The Prodigal Hero

by Nancy Butler

  Once they were out of the river, she collapsed on the pebbled beach.

  “Get blankets!” MacHeath roared in what she swore was a captain’s quarterdeck voice. He was standing over her, feet spread, and she had no trouble at all picturing him on a ship. She tried to tell him this, but her teeth were chattering so badly she could only stutter out his name.

  He crouched beside her. “Sit up, if you can. You’ll breathe easier that way.”

  “I’m ... all ... right,” she managed to get out.

  He laid a hand against the back of her neck. It was so warm. “Good,” he said, “but I’ll feel easier when I’ve gotten you out of the cold.”

  She raised herself onto her elbows and stared up at him. “I just had the strangest vision,” she whispered hoarsely.

  He set his fingers on her lips. “Shssh, don’t fret yourself, Alexa.”

  “It seemed so real,” she added in a wavery voice.

  But he’d turned his attention to the tall, lanky man who was hurriedly approaching with a pile of blankets. MacHeath quickly wrapped two of them around her.

  They were horse blankets, she realized. The pungent odor of the stable steamed up from her wet body.

  “We need to get her inside immediately,” he said to the liveryman. Then he hesitated. “If you have a spare room. Even the barn would be better than remaining out here.”

  “I’ll hear none of that,” said a dark-haired woman, who had come up beside the liveryman. “Of course we have a room for you. It’s Christmas, after all ... it wouldn’t be fitting to make you stay in the barn.”

  But that’s what Christmas is all about, Alexa remarked to herself. She nearly grinned. At least her sense of irony hadn’t deserted her. Only all her other senses.

  “Shall I carry you?” MacHeath asked, one arm still around her shoulders.

  “I think you’d better. I am so numb, I fear my limbs are going to crack right off.” She looked up and saw that his face had gone dark and remote.

  “What is it, MacHeath?” She gripped his arm. “Those men are gone, aren’t they?”

  “For the moment. The villagers came rushing out into the street when they heard the shots, and the two of them fled.”

  “And where did you come from?” she asked as he swung her up into his arms. “I could have sworn there was no one near the bridge.”

  “I was speaking to Mr. Gable in the doorway of the livery barn when I saw you’d gotten into trouble. Dash it all, Alexa, I would have killed Finch outright if I’d known he was going to turn his pistol on you. Thank God you fell off that bridge when you did.”

  “I didn’t fall,” she said in a subdued voice. “I knew he was going to shoot me—I saw it in his eyes—so I jumped. I didn’t panic this time ... I remembered what you’d said about keeping a cool head.”

  He stopped walking and looked down at her with no little awe. “You amaze me beyond words. That was the most coolheaded thing I’ve ever seen.”

  She felt the warm blush rise up from her chest.

  Mr. Gable and his wife led them over the bridge, through the thinning crowd of villagers, to a neat brick house just beyond the span. They went through a hallway to a small parlor hung with garlands of pine, where MacHeath set her down.

  “The attic room’s not very fancy,” said Mr. Gable, holding open a narrow door, which gave on to a narrow, winding staircase. “My wife’s brother sleeps up there when he is home from the navy. But there is a small fireplace.”

  “I’ll bring you up some dry clothes,” Mrs. Gable added.

  “Thank you,” MacHeath said with feeling.

  “You just take your lady upstairs and get her warmed up.”

  Alexa preceded him up the steep stairs, stumbling a little at the top step. He reached up and encircled her waist, propping her against the wall. “I hope,” he said softly, “that you have learned to stay where I put you, Miss Prescott.”

  She lowered her eyes. “I know. It was a foolish thing to do. I just wondered what was taking you so long.”

  He made no response to that, but leaned past her and opened the door. “Come on, you’re dripping all over Mrs. Gable’s stairs.”

  The walls of the attic room sloped down precariously above a narrow bed and a scuffed washstand. MacHeath went immediately to the fireplace, where several half-burned logs lay in the hearth. “You need to take off everything you are wearing,” he said without turning around. “Everything.”

