Games of Pleasure by Julia Ross Page A

about with animal pens, lay beyond the crossroads between the turnpike and the green track. She shaded her eyes and stared. Though she couldn’t see it, she could guess the name of this smaller, shabbier inn: the Drovers’ Arms.
    Miracle pulled a little knife out of her pocket, one of her small remaining treasures purchased so dearly at the Merry Monarch, and hiked her skirts up over her knees. Her boots were mired in mud, but the meadow in front of her glimmered with wildflowers. She would cut ribbons from her petticoat to tie posies to sell to travelers. Her heart ran cold at the risk if she was discovered, but she had to buy food now, or starve.
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    RYDER’S coach pulled into the yard of the White Swan. Ostlers looked with envy at his outriders’ smart livery and his splendid team of horses. Wherever he stopped, the business of the inn was deformed by his arrival, like tiny satellites falling under the gravitational sway of a large planet. Once again he stepped down into the center of a whirlwind of service and repeated the litany he had been intoning since London.
    â€œA lady in a brown habit riding a bald-faced chestnut gelding. The horse has a white patch like a map of Ireland on its rump.”
    Grooms shrugged. Servants tugged at forelocks. The host hurried out to wait in person on such a distinguished traveler. Ryder swallowed brandy while the horses were changed. No one had seen her. No one had seen the horse.
    He had just spun about to step back up into his coach, when another traveler stepped forward. The stranger glanced at the crest on the coach panels—the writhing dragon dying beneath the spear of St. George—and saluted him.
    â€œKenneth Blake, my lord, at your service! I was unable to avoid overhearing your inquiries. You will forgive my presumption, I’m sure? It may be another animal altogether, of course, but I could swear that I saw just such a gelding earlier this afternoon at the horse market in the next town, some ten miles farther up the road.”
    Ryder’s heart began to pound. “Ridden by a lady, sir?”
    â€œAlas, no, my lord. Offered for sale by a couple of ne’er-do-well characters—out-and-out ruffians, I would say—but the horse carried a sidesaddle and was marked exactly as you describe. I took a quick look at the nag for my daughter, but the man selling it didn’t seem to know much of its history. I thought it rather odd at the time.”
    Rank fear made Ryder physically ill for a moment, as if steel pincers had closed inside his gut. He thanked Mr. Blake and issued orders. His coach swung from the inn yard. The fresh horses plunged on toward Bristol at a gallop.
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    EVENING was closing in, cloaking the overhanging balcony in its gray veils. The painted swan on the sign curled its head back over one wing, as if to wink at passing travelers.
    Miracle swallowed hard and walked up to stand in the arched entry to the inn yard. She curtsied and kept her head down as she offered her flowers to everyone going in and out. “For your lady wife, kind sir! For your daughter.”
    She had already sold enough to buy a supper and a length of ribbon. Tomorrow she would make more posies. Perhaps wildflowers would take her all the way to Derbyshire. Meanwhile, she had only a few bunches left for sale and it was getting late.
    â€œOdd thing that,” a man said to his companion as he strolled out into the street. “One wouldn’t think that any member of the peerage would go to such lengths to hunt down such an ordinary animal.”
    His friend grinned. “Unless the peer in question was Irish, with a sentimental attachment to an animal with a map of his homeland on its rump—”
    â€œâ€”or an even deeper attachment to the missing lady in the brown habit?”
    Both men laughed and walked on.
    Her last few bunches of flowers fell at Miracle’s feet.
    Another gentleman had walked out of the