Fortunate Wager (4 page)

The waiter was in the coffee room when he returned. After commenting that he had found Bury St Edmunds a very pleasant town, Alex remarked that he had met with some residents who had mentioned an assembly.

‘At the New Subscription Rooms, my lord? Very smart they are, by all accounts. The next ball is on Wednesday, I believe.’

Harry leant against the side of the stall, watching as Caroline unhooked Solange’s tether. ‘You don’t think you are dressed too fine for this?’

She dusted her hands on the skirts of a walking dress that owed a lot more to her mother’s love of unnecessary flounces than her own taste. ‘Oh, I do hope so. I’ve been trying to render this wretched gown unwearable for weeks.’ She took a grip on the mare’s head collar. ‘It’s a lovely afternoon, girl. Would you like a stroll around the field and a mouthful of nice fresh grass by day instead of in the dark? Show your admirers how beautiful you are?’

Solange whickered into her hair. Flood met her eyes. ‘I’ll be
right alongside you, Miss Caro. Soon as she turns restive, you take to your heels and leave her to me and Mr Harry.’

Very slowly, and talking gently all the while, Caroline led the mare across the yard to the first paddock, which they had cleared of the other horses. It shouldn’t be any different to walking her around the field early in the morning, but there would be more to see and more movement to catch her eye and possibly make her bolt. There was certainly a moment when shouts from the street sent shivers quivering up and down her legs, but Caroline kept talking and after a minute of indecision, Solange moved forward again. As Flood shut the gate, Caroline let her go and leant on the bars, ashamed that her own legs felt so weak.

Flood grinned. Then his face changed. ‘What’s that varmint doing here?’

Caroline turned to see him hurtle down the path and twist his fist into the collar of an undersized man lurking in the stable archway, almost lifting him off his feet. She and Harry followed curiously.

‘Let go! I’ll have the judge on you for assault,’ whined the man. Caroline recognized him as Lord Rothwell’s groom, Jessop. ‘I’m here with a message for his lordship.’

‘He ain’t here, you lying little guttersnipe,’ growled Flood. ‘Which you knowed all along. And even if he had been, the likes of you don’t come no further onto our property than the road. Why didn’t you tell one of the lads you’d got a message, eh?’

‘Didn’t give me a chance, did you?’ Jessop wrenched himself free and looked murderously at Flood. ‘You’re going to regret this.’

‘Not as much as you will if you set one toe inside this yard again.’

Jessop spat on the ground and turned away. Flood watched him leave.

‘I know him,’ said Harry with a frown. ‘He’s been hanging around the betting ring on the heath all week.’

‘Up to no good, I’ll be bound,’ said Flood. ‘Always on the
edge of trouble, that one.’

‘But what was he doing
here
?’ said Caroline.

‘Wanted to know how we were doing with the mare of course. Either under orders or for information on his own account. Wouldn’t put it past him. Mr Harry’s ain’t the only money riding on this bet.’

‘Already?’ said Caroline, appalled. She looked back at the paddock anxiously, but Solange had moved over to the far side and was cropping the grass. The raised voices didn’t seem to have disturbed her. Even so … ‘The next time I see Lord Rothwell, I’m going to have words about that groom of his,’ she said with decision.

Harry and Flood exchanged grins. Caroline ignored them.

As it happened, she saw his lordship at church the very next day. She and Harry were sitting dutifully alongside the rest of the family waiting for the service to start when there was a disturbance in the doorway. Everybody’s heads craned discreetly in that direction. Lord Rothwell and another gentleman were apologizing to the sidesmen for their tardiness. Now they were being ushered to the pews reserved for the nobility. Caroline felt her eyes widen. She had thought Lord Rothwell well turned out, but his friend was positively exquisite! His coat and pantaloons were an exact match for each other in pearly grey, his waistcoat was figured cream silk, his neckcloth fell in snow-white folds, his gold locks had been styled by a master and not a speck of dirt sullied his highly polished top-boots. Hers was not the only mouth agape. Every young woman under All Saints’ vaulted roof was casting admiring glances. And didn’t he know it, thought Caroline, observing the tiny air of satisfaction in his bearing. The exquisite allowed himself a contented look around the packed church before sitting down on the other side of the aisle from Caroline.

