and the driver turned back to the road with a sigh. “I told them not to saddle me with a boy I didn’t know. Suit yourself. I haven’t the time to wait for your senses to return from wherever they’ve run off.”
With a flick of his wrists, the horses were moving, along with the carriage.
Leaving her stranded on the road.
Alone.
To be set upon by whomever happened by.
Bollocks.
She cried out, “No! Wait!”
The carriage stopped, barely long enough for her to scramble up onto the driver’s block before it moved again.
For a moment, she considered telling the coachman everything. Revealing herself. Throwing herself at his mercy and hoping that he would take her home.
Home. A vision flashed, lush green land that ran for miles, hills and dales and wild northern sunsets. Not London. Certainly not Mayfair, where the only thing lush were the silk skirts she was forced to wear every day, in case someone came for tea.
And her father had enough money that someone always came for tea.
London wasn’t home. It never had been—not for a decade. Not in all the time that she’d lived in that perfect Mayfair town house that her mother and sisters adored, as though they didn’t miss the past. As though they’d hated the life they’d lived all those years ago. As though they would forget it if they needed to. As though they had forgotten it.
Tears came, surprising and unbidden, and she blinked them away, blaming the summer wind and the speed of the carriage.
She was alone on the driving block of a carriage, dressed as a footman, headed God knew where.
And somehow, it was the thought of returning to London that made her sad.
So she stayed quiet, knowing it was mad, willing the coachman not to notice her, listening to the sound of the wheels and the horses’ hooves as the coach moved north.
Hours later, when the sun had set, it had become clear that Sophie was out of her element. She’d thought that wearing a footman’s livery, masquerading as a boy, and riding on the outside of a coach would be the most difficult parts of the charade, only to realize that those bits were, in fact, nothing in comparison to the arrival at the posting inn.
She watched from the driver’s block as the coachman climbed down to arrange space in the stables for the horses and, ostensibly, for storage of the carriage itself.
The thought gave her pause. Where did carriages go when they weren’t in use? It was a question she’d never had cause to consider.
“Are you going to sit up there like a lord? Or are you planning to come down and do some work?”
The words startled her from her thoughts, and she looked down to find the coachman staring up at her, his earlier exasperation edging into something else entirely. Suspicion.
Well. She couldn’t have that. Not now, at least, before she’d decided the next steps of her plan.
Plan was something of a misnomer for this outrageous situation. Disaster was a better descriptor.
“Where are we?” she asked, deliberately lowering the tenor of her voice—she couldn’t have him realizing that she was a woman now—and scurrying down from the carriage, willing to wager that, while she did not know what a footman did at this exact moment, descending to earth was an excellent first step. Once on the ground, she bowed her head and just barely caught herself before she sank into a curtsy. Footmen did not curtsy. That part, she knew.
“All that matters is that we are here before the marquess.”
“Where is he?” The question was out before she could stop it. She did not require the cold, critical gaze of the coachman to know that she had overstepped her bounds, but he provided it nonetheless.
“I don’t know what is wrong with you, boy,” he said, “but you had better set yourself straight. Servants don’t question their masters’ whereabouts, nor do they ask questions to which they don’t need answers. Servants serve.”
That was just the problem, of course. Sophie had no idea how to begin doing such a thing. “Yes, sir. I shall do just that.”
He nodded and turned away, tossing over his shoulder, “See that you do.”
She had no choice but to call after him, “That said . . . what . . . what shall I do?”
He stilled, then turned around slowly. Blinked at her. Then spoke as though she was a child. “Begin with your job.”
That wasn’t helpful.
She took a deep breath as he turned back to the