The Highwayman's Folly

by Daria Vernon

  “Oh, do you? It seems odd that I should be exotic when I’ve never left the isle.” This one was new. Her hands tightened on the reins.

  “I just, I don’t know. You’re just so different from any of the women I’ve ever met.”

  “You’re only saying that because none of the other women you’ve met have ever been kidnapped.” She bristled when others mentioned it, so she frequently opted to steal the pleasure from them.

  “I’m not. I found you very effervescent and intriguing even before all that. You remember. I loved you and offered for you.” He stopped his horse.

  The tone had gone serious. Taxingly so. She knew she was being rude, but she didn’t wait up for him. Hamm trotted past and cut her off.

  She met his eyes with her scowl, but now he looked too tragic to turn away from. A twinge of guilt began to tug at her. She didn’t have the stomach for guilt today.

  “I just thought—well, you’re so creative. So smart. You do and try a lot of interesting things. You just seem so special.”

  The compliments that were pouring forth were less opaque than his usual. Traits like “creative” and “smart” were the kinds of things she longed to be seen for, and yet—

  What was it that bothered her? It had to be the incongruity between them. That for all he spoke of their similarities, he himself was clearly aware of the differences and was savoring them as trophies instead of recognizing them for what they were—sheer incompatibilities. To him, she was the temptation of another world, someone to live vicariously through.

  The irony was that were they ever to be together, she knew he would never raise himself to her level of curiosity but instead seek to lower her to his.

  His awe often reeked of some covert jealousy. It revealed that he would trap her on the mantelpiece as his saucy knick-knack. One with a past that made him look more interesting and daring via his possession of her.

  A twice-ruined woman was shunned. A man with a twice-ruined woman was a fascinating rogue—a storyteller and a conqueror. He just wanted a wild horse to break.

  “Hamm—” She reached between their mounts to place a hand on his elbow. “Nothing has changed.”

  “Everything has changed. I’ve been a captain for two years now. I could be your captain.” Indignation simmered on his wide eyes.

  Not my captain.

  When he’d asked for her long ago, he’d had nothing to offer but perhaps his looks. His own name—and fortune—had been spoiled by a family of gamblers. In hindsight, she could see that he hadn’t overlooked her reputation back then at all. Instead, he was taking advantage of her vulnerable position, fancying himself the rescuing sort, even though it was her dowry that might have rescued him from destitution.

  But it was true, he’d spent the last decade in the navy—on a commission from a rich uncle—and had developed a very satisfactory living. He now had the respect of the aristocracy, the whole vacuous lot of them.

  “That I would even ask after a girl over thirty—”

  “Woman.”

  “Sorry?”

  “That you would even ask after a woman over thirty. Please, go on.”

  His face scrunched unpleasantly.

  “It’s time I should be getting back. I have business to attend to.”

  With a knowing raise of her brows, and little else in the way of a goodbye, Beth let him depart.

  A deep exhale escaped her once he was gone and she let her shoulders slump. Exhausting. She gave Cutter a congenial pat on the neck as though rewarding him for suffering alongside her.

  She was grateful that she could return to the house without that man on her heels. The nerve of him.

  Not my captain. Never my captain.

  Fewer things brought Rhys to mind these years since, but whenever something did spark a memory, it took her over like a mischievous spirit bent on possession.

  Hamm didn’t have the foggiest idea of Rhys’ existence, and yet it felt like he had maliciously trespassed where only Rhys should go—Captain.

  Beth looked at the ground and hardly saw her horse’s shadow. She’d been the one of them with real business to attend to and Hamm had nearly kept her from her noon appointment.

  Beth elbowed her way through the doors of her father’s study while removing her dirty riding gloves.

  “All my apologies, Mr. Bunce, for both my tardiness and my appearance.” She came to a stop in front of the stout man and puffed a lock of hair from her face. Mr. Edgar Bunce’s rosy cheeks pushed his spectacles upward.

  “You think I haven’t grown accustomed to both?”

