The Highwayman's Folly

by Daria Vernon

  The door was completely unguarded. She looked down at him, apparently with a look that exposed her puzzlement.

  “Can I trust you?” he asked. “Not to run down the road, or fling yourself into the forest, or threaten my throat with a hot poker?”

  She nodded and began her dull commute around the small and bedless bed chamber. Her turns about the room felt awkward without Harry’s light chatter filling up the space.

  The door wasn’t even locked. Rhys could stop her if she tried anything, even if he seemed a lazy sentry at present. Yet his trust left a strange feeling in her, and now her strongest instincts had become like two dogs pulling at either end of a rope.

  “Wouldn’t your men be upset at your lack of vigilance tonight?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not certain I care anymore.”

  “Do you still care about getting money from me?”

  He nodded gravely as she stepped over his legs to take another slow lap around the room.

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s a family I have to feed.”

  Her step faltered.

  “Oh.”

  “Not my family but people that I must protect as though they were. Until I die. I owe a great debt.”

  The knot that formed in her stomach upon hearing the word family was not unraveled quickly by the clarification that it wasn’t his family. There was still so much about him she didn’t know. She stopped walking and offered him the hand of her good arm. “Please. It feels strange to walk alone.”

  His immense hand tensed around hers. He actually allowed her to take some of his weight and it nearly pulled her into him before he was completely upright.

  “The activity of walking already seems silly in such a small space. Makes me feel like a mouse trapped in a clock.” She put her arm through his and they began to walk.

  “I thought that’s what ladies of your gentility do—walk around rooms.”

  “It’s certainly an interest that some would have preferred for me.”

  “But you have a certain proclivity toward the out of doors?”

  “I do. I like to ride. I like space and fresh air. How men don’t go insane on ships, I’ll never know.”

  “Some men do go insane on ships.”

  “Like your ship?”

  He stepped in front of her abruptly, his boots striking so firmly on the floorboards that she felt an admonishment en route. Instead, he just stood before her, his eyes traveling across her neck and face without ever meeting her gaze. She’d had enough.

  “You keep divulging all of these ominous clues to your past and then grow upset when I express my natural curiosity. A curiosity that you claim we share.”

  Uncomfortable though the moment was, she felt an incredible tolerance for standing in it with him. They faced one another, sharing nothing but breath. Finally, he placed a light hand where her neck met her shoulder, not far from her injury.

  “I’m not upset. Not with you.” He took a step closer and supported her neck as she looked up at him. “What hurts is that it would be very easy to tell you all of these things. I can tell that you’re a safe place for secrets, but it’s not your burden to carry mine. I’m burdening you enough. So sometimes I start to speak before realizing that it’s unfair of me.”

  He cast his eyes to the floor and his thumb began to absently stroke the back of her neck. A charge of warmth and alertness traveled down her spine. She placed a hand on the arm that held her, steadying herself.

  Rhys’ subtle smile broke through the melancholy air. “Perhaps you’re here to spy on me, trying to manipulate me out of my fortunes.” He shook her playfully.

  “Yes, that’s it. Why, I may be tied up all day and at the complete mercy of a band of criminals, but I’ve got you exactly where I want you. I’m going to steal this pristine lodge right out from under your noses, bury you all in the garden, and live like a queen on your stolen goods.”

  “Does your sarcasm mock this house? I know it’s half fallen down, but I’m oddly offended on its behalf.”

  Beth sighed, eyeing the door’s ornate molding from over his shoulder. “No, I’ll admit to some enchantment with it. It has some corners where, well, you can look and imagine what it once was.”

  “Sometimes . . .” He raised his eyes back up with a detectable flash of courage. “Sometimes, it’s easy to imagine it differently. It’s easy to imagine the folly as beautiful as it was in its first spring. And it’s easy to imagine that those cads aren’t downstairs. And to imagine that you don’t have this.”

