Regency Rogues and Rakes: Silk is for Seduction / Scandal Wears Satin / Vixen in Velvet / Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed / A Rake's Midnight Kiss / What a Duke Dares. Loretta Chase
fully shield them.
Still, any driver could manage a team in rain. This weather wouldn’t slow the Royal Mail, let alone stop it. Mail coach drivers continued through thunderstorms, floods, hailstorms, sleet, and blizzards. At present Longmore had only a bad rainstorm to contend with. No thunder and lightning to agitate the horses.
He drove on.
The storm drove on, too, with increasing intensity, the rain pouring straight down sometimes and at other times pelting sideways at them, depending on the gusting wind.
Though the waxing moon wouldn’t set until the small hours of morning, the storm swallowed its light. Rain poured off the hood, obscuring Longmore’s view of the horses as well as the road ahead. It dimmed what little light the carriage lamps threw on the road. The farther he drove, the darker grew the way ahead. He slowed and slowed again, and finally settled to a walk.
By the time they passed Queen’s Elm he was driving half blind and trusting mainly to the horses to keep to the road. Luckily this was a major coaching route, wide and smooth, which lowered the odds of his driving into a ditch.
Still, he needed to keep his mind on driving. Talking was out of the question. In any case, with the rain thumping on the roof and the wind whistling about their ears, they’d have to shout to make themselves heard.
They drove on through villages distinguishable mainly thanks to the lights in a few windows. Not many lights. It was bedtime in the countryside. The inns and taverns were awake, but not much else.
He glanced to his left. Only Sophy’s gloved hand, clenched on the curved arm of her seat, hinted at fear.
Though he quickly brought his gaze back to the road ahead, a part of his mind marveled at her. He couldn’t think of another woman who wouldn’t be shrieking or weeping right now, and begging him to stop.
He was starting to argue with himself about whether he ought to stop.
Though their creeping pace made it seem they’d been on the road for hours, he knew they hadn’t gone far. They hadn’t yet crossed the Putney Bridge, and that was only four miles from Hyde Park Corner.
Through the lashing rain he made out flickering lights ahead. Gradually, he began to discern the rough outlines of houses—or what seemed to be houses. Finally they reached the quaint old double tollhouse, with its roof spanning the road. The roof diverted some of the downpour while they waited for the gatekeeper to collect his eighteen pence and open the gate. Though he wasn’t inclined to prolong the encounter, he did answer Longmore’s question.
Yes, he remembered the cabriolet. An exceptionally fine vehicle and a prodigy of a horse. Two women tucked under the hood. Couldn’t properly make out their faces. One had asked for directions to Richmond Park.
When pressed for more detail, the gatekeeper said, “I told them to keep on this road up to the crossroads, then watch for the obelisk at the corner of Putney Heath, and go that way, rightish. I told them what to look for. It’s not hard to keep to the main road, but for some reason, there’s them that go astray there, and end up in Wimbledon.” He hurried back into the shelter of his tollhouse.
“Richmond Park,” Longmore said. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the wind and drumming rain. “What the devil’s there?”
“I read that Richmond Park was beautiful,” Sophy said.
“You think she’s gone sightseeing?”
“I hope so. It might calm her.”
He had to stop talking to negotiate the bridge. An old, narrow, uneven structure, it bulged up unexpectedly here and there. At this time of night, in this weather, the only way to proceed was cautiously.
Caution wasn’t Longmore’s favorite style.
He was grinding his teeth by the time he got them safely to the other side of the Thames. Thence it was uphill to Putney Heath and the obelisk, about two miles away.
The horses trudged up the road while the rain went on thrashing them, torrents cascading from the hood’s rim. The wind, howling occasionally to add atmosphere to the experience, blew the wet under the hood. It dripped down Longmore’s face and into his neckcloth.
Though he knew her glorious monstrosity of a traveling costume involved layers and layers, the wet would eventually penetrate to skin, if it hadn’t already.
He threw her a quick glance. She’d turned her head aside so that the back of her hat took the brunt of the wind-driven rain. That was the only sign of discomfort. Not a word of complaint.
He went on wondering at it, even while he watched the road and argued with himself what to do.
When at last they reached Putney Heath, the wind abruptly died down. In the distance a bell tolled. An ominous rumbling followed. He turned his head that way in time to see the crack of lightning.
The wind picked up again, coming from the same direction.
It was driving the thunderstorm straight at them.
* * *
Sophy was petrified.
Her heart had been pounding for so long that she was dizzy. She was terrified she’d faint and fall out of the carriage and under a wheel. If she fell, Longmore might not even notice at first, between the darkness and the rain’s incessant hammering.
Safe at home, the sound of rain drumming on a roof, even as fiercely as this, could be soothing.
This was not soothing.
She was city bred. If she’d ever spent time in the country, it must have been in her early childhood. She vaguely recalled traveling across the French countryside when she and her sisters had fled cholera-ravaged Paris three years ago. But they’d traveled in a closed vehicle, and not at night in such hellish weather.
Intellectually, she knew she wasn’t in any great danger. While a famously reckless man, Longmore was a highly regarded whip, too. In a carriage, one couldn’t be in safer hands. He drove with the magnificent calm the English deemed de rigueur in whipsters. The horses seemed tranquil and absolutely under his control. Traveling on the king’s highway, she knew, one could count on smooth, well-maintained roads. Hostelries lined them at short intervals. Help was rarely far away.
All the same, she didn’t feel very brave.
She’d started out concerned mainly about Lady Clara. The difficulties of travel, even at night, hadn’t crossed Sophy’s mind. For one thing, at this time of year, a sort of twilight prevailed rather than full darkness. For another, this evening had promised to be a pleasant one: When she set out from home for the Gloucester Coffee House, she’d assumed the moon would brighten their journey.
Instead, within minutes they were pitched into a streaming Stygian darkness, which feeble lights here and there only seemed to emphasize. The world about her felt too empty.
Breaking in on an unexpected silence, the crack of thunder, distant as it was, made her jump. Longmore’s head turned sharply that way, and in the faint glow of the carriage lights, she saw his jaw muscles tighten.
He turned to her. “Are you all right?” he said.
“Yes,” she lied.
“The horses won’t be, in a thunderstorm,” he said. “I’ve decided not to chance it. With a broken neck you won’t be much help to my sister. We’ll have to stop.”
She was only half relieved. As alarming as she found it to travel at present, she was impatient at delay. Back in London, after Fenwick had reported what his friends had told him about the cabriolet, she’d looked up Richmond Park in a road guide. It wasn’t very far from London. Still, near as it was, if even Longmore didn’t want to risk traveling on, no sane person would try it.
Though they seemed to be crossing an endless uninhabited wilderness, it wasn’t long before he turned into the yard of an inn. White flashes lit the sky, and the thunder rumbled oftener