In the next breath the carriage struck a bump, throwing them up and back down. She scrunched her face and winced at a telling jingle from the box.
Two thousand pounds. It would weigh half as much as a man, and Miss Blake had handfuls of strange, unscrupulous men hefting it about with the same circumspection as she might a butchered hog.
Patrick stared at the case, the last of his resolve crumbling. "There must be someone in London who looks for you, someone who will worry now that you've disappeared."
She stared at her lap, one hand worrying a small thread on her other glove. "Mister Lochner, my grandfather's solicitor. He sees to the payments and such things. But I don't believe he gives a fig if I come or go. Not so long as he gets his share."
Patrick ached at how forlorn she sounded. "No one to look after you?"
"No," she whispered, head shaking. "No one."
"What is your age, Miss Blake?"
"Eighteen," she muttered. Then, catching his narrowed eyes, she cleared her throat. "In July."
Twenty-four had never felt so ancient as it did in that moment.
Exhaling slowly, he glanced from her pooling blue eyes to the chest and back, a mix of worry and greed warring within him. "We'd go our separate ways?" he muttered finally.
A smile and a nod.
"And what happens when you meet your dark baron?" Divorce was almost as rare as sightings of fabled Scottish water serpents; he wondered if she'd included that dark aspect in her fairytale.
"Oh," she breathed, leaning in again, "we wouldn't really be married! More of an arrangement. And when you've made your fortune and I meet my perfect soul…" She swept her hands apart. "We could truly go our separate ways. I know it's a scandal, but no one knows us here. And so, we'd be free to go about our lives."
"It's a sin," he uttered, dumbstruck, "to be married to two people." Not that it had ever been of hefty concern to him; at least, not until now.
"An arrangement!" she insisted, wide-eyed. "It isn't a sin to buy tea for the pantry and visit a tea house all in the same afternoon. One is business and one is pleasure."
She smiled, and he gaped.
Patrick hated that any part of him was considering a scheme made up by a teenaged girl on a mad adventure. But the coins jingled and her wide helpless eyes went on staring, and he sighed. If her story were true, and she had come north all alone, he couldn't bear to leave her at the coach stop. Responsibility pricked his conscience, and he groaned. Knocking twice on the roof with his walking stick, he waited for the carriage to slow before sticking his head out. "Gretna Green," he called to their driver, wondering that his pride was worth two thousand pounds sterling.