What a dandy, she thought, and was cross with herself for having followed the herd. She leant back as his gaze reached her, not wanting to pander further to his self-esteem. For a fraction of
a second his eyes rested on Harry instead – and to Caroline’s astonishment a look of vitriolic dislike flashed across his face.

She blinked, but now Lord Rothwell was easing himself onto the bench and cutting his friend off from view. Had she imagined that look? Surely she must have done. Why would anyone hate
Harry
? She murmured an enquiry of her brother as to the gentleman’s identity.

Harry glanced across. ‘Who? Oh, that’s Giles d’Arblay. Goes it a bit at Crockford’s.’

So
he
obviously didn’t think there was a problem. Caroline slid another glance sideways. Lord Rothwell was staring ahead so rigidly that she knew he was aware of her. How silly. But she certainly had no wish to distinguish him after his rudeness yesterday. As the service wore on, however, the humour of the situation struck her. There they were, both pointedly ignoring each other whilst seated not three feet apart. By the Nunc Dimittis she was hard pressed not to scream with laughter.

In the catching-up bustle outside the church, which Caroline privately thought was the major reason most of her mother’s acquaintance attended the devotions, she was surprised to see Mr d’Arblay make a point of distinguishing Harry, asking him how many stable-hands Solange had crippled so far. ‘Only two,’ replied Harry in the same cheerful tones, ‘and they both have a spare foot, so we haven’t lost any work through it.’

Giles laughed and declared Harry to be enviously game. His eyes wandered past Caroline and settled on Selina. It being obvious from her close bonnet that she was not yet out, although she might as well be, the amount their mother took her about ‘
to get her accustomed, you know
’, he made her an elaborately regretful bow and moved on. Harry spotted some friends and strolled away from the family party likewise.

‘Miss Fortune,’ said a cool voice.

Caroline could hardly believe her ears. Lord Rothwell was addressing her! ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said affably. ‘I didn’t see you there.’  

Was that a twitch at the corner of his mouth? ‘Kindly apprise
your brother of my intention to call at Penfold Lodge tomorrow morning. I would do it myself, but I perceive your mother to be issuing invitations of some description and would as lief be away before she progresses this far.’

Did he
mean
to offend or was he so arrogant that he simply didn’t care?

‘Certainly I will let him know,’ replied Caroline, anger giving her words an edge and reminding her of another cause of offence, ‘but pray do not bring Jessop with you. He has difficulty enough comprehending the words “not on our property”. Flood was obliged to eject him only yesterday.’

Lord Rothwell looked sardonic. ‘Doubtless he was visiting an acquaintance amongst your grooms.’

‘They say not. Our men do not think very highly of him. Or his morals.’

‘And what do you mean by that, may I ask?’

‘Merely that he gave every impression of spying – in order to put himself at an advantage, perhaps, when it comes to the betting for Solange’s race.’

Caroline had not thought his lordship’s expression could grow any more austere. She was wrong. ‘I trust you do not think I had anything to do with his being at your brother’s establishment?’ he said, white-lipped.

‘Why, no. There would be no need. An owner, you know, must be welcome to see his horse whenever he chooses.’ A loud shout of indecorously unSabbath laughter drew her attention to the knot of young men and reminded her of Solange’s idiosyncrasy. ‘But only the owner, if you please, not his friends.’

‘I must say, you express yourself very freely for one who merely writes the reports for her brother.’

‘That is because Harry has too much bonhomie to enforce his own rules. I have no popularity to lose. Oh, I see Mama approaching. Would you care to be introduced?’

‘Your servant, Miss Fortune,’ he said, in tones of total dislike, and left.

M
ONDAY MORNING. SIX
o’clock. Alex reflected savagely that the majority of his acquaintance were no doubt asleep at this moment, most of them asleep in busy, lively, important London. But here was he, staring at the ceiling of a Newmarket coaching inn, thoroughly awake and already suffering from a surfeit of boredom. He rolled out of bed and irritably rattled open the curtains, ready to aggravate himself some more by looking out on a tedious, empty day.

