Lady Sherry and the Highwayman

by Maggie MacKeever

  “He won’t be on the loose for long. A most rigorous inquiry is underway. Handbills and posters with his description, as well as what we know of the woman who helped him escape, will be circulated. We’ll find the scoundrel, and when we do he won’t be given a second chance to avoid his just fate.”

  The woman who helped him escape? Those words echoed ominously in Lady Sherry’s mind. She wondered how detailed a description of the lady in question was already in possession of Bow Street. “Is this hue and cry not a trifle harsh?” she asked as silent servants set out clean glasses and dessert plates, knives and forks and fringed napkins, decanters of sherry and claret and port. “The man has already gone once to the gallows.”

  “Aye, and missed his own hanging.” Sir Christopher contemplated the large plate of fruit on the table before him, his attention wavering between peaches and grapes and cherries, figs and plums. “He won’t escape again.” He picked up his fork and speared a lush plum. “The law is not to be trifled with, by God.”

  Lady Sherry had no desire to trifle with the law, to have anything at all to do with the law, in fact. She feared it was a matter in which she was not to be given a great deal of choice. “What about the woman?” she murmured.

  Sir Christopher stared blankly at his sister over the top of the plum. “What woman?” he asked. “Oh, the dox—er, unfortunate female. It depends. Perhaps she’ll be transported. Or maybe she’ll hang. You may be certain that she won’t go unpunished. Here, puss, you aren’t ill, are you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  So Sherry had, and it was her own, dangling from a gibbet alongside a certain green-eyed highwayman. She could hardly explain this vision to her law-upholding brother. “It’s nothing,” she murmured. “Merely a touch of the sun.”

  “Ah, yes,” murmured Lavinia as she indicated to Sir Christopher that he should apply his fringed napkin to the plum juice on his chin. “Sherris was out earlier today. My dear, you told us nothing of all this excitement! I suppose you didn’t know. What a pity. Since you were so taken with the rogue as to put him in a book, you might have enjoyed being at hand to see his escape.”

  Sherry could not bypass this opportunity. She opened her eyes wide. “You were so similarly taken with him, dear Lavinia, that you’re forever after me to read what I have written about him. As for your suggestion, frankly I am shocked! Surely you realize that for a lady to be present at a hanging is hardly proper. Especially an unmarried lady like myself.”

  With this unkind comment, to which Lavinia could think of no suitably cutting rejoinder, the meal came to an end. Even Sir Christopher could manufacture no oil to pour on waters as troubled as these. Lavinia retired to the drawing room in a huff, there to sulk over her coffee cup until her spouse joined her and teased her into a better humor with pretty compliments. Sherry, meanwhile, appropriated the claret and withdrew, explaining to the startled servant from whose fingers she snatched the decanter that she had a touch of the headache, which nothing but water and wine would cure, and leaving him to report to his fellow footman—who confided it to the butler, who in turn conveyed the news to Lady Childe herself—that Lady Sherry was on the way to becoming as great a secret tippler as her adopted aunt.

  Happily unaware that she was about to be damned as a drunkard as well as an old maid, Sherry climbed the stairs to her book room. Her emotions were in turmoil. She was furious with Lavinia for discussing her unwed status in that odious, condescending way—and that there was truth in Lavinia’s remarks didn’t make them easier to bear.

  Lavinia, however, was the least of Sherry’s problems at this juncture. The highwayman had been seen riding off with a red-haired female. If he were somehow trailed to this house—

  Sherry quailed at the vision of herself being tried at the sessions at the Old Bailey on an indictment of conspiring at a condemned criminal’s escape. She quailed, also, at the thought of what such a scandal would do to her brother’s good name, and was horrified that her rash action might put his reputation in jeopardy.

  Obviously, the only reasonable course of action now was to go to Sir Christopher and make a clean breast of the affair. Sherry was sadly lacking in courage, alas. Even if her brother were able to prevent her incarceration in Newgate, he would doubtless tell Lavinia of Sherry’s folly, and Lavinia would in turn tell Lord Viccars. Anticipation of Lord Viccars’s resultant revulsion of feeling cheered her little more.

  Then there was the thought of the highwayman himself. She had been trying for what seemed an eternity not to think of what might be going on abovestairs, lest some guilty admission slip from her careless lips or her thoughts be read. Sherry thrust her key into the lock, glanced up and down the hallway to make sure she was not observed. This was a strange hour to visit her book room; she normally courted her muse much earlier in the day.

  Sherry opened the door, backed into the room, then turned—and found herself staring down the muzzle of a pistol for the second time that day. This time the pistol was clutched by no highwayman but by Aunt Tulliver instead. Behind her, Sherry glimpsed Captain Toby stretched out on the settee, looking unnervingly like a corpse on view, as did Prinny, who was stretched out on the floor beside the sofa, or at least as corpselike as was possible for a dog so obese. Prinny opened his eyes and observed Sherry, toward whom he nourished a grudge so severe that he closed his eyes again without so much as a welcoming twitch of his plumed tail.

  Tully lowered the pistol. “Stab me! I’d just closed my eyes for a minute and then the door opened— Well, I don’t mind admitting I thought I was done for! Come to think of it, you was almost done for yourself. I could have put a hole in you as easy as winking, and even you couldn’t hold it against me under the circumstance.”

  “I’m sorry.” Sherry was stricken with guilt by the sight of Aunt Tulliver, wig awry, clutching at her chest.

  Was there no one of her acquaintance whom Sherry had not mistreated this horrid day? She walked across the room, looked down on the unconscious highwayman and the bloodstained bandage wrapped around his leg. “He looks so very pale.”

  “So would you look pale if you’d just had a bullet dug out of you.” Aunt Tulliver adjusted a pillow behind the highwayman’s head and picked up a bowl of bloody water and rags. The room stank of the gin with which she’d rendered him sufficiently senseless to probe for the bullet in his leg. Her gin, in point of fact, from her private stock; for though Tully might have a taste for most alcoholic beverages, she preferred that fiery liquor known commonly as Strip-Me-Naked or Blue Ruin.

  Lady Sherry looked worried, as well she might. The highwayman, and the book room, was no reassuring sight. But Tully knew a fair bit about medicine, due to the circumstance of having nursed three spouses through illnesses that proved fatal (though that was not her fault) and to the additional fact of having a very inquiring mind. Tully was curious about everything from the mating habits of cuckoos to the latest scandals of the haut ton and claimed to see a distinct similarity between the two; she was interested in medicine, and in anatomy in general, and was not so very old that this scoundrel’s well-knit anatomy did not strike her as very interesting indeed.

  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.