Page 31 of Who’s That Earl

“Dougan,” he said, lifting the corner of a tarp the merest fraction of an inch with the tip of one finger, “would you happen t’ ken what’s—?”

Dougan dropped his currycomb, which hit the straw-strewn stable floor with a dull thud. “Och, nay, lad,” he exclaimed, eyes starting from his head. Thomas couldn’t immediately decide whether the man was denying knowledge of what was hidden in the stall or warning him away from further exploration.

Either way, Thomas’s curiosity was ignited. He gripped a fistful of the coarse, dusty fabric.

Dougan took a step closer. “Mrs. Higginbotham wouldna like that.”

Mrs. Higginbotham? He thought of all Jane had already told him. What else was she hiding?

“I promise you, I’ll bear the brunt of her wrath,” Thomas vowed, giving a sharp tug. No time like the present to begin his role as laird of the castle.

The first tarp slid onto the stable floor in a mud-colored puddle of holland cloth, revealing the dashboard and tongue of a carriage. A curricle, to be precise. The shadows were too thick to determine much more.

He reached for one of the two remaining tarps, and Dougan began to wring his hands. When the second tarp fell away, the third gave up its feeble attempts to shield the curricle from prying eyes and dropped in a heap. A cloud of dust and chaff billowed upward, and the tabby cat, which had worked up the courage to poke her whiskers from her hiding place in the crevice between two stalls, darted to safety again.

Thomas could not prevent a low whistle of astonishment. “Well, what have we here?”

The racing curricle, its wheels and body a glossy red trimmed out with black, would have been the envy of every buck from Balisaig to Brighton. Even in the feeble light filtering into the corner of the stable, it gleamed. Somehow, he could not imagine such a flashy equipage had belonged to the late Lord Magnus. Which left only one obvious suspect: a profligate novelist with, as Thomas had already noted, a flair for the dramatic. Oh, yes. This curricle had Robin Ratliff written all over it.

But why hadn’t Ratliff driven it to Edinburgh? The uncertain weather, perhaps. Or a not ill-founded fear of attracting the wrong sort of attention. Highwaymen would expect its driver to be worth a pretty penny, to say nothing of the value of the curricle itself.

Then again, Thomas could see no sign that the man kept horses for it. And not just any horses would do. A matched pair, black of course, well-bred and highly fed, the care of which would probably be more than poor old Dougan could handle.

As if he could read the direction of Thomas’s thoughts, the old gatekeeper bent and plucked up a corner of one of the tarps, fingering it uncertainly. “Mrs. Higginbotham isn’t going to like this at all,” he moaned.

“Well, now. And who’s going to tell her?” Thomas slapped the man’s shoulder and offered his widest grin.

“Och, she’ll ken. Even if you’re careful, she’ll take one look at the way the tarps lie and see they’ve been moved. An’ heaven help ye if ye’ve scratched the paint.” Dougan shook his head mournfully, as if Thomas might as well accept his fate and present himself to the executioner accordingly.

Thomas was only half-listening. Though not much of one for road races, he was finding it difficult not to wonder how well the curricle handled and how fast it could go. Whether anyone in the vicinity had a pair of horses they might let him borrow, just for an afternoon.

“Come, lad,” Dougan insisted, shaking off Thomas’s hand. He gathered up a tarp in his arms, and with a reluctant sigh, Thomas helped him spread it over the curricle, once more hiding it from view.

After they had replaced the third tarp, Dougan stepped back and passed a critical eye over their work. Again he shook his head despairingly. “She’ll ken. Just ye wait an’ see.”

“And what then? I did no more than look. Surely, Mr. Ratliff can’t object to that.”

“Eh?”

“Mr. Ratliff, the writer. The one who rents Dunnock. The one who owns this curricle.”

Dougan’s look conveyed quite clearly that though he knew folks called him “soft in t’ head,” he regarded Thomas’s head as softer still. “It’s Mrs. Higginbotham’s rig. Ha’n’t ye heard a word I’ve said?”

“No, Dougan,” Thomas corrected with a laugh. “She does a good many things on Mr. Ratliff’s behalf, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he ordered her to check on his curricle from time to time—though why he doesn’t just drive the thing himself, I canna guess. But she’s his employee. And a lady. She wouldn’t…”

His protests were growing feebler as the shake of Dougan’s head grew more pronounced. “Mrs. Higginbotham drove that there curricle through the castle gates an’ told me tae see that none other ever touched it,” he said. “Right smart, she looked.”

Thomas could well imagine. Too well. The color in her cheeks, the blazing look of triumph.

He was tempted to continue to insist on the impossibility of it all. But the morning had provided him with other evidence that Ratliff was an uncommonly generous and trusting employer. In fact, Thomas had never heard the like.

Mrs. Higginbotham’s name on the post.

Mrs. Higginbotham’s skittish spaniels underfoot.

And now Mrs. Higginbotham’s red racing curricle...

Of course, the name was a fiction. Jane had just confessed to inventing Mr. Higginbotham out of whole cloth.