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Anna would be stirring soon, making herself breakfast down in the basement kitchen. Her maid liked to start the day well ahead of herself, as she put it. They could have breakfast together and then go out.
Anna was already halfway down the stairs. ‘What are you doing up and about, Miss Phyllida?’
‘Joining you for breakfast. Then I want to go for a walk.’
‘Not by yourself, I’m hoping!’ The maid went to the pump and filled the big kettle. She was in her forties, plain, down to earth and with a past she never spoke of.
‘No, even at this hour someone might see me, I suppose, and that would be a black mark against my impeccable reputation.’ Phyllida lifted half a loaf from the bread crock and looked for the knife.
‘We wouldn’t want to be risking that, now would we?’ Anna enquired sardonically. She had been with Phyllida for six years now, knew about the shop and was not afraid to say what she thought about her mistress’s life.
‘No, we wouldn’t,’ Phyllida agreed, equally straight-faced. ‘So I’ll have a nice brisk walk and you can take a rug and a journal and sit on one of the benches beside the reservoir so the proprieties will be observed.’
It was just after six when they set out, weaving through the grid of streets that would take them into Green Park. Around them the St James’s area was waking up. Maids swept front steps, others, yawning, set out with empty baskets to do the early marketing. Delivery carts were pulling up at the back entrances for the numerous clubs, hells and shops that served this antheap of aristocrats, rakehells, high-class mistresses and respectable households. The sprawl covered the gentle slopes down to the old brick Tudor palace of St James and, beyond it, St James’s Park.
That would be too risky for an early-morning walk, Phyllida knew. Dolly mops and all their sisters of the night would be emerging from their places of business in the shrubberies, along with the occasional guardsman hurrying back to barracks having served a different kind of clientele altogether.
The early riders would make for the long tracks of Hyde Park, leaving Green Park as a quiet backwater until at least nine. ‘You can sit and read while I go past the lodge and the small pond down to Constitution Hill and back,’ Phyllida suggested as they turned up the Queen’s Walk towards Piccadilly. ‘Unless you want to come with me?’
‘You look in the mood for walking out a snit,’ Anna observed. ‘You’ll do that better alone. Who upset you?’
‘Oh, just some wretched lordling newly arrived in town and shocked to the core to discover he’s been flirting all unwittingly with a baseborn woman.’
‘More fool he. You shouldn’t let him upset you.’ There was nothing to say to that, but Anna seemed to read plenty into Phyllida’s silence. ‘I suppose you were liking him up to then.’
‘Well enough.’ She shrugged.
‘Handsome, is he?’
‘Oh, to die for and well he knows it.’ And he had seemed kind. He had a sense of humour, he loved his sister, he was eminently eligible. If she had not been who she was, then this morning she would have woken hoping for a bouquet from him by luncheon. What would it be like to be courted by a man like that, to hope for a proposal of marriage, to look forward to a future of happiness and children?
‘A good brisk walk, then, and some stones to kick instead of his foolish head.’ Anna surveyed the benches. ‘That one will do me, right in the sun.’
‘Thank you, Anna.’ The maid’s brisk common sense shook her out of her self-indulgent wonderings. ‘If you get chilled, come and meet me.’
She waved and set off diagonally along the path towards the Queen’s House on the far side of the Park. The early sunlight glinted off the white stone in the distance and the standard hung limp against the flagstaff in the still air. Phyllida breathed in the scents of green things breaking their winter sleep to thrust through the earth. That was better. When she was fully awake, feeling strong and resolved, then the weakening dreams could be shut safely away.
Rooks wheeled up from the high trees where they were building nests, jackdaws tumbled like acrobats through the air, courting or playing. Ahead of her the magpies had found something that had died during the night, a rat or a rabbit, she supposed, eyeing their squabbles with distaste as they fought for unsavoury scraps. She would have to detour off the path to avoid the mess.
As though a stone had been thrown into the midst of them the birds erupted up into the air, flapping and screeching at something that landed right next to their prize. For a second she thought it must be a bird of prey, then it turned its grey head and huge black beak in her direction, assessing her with intelligent eyes.
‘Lucifer!’ Surely the city had not been invaded by these grey-hooded crows? It stopped sidling up to the food and began to hop towards her. ‘No, go away! I don’t want you, you horrible bird. Shoo!’
As she spoke she heard the thud of hooves on turf coming up fast behind. The big bay horse thundered past, then circled and slowed as its rider reined it in and brought it back towards her at a walk. ‘Lucifer, come here.’ The crow flapped up to perch on the rider’s shoulder, sending the horse skittering with nerves. The man on its back controlled it one-handed and lifted his hat to her with the other.
‘Miss Hurst. I apologise for Lucifer, but he seems to like you.’
Of course, it had to be Lord Clere.
Chapter Five
Phyllida looked from bird to master. ‘The liking is not mutual, I assure you.’ Why couldn’t Lord Clere ride in Hyde Park like everyone else? Why couldn’t he ride with the fashionable crowd in the afternoon? Why couldn’t he leave the country altogether?
‘I imagine the dislike applies to me as we
ll,’ he said. ‘May I walk with you?’
‘I can hardly stop you. This is a public park.’ It was ungracious and she did not much care. Phyllida started walking again, the crow flapped down to claim its prize on the grass and Ashe Herriard swung out of the saddle.
