Lady Sherry and the Highwayman (8 page)

Nor was Tully so very old that she failed to see which way the wind was blowing. This rogue had made off with Lady Sherry at gunpoint and so she wished to save his neck. It made perfect sense. In a hen’s foot! Lady Sherry was as great a pig-widgeon as her abigail, both of them betwattled by a handsome face. Aunt Tulliver had been in the world a great many more years than either of them and was therefore considerably more skeptical. Certainly this highwayman fellow was as handsome as Adonis; but Tully could not rid herself of the feeling that something about him was not right.

She would not voice these doubts, not yet; Lady Sherry had quite enough already on her plate, and the rogue could do her little harm in his present condition. “This one won’t be dancing a jig for a while,” she said, shifting the bloody bowl from one hand to the other. “No, nor even walking a few steps. That’s a nasty wound he has. But he’ll do, milady.” And then she went on to speak knowledgeably of the danger of sepsis and mortification of the flesh as result of probing for a bullet, and the theory of laudable pus.

Sherry could not care for this conversation or for the bloody rags and water that Aunt Tulliver seemed bent on waving under her nose. Resolutely, she quelled her squeamishness. “I’ll sit with him awhile. You need to rest.”

Tully did not argue. Mettlesome and temperamental as she might pride herself on being, she was also old. Sherry followed her across the room, and once more locked the door. She picked up the pistol from the table where Tully had placed it and set the claret decanter on a table that bore mute evidence to the fact that Aunt Tulliver, at least, had enjoyed a hearty repast. A chair had been drawn up by the settee and Sherry dropped down into it.

The book room was very quiet. Sherry leaned her head back against the chair. She looked again at the highwayman, watched the steady rise and fall of his chest. He was very handsome in a reckless sort of way, even with his current pallor and his bright eyes shut. Sherry’s eyes closed also. She slept.

Chapter Eight

For some moments, all three of the occupants of the book room dozed. Prinny dreamed of chasing rabbits and Lady Sherry of being kissed in the manner enjoyed by the heroines of the books she wrote: activities that neither had experienced in real life. The third dreamer was not so far-ranging in his imagination, although there is little doubt that he would have vastly preferred not to know firsthand that of which he dreamed. Micah Greene—known also in certain quarters as Captain Toby—had also passed a very trying day. Now, in dreams, he again left behind the filth and promiscuity and general unpleasantness of Newgate Prison to mount the scaffold erected outside the debtors’ prison door. His dislike of the proceedings was not mitigated by the discovery that at least half of London had turned out to see him hanged. Micah stood on the scaffold, staring out at the sea of faces, seeing his life pass before him, a pageant of missed opportunities and foolish mistakes. Unwisely as he may have frittered away his days upon this mortal coil, Micah at five-and-thirty was not yet ready to write off the business as a bad job of work. The memory of standing on the gallows with the rope around his neck, staring out upon that sea of brutish, expectant faces, made him shudder in his sleep.

That movement jerked him back to wakefulness. Micah welcomed the horrid pain because it meant he was not dead. Fate—or some agent thereof—had intervened, and he had not been hanged.

Micah’s memories of his escape, alas, were sadly fragmented. He had accosted a female on horseback, had demanded her assistance at gunpoint. From that moment onward, matters seemed to have gone quickly downhill, beginning with the unlucky bullet that had lodged in his leg. He recalled hiding in a gardener’s shed, in a water closet, under a shapeless sack of a dress and a shawl and a hideously uncomfortable wig. He’d walked for what seemed like miles on his wounded leg, drifting in and out of consciousness, supported by two females. Then, as if the preceding had not been trial enough, matters had only gotten worse: he had regained his senses only to discover one female sprawled across his chest, holding him down, while another applied what felt like red-hot pincers to his leg. Another time, under different circumstances, Micah would have raised no objection if a bright-eyed lass wished to deposit herself upon his chest, might even have invited her to take whatever further liberties suited her fancy. But the liberties taken by this lass had been such that he hoped he would not set eyes on her again, nor the ancient beldame who had kept her company. How pleasant it would be to open his eyes and discover that these past few days had been no more than a singularly nasty nightmare.

