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“This is important. You must listen.”

“Do not be so tiresome. I shall discuss this with you rationally after luncheon when you come back to your senses.”

I wondered just what it would take to get her attention, and when I finally ran out of patience, I used the only approach I had ever found that worked. I am ashamed to admit that I pinched her arm—not enough to harm her, but sufficient to get her attention.

She screamed as if I had thrown her in the fireplace, but I could see it was all an act and waited her out patiently. When she finally shut her mouth for a moment, I told her how things were to be.

“I dispatched the instructions to my solicitor an hour ago. This townhouse will be sold within the week at whatever price I can get. At the end of that week, you may go to our sister’s house; you may take me up on my earlier offer for your own establishment; or you may go back to Scarborough; but make your decision before luncheon, as I will be gone before nightfall, and shall not be back for some time. The choice will be made for you if you refuse to see the world for what it is.”

She stopped screaming and looked at me appraisingly, wondering which approach to use next. There was a time when I would have waited and tried to keep peace in the family, but it was far too late for that.

Fitzwilliam Darcy had set me a task. He tried to rescind it immediately, but that was like trying to unlight a fire or unring a bell. There was just the slimmest chance that I could, maybe, for the first time in my life, earn the respect of the one person who needed and longed for it the most: myself.

Perhaps, once I managed that, I could work on earning respect from someone else.

Rogue

Mr Stockton

“You alright, Walton?”

“Been better, Stockton.”

“Shall I help you to your feet, or do you prefer the frozen mud for the moment? You do not look as comfortable as you might like.”

“Agreed, this position is not ideal.”

The man who now went by the name Walton was looking up from the mud, sporting what was likely to be a good-sized egg on his head, and a fair number of bruises that would be invisible beneath his coat but readily apparent to those who know how to look for such things.

He struggled to his knees, and I helped him to his feet. We were not to be seen keeping company too often, but as he was my ticket to a better life, I thought keeping him alive seemed eminently sensible. Damn, this charade was making me talk like one of them, or more likely, what I would be if we managed to pull it off—something far from guaranteed.

My employer—in reality, Mr Bingley and not Mr Walton—had made his enquiries carefully, but he already knew of my ‘habits’ before he approached me a month earlier. I was not in the least happy to learn he knew of my origins and the fact that I had not entirely left them behind when I became his coachman. The elevation from sometimes thief, sometimes gambler, and sometimes other things that need not be detailed here; to a respectable coachman for a rich tradesman, had been made the same as most elevations in my life: through stealth, guile, and lies. The man was newly elevated, fatherless, and protected by arguably the stupidest elder sister I had ever had the displeasure to meet, and another sister who followed her like a mongrel dog. The husband attached to the other sister would not have survived five minutes where I came from, but come to think of it, none of them would.

When Mr Bingley came asking me to return whence I came, I thought my scheme had come tumbling down, and wondered what other rich chucklehead I could work on. I enjoyed being a coachman, particularly as it gave me at least even odds of surviving to my thirtieth birthday, something my old life sadly lacked.

Bingley, as I was now instructed to call him when in ‘polite company’, wanted me to guide him through a manhunt, which would most likely pass through all the worst rookeries in London. The scheme was mad—absolutely barking mad—and not all that likely to succeed either, but he was determined. He was trying to find a specific man, who was going by another name, who truly did not want to be found and was inordinately good at hiding. The man had a visit to debtors’ prison or a nice jaunt to the continent with the army waiting for him should he ever be discovered, and was understandably disinclined towards either appointment. For all we knew, he might even have a noose all set up somewhere or other, and that was nothing to the debts waiting to be collected by those who could make him long for the fields of Spain. We had to flush him out, and we had to do it soon. Bingley had no idea how to go about it, but thought I just might.

The prize he offered in exchange was not only the life of a coachman, but the life of a gentleman. Not a rich and idle gentleman such as himself, but enough money placed in the four percents to keep me in a style that might allow me to take a wife, raise a few brats, and my grandchildren might even be fully respectable one day, presuming we kept our noses clean. It was a prize hard to pass up, even if the chances of one or both of us ending up dead were not to be dismissed lightly.

You may wonder how a man such as myself has the words to describe this endeavour using words like ‘endeavour’ which rarely pass through the lips of a coachman or a thief. Therein lies a story for another day, but suffice it to say that my time in the rookeries taught me more than one skill necessary for survival, and the most urgent was the ability to appear to be what you needed to be at the moment. Words are weapons, and I had armed myself better than my contemporaries, having a mother that was much smarter than most. Her tumble from the gentry to the whorehouse had been abrupt, but she was a tough old bird and remembered a few lessons.

Bingley thought it would take a month to teach me the words, the dress, and the mannerisms of a gentleman, but in the end, all he had to do was buy me a bunch of expensive clothes. Given my education at my mother’s knee, the mannerisms came along with the clothes, and we set to our task mere days after he sold the townhouse.

I had to admit that, once he elevated me to the status of a ‘gentleman friend’, I thoroughly enjoyed the entertainment of the sale of his townhouse. It was part and parcel of his plan, as it was necessary for it to be generally believed he was on a downward slide. I was there to watch the ensuing chaos, and had to work hard not to laugh.

“Charles, you cannot possibly sell the townhouse and all my decorations. I worked years to make it a perfect place!”

“And why should I not sell them, Caroline? I paid for them, or is there something here I am unaware of that came from your portion?”

We both knew how ridiculous that notion was. His sister had been decorating and redecorating the townhouse for years. I, of course, had never been inside, being just a coachman, but Miss Bingley provided nearly all our entertainment prior to that. The best part was watching her fawn over that Darcy fellow, and there were bets launched both above and below stairs in more than one great house about how long it would be before she attempted a compromise, and whether or not she would succeed. My own money was riding on within the year and the man tossing her out on her ear, as I thought Darcy was made of sterner stuff than most of my compatriots did. Most of the servants had never learnt to recognise the look of a man who was amiable enough but had a backbone of steel when it was called for.

“What has got into you, Charles? I shall not stand for this. Not for one more minute! You must desist immediately!”

“I agree, Caroline! Most emphatically! You must leave my disagreeable presence instantly. In fact, I have already taken the liberty of having your trunks packed, and the coach is sitting outside to take you to Scarborough. Goodbye, Caroline.”

With the sale of the house, Bingley had deliberately sold all his sister’s decorations, and the new mistress looked as if she had been invited to live in the palace, while his sister looked like he had grabbed her heart with his fist and ripped it out through her throat. The screaming fit that ensued with her dismissal to distant relatives was a masterpiece of theatre to behold, and I knew it would be worth years of entertainment below stairs. I found it entirely amusing that even though she had personally screamed at me over some imagined failure of duty more than a dozen times and tried to dismiss me twice, she had no idea I was her coachman once I was in my new clothes. I thought perhaps Bingley was testing me to see how well I could act when the heat was on, but it would take more than Caroline Bingley to bring me to any grief.

With the house gone without a second thought, Bingley began execution of the next part of the plan, once my money was safely placed with his solicitor, where I could get at it after our little adventure (or it could be delivered to my kin if things went badly), and we were off.