Lady Sherry and the Highwayman (25 page)

There was something queer about this tale, this situation. If Micah had sufficient money to pose as a nobleman, then why was Captain Toby so poor? Perhaps Micah’s charade was being financed by highway robbery. “And so you took to the road,” Sherry prodded. “It seems a great deal of risk to take for so little gain. For the theft of a few pounds, you could hang.”

Captain Toby laughed. “Dance the Paddington frisk? Not I. Though Micah damned near did so in my place. I should have let him, curst interfering meddler that he is.” He looked at Sherry appraisingly. “He’ll meddle no more, I think. Not since
you
saw fit to pay a call.”

Sherry didn’t like the sound of that. “Micah would be very angry if you were to harm me.”

“Harm you?” Captain Toby looked indignant. “I haven’t harmed a woman yet. At least not in the way you mean. No, ma’am, I wish you no ill. But it’s time for me to shove my trunk, if you take my meaning, before I make a renewed acquaintance with the constables, and I’m out of twig. It hasn’t seemed exactly the right time to refurbish my purse by going back on the road. And old Micah’s proving damned unreasonable about the matter, saying I should turn myself in and take my medicine so as to let
him
off the hook.”

Sherry followed these disclosures with considerable interest. “So Micah isn’t a highwayman?”

“Old upright Micah on the scamp?” Captain Toby threw back his head and guffawed. “We may be related, ma’am, but we ain’t such close kin as that. Mayhap it has to do with me being born on the wrong side of the blanket and him on the right.”

Sherry didn’t think it was altogether upright of Micah to pass himself off as Lord Grenville, but this hardly seemed the moment in which to quibble about such details. “So you are, er, illegitimate.”

“No need to mince words, ma’am. There’s many as would tell you I was a right proper bastard, was you to ask. Which you won’t, of course, having seen the wisdom of keeping dubber mum’d.” He paused, listening. “Hist! What’s that?”

Sherry heard it, too, a distant banging noise as if someone was assaulting the front door. Was it Micah? Sir Christopher and his constables? If only Sherry could gain possession of Captain Toby’s gun. Or Prinny choose this most opportune moment to fawn upon Captain Toby as he did upon everyone else. But Prinny had lost interest in the conversation and had gone off to hunt down rats, and Captain Toby gave no indication of the sort of carelessness that would enable her to take possession of his firearm. Instead, he grasped it all the firmer as he pushed himself away from the table and yanked Sherry out of her chair.

“Wait!” she pleaded as he dragged her across the stone floor toward the huge fireplace. “You said you meant me no harm.”

“Nor do I mean to preach at Tyburn cross!” retorted Captain Toby as he pressed a certain stone above the fireplace. “You’ll find your way out soon enough—but not so soon I won’t have cleared out! Go on, get in!”

Lady Sherry stared at the dark opening revealed by a section of the wainscoting that had swung aside. She was looking at a secret passage of the sort about which she had written so many times. Writing about a secret passage and exploring one were two entirely different things. Sherry had no desire to step into that dark, dank, and no doubt rat-infested space.

She hesitated. The shouts from outside had grown louder, as if the persons who desired admittance were following Sherry’s path around to the back door. From somewhere deep in the house, Prinny added his barks to the din. “Oh, please, don’t make me go in there!” Sherry begged. “I promise I won’t say a word about you to anyone!”

Captain Toby was not so green as to believe this promise. “When pigs can fly!” he growled, and pushed Lady Sherry through the opening, so roughly that she stumbled to her knees. Behind her, the panel slid shut, plunging her into the darkness of the tomb.

Chapter Twenty-five

Sherry lit the candle that she’d had the foresight to tuck into her bodice and tried to recall what she knew about secret passages. She reviewed priest’s holes and hides in pit and chimney, entrance via flues and trapdoors, and medieval subterranean drains that could be used as exits in case of emergency. The dark space in which she stood seemed to be very deep. Sherry stepped forward to investigate and discovered a narrow, winding passage in the thickness of the wall. She supposed she should not be surprised to find such a passage in a house as old as this; and wondered where it might lead. One thing was certain: she was not going back into the kitchens. Sherry gathered up her skirts and tentatively began to mount the stairs. At least the passage led upward, instead of down into some clammy, rat-infested drain.

