A Regency Match (13 page)

Marcus signaled the driver of the first carriage that they were ready to start and jumped aboard the third beside his betrothed. Just as they started to move, a desperate Dennis thrust his head inside Marcus's vehicle. “I say, Edgerton,” he said urgently to Bertie, “you wouldn't consider changing seats with me, would you? I have an aversion to … er … to laudalets.”

Marcus gave a shout of laughter and nodded his acquiescence to the amiable Bertie. “I can still take the ribbons later, can't I?” Bertie asked suspiciously.

“Yes, of course you can,” Marcus assured him. Dennis helped Bertie down, watched him climb aboard the second carriage, and then jumped up beside Sophy with a blissful sigh of relief. Marcus, meeting his eye, couldn't keep back his laughter. He leaned back and roared. Dennis, turning quite red in embarrassment, soon joined in. Iris and Sophy looked at each other nonplussed, but neither Marcus nor Dennis was in any condition to enlighten them. “What on earth has amused you so?” Iris demanded. Gentlemanly honor prevented them from responding, but Marcus did whisper to Iris that, if she wanted to be entertained that afternoon, she would do well to keep her eyes on Dennis when they alighted.

When they arrived at West Hoathly, the sight of Dennis being relentlessly pursued by the unshakable seventeen-year-old provided Marcus with so much amusement during their rambles through the village that he forgot to concern himself with Sophy. It was not until the various charms of the tiny hamlet had been duly admired, and the members of the party were ready to return to Wynwood that it was brought to his attention that Sophia was not anywhere in evidence.

Marcus quickly strode up the lane and around the churchyard to find her, but she was not there. Meanwhile, Mr. Carrington and Bertie combed the grounds around the Priest's House, and Dennis climbed the tower. When they returned to the waiting carriages and reported to Marcus that they hadn't found her either, his lordship did something quite uncharacteristic: he uttered a sharp and vulgar epithet.
I might have known
, he thought, gnashing his teeth in frustration,
that the infuriating Miss Edgerton would get herself lost
!

Chapter Ten

I
T WAS QUITE
impossible for anyone to get lost within the tiny confines of West Hoathly. Everyone agreed on that. But Sophy was indeed lost.

“
Lost
?” cried the long-suffering Lady Alicia. “How can she be lost?”

“Oh, pooh, she's
not
lost,” Charlotte said optimistically.

“She just sat herself down in some corner of the church and fell asleep,” Mrs. Carrington theorized.

“Irritating chit,” Lady Bethune muttered under her breath to her sister. “First she sets fire to the music room, then she rips Iris's dress, and now this!”

Marcus walked to the edge of the road and looked over the landscape. Sophia was not asleep in the church—he and Dennis had made sure of that. And she couldn't be anywhere in the village—even asleep—and not have heard them calling her. It was therefore logical to assume that she'd wandered out of the village. But where? To the east lay a wide expanse of Sussex downs, on which no movement could be discerned. There was nothing there to attract anyone, either. It seemed to him that there were only two possibilities: either Sophia had wandered in a northerly direction up the road on which they'd come, or she'd ventured into Ashdown Forest which surrounded West Hoathly on the south and west. If she'd gone up the road, the home-bound carriages would catch up with her. If, on the other hand, she'd gotten lost in the forest, they were in great trouble.

But he couldn't alarm the ladies with his fears. In order to minimize their alarm and to proceed with a search in an organized manner, Marcus decided to send most of the party home in two of the carriages. The third would be retained for the search party. A brief conference with Dennis, Mr. Carrington and Bertie resulted in a plan: Bertie and Marcus would make up the search party; the rest would travel home in Mr. Carrington's charge. If the homeward-bound carriages were to find Sophia along the road, Dennis was to take one of the horses and ride back to West Hoathly to inform Marcus.

When the ladies were requested to climb into the carriages, Lady Alicia, in acute distress, begged to be permitted to remain with the searchers. She could not bring herself to leave without her beloved Sophy. But Charlotte gently coaxed her into her seat, assuring her of Marcus's competence to handle the situation and convincing the worn-out, distracted old woman, by the calm sincerity of her manner, that Sophy would be found so quickly that Marcus's carriage would catch up with them before they even reached home.

