The LadyShip (15 page)

“I am so sorry, Mr Dudley,” she said, after what seemed hours. Shaking his hand and making an effort to speak nor
mally, she explained, “You must understand that you have
brought a most astonishing piece of news! Please do be
seated while I fetch a hot drink for you. When you are quite comfortable, you may tell Lord Vernon and Mr Allingham
precisely what has happened.”

Lucy came quickly forward then to relieve Mr Dudley of
his coat and hat. She smiled gently at him, and for a moment Felix stared at her, apparently transfixed by some
thing in her that he had not seen at his first fleeting glance
around the room; but when Elinor made the introduction,
Lucy lowered her eyes and backed away, saying she would
see to having a hot toddy brought up for Mr Dudley imme
diately. He thanked her, but then caught Allingham’s eye
on him and said with a slight stammer, “I should also be
grateful for some hot bread and cheese, ma’am, if it is not
too much trouble. I have not stopped to eat since break
fast,” he added defensively. Allingham’s scowl faded at
that, and he smiled faintly.

Lucy went off then and, with a last questioning look at
Lord Vernon—who smiled and shrugged, thus deepening
Elinor’s bafflement—she followed her sister. It was only after she had sent Lucy up again with Mr Dudley’s restorative
potion and a large platter of cheeses and fruit that it oc
curred to her that in the excitement no one had asked
whom it was that Miss Dudley had run off with!

She was shortly to be informed, however, for it was less than half an hour later that a summons sent through Teddy
brought Elinor back to the parlour. There she found that Mr
Dudley had been dismissed to sleep off the exertions of the
morning in one of the quieter bedrooms and that Mr Allingham
was leaning negligently against the fireplace with a
very odd look in his eyes—almost that of one who had a
great weight lifted from his mind, although Elinor did not
understand how it could be that.

It was Lord Vernon who spoke first. “Well, Miss Ben
nett,” he began chattily, “it appears that our pleasant little
jaunt to London must be postponed in favour of a prepos
terous, wholly unnecessary, damn-fool—”

“Vernon!” Allingham interrupted warningly.

“—flight to the border. Oh, aye—I know we have got to
go, but I’m damned if I have to enjoy the prospect. Miss
Bennett, have you a fast carriage we may hire to go after my
errant niece and her mysterious cavalier?”

Curiosity got the better of Miss Bennett and compelled
her to ask, “I beg your pardon, my lord, but do you not
know the identity of Miss Dudley’s ...of her
...”

“Paramour? Nary a hint!” Lord Vernon confessed cheer
fully. “She left a note, of course—typically long-winded
and uninformative—referring to him only as her True
Love. She did say that he was an officer whom she met in
Paris last summer, but that could be any one of thousands.”

To Elinor, however, whose acquaintance with officers in the army of occupation was, like Clarissa Dudley’s, limited
to a particular one of the thousands, this piece of news
came as a greater shock than the original announcement of
the elopement. It must be the sheerest coincidence! she
told herself. It could not be Ned. Ned was in
...
But then
she remembered that she did not know precisely where
Ned was, nor had he—now she came to think on it—ever
mentioned the name of the “friend” he had supposedly
gone to visit.

Aware of two pairs of curious eyes on her, she said hurriedly, “Of course, you may take any carriage you please,
gentlemen, and any attendants you may require. But—I beg
your pardon, for I am sure it is none of my affair—can you
tell me which route they may have taken?”

At this point, Mr Allingham revived and invited her to be seated. “Since you have heard the gist of it already, ma’am,
there is no reason you may not hear the whole. You may in
deed be able to advise us.”

“Allow me,” Lord Vernon interposed with anticipatory
relish, “to tell the tale. I fear, Miss Bennett, that Clarissa and
her lover”—Elinor glanced at Mr Allingham to see if he
winced at the plain use of this term, but he seemed
unaffected—“must already have been on their way for two
or three hours before their flight was discovered. Clarissa
had gone into Devizes, saying she was to meet her friend
Miss Spencer there, to visit the shops—a pastime common
enough to elicit no comment at home. She was let down at
the milliner’s, where she dismissed the coachman with in
structions to wait for her at the Feathers—the local inn.

“The coachman assumed—since he did not actually see
her but had no reason to suppose anything unusual was
afoot—that Miss Spencer was inside the shop. However, af
ter he had been waiting at the Feathers for half an hour past
the appointed time, Miss Spencer herself appeared there.”

“Alone?”

“Quite. Higgins, the coachman, approached Miss Spen
cer, only to be told that she had had no appointment to
meet Clarissa that morning and had driven into Devizes on
an entirely different errand. It came out, however, that
Clarissa had sent a sealed letter to Miss Spencer—who, I
must explain, resides some three miles to the south of Oak
wood—the previous evening, with instructions to deliver it
to Oakwood the following morning, and exacting some
silly pledge of secrecy until then. Miss Spencer had formed
the intention of calling at Oakwood with it after she fin
ished her errand, but instead—with some reluctance—she
handed it over to Higgins. He in turn sent it to Oakwood by
Clarissa’s footman and went off to search the village for
Clarissa.

