Lord Perfect (24 page)

"Why?" she said.

"It isn't sporting."

"It isn't
what
?"

"Sporting," he said.

"You mean it isn't
proper"
she said mockingly.

Peregrine wrenched the door open. "I mean," he
said, "it's like a great, big fellow picking on a little fellow.
That's what I mean." He waved her inside.

"Oh," she said, and went.

She became quiet after that, which suited Peregrine. He
wanted to eat and he wanted to sleep. After he'd had some rest he'd
be ready to talk, perhaps.

He did rest, very comfortably, though the inn was indeed
expensive and they ended up in a cupboard-sized room on hard cots
meant for servants.

Though it was more Spartan than anything he'd ever
experienced before, even at school, Lord Lisle was sound asleep when
Lord Rathbourne drove through Maidenhead at half past three o'clock
in the morning.

BENEDICT HARDLY NOTICED Maidenhead.

He devoted the first tautly silent moments of travel to
trying to revive his famous self-control, gather the remaining shreds
of his moral fiber, and evict the alien spirit that had taken
possession of him.

Then Mrs. Wingate spoke, and everything went to pieces.

"I think it would be best if we separated in
Twyford," she said. "I shall take Olivia to Bristol and
attempt to settle the treasure nonsense once and for all."

'To Bristol?" he echoed incredulously. "Did
you hit your head in Colnbrook as well as your hand?"

"You and I cannot return to London together,"
she said, "and you know you must hurry back if you wish to avoid
causing a stir. You were to set out for Scotland today, were you
not?"

"That is not the point," he said. "The
point is, you cannot travel to Bristol alone."

"I shall have Olivia with me," she said.

"You haven't any money," he said.

"I have a little," she said.

"It must be a very little," he said. "When
I came to your lodgings, you were preparing to visit the pawnbroker
with a sack of your belongings."

"Olivia and I have always traveled with very little
money," she said. "It is not as though I plan to hire a
post chaise. We can walk."

"To
Bristol
?
Are you mad? That is nearly a hundred miles." He recalled the
men's reaction to her provocatively swaying hips at the Kensington
tollgate.

She was proposing to swing those hips over a hundred
miles of road along which mainly men would be traveling.

"It is out of the question," he said. "I
will not permit it."

She turned in the seat to look at him. Her knee bumped
his thigh. He set his jaw.

"Where on earth did you obtain the mad idea that
you had any say over my doings?" she said. "Oh, never mind.
I had forgotten. With you, it is force of habit, ordering everyone
about. Very well, my lord. Go ahead and tell me everything I may and
may not do. I had rather spend the next few miles laughing than
fretting about my exasperating daughter."

"You say she is exasperating, yet you mean to
indulge her," Benedict said. "What have you in mind,
exactly? A visit to your relatives' mausoleum in the dead of night? I
have an interesting picture in my mind of the pair of you in hooded
cloaks, Olivia carrying a dark lantern and you with a spade on your
shoulder."

"Like many great estates, Throgmorton is open to
visitors on certain days," she said. "I shall take her to
the mausoleum and let her see how scrupulously the grounds are
tended. She will see for herself that, had any treasure been buried
there, the gardeners or men making repairs would have found it ages
ago. After that, perhaps we shall amuse ourselves looking for
smugglers' caves."

"In other words, you do not mean to return to
London for some time." He ought to be glad. He would not be
tempted to hunt for her when he returned from Scotland. In time, this
damnable infatuation would pass.

"Certainly not," she said. "You will be
in Edinburgh with your nephew. What is there for me—for
anyone—in London when Lord Rathbourne is not there?"

He glanced at her. She turned away again, her
countenance sober, but not before he saw the glint of mirth in her
eyes.

"You are laughing at me," he said.

"On the contrary, my lord," she said, "I
am trying desperately to contain my grief at your impending
departure. I am smiling bravely, not laughing. Well, I am not
laughing very much."

Troubled as he was, he couldn't help smiling, too. But
then, he was bewitched.