  His knuckles grazed her scabbing wound. “It’s easy to imagine talking to you then and telling you everything. In a world where I’m not responsible for what’s happening to you.”

  She had imagined it too. And it was easy. But she couldn’t say so. Because he was right, he was responsible for all of this. She couldn’t ever forget it, even if he sent her away on a horse right that moment.

  He raised another hand to her neck.

  “I didn’t realize your neck was so cold,” he said. He wandered to where his coat lay near the fire and pulled something out of the pocket.

  Beth was about to speak to his abrupt change of subject when the pendant dropped in front of her eyes, from between his fingers. She pulled away, wary of a cruel trick. But he brushed her hair to the side and reached around her, tying the new, forest-colored ribbon behind her neck.

  She lifted her hand to caress the pendant. Her fingers, her neck, her whole body sagged in relief. The cool weight of the pendant against her skin was the comforting echo of family and home.

  “I don’t know that this will keep my neck warm, but I accept.”

  “I’m getting to that part.” Rhys leaned down to his bag and withdrew a scarf—tatty and loosely woven in the color of faded moss. “We need to hide your treasure anyway. Keep it safe.” He bundled it around her, and she watched him in awe.

  In silence, the two walked back to the pallet, where he sat and re-bandaged her shoulder. After tying it off, his hand slid down her arm to her wrist. His thumb pressed gently against her pulse. She waited for him to pick up the ropes, but instead he stood.

  “I’ll get Harry to bring up some food for you and help you with the rest.”

  “I’m not hungry. I won’t need anything yet for another couple of hours.”

  “I’ll have him come up anyway.”

  Rhys made hastily for the door. Beth couldn’t make sense of him until—cruel wonderment solidified into realization—the coward.

  “You don’t want to be the one to tie me back up.”

  He turned slowly. Not denying it.

  Beth was swiftly on her feet and moving toward him. His words cut her off before she reached him. “Of course I don’t.”

  “So you’re making that sweet young man do it for you? If you don’t want to do it, then just let me go.”

  The man in front of her didn’t say a word to that and it infuriated her. He did so much for her, but never that. Never just letting her go.

  It was worse than that. In the time she’d spent away from him, cooped up in the little bedroom, she was increasingly ready to leave. But now, a moment spent joking by his side had twisted her senses. It had reawakened her to every dangerous sensation she’d felt the first morning. Feelings of curiosity and affection. Nearness. And that sensation—too rare for her—where her whole body’s awareness siphons down to that spot between her legs, as though a drawstring were tightened there.

  These feelings were what anchored her heels to the folly’s floor, making the words let me go heavier and heavier every time she uttered them. If she didn’t force herself to say it now, she might never.

  “I’ll give you two thousand pounds if you just let me go. It’s the most that’s possible to offer quickly, and I’ll make sure it’s done.”

  Of all the expressions sh
e’d thought might cross his face, a confused one was not what she expected. He raised a finger to his lips to suggest her silence. She might bristle at such a gesture, but she was too focused on what any of it meant.

  Wordlessly, he opened the door and called for Harry. A door somewhere in the hallway opened and shut with a bang. Soon it was Harry who stood in the doorway—Rhys having absconded like the thief he was.

  Chapter 9

  “Evening, Miss Clarke. How may I—” Harry’s gentle voice ceased to be heard as soon as the door to Beth’s room was shut.

  As Rhys pulled himself back down the hall, every fall of his boot soles on the carpetless floor made a heavy sound. Lies. He’d just told Beth so many lies. But he had to play the villain for one final night. He couldn’t chance Lion or Sol overhearing that he’d acquired what he sought in the village. He’d already told the men on his way inside that he had learned nothing.

  But now he knew where Greenthorne was. He was going to take her there. And he was going to accept nothing in return.

  The idea hadn’t become a certainty until returning to the folly. He’d taken the steps of the large staircase in bounds, knowing that one glimpse of her would bring an axe down on his indecision. And it did.