Not even briefly could Micah cherish that hope. His throbbing leg told him all too clearly that no overheated imagination could be held to account for his recent travail. His delirium had subsided somewhat now, at least sufficiently for him to wonder where he was. Perhaps, in light of his recent ill luck, he might be easier in his mind if he did not know. Micah was no coward, whatever else he might have been. Cautiously, he opened his eyes.

His first impression was of a large, dark room cluttered with bizarre furnishings and books. Then he glimpsed the female dozing in a chair drawn up close to the sofa where he lay. She was holding a pistol.
His
pistol, he realized. The pistol that, during his abrupt descent from the scaffold, had been pressed into his hand. Who had given the gun to him? Had his escape been planned, that riot could not have been better staged.

There was little point in asking questions for which answers were not readily at hand. Micah looked again at the pistol and the sleeping woman. She looked familiar. Aha. He had not immediately recognized her now that she was neatly coiffed and gowned, but this was the woman whose horse he had commandeered, who had dressed him in that queer rig; who had torn strips from her petticoat to bind his wound, in the process revealing an ankle that was exceptionally neat. Though Micah should have been grateful, in his dazed mind this red-haired, blue-eyed female was associated with a great deal of inconvenience and pain. Now she held a pistol trained on him, and Micah had had quite enough of being held prisoner. Freedom seemed worth any risk. He took a deep breath and lunged.

Lady Sherry wakened suddenly to find herself staring yet once more down the barrel of a pistol, with the additional perplexity of a highwayman sprawled across her lap. Sherry had been dreaming most pleasurably of kisses, and was as a result somewhat disoriented to find herself caught up in a very different kind of embrace. “Are you going to shoot me?” she inquired faintly. “I wish that you would not!”

Certainly, Micah did not wish to shoot this female. He had not shot anyone in all his life. However, he did not lower the pistol, or remove himself from the lady’s lap. He could not. Prinny had leaped atop him, under the impression that the man’s queer antics signified a desire to play some new game. The pain was intense.

The highwayman groaned. “Oh, you wretched beast!” cried Sherry, and swatted at the dog. Prinny removed himself from atop their guest and stalked across the room in high dudgeon, then flopped down by the door. Sherry helped her guest back onto the couch. He stared at her with perplexity. “You’re no serving wench.”

A serving wench? Was that what he had thought her? Sherry remembered Lord Viccars’s compliments on her appearance and almost laughed. “No. I’m no serving wench,” she said wryly, then frowned again as he grimaced with pain. “However did you get out from under that hedge?”

Micah did not care to recall the hedge, which had been very prickly, or his feelings when he had suddenly and painfully awakened, the horrid moment when he thought he’d been flung alive into his grave. “Was it you who put me there?” he asked as he took firmer hold of the gun that she had neglected to take from him.

Sherry resented the man’s suspicious expression, his unappreciative tone of voice. “Good heavens, man!
I
didn’t shoot you!” she snapped. “Nor have I turned you over to the authorities as any sensible person would have done. Instead, I saved your ungrateful neck. Oh, do put that thing down before it goes off and we have the whole household gathered outside the door, wishful of knowing what is going on!”

Micah forced himself to remain conscious, to concentrate on the pistol in his hand instead of the pain in his leg. Perhaps this female had saved him from the gallows—why, he could not fathom, unless she was one of those queer, bored women who would do anything for excitement—but every instinct screamed at him to trust her not one inch. His fingers, damp with perspiration, slipped on the pistol. He wiped his hand on his thigh. “I’ll just bide here a little longer and then be on my way.”

Lady Sherry gazed worriedly upon her houseguest. She could not like the pallor of his face, the perspiration that stood out on his brow. The idea that he should leave was ludicrous. “You’re hurt,” she pointed out.

Micah knew perfectly well that he was hurt. Each little movement, each breath he drew, caused his leg to throb in an agony almost sufficient to make one wish to cease to breathe. “Fiend seize it, of course I’m hurt! If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be bleeding like a stuck pig. Why the devil did you have to mix yourself up in this business? I might have been clear of the city by now if you hadn’t interfered!”