  Alexa was peeling herself out of her sodden, clinging, pelisse when Mrs. Gable came into the room, carrying a stack of clothing. She dropped her bundle on the bed and quickly turned to assist Alexa.

  MacHeath stood up from the fireplace, where the logs were now burning nicely, and, again without turning, muttered that he would get himself dried off in the barn. Alexa realized that he was nearly as wet as she was—his boots, his breeches, and the bottom half of his greatcoat were soaked.

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Gable said briskly. “You’ll do no such thing.”

  “But the lady and I are not—’’

  “‘There’s no fire in the barn,” she said. “You both need to stay here and get warm.”

  She crossed the small space and handed him some clothing. “These should do until your things dry out.”

  After she finished undoing the buttons at the back of Alexa’s gown, she slipped from the room. Alexa’s ears still burned from the words the woman had whispered over her shoulder before she left. “Mr. Gable and I passed the occasional time together before we were wed,” she’d said. “I am not one to judge others. And by the look of your man, he knows his way around keeping a lady warm.”

  Alexa put this thought from her mind as she quickly drew off her sopping outerwear. Her stockings and petticoat followed. She dried herself with the length of flannel Mrs. Gable had left behind and slipped into the dry chemise, before drawing on a red woolen dress, which had faded to a pleasing shade of rose. Whisking up the quilted comforter, she wrapped it around herself and hunkered down on the bed.

  “You can undress now,” she called to MacHeath. “I have my eyes closed, so your modesty will not be offended.”

  “Keep them closed,” he growled. She heard his greatcoat rustle as he drew it off.

  She waited five minutes and then opened one eye. He was standing by the fire facing away from her, clad only in a pair of corduroy breeches and woolen stockings. As she watched, he struggled to pull a homespun shirt down over his head. His naked back was smooth, a tawny color that was several shades lighter than his face.

  At the shipyards she had grown used to seeing the workmen without their shirts—in the heat of summer they often wore nothing more than canvas breeches—so she reckoned herself a fair judge of a man’s back. MacHeath’s was in no way disappointing—well-muscled and sleek, it tapered dramatically from his broad shoulders to his narrow waist.

  She stifled a sigh of discontent as he finally managed to tug the shirt over his torso, obscuring her view of that intriguing expanse.

  “Can I look now?”

  He turned and saw that she was already watching him. “As if you ever awaited my permission for anything.”*

  thou neve

  He began draping their wet clothing over a low bench beside the fire. He was still wearing his gloves, and she thought that an odd thing. It occurred to her that she had never seen him without them, though that was not surprising, since they’d spent most of their time together out-of-doors. But he had even kept them on last night at the inn.

  She wondered what his hands would look like. Long and elegant, she guessed, strong and supple. Not so very different from his tawny back.

  He did not seem disposed to make conversation, but paced restlessly along the narrow confines of the little chamber. Alexa picked up the flannel and began to rub her hair. Though it curled out of control, its texture was fine and it dried fairly quickly.

  She was watching him idly, while she blotted at a long tendril that she had pulled over one shoulder, when he
halted before the fireplace and took down a small carved ship from the mantelshelf. The handiwork of Mrs. Gable’s nautical brother, no doubt.

  He held it in his left hand, letting his fingers trace over the curve of the hull. Alexa was about to remark that it was not a bad replica, when she heard his low, shuddering sigh. She didn’t need to see his face to comprehend the pain behind that sound.

  Something about his posture, the dark head bent over the small ship, the fingers lovingly skimming over the smooth wood, sent her rocketing back in time ...

  A young man sat at a drafting table, leaning intently over the ship model he was carving, while the sunlight beamed in from a window, finding the fire in his deep-brown hair.

  “Oh ... my ... God.” Alexa stood up slowly, as if in a trance, the flannel and comforter both falling away, unnoticed, to the floor.

  MacHeath spun around, his eyes narrowed with instant concern. “Alexa?”

  “Go,” she said in a voice quivering with distress. “Please go.”

