Page 103 of The Traitor
***
Milly wore an old frock, one stored in the trunks Alcorn and Frieda had apparently not found in the attic. With Giles beside her in his everyday dress, they were just another young couple, tooling about in a dog cart, likely going into Town to visit relations or do some afternoon shopping.
She had waited the entire morning and even into afternoon, as Sebastian had suggested—not ordered—and her only course remained to return to her husband.
Though she was still angry with him. One heart-wrenching note did not a marriage repair. She understood better now why separate bedrooms might have some appeal, though the thought rankled.
“Traffic be a right bear,” Giles said. “Makes a man miss the village.”
“Would you rather work at St. Clair Manor, Giles?”
As he handled the reins with the competence of a country-bred man, Giles’s ears turned red. “The city ain’t so bad.”
Milly recalled his affection for one of the maids, and had the happy thought that being Sebastian’s baroness required skills other than reading menus or arguing with one’s spouse. Two servants could transfer households as easily as one, provided the young lady was willing.
As the cart rattled from Knightsbridge to the shady perimeter of Hyde Park, Milly admitted she was not traveling into London because she was ready to forgive and forget. She was ready to listen, and to be listened to.
Which might not be enough.
“Mayfair has some of the widest streets in London, and yet the traffic here is some of the worst. Makes no sense a’tall,” Giles groused.
“We’ll be home soon,” Milly said, and part of her could not wait to see her husband again, while another part of her dreaded a difficult confrontation.
Giles slowed the cart to accommodate a dray turning across an intersection before them. “What do you suppose Lady Freddy be doing out strolling without the professor?”
Milly pulled her thoughts off the speech she would deliver to her husband and followed Giles’s gesture with the whip. Lady Freddy was indeed on the arm of a strange man, or rather…
The fellow was portly, well dressed, and fairly dragging Freddy along by the elbow. Because the couple was across the way and up the street, Milly did not shout out a greeting to Sebastian’s aunt.
When she might have waved, she checked the impulse. Cold slithered down her spine, the same cold she’d experienced reading Alcorn’s helpful little note. Sebastian’s enemies were loose in London itself, and would use any means to harm him.
“I think he has a weapon pressed to her side, Giles. Lady Freddy’s in danger. His lordship warned me—”
“Then we’d best get help,” Giles said, asking the horse to pick up its pace.
“No, Giles. That fellow will make off with Freddy, and we’ll never find her. Turn the cart when next you can and then hop out. You alert his lordship.”
Giles’s expression went from affable footman happily in service, to sturdy young fellow not about to countenance foolery. “His lordship won’t like it, milady. He’ll sack me, and properly so.”
“His lordship will not like his aunt being carried off to France, or the war office, or wherever that man is taking her. I am the Baroness St. Clair, and I am ordering you to do as I say.”
Giles did not slow the cart.
“Please, Giles. I’ll be careful. Dressed as I am, I’m just another village girl about my business, and nobody will remark this cart.” Up the street, the man escorting Lady Freddy turned her down a side street. “I’ll follow them. All I’ll do is follow them. Tell his lordship that.”
Giles passed her the reins. “I’ll expect a decent character from you when he sacks me.”
“A glowing character, and he won’t sack you.”
Giles was out of the cart before the horse had halted. He loped off in the direction of the St. Clair town house, while Milly clucked to the horse and tried to look as if she drove unescorted through the streets of Mayfair as a matter of course.
The fiction was barely supportable, but as she followed Aunt Freddy and her dubious companion northward, the traffic became less fashionable and neighborhoods became less grand.
Also utterly unfamiliar.
***
“Describe the man with my aunt.” Sebastian saw the effect his captain-of-the-guard inflection had on his footman, and tried for a more moderate tone. “Giles, your position is not in jeopardy, but my aunt, and very likely my baroness, are. Was the fellow well dressed?”
