Since their conversation was being conducted in low tones as they passed through the throng in the gaming rooms, Marguerite thought she could not have heard her companion’s words correctly. “Comment?”
Jeremy repeated his earlier statements. Marguerite had not misunderstood. “The British Museum?” she echoed, perplexed. “Pourquoi?”
Jeremy shrugged. “I don’t know why. He’s trying to track down the highwayman’s red-haired doxy, from all accounts. It don’t signify.”
“Maybe not to you!” Marguerite interrupted with an expression of perfect horror on her pretty face. “But you haven’t been offered false coin! Zut! So that is what it is! I have wracked my brain, I can tell you, trying to figure out what she has that I do not—and now I understand! I tell you, Jeremy, it has rather raised my spleen, because never have I been so deceived in anyone!”
If Marguerite at last understood, her companion was not similarly blessed. Aware of the curious glances being cast at them, Jeremy begged Marguerite to lower her voice. He then begged her to share her enlightenment with him. Just what did it concern?
“Why, Viccars, of course!” Marguerite was exasperated to find Jeremy such a slow-top. “Lady Sherry, me, the highwayman’s wench—we’re all redheads, don’t you see?”
A certain portion of Marguerite’s logic, Jeremy could follow. He failed to see what about it had sent her into the boughs. “So you’re all carrot-tops. So what?”
“And so it doesn’t matter which red-haired female he’s with!” cried Marguerite. “When he’s with one he forgets the rest. He hasn’t been to see me because Lady Sherry occupied his thoughts. And he’s probably neglected her while traipsing after the highwayman’s wench. Two of us aren’t enough for him, apparently! His memory for mistresses is so short that we are all interchangeable.”
Interchangeable, were they? Jeremy was not impressed by this extremely specious example of feminine reasoning. Still, one aspect of Marguerite’s logic—or illogic—struck him forcibly. Marguerite, Lady Sherry, and the highwayman’s doxy were all red-haired. Jeremy was prepared to lay a monkey that he could make some good use of this coincidence.
“Listen, poppet,” he said. “Viccars will come to visit you again, and when he does— Well, I don’t need to tell you how to turn him up sweet! Don’t breathe a word to him of your suspicions. Don’t nag at him or scold. Act like you’re happy for him. Wish him a long life and happiness. But don’t act like you don’t care a groat—you know the sort of thing!”
Marguerite understood. She was to act the hypocrite. But to what end?
Jeremy only laughed when she asked this not-unreasonable question. “I can’t tell you that. You must leave all to me. And don’t despair; we ain’t in the basket yet!” On these encouraging words, he took his leave.
Don’t despair, Jeremy had said. Marguerite wished she could believe so easily that her troubles were at an end, that her creditors would not begin to hound her in earnest at any moment, and that she would not be forced to sell her jewels and all else that she owned.
Lord Viccars’s rejection was symbolic. She did not suit his taste. Never again would Marguerite dare to aim so high. She would be forced to make her way in the world in the only way she knew, enduring a series of fickle protectors, each less wealthy and aristocratic than the last, until she was no more than Haymarket-ware. Depressed beyond all bearing by these gloomy reflections, Marguerite swallowed another glass of claret, then retired to the faro table. If she were to be hanged, it might as well be for a sheep as for a lamb.
Chapter Fourteen
Hanging was also on Micah’s mind, though in regard to his own neck as opposed to sheep or lambs. He stood at the book room window, looking down into the gardens and wondering if the furor about his escape had yet died down. His leg had healed enough now that he could hobble about, was healing so very quickly, indeed, that Tully called it a near miracle.
She could take much of the credit for his recovery. Few convalescents would be as coddled as Micah had been. Both Tully and Daffodil were forever bringing him treats filched from the kitchens, fussing over him and unbosoming themselves to him, even allowing him to instruct them in the intricacies of the backgammon board. As a result, Micah had learned a great deal about Sir Christopher’s household. He knew where the family silver was hidden and of Lady Childe’s attitude toward his benefactress; he knew about the three gentlemen Aunt Tulliver had married and several more she had not; and he knew how Daffodil had come to be an abigail.
