4My Lady Wrexham was bored. She shut her eyes against the swaying of the coach, but her mind was active and she found it impossible to relax. It seemed to her that she had been jolting over bad roads, fording swollen rivers and being held up by floods for an endless length of time. She felt bruised and battered and utterly fatigued, and her red lips tightened ominously as her head rested against the blue satin upholstery of her coach – a sign, her maid thought, watching her timidly from the other side of the coach, that boded ill for somebody.
A bad rut in the road caused the coach to bump more than usual and Beatrice Wrexham sat bolt upright.
“A plague on it!” she exclaimed. “Will this journey never end?”
“The coachman was certain that we should reach Aviemore by five o’clock, my Lady,
