A Most Unsuitable Groom by Kasey Michaels (36 page)

Nicolette hadn't returned to the millinery shop to take delivery of her bonnet that afternoon, which proved that either the shopkeeper had lied about the day she was to return or that she hadn't been able to return. That last worried Mariah more than a little bit.

It all would have been so easy—see Nicolette, follow her as she left the shop, capture Renard and convince him to lead them to Edmund Beales. Mariah didn't know precisely how the Beckets would convince the man, and didn't want to know. She just wanted this over and her life with Spencer and William to begin in earnest, with no shadows of the past able to reach out and hurt them.

"Would it be terrible of me to beg you to buy me a pint of stout?" she asked. Spencer avoided a mug that a burly man in a leather apron was swinging about as he spoke to a companion. "It's so warm in this crush and Papa let me drink a bit of stout from his glass on very hot summer days."

"A sip is not a pint, Mariah " Spencer pointed out, already elbowing his way toward a stall selling stout and ale, both of which would probably cause less damage than a glass of water. "You can drink a little from mine, all right?"

"Are you afraid I'll go all tipsy and begin singing bawdy songs?" she asked him, feeling petulant. She was just
hot
after spending several hours in this mad crush of people, so very hot, and wishing everyone else would simply go home. Mostly, she was angry that she and Spencer were trapped here in Green Park, when anyone with any sense knew that whatever was going to happen would happen in Hyde Park.

Spencer dropped a few coins on the wooden counter and grabbed a pint, easing them back into a less crowded area. "Are you telling me you know bawdy songs?"

Mariah took two quick sips of stout and then sang out in a clear, strong voice,
"As I walked out one May morning, one May morning so early, I overtook a handsome maid just as the sun was rising."

".Oh, God," Spencer said, rolling his eyes, but then joined her in the chorus.
"With my rue dum day, Fol the diddle dol, Fol the dol the diddle dum the day!"

Behind them, Clovis took up the second verse.
"Her shoes were bright, her stockings white, her buckles shone like silver. She had a black and roving eye, and her hair hung down her shoulder."

By the time they'd reached the chorus once more, Aloysius, née
Anguish, had begun to dance a jig and several others nearby had lifted their mugs—undoubtedly not their first of the evening—to sing along.

"With my rue dum day, Fol the diddle dol, Fol the dol the diddle
—where are we going?" Mariah asked as Spencer took her arm and began dragging her through the crowd. "I love the next verse.
How old are you? My fair pretty maid. How old are you, my honey? She answered me right cheerfully, I'm seventeen come Sunday. With my rue dum day, Fol the diddle
—would you
stop
dragging at me! You're spilling the stout."

"Damn the stout," Spencer gritted out from between clenched teeth, not stopping until they were at the fringes of the crowd, a worried Clovis and Aloysius joining them a few moments later. "Is this how we watch for Renard?"

Mariah dipped her head, mumbled her apologies. "We both know Renard won't be showing up here, Spence. Besides, you did ask if I knew any drinking songs."

"I didn't expect you to break into verse, madam, with the rest of the world and his drunken wife joining in," he told her, stabbing his fingers through his hair. "Oh, hell, and yes, you're right. We should leave here, go to Hyde Park and the viewing stand, no matter what Chance said, and just follow everyone back here when they come to see the pagoda. At least, there, we can watch the royal viewing stand. The only way to see anyone here would be to be up in that damn balloon."

"About that, Lieutenant, sir," Clovis said, holding his hat in his hands, fairly wringing the cloth. "I saw over there where someone is selling rides on one of those pachyderm beasts. High above the crowd that would put you, sir, you and your lady wife. You could see a good fair lot, atop a pachyderm."

Spencer looked across the canal, where the Battle of the Nile was now raging, complete with flaming boats and small fireworks meant to resemble cannon fire. He could see an elephant that had been decked out with some sort of large open-topped box tied to its back, the box filled with no fewer than a dozen people, most of whom appeared to be hanging on for dear life while rethinking their bravery. Put Mariah up in a basket like that? "I don't think so, Clovis..."

