Sylvie laughed, watching them. “I think little Josephine just made a conquest.”
“Indeed,” Mayne said, watching how Josie’s curls were flying as Tallboys swept her around. She was laughing and laughing. Tallboys was a bit young for her. Couldn’t be more than four-and-twenty.
Which was just the right age.
Sylvie moved forward and Tallboys instantly came to a halt and gave a boyish bow. “You must forgive me,” he said, “I’m afraid that Miss Essex and I were overcome by the exuberance of the occasion.”
Sylvie dimpled at him and Mayne watched, expecting him to get an eager glint in his eye on hearing Sylvie’s charming accent. “An enchanting show of enthusiasm,” she was saying. “Perhaps you had made a feather on the race, hmmm?”
“Took a flutter,” Mayne corrected her. “Tallboys, your servant.”
Tallboys didn’t seem to have understood Sylvie. He had turned back directly to Josie and had pulled out his race book. “You see,” he said, “her name is Firebrand. It’s a good name, isn’t it, Miss Essex?”
“I think she was too delicate to be a firebrand,” Josie said. “Did you see how she flicked her ears after she slowed down? As if she knew she had won and was laughing.”
“She certainly knew she won; a good horse always does.”
“Some of my father’s horses became quite dejected when they lost.” And then they were off, talking of Josie’s father’s stables.
Sylvie turned back to Mayne. “I think Lord Tallboys has found a new passion in life,” she whispered. “He will give Skevington some stiff competition.”
“Do you think so?” Mayne felt as crotchety as a man of sixty. “He’s quite young.”
“They can play together, like two kittens.”
To Mayne’s mind, the way Tallboys was looking at Josie had nothing to do with kittens. “We must return to the box now,” he said, pointedly not issuing Tallboys an invitation.
Tallboys was an inane fool, though he’d never noticed it before. It was a wonder that Josie had laughed at his pitiful comments. She sounded as delighted as if she were talking to Prinny himself.
It was irritating to find oneself behaving like as much as a fool as Tallboys. He’d never liked it in others, and he was too honest not to notice the same stupidity in himself. The truth of it is, Mayne told himself, that you are engaged and yet you don’t feel quite engaged. He always thought that engagements were a matter of stolen kisses and sudden meetings of eyes.
Of course, he’d done all the business of stolen kisses in the past, and he didn’t want a wife who was as light-skirted as the women he’d slept with. He had to make up his mind. Either he wanted to exchange kisses with his fiancée or he didn’t.
Josie was trailing along behind Sylvie and Mayne, who seemed to be in a rather irritable mood, when suddenly a voice in her ear said, “Miss Essex?”
And when she turned in that direction, there was a portly young man smiling down at her as if he knew her very well.
She knew his face but she couldn’t place it, so she said, “Good afternoon, sir.”
“We met at a ball last week. I’m Mr. Eliot Thurman. May I take your arm?” he asked.
Mayne was continuing without her, so she did take his arm. And then before she knew it, they had wandered off in quite a different direction than Tess’s box, toward the tents where they were serving refreshments.
She went along rather listlessly. After all, did it matter? Mayne was in love with his passionless fiancée, to whom Josie was beginning to take quite a dislike. Griselda had left with Darlington, and if Josie thought that there should be limits to how close one grows to the enemy, well, Griselda had not asked her.
If only Annabel had come to Ascot! But Annabel didn’t want to bring Samuel into these crowds; Imogen was on her wedding trip; Tess was in Northumberland with her husband…Josie sighed. Then she roused herself. She might as well try to be polite.
“Do you have a horse entered in a race, Mr. Thurman?” she asked.
“No, I have not,” he answered. “My mother says that a gentleman must have an occupation. I’m a little too lazy for something as strenuous as smoking tobacco, so I devote myself to betting.” And he broke into a great peal of laughter: “Haw, haw, haw!”
Josie felt as if she must have missed something. “Your mother thought you ought to smoke tobacco…as an occupation?”
“It’s a jest,” he said to her with a shading of disapproval in his voice.
Last time she heard it, jests were supposed to be funny. Or at least make sense.
They had walked quite beyond the tents, into the formal gardens that ringed the stables and the racetrack. “I suppose we should return,” she said, stooping to examine the primroses. But someone had made a mistake and planted evening primroses and most of them were shut up against the sun.
But Mr. Thurman paused and made an odd little noise with his throat. Josie looked at him. He did it again. Suddenly Josie had the alarmed thought that he might be having a fit of some kind. People who had that sort of sodden red color high in their cheeks were prone to seizures of the heart, or so she’d heard. She frowned at him. Surely she knew that face, and in some unpleasant context too—
A second later she realized that Thurman was having an attack of a different kind, as he pulled her into his arms and pressed his lips to hers. They were surprisingly cool and rather flabby. For a moment Josie was frozen in surprise, but then he forced a plump tongue between her lips and she began struggling to get loose.
He was surprisingly strong. Before she realized it, he had backed her under the overhanging roof of the stable. Josie felt as if she were watching from the outside: watching another girl—some other girl, not herself—struggle against the man who had her pinned against the wall. He was rolling his tongue in her mouth so that she was almost choking. Suddenly she felt her dress catch on a spur in the boards behind her and rip. She started struggling, kicking him over and over in the shins, but she was wearing slippers, and he had his feet planted solidly. She tried to kick higher, but her dress was narrow and confined her movement. She managed to wrench sideways, away from him.
He pulled back for a moment and said, “You’re a feisty one.” His voice was thick, as if he were drunk. Josie filled her lungs to scream but he clamped his mouth over hers again and she almost suffocated. And then she realized to her horror that the rip in her gown was widening. If she didn’t get away it might fall clean off her body.
If she didn’t—
So she did.
She raised her leg in one quick and smooth motion and planted her knee squarely in the groin that had been rubbing itself all over her dress. His hands loosed her arms instantly and she staggered to the side, hearing her dress rip on the rough boards again so that she could feel air on her back.
He staggered back, bent over, his voice coming in a high wheezy rasp. “You damned—damned—”
Josie turned to run—of course she should run!—but then her eye caught the back door of the stables. In order to keep the stalls clean and sweet-smelling for the visitors who would be wandering through the stables, the grooms had been diligently throwing refuse out the back door. Presumably someone would haul it away in the morning, but now—