The warmth from the hearth in her room could not dispel the cold knot of frustration within her breast. She thought of the overturned cart, of the possibility that someone had been hurt while she sat in her comfortable carriage and did nothing. Or worse, that they might have injured someone as they flew through the scene. She thought of Mrs. Hobart’s assumption that her safety was worth more than anyone else’s welfare and knew it was absolutely untrue.
If this was what it meant to be a princess—to ignore those in need for the sake of some imagined danger, to be isolated from ordinary humancontact, to value consequence above compassion—then she doubted very much that she would like it at all.
Elizabeth drew her shawl closer and wondered if the man with the dark eyes had managed to clear the road safely, and whether the injured person had received the help they needed.
She pondered, too, whether she would spend the rest of her life concerned about such things while being carefully preserved from an opportunity to do anything about them.
Chapter Four
The snow was not content to descend in picturesque flakes; it was coming down in battalions. There would be no traveling any farther tonight. Darcy stepped down from his carriage into the yard of a small country inn and turned up his collar against the cold that was biting clean through his greatcoat.
This was not the inn at which he had intended to stop, only the one closest to where the accident had taken place. The swinging sign, an ambitious lion that had lost most of its gilding, creaked upon its iron bracket; the yard was a churn of snow, slush, and hoof-prints; two ill-trimmed lanterns hanging on either side of the front entrance guttered and smoked.
Nevertheless, the storm had rendered the roads treacherous, the daylight was long gone thanks to the delay, and Anders had said, as respectfully as possible, that any further miles would be foolishness.
Darcy was cold, hungry, and in no humour to argue.
The inn door opened upon a wash of heat and the cheerful confusion of a common room. The scent of roasted meat lingered in the air, and a fire sent a ruddy glow across the sanded floor. He stamped the snow from his boots, removed his hat, and approached the bar.
The innkeeper, a man whose high colour suggested a long and affectionate intimacy with his own merchandise, bustled out from behind a row of pewter tankards.
“Welcome, sir! Welcome! A night like this, we are all friends together. You are fortunate indeed to have reached the Lion before the drifts grew worse. The roads will not be passable by morning unless the Lord takes pity on us.”
“I require lodging for my men and a chamber for myself,” Darcy said, tugging at a damp glove-finger with icy hands, “and supper.”
The innkeeper’s smile broadened. “Lodging for the servants, of course sir. And a chamber, to be sure,” said the man, “though I must own it is not our best. We are nearly full, sir. Full to the rafters. We have a very distinguished guest in residence, and she has taken up the entire third floor, you see.”
Darcy repressed a sigh. “Any room will do. As for supper—"
“Ah! Supper.” Here the innkeeper’s face arranged itself into an expression of pained satisfaction, the look of a man who has received a great honour that has ruined him. “Your timing is unfortunate, sir. Our distinguished guest and her attendants had the goodness to approve the cook’s efforts with such enthusiasm that there is little left to set before another gentleman. There may be a bit of bread and some cheese, perhaps a little soup if the boy has not taken it to the upper parlour, and ale, certainly. But as for joints, pies, or a proper dish, I must candidly confess—”
“You have nothing.”
“Nothing at all, sir. The princess”—he lowered his voice to a rolling whisper—“the princess’s companion and coachmen had quite an appetite.”
Darcy’s brows drew together. “The . . . whom, did you say?”
“The princess, sir. A real one, from foreign parts. A Thurnian princess.”
Darcy would have laughed aloud were he not so cold and hungry.
He and Fitzwilliam had befriended Prince Adrian of Thurnia while at Cambridge. Darcy had frequently heard him lament that his country had princes enough to shoe the horses with them but not a single princess to speak of. The notion that one of these mythical beings had now appeared, in disguise, at a country inn in the middle of a January snowstorm was beyond absurd.
A clever woman had discovered that English innkeepers were as susceptible as anyone to a royal title and was exploiting it with full effect: arriving under a cloud of mystery, letting the whisper spread, and then, of course, warning people that her identity was a secret while enjoying every last comfort that identity afforded.
Darcy could almost admire the neatness of the plan if it did not promise to inconvenience him.
“Indeed,” he said aloud, keeping his tone bland. “And does she travel with a train of courtiers as well?”
“Well, she has her companion, and her driver, and a few others. Foreign royalty, sir. They are travelling rather”—he leaned forward, sounding out the word by syllable as though it was new to him—“incognito, sir.”
“I see,” Darcy replied, though what he saw was a well-practised imposture, and a host taken in by it. “Be so good as to show me the chamber.”
The innkeeper took up a key and led the way up a narrow stair edged with a rope in place of a rail. The house creaked comfortably about them; doors opened, voices rose and fell, a serving girl darted past with a tray of crockery. The innkeeper halted at a door at the very end of a passage so narrow that a man Darcy’s size could scarcely pass without brushing his shoulders against the plaster.
He opened a door upon a small square room that had, Darcy thought acidly, just avoided being a cupboard. There was a bed, very modest in itsdimensions, certainly too short for his tall frame; a rickety chest of drawers; a washstand with a cracked jug; and a chair that would, Darcy feared, collapse utterly beneath any man who weighed more than a feather. There was also a grate in which a little fire was doing its best to defend the room against the cold.
“This is your chamber, sir,” the innkeeper said with pride.