Captain Corcoran's Hoyden Bride Read online

  She had been cautiously feeling her way backwards with her feet, but the incongruity of the question halted her. Why on earth would a man paid to hunt down fugitives care what kind of weather she was out in? Unless it was on his own account. That must be it. He resented having to be up on that exposed box, in such foul weather.

  Well, it served him right! As she surreptitiously tried to ease one foot out of the mud that held it fast, she glared right back at him, the villain! What kind of man took on such work?

  He watched her freeze, then frown up at him in bewilderment. And felt as though somebody had reached into his chest and squeezed hard. It was as though somebody had cast a spell on the figurehead from The Speedwell, bringing her to life and casting her ashore in that muddy beet field. Dripping wet, confused and somewhat afraid, she still had sufficient spirit to lift her chin and square her shoulders, as though daring him to do his worst.

  ‘Mr Jago!’ he bellowed. Behind him, he heard the coach window come rattling down. Miss Peters tore her eyes from her appalled perusal of his wreck of a face. He saw the moment she recognised Mr Jago, then closed her eyes, her whole body sagging with what looked like profound relief.

  Just who the hell had she thought he was? And what was she doing out here anyway?

  He half-turned, and roared over his shoulder, ‘Did your letter not specify that we were coming to fetch Miss Peters from the King’s Arms?’

  Aimée wanted to kick herself. Of course this vehicle and its driver were the transportation arranged for her by her new employers. It was just because her nerves were in tatters that she had immediately jumped to the conclusion that Bow Street Runners or thief takers must have caught up with her.

  Thank heaven she had honest work now! She was not cut out for a life of crime. Her guilty conscience had left her fearing arrest every minute these last couple of weeks.

  Perversely, the stupidity of her mistake made her absolutely furious with the coachman for giving her such a fright.

  ‘Don’t you yell at him!’ she yelled at the piraticallooking driver. ‘The letter offering me this job did say someone was coming to fetch me, but I had been waiting for an age in that filthy inn yard, and assumed that my arrival must have been forgotten. So I decided to walk.’

  ‘In this weather?’

  ‘It was not raining when I set out,’ she replied tartly. ‘Besides, I am not made of spun sugar, you know. I will not melt.’

  Mr Jago opened the carriage door fully and clambered down. ‘Well, never mind who thought what,’ he said, crossing the road. ‘The thing is to get you out of this rain now.’ He extended his hand to her across the ditch.

  A fleeting look of chagrin flickered across Miss Peters’s face as she regarded Mr Jago’s outstretched hand. Then her mouth compressed into a thin, hard line. She looked as though she wished she could consign the pair of them to perdition. But in the end, he saw a streak of practicality overcome her pride. He nodded to himself in approval as she reluctantly took hold of Mr Jago’s outstretched hand. The former bosun had come back from London telling the rest of the crew that he’d found a woman who boasted she had a backbone of steel. Which was just as well, considering what lay in store for her. But even better, her swift suppression of that little flash of temper showed him that she was sensible enough to know when to bow to the inevitable.

  He could not help grinning when she consoled herself by pausing to bestow one last, fulminating glare at him before accepting Mr Jago’s assistance into the carriage.

  Coxcomb! Aimée fumed, gathering the folds of her sopping wet cloak around her as she settled herself into the seat. It was his fault she was covered in mud now. And the shaft of pure terror that had lanced through her when she had thought he had come to arrest her and haul her back to London had left her shaking like a leaf.

  ‘Captain Corcoran intended to pick you up in the gig,’ said Mr. Jago, his face creasing with concern as she knotted her fingers together on her lap in a vain attempt to conceal how badly they were shaking. ‘But seeing the weather likely to blow up a storm, he went to his neighbour, Sir Thomas, to see if it would be possible to borrow his carriage, so you would not get wet.’

  His eyes slid to the little pool of water that was forming around her boots, and added, with a faint tinge of reproof, ‘It all took a bit longer than we anticipated. But you really should have waited.’