His preconceptions received a sharp shock. Tradesmen’s carts trundled along the High Street. Shutters were folded back and the street washed down. Maids were abroad marketing. Maids! Alex disremembered seeing such a homely sight in Newmarket before and couldn’t help recalling Caroline Fortune’s pithy remark about servants not setting foot out of doors during a racing week.

Were his fellow bucks and bloods that perilous? Surely not. But Alex was fair-minded and reluctantly conceded that when in Newmarket, gentlemen were free of their families and tended to give themselves over entirely to pleasure. Crowded
hugger-mugger
into the town’s many inns and hotels, they were unfettered by the common restraints of polite life. And thinking wryly of all the times he’d paid off Giles’s fancies in other places, he thought the more respectable females of Newmarket might just have a point.

For now, he stood at the window of his room and watched the comings and goings of a market town. It was oddly soothing.
His attention sharpened as a nice chestnut with a long white star on its forehead trotted by. The youth riding it had a familiar action, one Alex had seen before. On the heath, presumably, one of the hundreds of horses and riders he had been scrutinizing this week. He frowned, trying to pin the memory down. But the entrance into his chamber of a maid to light the fire – and flustered to find him already out of bed – distracted him and chased the matter from his mind.

With no racing or cock-fighting or pugilism on offer, Giles did not put in an appearance at breakfast, relieving Alex of the necessity of finding an excuse as to why his friend should not accompany him to Penfold Lodge. Not, he qualified to himself, that he was letting a chit of a girl dictate his actions. That would be preposterous.

Fortune was there for once, out in the paddock. Watching unnoticed, Alex approved of the non-hectoring way the young man treated the horses. It was a fanciful conceit, but the beasts seemed to
want
to do their best for him. But, Lord, the place was quiet. No shouts from the stable-block, no ribald banter such as was to be found in other establishments. It was enough to give one gooseflesh.

‘We find it serves,’ explained Harry with a shrug when Alex greeted him. ‘Will you come to the house and join me in a tankard of ale?’

As they strolled towards the yard, Alex noticed a chestnut with a long white forehead star in the field. He paused. ‘Didn’t I see that one this morning trotting along the High Street?’

His companion stumbled on a tussock of grass. ‘I daresay,’ he said. ‘Most trainers take their horses up to the heath to exercise them. Here, Maiden,’ and he stretched out his hand to the filly.

‘Lad riding her had a nice action. Very smooth.’

Harry patted the horse’s neck. ‘Yes, we’re hoping for a result in next year’s Guineas with Maiden. You want to watch out for her.’

Fortune was hiding something. A trainer did not give out that sort of tip without good reason. Alex’s nerves tingled. As they
walked on, he directed a close look around the stable and yard, noting every man there. The sight of Solange with her nose in a bucket of feed, unperturbed by the head groom brushing her down was a considerable facer. Alex gaped. How the devil had Fortune managed it in so short a time? The mare looked … normal! ‘That lad,’ he said casually when he’d recovered, ‘the chestnut’s rider. Is he here? I’d like to commend him on his style.’

‘Eh? No, sorry, he rides out for me now and again but I haven’t got enough work to keep him full time. I believe he’s got several jobs on the go. You know how it is.’

Alex did indeed. His thoughts turned grim. The boy was good and would be in demand. If he was in and out of other stables, he could well be gathering just such information as would turn a pretty profit at the betting post. Maybe Giles was not so wide of the mark with his prejudice against Penfold Lodge after all.

Caroline sat on a hard chair in the New Subscription Rooms, watching the dancing and stifling a small yawn. Since Harry had relayed Lord Rothwell’s comments about seeing her ride Maiden on Monday, she had thought it prudent to rise an hour earlier to exercise the horses. Bertrand had always said she needed less sleep than a rabbit in a farmer’s sights, but even so she was feeling just a trifle over-extended now.