She would not think of rats, not now. Sherry wondered why she’d never thought to use rats in any of her books. As an inducement to terror, rats surely ranked with ghostly apparitions and ominous noises and lights seen nickering at midnight in ancient houses’ abandoned wings.

This particular ancient house appeared to be abandoned. Sherry hoped its appearance was not deceiving. She was in no frame of mind to deal with homicidal monsters or avenging shades. How many times she had written about a setting such as this, a delicate heroine exposed to supernatural danger and shattering alarms? Of clanking chains and haunted chambers and even once a globe containing human ashes that had been discovered in a haunted maze?

The heroine of that particular tale had been able to see visions. Lady Sherry wished she shared the trait. Despite the number of Gothic thrillers she had written, Sherry had never created an atmosphere so macabre as the one in which she now found herself.

Furthermore, the candle stub was rapidly burning low. Sherry hoped she might find an exit before it burned out and plunged her again into the dark, and she was reduced to screaming lunacy. Captain Toby had meant her no harm? Perhaps he was under the impression that Sherry wouldn’t mind rats nibbling at her toes and bats jousting with spiders for the right to nest in her hair.

At this horrid thought Sherry almost did scream aloud. She decided she would rather deal with ghosts than make the acquaintance of the rodent population of this house. And then she heard faint voices, as if wish had fostered thought. Sherry turned as quickly as she dared on the narrow step and peered back into the darkness through which she had come. She saw nothing but heard a scampering sound as if tiny—or not so tiny-rodent paws scurried away from the light. Certainly Sherry was not going back down the narrow steps to investigate! She turned back and continued to mount the stair.

She came to a landing. The voices seemed louder now. Despite her dislike of cobwebs and their creators, Sherry leaned closer to the wall. What was this? A latch? Sherry lifted it and a section of the wall slid creakily aside, and she found herself standing in a narrow opening at the back of a cupboard filled with ancient clothes. Sherry gingerly pushed aside the garments. She was careful to keep her candle as far away as possible from the rotting material.

Definitely the voices were louder now. Sherry recognized one of them as Captain Toby. She pushed open the cupboard door and stared into the door.

It was a large room and so brightly lit that Sherry squinted in the sudden light. Here at least King Cobweb did not reign supreme, not in the corners of the ceiling that displayed the twelve signs of the zodiac, or in the chimney piece that was a network of carving displaying the judgment of Solomon, or the mantelpiece lush with monkeys and birds and fruits. The mermaids and dolphins and arabesques on windowhead and wainscoting and plasterwork appeared freshly scrubbed, as did the intricately glazed windows in which clear panes contrasted with stained glass. The heavy oak furniture—delicately inlaid with pearl and hardwoods of different colors, and carved with intricate animals and flowers— gleamed as if recently polished.

As did Captain Toby’s pistol, which he was brandishing in a very menacing manner at the cupboard door. “Damned if you ain’t a plaguey one!” he snarled. “I thought I’d done for you at least upward of an hour. So there’s an opening to the passage in that closet, eh? Mayhap both of you might wish to explore. Here, my lad, up with you!” He moved aside then, allowing Sherry to see Micah, who was sprawled in a chair.

At first she thought that he was drunk and felt very much like scolding. Of all the ill-advised times to overindulge in the grape! Then she realized that the amount of liquor required to reduce a man to such a condition would most likely have also put him in his grave. “What have you done to him?” she cried as Captain Toby dragged Micah to his feet. And what had he done with the people who had been hammering at the back door not many moments past? No doubt when they had received no answer they had simply gone away.

“Climb down off your high ropes!” Captain Toby grunted. Perspiration stood out on his brow as he sought to balance Micah’s weight. “I told you I was wishful of going to ground for a while. Lord Law-Abiding here was going to queer my pitch, so I had to put out his lights. Now, ma’am, don’t nab the bib! It ain’t permanent. I just dosed him up with laudanum.”

Sherry had no inclination to nab the bib—to weep, in a gentler parlance. She was far too angry and indignant to find solace in her tears.

Captain Toby had slung Micah over his shoulder like a sack of meal. Sherry looked anxiously about for a weapon and encountered the gaze of a pair of green eyes. Micah wasn’t unconscious! She could have truly wept then, with relief. What was he frowning at so intently? Sherry followed his gaze to the display of ancient weapons that hung upon one wall.