  He took a step closer, one hand raised toward her, and she shrank back.

  “No.” She shook her head so violently that her wet hair lashed both sides of her face. “It’s just the aftershock,” she whispered raggedly. “I ... I need to be alone. Please leave me.”

  Whatever emotion he read in her countenance, it was enough to send him to the door. “I’ll be down in the barn,” he said. “If you need me, just tell—”

  “Go,” she said again, and he ducked his head once and went out.

  The instant the door closed, she sank down to her knees, her fisted hands held tight over her face.

  It is not possible ... she cried silently.

  And yet it had been right in front of her, almost from the start. The unusual color of his hair, the Scots father, his mention of a connection to her family. Good heavens, he had even asked her if she recognized him.

  She had to have been blind not to see it. Not to have known him—the one man who had possessed her thoughts from the time she was twelve years old.

  Simeon Hastings.

  She leaned against the bed, clutching the comforter to her chest. Had he ever planned to tell her? Her father would have recognized him, she was sure of that. And so would half the workmen in Cudbright. It was only she, with her idealized, childhood image of Simeon Hastings—preserved, unchanging, like a portrait in a locket—who had not been able to recognize the open-faced, idealistic youth in the weathered, caustic man he had become.

  “Oh, and Quincy would surely have known him,” she muttered with a frown. After all, it was Quincy who had been struck down when he discovered Simeon stealing from her father’s safe. It was Quincy who had vowed to testify against him at the assizes in Exeter. It was Quincy who had feared for his safety when Simeon escaped from jail a week before he was to stand trial.

  No wonder the man had made such a point of denying any cordiality between her cousin and himself. Friendship hardly enters into it.

  And what, then, was her role in this melodrama? The answer, coming rapidly upon her silent question, was all too obvious.

  Revenge.

  Oh, and foolish creature that she was, she had softened her heart to him, believing he was decent and kind, and that, even if he’d been thinking only of a reward at the beginning, he’d come to care for her.

  She shuddered now at her naivete, her complete ignorance of the depths of human deceit. She was nothing more than a pawn to him, the means to make Darwin Quincy suffer. The man who called himself MacHeath had no concern for her, other than her usefulness in his game of retribution.

  Her heart throbbed with a hollow, wrenching pain. Any excuses she had earlier manufactured to explain Simeon Hastings’s crime—that he’d been forced into stealing by some unknown family need, or that somehow Quincy had mistaken his actions and accused him in error—were now swept away by MacHeath’s callous duplicity.

  She trembled at the thought of what her fate might have been if she’d stayed with him. That he would never have returned her to her father was a certainty. One did not do favors for old enemies.

  They were heading for the sea ... such an easy place to dispose of a body. Though her death would not trouble Quincy nearly as much as the loss of her money, it would strike a blow, perhaps a deadly one, against her father.

  It didn’t matter, though, who he was aiming his vengeance at—her cousin or her father or herself. Her illusions had been shattered, and the last vestige of her childhood dreams vanished.

  She knew she was safe for the moment. He could hardly do her bodily harm under this roof. There had to be a constable or a magistrate here in Rumpley, someone who would be interested to learn that her companion was a wanted man. She was halfway to the door, determined to warn her host, when something stopped her.

  It was the piercing memory of MacHeath’s arms holding her tenderly against him in a dark alley, while his hand stroked over her hair. It was the stirring sensation of his body, strong and muscular, molded to hers in the bedroom of an inn, and the sound of his husky voice as he’d whispered, “Trust me, Alexa.”

  If he’d wanted to harm Quincy, then taking her virtue would have been a very good first step. Even a man as desperate for funds as her cousin, would balk at taking another man’s leavings. Last night MacHeath could have bedded her, if that was his intention—he had so beguiled her, she didn’t know if she’d have fought back. But he hadn’t taken advantage of her, he hadn’t even kissed her, though she’d nearly thrown herself at him. No, he had done nothing more than grin at her in his infuriatingly rougish manner and climb out the window.**

  She pounded her fists softly against the door. The icy river water must have shrunken her brain, to make her believe that Simeon Hastings could ever hurt her. And even though, as MacHeath, he had fallen into low company, she didn’t think his character could have altered so greatly, even in ten years. What more proof did she need, her insistent heart whispered, than that he had just now put his own life in peril to rescue her?

