“Watch your step!”

  A strong hand gripped her shoulder, pulling her back from the edge of a small hole where the ground dropped away in front of her.

  Mary staggered back from the broken earth, where several rocks and a good bit of soft dirt had sunken down a half dozen feet, most likely shifted by the last several days of rain. Mr. Beechum’s hand still held her shoulder, his fingers gripping her tightly, as though his own panic had yet to fade. She felt the solidity of his abdomen against the back of her head, the quickness of his breathing. “I didn’t see.”

  “Neither did I.” He moved back, the tramp of his hooves louder than usual on the forest floor. “Are you all right?”

  “I am still in possession of all my limbs,” she replied, and tried to laugh. But the laugh came out as more of a hiccup, and the absence of him standing behind her left her feeling strangely bereft. “Onward, then. And with better attention paid to the ground, I suppose.”

  They fell back into silence after that. Mr. Beechum walked ahead of her again, pausing to check the stability of the ground with his forelegs when it gave evidence of being less than stable. Mary caught herself lingering near the edge of the brook from time to time, watching the water ripple over stones that glinted like precious metals in the morning sun.

  Though the morning sun soon began to feel like the midday sun, and Mary glared up at the sky, or what pockets of it she could see through the swaying branches far above.

  “I’m hungry,” she said suddenly. Her feet had begun to hurt as well, and her head itched beneath her bonnet as though the thing was filled with ants. “May we stop here for a bit?” She phrased it as a question, even though she had already sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree and plunked her bag on her lap, opening it in search of her buns and dried apples. She retrieved two of the buns — slightly squashed, but still soft and carrying a pleasing, yeasty aroma — and held out one of them to Mr. Beechum. “It’s not much, but as you don’t have anything…”

  He nodded once and accepted the food from her. They ate in companionable silence, Mary pulling her bun to pieces before she popped each buttery shred into her mouth.

  “How much further, do you think?” Mary asked once she’d finished and wiped her hands on her already filthy skirt.

  Mr. Beechum looked in the direction they had already been heading, his gaze narrowing at something she could not see. If indeed, there was anything to see beyond the endless rows of trees and nature. “I expect another mile or so, perhaps. We should reach the border of the forest before too much longer. And then it should be a short way further towards Leeds.”

  She closed up her bag and stared up at him, or at the back of his head. “You don’t sound particularly certain. Yet earlier you said it was six miles to Leeds.”

  “And I believe it is.”

  “You believe it, or it definitely is? There’s quite a difference there.”

  He turned around, careful not to step on her bag or whip her in the face with his agitated tail. “Miss Clegg, I simply—”

  “You’re lost, aren’t you?”

  He drew in a deep breath. If there was to be a speech to follow it, Mary expected something of epic proportions to be conveyed on the forthcoming exhalation. “I am…” he began, and floundered to a halt. But then he cleared his throat and had another go at it. “I am not lost.”

  “Really?” Mary fiddled with the ties of her bonnet, fighting with the knot until one ribbon shredded and she yanked the thing off her head. A few pins came with it, but she snatched them up and stuck them back into the bun at the nape of her neck with special vehemence. “How then did you come to find yourself in the woods, Mr. Beechum?”

  “As I said, I was completing some survey work for the railroad, measuring the shortest distance from Leeds to Millcross, when I happened to… Well, it was only a few yards from the road, and then I discovered you—”

  “I do not think you can lay the blame for your disorientation at my feet.”

  “I did not say that,” he said, his voice considerably gruffer than before. “But it was as though one moment I had my things down on the ground beside me, my coat and my hat, my satchel, and then…”

  “And then,” she echoed, as though there was nothing else to say beyond those two words. She crumpled the edge of her bonnet between her hands and considered tossing it into the brook, allowing nature to tear it to pieces and the birds to use its fragments as foundations for their nests. Instead, she opened her bag again, stuffed the battered millinery inside, and felt a good deal more brave with the sun shining down on her head and no doubt manufacturing a few freckles on her cheeks. “But you believe Leeds is that way?” She indicated the direction they’d been following with a pert jut of her chin.

  Mr. Beechum nodded. “Unless the sun has decided to reverse its course through the sky, then yes. I do.”

  Mary stood up. Bonnet-less, glove-less, but with an unprecedented reserve of patience, considering the circumstances. The coach from Leeds had already left some time before. There would be others, of course, but the fact that the very first stage of her plan had unraveled so quickly was enough to make her laugh. Or cry. So instead she put herself in the odd place in-between the two, where she could only trudge persistently forward with a wave of ambivalence filling her sails. “We’ll follow the water,” she said, picking up her bag again, enjoying the tangible weight of it in her hand. “It must lead us somewhere eventually.”

  “The sea, more than likely.”

  She looked up at Mr. Beechum. It was an echo of her own thought, from hours before. “I’m sorry about all this,” she told him.

  His gaze caught hers. There was definitely a ring of hazel around his pupils, she noticed. “It is hardly your fault.”

  “You did accuse me of being a witch.”

  “I said you looked like one.”

  She scratched her nose at that. “Is there a difference?”

  A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I suppose I shall find out.”