Dared she? Sherry sidled toward the weapons. “And just where do you think you’re going?” Captain Toby demanded suspiciously. “Oof!” he added as his burden came to life suddenly and kicked him in the stomach. Sherry hesitated no longer but yanked a broadsword down from the wall and applied it to the highwayman’s head. Captain Toby collapsed with a groan.

Some few moments passed as Sherry helped Micah to disentangle himself from Captain Toby and broadsword. “Oh, Micah! Are you all right? You look so pale. I didn’t kill him, did I? Although it would have served the wretch right! Which reminds me, I came to warn you that Christopher knows all. I had to tell him! And now you’ll go to jail and it’s all my fault!”

This pretty speech had a reviving effect on Micah, who was not half as ill as he looked, having previously relieved himself of a considerable amount of the laudanum by the simple expedient of sticking his finger down his throat. “Don’t cry, my brave darling!” he murmured as he offered her, in lieu of a handkerchief, his sleeve. “Everything will be well.”

Sherry cried all the harder. She didn’t see how anything could ever be well again. Before she could say so—indeed, as if to bear out her apprehensions—the door burst open and a group of people spilled into the room: Sir Christopher and Lavinia, Jeremy and Ned, Lord Viccars and Marguerite.

“Aha!” said Sir Christopher. “Caught you red-handed, you rogue. Good for you, sis! Although you might better have left the business to Bow Street!”

“I didn’t!” Sherry left off wiping her damp face with Micah’s sleeve and instead clasped him to her breast. “He’s not! Christopher, you must listen to me. It’s
that
man you want!” She pointed to Captain Toby, who was clutching his abused head and muttering beneath his breath. “That’s your highwayman! And this—” She glanced at Micah. “Well, I don’t know who he is!”

Micah removed himself, with reluctance, from Sherry’s breast. “Grenville,” he said with a little smile. “At your service, milady. If you arrest me in this devil’s place, Sir Christopher, you’ll be repeating a mistake for which I already damned near hanged!”

Impatient as he was to carry out his duties, Sir Christopher was a fair man, and there remained the to-do attendant upon the mistaken arrest of a peer. He looked at the man sprawled out upon the floor and then at the man whose sleeve Sherry clutched. There
was
a definite resemblance between the men. “Then let’s have the straight of the story without circumlocution!” he said judiciously.

Sherry could not bear to listen to the tarradiddles Micah spun for her brother’s benefit. She released him and turned toward Lavinia, who was looking daggers at her. And who was that scantily clad female hovering near Andrew?

Andrew. Sherry had an apology to make to Lord Viccars. As well as a few choice words to say to Ned. She walked across the room. “Andrew, I am very sorry and I did mean to make you very happy, but it seems fairly obvious that we should not suit.”

“Not suit!” Lavinia had withheld comment already for longer than seemed humanly possible and could no longer refrain. Anyway, Christopher was too preoccupied with Lord Grenville to overhear and scold. “Sherris, when did you become a bedlamite? Rubbing shoulders with highwaymen! Paying off servants to keep your secrets! And now, to
not
marry Viccars! You have sunk yourself quite below reproach. Not to mention the rest of us, you wretched girl! How ever will we wrap
this
up in clean linen? I never was so shocked by anything in my life!”

No one made an immediate response to this tirade. Jeremy had wandered across the room to better hear the exchange between Sir Christopher and Lord Grenville, and Ned was deep in silent lamentation of his lost opportunities, his presence in the chamber attendant only upon Lord Viccars’s firm grip on the collar of his shirt. In his turn, Lord Viccars looked embarrassed, and Lady Sherry abashed.

Less prey to polite or servile scruples, Marguerite contemplated Lavinia, who was dosing her shattered nerves alternately with vinaigrette and fan. Much as Marguerite might resent her rival, she rather admired Lady Sherry for taking up with a highwayman. Too, Lady Sherry had just broken
off
with Marguerite’s protector, which left her feeling very charitable toward her.

“Ma foi!”
she said, therefore, to Lady Sherry. “What a cat that one is. If she was forever ripping up at you like that, then it is no wonder you kicked over the traces,
chérie!
I wish you would tell me all!” She turned a speculative gaze on Captain Toby.