Amanda Scott (3 page)

“It cannot matter if there are,” Nell said, staring at her. “There is no possible way that—”

“Oh, but there is always a way, my dear,” Lady Flavia said placidly. “Now hush and let me think.”

“But, Aunt—”

“Hush, I said. This may take a moment or two.” And with that, the old lady leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.

Watching her, Nell was torn between equally strong urges to laugh and to cry. Certain that her aunt had, after the fashion of the elderly, merely decided to take a nap without admitting the need for one, she exerted herself to control both urges and turned to stare out of the window again instead.

A broad ray of sunlight had broken through the clouds, gilding the pale yellow Bath stone from which the houses were built, and making sparkles dance in the puddles dotting the quiet street. The sight was a pretty one, but Nell found little satisfaction in it, feeling irritation instead when the peaceful silence outside was broken by the clatter of iron-shod hooves and carriage wheels on the wet cobbles as a small brown post chaise, picked out in red and drawn by a pair of bay horses, rattled toward her from the north end of Great Pulteney Street.

T
HE CLATTER HAD DISTURBED
one of the three dozing occupants of the post chaise sufficiently to make him push his curly-brimmed beaver hat up off his eyes and peer out of the window, squinting against the glare of sunlight on the wet pavement.

“Yeller houses,” the Honorable Joseph Lasenby muttered thoughtfully to himself before the information, slowly processed by his awakening brain, brought him to a startling conclusion. “By Jove, Bran,” he said in a louder tone, looking past the gentleman gently snoring beside him to the opposite side of the street, and finding no cause in what he saw there to alter his reasoning, “I believe we’ve come to Bath! Dash it all, wasn’t it Bath where Halstead said you’d find that heiress, the one you said you’d be damned if you’d abduct, wager or no wager? Here, wake up! No, not you,” he added with dismay when the large, toffee-colored hound taking up most of the floor space stirred and raised its head from his once highly-polished boot, gathering itself as though it meant to get up. “Down, sir! Down, I say.” The hound sighed and dropped its head again to the booted foot.

Freeing his elbow sufficiently to gain some leverage in the close confines of the chaise, Mr. Lasenby jabbed the gentleman sprawled beside him. “I say, Bran, do wake up.” He jabbed again. “There must be some sort of a mistake. Tell the lad!”

Brandon Manningford grunted and tried to evade the annoying elbow, but Mr. Lasenby being determined to wake him and the chaise being entirely too small to allow him to move out of reach, it was not long before he opened his hazel eyes and gazed irritably at the other young man. “What the devil do you mean by jabbing a fellow, Sep? You’d be sorry if I retaliated in kind.”

“Dashed right,” Mr. Lasenby replied placidly. “You’re bigger than I am. Stronger, too, and you might take it into your head to call in all my vouchers—not that that would do you a lick of good. But look here, we’re in Bath, I tell you.”

Mr. Manningford continued to regard him with displeasure. “So? What if we are?”

“Dash it all, man, Miss Wembly might accuse me of having the worst memory in all England, but you ain’t the one cursed with a grandfather plaguing you to marry money, and I remember plain as day that you said you’d no interest in heiresses!”

“That is not at all what I said,” Mr. Manningford informed him testily. “I said I’d be damned if I’d abduct one merely to win another wager with Halstead.”

“Nothing mere about four thousand, Bran! Dash it, I’d know what to do with it. And it ain’t as though abducting an heiress is beyond your line. ’Tain’t nearly so bad as some things you’ve done. Why, you once rode a bear into a dinner party, and another time, you put that same bear to bed with a total stranger. And how about the time you told that fellow you was going to pay him some ridiculous sum for a horse he wanted to sell you, and that all he had to do was to take your note of hand to a certain banker? That poor toad ended in Bedlam or some such like place.”

“You never get that tale right,” Manningford complained, straightening in his seat and rubbing the place where a crease in his heavily starched neckcloth had irritated his throat. His hat had long since fallen to the floor, and as he bent to rescue it, he patted the dog’s head, adding, “Fellow tried to cheat me, so I gave him a note to a banker who happened to be guardian for a nearby insane asylum. Is it my fault the coper assumed the note requested payment when instead it said, ‘Admit bearer to your asylum?’ Served him right. But, Sep, that prank and the others with old Nolly are buried in my misspent youth, and at my worst I never abducted an heiress. Ill-bred thing to do, that is, not to mention its being a hanging offense. You surprise me.”

