Elisabeth Fairchild Read Online Free PDF Page A

necessary when she stood firmly upon the ground. “We have had an a-a-adventure this morning, have we not?”
    Nell felt as if she fell for a moment into the laughing depths of his pale blue eyes. “We have that,” she breathed, and disengaged her hand from the heat of his.
     
    As it turned out, the morning’s adventure was not yet finished. Beau found his seat readily enough. He had but to call out to the man who sat the foremost coach bench. “I’m Beauford. You’re expecting me."
    “Oiy! If you be Charley’s friend,” the coachman agreed. “Figured it had to be you, when I saw the gingers set to through the gatepost there,” he laughed. “Jump up beside me lad. We’ll see the prads down to Brighton at a spanking pace.”
    “I shall just see the ladies comfortably seated,” Beau politely tipped his second-hand hat.
    The coachman nodded. “Be quick about it. I’ll not delay the mail for no man.”
    Nell Quinby and her aunt were booked for inside passage, where comfort was generally assured, for no more than four were allowed. But, when the coach door was opened it became quite clear that no more than three would ever manage to squeeze themselves into this particular mail coach.
    The enormous, bombazine draped woman who took up all of one seat, was asleep, her expensive velvet hat tilted down over her eyes, so that two of the feathers that graced its magnificent crown fluttered back and forth with the regularity of a pendulum in rhythm with the light snores that whistled through her nose.
    The woman who occupied the second seat, while still wearing the weighthat came with the bearing of the new baby that rested in a basket on the seat beside her, looked quite small by comparison. Her eyes rounded with growing concern when it was made clear to her that two additional women had booked inside passage, and stood waiting to crowd in.
    Beau could not resist a smile, when he heard the peal of laughter that escaped Nell Quinby’s lips, but he did not stand about waiting to see where the argument would lead when Nell’s aunt insisted, “This is no laughing matter. Where in the world are we to squeeze ourselves? I shall be quite ill before we’ve gone a mile if I am forced to ride upstairs. And you’ve no hat, Fanella, so I cannot ask you to sit outside . . .”
    Beau knew he could be of more assistance than in trying to make room where there was none to be had. Directing an encouraging smile Nell’s way, he ducked under the low beam of the door that led to the taproom of the White Hart Inn.
    “I shall ride up top,” he heard Nell offer sensibly, as his eyes adjusted to the dim interior.
    He called in an authoritative manner for the innkeeper’s wife. A short, heavy-set woman came running.
    “Have you a-a-a Sunday b-b-bonnet?” he asked breathlessly.
    Her eyes popped and she looked him up and down with disbelief, as if she faced a madman. A bright-eyed lass, who looked to be the woman’s daughter, seemed to take in the meaning of his urgent request in an instant. “Has a lady passenger lost hers then, sir?”
    He rewarded her understanding with the flash of a coin, and a gracious smile that had her beaming back at him. “A pound for the best hat you have to offer.”
    She took the coin. “I’ve no bonnets worth a quid, sir, but half a minute, and I shall fetch my best.”
    Beau could see through the low doorway that the postboy, resplendent in his scarlet coat and tall hat, had taken up his yard of tin to sound out their leaving. He called after the girl, “Toss it from the window. The coach would leave without me, otherwise.”
    The horn sounded.
    Beau ducked out the door, and scrambled to his place beside the coachman, even as the wheels began to move. Almost on a level with them, one of the windows of the inn flew open and the girl leaned out, waving a straw bonnet.
    “Sir, catch, sir!”
    Snatching up the bonnet as it sailed out of the window, Lord Brampton Beauford, seventh Duke of Heste,