Free Too Dangerous For a Lady by Jo Beverley

frightened and angry. He’d been himself, however. Neither had slipped away in life.
    She wished she knew his real name. She couldn’t keep thinking of him as Lieutenant Thayne when he was no longer in the military, and she was sure his name wasn’t Ned.
    He’d be Thayne, then. Simply Thayne, and by that name surely she could find him. Against her will her mind slid toward dreams. If Great-uncle Peake was all she hoped he would be, there might be a future for them.

Chapter 7
    A t last, they stopped for breakfast. Polly didn’t think three miles far enough, but William overruled her. In the common dining room of the Three Bells they were the first ones bringing news of mayhem. Some people were alarmed, but it was clear others felt some sympathy for the Spenceans.
    â€œTime Lunnon paid ’tention t’plight of t’north,” one burly man said in an accent so thick Hermione found it hard to understand.
    â€œBut not by public disorder,” said a pinch-faced clerical type.
    â€œOrderly march, that’s all.”
    â€œIt’ll turn into disorder. You mark my words.”
    â€œAnd why not?” asked a gray-haired man who’d been observing from the fireside, puffing on a pipe. “Think back to the Magna Carta. Where’d we all be if Bad King John hadn’t been stopped? Then there’s the Glorious Revolution that put Queen Mary and King William on the throne. Without that, we’d all be Papists. Or burning at the stake.”
    â€œLord have mercy!” exclaimed the clerical man’s wife. “When was that?”
    â€œNot a hundred and fifty years ago, ma’am, after Charles the Second died and his brother James became king. Rabid Papist he was, and tried to foist a false son on us all. The warming-pan baby,” he reminded everyone.
    â€œOh, that,” said a big-breasted matron in a fur-trimmed cloak and a grand bonnet. She’d made no secret of being a wealthy widow who ran her dead husband’s saddlery business. “A substitute baby smuggled in by means of a warming pan when the queen’s child was stillborn? I’ve never seen a warming pan big enough.”
    The man’s face twitched with annoyance. “We’ll be thinking you a supporter of the Stuarts, ma’am.”
    â€œOnly if you’re a fool,” she dismissed. Hermione delighted in her effortless authority. How splendid to be a wealthy widow running her own business.
    â€œA
royal
bedpan,” the man persisted. “Everything they have is bigger than normal.”
    Some of the people in the room were nodding, but the widow hadn’t finished. “You’ll be saying next that they have extra-large royal chamber pots. Those changes you talked of, sir, were brought about by the nobility squabbling among themselves and had nothing to do with folk like you and me. Look at how the first King George came upon us. He didn’t even speak English, but we had no say.”
    â€œThere you are, then,” said the man with the pipe. “That isn’t right.”
    â€œBut it preserved law and order from Papists and Scots. That’s all that matters to law-abiding folk.”
    There was a murmur of agreement and the man fell silent, but Hermione noticed that his waistcoat was made of a fabric striped thinly in black, red, and green. Like Thayne’s neckcloth. And the bonnet of the woman in the innyard. Three very different people to be following a fad, but her main concern was stumbling across arguments in favor of unrest in such an unlikely place.
    Once in the coach, Hermione wanted to discuss it with William, but it would upset Polly and disturb the boys. The boys were content now their stomachs were satisfied, but her own breakfast sat heavily inside her. Perhaps Polly was right to be fearful. It was as if there were a contagion in theair. She watched men digging out a drainage ditch, while others mended a nearby fence, and wondered