It would not have been so bad if she had been dancing herself, or even conversing with someone interesting. But there was a dearth of young men tonight, and because she took pains to be either too clever or too bubbleheaded for all the middle-aged gentlemen on the look-out for a unpaid housekeeper, she was thrown back on the chaperons (whose gossiping she inhibited) or the other unpartnered young ladies. Caroline listened to them rattle on, interspersing the odd word, all the while calculating for the ten-thousandth time in her head how soon she could be considered a failure in the marriage stakes and thus reintroduce the subject at home of moving permanently to Penfold Lodge to be a companion to Bertrand’s mama.

The set ended. Harry squired Louisa over and went in search of lemonade. Alderman Taylor, thought Caroline, looked decidedly unenamoured by Harry’s solicitous care of his daughter, but so long as the young pair did not stand up together for more than two dances he could not complain. The fact that they were always the longest two dances on the card had fortunately escaped him.

A ripple of interest suddenly spread through the room. Caroline glanced across and to her amazement saw Lord Rothwell’s tall, immaculately clad figure stroll through the door. At the sight of the gratified smile on Alderman Taylor’s face, Caroline was glad he had decided not to spurn the invitation, although it was possibly only because he and his fine friend were at a loose end that they had made the journey.

The alderman wasted no time in beckoning Louisa over. In a spirit of pure mischief, Caroline linked her arm in her friend’s and accompanied her. There was an undignified stir from the chaperons’ bench as a number of ladies felt the need to take a prompt turn about the room.

‘Louisa, my dear, here is Lord Rothwell desirous of asking you to stand up for the next dance. I’m sure you have that one free, do you not?’

Louisa’s dance card had never yet been anything but full within minutes of her entering a ballroom, but she obeyed her father’s implicit instructions and bobbed an amiable curtsey.

Out of politeness, Giles d’Arblay should then have offered to stand up with Caroline, but instead he allowed his eye to be caught by one of the ladies behind her and was seamlessly engulfed in a charming flurry of introductions.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Lord Rothwell in a constrained voice. ‘My friend has no manners.’

‘I assure you I do not regard it,’ returned Caroline. She glanced at Alderman Taylor whispering hasty instructions in Louisa’s ear and chuckled. ‘Was it very flat in Newmarket tonight?’

‘By no means,’ said his lordship austerely. ‘But it is a fine
evening and as I had already had occasion to mark the elegant exterior architecture in the town, we took a fancy to see these rooms. They are as handsome as report indicates.’

‘Spoken like a gentleman. The set is forming, my lord. I had best see if Louisa’s erstwhile partner would like me as a consolation prize.’

He did, but with such a bad grace that Caroline was obliged to spend most of the half-hour flattering him into a better humour, with the result that their steps were less than polished. She was all the more astonished when Lord Rothwell solicited her hand for the cotillion.

‘Are you sure? The cotillion is the supper dance, you know.’

His mouth twitched at her frankness. ‘Precisely. I am paying you back in your own coin. Making use of you, as you used me the other day.’

Caroline felt an unpleasant stab of conscience. ‘My lord?’

‘Better I take
you
into supper than any of the other insipid females I see lined up waiting to toad-eat me.’

She should have known his manners had not taken such a nice turn without an ulterior motive and she supposed she had deserved his unflattering elucidation. Still, she liked to dance and it was an undoubted pleasure to do so with a partner as accomplished as Lord Rothwell. When he steered her towards Harry and Louisa at the supper tables, however, Caroline determined that the favour was now used up. He would not fix his interest
there
if she could help it. She quizzed him throughout the repast on the luminaries who commonly graced the town during the racing weeks. As she had expected, he was both knowledgeable and sarcastic about his fellows. What was more to the point was that although Caroline herself found his comments amusing, Louisa – who had little interest in the London
ton
– came to the conclusion that Lord Alexander Rothwell was rather a dull dog long before the end of the meal.