  His abrupt entry had woken her, but in that sliver of time before she’d jolted to consciousness, his decision was made. Seeing her—this brilliant person—leashed up on a shabby pallet, the answer was as bright and obvious to him as the sun. He’d get her the hell out of there.

  Rhys closed his door with the necessary slam and crossed to the bed. The room felt cold, dead . . . empty. It wasn’t for the lack of a fire, but for the lack of her.

  Beth was right. He’d tried to ignore her plight and his part in it. When he’d made his vow to her at the bottom of the ravine, he’d only promised her safety. But tacitly, there had existed many more promises he wished to keep—ones he never uttered aloud because he knew that Lionel would be a thorn. He’d broken almost all such promises.

  Women of her ilk had wounded him before, and he’d not forgotten it. They’d breathed the weighty whispers that saw him, and the others, thrown in prison. They’d attested to the honor of a madman, while Rhys’ friend Dewey, a man of real honor, had dangled at the scaffold.

  But Beth was not them. She wore their clothes, and she knew their language, but the core of her was made of something else entirely—of running water that adapted itself to the curves of life. She slid into one situation as easily as the next, and only rarely did he catch a hesitation or see her shake. She seemed almost more habituated to her situation than he was—ready to laugh at a moment’s notice even as she was heaped upon with myriad discomforts. More than once he’d read her laughter as trust, and it had gutted him that it was so misplaced. Now he would make good on whatever she had seen in him.

  Rooting around in his saddlebag, he found a piece of parchment and tore off a scrap. He’d been worried before about influencing Harry’s loyalty in any way as the group splintered, but the care that Harry had shown to Beth had made clear enough what sort of man the boy had become. Rhys wanted Harry at his side.

  He pulled Beth’s little pencil from his pocket. It had detached from the ties of her lost notebook. Regret over its loss swelled in him once more, but he forced it aside. He had to focus.

  At midnight, Rhys returned to her room. This time he slipped in quietly, even though he’d hoped she might be awake. She was not.

  Her face was mostly veiled by tangled brown waves, yet he could see where her lashes rested against her cheek. She seemed contemplative, even in dreaming. Did her curious mind ever sleep?

  He smiled down at her, but a shadowed feeling was creeping up on him.

  “I will be happy when you are happy,” he whispered, as though hearing himself say it aloud might push the forceful specter away. Instead, the feeling only coiled tighter around his stomach.

  It would be his greatest relief to see her away from this place. He’d be cut free too—from Lionel, from Sol. He’d spent enough years hiding from his ruined name in the purgatory of a criminal livelihood. They’d both be free. They’d both be—

  Ah, that was it, wasn’t it? He’d never see her again.

  She was the only person who had spared a thought for his plight, even when she didn’t know what it was and even in spite of her own. Her hand in his arm would never again transport him to some other life. It was all fantasy.

  Rhys tilted his head to look at the stony maenad that lay across from Beth. The nymph smiled faintly, sympathetically. He placed a hand on the statue. “I already miss her.”

  He sighed.

  Everything was in place. He’d passed off his note, and Harry knew what to do. They’d talk in the woods early, before the lazy cads rose.

  Rhys resisted brushing the hair from Beth’s cheek. There would be no more of that either. It was time to tell her the rest of his promises, even if she couldn’t hear them.

  Beth’s strange and turbulent sleep blossomed into a curious morning.

  The less cultured among the troop of thieves tended to sleep until noon, yet Beth could hear their muffled jabbering floating up from somewhere outside.

  Harry hadn’t come to wake her. Nor had Rhys.

  What time it was, she could not quite tell, but the light still seemed gray around the curtains. The men’s voices died down, and Beth concentrated on a different sound. A song thrush’s whistles and trills pierced through the stillness—it was indeed early.

