Regency Pleasures and Sins Part 1. Louise Allen

was Box Moor. Now, where best to stay? Her heart told her the Lamb and Flag, but her head counselled caution. Hemel Hempstead was large enough to hold several respectable inns and, more importantly, magistrates.

      She lifted the volume and started to leave, then turned back. She had better leave Philip a note to say they had gone away, although as he was not even here to meet her on her return, she felt a chilly hardening of her heart towards him. She pulled a sheet of notepaper towards her, dislodging several bills as she did so. Oh, Philip! Was it possible to stop loving your own brother? How many blows to the heart does it take before that feeling died?

      Jenny was in the hall, portmanteaux and bandboxes at her feet and a battered hat box in her hands. ‘What do you want this dirty old thing for, Miss Katherine?’

      ‘I do not want it at all, I want what is in it.’ There was an ugly hat resting on a bed of crumpled tissue paper. Katherine tossed it aside and reached under the paper. Her fingers closed over something as fluid and sinuous as a snake and she drew it out.

      ‘Miss Katherine! Diamonds!’

      It was a necklace, dull through neglect, but still sparking with the unmistakable watery fire of the true gems. ‘This is my last thing of any real value and I have been saving it for a rainy day, Jenny.’ She sighed. ‘It belonged to my grandmother and it will have to be sold to be broken up, I am afraid, the stones are an old-fashioned cut and setting.’

      ‘But, Miss Katherine, if you had this …’

      ‘No, Jenny, it is worth a few hundreds, not thousands; see, there are not many stones and they are quite small. But I need it now—this is not a rainy day, this is a hurricane.’

      John was ready and they piled their baggage into the old coach. ‘Newman’s of Lombard Street, please, John, and then the road to Aylesbury and Oxford.’

      * * *

      Mr Newman was courteous to Mrs Lydgate. He did not know her, or recognise the name, and her dress was two Seasons out of date, but he recognised Quality when he met it. What he had not bargained for was a steely determination.

      ‘One hundred? I am sorry, Mr Newman, I have obviously been wasting my time and yours. I will find another jeweller with an appreciation of fine stones.’ She let her eyes roam around the shop dismissively. ‘You were recommended by Lady … er, well, perhaps I should not mention names. She will be so disappointed to hear she was mistaken in her advice.’ Katherine rose and picked up the necklace, careful that the darn in her glove did not show.

      Half an hour later she was hurrying out to the coach, her reticule bulging, a gleam in her eyes. ‘Three hundred, Jenny, just imagine! I would have been happy with two, but I sneered so much at his lovely shop he gave me three.’

      Her triumph lasted all the way to Hemel Hempstead. With money in her pocket they could afford a change of horses, and when they reached the town she indulged herself with two rooms in the Swan in the High Street. It was only as the three of them sat down to dinner in the private parlour she bespoke that the fear began to creep back. By tomorrow, four days left. Only four days.

      If she failed, then Nick would hang. She would be there, although not where he could see her. He would hate that, his pride would revolt at the thought that she should see him choke and slowly strangle to death, kicking in front of a baying crowd. She had known him for only a few hours, but already she knew that his pride drove him, fed him with a sort of anger that had driven him into whatever life he had lived on the continent and now gave him the grace to look an unjust death in the eye with dignity.

      ‘Are you going to tell us what we are doing here, Miss Katherine?’ John demanded after the waiter had deposited a leg of mutton on the table and departed.

      ‘Yes. Will you carve that, please, John? We are going to prove Mr Lydgate innocent and to do that we need to meet a highwayman called Black Jack Standon and a magistrate whose name I do not know, but who probably has a new watch and a scar on his head.’

      ‘Heaven preserve us, Miss Katherine.’ Jenny reached for a glass of ale and gulped a mouthful. ‘We’ll be murdered in our beds.’

      ‘I doubt it,’ Katherine responded tartly. ‘We will have to identify the magistrate, of course, but I need to find Black Jack before I actually approach the Justice. Dear me,’ she added as John opened his mouth to begin what was obviously going to be a lengthy protest, ‘what melodramatic names these highwaymen adopt. Quite unnecessary, I would have thought. I am sure they are not as ferocious as they would like everyone to believe.’ She relented at the sight of their appalled faces and retold Nick’s story.

      ‘That’s a terrible thing if he is telling the truth, but do you have to do this, Miss Katherine?’ John asked sombrely. He appeared to understand at last that she was not going to be discouraged.

      ‘Yes, John, or I will always have it on my conscience. Now,’ she said briskly, ‘how do you suggest we find the magistrate who was robbed?’

      Jenny took another swig of ale, tossed her curls and said, ‘I’ll ask.’ She got to her feet and with a swing of her hips vanished through the door into the taproom. Katherine looked dubiously at John.

      ‘I’ll keep an eye on her.’ He followed the maid out, leaving Katherine sitting alone, her chin propped on her hand, her mind at last free of all distraction.

      Last night she had slept in the arms of a man she scarcely knew, a convicted felon she had married out of hand for sheer expediency. Her conscience nagged her. She had not deserved to have found someone who treated her with respect and consideration, she told herself bitterly, but by some miracle she had done so. She might be innocent of men, but she had a very good idea of just what self-control it had taken to sleep with her scarcely clad in his arms. Katherine folded her arms on the table, bent her head down and tried to send some message of support. She dared not think of hope yet: it would be too cruel.

      Back in his dank cell Nick rested his head on his bent knees and let his mind dwell on the warm, soft, trusting femininity he had spent the previous night cradling in his arms. He corrected himself: not so trusting, perhaps. She knew exactly what she was expected to have to do last night and had been prepared to go through with it out of a sense of honour that men liked to think only their sex possessed. What must that have cost? He had all too vivid a memory of himself in that mirror: filthy, dangerous, desperate. And yet she had sent him soap and soft towels and a book of poetry. What was she doing now? He breathed slowly, deeply, recalling her voice and the generosity of her innocent lips against his. Kat. Kat, don’t come back. Please.

      The next morning Katherine rose at seven, dressed with care in her best walking dress and left Jenny behind to discover the direction of Mr Highson, the outraged magistrate. Jenny had had easily extracted the tale of the magistrate and the highwayman from the crowd in the common tap the night before, even if she had had to be rescued by John from the somewhat over-amorous advances of her new friends.

      John drove the gig they had hired and Katherine was thankful for his stolid bulk beside her. If she had realised he had felt it necessary to shove two loaded pistols into his belt, she would have felt considerably less sanguine. She tried to breathe deeply and calm herself. She had two days before they must return to London, surely that would be enough?

      They crossed a bridge and she found herself looking out over water meadows dotted with grazing beasts. This must be Box Moor. What hope of being waylaid by Black Jack? she wondered. That would be a saving of time indeed! But nothing disturbed their journey and before many minutes had passed John was swinging the gig into a small stable yard.

      Silence. The place appeared deserted. John shouted, ‘House!’ and finally a scruffy youth wandered out and squinted at the gig as though he had never seen one before.

      ‘Yer?’

      ‘Where is the landlord? My mistress requires refreshment.’

      ‘Er. Inside. Master’s inside.’

      ‘Well, come and hold the horse, you half-wit, while I help my lady down.’

      Katherine