Free Drury Lane Darling by Joan Smith Page B

gave him a warning glance.
    “If you don’t tell me this instant, I shall notify your father, Nigel,” Pamela stated firmly. It was the likeliest threat to bring him to heel.
    “We might as well tell her,” Nigel said. “She’s like a dog with a bone, Wes. We’ll not get a moment’s peace till she knows everything. We certainly don’t want Papa making a fuss. And Mama! Lord, she’d have me filleted and fed to the vultures. I hope Fleur has the sense to get back before dawn.”
    “Where has she gone?” Pamela demanded, her voice rising.
    “You tell her, Wes. I have to run up to my room for a moment.”
    Nigel vanished, and Pamela allowed herself to be returned to the saloon on the understanding that she would be told all. Breslau, that mountain of confidence, appeared decidedly ill at ease.
    “There’s nothing for you to worry about. Fleur has gone to visit a—a friend,” he said.
    She pinned him with a disbelieving stare. “The vicar?” she enquired in a tone of heavy irony.
    “Hardly.”
    “I didn’t come down in the last rain, Breslau. Ladies don’t go slipping out in the dead of night in the freezing rain to pay a social call. Now what is really going on?”
    Breslau was unaccustomed to such brash behavior from young ladies, and pokered up. “If you insist on knowing, she’s gone to visit a gentleman,” he said curtly.
    Pamela’s eyes opened wide. For a moment she was speechless, then she asked, in a squeaky voice, “A love tryst, do you mean?”
    “That’s a somewhat Elizabethan turn of phrase, but you’ve got the general idea.”
    “Who?”
    “She didn’t leave a note.”
    “Then you don’t know for sure. How could she be having a rendezvous? She doesn’t know anyone here.”
    “Fleur has a broad circle of acquaintances throughout the country.”
    “A woman wouldn’t go to such uncomfortable rounds for a mere acquaintance. I wonder if it’s that handsome young stranger she was talking to at the assembly.”
    “Very likely.”
    “But he doesn’t live around here or Nigel would have recognized him. She wouldn’t meet him at the public inn, surely. She’s not that rackety, is she, Breslau?”
    “We had achieved a first-name basis a while back,” he pointed out with an arch look designed to divert her thoughts.
    It failed miserably. Pamela was scrambling through her mind and hit unerringly on the culprit. “General Max!” she exclaimed. “I knew there was something havey-cavey going on.”
    “The slander is in your dish, madam. I didn’t mention names. And it would be better if you not air your suspicions to your hostess.”
    She glared. “I’m not a complete Johnnie Trot.”
    “If you’d care to have a seat, Miss Comstock, then you would permit me to do likewise. I’m tired, at the end of a long day.”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, sit down. I think better when I pace.”
    She began pacing up and down in front of the grate, while Breslau followed her silently with his eyes. The light from the grate struck her curls, burnishing them with copper highlights. Divested of her shawl, Pamela’s slender figure made a pretty sight as she paced back and forth, like a preacher preparing his sermon. After a few turns, she drew to a stop in front of Breslau’s chair.
    “That can’t be right,” she said. “General Max wouldn’t dare invite her to his house, nor take her to a local inn. His mother is as bad as Lady Raleigh. As good, I mean,” she said hastily when Breslau’s thin lips lifted in a smile.
    “Then we must assume he had his carriage waiting nearby and carried her a little further afield.”
    “I doubt very much if she’d oblige him after the cool way he treated her tonight. She’s no doormat, Breslau, and she was furious.”
    “I’m aware of that. Apparently he sent her a billet-doux sometime during the assembly to patch up the rift and arrange the, er—love tryst.”
    Pamela considered this for feasibility, and was still unconvinced. “It is all