Chapter Fifteen

The carriage ride away from London was decidedly different from the one they’d taken there. For one, the carriage was small and private.

Two, Jess was dressed as, well, herself in a simple muslin dress covered in pale purple flowers and a purple spencer jacket.

Three, as the only occupants in the carriage, Jess and Derek each had their own comfortable seat with enough space to give their legs an occasional stretch.

Four, Jess had nothing to occupy her mind beyond listing all the ways in which this ride was different from her last.

She couldn’t plan because she knew nothing beyond their next destination. There was no imminent danger within the carriage, and it was impossible to convince herself that there was a necessity to pay attention to the possible implications of every rut, bump, and jostle.

Across from her, Derek was working away on the diary, a travel desk on his lap and papers spread out across the seat. A few had fallen to the floor. Jess had picked them up the first time they’d fallen, but two more had fluttered down as soon as she placed them back on the seat, so she’d left them alone.

It wasn’t as if they were going anywhere. They were stuck in this carriage just like she was. The only difference was they had a purpose. She was currently useless. And bored.

Derek slid the short steel-nibbed pen into its holder on the travel desk and rolled his shoulders with a groan. He stretched his head from side to side as he waited for the messy scribbles to dry on the page so he could add it to the stack around him.

“Is there any way I can help?” Jess asked.

He looked at her, eyebrows raised until they edged over the top of his spectacles. “I thought I was here because it would take you too long to translate the diary.”

That was true, but she was going crazy with nothing to do. She hadn’t had nothing to do in ten years. “How much longer, do you think?”

Derek leaned toward the window and took in the passing scenery. “Not too much, I think. Another couple of hours.” He glanced upward. “Maybe an hour the way Jeffreys drives.”

An hour. She could do an hour. Compared to the last day and a half, an hour was nothing. They’d departed London with the first rays of yesterday’s sun, but even with Ryland sending servants ahead to arrange for fresh horses, they couldn’t make the journey in a single day.

The night they’d spent at the inn had been uneventful. Jess had lain in her room, sliding in and out of a restless sleep, until it was finally a decent hour to rise and start their journey again.

Derek yawned and let his head fall back against the cushioned seat. “Pardon me,” he mumbled.

Jess glanced at the number of papers strewn about the carriage, a far greater number than there had been the day before. “How many candles did you burn through working on the diary last night?”

“Four.” Derek scrubbed a hand across his face, dislodging his spectacles so they hung off one ear. He slid them back into place and blinked at the view again. “We can’t tell them we’re married.”

Jess hadn’t given much thought to what they would say to his family. She wasn’t accustomed to going into situations where the people involved already knew her, or, in this case, knew who she was with. “What do you suppose we should tell them?”

“Certainly not the truth,” he said with a shake of his head. “Not that they would believe it.”

“I’ll take care of it.” Jess stood up into a crouch and banged her hand on the roof of the carriage. “I just need to get something from my trunk.”

“You will not be a tiger,” he growled, referring to the young boys who frequently rode on the backs of carriages and acted as footmen. “In fact, for this entire journey, I insist you remain a woman. I’m having a difficult enough time with my part of this charade. I can’t slip up and call you my wife when you’re dressed in trousers.”

Jess blinked at his disgruntled pout and had to bite her lips to refrain from smiling. “Very well. I’ll remain a woman.”

“You could let me go alone,” Derek grumbled. “I don’t see why you have to accompany me in the first place.”

“May I be frank?” Jess asked with a sigh, already regretting the offer.

“That would be a delightful change, yes.”

“Aside from the fact that we’re much too close to Marlborough for me to be comfortable showing my face anywhere, I don’t trust you.”

“Well.” He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “That was honest.”

“What if your family asks questions you don’t know how to answer? What if you get frightened and don’t meet us in the morning? What if we aren’t as safe as we think we are and need to flee in the middle of the night? You don’t know how to handle those things.”

“That . . . seems a rather different idea of trust.”

Jess shrugged and began digging around in the small satchel she’d brought into the carriage with her, not wanting to delve into the meaning of a word she’d had little acquaintance with for several years.

The carriage rolled to a stop, and the trapdoor in the roof flipped open, revealing Jeffreys leaning back from the driver’s seat. He was covered in road dust but didn’t look the least bit tired yet. “Why did we stop?”

Jess wriggled out of her middle-class spencer and donned the plain brown pelisse she’d pulled from her bag. “I’m going to be married to you while we visit Derek’s parents. We’ll say Chemsford allowed me to come along because we’ll be going near to my own family’s home.”

