LITMIR.BIZ

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am giving up on the mystery of the vanishing oats for the night.’ Bree blotted the ledger and put away her pens. ‘Come on, let’s go and find some dinner—I expect you can manage to put away another platter of something.’

      They rented a small, decent house in Gower Street, but the sprawling yard of the Mermaid seemed more like home for both of them and they maintained private rooms up in the attic storey for when they chose to stay overnight.

      Bree stopped and looked back over the yard, seized with a sudden uneasiness, as though things were never going to be the same again. She shook herself. Such foolishness. ‘You weren’t born when Papa bought this—I can only just recall it.’ She smiled proudly. ‘Twenty years and it’s turned from a decaying, failed business into one of the best coaching inns in the capital.’

      ‘The best,’ Piers said stoutly, cheerfully ignoring the claims of William Chaplin at the sign of the Swan with Two Necks, or Edward Sherman’s powerful company with its two hundred horses, operating out of the Bull and Mouth.

      From small beginnings, with his own horses and a modest stage-wagon service, William Mallory had built it into what it was today, and Bree had grown up tagging along behind him, absorbing the business at his coat tails.

      It had worried her father, a decent yeoman farmer, that his daughter did not want to join the world of her mother’s relatives, but Edwina Mallory had laughed. ‘I was married to the son of a viscount, my eldest son is a viscount and I am delighted to let him get on with it! Bree can choose when she is older if she wants a come-out and all the fashionable frivols.’

      And perhaps, if Mama had lived longer, Bree might have done. But Edwina Mallory, daughter of a baron, once married to the Honourable Henry Kendal, had died when Bree was nine, and her relatives seemed only too glad to forget about the daughter of her embarrassing second marriage.

      ‘What does Kendal want?’ Piers asked, hostility making his voice spiky. He had picked up the letter lying on her desk, recognising the seal imprinted on the shiny blue wax.

      ‘I don’t know,’ Bree said, taking it and dropping it back again. ‘I haven’t opened it yet. Our dear brother is no doubt issuing another remonstrance from the lofty heights of Farleigh Hall, but I am in no mood to be lectured tonight.’

      ‘Don’t blame you,’ Piers grunted, handing her the shawl that hung on the back of the door. ‘Pompous prig.’

      She ought to remonstrate, Bree knew, but Piers was all too correct. Their half-brother, James Kendal, Viscount Farleigh, was, at the age of thirty, as stuffy and boring as any crusted old duke spluttering about the scandals of modern life in his club.

      As soon as Bree was old enough to realise that her mother’s connections looked down on her father, and regarded her mother’s remarrying for love as a disgrace, she resolved to have as little as possible to do with them. Now, at the age of twenty-five, she met her half-brother perhaps four times a year, and he seemed more than content for that state of affairs to continue.

      ‘I don’t expect he can help it,’ she said mildly, following Piers out into the yard. ‘Being brought up by his grandfather when Mama remarried was almost certain to make a prig out of him. You won’t remember the old Viscount, but I do!’

      Bree broke off as they negotiated the press of people beginning to assemble for the Bath stage in less than hour.

      ‘Hey, sweetheart, what’s a pretty miss like you doing all alone here in this rough place? Come and have a drink with me, darling.’

      Bree looked to her left and saw the speaker, a rakish-looking man with a bold eye and a leer on his lips, pushing towards her.

      ‘Can you possibly be addressing me, sir?’ she enquired, her voice a passable imitation of Mama at her frostiest.

      ‘Don’t be like that, darlin’—what’s a pretty little trollop like you doing in a place like this if she isn’t after a bit of company?’

      As Bree was wearing a plain round gown with a modest neckline, had her—admittedly eye-catching—blonde hair braided up tightly and was doing nothing to attract attention, she was justifiably irritated. But it was the rest of the impertinent question that really got her temper up.

      ‘A place like this? Why, you ignorant clod, this is as fine an inn as any in all London—as fine as the Swan with Two Necks. I’ll have you know—’

      ‘Is this lout bothering you?’ At the sight of Piers, six foot already, even if he had some growing to do to fill out his long frame, the rake began to back away. ‘Get out of here before I have you whipped out!’

      ‘Honestly, Bree, you shouldn’t be here without a maid,’ Piers fussed as they pushed their way into the dining rooms and found their private table in a corner. ‘You’re too pretty by half to be wandering about a busy inn.’

      ‘I don’t wander,’ she corrected him firmly. ‘I run the place. And as for being too pretty, what nonsense. I’m tolerable only and I’m bossy and I’m too tall, and if it wasn’t for this wretched hair I wouldn’t have any trouble with men at all.’

      The waiter put a steaming platter of roast beef in front of them and Bree helped herself with an appetite, satisfied that she had won the argument.

      Half an hour later she sat back, replete, and regarded her brother with fascinated awe as he dug into a large slice of apple pie.

      ‘This is your second dinner tonight. I think you must have hollow legs, else where can you be putting it?’

      ‘I’m a growing boy,’ Piers mumbled indistinctly through a mouthful of pastry. ‘Look, here comes Railton. I think he’s looking for us.’

      ‘What is it, Railton?’ The Yard Master was looking grim as he stopped by their table.

      ‘We’ll have to cancel the Bath coach, Miss Bree.’

      ‘What? The quarter to midnight? But it’s fully booked.’ Bree pushed back her empty plate and got to her feet. ‘Why?’

      ‘No driver. Todd was taking it out, but he’s slipped just now coming down the ladder out of the hayloft and I reckon his leg’s broke bad. Willis is taking the Northampton coach later, and all the rest of the men are spoken for too. There’s no one spare, not with you giving Hobbs the night off to be with his wife and new baby.’ His sniff made it abundantly clear what he thought of this indulgence.

      ‘Are you sure it is broken?’ Bree demanded, striding across the yard, Piers at her heels. ‘Have you sent for Dr Chapman?’

      ‘I have, not that I need him to tell me it’s a break when the bone’s sticking through the skin. You’ve no cause to go in there, Miss Bree. It’s not a nice sight and Bill’s seeing to him.’

      Even so, one did not leave one’s employees in agony, however much of a fix they had left one in through their carelessness. Bree marched through the hay-store door and was profoundly grateful to see there was no sign of blood and Johnnie Todd was neither fainting nor shrieking in agony.

      ‘He’ll do.’ Bill Potter, one of the ostlers and the nearest they had to a farrier on the premises, got to his feet and walked her back firmly out of the door. ‘Doctor will fix him up, never you fret, Miss Bree.’

      That was good, but it didn’t solve the problem of the Bath coach. ‘I’ll drive it.’ Piers bounded up. ‘Please?’

      ‘Certainly not! It’s one hundred and eight miles.’ Bree knew the mileages to their destinations, and all the stops along the way, without even having to think about it. ‘The most you’ve ever driven is twenty.’

      ‘Yes, but I don’t have to drive all the way, do I?’ Piers protested as they walked back to the office.

      ‘What?’ Bree broke off from wondering if she could possibly send round to one of the rival yards and borrow a driver. But that put one in debt …

      ‘Johnnie

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