“Such a nuisance, Perkins,” Her Grace the Duchess of Haverford consoled her coachman. “But I know you will have it repaired as soon as you may.”
She was sitting on a blanket spread over a grassy bank, perfectly comfortable, and had been hardly at all bruised when the coach lost its wheel, as she assured her companion, Adeline.
“I’ve sent to the nearest village, ma’am, but they don’t have a wheelwright, seems like, and Chipping Sodbury is a good fifteen minutes ride, if these coach horses of Lord Aldridge’s will let us ride them. I don’t like to leave you out here in the open, and that’s a fact.”
The duchess looked up at the clear blue sky, and around at the four strong outriders who stood ready to guard her. What Perkins thought might happen to her in this quiet country lane while he and the two footmen attended to the coach, she had no idea. But the coachman refused to send one of the outriders to the market town, and the outriders would not leave her side nor their horses, so Perkins must be on his way or she would be sitting on this bank until nightfall.
“I shall be perfectly comfortable,” she soothed.
At that moment, a man came hurrying into view; a tall young gentleman with a flaming thatch of red hair displayed when his tricorne hat tumbled off in his haste. The gentleman looked familiar, and in moments the duchess had placed him. “Lord Avery,” she called. “How pleasant to see you.”
Lord Avery reached them, after a quick glance that took in the broken wheel and the hovering attendants.
“Your Grace,” he said, bowing. “I am sorry for your troubles. May I offer you the comfort of Avery Hall and the company of my mother while your men see to the coach?”
The duchess accepted with pleasure, and soon she and Adeline had washed, taken advantage of the conveniences, and been escorted down to where the dowager Lady Avery waited in a pleasant sitting room on the ground floor.
“My apologies for not rising to greet you, Your Grace,” the lady said. Ah. Yes. Eleanor had heard that Lady Avery had been injured in the accident that had killed the previous Lord Avery. Eleanor rather thought that the viscountcy was now in better hands, but it would not be polite to say so.
“My condolences on the death of your husband,” she murmured. “Is that a Merlin chair? How clever.”
Lady Avery showed off the attributes of her chair with every sign of delight. “And I am to have one for outside, as well,” she said. “Like the ones they use in Bath, designed for rough paths. The chair designer was here last weekend, and I had the most wonderful time. Oh, but I do run on. Will you and Miss Grenford take tea, Your Grace.”
The duchess accepted on behalf of her and Adeline, but her mind was carefully sorting through the little bits of news and gossip that came to her attention in her copious correspondence. Yes. That was it. “Tell me more about the chair designer, Lady Avery,” she said. “A carriage maker’s daughter, and a talented designer of chairs, I have heard.” And, according to Lady Cresthover, who was in some way related to one of her aunts, the next Lady Avery, however unlikely such a marriage might be.
Minerva Bradshaw, the chair designer mentioned above, is the heroine of Candle’s Christmas Chair, in which Lord Randal Avery does not allow the difference in their social classes to prevent him from courting the lovely woman from whom he is buying his mother’s Christmas present. Click on the book link for more.
I first met Min and her viscount in Farewell to Kindness (which is Rede’s, the Earl of Chirbury’s, story). Min provided the invalid chair that Rede’s cousin, Alex Redepenning, has collapse under him during a vigorous chair based rendition of a line dance. I wondered how a carriage-maker’s daughter with a business making invalid chairs came to marry a viscount, and next thing I knew, a tall skinny viscount with bright red hair turned up at her carriage-maker’s shop to order a chair as a Christmas present for his mother.
More about the history of wheel chairs