  She shifted to make her shoulder more comfortable. Sleep had been fitful. There had first been a nightmare of Lionel and his quiet accomplice, Sol, chasing her through the forest. They’d sounded like animals, like predators behind her. Yet when she would fearfully check over her shoulder, prepared to see a real lion leaping for her throat, it would be Lionel’s smudged and twisted maw instead.

  She’d dreamed also of riding her horse, Cutter, over the moorlands, but then the dream had changed. She found herself sitting at the edge of Greenthorne’s pond, staring into it and hearing Rhys’ voice, as distant as the stars. He apologized to her. Made promises to her. And at last she was transported to the folly, where the maenad was a real woman and Beth wept into her lovely arms.

  Now she looked into the nymph’s familiar face, which was always eye-to-eye with her when she awoke. “I only want to daydream with you all day and purge all of the conflicts in me.”

  Rhys’ manner had been so strange the night before—his urgency, his confusing honesty, the look on his face when she’d made her offer, an offer that seemed not to matter at all. Then he’d silenced her with one finger to his lips, and she still didn’t know why.

  The pendant gently bumped against her neck as she shifted again. Rhys’ scent wafted from the yarns of the scarf he’d wrapped her neck in. She inhaled it deeply, then stopped herself.

  “I thought last night that he might kiss me.” She bit her lip against the guilt of the next part of her confession.

  Her confessor, the maenad, awaited the rest. And?

  “Don’t make me say it, friend.”

  Beth imagined that kiss. She idealized it as part of some spell this place had cast on her. With that kiss, the wall sconces illuminated. Their flickering candles revealed gilt swirls on the walls and floors so gleaming that one’s shoes reflected in it as though walking on a pond. Rhys was illuminated too and that was when the fantasy fell apart.

  Her mind started over.

  She stripped those fairytale layers away to find Rhys alone in that imagined kiss. Just as he was and nothing more. The wintery scents that clung to his great coat. The sweat that formed on his temples beneath his hat. Rough skin mismatched to his gentle touch. His warmth. There he was. And with all the brilliant trappings stripped away, she still desired that kiss.

  It had been so long since she’d been touched, and now—

  She shut her eyes hard ag
ainst the truth.

  “I confess—”

  But her intimate confession was stolen as the door burst open. Lionel stood there. “Talkin’ to yer friend again?” He laughed wildly as he sauntered in with his hands on his belt.

  Beth squirmed upright. A barb was ready on her tongue, but something didn’t feel right. There was something altogether too confident in Lionel’s expression. Something . . .

  Beth opened her mouth and screamed, “Rhyyyyys!”

  Lionel winced at the sound she made but otherwise looked down pitifully at her. Her voice was still ringing in her ears. She swayed as her stomach turned over with fear.

  “Where’s Rhys? Harry?”

  “Wish I knew.” The man shrugged. “My guess is that they’re off pissin’ in the woods somewhere, readyin’ to betray me. I’m not so dumb as they think, though.” He nudged her roughly with his toe. “No matter. It’s time to get ready for yer big day!”

  Solomon trundled into the room behind him.

  “Get ’er up, Sol. We need to clean this gentlewoman off so she can fetch a good price. You did want to go home, didn’t you?”

  Sol knelt to untie her hands.

  “You don’t know where my home is.”

  Lionel’s horrific grin was sharp enough to slide right through her soul. “Oh darlin’, we’re about to.”

  Sol jostled her up to her feet, but she fought him, thrashing and dropping her weight. She fought with such blind and terrible rage that she hardly noticed when she’d been dragged outside.

  Sol stopped at a horse trough at the side of the lodge. He shoved her toward it contemptuously, seemingly glad to be rid of her writhing body—all sharp elbows and fingernails. Stale, green water shimmered up at Beth, a thin layer of ice on its surface. Lionel set himself down on a milking stool with his pistol trained squarely at her.

  Beth examined the edge of the forest, looking for any sign of Rhys, of Harry, of hope.

  “No, girl. You look over here at me.”