The Viscount's Revenge (The Royal Ambition Series Book 4) (24 page)

“And Richard?” said Amanda, putting a hand to her head, which felt burning hot.

“Young Colby will be sent to sea. It will be years before you see him again.”

“Oh, God, if you would only listen, only understand!” cried Amanda.

“You will do as you are told,” he said in a hard voice. “If you do not, you will be transported to Botany Bay and your brother will hang.”

He seized his hat and crammed it on his head. He grasped her roughly by the arm, and unlocking the door with his free hand, bundled her roughly down the stairs.

Amanda cried dismally the whole long journey home. When they arrived at Berkeley Square, he looked at her woebegone face with bitter satisfaction.

“Good. You look ill,” he said. “Go straight to your room and let me make your excuses to my mother and your aunt. Then I will send for young Colby.”

Amanda fled to her room. Although a squad of housemaids had put everything to rights, she could see it had been searched. The diary was gone, and all her belongings were in different positions. She was now beyond tears. The clothes, which had had their linings slit, were lying in a neat pile, ready for repair. She felt cold and sick. He would never understand that it was two romantic children who had planned the highway robbery. Two children who had been humiliated so much at the assembly that he had seemed fair game.

Two children who had grown up too late.

There came an urgent scratching at the door. “It’s me, Susan. Open the door.”

Wearily Amanda walked across the room and tried the handle. But of course! Lord Hawksborough had locked her in.

“I can’t, Susan,” she whispered back, her mouth close to the panels. “It’s locked.”

“Wait! Oh, the key’s on
this
side of the door.” There was a click as the lock opened and Susan strode into the room.

“Look here, Amanda,” she said gruffly. “I called on Lady Mary because I wondered why she had left without saying good-bye. She said Charles was not marrying her because of you. I said you were a trump and it was all ridiculous. She told me to ask you. So here I am.”

Amanda was all at once overcome with the desire to unburden her woes to a friend. And so she told Susan the whole story of the highway robbery and of Lady Mary finding the diary.

“You must help me explain to Charles,” ended Amanda. “You must get him to understand—”

“I can only get him to understand what
I
understand,” said Susan harshly. “You are a common, greedy little thief. I agree it should be kept from Mama and your aunt. But I wish you
had
an infectious disease. You
are
an infection, a veritable pox! As for Richard Colby…” Susan’s voice cracked and large tears began to roll down her face. “I had thought… had hoped… Oh, what does it matter now. Mama is right. ‘There will be plenty of suitors gathered round your dowry,’ she said. I wish I were dead. I hope Richard goes to sea, and I hope… I hope they
keel-haul
him!”

She fled from the room and locked the door behind her.

Amanda sat very still. Now she had the guilt of Susan’s grief to add to the other guilt. Poor Susan, whose very fragile self-esteem, whose newfound confidence, had been smashed by the thought that Richard only wanted her money. Why else would a thief and a highwayman be interested in her?

Amanda rose stiffly and walked to the window and looked out. An open carriage was turning the square with two elaborately dressed ladies holding parasols over their heads. One of them dipped her lace parasol. It was Miss Devine. For a moment it seemed as if she looked full at Amanda. Then she raised her parasol and the carriage bowled past.

Amanda drew in a deep shuddering breath. Miss Devine brought back vividly the assembly at Hember Cross, where it all seemed to have begun.

But at the bottom of her misery a little spark of anger was beginning to burn. What did any of these people know of the fear of poverty? If one had been brought up to assume that members of one’s class never worked, then how was one supposed to
think
of work?

We should have stayed at Fox End and turned the whole garden over to vegetables and kept geese and chickens, thought Amanda.

But we had no one sensible to advise us. We never thought for a moment that Aunt Matilda would make some shift to help us out of trouble.

She turned as the lock clicked in the door again. A tray was pushed into the room by means of a long pole. The scared face of a servant briefly appeared in the doorway, and then the door was slammed and locked.

It appeared as if the tale of her severe infectious disease was already all over the house.

Amanda was amazed to find she was very hungry despite her misery. After she had eaten a good meal and drunk two glasses of claret, she began to search around in her mind for a way out of her predicament. It was all right for herself—well, not all right, but not as bad as poor Richard, faced with years at sea.

Amanda sat up very straight. Somehow, she had to get to Oxford before he left and warn him. She had the five-hundred guineas.

But how to get out of the room?

She sat all day puzzling over it, until she felt she had hit on a sort of plan. She ate her evening meal and then settled down to wait until the whole house was asleep.

She began to feel tired and wondered whether to try to catch a few hours’ sleep herself, but dreaded the idea of waking up and finding it morning.

Amanda waited and waited until the clock on the mantel chimed three silvery notes and the hoarse-voiced watch in the square outside called three o’clock in the morning and added it was a fine starlit night.

She took a bodkin from her dressing table, slid a sheet of paper halfway under the door, and poked and fiddled, trying to make the key fall onto the paper so that she could draw it underneath the door to her side.

At first she was too anxious, too nervous, and her hands perspired so much that the bodkin kept slipping in her grasp. At last she took a deep breath and forced herself to concentrate on her task.

After what seemed a very long time, the key suddenly fell with a satisfying plop on the paper on the other side. Amanda drew it under the door with trembling hands.

Now, to escape!

She made her preparations carefully, packing up only two handboxes full of clothes. She put on a wool gown and a warm cloak and then took a deep breath and let herself out into the passageway.

