An Ideal Duchess (2 page)

             
His mouth tightened at that thought, and he felt the surge of uncontrollable and choking fury that made him tremble with frustration over his impotence when his thoughts strayed towards things he could not control. And so he blanked his mind of them, refusing to allow the black melancholy, which threatened to force him to wander down the rabbit’s hole of self-destruction. He picked up speed as he crested the knoll, and then launched himself and the glider upwards, feeling the accumulated wind catch and hold him up.

             
Even though he knew with a certainty, since perfecting his design, that he would fly, Bron Townsend still felt a rush of surprise to see the modified Chanute glider going straight ahead, to feel the wind current on his face and his body. Below him, he heard Bim’s hoot of triumph, and he nearly jumped with equal exhilaration, only just remembering he was presently floating three hundred feet above the rolling green of the Cotswold Hills.

             
He had done it!

             
He had flown his first aeroplane. The enormity of his achievement, born of six years of careful study, tests, and copious amounts of correspondence with Octave Chanute and Professor Langley of the Smithsonian, not to mention his journey to Leicestershire to watch Pilcher’s flights, was astounding, sobering even. He contended himself with a broad grin and shifted his body forward in the operator’s seat, bringing the front edges of his glider down to elevate the rear ones; he felt the current quickly spill from beneath the silk wingspan of his glider, canting him towards the ground. He straightened his legs, bracing for impact, when he suddenly felt the glider knocked sideways with a loud
crrack!
, and rather than land on the springy grass, Bron found himself careening directly into a tree.

             
His last thought before he fell into unconsciousness was a brief spurt of despair that his first flight would be recorded with the day of his death.

*          *          *

              Anthony—otherwise known as Bim to his intimates—broke into a run, his heart in his throat, as he cursed Bron for his obsession with flight. They had gotten into more scrapes than he could count over the years as he followed his best friend’s wild theories across England, and he would personally rip Bron limb from limb if he died from this mad folly.

             
He reached the cracked glider and pushed aside the tangled, broken struts, uncaring of the time spent sewing the balloon silk to the wooden beams and stanchions as he ripped it away to get Bron out of that damn aeroplane. He heaved a huge sigh of relief when he noticed Bron was not dead, but merely unconscious, though the gash on his forehead and the abnormal angle of his left arm worried him a bit. He kicked the rest of the glider aside and rolled Bron onto his back with an oath, wondering how he would get him to the wagonette they had left on the dirt village road.

             
“Bron, you idiot, wake up,” He slapped his friend lightly on the cheek.

             
Bim ripped his cap from his head in frustration as he crouched beside his friend’s prone body, and then untied the kerchief knotted around his throat and pressed it against the shallow gash on Bron’s head. He wasn’t much at first aid, but he figured he ought to clean up the wound or something. As he looked about for something…or someone, he noticed the flock of great woolly black-faced Cotswold sheep, into whose grazing grounds Bron had floated, and who now barely looked at them, placidly chewing their cud. Then the sheep bleated, scattering as quickly as their woolly, cumbersome bodies could manage, as a pack of retrievers scampered between them, woofing and nipping at their hooves.

             
“I say!”

             
Bim stood at the sound of a human voice, and saw that following behind the dogs were a number of men in thick coats and knickerbockers, carrying walking sticks and folding seats, and behind
them
, beaters, loaders and keepers holding the rifles, and ammunition and game bags.

             
“I say,” Came again, the strident voice belonging to a stout, bearded man. “You’re trespassing on our shoot.”

             
“I’d say you’re trespassing,” Bim glowered. “The covert ended about a mile back.”

             
“What’s this, what’s this?” Another man in tweed pushed to the front. He stared at Bim in confusion.

             
“He’s ruined our shoot, that’s what.” The first man complained.

             
“Papa, Sir Leyland, look—he’s injured.”

             
Bim started at the feminine voice—a feminine
American
voice—and turned to see a tall, slim young woman break free from the group to walk towards him. She sank to the ground beside Bron, apparently uncaring of her tweed tailor-made, and removed the handkerchief over the gash on his forehead with a wince. He opened his mouth to speak, but the look she turned on him was ferocious in its intensity, her blue eyes bright with disapproval.

             
“Why didn’t you fetch a doctor?” She accused, and then turned to face the other men. “We must fetch a doctor, Papa!”

             
Here was a young woman accustomed to being obeyed.

             
The second man, whom she called “Papa”, joined them, and bent over Bron beside her. The resemblance crackled between them, as though she was molded from his piece of clay, though copied along more delicate lines: tawny hair swept back from a fine-boned brow that tapered to a strong, cleft jaw, deep-set eyes, and a general air of command.

             
“I’ve a wagonette on the road, but wasn’t sure whether to move him,” Bim said shortly.

             
“Then why didn’t you bring the wagonette here?” The young woman stood and looked at him as though he were a half-wit.

             
Bim grinned, finding a measure of humor in this predicament. “You’re right about that, Miss…”

             
“Vandewater.” She arched a brow. “Aren’t you going to fetch your wagonette?”

             
“Aye,” He said, exaggerating the local dialect in his speech and doffing his cap.