Micah turned away from the window. The book room was stifling hot. He took off his shirt and dropped it into a chair, limped to a bookshelf and surveyed the volumes lined up there. Though Micah wasn’t much of a reader in the normal way of things, he had taken to this means of whiling away the hours when he lacked company. Thus far he had read Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee, a powerful description of Irish exploitation by English landlords; Shelley’s Vindication of Natural Diet, which traced man’s evil impulses, and most wars, to the ingestion of meat; and Lord Byron’s The Giaour, a tale of Oriental adventure, violence, and love. He had perused a number of accounts of gentlemen of the road that Lady Sherry, rather surprisingly, had on hand: The True and Honourable History of the Life of Sir Oldcastle, who was believed to be the original of Mr. Shakespeare’s Falstaff; The Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey, a rather dull volume except for a description of the highwayman’s unusual mask, which covered his entire face with painted features described as extremely repulsive; and Recantation of an ill led Life, by one John Clavell, who was eager to tell the world how to travel without being robbed, no doubt in an effort to avoid the hangman’s noose.
The hangman’s noose. Micah grimaced and turned away from the bookshelf. He hobbled around the room in search of diversion, spent some time inspecting the worn tapestries that hung upon the walls. Then his glance lit upon Lady Sherry’s manuscript. He knew now that she wrote novels and had even browsed through some volumes set aside on a special shelf. Murder and ravishment and kidnapping, ghosts and vampires and moldering castles—to discover that the lady’s mind was of a lurid bent. Expecting more of the same, Micah sat down at the library table and began to scan the closely written pages. A moment later, he chuckled and settled down to read in earnest.
Lady Sherry found him in this posture, a half hour later, when she walked into the book room, a tea tray in her hands and Prinny trotting eagerly at her heels. No sooner did she have the door open than the dog pushed past her, prepared to leap. “No!” cried Micah. Prinny dropped abjectly to the floor.
Sherry stared, amazed, at Prinny. “However did you manage that?” she asked in awe. “He actually obeyed!”
“It’s all in the tone of voice!” Micah gasped, still caught up in merriment. He gestured with a manuscript page. “I’d no notion you had such talent for comedy. Captain Blood! Ophelia! ‘Pray, sir, if you are a man of honor, you will not ravish an unhappy lass!’ ” He dropped the page and burst into renewed whoops.
Sherry glanced anxiously into the hallway, which was fortunately deserted, then hastily closed and locked the door. Micah was still chortling. How dare he poke fun at her story? Although truth be told, she didn’t like the thing much herself. “I suppose you will tell me it isn’t realistic,” she said with resignation, and then added, “Oh, gracious!” as she realized belatedly that she was locked alone in a room with a man who wore no shirt.
Micah realized the import of the situation in almost the same moment, due largely to the startled expression on Lady Sherry’s face. He had placed her in a very compromising position by his current mode of dress. Or undress. “Have I offended you? Shall I put my shirt back on? It’s just so accursed hot!”
“Oh, no!” Sherry wished no one to suffer discomfort on her behalf. Unusual as the situation might be, she was no schoolroom miss to swoon away at sight of a man half dressed; but instead a mature novelist, aged seven-and-twenty, who could not help but think that so risqué an encounter—properly fictionalized, of co
urse—might liven up her current book. “It is hot, and I am not offended. In truth, I would take my own shirt off if I dared!”
“Why not do so, then?” Micah was intrigued by this suggestion. “I don’t mind.”
“You don’t—” Sherry elevated her gaze from Micah’s bare chest to his face. He was smiling. “Wretch!”
“You would be perfectly safe!” Micah was enjoying the sight of her pink cheeks. “I am incapacitated, you will recall.”
No man could be called incapacitated who possessed a chest and shoulders so muscular, so well-defined. Lady Sherry, quite properly, did not voice that thought. “What you are, sir,” she said wryly, “is an arrant flirt. But you were reading my story. You don’t mind, I take it. I was afraid you might.”
