Free Elizabeth Thornton by Whisper His Name Page B

the fire.

CHAPTER 6
    A bbie used her handkerchief to mop up the vapor on the coach window and looked out. The dismal view of sodden hedgerows in the fading light seemed to mirror her own dismal thoughts. It had been raining intermittently since they left Bath. The temperature was so frigid that she was surprised the rain had not turned to sleet. Nothing had passed them on the road since they changed horses at Devizes. Marlborough was only ten miles away, but at this rate it would be dark before they reached it.
    She suppressed a shudder. Now that they were almost at Marlborough, her nerve was beginning to crack. He would be there, waiting for her, the man who’d assaulted her in Bath. He’d told her they would be watching her and she believed him. She felt horribly exposed. He’d had no trouble invading her home, and she didn’t think it would be any harder for him to invade her bedroom at the Castle.
    It wasn’t bravery that made her suddenly decide to defy his instructions, but cowardice. She didn’t want him to know where her room was, didn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night with his hand over her mouthand his knife at her throat. There was something about him that made her skin crawl, and it wasn’t only because he’d attacked her. She’d relived that scene many times in her mind and she sensed … evil, depravity, something so corrupt she didn’t know how to explain it.
    The thought prompted her to move her hand to the small leather portmanteau beside her on the banquette. Daniel’s pistol was inside it. She’d taken the trouble to learn how to load it and use it, but that knowledge came from a book. She’d yet to practice what she’d learned. The gun was supposed to make her feel safer, but when she thought of
him
, her precautions didn’t seem adequate. Not nearly adequate.
    She was afraid to defy his instructions, but she was even more afraid of meeting up with him again. So she’d decided on a compromise. She’d put up at the Castle, but she’d find her own accommodations under an assumed name. It was the book he wanted, and as long as he thought she could get it for him, she was safe, up to a point. He wouldn’t kill her, but there were other ways of terrorizing a woman.
    She let out a shivery sigh and turned her head to look at her young maid. Nan was sleeping, covered with blankets to keep her warm. The poor girl had embarked on this journey in good faith, but it turned out that she didn’t have the stomach for coach travel. The swaying of the chaise nauseated her. They couldn’t go on like this. When they reached Marlborough, she’d have to arrange for Nan to return to Bath in the morning, and if possible find someone to take Nan’s place.
    Her thoughts drifted to the last time she had made this journey, just before Christmas, on the first leg of their jaunt to Paris. The roads had been in no bettershape then, but the atmosphere inside the coach had been far different. They’d been jubilant, irrepressible, she and George and Olivia, and they’d carried on like school children playing truant. The least little thing had set them off into gales of laughter.
    George
. She couldn’t believe it had come to this. She half expected to waken and find that she was having a nightmare. But George wasn’t the sort of person who turned up in one’s nightmares. He was too easygoing, too much fun, too nice.
    And these were the very qualities that worried her mother. In fact, her mother’s worst nightmares were about George. As the younger son, said Mama, he had to take up a profession. He couldn’t always rely on Daniel to give him an allowance. But the professions that Mama thought suitable—the church, the army, the law—bored George to tears. If he had to take up a profession to earn his bread, he said, he’d take up landscape gardening. That was the great love of his life.
    There was no doubt about it, Mama had declared. George took after his father, and she trembled in her