Unlacing Lady Thea

After a few minutes Thea lowered the blind. It was easier on her nerves to see where they were and, if she was looking out of the window, then she was not watching the man slumbering by her side. He was snoring a little, which was not surprising after all he had drunk, she supposed. The sound was oddly comforting.

A glint of water showed her they were crossing Westminster Bridge, the new gaslights disappointingly extinguished. But the view downriver was as dramatic as when Wordsworth had written about it. ‘The City now doth like a garment wear the beauty of the morning...’ she murmured.

Beside her Rhys sighed as if in protest at the sound of her voice and turned over, his eyes tightly closed in sleep. His hair was fashionably cropped, but one dark lock fell over his forehead, a vivid reminder of the youth she had known. Thea reached out to brush it back, then stopped, her ungloved hand a fraction above the slightly waving strands. They rose to meet her fingertips like the pelt of a cat that had been stroked until its fur crackled.

Thea folded her hands in her lap. Some things were better left as dreams and memories. Some things were safer as girlhood follies. After a few minutes she drew the road guide from her reticule, where she had placed it in case she had needed to set out by herself, and unfolded the map.

They were heading into Southwark. As she had since she had begun this journey, she began to count off milestones in her head. Gathering everything she needed, undetected. Escaping from the house to the King’s Head—not the closest inn, but one where she would not be recognised, despite the extra hour’s walking it added to her flight. Taking the stage. Finding a hackney carriage to Rhys’s house and then, the most difficult part of all, persuading him to take her with him.

Would he have agreed if he had not been drinking or if he had recognised that she was a grown woman now? She glanced down at his face, pillowed on his bent arm. Those blue eyes were closed, the veiling lashes a dark fringe. The bend in his nose was more visible from this angle and his lips moved slightly with his soft snores. There was a small scar just below his ear. That was new.

Thea wrenched her attention back to the map and the view from the window. Houses were thinning out; ahead was Deptford, full of history. According to her guidebook, it was where Sir Francis Drake was knighted and where Tsar Peter the Great stayed when he visited England. She watched eagerly for signs of the glamorous past and was sadly disappointed by crowded, dirty streets. They rattled over cobbles, the chaise jerked to a halt several times but Rhys slept on, much to her relief. When he woke, sobered and doubtless with a crashing hangover, would he change his mind about her?

The road began to climb towards Blackheath. Wake me for highwaymen, Rhys had instructed. Well, if they were to find any, this was a likely spot. She found she could not become very apprehensive, not on a clear June morning. More worrying was wondering where he had given the order for the first change. If it was too close to London, then there was the risk he would send her back. They rattled past the Sun in the Sands, the Fox under the Hill and the Earl of Moira as the road kept climbing. Shooter’s Hill, she supposed, and relaxed a little.

Now they were slowing. Ahead she could see buildings, swinging inn signs. The postilions turned into the Red Lion’s courtyard and ostlers ran out to make the change as the landlord strode across the yard towards them, attracted no doubt by the coat of arms emblazoned on the carriage doors.

Thea dropped the window. ‘Shh! His lordship is sleeping,’ she whispered to the man. Hodge appeared beside him and she murmured, ‘Please have something if you need to, but don’t wake his lordship.’

Hodge showed no surprise, but then, he must have been aware of the state his master had been in when he boarded the chaise. He nodded and went into the inn, her maid on his heels. Thea closed the window and sat on guard, her veil in place, jealously watching for anyone who might disturb Rhys’s sleep. But after the arrival of a stagecoach, an altercation between two stable dogs and the shrill laughter of a kitchen maid flirting with an ostler all failed to do more than make him bury his head more firmly in his arms, she began to think he might sleep all morning, and began to doze herself.

Hodge opening the door woke her with a start. He passed her a mug of coffee and a napkin wrapped around a bread roll stuffed with bacon and glanced at his unconscious master.

‘Does he always sleep like this?’ Thea whispered.

The valet shook his head. ‘No, my lady.’ He took the mug when she had gulped the cooling coffee and closed the door softly, leaving her more than a little disturbed. Did Hodge mean he always drank that much and therefore slept heavily?

It had shocked her to find Rhys castaway and to see him toss off brandy as though it were lemonade. The rumours immediately after the fiasco of his wedding day were that he was a man who did not care, who had been glad to lose the responsibility of a wife and that he had plunged into a life of rakish dissipation.

He had cared, of course. She had seen his face in that first shock of betrayal; she had felt his fingers shake as she had pressed her pocket handkerchief into them, had felt his body rigid with pain when she had risked a brief hug. But then he had turned from the altar rail, a rueful smile on his lips, confessed that he had suspected the impending elopement all along and that he wished the scandalous couple happy.

For a man not given to falsehood, it was an impressive performance. It confused the gossipmongers, deflected some of the opprobrium from Serena and Paul and, she supposed, it salved Rhys’s pride not to appear a victim, someone to be sorry for.

When she had been in London for her first Season the only news she could discover of him was that he had steadied, taken his seat in the House of Lords and was managing his estates with a firm hand—but that he had a shocking reputation with women. Far from seeking a new bride, he flirted as if it was a form of elegant warfare, while keeping a string of mistresses who were, she gathered from the whispers, both beautiful and expensive. He was either not invited to the entertainments thought suitable for innocent young ladies, or he chose not to attend them.

The mothers of hopeful daughters were outraged: a young, wealthy, handsome earl should be setting up his nursery. Preferably with one of their girls, any of whom had been better brought up than that flighty Lady Serena Haslow. If Lord Denham would stop indulging in the pleasures of the flesh and the gaming room long enough, he would soon come to his senses and marry one of them.

