Miss Weston's Masquerade Read Online Free Page B

team.
    ‘What, m’lud? Not taking me? Who’ll sort the ’orses out?’
    ‘I think I'm capable of giving simple instructions to ostlers, Jem. You can follow tomorrow and bring the team back from the Shoulder of Mutton at Dartford. Get up, er, Cass.’
    Cassandra scrambled up to sit beside him.
    ‘Cross your arms and sit up straight,’ Nicholas hissed out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Let them go, Jem.’
    The team was fresh and enough of a handful to occupy Nicholas’s attention for the first ten minutes as he negotiated the thronged streets leading to Piccadilly and Green Park. Sitting up straight as she’d been ordered, Cassandra hardly knew where to look first. The quiet streets had been transformed into bustling life, so crowded she wondered that the traffic was moving at all.
    Carriages of all kinds wove their way around tradesmen with barrows, a man was driving pigs, a broken-down hackney carriage with the wheel off half blocked the street while two coachmen quarrelled over who had caused the accident…
    ‘Look at that beautiful lady, Nicholas.’ She uncrossed her arms to tug at his sleeve. ‘Oh, I wish I had a dress like that.’
    Nicholas glanced in the direction she was pointing and snapped, ‘Sit still and cross your arms! And don’t gawp.’
    ‘But I’ve never seen a gown like that, so daring. How does she make it cling so?’
    ‘Never you mind,’ Nicholas said grimly, swearing under his breath as a coalman shot a load of coal noisily down a cellar chute making the wheelers shy. ‘No woman walking the streets unaccompanied is any better than she should be. And I am beginning to think that a fresh team and Cassandra Weston in combination are more than any man should have to deal with at once.’
    ‘Oh, Nicholas, is that the Banqueting Hall?’ Cassandra was too excited to be crushed by his irritation. ‘Slow down, please, I want to look at it.’ She was swept up by the exhilaration of being driven through London, seeing before her eyes all the sights she had read about.
    ‘Perhaps you would like me to stop and buy you a guidebook?’ he enquired politely.
    ‘I wish you would. Papa has Mr Pennant’s London . If I had thought, I would have brought it with me, for Papa swears by it as a guide.’
    ‘Cassandra, I have no intention of sightseeing, gawping at streetwalkers, visiting bonnet shops, calling on the Prince Regent or any of the other diversions you seem to have in mind. Now, you tiresome child, you will sit still and be quiet, or I will set you down on London Bridge and you may throw yourself in the Thames or walk home to Ware as you wish.’
    They both subsided into smouldering silence. Cassandra waited until Nicholas had turned the team onto the bridge, before she ventured, ‘Do you regret bringing me?’

Chapter Three
     
    ‘I must have been mad,’ Nicholas said grimly.
    Cassandra shot him a glare and sniffed defiantly.
    Poor brat, he thought with a surge of unwelcome sympathy. She was fighting not to let him see she was almost on the verge of tears. She was tired, she was frightened and the sights of London were probably a welcome distraction.
    ‘Don’t sniff, child. I don’t allow Jem to sniff, and besides, your nose is getting pink.’ Nicholas smiled at her, his irritation suddenly gone, as they passed the new obelisk in St George’s Circus. ‘If you want to sightsee, how about that magnificent building on our left?’
    ‘What is it?’ Cassandra craned to look.
    ‘The King’s Bench Prison.’
    She shuddered and averted her gaze from the grim walls, her appetite for sights disappearing no doubt vanishing. The team settled down to their work and soon the wide streets of Southwark were behind them, Greenwich and Blackheath with their palace and parkland were past and the horses were breasting the long pull of Shooters Hill at a steady trot.
    ‘Are there highwaymen?’ she asked, gazing at the thick wood which grew right down to the road edge and inching closer to