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Chapter 4: Absconded
Liam had convincedher to hand over the reins after perhaps two hours of correcting her steering with his little guiding touches. Those little touches were maddening. Each time he tried to back seat drive, she tried to yank out of his reach, half sure to touch him would feel the way it did to look at him — blinding, burning, and world-shifting.
As reluctant as she was to give control over to him, she was getting tired of leading them into ruts and off-road, nearly colliding with walls or hay bales, or running through large puddles again. The skirts of her wedding gown were flecked with mud from her driving efforts, but she found she didn’t care.
Though without the reins to grip, Diane found she had to keep a fistful of Liam’s coat in her hands to steady herself against the awful bounces and jolts of the vehicle over the bumpy roads. In her other arm, she held the little fainting goat clutched to her side.
It had yet to faint, as Liam had pointed out. In fact, the most of what it had done was squirm, kick, and bite at her hands. She eventually gave it her veil to chew on, and that seemed to satisfy the little creature. It had a challenge getting the gauzy fabric between its teeth, finding rather that the veil would stick to its tongue and stay there like floss.
At first, every carriage they passed, Diane felt like a beacon of sin. Surely, anyone that spotted them would see it as if it were written on their faces, that they were absconding together.
After no one pointed and laughed at them, or shamed them for driving the carriage together, Diane realized they must have looked the part of simply another married couple, driving about. The thought caused her no shortage of flutterings and palpitations, and the need to correct someone, anyone.
‘It’s not what it looks like,’ she mouthed to the goat.
It merely blinked those sideways pupils at her again, and tried to chew her veil some more.
“These drawings you spoke of,” Liam said, breaking the silence.
Those words alone were enough to set her cheeks ablaze. She cringed and hoped to disappear from the world, to erase that she had even hinted at her sketches to him.
Liam glanced at her sidelong, his stoic mask returned. “How could they compare to unfaithfulness?”
She resisted the urge to hide her face as she had felt a number of times while driving, as the only hiding place available was his shoulder.
“It would be impolite to discuss them,” she said airily, as if they were merely discussing the weather.
“We stole a gig,” Liam pointed out in that impressive, deep, monosyllabic monotone of his. “And a goat.”
Such a way with words, that one.
Diane shifted, her hip pressing entirely against the seat rail in an effort to put at least an inch of space between her body and his. Their shoulders still brushed with the movement of the carriage, and she would not give up her vise-grip on his coat. She’d never fallen out of a carriage before, but she had never feared it so much as today.
“What is your meaning, sir? That we are brigands and thieves, and our manners ought to match our actions? I am still a lady of gentle breeding, am I not?”
Liam did not take his eyes off the road before them, though it was empty for miles. “One who owns something so foul she would not describe its contents."
Diane scoffed. “I hate it when you narrate.”
He did that a lot, come to think of it. Rather than contribute meaningfully to conversations at dinners, Liam often would observe a guest’s behavior out loud than express what he thought of it. There were underground rivers that were better known to man than Liam’s opinions, if one didn’t carefully observe the minute changes of expression, the way someone intently watching his reflection in the window would.
“Have you seen this goat faint yet? Or at all?” Diane said, trying to change the subject. “I think it’s just a regular goat.”
“No more than I have seen the contents of these increasingly interesting drawings.”
The goat had begun biting her fingers again, so she deposited it next to her trunk once more. She had initially brought it into their seat to keep it from gnawing at the corners of her now sole belonging, but she supposed the leather luggage would endure it better than her hands would.