  Aimée’s chin went up. She absolutely hated being criticised for showing some initiative. Looking Mr Jago straight in the face, she considered telling him exactly why she had set out on her own across unknown terrain. How could she possibly have known what this Captain … whatever his name was, had arranged? It was not as if anyone had bothered to inform her. Why, the Captain had not even deigned to put his name to the letter his man of business had left for her at the Bull and Mouth.

  And was she supposed, then, to just meekly accept any arrangements he might or might not have made on her behalf? As though she had no brain in her head?

  However, she reined in her impulse to inform him exactly what she thought of him and his employer. It would not be a good start to her new life, to spend the journey to The Lady’s Bower arguing with a man who seemed to be very much in her employer’s confidence.

  The fact that the carriage, with her in it, was even now rattling into the very yard of the King’s Arms she had hoped never to see again almost overset her good intentions. All the time and energy she had wasted, getting thoroughly soaked into the bargain, and here they were, back in the King’s Arms, presumably in order to collect her trunk.

  She seethed. If anybody had thought to inform her of their intentions, she need never have set out in the rain at all!

  And Mr Jago was still looking at her with that faint air of reproof as though he expected her to be grateful to his employer!

  For one moment, just one, she admitted to herself that perhaps she ought to feel grateful. She could not remember anyone going to such trouble to see to her well-being, at least not since her mother had died.

  But on the very day of that wretchedly pathetic little funeral, she had discovered that it was no use sitting about waiting for somebody else to look after her. Her father had taken to the bottle; if she had not swiftly learned to shift for herself, she would have starved.

  And half a lifetime of facing neglect, of having to be self-reliant, was not going to dissipate under the meagre weight of Mr Jago’s disapproving frown!

  The coach lurched to a halt, rocking as the driver jumped down from his box. She tore her eyes from Mr Jago’s disapproving ones to follow the driver’s progress across the yard to the inn door.

  He had one of those voices that carried. Even from this distance, she could hear him berating the landlord for not stopping lone females from going wandering about the countryside in foul weather—in such highly colourful terms that she wondered whether she ought to be covering her ears. She was quite sure she ought not to know what half those terms meant. And Mr Jago, to judge from the way he shifted in his seat and cleared his throat loudly, was alive to her embarrassment, but at a complete loss to know what to do about it.

  He ought, of course, to have got out and told the man to mind his manners.

  Although perhaps not. She was merely a governess now, and not worthy of much consideration. She had to content herself with displaying her disapproval by glaring out of the window at the driver as he instructed the ostlers to stow her trunk in the boot at the back of the carriage.

  She hoped she would not have to have too many dealings with this bad-tempered man. She thought it unlikely. A governess would not have much to do with the outdoor staff.

  Thank goodness.

  Having strapped the trunk in place with a violence that had the whole carriage jerking, and which to her mind seemed completely unnecessary, the driver whipped up the horses and the carriage lurched out of the yard at a cracking pace. She grabbed for the strap as they rattled down the lanes she had so recently trudged along, with a speed that had both passenger
s bouncing around the interior.

  Wonderful. She was going to arrive at her first proper job in a state of bruised, chilled exhaustion! She had so wanted to impress her employers with an image of neatness and competence. Instead, she had the feeling that if this nightmare ride continued for much longer she was going to tumble out of the carriage looking like something the cat had dragged in.

  What was more, if she had been a delicate sort of female, she had the notion she would promptly go down with a severe chill and take to her bed. The Captain might well have taken some pains to procure a closed carriage for her, to prevent her from getting the wetting that her independence of mind had ensured she got anyway, but he had not thought to equip it with a hot brick. No, there was not so much as a blanket to keep off the chill that was seeping through to her bones.

  She had been far less uncomfortable outside! At least the activity of walking had kept her warm, whereas now, sitting still in her wet clothes in the unheated confines of the carriage, she was starting to shiver.