  “Well, you will just have to grow accustomed to my apologies, too, then because I’m afraid I cannot stop myself.” They shared a smile as Beth moved around to the business side of her father’s desk and took a seat.

  Beth sighed and moved her hands across the oak surface, reacquainting herself with the feel of it. She waited patiently as Mr. Bunce settled in and began to withdraw various ledgers from his satchel.

  The unassuming solicitor had proven himself indispensable to her in the past few years. He had, in a sense, given her all of the freedoms she’d once longed for. It was by his hand that everything from Dahlia’s estate had been settled. He provided Beth with sound advisement but adhered to her decisions without waver. This trait seemed, to Beth, the rarest thing when even the dressmakers tried to tell her her own mind.

  He had not even questioned her decision to let Ashecote House to a family. In fact, he’d found the idea very smart with so many country houses languishing, idle. With every asset signed over to her, she felt more emboldened. Ideas—daring and indecent—began to take shape.

  She’d been certain one day that she’d finally found the thing that would raise Mr. Bunce’s eyebrow. And she’d been right.

  “Just to be certain I’m hearing you correctly, you wish me to retrieve the hanging records at Bristol Newgate from 1780 to 1782?” he’d asked.

  And she’d confirmed it with all the indifference of asking for a glass of water. His eyebrow then lowered, and he’d gotten to work. Good man. With that, he’d secured her trust forever.

  Indeed he’d found those records. After hours of poring over them together, she’d found the name she was looking for. Heathcote Dewey. The unjustly hanged quartermaster. Rhys’ friend.

  They discovered Dewey’s family in Cardiff and sent a representative to discover their needs and wishes, and to fulfill every one of them. Mr. Bunce had only ever asked once, “What is your connection to the widow?”

  And Beth had told him, “Truthfully, I have none.”

  During that business, Mr. Bunce had brought several archived copies of Bristol’s Weekly Intelligencer to her desk—each one splashed with stories of the Labrador mutiny. And there was a name, his name, not just Rhys but—

  Rhys Bowen.

  Her highwayman, her captain, had a name.

  Now it was a different gazette that Bunce dropped onto the oak surface. Beth reached for it, but Bunce put a warning hand over it.

  “I regret to inform you that it looks like another dead end. Germain David Desmarais is not our man.”

  Well, wasn’t that just the perfect news to complete her morning? Beth snatched up the copy of The Chelmsford Chronicle. There it was, circled at the bottom of the back-page obituaries. It described Germain D. Desmarais as a family man of six-and-thirty, the son of a baronet.

  Beth’s vision blurred as she stared right through the document. For nearly a year after she was taken from Ashecote, her father had tried to track down Desmarais. He’d occupied his worried mind by entertaining investigators and thief-takers in his study, until one day, one of his hired men got word that Desmarais had died on the Continent. A supposed acquaintance of his had said he’d expired pathetically in a debtor’s prison. While Beth thought that might be an apt exit for such a man, there was no evidence.
Debtor’s prisons around Paris had no record of him, and the acquaintance soon disappeared.

  Her father was prepared to believe it was over, but Beth didn’t trust it. It would have been too easy for that simpering fraud to slither out of his identity. Indeed, they’d discovered that he’d likely done it at least once. Most had only ever known him by his surname. He’d been a servant long before he’d managed the lands, and he’d let himself be called Desmarais since boyhood. But after his disappearance, they’d found documents of his bearing many names: Germain, Didier, Jules, Gregoire, Edmund. They had even discovered an alternate surname of Janssen.

  Beth had once been happily resigned to not owing that man a single further thought. But there was no way he was dead, and her need to prove herself correct—to not be caught out by that swindler again—became an obsession.

  “I’m very sorry, Miss Clarke.”

  Beth relaxed against the back of her chair. “Me too, Mr. Bunce.”

  That night, Beth had Lily pour a bath to soak up her disappointments.

  “Careful Miss, ’tis still quite hot.” Then Lily closed the bedchamber door.