The chaise rattled out of the yard and turned east towards Dartford. No one was forcing Rhys to go on this European trip. A few months ago, with the Continent at war, he could not even have contemplated it. So why was he going now, and why had she sensed such equivocal feelings about it the night before?

* * *

The bed, unaccountably bumpy, suddenly tipped. Half awake, Rhys grabbed for the edge, missed it and slid down until his booted feet hit some obstacle. Boots in bed? A gentleman always takes his boots off, at the very least. ‘Where in Hades...?’

‘This is the West Hill down into Dartford. The route guide warns it is uncommonly steep.’ The matter-of-fact voice jolted him into a wakefulness that the discomforts of his bed had not achieved.

‘Thea?’ Rhys sat up, shoved the hair out of his eyes and groaned at the sunlight. If this was a dream, it was an uncommonly uncomfortable one. ‘What the devil are you doing in my chaise?’

‘You said I might come with you to the Continent. Surely you weren’t so foxed last night that you cannot recall promising?’ Pin neat, drab in mud-brown wool, as ordinary as a London sparrow and three times as real, she regarded him with what appeared to be disapproval.

‘I’d hoped it was a nightmare. And what are you looking at me like that for?’ He lifted the section of padded board and slotted it back into position so he could sit. ‘My mouth feels like the floor of a cockpit.’

‘I am not surprised—you were positively castaway last night. I suggest you tell the postilions to stop here and have some breakfast. The rest of us ate at Shooter’s Hill.’

To retort that he was in charge of this journey and would make the decisions where to stop was to plunge back into the bickering of their childhood. Not that Thea had ever bickered. Or whined, come to that. She merely widened those unremarkable hazel eyes until he felt he had somehow disappointed her. And he did want something to eat and a quart of black coffee and then, with any luck, someone would hit him over the head so he could forget this headache in merciful oblivion.

Rhys dropped the window, leaned out and yelled, ‘Next decent inn!’

‘That will be the Bull.’ Thea frowned at her road book.

‘Never mind inn names, what the devil am I going to do about you?’ He must have been beyond foxed to give in to the girl. Vague memories of an awful suit of male clothing swam into his memory.

‘Take me to Godmama.’ She regarded him through eyes suddenly narrowed with suspicion. ‘As you promised.’

‘You took advantage of me,’ Rhys retorted.

‘Do women often take advantage of you?’ she enquired sweetly.

‘When my luck’s in,’ Rhys muttered and Thea laughed. How could he have forgotten that wicked gurgle of laughter? He bit his lip to stop himself smiling back at her. ‘This is an improper conversation and an utterly improper situation. If it ever gets out, you’ll be ruined.’ He squinted at her. ‘You aren’t a child any longer.’ Was she? She looked about seventeen, if he was generous.

‘No, I am not. And as for being ruined—’ Thea shrugged as the chaise slowed. ‘Good. Then Papa will stop trying to marry me off to devious, fortune-hunting... I mean, then I can have the freedom to live my life as I want to and not dwindle into an old maid.’

What is the matter with her? Every other girl wants a husband, full stop. Why must Thea be so contrary? ‘Is that before or after your father shoots me?’ he enquired as they stopped and an ostler hurried up. Rhys opened the door. ‘No, we do not need a change of horses, but I want breakfast.’

‘So do I, now I think about it.’ Thea hopped down before he could offer his hand. ‘A bacon roll and warm coffee were not very sustaining.’

She had her thick veil down, so he could find no reason to object, but when she returned from, he presumed, finding the privy, he wedged a chair under the door handle of the private parlour.

‘Very wise,’ Thea observed, taking her seat. ‘If this was a stage farce, someone would burst through the door just as I removed my veil to eat. And, of course, by hideous coincidence they would know me very well and have a fatal penchant for gossip. Papa would arrive with a horsewhip....’

‘Do you see many farces?’ Rhys refilled his cup and added sugar. He needed all the strength he could get.

‘Not these days,’ Thea said, and sliced the top off an egg with undue force. Eggshell fragments splintered, Rhys winced. ‘Papa knows perfectly well that being kept away from London and the galleries and the theatres and the libraries is a torture. I am so looking forward to Paris.’

Rhys told himself that it was unmanly to whimper. ‘Perhaps you have a friend somewhere in Kent or Sussex? Someone you can stay with?’

‘You promised.’ And he had. Being drunk was no excuse; a gentleman should be able to hold his liquor. A gentleman never broke his word. And he owed her. Not for that lock-picking incident that he vaguely recalled coming up last night, but for years of friendship culminating in that moment in the church when she had slipped him her handkerchief, had looked at him with a world of understanding in her eyes for his pain, had given him a brief hug.

Thea had said nothing and had broken the contact almost immediately, as though she knew that too much sympathy would break him. The sixteen-year-old girl had offered him the only thing she could: her understanding and a calm presence that stopped him falling apart. That clear-eyed look told him that she trusted him to do the right thing and, somehow, he had.

What would have happened if she had not been there? Would he have given chase, called out his best friend? Put a bullet in him and left three lives in ruin instead of just his own?

‘Yes, I did, didn’t I? All right, I won’t go back on it.’

‘Thank you.’ Her hand shook a little as she lifted her cup, but otherwise she gave no sign that she had feared his refusal.

She always was a courageous little thing. Rhys poured more coffee so she wouldn’t know he’d noticed that tremble and felt a pang of guilt. He should have kept in touch. But gentlemen did not write to young girls.

‘Why were you—?’ Thea broke off. ‘Nothing.’