My Favorite Marquess. Alexandra Bassett

pothole, Peabody braced himself on the edge of the seat. Even in the darkness, Violet could make out his bulging eyes. “Did you hear that?” he quavered.

      “What?” Hennie went rigid. “Was that a gunshot?”

      “No—a different sound…more horrible…like that of breaking china.” Peabody’s voice cracked. “Yes, I’m sure of it. The Limoges will be all in shatters by the time we arrive at Trembledown!”

      Since the china had been scrupulously wrapped by Peabody himself, crated, and securely lashed on top of the carriage, it stretched credulity to think that one could have actually heard it breaking from where they were sitting. Violet pointed this out.

      “But the road is so ill kept!” Peabody said.

      “And so dark!” Hennie echoed.

      Hennie and Peabody were united in their disgust with the conditions of their ride through Cornwall. From their complaints, you would think that Violet was hauling them across England by donkey cart rather than in the relative comfort of her father’s well-sprung traveling coach.

      “I had not reckoned on what punishment the china would have to withstand,” Peabody lamented.

      “Or what dangers we might have to withstand at the dread hands of Robert the Brute!”

      Just then, Peabody gasped.

      “What is it?” Henrietta cried, startled.

      The manservant collapsed, clasping his hands to his head as if he were suffering the agonies of the damned.

      Violet feared he was having an attack of apoplexy. “What is the matter?”

      “The soup tureen!” he wailed.

      Violet stared at the agonized figure with waning forbearance. “Surely you cannot tell exactly what piece of china you imagine to be broken. Really, Peabody!”

      “No, it is not broken.” He lifted his head up with resignation, like a schoolboy ready to receive his punishment. “I—” He released a shuddering breath before confessing, “I forgot to pack it!”

      Violet absorbed this information with astonishing equanimity. Perhaps at some point in her life such news would have thrown her into peevish displeasure. (In fact, at any point in her life before she had begun this wearisome voyage it would have.) But now she rated such a triviality as unimportant.

      The only important thing was getting out of this blasted carriage.

      “No matter,” she said, trying to reassure Peabody.

      Peabody mistook her indifference for remonstrance. “You see, it wasn’t in the display cabinet, but in the cupboard. Things were at such sixes and sevens when all the packing was occurring…It was all so hurried, with your making the hasty plan for this trip…Please forgive me…There was so much to tend to…And then at the last minute we were forced to make room for the harp.”

      Hennie, who was sensitive on this issue, looked as if she were under attack. “I’m sure I never forced anyone to allow me to bring my harp. That I would never do. I merely pointed out that since I do feel that I am being of service by accompanying Violet on her little adventure and since my pleasures are so few…” She swallowed. “But of course I know I am lucky to have been asked. After all, I am nothing but a homeless spinster. I thought that if my harp could provide a few moments of enjoyment for us, it would be a partial repayment of the debt I owe Violet for the honor she does me by consenting to let me join her household.”

      Violet gritted her teeth—after all, Hennie could now afford an establishment of her own, but Hennie had expressed horror at the idea of herself, an unmarried lady, living alone. “It is I who am grateful to you for accompanying me, Hen. And as to your harp”—which, when plucked by Hennie, was as effective an instrument of torture as anything Torquemada had to work with—“it was no bother at all to bring it.”

      Actually, it had caused a great deal of trouble, and explained the presence of Peabody, who would normally be riding in the baggage coach with Violet’s maid, Lettie. Hennie had objected as vociferously as she was able to the harp’s being secured to the top of the carriage. Something about its tone being ruined. Violet had never been present when anything approaching a pleasing tone had ever escaped that wretched instrument, so she was skeptical of this claim. Nevertheless, Hennie was adamant, and there had been nothing for it but to place the harp inside the baggage carriage, which barely left room for Lettie. That Peabody would suffer to ride in such discomfort was out of the question.

      Violet secretly hoped that the evil lyre would meet with an unfortunate accident as it was being unloaded from the baggage carriage, which, due to a broken wheel, was now almost a day behind them.

      “Nevertheless,” Peabody said, “the harp did rather confuse matters at the last minute. And that is how the soup tureen came to be left in the cabinet.”

      “I said it does not matter, Peabody.”

      “But, madame, what shall we do?”

      “Do?” she snapped, finally reaching the frayed end of her last nerve. “We shall drink soup directly from the pot if we have to! Who cares? At this rate I shall count ourselves lucky if we ever get close enough to a hearth to have soup served to us in any container!”

      “Indeed!” Hennie couldn’t help injecting fretfully. “Especially with Robert the Brute about. They say he has waylaid carriages such as this one before!”

      “Enough.” Violet clapped her hands like one of her tiresome old governesses. “I will hear no more of crockery and cutthroats.”

      Hennie nearly fainted. “Do you think he would cut our throats?”

      Violet attempted to stifle her cousin’s growing hysteria with a glare that could have cut through stone.

      Difficult as it was for Violet to believe now, when she had embarked on this trip a week ago, she had been grateful to have these two accompanying her. Especially Peabody, who was her father’s butler at their home, Peacock Hall, in Yorkshire. Normally the butler would be considered indispensable to her father, but this spring Sir Harlan had decided to travel to Italy. He explained his newfound mania for travel by saying that he had secretly longed to go to the continent for years, a desire now made possible because Napoleon was confined to Elba. But Violet suspected that his sudden wanderlust had more to do with his youngest daughter Sophy’s first Season.

      Sophy, a man-mad youth, was now loose in London—a town brimming with Corinthians, dandies, rakes, and all manner of other males, both suitable and unsuitable. Violet feared her sister would naturally lean toward the latter. No doubt contemplating the potential havoc his youngest was likely to wreak on the capital accounted for their father’s sudden yearning for foreign soil.

      Violet only hoped (though rather doubted) that their aunt Augusta was up to the demanding task of chaperoning such a minx.

      In fact, she feared that the two of them together would just result in twice the mischief. That was one of the reasons she had so easily relinquished her plan to accompany Sophy to London and share the chaperone duties with Aunt Augusta. Chief among the other reasons was the fact that she was not quite prepared to be seen as a chaperone, the older sister (emphasis on old ). She was not yet twenty-eight, and while that could no longer be considered the first bloom of youth, she hadn’t been able to contemplate with indifference the experience of being set to the side at Almack’s like that institution’s notoriously stale cakes.

      Then had come her correspondence with the Marquess of St. Just.

      That top-lofty toad’s snide remarks angered her so, nothing would have induced her to come within fifty miles of London while the insufferable creature was there. Treating her as if she were some sort of social barnacle! Indeed, it had made her want to hurry her departure to Cornwall to take care of business while she had reason to believe he was not in this area.

      If she were of a charitable mind, and less cold and fatigued, she might have thanked the irritating marquess. His correspondence