  Beth stepped into the bath right away, forcing herself to bear the still-too-hot water. The sensation as she sank into it made her heart pound. Life had once again become unutterably dull and this slight, heating pain seemed as good as it got. And then even that sensation was gone.

  Taking up her father’s obsession with Desmarais was a hobby that was losing its legs. She looked to where she’d dropped The Chelmsford Chronicle on her bedside table. Useless endeavor. There was no new information, but it wasn’t really about that anymore, was it? It was about her renewed boredom. It was about how her love for Greenthorne and her sense of suffocation at Greenthorne were battling within her, and no occupation could stave it off for long.

  Life was better when Allison was around. Beth lifted the goat’s milk soap from its tray and lathered her hands. Just one more night and the Weldons would be back from their tour on the Continent. Better than that, they’d be moving into a new home, much closer to Greenthorne.

  Years on, her misadventure was now referred to in whispers as The Ordeal and her time since The Ordeal was now passing very much the same as her time before it, only now she was awake to aspects of herself that she’d hardly known before. The thrill of opening an atlas now paled in comparison to seeing the whole of the county quiet and still before sunrise. No country home could make her forget the ostentatious curvatures of the folly’s plaster. No man’s touch could make her forget . . .

  Her hand was already on her thigh below the water, as a dark and beautiful feeling glided through her. Her hand slid up just as his had. Mimicked the edge of his finger finding and parting her . . .

  Beth glanced darkly toward the door and pressed her lips together to strangle off the purring sighs as they rose.

  Across from her bath, at the foot of her bed, was the chest that she’d long ago buried Rhys’ cape in. Since the night that she’d taken it from the downstairs cupboard, it remained in that chest. It had called out to her ever since, but she’d resisted touching it again, even in those early days when the howls of temptation were furiously loud.

  Beth sank lower in the water, as if to be nearer to the sensation that was emanating from her lap as she stroked. She did not take her eyes off the wooden chest.

  She felt herself called by it less and less these days. Rhys was distant. Blurred. She could hear his voice but not quite see his features. She was forgetting, and it felt disappointingly similar to healing.

  But the way he touched her was the one thing that could not be shaken, and she could hardly touch herself without borrowing from his memory. He was still the coal that fueled her breathless ardor in moments like this. For this, she allowed him passage into her, past all the barriers of shame.

  Beth’s lips dipped into the water, and she exhaled slowly, trying to draw out the grip of pleasure that was pressing her into the bottom of the basin. She slowed the swirls of her fingers, breathed deeply, tried not to—not yet—

  A knock at the bedroom’s door loosened Beth’s control and she flew—too soon—over the precipice of bliss. She splashed like a netted fish, struggling to get herself upright as Lily entered. A spasm clapped Beth’s thighs together, sending up one last ribbon of water.

  Lily’s expression exposed to Beth exactly what sort of a scene she’d caused. The young woman blushed. “I just brought—” Lily distractedly bustled to the bed, ignoring the flushed panting of her mistress. “I forgot to leave ye with some towels.” A short stack of linens was set on the counterpane.

  “Thank you, Lily. Would you mind?” Beth reached out an arm and Lily hurried to place a towel in her hand. The girl fiddled with her apron and did her best to look elsewhere but at Beth.

  “Anything else, Miss?”

  “That’s it for the night, thank you.”

  The door closed behind the girl. Beth still quivered in blissful recovery. A cheeky smile took over her face as her body relaxed. She didn’t so much mind being caught. Sometimes there were advantages to having one’s reputation in the gutter.

  Chapter 16

  Forks clinked gaily at the table that night. Candelabras cast their dancing light on half a dozen smiling faces. The Weldons’ footmen stepped in and out of the fray with deliveries of silver salvers, piled high with all manner of colorful delights. Peals of laughter bounced off the walls of Tallyside’s intimidatingly grand, yet sparsely furnished dining room. Glasses were fumbled and broken. Wine was spilled.