  But then, what did it all mean? Would he intentionally risk prison by returning her to Cudbright, where he was sure to be recognized? Was he that foolish? That noble?

  Was it, as he claimed, that he was only after a purse from her father? But Papa would not blithely give money to the man who had betrayed him. He was more likely to have him clapped in irons.

  I have business with your father.

  The words he had spoken yesterday with such portent echoed back to her. Was it possible that he was after more than just a monetary reward? Was he going back to plead his case, using her as leverage to get a fair hearing from his former master?

  The questions shifted and darted inside her head. She weighed what she knew of the man against these new perplexities. Nothing made any sense. She needed someone else’s counsel, she realized. Her own scrambled wits had failed to give her an answer.

  She crept down the stairs and found Mrs. Gable seated in the parlor.

  “Feeling better?” she said from over her knitting, when she noticed Alexa hovering in the doorway. “Mr. MacHeath’s gone into the barn to look at one of the horses.” She tipped her head to one side and grinned. “Ah, he is a bonny man.”

  Alexa opened her mouth to protest that there was nothing bonny about a man who had kept her in the dark about so many things, but she never got the words out. A boy of five or so came pelting into the room from the front hall and went straight to his mother’s knee.

  “Look, Mummy,” he cried, holding up a ragged piece of paper. “The man made me a picture of Towser chasing his tail.”

  Alexa nearly wept. In the old days Simeon Hastings had often made drawings for her, pictures of her spaniel or her moor pony. He would leave them by the kitchen door, tucked under an old wooden buoy her father had salvaged. The days she found one of those drawings in that secret place were always full of bright promise.

  She sank down into the chair beside Mrs. Gable, her eyes bleak.

  The child ran to her, holding out t
he drawing. “See,” he said. “Isn’t Towser a funny fellow?”

  She nodded and swallowed a sob. Mrs. Gable shot her a swift look of comprehension and told the boy to run off outside.

  “What’s happened?” she asked. “You didn’t look this bad after nearly drowning in the river.”

  Alexa’s voice was barely audible. “I … I just discovered something very ... disturbing.” She held the back of her hand to her mouth. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” the woman asked gently.

  “I don’t know if I can. You are a stranger, and yet you’ve been so very kind to me and Mr. MacHeath.” She stifled another sob. “But you see, that’s the problem, he isn’t ... he isn’t—”

  “He isn’t named MacHeath,” Mr. Gable said from the hall doorway.

  Alexa’s head reared up in surprise.

  “Though I don’t know what his real name is,” he added as he came into the parlor. “When he was our captain, we all assumed he was using a false name. It was common among smugglers. Most of us had something in our past we wanted forgotten.”

  “Smugglers?” Alexa repeated in a tiny voice.

  “I expect he’ll have my head for telling you, miss, but it’s old news. I used to sail under your Mr. MacHeath. Till I discovered I had more aptitude for four-legged beasts than four-masted ships. So I left the coast and came inland. That’s why he tarried so long with me that you had to come looking for him. We were talking over old times.”

  She took a few seconds to process this spate of startling information.

  “He knew I was here in Rumpley,” Mr. Gable continued, “and figured I might be of some help to him. We bein’ old mates and all.”

  Her eyes flashed. “He never told me any of this ... about you or about his real identity or about having been a smuggler.”

  “A man who keeps secrets most often has good reason,” he stated evenly. “He told me that until he carried you off two days ago, he hadn’t set eyes on you in ten years.”

  He looked at her assessingly. “You couldn’t have been more than a gangly girl at the time ... it’s no wonder you didn’t recognize him now. I last saw him five years ago—he came here for the boy’s christening—and I barely made him out today, he’s changed that much.”