“Bit of a strange story,” Jeffreys said.

“It will hold if we state it plainly.”

Jeffreys gave a nod, blew her a kiss with a cheeky grin, and then shut the trapdoor before getting the carriage rolling again.

Jess buttoned the pelisse and then looked up to find Derek studying her, the lenses of his spectacles distorting the squint of his narrowed eyes. “What?”

“How many false husbands have you had?”

She shrugged. “Ten, maybe? Eleven? I know it seems like I suggest it a lot, but most of the time I don’t need it. I don’t often travel in a capacity that would make someone question my connection to my companions, nor stay in one place long enough to need such a disguise.”

“Does it mean anything to you?”

What did he mean? Did he think she got caught up in the sentimentality of her own lies? “It’s merely a disguise, Derek. Like changing my coat. It simply keeps people from taking a closer look.”

“Do you think it will mean less to you when you truly marry?”

He was scraping a rusty knife across her soul. It was on the tip of her tongue to make a cryptic comment that jabbed at his wit, but she couldn’t. She remembered the way he’d stumbled over asking for rooms for him and his wife at the inn last night. Derek was an innately honest person. Only the fact that he appeared genuinely curious and not the least judgmental allowed her to answer him truthfully. A small bit of honesty in private was the least she could give him.

“I doubt I’ll ever marry,” she said.

He tilted his head to look at her through narrowed eyes. “Why not?”

“Given the fact that I am not made of paint and canvas, I suppose it’s possible you haven’t noticed that I am not the usual sort of female.” Jess looked out the window on the pretense of determining how much farther they had to go.

Not that she knew. This part of the country was as foreign to her as the Americas would be. Looking out the window was better than watching him scrutinize her. Most of the time, being strange didn’t bother her. She’d much rather have the abilities and wit to take care of herself in any situation than the life of luxury that left one scrambling for purchase when things didn’t go as planned.

It made her different, though, in a way that not all people would see as good. Those she allowed into her life on a prolonged basis saw no problem with her strangeness, but her life didn’t lend itself to the sort of closeness marriage would require. Marriage would gain her nothing materially, so companionship was its only lure.

“Not every man wishes for a conventional wife,” Derek said. “Lady Chemsford is hardly a typical marchioness.”

“Nor was she the kind Lord Chemsford was looking for.”

Jess leaned a bit closer to the window. Daphne might not have all the typical feminine graces of an aristocratic wife, but if trouble came knocking, she’d tuck herself behind her husband’s coattails. Jess would climb out the window in order to circle around and stab it in the back. No man wanted that in a wife, not really.

Derek murmured a sound somewhere between a grunt and an actual word. Jess took that to mean he saw her point and agreed.

Irritation at his agreement had her gritting her teeth. Irritation at herself for finding his acceptance of the truth irritating had her flopping back into the carriage seat and tossing him into the uncomfortable position.

“What about you?” she asked. “When do you intend to marry?”

He blinked at her as if the idea had never occurred to him. “When I meet someone who suits me, I suppose. I’m quite comfortable, but I’m not amassing a great deal of wealth and I’m not the eldest son, so my marrying isn’t all that imperative.”

“But mine is?” Jess raised an eyebrow, hoping he could feel the daggers she was throwing at him in her mind.

He shifted in his seat and looked out the window. “We’re nearly there. I should probably try to gather these papers into some semblance of order.”

Jess sighed and leaned her head back on the seat. Maybe that was what she could give him in return for his assistance on the diary. By the time this trip was complete, Derek Thornbury would know how to stand his ground.

Awkward moments were nothing new to Derek’s family. With Derek prone to spouting off distantly relevant pieces of history; his older brother, Lewis, trying to turn everything into a competition of athleticism; Mary, the elder of his sisters, missing the meaning behind every single one of their father’s sardonic jokes; and his youngest sister, Jacqueline, placing flower fairy crowns on everyone’s head, family interactions were tumultuous to say the least.

The presence of a couple no one could quite explain sent the entire raucous family into a stunned silence. It didn’t help matters that Derek had forgotten Jess was supposed to be married to Jeffreys and had first introduced her to his mother as Miss Smith. Jess had smoothly corrected him by saying, “It’s Mrs. Smith, actually. May I say what a lovely garden you have?”

Derek blamed the fact that he still didn’t know the infernal woman’s name, but in truth the moment had scared him a bit. If he didn’t come up with a way to keep their supposed story straight, he was going to get them killed or something equally as horrid.

That was assuming, of course, that he managed to make it through this one single evening at home with his sanity intact.

