Page 41 of Duke of Sapphire

Henry looked at the traveling case. “There is.”

Ian appeared appeased. He looked out the window.

Henry rapped the roof with his knuckles.

The carriage moved.

Charlotte watched Drummond Hall through the window. She admired one last time the stone front of it, the wide drive, the kitchen garden wall she could just make out at the eastern edge. Mrs. Wick had gone back up the steps and was standing at the front door. She did not wave. She just watched.

Charlotte looked back until the bend in the drive swallowed the house and it was gone.

She turned away from the window.

Henry had his traveling case open and a document across his knee. He was already reading. He had a small crease between his brows that appeared when the text required close attention, and his thumb moved along the margin the way it did when he was annotating in his head.

Ian shifted on his seat. His eyes had gone heavy already. He fought it for perhaps two minutes and then he listed sideways and rested against a cushion. The soldier in his breast pocket tilted at an angle.

Charlotte looked down at him. Then she glanced at Henry.

He turned a page without looking up. The crease between his brows deepened. Outside, the road north curved away behind them and the Scottish afternoon pressed gray and cool against the carriage windows, and the miles were already beginning to accumulate between her and the only world she had ever run from.

This is not what you expected, she thought. None of it is.

She had climbed into a stranger’s carriage in the dark with borrowed clothes and no plan and the dim conviction that anything was better than standing still. She had expected to be discovered within the first hour. She had expected to be sent home within the day. She had not expected Ian, or the broken soldiers, or the woods at midnight, or a duke who laughed when she was not prepared for it.

She had not expected to return to town as the Duke of Sappherton’s wife with a child in tow.

Henry turned another page.

Charlotte swallowed as her nerves coiled. She did not know what was waiting for her in London.

CHAPTER 13

“That seat,” Ian announced, pointing at the empty backward bench opposite, “is for luggage.” He said it the way he said most things—with enormous conviction and no expectation of argument—and settled himself between Henry and Charlotte.

Henry opened his document case.

The leather was warm from his hands and the letter inside was half-annotated, the margins already thick with his own shorthand. He had planned to finish it before the first stop. He had planned, in fact, to finish three letters, review the timber summary his solicitor had sent up with the last post rider, and begin the draft response that had been waiting since Tuesday.

He pulled out his traveling graphite pencil and poised it over the document in his hand.

The road north of Carlisle had been punishing enough. This road, one day south of the border, was only marginally better—the springs groaned on the ruts, a low, rhythmic complaint that had been underscoring every mile since dawn. The carriage smelled of leather and frigid air and, faintly, of the heather that had caught in Ian’s coat somewhere in the last few days and refused to leave.

The afternoon light was thin. It came through the window at a low angle and lay across Henry’s document case in a pale stripe that shifted with every jolt of the road.

“Shaggy coos,” Ian said.

Henry made a note in the margin.

“Lots of them. Like the ones at home.”

He did not look up. “Yes.”

Ian seemed to find this satisfying, and he continued peering out the window.

Henry returned to the letter. The timber dispute had escalated as Charlotte had predicted it would—he had not told her that—and the solicitor was now proposing a compromise that was not, technically, the arrangement she had suggested, but was close enough that he had spent several minutes in the study at Drummond Hall not enjoying the parallel.

He drew a line under the third paragraph and began a note.