear whatever it was, and so she ran away. Blindly. She simply ran away.”
They’d reached the Hyde Park turnpike. Unlike the mail coaches, their vehicle had to stop, and he had to pay.
He took advantage of the pause to check on Fenwick. The boy sat in the rear seat, arms folded in the approved posture for tigers, looking up at the rapidly darkening sky.
Longmore looked up, too. Thick clouds swarmed overhead. He wasn’t concerned. The hood was up, and if they faced a heavy rain, he could put up the apron. The back seat hadn’t a hood, but Fenwick would be all right. Olney had packed an umbrella, and Reade—deeply unhappy about being left behind—had been made to donate one of his older cloaks.
Longmore drove on, through the turnpike. They passed the White Horse Inn and the Foot Barracks.
“I don’t understand what’s got into my sister,” he said. “She always used to be so sensible.”
“Sensible but ignorant,” Sophy said.
He heard a wobble in her voice. It was very slight, but he was acutely attuned to her voice, in all its changes. Sometimes, in a crowd, he knew her by her voice alone, even when she adopted one of her provincial accents.
He looked at her. She had her hand to her forehead. The veil was in place, making it impossible to read her expression, yet even he could tell she was upset.
“Now what?” he said sharply.
“She doesn’t know anything,” she said. “Even for a girl of one and twenty, she’s lamentably naïve.” She took in a deep breath and let it out.
He watched the rise and fall of her bosom. It was crass in the circumstances, he supposed, but he was a man, and it was nighttime and she was dressed like a fashionable impure.
They passed the Westbourne conduit and approached the Rural Castle Inn. The mail coaches’ horns sounded. They were sending the Portsmouth coach on its separate way, down the Brompton Road. Where he’d soon follow.
“She has three brothers,” he said. “She’s not that innocent. She knows what men are like. She should have known better than to encourage any of that lot of loose screws.”
“A woman might think she knows about men, but until it happens—until a man touches her, she doesn’t know.”
He remembered this woman’s reaction when he’d breathed down her neck.
Was it possible she didn’t know what he’d assumed she knew?
But that was ridiculous. She was no schoolroom miss. She’d grown up in Paris. She was a milliner. And she walked the way she walked.
He passed Sloane Street and turned into Brompton Road. No parade of mail coaches now. Only the lone one, not very far ahead.
“Maybe that’s it,” she said.
“What is?”
“Maybe she’s had even less experience than other girls her age. It’s—what?” She counted on her gloved fingers. “A month since she told my brother-in-law to go to the devil. Only think what it’s been like for her. Imagine spending most of your life assuming you’ll marry one person, and then realizing he or she isn’t what you want. I’m sure she felt liberated and exhilarated after rejecting the Duke of Clevedon—but afterward … She had to find herself. She had to do what other girls do at seventeen or eighteen, in their first Seasons.”
“Yer worship!” Fenwick’s high-pitched voice broke into a very difficult piece of cogitation. “I say, your highness!”
“Your lordship,” Sophy corrected. “I explained that to you. How hard is it to remember?”
“Yer lordship!” Fenwick said more forcefully.
“You better close up the front the best you can. East wind coming about.”
“What is he, a weathercock?” Longmore said.
That was when the rain started pelting down.
“Better hurry, yer majesty,” the boy said. “Weather’s going to turn ugly in a minute.”
On Putney heath, to the south of the village, is an obelisk, erected by the corporation of London, with an inscription commemorating an experiment made, in 1776, by David Hartley, Esq., to prove the efficacy of a method of building houses fire-proof, which he had invented, and for which he obtained a grant from parliament of £2500.
—Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of England, 1831
The weather did turn extremely ugly, very quickly. The wind picked up speed, driving the rain sideways at times, so that even the apron couldn’t fully shield them.
Still, any driver could manage a team in rain. This weather wouldn’t slow the Royal Mail, let alone stop it. Mail coach drivers continued through thunderstorms, floods, hailstorms, sleet, and blizzards. At present Longmore had only a bad rainstorm to contend with. No thunder and lightning to agitate the horses.
He drove on.
The storm drove on, too, with increasing intensity, the rain pouring straight down sometimes and at other times pelting sideways at them, depending on the gusting wind.
Though the waxing moon wouldn’t set until the
