Elisabeth Fairchild Read Online Free PDF Page B

the North downs, that received the majority of Nell’s attention. She scratched the battered ears, and stroked the eager nose, and wondered what had taken such a toll on the animal at her knee.
    Mr. Ferd leaned back. “I must warn you. Bandit steals hearts, as frequently as he holds up coaches.”
    In leaning back, the ear lobe of the young man whom Gates had addressed as “your grace” was, for an instant, very close to Nell’s nose. There was something disconcerting about being in such proximity to a stranger’s ear. Nell could smell the clen, masculine tang of sweated neck. Her lashes swept downward, shutting out for an instant, the distraction of eyesight. She longed to lean closer, to breath deep. Mr. Ferd was not a smoker or drinker. There was no taint of the horrid weed about him, no reek of the tap either. There was instead, a pleasant, manly odor that was uniquely his own.
    Nell opened her eyes with a sigh. The movement of her breath across his ear, visibly affected Mr. Ferd. He sat forward swiftly, as if pushed by a hand, and a flush of red color stained his neck and swept up into his face, into the very tip of the ear on which her breath had played.
    Nell’s eyes rounded. How exhilarating to cause such a reaction, no matter how unwittingly. “I shall do my best not to allow this fellow to seduce me with his very speaking eyes.” She patted Bandit on the head, voice hovering on the edge of laughter.
     
    The original driver, the graying gent who sat beside Mr. Ferd, turned in his seat. “This is the Weald,” he said to all of the topside passengers, indicating the land about them. “It were once a great oak forest that stretched as far as a man can see and beyond. One hundred and twenty miles it went. The Romans, when they marched through, called it Anderida, for so awe-inspiring was the sight of the woods, that it required a name all to itself.” His voice flattened. “What were once a wall of trees is fallen to the woodsman’s axe, and the charcoal makers’ fire-- felled to stoke the furnaces of the Sussex iron foundries. There’s pockets left. You’ll see some of old Anderida in Ashdown Forest once we’ve stopped for horses in East Grinstead. You’ll see there, what all this once was, before progress,” he used the term derisively, “changed the face of things.”
    As he spoke, huge hands gesturing in highly worn and work stained gloves, Nell noticed how very different those gloves were from Mr. Ferd’s. The more she looked from the one set of hands to the other, the odder she found their differences. These were coachman’s gloves-- these stiffened things, dark with use and weather, molded to their owner’s hands. stitches rubbed through, seams loose between every finger that held a leather line. These were unmistakably the gloves of a man who drove a coach on a daily basis.
    Mr. Ferd’s gloves, by contrast, the very gloves that had touched upon the bareness of flesh beneath her skirts, looked completely out of place. They were fairly clean, unusual in an item of clothing used daily in the proximity of dusty, sweaty horseflesh. The leather was thinner, softer, more supple. The gloves seemed strangely at odds with the rest of Mr. Ferd’s attire. All else spoke of thrift and long use.
    Nell wondered if she made too much of a simple thing. The hands within the gloves behaved like coachman’s hands. They handled the lines with comfortable finesse.
    Mr. Ferd seemed to sense her interest. He turned to look her way. Feeling prettier, and more feminine and more interesting merely by having met such a look, Nell promptly forgot all about gloves, and fell to contemplating just what it was in a pair of pale blue eyes, that could make her feel so warm and quavery inside.
     
    At East Grinstead, a lively market town, the passengers were informed they had time enough to stretch their legs and relieve bruised and jostled kidneys, as the horses were changed. Nell was the first to step down. She went in