Alec Mackenzie's Art of Seduction (Mackenzies & McBrides #9)(68)
Alec’s rumble of anger shook the bed, but he realized their argument would quickly escalate to a shouting match, for which he didn’t have time, and conceded.
He took in her flushed face, flashing eyes, and clenched fists and decided that later he might enjoy continuing the row. Even her triumph as Alec growled that she might as well accompany them made him want to kiss her. A full-blown argument would probably have an even better ending.
Celia scrambled into the coach when they went down after breakfast, as though worried he’d tell the coachman to rush off and leave her behind. Alec said nothing, only helped Mrs. Reynolds in and took his seat, and they were off.
The house the coach bumped toward was south of Stanhope near the village of Mucking, which ran along a creek emptying into the Thames. Farms spread from one side of the village, lush and green, and marshes, gray tinged with green, lay on the other.
Closer to the river, on the road to Tilbury, the coach creaked onto a tiny lane scarcely wide enough for the vehicle. Lined with brush that slapped against the wheels, it ran alongside the creek. The roof of a large house appeared over the brush, but this road skirted rather than approached it.
“Is this the house?” Celia asked as Alec tensed. “I know this place. It is Lord Spalding’s estate.”
Alec nodded. “Aye. The second possible prison is just beyond this.”
Chapter 22
Celia leaned forward to take in the stone chimneys rising above the close-growing trees. “Lord Spalding and my father don’t get on. Lord Spalding is obdurate in the question of banning slavery completely, even in the colonies. They quarrel about it endlessly.”
Alec said nothing as he studied the house, committing every stone of it to memory.
The road curved past the house and headed toward fields, which were sprouting whatever Englishmen planted in this part of the country. A wall separated the grounds from the lane, and beyond the wall was a smaller building, long and low, one story high, that stretched across the bottom of the garden. Alec knocked on the roof of the carriage and asked the coachman to stop.
“The orangery,” Celia said, looking out with him. “Very lovely inside, with lavish rooms where Lord Spalding holds banquets when the fit takes him. He keeps his orange trees in there too, but they are incidental.”
Alec huffed a laugh as he ran his gaze over the arched, many-paned windows on the orangery’s ground floor. The foundation bore small windows, which presumably opened to a kitchen and other storage rooms.
“As deathly quiet as the house in Cambridge,” Alec observed. The building was meant to be festive, but under the leaden skies it was drab and forbidding.
“Most families are in London still.” The scent of rosewater Celia had bathed her face in that morning touched Alec as she leaned to him. “There will be a few more grand balls in the city, then we’ll start heading to estates for summer fetes and house parties, and when it gets colder, hunting and shooting.”
“Not much different from what we do in Scotland,” Alec said. “Summer and fall is for growing and harvesting, January for swanning to Edinburgh, putting on silk stockings, and pretending to be dandies.”
“I look forward to that,” Celia said in a light voice.
Alec liked that she assumed all would be well sooner or later, that normal life could resume for him. Alec was skeptical, but having her optimism about him was refreshing.
“Shall we drive on?” Mrs. Reynolds asked in impatience from where she sat on the cushioned seat. “In case they have guards?”
Alec knocked on the roof, and their journey resumed. They continued the drive, pretending to be nothing more than an idle family traipsing about the country, reveling in its natural beauty—a popular pastime—before they returned to Stanhope to sleep.
The next morning they headed south. A ferry at Tilbury took them with the carriage across the river to Gravesend, and in a village not far south of that, they crossed an ancient road that had lain here for seventeen centuries.
“This is the road that took pilgrims to Canterbury in the days of Mr. Chaucer, my brother told me,” Celia said, indicating the large, flat stones with grass growing up between them. “And the Roman legions marched over it from the sea to London—Londinium—and back again.”
Alec gazed down the faint line of stones, placed there by men of the Roman army nearly two millennia ago. His brother, Malcolm, had a fascination for history and antiquities—the discovery of the ancient city of Herculaneum near Naples excited Mal to no end. Only business at the distillery and then the Jacobite Uprising had kept him from rushing there and burrowing into the earth himself. He’d do it one day soon, no doubt.
Alec took his notebook from his pocket, opened to a blank page, and quickly sketched the road. He’d fill in more later from memory—the vast gray sky, the contrast of the very English farm village around it, the ghostly auras of the legionnaires as they tramped after their commanders.
Their coach left the road behind and turned south and west, moving slowly through farmlands interspersed with wild country. Alec hadn’t been in this part of England before and wondered at the odd, squat houses with brick roofs topped with large, conical chimneys that rose from the grasses from time to time.
“Oast houses,” Celia said, noting his puzzlement. “For drying hops, which many farmers grow in Kent. They spread the hops on a drying floor, and heat comes up through cracks beneath and disperses through the chimneys.”