Page 30 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

Chapter 10

Constantia weighed whether to call out and beg the driver to stop.

They were currently passing through what might as well have been the middle of nowhere, and daylight was beginning to fade. But those were not always disadvantages. Darkness made it easier to disappear, and there would surely be a hedgerow or an outbuilding where she could shelter from the cold and damp. She was still sore and bruised in places, true, but she could walk. If she kept the setting sun to her right, she would be headed south. Eventually she would reach the water. A port town. A fishing boat.

Somewhere, some way she could get free of England entirely, without endangering anyone else.

She could feel Ryland’s eyes boring into her with that mixture of astonishment and irritation he did so well. He would never permit her to walk away from the carriage, no matter how worried he claimed to be about his sisters. It wouldn’t suit his notion of honor.

“You are right, of course,” she said, pushing her shoulders down and turning to face him. She wouldn’t cower like a frightened animal. “Ridiculous to think that I might be followed. What could anyone want with me?” She forced a little laugh into her voice. “Artists can be prone to fits of overactive imagination.”

He nodded, a trifle wary of her sudden change of mood, if not the sentiment. “Yes. Perfectly understandable. You’ve suffered a shock, and your mind wants to concoct some interesting explanation for what happened, something that seems worthy of all the pain and disruption the accident caused. With time, however, the simple truth will come back to you. And when it does, I’ll be only too happy to make whatever arrangements I can to help you get wherever you belong.”

Only too happy . . . That, she didn’t doubt. But the truth was, she didn’t belong anywhere. She never, never had. Certainly not with Lord Ryland’s family, where she might put his innocent sisters in danger. Oh, why hadn’t she considered that risk sooner?

To her chagrin, tears sprang to her eyes. Shifting her gaze back to the window, she surreptitiously whisked the moisture away with her bandaged knuckles. “You’re too kind,” she said, surprising herself with the apparent sincerity in her voice.

“You’re overwrought,” he said, in that soothing tone she imagined him using with his sisters. “You should try to rest.”

She nodded. Yes, she was exhausted and in shock. Leaning her head into the little corner formed by the back of the seat and the frame of the window, she closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. She wished with fresh desperation that she could remember those few moments before the accident. But try as she might, everything between the time of her leaving the meeting of the magazine staff and waking in Lord Ryland’s house stubbornly remained a blank—and might always be so. No way of knowing for certain if she had been chased into the street or merely stumbled. No way to determine whether she was already being followed or whether she had a few more days or even weeks of peace.

And so, in spite of the comforting appeal of Ryland’s words, in whose warmth she longed to luxuriate for a little longer, she focused instead on the damp chill seeping in around the glass and began to plan.

Once they had stopped for the night, she would set out on her own.

Sometime later, she was roused from thought—or rather, to her astonishment, from sleep—by the slowing of the carriage.

“Almost to the inn,” Ryland said, peering outside. The sky was dark. “I wonder whether we shouldn’t change horses and press on.”

“I suppose that depends,” she replied, trying with subtle movements to ease the kink from her neck, “on whether you are more concerned with the distance to be traveled tomorrow or your comfort tonight.”

“My comfort?” He made a scoffing noise in his throat, as if he’d never considered such a thing. He looked her up and down. “Yours, certainly. John Coachman’s,” he added, jerking his gaze back to the window. “No, we’ll stay. Tomorrow will have to take care of itself.”

She mustered a smile. Tomorrow she would once more be taking care of herself—as she preferred, of course. Only it had been more than a year since she had faced the peculiar struggles of a woman traveling over long distances alone. She couldn’t yet judge how far she would be able to walk in a day, or how far she was from the coast. And then there was the matter of her money, the larger share of which had been entrusted to Lord Ryland. She hadn’t yet worked out how to retrieve it without raising alarms.

But she would manage, somehow. Because she always had—and what choice did she have?

The inn was a large and bustling one, well suited to her intention of slipping away undetected. Ryland helped her down from the carriage and into a clean and neat anteroom with a tall counter opposite the door and well-polished benches along two walls hung with flower-patterned paper.

“My lord.” A bespectacled woman, her brown hair liberally streaked with gray and arranged in the sort of knot from which softening locks did not dare slip, appeared suddenly behind the counter, as if she had emerged from the woodwork. Only then did Constantia see the outline of the door behind her, carefully papered over to disappear into the wall. “How may I serve you?”

“Two rooms, please,” he said. “One for me and one for my sisters’ new governess, Miss—”

“Creevey,” Constantia supplied hurriedly. If she were right about being followed from London, then Cooper might be recognized.

“Very good, sir,” the woman said, as if Constantia hadn’t spoken. She wrote something in a ledger and handed over two keys. “I’ll have a boy bring up your things. Will there be anything else?”

“Miss . . . Creevey,” he glanced over his shoulder at her, something like confusion or perhaps speculation lifting one dark brow, “will take supper in her room.”

Constantia only narrowly prevented herself from exhaling a sigh of relief. Lord Ryland’s sense of propriety—she had almost called it thoughtfulness—would make it possible for her to get away that much sooner, and on a full stomach to boot. And if he intended to eat in the dining room, as his lack of instruction regarding his own meal would seem to indicate, that would provide just the window she needed to slip into his room and retrieve her money.

A few moments found her comfortably ensconced in a room on the second floor, blessedly near the servants’ stairs, which she hoped would not creak. A girl arrived soon after with a fine supper of roast venison, and Constantia ate heartily, though she was not especially hungry. One never knew how long it might be between meals.

When the girl returned bearing a canister of hot water, Constantia bathed with her new soap and donned her nightdress, though she hadn’t any intention of sleeping. She also scattered a few of her things about the room, the sign of a traveler settling in. That way the servants would assume that “Miss Creevey” was intent on a night’s slumber, and nothing more.

She even dropped a subtle question regarding the frequency with which public conveyances stopped at the inn. In the morning, when it was discovered she was gone, someone might think to ask the servant, who would say she hadn’t noticed anything amiss, but when pressed would recall a seemingly innocuous query about the stage.

At last, heartened by the clatter and commotion rising from the dining room below, she slipped on her mantle in lieu of a dressing gown and her shoes, stepped into the corridor, and took the stairs to the third floor.