Dread pooled in King’s stomach at the words. At the thought of the dark, cavernous coach. He blustered. “You’re afraid I’ll win again. That’s why you refuse to help me.”

Warnick shrugged one large shoulder. “No one ever said we were required to play fair.” And with a mighty “Hyah!” he was in motion, leaving the posting inn like a shot, a half-dozen other racers following him, leaving King in a cloud of dust. With nothing but a broken-down curricle, an empty carriage, and a seething desire for revenge.

Turning on one heel, King went looking for his coachman.

As it turned out, he was not through with Lady Sophie Talbot.

Chapter 5

MISTREATMENT BY MAIL:

NORTH ROAD? OR NORTH RUDE?

Mail coaches were decidedly uncomfortable.

Sophie shifted in her seat, doing her best to avoid eye contact with the legions of others piled around her in the once massive, now all-too-small conveyance. Unfortunately, there was very little room to shift, and even less to avoid eye contact.

The space was filled with women and children, none of whom seemed particularly interested in making conversation, despite the close quarters. Sophie met the gaze of a young woman across the small space between the benches of the coach. The woman looked down at her lap instantly.

“Oi!” a boy cried out as Sophie accidentally elbowed him, extracting a watch from the inside pocket of her livery.

“I do apologize,” she said.

He blinked up at her, then down at her watch. “Wot’s that?”

She looked down at him, surprised. “It’s a timepiece.”

“Wot’s it for?”

She wasn’t quite certain how to answer. “To tell the time?”

“Why?” This was from a small girl on the floor by Sophie’s feet. She craned to look at the watch face.

“To know how long it’s been since we left.”

“Why?”

Sophie returned her attention to the boy. “To know how close we are to our destination.”

The girl on the floor looked perplexed. “But won’t we get there when we get there?”

“Aye,” the boy said, crossing his arms and leaning back in his seat. “Seems a waste of time to think about how long it will take.”

Sophie had never met two more fatalistic children in her life.

Though, she had to admit, she wasn’t exactly telling the truth. She wasn’t simply curious about when they might arrive at the next stop along the mail coach’s route—she was calculating the distance between her and the Marquess of Eversley, who would no doubt be furious when he discovered that she’d sold his carriage wheels for coach fare north.

She highly doubted that he would believe that he deserved it.

Nor would he care that it was not theft, per se. She fully intended to pay him back.

But she had to get north, first.

North.

The decision had been made in the dead of the previous night, as she’d tried to sleep in the too-bright hayloft, beneath old newsprint that had been left for a makeshift blanket. Unable to find slumber, she’d sat up to find that the newspaper was a scandal sheet from several months earlier. DANGEROUS DAUGHTER DISCOVERED WITH DRURY’S DEREK shouted one headline, the story recounting a particularly scandalous moment in which Sesily was speculated to have been in the rafters at Derek Hawkins’s theater. SESILY SECRETLY SCANDALIZING STAR OF THE STAGE? questioned a second story. As though there were enough to say about the afternoon.

Which there wasn’t.

Sesily had been doing nothing scandalous that day. Sophie knew it, because she had been there as chaperone, listening to Derek Hawkins’s endless droning about his unparalleled talent, alternating between declaring himself “the greatest artist of our time” and “a genius for the ages.” At one point, the awful man had actually suggested he might be well considered for the role of Prime Minister. And he’d been serious.

The most brazen thing Sesily had done was to ask if Hawkins considered her his muse. To which he’d replied that he was beyond need of a muse; indeed, his muse came from within. He was his own odious, insufferable muse.

If there had been scandal that afternoon, Sophie might have found the whole experience more palatable.

But the gossip columns didn’t care for truth. They cared for TALBOT TATTLING, as the papers referred to the headlines about her sisters. And her sisters adored it. She recalled Sesily reading this particular article aloud.

Sophie, however, did not adore it. Instead, she had crumpled the paper with fervor and considered the options that lay before her. Not options. Option. Singular. Because the truth was that women in Britain in 1833 did not have options. They had the path upon which they tread. Upon which they were forced to tread. Upon which they were made to feel grateful they were forced to tread.

There she had stood in the pebbled drive of the Fox and Falcon, watching the Marquess of Eversley, portrait of superciliousness, march away from her, somehow impeccable even while missing a boot. And that man—a man so arrogant he called himself King—had made her decision for her.

She wasn’t returning to that path. She was forging her own.

North.

To the place where she had never been judged, where she had lived far from the threat of insult or injury or ruination. To the place she’d been allowed to be herself, not the plainest, least interesting, unfun Talbot sister, but simply Sophie, a little girl with dreams of being the proprietress of a bookshop.

She’d live out her days far from the glitter and gossip of London’s ballrooms, far from the scandal sheets, far from the aristocracy. And she would do so happily. Without men like the odious Marquess of Eversley setting the standard of right and proper.

She’d apprise her family of the decision and settle in Cumbria. Happily. Her father would send her funds and she’d begin her life, free from Society.

Happily.

She leaned back against a particularly uncomfortable case, the corner of which gouged into the back of her neck. Not that she cared. She was too busy imagining this new, fresh life. Away from the cold, uncaring eyes of Society.

She’d rent the rooms above one of the shops on the high road in Mossband. They would remember her there—they’d welcome her home. The haberdasher, the butcher, the baker. She wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Lander were still at the bakery—he with his wide smile and she with her wide hips—and if they still made breakfast buns laden with cinnamon and honey.

She wondered if Robbie was still there.

The baker’s son had been long and lean, with a winning smile and a teasing gleam in his eye. He’d been two years older than she, and her playmate in the afternoons, when he’d stolen away from the bakery with one of those buns, sticky and sweet, and they’d licked sugar from their fingers and whiled away the hours until supper with plans for the future.

They would marry, Robbie had promised her when they were too young to understand the meaning in the word. One day, he would be the Mossband baker, and she the woman who ran the bookshop. And they would rise before the sun and work a full, happy day, the smell of those buns clinging to hair and clothes and books.

It had taken Sophie no time to decide that without the yoke of London and the ton, she would have that bookshop. Her father would send her funds, and she would make Mossband the most lettered town in the North Country. There wasn’t a bookshop for miles—books had arrived by post from London when she was a child, or had been purchased in bulk when her father traveled to Newcastle to negotiate coal prices. He’d always remembered “his girlies,” as he liked to refer to his daughters, and he’d returned with gifts for them all—hair ribbons for Seraphina, elaborate clothes for Seleste’s dolls, silk threads in every possible color for Sesily, sweets for Seline. But for Sophie, it was books.