  Yes, if she were not as tough as old boots, the incompetent Captain would be summoning a doctor for his new governess, within hours of her arrival.

  Perversely, cataloguing the fallibility of her new employer went a great way to consoling her for her uncomfortable physical state. Like all men, he had decided he knew what was best, without either consulting, or informing, her what he was about. And his plans, like the plans of every man she had ever met, had been woefully inept. As well as being deleterious to the health of the female they intended to dominate.

  She gripped the strap a little harder, bracing her feet against the opposite seat as they flew over the potholed, rutted road.

  Oh, how she hoped some of his children were girls. She would thoroughly enjoy teaching them to think for themselves. To warn them that though men thought they were the superior sex, they were not to be trusted, never mind depended on!

  She had cheered herself up no end with a series of similarly subversive plans by the time the carriage finally slowed down, to make a sharp turn between two gateposts topped with stone acorns. And the smooth glide along the short, but impressively maintained, driveway came as a welcome respite to her bruised posterior.

  Mr Jago opened the door, got out and extended his arm to help her alight.

  Aimée found herself standing on a neatly raked gravel turning circle in front of a three-storeyed, slate-roofed house.

  The front door opened, and three men in a livery that consisted of dark blue short jackets, and baggy white trousers, which made them all look vaguely nautical, came tumbling out. One of them, a bow-legged, skinny man with eyes that each seemed to work totally independently of the other, came scampering up with an umbrella, which he unfurled with a flourish, and held over her head.

  Far too late, of course, to do her any good, but it was a lovely gesture. She smiled her thanks and the man grinned back, revealing a set of teeth that appeared to have been stuck into his jaws at random.

  ‘I am taking the carriage straight back to Sir Thomas,’ the driver bellowed, shattering the feeling of welcome that had briefly engulfed her.

  ‘Get Miss Peters’s trunk and see her settled!’ he barked at nobody in particular. Yet one of the men ran directly to the boot of the carriage, unstrapped her trunk, hefted it on to his shoulder and trotted with it to the house. Her eyes widened in amazement. It had taken two sweating ostlers to manhandle it into the rear boot of the stage when she had left London, yet he was treating it as though its weight was negligible.

  Mr Jago waved his arm in the direction of the front door. ‘Welcome to your new home,’ he said.

  With the bow-legged man holding the umbrella over her, the support of Mr Jago’s arm, and the way the other two men stood each to one side like a guard of honour as she trod up the three shallow steps to the front door, Aimée almost felt like a queen being escorted into her palace.

  She shook her head at the absurd notion. It was only the latest in a string of strange fancies that had popped into her head today. The certainty that she had been forgotten, when in fact her new employer was going out of his way to help her, the conviction that the piraticallooking coachman he’d sent was a Bow Street Runner, and now, the odd feeling that had not Mr Jago frowned at them so repressively, the oddly liveried staff here would have burst into applause as she alighted from the coach.

  She raised her hand to her brow. Perhaps she was sickening for something after all. Her nerves had been strained almost to breaking point over the last few weeks. And her journey from London had seemed never-ending, because of the persistent feeling that at any minute, somebody was going to point at her, and cry ‘There she is!’ and drag her ignominiously back again.

  And yet, here she was, her muddy boots staining the strip of carpeting that ran down the centre of the highly polished wooden floor of The Lady’s Bower. And the front door was closing behind her.

  Shutting her off from her past.

  Oh, they would keep on looking for her for a while, she had no doubt of that. But nobody, surely, would ever guess she had managed to get herself employment as a governess. Or if they did, by some peculiar quirk of fate, pick up her trail, she was surely not worth following this far north. Not all the way into the wilds of Yorkshire!

  She had done it.

  She had escaped.

  And suddenly, the realisation that, against all the odds, she had reached her chosen hiding place came over her in such a great rush that she began to shake all over. The room shimmered around her, the heat, which had seemed so welcome only seconds before, now stifling her.

