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‘I could go and pawn it,’ put in Prudence, startling them both.
‘That ain’t no better an idea than to let him go off and not come back,’ said the landlord scathingly.
He had to agree. She was sure to come to some harm if he let her out of his sight. He’d never met such a magnet for trouble in all his life.
‘You do realise,’ he said, folding his arms across his chest, and his gold watch to boot, ‘that I have a horse and gig in your stables which would act as surety no matter which of us goes to raise what we owe?’
The landlord gave an ironic laugh. ‘You expect me to believe you’d come back if I let either one of you out of my sight?’
‘Even if I didn’t return you’d still have the horse.’ Which would serve him right. ‘And the vehicle, too. I know the paint is flaking a bit, but the actual body isn’t in bad repair. You could sell them both for ten times what we owe for breakfast.’
‘And who’s to say you wouldn’t turn up the minute I’d sold ’em, with some tale of me swindling and cheating you, eh? Trouble—that’s what you are. Knew it the minute I clapped eyes on yer.’
‘Then you were mistaken. I am not trouble. I am just temporarily in a rather embarrassing state. Financially.’
Good grief, had he really uttered the very words he’d heard drop so many times from Hugo’s lips? The words he’d refused to believe any man with an ounce of intelligence or willpower could ever have any excuse for uttering?
‘What you got in that case of yours?’ asked the landlord abruptly, pointing to his valise.
Stays—that was the first thing that came to mind. And the landlord had already spied the stocking Prudence had extracted from his jacket pocket.
‘Nothing of any great value,’ he said hastily. ‘You really would be better accepting the horse and gig as surety for payment.’
The landlord scratched the lowest of his ample chins thoughtfully. ‘If you really do have a horse stabled here, I s’pose that’d do.’
Gregory sucked in a sharp stab of indignation as the landlord turned away from him with a measuring look and went to open one of the back windows.
‘Jem!’ the landlord yelled through the window. ‘Haul your hide over here and take a gander at this sharp.’
Gregory’s indignation swelled to new proportions at hearing himself being described as a ‘sharp’. He’d never cheated or swindled anyone in his life.
‘It’s horrid, isn’t it?’ said Prudence softly, coming to stand next to him. ‘Having persons like that—’ she jerked her head in the landlord’s direction ‘—doubt your word.’
‘It is indeed,’ he replied. It was especially so since, viewed dispassionately, everything he’d done since entering this inn had given the man just cause for doing so.
‘Though to be fair,’ she added philosophically, ‘we don’t look the sort of people I would trust if I was running this kind of business.’ She frowned. ‘I put that very clumsily, but you know what I mean.’ She waved a hand between them.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do know exactly what you mean.’
He’d just thought it himself. Her aunt had marked him as a villain the night before just because of his black eye. Since then he’d acquired a gash, a day’s growth of beard, and a liberal smear of mud all down one side of his coat. He’d been unable to pay for his meal, and had then started waving ladies’ undergarments under the landlord’s nose.
As for Prudence—with her hair all over the place, and wearing the jacket she’d borrowed from him rather than a lady’s spencer over her rumpled gown—she, too, now looked thoroughly disreputable.
Admirably calm though, considering the things she’d been through. Calm enough to look at things from the landlord’s point of view.
‘You take it all on the chin, don’t you? Whatever life throws at you?’
‘Well, there’s never any point in weeping and wailing, is there? All that does is make everyone around you irritable.’
Was that what had happened to her? When first her mother and then her father had died, and one grandfather had refused to accept responsibility for her and the other had palmed her off on a cold, resentful aunt? He wouldn’t have blamed her for weeping in such circumstances. And he could easily see that bony woman becoming irritated.
He wished there had been someone there for her in those days. He wished there was something he could do for her now. Although it struck him now that she’d come to stand by his side, as though she was trying to help him.