It was a depressed and silent band who gathered in the lane, and a depressed and silent Marcus who assisted them to climb aboard. When Iris came up beside him, he took her hand. “I'm so sorry I shan't be riding back with you,” he whispered.

She squeezed his hand comfortingly. “So am I. I hope you won't be long.”

“I hope not.” he smiled at her ruefully. “You must be wishing you'd never agreed to this party. Your mother's ball for two hundred would have been far less troublesome.”

“Not at all. Don't tease yourself on my account. Everything has been lovely so far. And even this will be something to laugh about when you've found Miss Edgerton and have come back home.”

Marcus smiled at her gratefully. “As I said before, my dear, you are a great gun.”

As soon as the carriages had left, Marcus and Bertie set about their task. With West Hoathly as their starting-point, they agreed to walk in opposite directions along the edge of the woods for half-an-hour. They were then to return to the village and, if they'd had no luck, they would reassess the situation.

As Marcus hurried along, peering through the trees and calling Sophy's name over and over, he began to feel something akin to terror. Although there would be three hours or so of daylight, the depths of the forest already looked forbiddingly dark. If the girl had lost her way in those quickly-deepening shadows, he very much doubted that they could find her before nightfall. A group of experienced searchers might manage to find a lost girl in a patch of woods at night by using torches, but Ashdown was a
forest
, thick, deep and widespread. The chances of locating her within its depths were slim, and the dangers which a defenseless girl might have to face within its bounds were many. And they were dreadful to contemplate.

When Bertie and Marcus met at the carriage and looked at one another, their eyes were frightened and their lips set. “If this is one of her tricks,” Bertie muttered, “I'll
throttle
her!”

Marcus looked at him curiously. “Tricks? What do you mean?”

Bertie colored. The words had just slipped out because of his fear for her safety. He hadn't intended to give her away. “I … I only meant … she used to like to play this sort of trick on me when she was a child,” he improvised embarrassedly.

“I see.” Marcus scrutinized the young fellow shrewdly. Sophy
had
been up to something these past few days, that much was clear. And Bertie was privy to it. But he looked too pale and frightened to have any information
now
that she was playing a game. They must find her, and quickly. “I think we'd better face the fact that the forest is too big for us to cover on our own. Let's see if we can get some help from the locals.”

The coachman pointed out that a woman in a cottage right near their present location was peering out at them through a little, leaded window. Marcus tapped at her door and told the aged, bright-eyed woman who answered what the problem was. The woman clucked sympathetically. “I th'ot 'twas somethin' o' the sort,” she said. “Been watchin' ye fer an hour or more.” Her son would be glad to help, she said, when he came in from the fields, but in the meantime she suggested that his lordship go to see Old Andrew, who lived in the last cottage in the lane. Andrew was said to know the forest better than anyone.

While the coachman walked the horses, Bertie and Marcus hurried to the cottage the woman had indicated. But there was no answer to their knock, and when they peered into the house (the door not having been locked), they found it empty. “Old Andrew must have gone out,” Bertie said, discouraged.

Marcus kicked at the pebbles in the path in chagrin. “Damn it all, I can't stand around here waiting. I'm going to search Ashdown myself. You wait for this Andrew and bring him in after me. You'll hear me shouting—just follow the sound.”

Despite Bertie's protests that he'd get himself lost as well, Marcus strode off toward the forest without another word. But as he came round the back of the cottage, he noticed an old man walking in his direction from the woods. He carried a huge bundle of twigs on his back. When they were close enough to speak, Marcus asked, “Are you called Old Andrew?”

“That's who I be,” the man answered. “Are you wantin' me for somethin'?”

“I'm told you know the forest very well, We've lost a member of our party who may have wandered in there. Will you help us search?”

“There ain't nobody in there now … leastaways, not hereabouts. I been wanderin' about in there fer the last hour and didn't notice no tracks.”

