Lady Sherry and the Highwayman

by Maggie MacKeever

  Lady Cecilia turned back to them then. “You are glad who escaped?” she asked.

  “Not glad!” protested Sarah-Louise innocently as she nudged Sherry in the ribs again. “How could I be? At least that horrid Bonaparte person will not escape his prison on Saint Helena. Oh, look, there are Andrew and James. I’ll wager they’ve been playing at cards. Come, Lady Sherry, let me introduce you to my husband. Isn’t he a handsome brute?” Without giving Sherry an opportunity to answer, she maneuvered her up off the sofa and through the crowd.

  “I thought you were in need of rescuing. Cissy can be a trifle overbearing,” whispered Sarah-Louise. Sherry felt as though she were being swept along in a small whirlwind’s wake.

  Sarah-Louise’s James was indeed handsome, a tall man with carelessly arranged dark hair and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. The sight of their obvious affection for each other caused Sherry a pang of regret. She did not love Andrew as she should, not in the manner she had recently discovered it was possible to feel, yet had still agreed to become his wife.

  Perhaps it was just as well. Sherry sipped champagne from a crystal glass. She had fallen in love, however briefly, and it had been both unsuitable and uncomfortable. At least she would be more content with Andrew than if she continued to dwell beneath Lavinia’s roof. Perhaps her efforts to make Andrew happy—and Sherry did mean to make Andrew happy—would distract her from her own heartache. Surely it must be better to settle for what love was available than to do without any love at all.

  The evening passed in a confused impression of bare arms and bosoms and backs swathed in shades of blue and green, violet and primrose; of gowns of patent net and lace and ribbon, velvet and silk, satin and shot sarcenet, crepe and tulle over satin slips. Sherry saw shirt points so high they must surely cut their wearers’ ears and every variety of intricately tied cravats from the Oriental and the Mathematical to the Ballroom and the Trone d’Amour. Countless times, she was introduced to some new person; and professed herself delighted to countless more. Throughout it all she maintained an abstraction that would lead Lady Cecilia to incline her turbaned head, setting atremble the long white feather thereto attached, and pronounce gravely that Lady Sherry was not only a female of unusual character but an excellent creature withal, not given to frivolity but distinguished for her accomplishments and possessed of a well-regulated mind; and Sarah-Louise to speculate merrily with her spouse not upon Sherry’s intellectual resources but upon what had preoccupied her thoughts.

  Lord Viccars had not failed to notice that his fiancée was in a very quiet mood. Andrew was feeling a little pulled-about himself, subject to the blue devils common among bachelors whose days of freedom are about to end. Before him loomed a clear picture of what was to come. He saw himself grown sedate, complacent, and prone to embonpoint; clustered around him his wife, children, and even the family dog, all of whom would no doubt make demands upon the head of their little household. They would require his time and attention and affection. The children would grasp with sticky fingers at his exquisitely tailored coat and breeches; the dog would enthrone itself on the drawing-room settee. As for his wife—

  Andrew glanced at Lady Sherry, and felt vaguely ashamed, for anyone less grasping he had yet to meet. Still, he could not rid himself of the suspicion that with marriage she would change into someone quite different from how she was now, someone grasping and greedy for the things of this world that his money could provide her, clothes and jewelry and the fashionable diversions of the haut ton; that with marriage a transformation would be wrought similar to that which had occurred in his first wife. There was something to be said in favor of such creatures as Marguerite, who wore their avarice on their sleeves as openly as more tender females wore their hearts and who gave good service for payment received.

