After carefully attaching his saddle bags which held extra shirts, drawers, and a spare jacket, as well as an assortment of medical supplies, he and Heracles departed the stable in search of Mrs. Taylor’s orchard.
Wills stood before Captain Still, struggling to remain stoic, the very portrait of a young man who’d just lost his father and was now leaving the only life he’d known for the last ten years. “I regret to inform you, Sir, that I’ve taken a position as an assistant to Dr. Partlow, an acquaintance of my father, who has a practice in Peterfield.”
The captain, who had been seated when young Morton entered the cabin, stood and came around his chart-littered desk to stand near the young man. “Wills, I’ve known you since you were a child. Are you sure you’re ready to leave the ship and face the world on your own? I know you’ve had some differences with Dr. MacCloud, but surely, your feelings might change with time. He’s a good man.”
“Yes, I must leave as soon as possible.” Wills gave the captain a clipped answer, eager to end the exchange. The small space between them was thick with tension and unspoken words which were tearing their way through Wills’s gut like a finely honed scalpel.
“I—.” The expression on Captain Still’s face said he had a lot more to say but was tamping the words down. He finally uttered, “Godspeed, lad,” and shook the young man’s hand.
The young physician’s assistant turned to leave the cabin and picked up a bag leaning next to his sea chest in the companionway. He dreaded the next part of the journey like a condemned prisoner’s last walk from Old Bailey to a hanging outside Newgate.
Shoulders squared, Wills hoisted his sea chest to one shoulder and walked away from the docks toward the streets of Portsmouth to find a hackney cab for hire.
A few miles out of Portsmouth, Cullen soon discovered Heracles did not quite live up to his illustrious name, but was a decent road companion all the same. The moody beast had been moving at a canter for awhile, but suddenly slowed, whipped his head around, and stopped.
Cullen slewed forward and then pulled hard on the reins. What the devil? Heracles pranced sideways and snorted. Suddenly, a fox strutted across the road with three kits in parade behind her. After waiting what seemed an eternity for the little family to slip into the thick underbrush of the Hawthorn hedge, Heracles finally deigned to move on.
“What kind of Greek hero are you?” Cullen leaned forward and in spite of his annoyance at the delay, couldn’t help rubbing his stubborn mount’s neck. He shook his head and urged the animal back to a respectable trot. He knew the tower of St. Peter’s could not be far. He’d been on the road for over two hours. Once he spied the church, the Peterfield Inn would be his next stop. He and his unpredictable mount needed a short respite from the road, and their own crotchety company.
When at last the coaching inn courtyard hove into view, Cullen slid down from Heracles’s considerable back and handed him off to a groom just as the post coach from Portsmouth rolled to a stop. He’d considered taking the coach, which would go all the way to London, but had decided instead to hire mounts along the way, to clear his head before facing his aunt. And riding solo would save him a number of hours, versus taking a mail coach.
The horn sounded before the coach rumbled into the courtyard, and there was a flurry of activity as travelers dismounted. A young woman and her mother exited the coach deep into a loud argument about whether they would eat in the tavern, or hire a private room. A ridiculous hat laden with fake fruit and flowers balanced atop the young woman’s brassy blonde curls while her mother’s face was barely visible beneath a bonnet with side flaps so large, surely the woman lacked sufficient peripheral vision to safely navigate the few steps into the inn.
Cullen hesitated a bit longer to allow the crowd of travelers time to alight and find their way inside. He was still observing the comical, squabbling mother and daughter when he nearly missed the last person off one of the outside seats on the coach.
She wore a drab, outdated traveling dress and reminded him a bit of a forlorn crow. Tall for a woman, she took long, deliberate strides and seemed oblivious of her unfashionably short skirts, showing a bit of stocking above the tops of her sensible walking boots.
The woman stopped short of the door to the inn and waited while one of the inn’s servant boys in the courtyard retrieved her luggage from the boot of the stagecoach. She directed him to a carriage on the street outside the inn where the driver took the small trunk, a sea chest in fact, and stowed it behind his seat.
When she walked by Cullen, he snatched a glimpse of extraordinary gray eyes. In a passing moment so brief, he later would wonder if he’d imagined it, he thought he saw a glimmer of recognition flash before she lowered her eyes beneath impossibly thick, soot-dark lashes. And then she was gone.
Willa settled into the hard, uncomfortable squabs of the hack cab Dr. Partlow had hired for her. She cautioned the flutter of hope in her stomach against expecting too much, but she’d latched onto the letter he’d sent like a lifeline. She’d read over and over the few lines in his spare, cramped penmanship inviting her to leave the ship and join him in Peterfield as an assistant in his practice.
She’d opened her plain gray reticule several times during the stagecoach journey to touch the folded piece of paper. She’d met Dr. Partlow only once, when he’d invited her and her father to join him for