  They began walking, keeping the brook to their right, their attention occasionally drifting skyward in order to make certain they were not being subtly turned around without realizing it.

  “Do you think you might have anyone looking for you?” she asked when the silence — about three minutes of it — became too much to bear.

  “Right now?” He seemed startled by the question. “I cannot think anyone would be. I have only been gone for a few hours, nothing to worry or excite someone into investigating my absence.” He paused and held out his arm to halt her progress when they came upon a few large rocks in the path before them. “This way,” he said, his fingers just touching her sleeve as he indicated an easier course around the largest of the boulders.

  She followed where he led, watching how well he navigated the uneven ground despite his size. “I wonder…” she said out loud, without realizing that she had.

  Mr. Beechum made a sound in his throat, not quite a word but something more than a simple shifting of phlegm from one place to another. But it was enough to indicate that he was both listening and expected her to continue.

  “Oh, it’s…” Mary waved a hand, shooing away his incomprehensible sounds while barrelling forward with the next part of her speech. “I left a note. For my mother or… well, whoever might find it first. But I wonder if they’ve already discovered it.” Would they be out searching for her now? She had been purposely vague about the details of her journey — partly because her plan had been short on specifics even once she’d put the first few steps of it into action — only stating that she was on her way to visit her Aunt Addison in Bath, and that Mr. Haverstick could wait for one of her younger sisters to come of age if he was so desperate for a wife whose forebears had been on friendly terms with William the Conqueror.

  “What do you think they will do when they discover you missing?”

  Mary pondered that. Would there be a great hue and cry at her absence? She realized belatedly that her sudden departure could ignite a spark of scandal if word slipped out. A young, unmarried woman leaving home on her own, carrying only a few necessities and a handful of buns pilfered from the kitchen? “I believe they will do as little as possible to draw attention to what I’ve done,” she replied honestly. “They probably hope I will return home with my conscience pricking me forward and that Mr. Haverstick will not be chased away by my apparent capricious nature.”

  “Capricious?”

  Mary shrugged. “I think my mother prefers to use that word in public, rather than describe me in front of others as ‘ungovernable’ or ‘an interminable headache’.” As was her wont.

  Mr. Beechum moved aside as they came to a place where the brook continued to flow downward in a small waterfall but the bank beside it rose sharply upwards, forcing them to climb. As she hoisted herself up onto the first rock, set into the earth like a large step, he held out his hand to her. She glanced at it, hesitated, then gripped his fingers and held onto them for balance as she moved on to the next rock.

  “You would think with all of the stone walls and houses in existence, we would have eventually pulled all the rocks from the ground and created a much smoother surface for walking.” Mary stood at the top of the slope, looking down at the way she had come. “But how will you—”

  Her question was both interrupted and answered by Mr. Beechum deftly picking his way up the rocks, his features knit into a pattern of concentration as he searched for the best places to set his hooves, his brow remaining furrowed until he reached the top beside her. “I will be fine, Miss Clegg.”

  She took a small step back, even though there was still a fair amount of space between them. “So I see.”

  Mary led the way down the other side of the rise, before Mr. Beechum could voice any objections. But if she happened to fall into a pit because of her foolhardiness, she would allow him to chastise her for it after the fact.

  “Who is Mr. Haverstick?”

  His question made her heel slip on a tree root. She caught herself before he could see the misstep, and she clung to the knot of a tree as she turned around to gauge his expression. “He is… um. He wanted to marry me.”

  “But you did not want to marry him?”

  “Do not. And no.” She knelt down to look at an impressive mushroom — impressive for its size and also the brilliant white of it set against the backdrop of moss and the previous season’s leaves. “And I suppose I shouldn’t say he wanted to marry me. He wanted to marry my family. Though we are poor, you know.” She stood up again, carefully stepping over the mushroom and nearer to the edge of the brook, where there were fewer living things she might accidentally crush beneath her foot. If Mr. Beechum was at all shocked to hear her speak of her family’s finances, she did not look back to see. It was not at all the thing to openly acknowledge one’s poverty or riches, and yet the entire world seemed to spin on a thread made of fortune. “But despite our empty pockets and our lack of enticing dowries, we have good blood, or so I’ve been told. And Mr. Haverstick does not. But Mr. Haverstick has four thousand pounds a year, and apparently four thousand pounds a year covers a multitude of questionable predecessors.”

  “And so you ran away, rather than marry him?”

  She flashed a smile at him over her shoulder. “I suppose that does not sound very complimentary towards Mr. Haverstick, does it?”

  Mr. Beechum’s tail flicked quickly back and forth. “One could also say that it does not sound very complimentary towards you.”

  She searched his eyes and that telltale muscle in his jaw for a sign that he was teasing her, but his head was turned in such a way that she could not discern the details. “Are you one of those, then?”

  He stilled, his gaze finally rising to meet hers. “One of what?” he asked, in a voice that seemed to already be raising bulwarks against possible offense.

  “One of those gentlemen who believes that a woman will simply fall down at their feet at the barest hint of a marriage proposal.”

