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“Well, if you are, then I will trust you.”
“I’m very glad you trust me, Miss Stapleton. I should be most heart-wrecked if you did not.”
“Especially as I’ve willingly placed my life in your hands today.”
“Exactly so. Why, for all you know, I could be driving you to the border for nefarious reasons myself,” he dared.
“Saving dear Becky from social ruin is worth it. Oh, look! Here is an inn. Perhaps we should see if they have stopped here.”
He obeyed her implied request and stopped at the Akeld Arms, where quick enquiry of a coaching boy was met with a negative of sighting them. Daniel tossed the boy a coin and resumed their journey.
“It was perhaps a little close to Wooler to expect anyone to change vehicles there,” she said with a heavy sigh.
“One would hardly need the horses to be changed so soon,” he agreed.
“I suppose you are right, and they must have travelled further. Do you think they stopped at Milfield?”
“To reach the border is only fourteen miles. With good horses, one shouldn’t have to change before that, I would think.”
“I have never contemplated all that would be necessary if one was to elope.”
He smiled. “I can’t help but be relieved.”
“I still cannot believe the lieutenant was so utterly unscrupulous as to persuade poor Becky to agree to such a deed.”
“A man will do a lot to win a wife,” he said.
“But by so dishonorable means? I should think you, sir, would not wish for Becky to be so stained with disgrace.”
“I should most certainly not wish any such a thing for my niece.”
“And for any other females of your acquaintance, I should hope.”
The horses slowed as they rounded a bend. “I agree that in most cases that would be so, but I cannot agree in all.”
“But just imagine the scandal, and how people would talk!”
“Which would only matter if one cared about the nattering of others,” he countered. “You, I am persuaded, would not be as concerned as some about the opinions of people like Mrs. Cleever.”
“Because I know most of the village gossip anyway. But that is beside the point. One simply cannot cast one’s reputation aside as if it is no very great thing.”
“A reputation built on the judgments of others for whom you have no care?”
There was a pause, then she said quietly, “I might wish to not have to care, but I find I care all the same.”
And that honesty was why he loved her.
“Perhaps it is different for a man. Your reputation need not damage you in the way a lady’s does.”
“I must disagree. I have spoken to you before about James Langley, my friend with the castle by the sea. His reputation was such that few men wished to work with him, and it was only by God’s grace that he changed and became quite a different man. A man’s reputation means he can be known as a crook, a sad dog, or a cur.”
“Or a rum ’un, or a trump, or a Trojan.”
He laughed. “Where did you learn such language?”
“My grandfather was never moderate in his language, and I may have overheard others describing you like so.”
“As the sad dog or the Trojan?”