"Oh, come on, Spencer, we'll be like Hannibal, crossing the Alps," Mariah begged, more than happy to have her feet somewhere other than where they were, surrounded by puddles, with only half of them, she worried, being mud puddles and the rest created in ways she could have only guessed at before she'd seen a red-faced, clearly drunken young man clad in the first stare of fashion bent over, his hands on his knees as he cast up his accounts in a fit of violent retching. "And Clovis is correct. We would be higher than anyone else, according us a much better view."

After indulging in a short mental vision of commandeering an elephant and riding it through the throng, hard on the heels of a fleeing Renard and Nico-lette, Spencer sighed and nodded his agreement. And a few minutes after that, he was handing a dark-skinned old man in a turban and baggy pants a shilling each for he and Mariah, then watching in amazement as Mariah nimbly ascended the wooden ladder propped against the side of the now-kneeling elephant. Was there anything the woman wouldn't dare?

He joined her in the box that was covered in an assortment of rather moldy carpets and he looked out over the park, toward the Chinese pagoda, now lit on all seven stories with what had to be more than a thousand flickering lights. "I hesitate to point this out, Mariah, but this elephant's hind leg is shackled to a fairly stout stake hammered into the ground. We're going nowhere."

Mariah, heady with the height, the thrill of the thing, turned to grin at him. "And where did you want to go, Spencer? We'd be trampling the villagers, as I've heard happens in India, if the elephant broke loose. I hope the stake is very heavy and hammered into the ground at least three feet or more. Oh, look—there's Aloysius, waving up at us.
Yoohoo, Aloysius! Here we are!"

"Oh, for the love of—Mariah, I know I said I doubted anything was going to happen here in St. James's tonight, but if Chance knew I'd spent precious time perched on a damn elephant, I wouldn't blame him for knocking me down."

"You're just upset because we've been banished here, that's all," Mariah told him. "So am I, truthfully, and the pistol is banging painfully against my leg when I walk, so I'm not all that delighted to be here, either. Just let's make the best of it, all right?"

Spencer turned her to face him, ran his hands down over her hips and found the outline of the pistol. The large pistol. "How in bloody hell—?"

"I took a page from Courtland's book of brilliance and fashioned a sort of
harness
for it from strips of my petticoat. As you're already
pawing
me in public, perhaps you'll find the seam I opened enough to reach my hand inside my gown and extract it, if necessary,"

"I'm definitely never letting you anywhere near my sister Morgan," Spencer grumbled, turning his attention to the fireworks that had begun in a small way, with Catherine wheels spinning colored flame in the trees to the sounds of
oohs
and
ahhs
from the increasingly drunken crowd.

"You didn't bring a pistol, Spencer?"

"Clovis has it, tied around his neck together with his own, beneath his coat I can have it at a moment's notice."

Mariah stepped closer to him as the elephant seemed to decide he needed to shift his weight about somewhat, and slipped her hands beneath Spencer's jacket, her ringers closing around the leather harness holding the mechanism for his knife. "Well, I suppose that's all right, then. We neither of us expect to be a part of whatever happens tonight, but at least we're prepared."

The dark sky above them suddenly lit with the explosion of larger fireworks—Congreve rockets especially made to be all flash and dash, rather than the destructive rockets he'd invented for warfare. Mariah rested her head against Spencer's shoulder as she looked into the sky above their heads. "Oh, look, aren't they beautiful!"

The crowd no longer milled below them, but had all stopped where they were, to cheer each new explosion, those emanating from the area behind the bridge holding the Chinese pagoda as well as more bright explosions in the distance—in Green Park, even as far away as Hyde Park itself.

Spencer felt a tug of disappointment that he wouldn't see the large Temple of Discord be enveloped in fireworks as the entire top of the Temple was craftily revolved to reveal, as the smoke from the explosions cleared, a new name for the structure, the
Temple of Concord.
He'd have to hear Rian tell him about the thing, probably at least a dozen times.

