Marquesses at the Masquerade(18)

She took a seat in the coach opposite Marcus, a servant handed Socrates to her, and they were off.

“I appreciate your willingness to travel on the spur of the moment,” Marcus said. Considering that he was a marquess and she was a lowly dog companion/former seamstress, he was being remarkably gracious toward her, but what else would she have expected? He was the same considerate man she’d met at the ball.

“There really isn’t any comparison between the work I was doing and what you were offering,” she said. He nodded in acknowledgment, his gaze lingering on her for a moment, and her heart thumped in anticipation of she didn’t even know what, but all that happened was that his brow wrinkled a little.

While she was in his house, she had begun to worry that, in the close confines of the carriage, he might remember her, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Good, she told herself unconvincingly. All for the best.

Socrates, meanwhile, grew unsettled as the carriage rolled through the streets of London and into the countryside, alternately standing up and sitting down in Rosamund’s lap and on the seat next to her. After yet another trip across Rosamund’s lap, he whimpered and looked at Marcus.

“Here, hand him over,” Marcus said. “I suppose he’s not used to coach travel.”

With an apologetic look, Rosamund passed the little dog to Marcus, and there was quiet in the coach for about three minutes, at which point Socrates began pacing back and forth across Marcus’s lap.

“Must you?” Marcus asked his dog.

“Perhaps he would like to be on the floor,” Rosamund said. So Socrates was gently deposited on the floor, where he curled into a ball for some time before standing up again and looking imploringly at Rosamund. She leaned down and scooped him up.

“At this rate, you will be ready to give notice by the time we arrive at my grandmother’s house,” Marcus observed.

“Nonsense, he is the dearest thing,” she said, petting the dog’s soft head. This seemed to calm Socrates a bit.

“You have not yet heard him howling. Have you always had a particular way with dogs?”

“I’ve always loved dogs. We had one when I was little, though it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a household with a dog.” Rosamund couldn’t imagine Melinda even petting a dog, let alone welcoming one into her household. Though it was just as well for the world of dogs that none of them had to be part of Melinda’s household, however much Rosamund would have loved a dog like Socrates to curl up with her in her cold little room.

He nodded, a man with impeccable manners marooned in a coach with a woman so far down the social scale from him—or at least, to his knowledge—that normally he would not be expected even to acknowledge her existence.

“I have a number of dogs at my country estates, but they are bigger, naturally, and housed in kennels. Socrates was a gift from my mother, and thus of special concern to me.” He chuckled. “It was the oddest thing. He took to me from the first moment. I can’t say the sentiment was shared initially, but he has grown on me. Slightly.”

She’d seen Marcus at the ball with his mother, seen the easy affection between them, and she nearly chuckled at the idea of his mother presenting him with a lapdog. Her father had given her a puppy for her third birthday, and Tatter had been her constant companion.

She smiled at Marcus, and he smiled back, though with a wrinkled brow again. His smile gave her a little spark of happiness before she reminded herself that she was the only one in the carriage dreaming dreams. She simply needed to not care, for the next few weeks, that he didn’t know who she was, and then she would be free to begin a new life.

*



Rosamund was quite pretty. When he’d first encountered her on the street, Marcus had merely noticed this fact in the reflexive way that a man notices an attractive woman.

That he was noticing her prettiness now, again, as they sat across from each other in his coach was because of that same reflex, and not because he was on the alert for pretty women. Far from it, since there was only one pretty woman he wished to know better: Poppy. She was the reason for this journey to the country, where his grandmother had repaired, because he hoped she might be able to shed some light on the initials on the necklace clasp and thus Poppy’s identity. Still, he was a man, and he’d long ago learned that some things about being a man were fixed, and noticing pretty women, whether he wished to or not, was one of them.

When he’d proposed the plan to visit Lady Tremont, his mother had pointed out that he could easily send her a letter. It wasn’t as if seeing the pearls themselves would help his grandmother solve the mystery of Poppy, since pearls were pearls. But it had been almost three months since the ball, and despite the fruitlessness of Marcus’s efforts to find out who his mystery lady was among their acquaintances, he couldn’t forget Poppy, and he needed to do something.

Besides, his grandmother had also seen the mystery lady at that ball, if briefly, and maybe in talking about her, one of them would remember something more, some detail that might help identify Poppy.

My Poppy, as he had taken to thinking of her. Ever since the ball, he’d actually had trouble focusing on much besides her and the hope that he would either discover her identity, or she would somehow contact him. He hadn’t forgotten for a moment how it had felt to be with her, and he’d spun more than a few fantasies about what it might be like if she were part of his future.