It was a very good thing that the gentleman’s pistol was no longer within Lady Sherry’s reach, else her tenth crime might have been other than she’d planned. “It was you who interfered with me,” she pointed out with a forbearance that was possible only because she remembered she was speaking to a wounded and perhaps deranged individual who clutched a pistol in his hand. “Not the other way around. All I wanted to do was come home. I do not recall that I invited you along. But since you are here, and obviously in no condition to take yourself elsewhere, it might behoove you to keep your voice down. My brother is a magistrate, and you are currently beneath his roof—without his knowledge, I might add!”

A magistrate’s sister? A magistrate’s
roof!
Micah could think of no words sufficiently forceful to express his dismay. In a most unfriendly manner, he gazed upon his hostess. “The devil!” he groaned.

How ill he looked. “You mustn’t worry!” Sherry said hastily. “You’ll be safe enough as long as we are careful and you remember not to shout! This is my room, and only Tully has a key besides me. Frankly, sir, I wish I’d never set eyes on you, but I did, and here you are and here you must stay until you may leave without running a risk of landing all of us in the basket! Oh, do stop waving that gun about. You are the worst person I have ever met for threatening people. Pistols and pruning knives—” She frowned. “Which is an odd thing in you, because you are said to have treated your victims so very courteously. Perhaps you are courteous only when committing robbery?”

This argument made no small impression on Micah. Even greater was the impression the lady made when, exasperated, she tweaked the pistol from his hand. He looked into its barrel and attempted a smile. At this abrupt
volte-face
, she stared at him in surprise.

“I must trust you, must I not?” he asked. “And I must also apologize for using you infamously. My only excuse is that I found the prospect of my own hanging a trifle unnerving. Damned if I know why you’re doing so much for a curst ill-tempered brute! But since you’re willing, I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

That pretty speech cost him dear, thought Sherry, as the man lay back on the pillows with which Tully—or more likely Daffodil—had softened the contours of the couch. The fear that she had experienced in the dining room had changed into exasperation with the discovery that her highwayman was safe. She had come to think of him as hers, the result of having put him in a book, although it was hardly an inspiration for which she was grateful, since the manuscript was going far from well.

Writing hair-raising adventures was one thing, living them quite another. That she
was
living an adventure, Sherry realized when the highwayman smiled at her again. “My apologies, ma’am, for ever mistaking you for a serving wench,” he said. “It’s clear you’re nothing of the sort.”

If the rogue had been handsome when unconscious, he was an Adonis when he smiled. “You are forgiven,” Sherry said ruefully. “I fear I looked the part.” How merrily those green eyes twinkled. She dropped her gaze.

Cursing her shyness, aware that the highwayman was watching her with amusement, Sherry sought for a diversion. “Here. I thought this might refresh you,” she said awkwardly, and shoved the claret toward him. His hand shook as he grasped the decanter, and he swore to find himself so weak. Sherry reached for the bottle as it slipped through his fingers. Her hand brushed his.

His skin was cool, almost too cool; a temperature that surely should not have caused heat to prickle up her arm, throughout her entire body, to flame in her cheeks. Sherry jerked away, almost dropping the decanter herself before setting it unsteadily on the table beside the sofa, where crumbs and dirty dishes testified to Aunt Tulliver’s feast. Her eyes fixed on the man’s face, she put the pistol down on the library table, out of his reach. The highwayman looked puzzled, she thought.

Micah was indeed perpexled. He wondered what had caused his benefactress suddenly to turn pink and then pale and back away. “Wait!” he called softly.

She did not heed his plea but instead sped out of the room as if the hounds of hell themselves were in hot pursuit. Micah heard the key turn in the lock. The huge dog remained sprawled vigilantly by the door; whether to guard him or to prevent his escape Micah could not say. Not that he could hobble far on this curst lame leg. He wished the pistol were not so far from his reach.

Micah sighed, reached for the decanter of claret, leaned back against the pillows. That simple exertion caused his leg to throb. A long convalescence seemed to be called for.

He raised the bottle and drank deeply from it, his benefactress having failed to bring him a glass. Then Micah settled back among the cushions and drifted off to sleep again, to dream not of the gallows but of a great white dog and himself astride its back, taking from the rich and giving to the poor.