As much as Spencer believed this entire celebration was nonsense, an expense England could not afford after a long war had depleted the Treasury, an affront, almost a
goad
to Bonaparte to prove the celebration premature, he could not deny that the evening itself was fairly close to spectacular. A fete so grand, nothing close to its scope and grandeur would probably be seen again for several generations. They were celebrating victory, after twenty long years of war across the continent. This was history in the making, a thrilling and glorious time to be alive.

The dawn of a new peace, please God, a lasting peace.

"Maybe Prinney isn't as silly as I believed him. Maybe we all do need something like this grand spectacle right now," Spencer said, drawing Mariah close against his side, smiling as the bright colors of the fireworks seemed to be reflecting in his wife's shining eyes.

And then he tensed, his arm going more tightly around her.

"What's wrong, Spence?" Mariah asked him, immediately sensing his sudden alertness.

"Did you hear it? God knows I've heard that sound enough "

"It's the
bang
of the fireworks exploding, that's all," Mariah told him, but she was already following him as he pushed aside people sharing the basket with them, heading for the ladder. "Isn't it?"

"Not that last one, no, and it sounded close by,"

Spencer said, whistling the attendant over to make the elephant kneel, then holding the ladder still as he helped Mariah over the railing of the basket. She quickly climbed down and he joined her almost immediately, ignoring the short ladder as he jumped to the ground. "Clovis, Anguish—to me!"

"Er.. .that's Aloysius, sir."

"Bloody hell, Anguish, now's not the time. Did you two hear the difference in one of the explosions? Just a minute ago.
There!
There's another one, coming from somewhere behind us," he said, looking up at the sky in time to see one of Congreve's rockets shooting overhead, heading for Green Park...or perhaps even Hyde Park itself.

"Those...those are
real
rockets?" Mariah asked. "My God,Spence!"

He grabbed her hand and began pushing his way through the crowd toward the Chinese Pagoda, Clovis, Aloysius and five strapping sons of former members of the Black Ghost crew running ahead to help clear the way.

Mariah used her free hand to hold the pistol still at her side as she ran, not that her leg wouldn' t be bruised badly by the time she awoke tomorrow... if she awoke tomorrow. "Oh, excuse me!" she said, as Spencer was pulling her along willy-nilly and she'd crashed into a blowsy-looking woman in red satin and green-dyed feathers, knocking her to the ground.

"Here, now, look what you did, knocking my Maisie on her rump! How about I knock you down, you flame-haired bitch!"

Spencer didn't actually stop so much as he paused, pushing Mariah behind him even as he stepped forward and pushed out his right arm in a short, economical movement that had his fist connecting with the protesting man's jaw and the man's rump connecting with a large puddle on the ground, just beside his Maisie.

"Be more careful, Mariah," Spencer said, dragging her along again.

"Me? You're the one who
rammed
me into the poor woman. Oh, I don't have the breath for this," she complained as she hiked her skirts nearly to her knees and tried to keep up.

She longed to ask Spencer where they were going, other than in the general direction of the Chinese pagoda, and what he expected to do when they got there.

But there was no time for questions.

They ran along the canal, the decorated rowboats flying French flags still burning down to their water-lines, Catherine wheels spinning colored fire, smoke hugging the ground around them, thin shafts of hot color shooting up into the sky—riots of color, like cabbage roses, blooming over their heads.

And the occasional rocket that sang over their heads, not exploding in a shower of pretty colors but heading somewhere else.. .somewhere deadly.

The battering ram that was the men from Becket Hall cut a swatch through the revelers who still laughed and cheered each rocket, and at last they were clear of the worst of the congestion and within sight of the yellow bridge.

Spencer skidded to a halt and looked at Mariah even as a nearly breathless Clovis handed over his pistol. "You stay here with Clovis, you hear me?"

"No! I don't know where you think you're going, Spencer Becket, but I'm going with you and you can't stop me. I mean it, Spence, you—"