“Mind?” Micah compromised comfort with conscience by shrugging into the shirt but leaving it unfastened. “Why should I mind? I thought you might dislike me reading your story without so much as a by-your-leave.”
Sherry set down her tray, which contained teapot and cup and a plate of sugar-dusted teacakes. “I meant, I thought you might not like it that I’d based a character on you.”
Micah paused in the act of reaching for a tea cake. “On me?” he asked.
“On Captain Toby.” Sherry lifted the teapot and poured. “You never have told me how you came by that name.”
“Captain Toby,” Micah repeated, and smiled. “No, I don’t mind. It’s rather a good joke. But your Captain Blood—it’s all balderdash; you must know that.”
“Balderdash?” Sir Christopher had voiced a similar conclusion on the sole occasion that he had read one of Sherry’s books. Now Micah, too, thought her writing lacked a realistic touch. Sherry could not take this criticism too grievously to heart, since her readers apparently did not care whether her tales were realistic or not.
She sat down at the library table. “What is balderdash? Why do you say that?”
Micah joined her at the table. “My good girl, it is all balderdash! Poppycock! People don’t act like this. Life isn’t like this. Good God, you know that! Furthermore, this Captain Blood of yours is the dullest cove I’ve read about in any book. Your Ophelia—and why Ophelia, of all things?—could duel him with a hat pin and win!”
“I see.” Andrew had thought Captain Blood too rakehelly. Sherry rested her chin on the palm of her hand. “Perhaps I should just give the whole thing up as a bad piece of work. Unless you’d be willing to tell me what a highwayman’s life is really like?”
“I tell you—” Micah broke off to scowl at Prinny, who had inched unobtrusively forward to put his head on his new friend’s knee. Since it was not his injured leg that the dog thus favored, Micah did not push him away. “You did save my bacon,” he admitted. “It’s only fair that I repay you. Just what is it that you want to know?”
Sherry set aside her teacup, reached for her pen and ink and several sheets of the best paper. “Everything! How did you come to embark upon a life of, er, crime?”
“Ah, that!” Micah appropriated the abandoned teacup, which he filled to the brim. “I was always a bad ‘un. Started spinning whoppers as soon as I could talk. Started running off as soon as I could walk! Drove my old guv’nor half wild with all the trouble I got into. Then I came of an age to discover—”
“Women and wine!” Sherry scribbled furiously. “Of course!”
“Women and wine and the gaming tables!” Micah amended, with a wicked leer and a flourish of his teacup. “I drank wine like it was water, and the ready flowed through my fingers like it was the same. As for women—”
He sighed. “Ah, but I was a wild lad. The guv’nor did right to cast me out before I brought us all to ruin.”
Sherry was intent upon her paper, her flying pen. “Of course! Just as I suspected! You took to the road to pay your gambling debts. What was your game— faro? Macao? Deep basset? And how did you escape from the gallows? Was that riot part of the plan?”
Micah was watching her, amused by the enthusiasm with which she was writing down his words. “My doxy arranged it all. A clever piece is Moll. She’d take to the road with me if I let her. Many are the times I escaped out her window when the law came sniffing too close to my heels.”
Sherry glanced covertly at Micah’s half-bared chest and experienced a pang of envy for the very bold-sounding Moll. Somberly he added: “As for the other—why, ‘twas backgammon as was my ruin.”
“Backgammon?” Sherry saw the mischievous expression on his face. “You’re telling me Banbury tales, you wretch!”
“Well, yes,” admitted Micah. “You must not blame me when you rise so prettily to the bait! The truth of the matter, you see, is that I’m not a highwayman at all.”
“Yes, and I’m not a magistrate’s sister!” Sherry set down her pen. “What clankers will you try to tell me next? It is very bad of you. I had hoped you would help me with this wretched book.”
Micah picked up the manuscript pages and leafed through them. “What’s wrong with it?”
Sherry looked at him indignantly. “What do you mean, what’s wrong with it? You said that it was balderdash just moments past. I hardly consider that high praise!”