She looked away, to the road ahead, and her expression
sobered. "It will not be a laughing matter if we do not take
care," she said. "You know we must separate as soon as we
recover the children, and you must take Peregrine to Scotland without
delay. If you are only a day or two late, his parents will not make a
fuss."

"They always make a fuss," he said. "His
parents are the least of the difficulty. By now my household will be
aware that something is amiss. Someone will talk and some sort of
rumor will begin making the rounds. I shall need a good lie."

"I shall need one as well, for Mrs. Briggs,"
she said, "to explain my extended absence."

"Write her a note when we get to Twyford,"
Benedict said. "You are needed to nurse your sick relative. I
shall see that the note arrives quickly. As to my story: Perhaps I
shall say that Peregrine took it into his head to join a traveling
acting troupe or a band of gypsies. Or perhaps he became enslaved by
the charms of a peddler's daughter and followed her. That is the sort
of romantic idiocy his parents would accept implicitly."

"They do not know Lord Lisle very well, do they?"
she said. "Even I, knowing him for only a few weeks, would never
believe it for a moment."

"What I cannot believe is that his parents had
anything to do with producing him," Benedict said. "All the
Dalmays are emotionally extravagant, and they tend to choose spouses
of the same temperament."

"He is an aberration," she said. "It
happens all the time. I only wish it had happened in Olivia's case."

"Then Peregrine would have
missed an adventure," Benedict said.
And
so would I
, he thought.

The end of it was approaching all too quickly.

"If only it were no more than that," she said.
"But it is not, and I don't mean to let her off easily."
After a pause, she added, "Rathbourne, what shall we do if it is
found out that we traveled together?"

He had no trouble imagining that possibility. He knew
that the darkness was not a completely reliable shield. He realized
that someone might have recognized him at some point along the last
twenty-odd miles.

He was well aware of how swiftly gossip could travel.

He remembered the men talking about Jack Wingate at the
club. He could still hear the mingled contempt and pity in their
voices. He could hear the disgust in his father's voice, when he
spoke of the Dreadful DeLuceys.

Benedict had seen countless times what happened when
some unhappy soul became the subject of scandal: the titters and
whispers behind fans, the smirks, the not-so-subtle innuendoes, the
not-at-all subtle caricatures hanging in shop windows or pinned
inside umbrellas for all the world to see.

The prospect of becoming such an
object was not pleasant to contemplate. The prospect of
her
being tittered and whispered about and caricatured was intolerable.

"Denial is the only sensible response," he
said.

"Do you truly believe it could be so simple?"
she said. "All we need do is say, 'It isn't true'?"

"No," he said. "We pretend a faux pas has
been committed. We elevate an eyebrow. We allow ourselves a faint,
pitying smile. If people persist in being tiresome, we adopt the
expression and tones of one who is bored witless and endeavoring to
be polite, and say, 'Indeed' or 'How very interesting.'" He
demonstrated as he spoke.

"That is very good," she said. "But are
you sure it will be sufficient?"

"It had better be," he said.

In the distance he made out a faint twinkle near the
side of the road. "That looks to be Twyford," he said. "We
had better decide how to proceed once we locate the children."

They devoted those last minutes to working out the
logistics of going their separate ways.

It was a more melancholy experience than he was prepared
for.

He had not long to be melancholy, however, because at
Twyford, they learned that no one—man, woman, or child—had
disembarked there from the Courser.

They drove on, to Reading.

Chapter 11

THE SKY WAS LIGHTENING BY THE TIME BENE-dict and Mrs.
Wingate had made the rounds of the likeliest inns in Reading. By this
point, she was on the point of collapse, though she refused to admit
it.

They stood near the ticket office of the Crown Inn, she
watching every vehicle that came and went while quarreling with him
about their next step.

"This grows ridiculous," he told her. "We
have wasted valuable time taking the word of innkeepers and servants
who are half asleep. It makes as much sense to wait in Reading for
the Courser to make its return trip, and speak directly to the
coachman."