Marcus gestured helplessly. “Are you sure? Where else could she have gone?”

“
She
?” Old Andrew gave Marcus a sharp look, then set his bundle on the ground. “This lost party … it's a
female
?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“Pretty little thing, with reddish hair an' a green dress?”

Marcus felt his heart leap. “Yes! Have … have you seen her?”

“Yessir, I have. But she ain't in the forest, that I kin swear to.”

“Well, then, where
is
she? Speak up, man!”

The old man cackled. “I ain't sayin' as I know where she
is
. All I know is she ain't back in there.”

Marcus groaned in impatience. “If you don't know where she is, how can you be sure she's
not
lost in Ashdown?” he demanded.

“‘Cause no one could ride a horse in there nohow.”

“A
horse
?” Marcus was beginning to feel that the conversation was taking place in a dream. Nothing was making sense. “No, you don't seem to understand. The lady we're looking for was not on horseback. She was on foot.”

Old Andrew grimaced at the impatient gentleman with disgust. “I know
that
,” he said in a tone he might have used for an idiot child. “I giv'd her
mine
.”

“What? You gave her a
horse
?”

“Well, I din't
give
it exac'ly. She paid me a yellow-boy to let her ride him.”

Marcus shook his head in utter bewilderment. “Perhaps we'd better start at the beginning,” he said, mustering up what patience he could. “How did she happen to ask you for your horse?”

“Well, sir, y'see, I was rubbin' ol' Thunderer down, there in front o' the shed where I stable him, when the young Miss comes walkin' up the lane and stops to watch me.”

“This ‘young Miss'—you say she had a green dress and auburn hair?”

The old man nodded. “All curled, it was. An' her bonnet … it was tied on wi' shiny green ribbons—”

“Yes, that's the girl. Well, go on.”

“‘That's a fine roan,' she says, friendly-like. ‘Thank ye, Miss,' I say, givin' me forehead a knuckle. Then she nods 'n comes up to ol' Thunderer an' pets his nozzle. Ol' Thunderer, he takes to her amazin'! She has a real way wi' horses, she has. Then she asks me can she ride him fer a bit. I can't think what to say to that, 'cause Thunderer, well, he's a bit huge fer a wisp of a lass like her. But she takes out this here yellow-boy from her—what do the ladies call 'em?—reticule. E'en so, I hold back. But she says as she's a bruisin' rider—those're her very words, ‘I'm a bruisin' rider,' she says. So I let her have 'im.”

Marcus, straining to follow the gist of the old fellow's account, was unaware that Bertie had come up behind him and was listening to the tale with open-mouthed attention. It was Bertie's snort of laughter which made Marcus look round. “Did you hear all that, Bertie?” he asked in a kind of stupefied amazement. “She's gone off
riding
!”

“If that ain't just like her!” Bertie marvelled, a tinge of reluctant admiration for the girl coloring his tone.

“Can you tell me what
isn't
like her?” Marcus snapped. “Is there
any
impropriety, any indiscretion, any outrage which that infuriating little madcap would not perpetrate?” He turned and stomped furiously back across the field. Bertie, stung by Marcus's tone and the injustice of his words, ran after him. “That's not quite fair, you know, my lord,” he shouted indignantly. “Not fair at all.”

Old Andrew watched them for a moment, shaking his head at the inexplicable tempers of the gentry. Then he calmly picked up his bundle, shifted it onto his back and trudged after them.

Marcus continued across the field, each step pounding the ground heavily, as if the force of his footfalls would in some way dissipate his rage. He'd been misused—abused, rather!—by that abominable girl. He had come to spend a fortnight in the country with a few intimates, to celebrate a special occasion in his life, and she had completely cut up his peace. And her witling of a cousin dared to say that he was
unfair
!

Without warning, he wheeled on the unfortunate Bertie, who was coming up behind him. “Unfair, am I? In what way am I being unfair? There has not been a day since we arrived that your goose-witted cousin hasn't made some mischief. And now she's taken a horse and ridden off to God-knows-where, to return God-knows-when! And you have the temerity to call me unfair?”