Caroline shot a rapid glance at the White Hart next morning as she and Solange trotted back in the early dawn, but all the
windows were close-curtained and no Lord Rothwell gazed out at her. Still abed with any luck. Fatigued beyond measure after being polite to the Bury St Edmunds luminaries for a whole evening. ‘So why did he come?’ she asked Solange, perplexed. ‘For that matter, why is he still in Suffolk when everything about him says London? His clothes, his manner, his friends …’ She grimaced, thinking of Mr d’Arblay’s rather cold-blooded charm, and felt Solange pick up her mood. She made haste to reassure her. ‘Apart from you, darling, you’re just beautiful. I don’t believe he’s here simply to see you win a race, even so.’

A dog barked in the yard of the Star, causing the horse to shy across the cobbles. ‘Silly girl,’ chided Caroline. ‘And you five times its size.’

Solange whinnied as if to say size had nothing to do with it.

In the stall, Caroline put Lord Rothwell out of her mind as she spent a while rubbing the mare down. One of Bertrand’s tenets had been that the bond between rider and horse was the strongest there is. This had been Solange’s first time out of Penfold Lodge; Caroline had to reassure her that she’d been fast and strong and clever and had done spectacularly well. Oh, to have time to linger for as long as she wished with her. But it couldn’t be done. One last pat and then, with a look at the lightening sky, she swung herself into Fancy’s saddle.

There. Alex had been almost sure it was Fortune’s mystery rider he’d seen going up to the heath on the bay colt as he opened his curtain. After a frustrating couple of days finding excuses to visit other training yards and seeing neither hide nor hair of him, Alex had hastily made ready after that glimpse – and had been rewarded by the sight of the lad trotting the horse back to Penfold Lodge.

At last. He pulled his cap low and edged along the street behind the colt, his outline disguised by the bulk of the oldest coat in his wardrobe. He’d wait on the corner opposite the stables, then follow the lad to see where he went next. With any luck, he’d soon be free of his obligation to Sally Jersey and could
go back to London and civilization.

An excellent plan, but infuriatingly thwarted. As the archway remained empty, Alex concluded this must be the one day the wretched boy worked at Penfold Lodge all morning. He cursed long and hard. He couldn’t wait here any longer, the town was livening up and he’d already attracted one or two curious glances. Nor could he stroll into the stables legitimately as Solange’s owner, not when he had such odd clothes on. He’d go back to the White Hart, change, then return.

Which he did. And found only a yard full of stable-hands, eating porridge out of a common tureen and politely astonished that one of the gentry should be abroad so early. He thought the whole street could probably hear his teeth grinding as he strode back.

‘I don’t know what you were worried about. Life here is just one dissipation after another,’ said Giles, pouring himself a second cup of coffee.

Alex threw him a fulminating look. Despite a robust breakfast, he was still in a thoroughly bad temper. ‘Do elucidate,’ he said.

‘You cannot possibly have forgotten that we are invited to Mrs Fortune’s At Home today?’

‘Giles, we are not! We cannot be. I was assiduous in not attracting one of that damned woman’s invitations!’

‘Dear, dear. You should have warned me. Knowing time was likely to be hanging on our hands, I accepted for both of us.’

‘Accepted? For poor company and bad wine? Are you mad? Whatever possessed you?’

‘She has a deuced pretty daughter.’

‘Now I know you are all about in your head. That was last season. And however pleasing a young woman is to the eye, if she has an encroaching mother, it is as much as one’s life is worth to pursue the acquaintance.’

‘Hence your monopoly of the goldsmith’s chit at the Assembly Rooms, I suppose? No vulgar mama to bring you up to scratch.’

‘I would hardly describe it as a monopoly. You stood up with her yourself when they called the extra dance at the end.’

‘But I had to bribe the fiddle player to stay on for another
half-hour
– you simply lordshipped your way into displacing some poor yokel for the privilege.’

‘And was well-served by being wearied to death. A beauty she may be, but Miss Taylor has precious little conversation.’

‘Lord, Alex, there’s no rule says you have to
listen
to ’em.’

Which was presumably why his friend had not realized Louisa Taylor was infatuated with Harry Fortune. Alex decided against enlightening him. A fruitless pursuit might at least stop Giles plaguing
him
out of his life while he was forced to reside in Newmarket.