“With a singular lack of success, needless to say,” Lord
Vernon added caustically. “In any case, Higgins returned
home only a few minutes behind the footman—who’d no idea of the urgency of the thing and dawdled on the way,
so that it was past noon before my sister-in-law Helena fi
nally sent Felix after Clarissa. Lord knows what she thought
he could do, but she’s a stubborn woman, Helena is, when
she takes one of her attitudes.”

Having come to the end of this recital, his lordship
helped himself to a slice of the bread that had been brought
for Felix, and looked expectantly towards Elinor. Elinor
was hesitant to voice any opinion at this point, and she
turned tentatively to Mr Allingham. She had been reluctant
to look into his eyes while Lord Vernon unfolded his tale,
fearful of what she might see there, and she was utterly un
able to bring herself to voice her suspicions about Ned—
although she was now firmly convinced that he was Clar
issa Dudley’s lover. It all fell into place—Ned’s unexpected
arrival at The LadyShip, just a fortnight after Allingham had
mentioned his intention of marrying (by which he must
have meant his intention to offer for Miss Dudley), his dis
tracted moods, and his mysterious departure for an
undisclosed destination.

Torn between sympathy for her
brother and an equal desire to comfort Marcus Allingham
somehow for the dashing of his hopes, she found herself
with nothing to say. She heard Lord Vernon, looking at the
clock on the mantel, say that it was nothing to him if Mar
cus wanted to go haring around the country in the middle of the night, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it came on to snow at any minute.

“But—they cannot have got very far yet!” Elinor said,
interrupting Lord Vernon’s further ruminations on the doubtless sorry state of the roads between Wiltshire and
Scotland. “Should we—should someone not go after them immediately?”

“They’ll be past Leicester by now,” his lordship said re
pressively.

“Not at all! They will have had to hire a carriage in Calne
or Devizes if they did not take one from—from the Dud
leys’ stables. There is not an inn in that vicinity with horses
so fast as ours. If you—we—start immediately, we can
overtake them before they reach the border.”

“I suppose they’ll have to stop for the night,” Allingham said, following Elinor’s reasoning.

“Of course. But we need not!”

Lord Vernon addressed Elinor indulgently. “Come,
come, Miss Bennett—even you must sleep sometime.”

“But we can take Her Ladyship!” she exclaimed, but as this inspired notion made no impression on her audience,
she was obliged to explain that this special coach was fully
equipped for night travel, was large enough to accommo
date comfortably as many as six persons, and with two
drivers relieving each other could go on without stopping,
through the night if necessary.

Lord Vernon did not look as if he fancied this scheme any
more than any other that would tear him from his comfortable fireside, but Allingham began to look more interested
and demanded to see this modern marvel of transportation.
Elinor took both gentlemen downstairs, put on a warm
cloak, and led the way across the yard.

It was not yet dark, but a few white flakes were indeed descending from the ominously still clouds above them. In
the stables, Nash and two ostlers lowered Her Ladyship to
the ground for inspection. Lord Vernon, whose mechanical
knowledge was minimal, merely stood by politely, but
Allingham was fascinated by Elinor’s description of the
coach’s unique features and asked any number of questions about its dimensions, weight, length of pole, kinds of wood
used in the construction, and maximum speed.

Lord Ver
non listened to these unexpected effusions with an enig
matic expression on his face but finally interrupted to
remind him of the matter at hand, and after some debate
among them, it was settled that an attempt would be made
to go after the runaways that afternoon. The wheels would
be put back on the coach as quickly as possible, and it
would be loaded with enough provisions to keep four persons, including Clarissa, in comfort for several days.

“I daresay we will all be merry as grigs,” Allingham said,
“but I will thank you, Miss Bennett, to cease including yourself in this little expedition. I appreciate your concern and your invaluable assistance, but among Vernon, Felix,
and me, we will manage quite nicely, thank you.”

“Has Mr Dudley not done enough already, sir? The poor
boy is worn out,” Elinor said firmly, looking directly at him
for the first time. “One, or even two, of our postboys may
come with us, but it will be necessary to have another female along to escort Miss Dudley home when we have
caught up with them. I know you will not wish her to be
the object of any more comment and speculation from
those persons you must of necessity meet on the road, than
she has been already.”

Allingham argued—irrelevantly, in Elinor’s view—that
she was scarcely a suitable chaperone, being unmarried and not
much older than Clarissa herself, which Elinor informed Mr
Allingham was a great piece of nonsense, particularly since
she had spent years building a reputation for herself as a re
spectable businesswoman.

“I am known in a good many establishments on the
North Road as well, sir, and who better than I to make en
quiries for you and guide you?”

Lord Vernon observed with interest that Allingham was
beginning to show an unholy amusement at Miss Bennett’s
unexplained passion to be included in the proposed folly
and that he was deliberately provoking her into argument
by countering her professed concern for the proprieties
with an uncharacteristic lack of concern for appearances on
his part.

Aside from interpolating once that they were both
mad as March hares, his lordship said nothing in further
ance either of Allingham’s argument that Miss Bennett’s
knowledge of the roads between Newbury and the border
was superfluous given that he possessed a perfectly good
map and a copy of Paterson’s road book, or of Miss Bennett’s contention that even if Ned and Clarissa spent one
night under the same roof before they could be overtaken,
discretion would still salvage Clarissa’s reputation—but not
if she were to return home under a solely masculine escort, even if one of the gentlemen was her brother.