             
The two brown horses hitched to the wagonette stared at him just as placidly as the flock of sheep, their ears flicking at the sounds and the flies buzzing around them. He gave their velvety noses a fond stroke, and then climbed into the raised seat of the waggonette and retrieved the reins. He clucked his tongue, tugging the reins lightly in his hands, and the horses began to clop leisurely towards the clearing where he left Bron. He pushed aside his worry that Bron hadn’t yet regained consciousness, focusing on the issue of getting him to the local physician. When he reached the clearing, he found Miss Vandewater directing some of the beaters to carefully lift Bron from the ground. All traces of his humor disappeared as he brought the horses to a halt and jumped from the seat.

             
“Don’t—don’t jostle him!” He stammered, his heart beating in fear.

             
“They are being as careful as they can be,” Miss Vandewater said crisply and laid a hand on his arm.

             
He looked down at her, feeling the force of her sympathy. He impulsively lifted the hand from his arm and kissed her knuckles. Her eyes widened with shock, and he doffed his cap once more before returning to the wagonette, where the beaters had laid Bron on its flat bed. He jumped back into the seat, grabbed the reins, and guided the horses around in order to take Bron home, where he would send one of his servants to fetch the doctor.

*          *          *

              “That Papa, was not a common laborer.” Amanda Vandewater didn’t know whether to be amused or outraged by the man’s insouciance.

             
They stared after the wagonette as it clambered across the field towards an unknown direction, silently, and as always, in one accord.

             
“Come along, Puss,” He father said after their brief silence. “Sir Leyland is growing impatient, and I don’t want him to miss the nice, fat partridge I was told had been raised this past spring."

             
Amanda followed her father, but cast another look behind her, her curiosity over her first shooting party replaced by her curiosity over those two men. She then glanced at the bizarre contraption entangled in a tree, and walked over to it, bending to touch the strips of silk sewn to a wooden pole.

             
It was then she saw the thick metal bullet smashed into one of the cracked beams, still hot from the barrel. She felt a surge of guilt and fury that one of her father’s guests had been so careless, and stood, intending to give the culprit a dressing down. She did not shoot, but surely, the first rule of doing so was to make certain one did not hit a human being.

             
She marched quickly behind the men, who had already covered another few yards in the meantime, but was startled by Lord Pelham’s sudden appearance in the tall grass, his short, barrel-chested body weighed down by the shooting accoutrements most men would leave to their loader.

             
“You oughtn’t to speak with such ruffians, Miss Vandewater,” The baron suffered from a definite speech impediment, and his unctuousness exacerbated it. “But I do admire your soft heart towards the working classes.”

             
“Do you know the order of the guns, my lord?” She asked abruptly.

             
“Ah, no,” Lord Pelham stammered. “Has something upset the shoot?”

             
“I’m merely trying to discern who last shot in this direction.”

             
“No, I’m sorry, Miss Vandewater,” Lord Pelham gave her a timid smile. “Might I escort you to your father?”

             
Amanda swallowed her next biting retort, realizing she was taking her irritation on this relatively harmless man, and nodded.

             
“Capital!” Lord Pelham took her encouragement as a sign of her acquiescence to his offer, and was bold enough to take her hand and place it in the crook of his elbow. “You’re a great gun. Don’t chatter on like most chits.”

             
“Do you think I might try to shoot? It seems like ripping good fun.”

             
Lord Pelham’s expression contorted with horror before he remembered he was supposed to be courting her—or rather courting her dollars. She raised a brow as he cleared his throat.

             
“Can’t say it’s proper for ladies to shoot,” He coughed delicately. “Wouldn’t want to spoil the guns by changing them right now.”

             
“Of course, my lord,” Amanda said diffidently. “You know best on these matters.”

             
Lord Pelham’s expression eased, and he gave her a fond look. “If you’d like, I could guide you on all manners…”

             
Oh dear, was this a declaration?
Amanda grimaced. If it were, it was not the most romantic time to bend on one knee and propose, what with the earth damp and muddy, and the air filled with the aroma of cordite and cold, wet dog.

             
“Tell me, my lord,” She said hastily, before it could turn into a declaration. “Over whose field are we currently tramping? That young man said we were trespassing.”

             
“I’m sure he must be mistaken,” Lord Pelham sniffed. “The boundary between Foxcote and Challoner land is most certainly a mile ahead of us.”

             
“Challoner?” She kept her tone neutral.

             
“A squire of little consequence, though he does boast of a connection with the Duke of Malvern.”

             
“Oh?”

             
Amanda’s ears pricked up at the mention of a duke. She might not be on the hunt for a title, but the manner in which these creatures were spoken made them seem almost mythical. If she had not glimpsed one of them during the Season—the somnambulant Duke of Devonshire at Covent Garden—she would almost believe they were Apollo, J.P. Morgan, and Richard Coeur de Lion all in one. As it was, she was acutely disappointed by the titled specimens presented to her in London, finding them on a whole, weak-chinned, pale-eyed, and concerned only with “huntin’, racin’, and shootin’”—ironic, considering her escort at a shoot was one of the peers she weighed and found lacking.

             
Lord Pelham promptly shushed her with a sharp whistle instead of gratifying her curiosity, and she stumbled back as the baron gestured for his loader to hand him his gun. She followed Lord Pelham’s line of vision to the flutter of white in the longish grass yards ahead of them. Her father, Sir Leyland, and Mr. Markham-Sands also had their guns in hand, and the shaggy retrievers woofed and made a beeline for that flash of white, which quickly revealed it to be a covey of sturdy partridges. The guns went off, increasing the smell of cordite, and she clapped her hands over her ears at the noise as the birds flew up to escape the snapping maws of the retrievers and the bullets from the guns.