Very carefully, frightened to make a sound, she made her way down to the back entrance that John the coachman had shown her. Once down the passageway beside the mews, she stopped and waited for the mad thumping of her heart to subside.

She had done it! Now to warn Richard.

But the early-morning stage to Oxford turned out to be fully booked, and she had to wait impatiently until eight-twenty in the evening, which was when the Oxford Mail took the road.

The day had turned very warm and she was hot and tired and dusty by the time she climbed aboard the coach at The Swan with Two Necks in Lad Lane. She settled back in her seat with a sigh of relief, feeling some of the tension easing from her body.

The Royal Mail coaches were still regarded as a miracle of speed and Amanda stared wide-eyed at the timetable posted outside the inn:

Imagine being in Scotland in a mere 45 1/2 hours! The world was shrinking in an exciting way, thought Amanda. To be able to see all those faraway places, to have them brought magically within reach.

The Royal Mail kept to a strict timetable. The mail guards on the coaches carried a sealed watch and a timetable, which was handed on from one to the other. It gave the precise schedule for the journey, and it was the mail guard’s task to see that any delay in starting was made up during the journey to the next stage.

Riding the mail coach was still considered quite a daring thing to do, although the timid Aunt Matilda had somehow taken it in her stride. There were many stories of people who had died from fright when the coach went over fifteen miles an hour, and many a physician learnedly explained that the celerity would give rise to an affection of the brain.

The mail coaches were all the same design, painted maroon and black, and built in the Millbank yard by a man called Vidler.

The mail guard was the only Post Office figure on the coach and he was an imposing sight. His coat was scarlet with blue lapels and white ruffles.

His coat lining of blue matched the blue of his heavy cloth waistcoat. He wore nankeen breeches and white silk stockings, and his hat had a gold band on it. The curved bugle of Elizabethan days, although still used as the insignia of the Posts, had given way to a long brass horn on which the guard could play his own composition, so that every innkeeper, every stableboy, and every turnpike guard would know who was in charge of the mail that day.

At eight-twenty precisely, the many-caped coachman up on the box shouted to the guard at the back, “All right behind?”

“All right,” came the reply.

“Off she goes!” cried the coachman.

The guard blew an elaborate fanfare on his horn as the mail coach surged forward. Then he put his instrument away in a little tunnel of a basket fastened to the coach side and began to ask everyone on the roof his destination.

Inside the coach, in all the luxury of a comfortable seat, Amanda said farewell to London.

Her eyes filled with tears as the City streets fled past, until London wavered like a drowned metropolis in front of her.

At last, weary with emotion and heat and fatigue, she fell asleep.

The Mail took only a mere six hours to reach Oxford, depositing Amanda in the middle of that city at two-twenty in the morning. She decided to put up for the rest of the night at the Gold Lion, and visit Richard at his college as soon as daylight arrived.

But standing in the innyard, a portmanteau beside him, waiting for the southbound Mail, was Richard.

Amanda screamed his name, and, racing across the yard, flung herself on his chest, crying, “Oh, you’re safe. He has not sent you away!”

“Quiet down, Amanda,” said Richard, pushing her a little away so that he could look at her. “A groom arrived not so long ago, waking up the whole college with the news that I was summoned to London by Lord Hawksborough immediately.

“Hawksborough has so many carriages. He has his own travelling carriage and then there’s that antique thing of his mother’s that we held up. I thought he might have sent one… Why, Amanda! You are shaking.”

“He knows about the robbery, Richard. He… he said he could not turn us over to the law because of Aunt and his family, but… Oh, Richard, I am to be locked in my room until the end of the Season, and you are to be sent to sea for years and years and
years.
” Here Amanda burst into noisy tears while Richard looked at her in horror. They were gradually collecting a small audience, and one blood strongly advised Richard to “marry the girl and do the gentlemanly thing.”

“Here!” said Richard. “You’d best come into the inn and tell me all about it.”

Like all posting inns, the Gold Lion was as busy in the middle of the night as it was during the day.

Soon they were seated over a bottle of wine. Richard’s eyes grew wider and wider as Amanda told him the whole story.

“So you see,” said Amanda, finished, “I cannot go back. I
had
to rescue you. I have five hundred guineas, Richard. Well, a bit less because of the coach fare. But we can both go back to Fox End and… and… dig over the garden and plant vegetables and keep chickens and…” Her voice trailed away before Richard’s hard stare.

“No, Amanda,” he said. “I’m going to face Hawksborough. He’s not in love with
me.
Yes, you may stare! But that’s the main reason you could not explain things properly to him. The man’s in love with you. I noticed it a good while ago. You go to Fox End. A Mail goes from here to Hember Cross. Mr. Cartwright-Browne should have left. You stay there. If Lord Hawksborough still wants to send me to sea, then I’ll need to take the punishment. We’re lucky we didn’t hang, Amanda. We did a pretty rotten thing and we’re lucky to be alive.”

A horn sounded from the yard.

“The Mail,” said Richard, springing up. He gave Amanda a swift hug.

“Don’t go,” she said, clinging to him desperately.

“I must. You’ve had a hard time of it, sis, and it’s my turn now.”

A kiss on her cheek and he was gone.

Amanda sat back in her chair and buried her head in her hands.

They were paying for their crime. How long must they go on paying?

Richard wandered the streets of London for several hours, not quite knowing where he was going.

The day was sunny and still and warm, with only the faintest chill in the air to remind him of winter past.