Micah shrugged, thus disturbing Prinny, who removed his head from Micah’s lap and went to stretch out on the settee. “I didn’t say it was bad balderdash! Whether or not you meant it to, it made me laugh. I’ll tell you what I think. What’s wrong isn’t with your book; it’s with you. Your heart’s not in it, so to speak.”
How strange, thought Sherry, that a highwayman should possess such depths of understanding, for what he said was true. This was the first book Sherry had written without her mama’s participation in the process, without each evening’s enthusiastic discussion of the work in progress. Of course it must seem different. Sherry wondered why she hadn’t realized this for herself.
How her mama would have loved this adventure. Sherry reached for the teapot and found it empty, so she went to her bookshelf to fetch the decanter and glasses that she kept hidden there. Micah’s pistol lay there also. She picked it up and brought it to him.
“You might as well have this,” she said, then unstoppered the decanter and poured. “I suppose I’ve been listening too much to Lavinia. She thinks I should set my pen to instructive, enlightening, and, above all, moral tales. As if what I write isn’t respectable somehow. Although Lavinia seems to enjoy reading it well enough! And so I feel guilty because I cannot write other than I do, because it emphasizes my deplorable lack of high-mindedness.’’
“How absurd you are!” Micah sampled his port and judged it very fine. “High-minded females are a bore, and so are instructive books. Look at your Lavinia. Why would you wish to model yourself after such a prune?”
A prune? He had called Lavinia a prune? Seldom had Sherry felt so in charity with anyone in all her life. Or so comfortable, she realized with surprise as she smiled at her highwayman over the rim of her own port glass. She would miss him when he was gone. Because, of course, he must go, and soon. Reticent as he was on the subject, the man had a life elsewhere, a family, perhaps even a wife.
Of course he would have a wife, Sherry decided as she gazed at his handsome face. At least one. The usual moral distinctions could not be expected to matter to a highwayman.
She lowered her gaze. Folly, to waste time with such thoughts. Even if Micah were of unexceptionable birth and social standing, he would not be for her. He would have his pick of beautiful women, and among them would not be a spinster authoress.
He was not of exceptionable birth and social standing but a scoundrel and a rogue. Apparently, Sherry had reached that advanced stage of life when ladies must beware of strange fantasies.
Micah watched her, and the unhappy expression settled on her face. He got up from his chair, hobbled around the table, grasped her wrists, and pulled her to her feet. “What the devil is it that plagues you so? One minute you’re laughing and the next you’re blue-devilled. I wish you would let me help.”
&n
bsp; The only way Micah could help Sherry now was by releasing her, and he did not. Such was the effect of his touch, his proximity—his bare chest—that she was half deafened by the pounding of her own pulse.
Nor were her thought processes unaffected. Sherry knew only that Micah mustn’t guess how he affected her, and therefore said the first thing that came to her mind. “I’m to be married! Oh, please let me go!”
How pink were her pretty cheeks. How her lovely bosom heaved. How adorably confused she was, altogether. Why had Micah not realized it before— “You’re going to be what?” he inquired.
“Married!” Sherry struggled with a most improper impulse to touch her fingertips to her highwayman’s bare chest. “To Lord Viccars— Andrew! Soon!”
Micah transferred his grip from Lady Sherry’s wrists to her shoulders—lest he be condemned as a brute, it should perhaps be noted that she made no appreciable effort to escape—and gave her a little shake. “The devil with Viccars,” he said.
Sherry stared up at him, her lips parted in astonishment. There was nothing for it but to kiss her. Micah proceeded to do just that, so thoroughly that Prinny, who had been watching these strange goings-on with interest from the settee, yawned in boredom and resumed his nap.
“Oh!” cried Sherry when Micah at last paused to let her breathe. She pressed her hands to her flaming cheeks. “How dare you—”
“Missish airs don’t suit you.” Micah drew her closer into his arms. After a moment’s hesitation, Sherry relaxed against him. Clearly, they were both lunatic.
Equally clear was Sherry’s realization that she knew as little about romance as she did about highwaymen. Andrew’s kiss had been pleasant, had filled her with a gentle warmth, but this—
Lady Sherry and the Highwayman Page 11
