Royal Regard

Chapter Twenty-Six

A scant half-hour later, they pulled up at a posting inn, where a decrepit coach with a red stripe was being pulled into the stable.

"He can't have stopped this close to London. He was trying for Dover," Firthley argued.

"He can't make it there in time. If he is going to miss the tide anyway..." Nick surmised. "Perhaps he plans to stay in London, hide in plain sight and leave on a passenger boat or find a new coach. From the sound of it, anything would be better than the boneshaker he bought in Town."

"And maybe this isn't the same carriage."

"Then it 'beseems we should ask,' do you not think?" Nick trotted his horse to the stable but didn't dismount, declining to give the reins to a groom who came running. Instead, he demanded, "Where is the owner of that coach? Has he traded it for new?"

"No, my lords. Inside, 'e is. 'E and his lady take a room for the night."

Firthley asked, "French?"

"As frog's legs, Sir."

"What color was her dress?" Nick asked, "And her hair?"

"Red, my lord, both. No, not quite. Hair was gold-red, like a ha'penny."

Nick swung his leg over the saddle.

The groom continued as he took the reins, "'E said she's too sick from champagne at the wedding breakfast to go on 'til tomorrow, and must be she is. Clothes was a mess, and she ain't woke even with her head smacked 'gainst the door."

At Nick's expression, the man hastened to explain, "He ain't done it purposeful, my lord, only he was trying to carry her out of the coach himself. Won't have no help from no one. Proper bridegroom 'e was, agog to get to his room." The man leered, and it was all Nick could do not to drub him with the blunt end of his pistol.

"Keep my horse here and saddled and water him."

Nick was opening the front door before the man had finished mangling his title, with Firthley no more than a step behind.

Slamming the barrel-shaped proprietor against the nearest lime-washed wall, a forearm across his throat and a pistol to his belly, Nick demanded, "Where is she, you addle-pated puff guts?" Nick tried to leave a bruise with the barrel of the gun. "And do not lie to me, or I will see you dead."

At the request of one duke to give information about another, the man hemmed and hawed, trying to persuade Nick he had no notion of a Frenchman with a sleeping woman.

The soldier with them came in then and confirmed, "If he doesn't kill you, it will be Newgate by sunrise."

The man couldn't talk fast enough. "First floor, Yer Grace. Third door on the left." Nick couldn't run up the stairs fast enough, galloping two at a time, Firthley still close behind. The soldier called out, "I'll keep him here, Your Grace," then, apparently to a cohort coming in the door, "Up the back stairs, man, before Lord Firthley and His Grace get into the thick of it."

When he reached the third door on the left, Nick slammed it open with his shoulder, breaking the lock and the door jamb. The first thing he saw was Malbourne throwing a sheet over Bella, as though her presence were an affront to his sensibilities.

Before it covered her completely, though, her motionless, unclothed body was all he could see, lying on the bed, white-faced, slack-jawed, bruises on her throat. As far as Nick could tell, dead. His breath stopped and he nearly lost control of his stomach.

Her dress was ruined, as were a black jacket and waistcoat, all tossed carelessly on a chair. Before he fully registered Malbourne in his shirtsleeves and tidy cravat, the blood seeping onto the pillowcase under Bella's head coated Nick's vision in red.