Free Amanda Scott by The Bath Eccentric’s Son

or in a tangle with another carriage. Watch that fellow on the right, will you!”
    “Hold your nash, Seppi. I’ve never overturned you yet, have I?” Manningford waved thanks to the gentleman who had halted his own carriage in rather a hurry to allow him to turn his around. “We are taking Miss Bradbourne back to Laura Place.”
    “Taking her back!” Mr. Lasenby looked from one to the other, then uttered a weak laugh. “I wonder what nonsense you can be speaking, Bran. Miss Bradbourne, I daresay you do not know what he is talking about. Pay him no heed, I beg you.”
    Nell looked straight ahead, biting her lower lip to keep the bubble of laughter she felt rising in her throat from bursting forth, and grateful that her short stay in Bath made it unlikely that any of her great-aunt’s friends, or anyone else, would recognize her in her present position.
    Manningford, shooting a glance at her, said nothing until he had negotiated the turnpike again, but once they were through, he said to Mr. Lasenby, “She knows the whole, Sep, and she objects to being abducted, so I am taking her home immediately.”
    “She knows?” Mr. Lasenby tugged at his highly starched neckcloth, evidently finding it suddenly a trifle too tight. “I say, Miss Bradbourne, I hope Bran’s little indiscretion—”
    But here he was interrupted by a crack of laughter from Manningford. “You sound just like her, Sep! Indiscretion is precisely the word she employed to describe what I tried to do. Oh, and Miss Bradbourne,” he added in lower voice, “if you have not already done so, I beg you will put that pistol back where you found it before we reach Laura Place and without waving it about, if you please, for all and sundry to see.”
    “Pistol!” Mr. Lasenby choked the word out. “She’s got a pistol?” Watching in fascinated dismay as Nell gratefully removed it from beneath her hip and returned it to her reticule, he said as she did so, “Now, look here, Bran, I said the whole notion was mad-brained, and if you had not let your father get your temper up like you did, you’d have seen as much from the outset. For I’ll tell you to your head, my lad, you have not managed this business with a jot of your usual finesse, and that’s a fact.”
    Manningford chuckled, glancing again at Nell, who refused to look at him for the simple reason that she was still having difficulty, both in containing her laughter and in believing that any of what was happening was real. She was quite certain that at any moment, she would awaken and find herself in her own bed, where she would be able to laugh without restraint for as long as she wished to do so, and without anyone’s believing she ought to be clapped instantly into Bedlam.
    “Sep is right, Miss Bradbourne,” Manningford said ruefully. “I lost my temper last night, drank too much port afterward, and acted this morning without allowing myself so much as a moment to think. A single moment’s reflection must have shown me the idiocy of succumbing to an impulse born out of temper.”
    “Ought to have taken the post chaise instead of this rackety phaeton, for starters,” Mr. Lasenby muttered.
    Manningford chuckled again. “With you acting as postilion, I suppose. Or do you imagine that fellow we had from Westbury yesterday would have obliged us by going on to Reading with Miss Bradbourne as our captive? If he had, Sep, I’d have had to leave you behind, since the chaise barely had room enough for the two of us. It would never accommodate a third.”
    “It did accommodate a third,” Mr. Lasenby said testily, “just as this vehicle is accommodating a fourth, or had you forgotten King Ethelred, who, as I plainly see, is still taking up more than his fair share of the floor space?”
    “King Ethelred?” Nell said, looking down at the hound’s head, which was all she could see of that noble animal, since the rest was well back under the seat. “Is that what you call him?”
    “It is what