  Tugging at the ribbons of her bonnet, she tottered to the staircase, sat down heavily on the bottom tread and bowed her head down over her damp knees.

  She was not going to faint! There was absolutely no need to.

  Not now she was safe.

  Chapter Two

  Somebody, no, two somebodies took her by one elbow each, and hustled her across the hall and into a small parlour. They removed her wet cloak, her undone bonnet sliding from the back of her head in the process. And then they lowered her gently on to an armchair in front of a crackling fire. Again, she leaned forwards, burying her face in her hands to counteract the horrible feeling that she was about to faint.

  ‘Get some hot tea in here!’ she heard Mr Jago bark, swiftly followed by the sound of feet running to do his bidding. ‘And some cake!’ She heard another set of feet pounding from the room.

  Eventually, the lurching, swimmy sensations settled sufficiently for Aimée to feel able to raise her head. Mr. Jago and the wall-eyed man who had held the umbrella over her were watching her with some anxiety.

  ‘I will be fine now,’ she murmured, attempting a smile through lips that still felt strangely numb.

  ‘Yes, you heard her,’ Mr Jago said, starting as though coming to himself. ‘And the sight of your ugly mug is not going to help her get better. Be about your business!’

  ‘Looks like a puff of wind would blow her away,’ she heard the man mutter as he left the room.

  ‘Aye, far too scrawny …’ she heard another man, who had apparently been lurking just outside the door, agreeing.

  And then there was just Mr Jago, assessing her slender frame with those keen blue eyes.

  As if she was not nervous enough, that comment, coupled with Mr Jago’s assessing look, sent a new fear clutching at her belly.

  ‘I am far stronger than I look,’ she declared. ‘Truly, you need have no fear that I am not fit for work!’

  Indeed, she did not know what had come over her. She could only assume that the strain she had been under recently had taken a deeper toll on her health than she had realised.

  She knew she had lost quite a bit of weight. To begin with, she had felt too sickened by what her father had done to feel like eating anything. And then flitting from one cheap lodging house to another, whilst racking her brains for a permanent solution to her dire predicament, had done nothing to counteract her total loss of appetite.


  And the people she’d been obliged to approach, in the end—people nobody in their right mind would trust! She had not been sure they had not double-crossed her until she’d boarded the stage, and it was actually leaving London.

  ‘I am just tired,’ she pleaded with Mr Jago. ‘It was such a long journey …’ And it had begun not the day before, in the coaching yard of the Bull and Mouth, but on the night she’d had to flee from the lodgings she shared with her father. When she had to finally accept she needed to thrust aside any last remnants of obligation she felt towards the man who had sired her.

  For he clearly felt none towards her!

  To her relief, Mr Jago’s expression softened.

  ‘You must rest, then, until you have recovered,’ he said. ‘Do not worry about your position. It is yours. Quite secure.’

  The door opened, and the burly man who had taken her trunk upstairs came in with a large tray, which he slapped down on a little side table at Aimée’s elbow, making the cups rattle in their saucers. Mr Jago shot him a dark look, which the man ignored with an insouciance that immediately raised him in her estimation.

  Once she had drunk two cups of hot sweet tea and consumed a large slice of rich fruitcake, Mr Jago led her up the stairs to a charming little bedroom on the first floor. On the hearthrug, before yet another blazing fire, stood a bath, already filled with steaming, rose-scented water.

  ‘You will feel much better for getting out of those wet clothes and having a warm bath,’ said Mr Jago, and then, going a little pink in the cheeks, added, ‘I hope you will be able to manage unassisted.’

  ‘Naturally,’ she replied, determined to erase the impression of a helpless, weak and foolish woman she was worried might be forming in his mind, after the way she had behaved today. ‘A governess has no need for a maid.’

  He cleared his throat, going a tinge deeper pink, then said briskly, ‘Have a lie down, after your bath. There is nothing for you to do until this evening, when the Captain requests the pleasure of your company at dinner.’