Chase the Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page B

into a second oblivion, the sleep of emotional and physical exhaustion, but just before she slipped over the edge, she heard a soft, explosive execration that seemed to make no sense. And then she heard no more.

I n the name of the Almighty, man! The girl was in your charge.” Sir Edward Paget paced the stone-flagged terrace overlooking the broad sweep of the James River, his agitation more clearly expressed by the fact that his wig was askew than by the heat of his remarks.
    “No, Edward, she was in mine,” Eliza Paget moaned, dabbing at her beaded upper lip with a lace-edged handkerchief. “You cannot hold Mr. Trueman to account.”
    “You, madam, have never been able to take charge of your daughter in proper fashion.” Sir Edward rounded on his wife, the irascibility that he usually kept in check when talking to her bubbling over under the press of near-ungovernable anxiety. “I should never have permitted the visit, but I cannot forever be accompanying you on your social gadabouts.”
    Eliza Paget whimpered, and Charles Trueman shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “She cannot have been taken from the house, Paget,” he said, “even if her disappearance had anything to do with those damn bandits. They came nowhere near the house. The arms were stowedabove the smokehouse, and the barn they fired was at the far side of the stableyard. Old Jebediah remembers little before they clubbed him, but he swears he saw no woman.”
    “You have found nothing?” Sir Edward buried his nose in a tankard of nutmeg-laced toddy. “No trace at all?”
    “Nothing.” Trueman shook his head in bewilderment. “Not a sign of an abduction—or of worse.” He looked anxiously at the distraught Eliza, whose sobs became noisy.
    “Go inside, woman! Your sniveling doesn’t help,” her irate husband snapped, and his wife made haste to obey, the streamers pinned to the sides of her lace coif fluttering away from her head as she scurried from the terrace and into the relative cool of the central hall.
    “I’ve had the woods beaten and every inch of the estate combed,” Trueman said, his tone businesslike. “The household slaves have been questioned repeatedly. Not one of them saw or heard anything untoward.” He chewed his lip for a minute before saying tentatively, “There would be no reason for Bryony to … well, to leave of her own accord?”
    Sir Edward’s generally pale, well-bred countenance darkened. “That is calumny, sir.”
    “No, I beg you not to take it as such,” his guest made haste to conciliate. “It is just that, well, young girls do get strange notions sometimes. I just wondered….”
    “Bryony has never had a strange notion in her life,” said her father. “She’s headstrong, I grant you, but she has more sense in that head than half the women in the county put together.”
    Trueman was inclined to ascribe this to paternal bias.Who ever heard of a twenty-year-old girl having anything in her head beyond balls and visiting and games? But then, as Mrs. Trueman had remarked only that morning, if Bryony Paget had been wedded and bedded these two years past, as she should have been, none of this would have happened. It was unheard-of indulgence for Sir Edward to agree to a postponement of a wedding that had been arranged since the young couple had been in their cradles. It was actually rumored that Miss Bryony had told her father she was not yet ready for matrimony, and Sir Edward had agreed without a murmur. No one, it seemed, had given a thought to the prospective groom, so Francis Cullum grew more disconsolate by the day.
    Following this reflection, Trueman suggested, “I suppose Francis has no light to throw on the matter? He left to ride home immediately after dinner, complaining of a powerful migraine.”
    “No, he has nothing at all to offer, beyond the fact that he spoke with her at dinner and she seemed her usual lively self.” The English aristocrat took another turn around the terrace, trying to