“Why?” Mr. Lasenby demanded. “The wager was Halstead’s notion, not mine. I thought the idea bacon-brained from the start, even if she is as rich as Croesus. Not that I’ve the least notion how rich that might be,” he added thoughtfully. “Didn’t know Croesus, did I?”

“I don’t suppose you did, or you’d have borrowed money from him,” his friend retorted. “But forget the heiress, will you? If you will exert that feeble brain of yours, you will recollect that Bath is also where my esteemed father resides.”

“So he does,” Mr. Lasenby acknowledged, much struck. Then, after another, visible mental struggle, he added, “You said years ago you didn’t mean to ask him for another groat, so I still can’t think why we’ve come to Bath unless you changed your mind about that heiress. Not that you could pull it off, of course.”

Manningford smiled, but the expression altered to a sharp wince when one wheel of the chaise struck a pothole. He looked out the window to see that they had passed from Laura Place into Argyle Street and were approaching Pulteney Bridge.

Spanning the River Avon and built end to end with small shops, the three-arched span was the only work in Bath by Robert Adam, once England’s leading architect, but just then Manningford remembered only that it was too narrow and was glad there was no traffic. As the chaise lurched over another hole, he pressed a hand against his aching head. “Blast. My brain feels like someone’s got loose inside with a hammer and anvil.”

“You drank the devil of a lot of brandy last night,” Mr. Lasenby pointed out. “Ought to have stuck with the port, just as you ought to have stuck to faro instead of turning to the wheel. It ain’t never been lucky for you, Bran.” Regarding Manningford curiously, he added, “You lost the devil of a lot of money last night. Dash it, after all you’ve lent to me, it must be low tide with you. You sure it ain’t going to be the heiress?”

“I’m sure,” Manningford said with a sigh. “I’m too old, Sep, and I hope I have gained sufficient wisdom with the years not to back myself anymore to win idiotic wagers.”

Mr. Lasenby looked doubtful. “You ain’t so old as all that, Bran. Same as me, ain’t you? Though you’ll turn twenty-nine in December, as I recall. Don’t hardly make us graybeards.”

Manningford shrugged. “Boredom ages a man, Sep. I fear I’ve become a sober citizen, tired of pranks and nonsense.”

“Certainly, you have.” Mr. Lasenby looked pointedly at the hound on the floor. “Perhaps the fact escaped you, but it has not before now been my habit to travel with damp canines in my post chaise. On the hunting field, I’ll grant you, or when one goes out shooting, one may without censure be accompanied by one’s dog, but not in one’s town carriage, my lad. Certainly not in a small, enclosed post chaise. Even Poodle Byng would scorn to do such a thing. You mightn’t have noticed it, Bran, but your friend there carries a certain odor with him—no doubt we do too, by now—and not one that will add to our welcome, wherever we’re bound. Not that I wish to complain, mind you, but—”

“Peace, Sep.” Manningford grinned at him. “The poor old fellow stinks like a polecat, but he can’t help it any more than he could stop the rain when we let him out to do his business. He’s the only thing I won last night that I didn’t manage to lose again, and I did not hear you make any suggestions about what I was to do with him if he didn’t come with us.”

“Well, you’re wrong there,” Mr. Lasenby said. “Miss Wembly was quite right about my lamentable memory, but I distinctly—”

“No acceptable suggestions,” Manningford retorted, laughing.

“Perhaps not, but if you think I mean to sit here and listen to you telling me what an old sobersides you’ve become when you just won that beast on the most ridiculous wager—”

“Fustian. Nothing ridiculous about it. If I’d lost, I’d have had to stand Halstead to a dinner at the Drake in Reading, where they pad the reckoning with every crumb and scrap they can. Likely I’d have ended franking the place for a fortnight. Still, the odds must be shockingly against tossing a pack of cards into the air and having every single card land face down. I couldn’t have known I’d win the best hunting dog in all England, could I?”

Mr. Lasenby shook his head sadly. “Bran, old fellow, if you think Halstead would stake an even passably decent dog against one dinner, no matter what the odds were, you must be all about in your head. Why, the wine at the Drake is only tolerable, and the caper sauce they served the only time I ever dined there was a joke. That’s a fact, Bran.”

Manningford shrugged. “I like him. Here, fellow,” he added, holding his hand out to the dog. Raising its head again and looking over its shoulder, the dog politely sniffed the hand and, evidently finding it pleasing, pushed its nose against it. Manningford grinned. “See that, Sep. He likes me.” He patted the dog’s head. “Good lad. I say, Sep, do you happen to remember by what name Halstead called him?”