“You all work for Lord Chemsford?” Derek’s father asked as Mother passed tea around the gathering. It was just Derek’s luck that the entire family had been home when the unknown carriage had pulled up to the door. He’d been hoping that his elder sister, at least, would have been at her own home on the other side of the village, but no, she, her vicar husband, and both of their children had come for dinner.

Nothing could make them go home until they’d heard everything.

“We don’t want to be an imposition,” Jess said as she accepted a cup of tea. “Mr. Smith and I can find an inn for the night and return for Mr. Thornbury tomorrow.”

Derek narrowed his eyes at Jess. Given their discussion in the carriage, he knew the offer was as fake as her marriage. She was depending upon his family’s curiosity to turn down her offer.

And drat it all, Derek knew the ploy was going to work.

“Nonsense,” his father said, because that man wasn’t about to let an evening like this one pass. He would have fodder for jokes for years the way this evening was going. “We’ve plenty of room here. Can’t you stay more than the one night? We only saw Derek for a week or two before he went off to work for Lord Chemsford.”

Jeffreys did an admirable job of looking regretful. “I’m afraid we can’t linger. We’ve other items to procure before we return home and a very strict schedule to keep if Mrs. Smith here wants to catch her family at a good time.”

Derek had to admire the fact that, aside from the marriage bit, Jess and Jeffreys had managed to participate in much of the conversation without saying anything that was actually a lie. Misleading, yes, but not a lie. That made it even more difficult for Derek to keep up. What was he supposed to share? What did he hide? What truths had Jess told him that were crafted in a way to deliberately mislead him into thinking she meant something else?

Maybe it was a good thing Jess hadn’t let him come here alone.

“I thought you were cataloguing Lord Chemsford’s collection. Why do you need your books?” Lewis asked Derek. His brother had never quite understood what Derek did for a living. None of his family did.

Derek swallowed. It was his turn to attempt an honest prevarication. “I need my books to, um, fully comprehend the meaning of an, er, item I came across in the, um, parlor. Its connection to, um”—he shifted in his seat and had to make a conscious effort not to look in Jess’s direction—“a particular class of art could have significant impact on its importance.”

Complete silence met his statement. No one even moved a teacup.

“No one understood that, did they?” Mary asked. “It wasn’t only me?”

Her husband gave her hand a pat but said nothing.

“Not only you,” Lewis muttered.

Yes, if they died on this adventure, it was fairly certain Derek would be at fault.

“Why don’t I show you to your rooms?” Mother asked. “You can freshen up for a bit.”

“That would be lovely, thank you,” Jess said, the sweet tone of her voice sounding oddly natural. When had she started using the word lovely? If he didn’t know better, he’d believe she always behaved this way.

Did he know better? What if this was her natural state and the prickly woman who’d refused to cook him Naples biscuits was a false persona?

As she passed where Derek was seated, she stepped hard on his toe and threw him a warning glance before following his mother from the room. He sighed in relief as he wiggled his sore toe.

It would seem he wasn’t entirely wrong about her.

Jeffreys trailed behind her, shaking his head and chuckling softly.

Once the soft sounds of their footsteps and chatter had faded up the stairs, the drawing room rumbled with his family’s questions.

“What is really going on here, Derek? You’d let us know if you were in trouble, wouldn’t you?”

“What do they do for Lord Chemsford? Are they servants? Should Mother be putting them in the guest room?”

“Do you think the fact that one of his fingers is missing makes driving the horses more difficult?”

“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be driven into the woods and left to fend for myself.”

“Father,” Derek groaned. “They aren’t going to leave me in the woods.”

His father shrugged. “Woods, middle of a village, seaside cliff . . . you’d best make sure you’re keeping some funds on your person.”

Mary clutched her husband’s hand. “Father, do you truly think they mean Derek harm?”

Derek held up both his hands to silence his family. “No one means me any harm.” Any harm he might encounter on this trip would be intended for Jess, a possibility that choked him up a bit. “I asked for the detour by here to pick up the books because I wanted to satisfy my own curiosity. William”—his father’s eyebrows lowered and Derek quickly corrected himself—“Lord Chemsford doesn’t have a particular interest in these details, so my visit will be short as it’s, uh, not for him.”

This was tiresome. Derek’s father was a land-owning gentleman with an estate that kept the family comfortable and allowed them to circulate in the society of the village and, occasionally, nearby Oxford. He’d rubbed many a shoulder with a titled man, and of course he’d sent his sons to university with them, but he’d never approved of nor understood Derek’s familiarity with a few of the upper-class people he’d met over the years.

