A Night Like This (Smythe-Smith Quartet #2)(51)

“Do you think the weather has improved?” she asked, turning to face the window. It was hard to tell; the glass was old and wavy, and the inn’s large overhang shielded it from the direct onslaught of the rain.
“Not yet, no,” he replied.
She turned back, murmuring, “No, of course not.” She fixed a smile on her face. “I should finish my tea, in any case.”
He looked at her curiously. “You’re no longer too warm?”
She blinked, taking a moment to remember that she had been fanning herself just a few moments earlier. “No,” she said. “Funny, that.” She smiled again and brought her mug to her lips. But she was saved from having to figure out how to set the conversation back on its previous, easygoing course by a loud crashing noise just outside the dining room.
“What can that be?” Anne asked, but Daniel was already on his feet.
“Stay here,” he ordered, and strode quickly to the door. He looked tense, and Anne saw something familiar in his stance. Something she’d seen in herself, time and again. It was almost as if he was expecting trouble. But that made no sense. She’d heard that the man who had driven him out of the country had dropped his quest for revenge.
But she supposed that old habits died very hard. If George Chervil suddenly choked on a chicken bone or moved to the East Indies, how long would it take her to stop looking over her shoulder?
“It was nothing,” Daniel said, coming back to the table. “Just a drunkard who managed to wreak havoc from the inn to the stables and back.” He picked up his mug of tea, took a long swig, then added, “But the rain is thinning out. It’s still drizzling, but I think we should leave soon.”
“Of course,” Anne said, coming to her feet.
“I’ve already asked them to bring the carriage around,” he said, escorting her to the door.
She gave him a nod as she stepped outside. The fresh air was bracing, and she did not mind the cold. There was a cleansing quality to the chilly mist, and it made her feel more like herself.
And right then, in that very moment, that wasn’t such a bad person to be.
Daniel still had no idea what had happened to Anne back in the dining room. He supposed it could have been exactly what she’d said, that she’d choked on a bit of her tea. He’d done so before, and it was certainly enough to set a body coughing, especially when the tea was steaming hot.
But she’d looked terribly pale, and her eyes—in that split second before she’d turned away—had looked hunted. Terrified.
It brought to mind that time he’d seen her in London, when she’d stumbled into Hoby’s, scared out of her wits. She’d said she’d seen someone. Or rather, she’d said there was someone she did not want to see.
But that was London. This was Berkshire, and more to the point, they had been sitting in an inn full of villagers he’d known since birth. There hadn’t been a soul in that room who would have had cause to harm so much as a hair on her head.
Maybe it was the tea. Maybe he’d imagined everything else. Anne certainly seemed back to normal now, smiling at him as he helped her up into the curricle. The half canopy had been raised against the rain, but even if the weather held, they would both be thoroughly chilled by the time they reached Whipple Hill.
Hot baths for the both of them. He’d order them the moment they arrived.
Although sadly, not to be shared.
“I’ve never ridden in a curricle,” Anne said, smiling as she tightened the ribbons on her bonnet.
“No?” He did not know why this surprised him. Certainly a governess would have no cause to ride in one, but everything about her spoke of a gentle birth. At some point in her life she must have been an eligible young lady; he could not imagine she hadn’t had scores of gentlemen begging for her company in their curricles and phaetons.
“Well, I’ve been in a gig,” she said. “My former employer had one, and I had to learn to drive it. She was quite elderly, and no one trusted her with the reins.”
“Was this on the Isle of Man?” he asked, keeping his voice deliberately light. It was so rare that she offered pieces of her past. He was afraid she would bottle herself back up if he questioned too intensely.
But she did not seem put off by his query. “It was,” she confirmed. “I’d only driven a cart before that. My father would not have kept a carriage that seated only two people. He was never a man for impracticalities.”
“Do you ride?” he asked.
“No,” she said simply.
Another clue. If her parents had been titled, she would have been placed in a sidesaddle before she could read.
“How long did you live there?” he asked conversationally. “On the Isle of Man.”
She did not answer right away, and he thought she might not do so at all, but then, in a soft voice, laced with memory, she said, “Three years. Three years and four months.”
Keeping his eyes scrupulously on the road, he said, “You don’t sound as if you have fond memories.”
“No.” She was quiet again, for at least ten seconds, then she said, “It was not dreadful. It was just . . . I don’t know. I was young. And it was not home.”
Home. Something she almost never mentioned. Something he knew he should not ask about, so instead he said, “You were a lady’s companion?”
She nodded. He just barely saw it out of the corner of his eye; she seemed to have forgotten that he was watching the horses and not her. “It was not an onerous position,” she said. “She liked to be read to, so I did quite a lot of that. Needlework. I wrote all of her correspondence, as well. Her hands shook quite a bit.”