“Haven’t a notion,” Mr. Lasenby replied, gazing with disfavor at the dog. “Knowing Halstead, I should think it would have been something ridiculous, like King or Duke or Chief, don’t you? That man’s got feathers in his cockloft.”

“Or Prince,” Manningford said, ignoring the rider. He eyed the dog skeptically. “He doesn’t respond to any of those names.”

“Probably got more sense than Halstead,” Mr. Lasenby said. “How about Stinker or Duffer or Tramp?”

The dog put its head down on its paws again.

“There now, look at that,” Manningford said reprovingly. “You’ve hurt his feelings.”

“Well, if you expect me to apologize, you’re fair and far out, for I shan’t do any such thing. I’ve told you what I’d name him if he were mine.” A shudder crossed Mr. Lasenby’s cherubic face at the thought, and he glanced out the near side window again. They were passing a portion of the city’s medieval wall, and when the chaise emerged just then into the opening known as the Saw Close, Mr. Lasenby found himself facing a carved wooden plaque informing passersby that the house it adorned had belonged to Beau Nash, that once great arbiter of social life in the City of Bath. “I say, Bran, is it true that Nash’s mistress spent the rest of her life sleeping in a tree after his death?”

“Good Lord, Sep, how should I know?”

“Well, you lived here, after all.”

“Not then I didn’t. Good Lord, he died half a century ago! I do know her name though,” he added with a smile. “Popjoy, it was—Juliana Popjoy. An appropriate name for a mistress.”

Mr. Lasenby chuckled, and silence fell between them until the chaise had passed by the beautiful central garden of Queen Square and made its way up Gay Street to the Circus, which, inspired by the Roman Coliseum, had been designed by John Wood the Elder and built by his son in three curved segments so that at each of the three approaches one was met by a sweeping, three-tiered facade of columns. The chaise rattled across the cobbled, circular central area and turned west onto the steep incline of Brock Street, slowing noticeably.

“Only a short distance now,” Manningford said.

“Steep street, this one,” Mr. Lasenby observed, shifting his legs away from the dog’s pressing weight. “Makes one feel some sympathy for the horses.”

“Save it for the chairmen we’ll hire if ever we come up on a rainy day,” Manningford told him. “One rarely employs a carriage in Bath, and chairmen charge extra to carry one up this hill. But only wait until you see the view from up top.”

A few minutes later, when the chaise drew to a halt before the Royal Crescent, crowning the hilltop, Mr. Lasenby agreed that the view was all that had been promised. The city lay behind and below them to the east, while away to the south, under billowing clouds, beyond well-tended grassland, all the way to the horizon, lay green fields dotted with sheep and parkland lush with trees.

Mr. Lasenby raised his quizzing glass. “Sheep?”

“A ha-ha runs across the grassland there to prevent them from straying this far,” Manningford said. He glanced at the door in front of which the chaise had halted. “Doesn’t appear that our arrival has been noticed. I hope Father hasn’t turned off all the servants again.”

“What?” Mr. Lasenby looked dismayed. “Turned them off! Why would he do a fool thing like that?”

Manningford, pushing open the door of the chaise, looked back and shrugged. “He does that sort of thing. No, dog, you wait until I see what’s what.” He stepped down and said to the postboy, “Someone will come out to get our things and the dog. Then you can take the chaise ’round back to the stables, where you’ll find a bite to eat and a place to spend the night if you don’t have to get the horses back today.”

Shaking beads of water from his yellow oilskins, the postboy, who was in fact a small, weather-beaten, middle-aged man, nodded and reached to take the money Manningford held out to him. “Right you are, sir. I’ll have my sup and be getting straight back, if it’s all the same to you.”

Mr. Lasenby, having followed Manningford to the flagway after carefully shutting the protesting hound inside the chaise, paused now to savor the full impact of the semi-elliptical, five-hundred-foot sweep of thirty houses joined in a single facade designed simply at ground level, elaborately above. “I say, Bran, are these houses all the same inside, too?”

“Not at all. In point of fact, if you were to step ’round to the far end there, by the Marlborough Buildings, and have a look at the backside, you’d see what a sham all this frontage is. From behind it looks like any street of houses in London, growing together cheek by jowl but all different sizes and all in a scramble.” Noting that the dog had continued to voice its disapproval of being left in the chaise, he glanced at it and said, “Silence, dog. I wonder what I shall do with you. Here, Sep, stop gaping about and come inside. I must find someone to deal with all this.” Extracting a key from his waistcoat pocket, he strode up the stone steps to the white-painted front door.