  He snorted. And then he looked appalled that he had snorted. “I have never been referred to as a gentleman before.” He cleared his throat and reached out to lift a branch that would have smacked her in the face as she was paying only the barest measure of attention to her surroundings. “And I suppose I would be more surprised than anything to find that a woman reciprocated my affections.”

  “Ah, you see? There’s the difference. You believe that marriage involves things like feelings and emotions, whereas my mother has done everything in her power to teach me that the primary reason for marrying is to make a profitable match with someone whose family hasn’t spent the last half dozen generations bearing children with their cousins.”

  Mr. Beechum coughed, and Mary glanced back to find him smacking delicately at his chest with the side of his fist.

  “Are you all right?”

  He nodded, but did not speak.

  “Are you sure?”

  Another nod. And then a deep breath. And then a brief closing of his eyes which made Mary think of someone taking a moment to wind up their timepiece for the night. “I am curious,” he began, picking over his words with the same care she thought he would use to cross a rapidly flowing stream. “Are you always so free with your opinions?”

  “Oh, all the time. I’ve tried being quiet and biddable, but I’m not very good at it.”

  It was two more hours before Mary flumped down on another fallen tree — this one with enough moss and other things growing from the carcass that it was almost comfortable — and declared that they would not be arriving at Leeds at any point in the foreseeable future.

  The brook still frothed and burbled beside them. Mary wondered if it had begun to laugh at them, with the way its brilliant splashing seemed almost gleeful at times. They shared the last bun and ate all of the spiced apple rings, rejuvenating the dried fruit in their mouths with sips of water from the stream.

  “Perhaps the water is cursed,” she mused after she licked the last drops of clear water from the side of her palm. “And now that we’ve gone and tasted it, there’s a spell on us.” She looked at Mr. Beechum, waiting for a comment or even a confirmation that he’d heard her, but she found him watching her with an odd, detached expression, as though his thoughts had traveled to some far off place while she finished off the last of their food.

  “Hmm. What?” He shook his head, startled back to attention. He blinked several times, his cheeks reddening as he quickly looked away. “I beg your pardon.”

  Mary could not blame him, really. They had been wandering together through the woods for the majority of the day, not counting the time spent before they had stumbled upon one another. No doubt he was as tired as her and equally frustrated. Her own feet hurt, and she longed to take off her boots and stockings and submerge her feet in the cool water of the stream. Half of her pins had fallen out of her hair, she itched and perspired in too many uncomfortable places, and they were now — with the last crumb of Hattie’s buns wiped from the corner of her mouth — out of food.

  She looked up at the sky. It was an afternoon sky, the light from the sun angling its way through the tops of the trees as it drifted towards the western horizon. Would they find their way out before dark? She didn’t think she would be afraid to spend a night outside, away from the comforts and security of her home and bed. But that was an easy thing to tell herself when it was still fully daylight and she could still see her own hands were she to waggle them in front of her face.

  “We have a few hours left before sunset,” Mr. Beechum said, in tune with her own thoughts. “I am certain that a few more miles… as long as we continue to follow the path of the stream…”

  Mary stood up, biting back a small yelp at the growing ache in her back. She was young, yes, and fairly active. But this many hours spent cavorting around so much unbridled nature had already begun to take its toll. “I commend you for your optimism, Mr. Beechum.”

  Their pace slowed as the afternoon stretched onward. Around them, the trees opened up, but not so much that Mary allowed herself to hope anything like a border or an end to their journey would soon be reached. She caught herself crouching down beside the edge of the brook more often than not, picking up small stones that glistened in the light, debating whether or not to put them back or tuck them into her bag and hope they still looked half as interesting once they were dry.

  Away from the stream, she came across a scattering of bushes showing small clumps of green berries, a few of them already changed to a deep, satisfying shade of blue. She plucked one of them and pinched it between her finger and thumb, then gave it a sniff to make certain it was indeed a blueberry and not something that would leave her sick and writhing on the forest floor. It wasn’t quite as ripe as she would’ve preferred, but as they were out of food and there was not someone selling leek pies and baked potatoes beyond the next oak tree, beggars could not be choosers.

  She dragged her beleaguered bonnet from the depths of her bag and used it as a basket as she gathered as many of the ripe blueberries as she could find. A few she ate, though she tried to save as many as possible, wondering if Mr. Beechum was partial to blueberries or something else entirely.

  “Mr. Beechum?” She had last seen him some ways behind her, seeking out a higher place to see a greater swathe of the woods surrounding them. She opened her mouth to call for him again, but instead a swear rang out — not from her own lungs — loud enough to startle a handful of birds that had been sheltering in the bracken behind her.

  Mary dropped her bonnet on the ground and rushed around the blueberry bushes. She saw Mr. Beechum immediately, nearer than she had thought he would be, but kicking out his right rear leg in an agitated manner while his tail twitched furiously behind him. He appeared to be twisting himself around, trying to look at the offending leg, and all as he bleated out a catalog of expletives that made Mary aware of what her own vocabulary lacked.

  She approached him carefully. When he set his weight on his back leg and tried to walk, a jolt of pain rippled through him from head to hoof. He clenched his jaw with such force that all further invectives were swiftly cut off.