Page 81 of The Gentleman’s Leading Lady

Dante growled and stepped forward. The most feral and uncharacteristic rage was overtaking him. “Cerys did not run away.”

Bathsheba widened her eyes slightly. “But she did. Perhaps you said something to frighten her?”

He froze then, strangled by the old fear. He was too large, too dark, too brooding. Too foreign, too clumsy, too much. He had declared his heart, after his own fashion, and she didn’t want it. And instead of telling him gently to his face, and facing his wrath, she had decided simply to scupper off. Without leaving a direction with her friends, so he could not pursue her.

He stood racked with humiliation, unable to speak. At least when he had learned of Bathsheba’s perfidy, he had been in the company of one good friend who had told him the news of her marriage and taken him straight out to get drunk after. This time he stood in a room full of strangers with his cracking heart exposed to the raw wind.

“Which turnpike house?” asked the knight, Sir Hewitt.

“And which direction was she headed?” asked Penrydd, his voice as cold as a snowbank. Neither of them were taken in by Bathsheba’s tale.

“Oh, dear, I couldn’t say.” Bathsheba bit her lip, affecting distress.

“Was it the lower? Near the boarding school?” Andover demanded.

“Or the upper, by the Gallows Oak?” Dutton asked.

Bathsheba shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t know. I get so turned about in this town, I couldn’t tell you which end is which. Miss Evans did share the name of the town where her lover lives. Tewkesbury.” She paused with a small frown. “Or was it Prestbury?”

Dante growled again. The towns lay in different directions. “We’ll have to split up and canvas all the major roads. Ask if someone has seen her.” He wanted to howl. It could take days to track her down, and when he did— “At least there are five of us. We can cover a great deal of ground.”

Bathsheba shook her head. “Oh, Dante. Why pursue a woman who doesn’t want you?”

Because she did. He would swear she did. When she kissed him, she held nothing back. She was only worried that she would have to give something up to marry him, her acting, her dreams of being seen and admired. But he would take nothing away. He wanted to give her everything. He would convince her of that.

“I—” Had offered her everything. All of himself. What if she didn’t want him? His throat was gravel, drying out the words on his tongue.

“Cerys didn’t run away,” Penrydd said coldly. “She is young, and I grant you she’s headstrong, but she is not careless, and she is not fickle. You wrote the Viscountess that you feared for her reputation with the way she was carrying about with Manelli here.”

Dante felt a rope had been twisted around his neck and hoisted. “She—what?”

“Wrote my lady,” Penrydd said, “to tell us she thought Cerys was risking her reputation with you. And now her ladyship claims our girl has gone off on a whim, making no proper parting with her friends.”

“Well.” Bathsheba stroked her own arm again, as if reveling in her soft beauty. “Did she last time, when she left Newport? Make a proper parting, that is.”

That silenced Penrydd, but not his compatriot. “We’ve always known where she is,” the knight said. “She wrote us the moment she arrived in Cheltenham.”

“You must be Sir Hewitt.” Bathsheba gave him her sensuous smile. “I don’t need to explain to you, sir, how a young woman might change her loyalties.”

“Lord Baeccon. Sir.” Evans leaned against the door jamb, crutch under his arm. He looked cool-headed where Dante was unraveling. “Where does your coachman lodge?”

Bathsheba paled.

“Eh, what’s that? We send down to the Fleece Inn when we need a man,” Baeccon said. “Our coachman peeled off on our way up from London, said he didn’t want to leave town.”

Evans turned to Dante. “Where’s the Fleece Inn?”

“I’m afraid the coachman won’t be able to tell you much,” Bathsheba said, rushing out the words. “Hostile, taciturn man. I found him very difficult.”

Penrydd pointed to the two men he’d brought with him. “Between us, we’ve survived Tenerife, Acre, and Gibraltar,” he said. “One coachman will not defeat us.” Then, to Dante’s surprise, the viscount looked in his direction. “Lead the way.”

The coachman had his lodgings in one of the narrow passages in the brewery quarter, where wooden buildings leaned against one another and the streets had not benefited from the work of the Paving and Lighting Commission. The smell of boiled beef drifted out of the door as a young boy in ragged breeches and a dirty shirt opened it.

The smell turned Dante’s stomach. Every moment that passed, Cerys might be farther away. He didn’t know which he feared more: that he would find her fled with another, or that he would find her, and Bathsheba would have done something to turn her off him.

Or she simply didn’t want to marry him on the grounds of his own many flaws.

“Aye?” The boy squinted into the dimming evening, then widened his eyes. “Gor, Mum, they’s a clacket of genmum at the door!”