  Allison chattered brightly in the middle of the long table, looking like a ray of sunshine in a crisp yellow caraco, frothy with lace and no doubt acquired in Paris. Her nose and cheeks had picked up a Mediterranean gold. Lady Weldon’s stern gray eyes could not conceal a glint of pride as her daughter gushed to their nearest family about ruins in Rome, icons in Tuscany, and the dangers brewing in Paris.

  Allison cast the majority of her animated storytelling toward her father, Lord Weldon, who sat at the table’s head. The Earl of Weldon had been dabbling in the textile trade for years but had recently abandoned the project to spend more time with his family at their new home.

  The Weldon’s adopted son, Stefano, was among the happy party, seated next to Lord Weldon. Unable to inherit his father’s title, Stefano had taken the trade business rather more seriously. Now it was all but handed over to him, and he would soon return to Greece to run it. Allison had never said much of him. He’d been taken in by the family as a young boy back when the Weldon’s believed they could not conceive. Allison had come along over a decade later. A welcomed surprise.

  Beth eyed the swarthy man with curiosity. His short beard was quite a novel thing to see in England and only strengthened his mystery. He looked a touch older than his four-and-thirty, for the seaside sun had rid him of the softness of youth. Beth sipped her wine as she assessed his unique features—they didn’t put her off. Her eyes grazed further down his build to where his buckskins went taut around his thigh—

  Oh Lord. She was completely foxed, wasn’t she? She’d be caught gawking if she did not rein it in. She looked around. Her own father swayed in his seat, his cheeks shining like persimmons. At least she was no more cup-shot than anyone else at the table. She politely brought a green bean to her mouth and missed, poking her lips with the fork’s tines. From the corner of her flitting eye, she caught the twinkle in another—Stefano had seen that. He smiled, playfully poking his lip with his own fork. Beth didn’t turn away at his notice but instead allowed an unstoppable smile to take her over.

  Everyone else was too merry to catch them. Their little moment would be held in confidence. The thrill of such a fleeting flirt left her all the more keenly aware of just how dull things had been. She placed a hand against her embroidered stomacher, enjoying the rush she felt behind it.

  The messy merry-making went late. The night had
been an intimate prelude to the grand fête that was yet a few nights off. This sort of small party was much more to Beth’s liking, and she couldn’t stop her smiling as she watched everyone stagger off to the bedrooms of the large manor, laughter fading down every corridor. Even the staid Lady Weldon had had her long, straight back turned to jelly by the wine.

  Beth linked arms with Allison. “I’ve never seen your mother like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well . . . laughing.”

  “Ah yes, she’s not always so strict as you imagine. I believe our tour did her some good. She had not been to the Continent since she was my age. I suspect she relived a few good memories. She’s gentler on me anyhow, and she’s very pleased that Papa is back with us.” Allison tightened her grip on Beth’s arm, swaying somewhat. “Funny that you should even notice her.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it was not her that you exchanged smiles with all night.”

  Beth still felt the buzz of the evening as she lay awake in her shift. The full moon had disappeared from her window, climbing too high to see. The feeling that had started behind her stomacher now consumed her entire body. Her skin tingled and crawled, leaving her helpless to sleep.

  She sat up, fixing her eyes on the door that adjoined her guest room to Allison’s. She crept over to it and creaked it open.

  “What?” The whisper from the darkness was sharp and annoyed.

  “Are you awake?”

  “Does it not sound like I’m awake? I’m dreading the morning headache too much to fall asleep. I fear I’ll be losing my stomach ’til next supper.”

  Beth smiled at the words that emerged from the shadows. She’d no doubt be spending tomorrow in much the same fashion. Beth put her arms out ahead of her and felt her way around until she could tell she was at the bedside. The faint moonlight bounced off Allison’s smile and the whites of her eyes.

  “What do you need, Beth?” There was a rustling as Allison threw the covers open. “Did you have a nightmare? Do you want to get in with me and comfort yourself?”