Derek had never understood why a man’s title mattered more than his character when it came to choosing whom he associated with. Over time, he’d learned to simply not talk about it. That hadn’t been a difficult decision, really, as Derek preferred to talk about the art he worked with anyway.

Fifteen minutes later, Derek had finally reassured his family, but then his mother returned to the drawing room and he had to start over again. By the time he escaped to his own room, he was exhausted. He took a spare taper up with him, though, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep until he’d located the books.

Since he was alone in the upstairs corridor, he knocked lightly on the guest room door as he passed.

It swung open to reveal Jess. She was still in her traveling dress, but her hair had been brushed out and braided, giving her a softer appearance. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Derek said. “I was . . . I’m not sure why I knocked. I suppose I’m making sure we didn’t need to do anything tonight.”

“You’ve finished with your family already?”

The surprise on her face sent a wave of guilt through Derek. He hadn’t seen them in months, though they’d exchanged many letters in that time. Despite their vast differences, his family was close. Perhaps that was the problem. “I find I’m not very good at lying to them. When this is over, I’ll return and have a proper visit.”

Her gaze cut briefly to the right before she looked back at him, chin raised a bit. “We’ll have you back here as soon as possible.”

Even if they failed, he’d be back in a month, barring some incredible danger. He didn’t mention it, though. He’d noticed that for all of Jess’s practicality, she didn’t entertain the notion that she might fail.

“We’ll leave at the earliest polite moment tomorrow,” Jess continued. “As soon as we decide where to go.”

Derek nodded toward the lit candle and extra taper he held. “I’m working on that now. The sooner we decode the diary, the better.”

“I’ll help.” Jess stepped through the door, crowding slightly into his space, and pulled it shut behind her.

“Help?” Derek choked out.

“I do know how to read, Derek.” Jess glared at him. “I’m assuming your books are in English?”

“Well, yes, but . . .” He cleared his throat. “They’re in my room.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll try not to muss your bedcovers. Lead on.”

“Should we get Jeffreys?” While Jess might see the other man only as another member of their party, Derek considered him the chaperon keeping them from total impropriety. If he were to join them, having Jess in his room would feel less awkward. Hopefully.

“No.” Jess jerked her head toward the door. “He’s already asleep. Stripped the covers from the bed and made himself a pallet before I’d even had a chance to say I’d take the floor. If his snores are any indication, the floor isn’t bothering him any. I won’t wake him now. He can’t afford to nod off while driving the horses. You and I can always nap in the carriage.”

There was no refuting that logic. Derek cast a glance at the closed door, forced to consider an unforeseen aspect of this charade. Would he be sharing a room with Jess? He couldn’t even handle the idea of looking at books in such a private space, much less bedding down, even if it wasn’t in the same bed.

Perhaps he’d simply have to sneak out and join Jeffreys wherever he slept.

That was a problem for the future, though. Not far in the future, but not tonight. “We can look at the books in the morning.”

Jess’s shoulders tensed and her gaze narrowed. “Give me the candles, then.”

“What?”

“The candles.” She held out her hands. “If you aren’t going to be looking at the books tonight, you won’t need them.”

“I’m not giving you the candles,” Derek sputtered, even as part of him acknowledged that he could easily hand them over and go down and get more. It was the principle of the matter. Jess was not going to take away his candles like his mother had done when he was a little boy and tried to sneak them into his room and read late into the night.

“I’ll not allow you to keep information from me,” Jess said, looking ready to skewer him with his unlit taper. Or perhaps even the lit one.

“I never intended to,” Derek ground out. He’d never felt the urge to argue with anyone, at least not over something other than art and its historic implications. Jess riled him up, though, in a way he didn’t completely understand. She frustrated him and, unlike a mysterious painting or an unknown sculpture, no amount of research was going to clear up the confusion she stirred.

“Why won’t you let me see the books, then?”

“They. Are. In. My. Bedchamber.” Derek leaned a little closer with each word he whispered. “Have you no sense of propriety? We are in my father’s house, he assumes you are married to another man, and you want to spend the evening in my bedroom. My apologies, but I don’t quite have the same disregard for normality that you seem to.”

Something about his words meant something to her, because she jerked back and all of the aggression fell from her body and face. “You’re right,” she said softly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Before he could adjust to her new attitude, she’d slipped back into the room and shut the door.

Derek stared at it until a drop of wax from the candle he was holding splashed onto his thumb and jerked him from his reverie. Books. He would go bury his head in books. At least there, things made sense.