Romney Marsh Trilogy: A Gentleman by Any Other Name / The Dangerous Debutante / Beware of Virtuous Women

Chance looked about his fairly cavernous bedchamber as if he’d never seen it before this moment. It was a bedchamber, somewhere to sleep. Beatrice had overseen the decoration of the rest of the house but had left his chamber relatively untouched. And so had he. Clearly Julia Carruthers seemed to think this unnatural.

“There are the paintings,” he pointed out, stung into defending himself.

“Yes, there are. Trees and grass and hills. And a pond. Where are they located?”

What a ridiculous question. Why didn’t he have an answer? He’d been living with these paintings for over six years. Chance coughed into his fist. “Located? I don’t know. My late wife was raised in Devonshire. That seems as good a place as any for trees and hills and ponds, don’t you think?”

“Having lived my life next door to Romney Marsh, where hills and trees are both at a premium, I confess I really couldn’t say. You’ve nothing of Romney Marsh or the sea here, do you, even though you were raised there?”

This conversation had gone on long enough. “I lived there, Miss Carruthers. There’s a difference. And only from an age not much younger than you are now, with the majority of my time being spent away at school. There, are you quite satisfied now? Or is there anything else you’d wish to know about or poke at before we’re able to be on our way?” He made a point of pulling his timepiece from his waistcoat pocket and opening it.

In for a penny, in for a pound, Julia decided, knowing she couldn’t be much more embarrassed than she already was at being discovered in her employer’s bedchamber. And thankfully it was much too late for him to fling a five-pound note at her and send her on her way. “The portrait over the mantel in the drawing room. Your wife, sir? Alice looks very little like her, although that may change as she grows.”

“My question was meant as an insult, Miss Carruthers, not an invitation. But since you probably know that and asked your question anyway, I can tell you we meant for another portrait, Alice posing with her, but Beatrice never seemed to find the time to—We’re done here, Miss Carruthers,” Chance snapped out tightly, then turned on his heel and left the chamber.

Julia lingered a few moments longer—just until she could hear his heels on the marble stairs over the rapid beating of her own heart—then raced to the nursery to snatch up the remainder of her belongings.

When she returned, breathless, to the street, it was to see she’d been correct, that her new employer had chosen to ride out of London on the large red horse she’d earlier seen saddled and tied to the second coach.

Which was just as well. She really wasn’t ready to face the man again and probably wouldn’t be for some time. She could only hope that he would have forgiven her inexcusable behavior before their first stop along the road. During which time, she promised herself, she would practice dedicating herself to being subservient and uninterested and totally uncurious about anyone or anything other than performing her assigned duties without bothering the man again. Cross her heart and hope to spit.

“So much for setting impossible goals,” Julia muttered not three hours later as she held Alice’s head while the child was sick into the ugly but efficient chamber pot that Julia had found beneath her seat in the coach. They’d stopped along the way, but only briefly, to change horses.

“I don’t like coaches,” Alice said a few moments later as Julia wiped the child’s mouth with a handkerchief. “I want it to stop. I want it to stop now, please, Julia.”

“And stop it will, I promise.” Julia eased Alice back against the velvet squabs and returned to her own seat, which was no mean feat, as the roadway below them must have been attacked by a tribe of wild men with picks and shovels intent on destroying it, and she was half bounced onto the floor twice.

Thinking words she could not say within Alice’s hearing, she then opened the small square door high above the rear-facing seat. Pressing her cheek against the coach wall, she could see the legs of the coach driver and the groom riding up beside him. “You, coachman!” she called out. “Stop the coach!”

“Can’t do that, missy. We’re behind-times as it is.”

“I said, stop this coach! Miss Alice is ill!”

“Oh, blimey,” the groom said nervously. “Billy, Mr. Becket won’t like that.”

“And yet Mr. Becket isn’t down here, holding a pot for Miss Alice to be sick in!” Julia shouted. “If you’re going to be frightened of anyone, Billy, it should be me, as soon as I can get my hands on you! Are you aiming for every hole in the road?”

There was no answer from Billy or the groom, but Julia could feel the coach slowing, its bumps and jiggles, if anything, becoming even more pronounced. But at last the coach stopped.

“I’m going to be sick again, Julia,” Alice said, almost apologizing.

Julia scrambled to the child, opening the off door as she did so, and pulled Alice rather unceremoniously toward the opening. Holding her by the shoulders, she said, “Just let it all go onto the ground, sweetheart. I’ll hold you tight and you just be sick, all right?”

Alice’s answer was a rather guttural, heaving noise, followed closely by a few startled male curses…which was when Julia realized that Chance Becket had dismounted and come to see why the coach had stopped.

“God’s teeth, woman, you could give a man a little warning!”

“Or I could wish little Alice’s aim were better,” Julia muttered, but very quietly.

