The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton by Miranda Neville Page B

several miles to the nearest mail stop or post road. Nevertheless, someone there should be able to point them in the right direction. Perhaps they could even beg a ride in a cart with the promise of reward at the other end. Celia assured him that Mrs. Stewart would take care of things. Best of all, the inhabitants there, however poor and rustic, had to eat.
    A disadvantage of livestock was the gifts of dung they left in the fields. By the time they scrambled over the last stone wall at the end of the village street—if the single narrow earthen track could be so dubbed—his feet were soiled by substances he’d rather not identify. He wondered if the place would run to the comfort of a hot bath. Without ready money it seemed unlikely. Still, he was prepared to exercise the considerable powers of persuasion that instinct told him he possessed.
    He never had the chance.
    A small child emerged from one of the buildings, stared at the pair of them, and started to cry.
    “Gypsies, Ma!” the urchin shrieked.
    Half a dozen doors burst open to release a crowd of women, children, a couple of men, and several dogs. All were barking, shouting (the people) and waving sticks (again the people). At them.
    “Be gone! You dirty heathens.”
    “Stealing varmints.”
    “Horse thieves!” That one rankled.
    He made one attempt at reasonable discourse. “Good people, we are not Gypsies. We are the victims of robbery.”
    The dictum that a soft word turneth away wrath was proven eminently false.
    “Set the dogs on them!”
    The dogs, each one large and loud with enormous teeth, didn’t need any setting. At least six were headed in their direction.
    He grabbed Celia’s hand. “Run!”
    He learned that he could run fast and so could she. Only a slight moderation of his pace was needed and she kept up. Not that the hounds snapping at their heels couldn’t have caught them. But once clear of the hamlet their owners called them back. No one was looking for trouble.
    Celia collapsed on the grass, emitting great gasps of breath. She’d done well but with the danger passed she appeared to be suffering an attack of the vapors. Perhaps she was terrified of dogs. Kneeling, he took one shoulder in a firm grasp and raised her chin with his other hand. “Listen, my dear. We are safe now. The dogs have gone.”
    She shrieked. With laughter. She was laughing.
    “What, may I ask, is so amusing about our current predicament? I for one am disappointed not to be enjoying a meal, a bath, and a carriage.”
    That set her off even worse. He sat back on his heels, stared at the sky, and waited for the restoration of her wits. A final splutter, a quick back of the hand over her wet eyes, and she looked almost rational. He raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
    “It’s you. Being mistaken for a Gypsy. It’s so funny.”
    “Not just I. You were too.”
    “But I am a kind of Gypsy, if you think about it. A wanderer, anyway. But not you. You are such a very proper man.”
    He still didn’t understand what merited such excessive mirth. Mildly amusing, he’d call it, at best. Even if he were a very proper man, a fact he had every reason to doubt.
    She stood up. “Come on, Terence, let’s go.”
    By Zeus, he hated that name. But until his memory returned it was the only one he had.

Chapter 7
     
Beware of Greeks following bloodhounds.
     
    N ick Constantine despised the countryside. He been born in a Greek village and once he reached London, after a few years’ detour around the oceans as a sailor on a ship of dubious legality, he’d left the comfort of fog and pavement as rarely as possible. The Governor had brought him to this benighted part of northern England for what promised to be an easy job. How hard could it be to snatch and rob a governess?
    But everything had gone wrong. He blamed the rolling moors and rocks and endless green stuff. The way he figured it, if God had intended man to live in the wilderness, He would never have created pavement. The