The Runaway Duchess by Joanna Lowell

Author:Joanna Lowell [Lowell, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

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This inn was more promising than the last. For one, it wasn’t situated on the edge of a bleak, howling moor. The hansom had rolled along through wooded green hills and stopped in a picturesque village square lined prettily with cottages climbed over with roses. The frontage of the inn was likewise bright with roses, and the man who greeted the cab, old and half-deaf, with a shock of white hair standing straight up from his head, had a twinkling eye and wore a spotless white flannel suit. He looked like a benevolent grandfather presiding over an afternoon lawn party with a full tea and the promise of a cricket match.

“Come along of me,” he said to Neal with charming simplicity. “I’ll send the boy to fetch the trunk for the missus.”

He thought Neal was her husband. So had the passengers on the train, all smiling their approval. They did look well together. And throughout the many legs of the journey, she’d clung to Neal like a newlywed. She’d needed his strength.

What if her flight from Cranbrook had been reported in the papers? If they pulled into a crowded station and she saw a reproduction of her own face staring back at her from beneath a lurid headline?

Her fears had proven baseless. The Cornishman listed rooms to be let, situations wanted, the produce and value of copper ores sold last Thursday at Truro. She’d scanned the dense type every time someone in her vicinity turned a page.

Advertisements for sulfur hair restorers. Wine of phosphates. Wholesale coals and potatoes. “The Tale of the Cat-Hammed Cow,” a humorous skit for sale at the undermentioned booksellers for sixpence.

Nothing about a missing duchess.

Cranbrook had kept things quiet. She didn’t have to worry that every farmer in the West Country had been mobilized to flush her from the hedges.

A wan sorrow mixed with her relief. Her mother had been expecting her to write from Fowey. Cranbrook would have to have told her. Shouldn’t her mother have forced Cranbrook’s hand, gone to the police herself, scandal be damned? For all she knew, her only daughter was dead in a ditch.

It helped Lavinia, of course, the lack of public outcry. She didn’t want to be found.

But it also hurt.

By the time she and Neal had boarded the second train, she’d managed to let go of her sorrow and her fear. In part, because she hadn’t let go of Neal. Touch bolstered her. She began to feel a bit giddy with him at her side. His presence comforted and excited her at once.

He wasn’t hers. He couldn’t be. She’d have to let go eventually.

Unless.

She watched as he followed the grandfatherly ostler into the inn. He hadn’t kissed her in the cab, as she’d imagined he might. He’d seemed preoccupied, distant. Something weighed on his mind.

His mother’s illness, perhaps. He would move heaven and earth for his mother, it was obvious. And if he had gone missing at Bodmin Station, that mother would doubtless be out scouring the hills herself, no matter how sick she was.

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