Alice had more than emptied her small belly now, and Julia once more eased her against the seat, handing her a clean handkerchief. “Stay here, sweetheart, and don’t cry. I’ll handle—speak to your papa.”

Grabbing the brass pot with one hand, Julia kicked down the coach steps and made her way, pot first, out of the coach and onto the ground. She spied the coachman, a small, painfully thin man of indeterminate years who, she had noticed, walked with the same rolling motion of a seaman more used to ships than dry land. If he were to apply to her for her opinion on his choice of employment, she would be more than pleased to tell him leaving the sea for a coachman’s seat had not been an inspired one.

“Billy,” Chance said. “You have a reason for stopping, I’ll assume?”

“I’ll answer that, Mr. Becket. Deal with this, Billy, and go to sleep tonight blessing your guardian angel that I haven’t dumped its contents over your head,” she said, biting out the words, all but tossing the pot at the coachman, who was suddenly looking a little green himself.

“Why is Alice ill?”

Julia had to unclench her teeth before she could answer what had to be one of the most ignorant questions ever posed by a man. “The pitching of the coach, Mr. Becket. A child’s stomach isn’t always up to three full hours of such motion. And my stomach has expressed a similar wish as Miss Alice’s, so if you’ll excuse me?”

Chance stepped back as Julia looked rather wildly toward the line of trees, then all but bolted into them until he could no longer see the blue of her cloak.

“This is why women are not welcome aboard ship,” he said in disgust to Billy, who heartily nodded his agreement, then went off to deal with the contents of the pot.

“Papa?”

Alice. He’d forgotten Alice. There had to be a special hell for fathers such as he. “Alice, poppet,” he said, climbing into the coach, leaving the door open behind him, as the interior smelled far from fresh. His daughter looked rather pale and somehow smaller than he remembered her, as if she’d shrunk in both size and age, as she hugged her stuffed rabbit to her chest. “How are you feeling now?”

Alice sniffled, her bottom lip trembling. “I want to go home, Papa. Buttercup doesn’t like coaches. Coaches have too many bounces.”

How could he have been so oblivious? Good weather, fine teams, a brisk pace and Becket Hall by ten that night. He’d been thoroughly enjoying himself up on Jacmel. And all without a single thought to his daughter’s comfort. He most certainly hadn’t thought about Miss Carruthers’s comfort…although he hadn’t been able to completely put the infuriating woman out of his mind.

“I’m afraid we can’t return to London, poppet,” he said, cudgeling his brain for some explanation the child might understand. Being rid of her would not have been a good starting point for that explanation. “But I promise that the coachman will drive much more carefully so there aren’t so many bumps. And tonight you’ll sleep in your own bed at Becket Hall.”

“You can’t possibly mean that. Not now. You really intend to drive all the way to the coast with this child?”

Ah, and here she was again, the woman who either didn’t know or didn’t care about her proper place. “Yes, Miss Carruthers, I still intend exactly that—and last night sent a message to Becket Hall saying exactly that,” Chance said, exiting the coach to stand on the ground beside her. Her pale complexion had gone positively ashen. “You look like hell.”

“Compliments are always so welcome, especially when one is considering death to be a viable alternative to one’s current condition,” Julia said, looking back down the roadway, longing for her portmanteau and her tooth powder. “We’ve so outstripped the second coach? Alice’s clothes are in that coach.”

“The coachman knows the way. Or are you worried that my daughter’s cases might disappear forever, Miss Carruthers?”

“No, those worries are for my own cases,” Julia said almost to herself. Then she took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I refuse to allow Alice to travel this way. There, I’ve said it.”

“And meant it, too,” Chance added, looking back over his shoulder. Alice’s small head had disappeared from sight below the opened window. “Very well. Do you believe we can agree on Maidstone?”

“We’ll stop there for the night?”

“We will stop there for the night, yes. But for now we must push on. Agreed?”

“Grudgingly, yes,” Julia said, then squared her shoulders and climbed into the coach. She carefully eased the now-sleeping Alice aside so that she could sit on the front-facing seat—the rear-facing seat had been an unfortunate choice for her stomach—then pulled the child half onto her lap.

Looking out the opened window, she said, “She’ll need a bath, fresh clothing and a good night’s rest, Mr. Becket. She’s a small child and fragile and should be handled accordingly.”

Chance nodded, knowing the woman was right, hating himself for being so selfish. “You’ve made your point, Miss Carruthers. No need to drive it home with a hammer.”

“No need but definitely a strong desire,” Julia muttered as the man slapped his hat back on his head and returned to his mount. Moments later the coach lurched forward once more, never reaching the killing pace set earlier. She then spent the next hour stroking the sleeping Alice’s curls and looking out the off window while ordering her stomach to behave.