Marianne's first instinct was to laugh, because surely this was a joke. Surely someone from the dinner had arranged it as a prank on the girl who'd fled early. But the man's face in the passing lamplight was not one she recognized, and his coat, even soaked at the shoulders from having held the door for her, was cut from cloth finer than anything in her father's wardrobe.
"This isn't my carriage," she said, which was, she realized immediately, an extraordinarily stupid thing to say to a stranger she was currently riding in a carriage with.
"No," he agreed. "It is mine."
"Then I am dreadfully sorry, sir. If you would simply stop and let me out, I can—"
"In this rain? Absolutely not." He said it without any particular warmth, more as a statement of practical fact than chivalry, and reached up to rap twice on the roof. The carriage did not stop. If anything, it seemed to pick up speed, the wheels hissing over wet cobblestones. "We are already moving. I would rather deliver you somewhere dry than deposit you in a gutter to satisfy your sense of propriety."
Marianne opened her mouth to argue, and then closed it again, because objectively he was right, and objectively she was currently trapped in a stranger's carriage in the rain with no better alternative, and objectively this was the worst evening of her life following what had already been a fairly wretched one.
"Where were you meant to be going?" the man asked after a silence that had stretched long enough to become uncomfortable.
"Chandler's Row, near the bakery on the corner." She hesitated. "I don't suppose that is anywhere near your route."
"It is not remotely near my route." But he rapped on the roof again—three times this time—and called up through the small hatch, "Chandler's Row, if you please, Hobbs, before Bond Street," and settled back against the seat as though he had not just rearranged an entire evening for a woman whose name he did not know.
"Thank you," Marianne said, and meant it, though the words came out smaller than she intended, swallowed by the awkwardness of sitting across from a man who had every right to be irritated with her, and instead seemed merely tired. Not annoyed—tired in a way that went deeper than one ruined carriage ride.
"You're welcome." A beat. "You may as well know, since we are stuck with each other for the next quarter hour, that you have interrupted what was meant to be a very brief errand to clear my head before I go home and inform my family that I intend to be an extremely difficult son for the remainder of the evening."