  With the thought of Marguerite, Lord Viccars experienced renewed guilt. He had been quite cavalier of late about his visits to his petite amie, had not even broken to her the news of his impending nuptials. No doubt she had heard the tidings by now. Among her acquaintances must surely be someone who read the Morning Post. He would call on her, Andrew promised himself, as soon as he had steeled himself to withstand her recriminations and her tears—and, yes, her wiles as well, because Marguerite would not give up a title and ten thousand pounds a year without putting up a good battle, and her weapons were not easily withstood. If only Sherry—

  To think of a reciprocation of passion in marriage was absurd. The highest relationship in love was mutual esteem. So Cecilia had always decreed, and Andrew couldn’t doubt that his elder sister knew best when it concerned propriety. Lord, but Cissy gave a dull party! Sherry must be bored half to tears. Andrew himself wished he might be elsewhere. At Mott’s in Foley Street, perhaps. Or flirting with some bird of paradise in the Argyll Rooms. Anywhere other than in these hot and crowded rooms, rubbing shoulders with people who would speculate among themselves as to how Lady Sherry had inveigled him into the parson’s mousetrap as soon as they were out of earshot.

  This evening must be even more of an ordeal for Sherry than it was for him. “I’m sorry about this. Cissy was determined to do all that was proper,” he said.

  Sherry started at the sound of Andrew’s voice, murmured some polite response. She, too, had been deep in thought. sSo noisy were these crowded rooms that it was nigh impossible to do anything else, the most successful party being one in which several attendees came perilously close to being crushed to death.

  Sherry had not appeared in public for some time. Not since the morning of Micah’s abortive hanging, in fact. She wondered what Micah would make of these fine ladies and gentlemen, what he would say to Lady Cecilia’s pointed remarks. Most likely, he would laugh as he laughed at all else. Given the opportunity, which in time he doubtless would be, Micah would laugh at Lucifer himself.

  Sherry wondered where the rascal might be now. And then it occurred to her to wonder whether there were others among this fashionable throng who had set out to enjoy the spectacle of a hanging several days past. If by exposure to the polite world she increased the risk of being recognized. This train of thought recalled her to the insurmountable-seeming problem that she faced: Ned, who grew more threatening daily and who must be paid off.

  Lord Viccars paused in a smaller room, where a game of piquet was underway. Sherry roused herself from her abstraction and watched the card play, which was for twenty-five pounds the rubber and ten shillings the point. She remembered what Micah had said about his gambling debts. Had he, too, played at cards? Or was he a more foolish plunger like the beaux at White’s, who had been known to wager on the progress of a fly across a windowpane? Like the Prince Regent himself, who had once lost several thousand pounds betting on twenty turkeys racing against as many geese?

  And what difference did it make? Lady Sherry had her own debts to resolve, the sooner the better now that Lavinia was known to be increasing and Sherry had been so foolish as to quarrel with her. Christopher could not be persuaded to advance Sherry money, because Lavinia would wish to take her revenge by allowing his sister to be married looking like a dowd. Or so it seemed to Sherry, who was not thinking very clearly at this point.

  Much as Sherry disliked to involve Lord Viccars in her troubles, there was no other solution now. “Andrew,” she murmured as they continued their perambulations through the crowded rooms. He bent closer so that he might hear her. “I promise that I mean to make you very happy. And I wish you to lend me five hundred pounds!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Exhausted as she was by her dissipations of the previous evening, Sherry arose the next morning at her accustomed hour. She hoped to find her brother alone at the breakfast table in order to have a private word with him, to try to counteract if possible Lavinia’s spite.

  Alas, his wife was there before her. “Sherris, you are late today,” Lavinia said. “We had not thought to enjoy your company over the breakfast cups. Now that you are here, I wish to hear all about your party. I hope you ex
plained that illness prevented my attendance and Christopher’s, or else it must have looked very strange, indeed.”

  What Sherry recalled primarily about her party was that she had asked her fiancé for the loan of five hundred pounds. “It was well enough,” she murmured as she took her seat at the table. “If you care for that sort of thing.”

  “If you care—” Lavinia arched her golden brows. “Do you not realize what a signal mark of honor Cecilia did by honoring you in that way? And you do not even know who was present! How can you know if you were a success or not if you do not even know who was present and who was not? I should have known, had I been there! Had I not been so ill!”

  Clearly, Lavinia wished some comment on her illness. Sherry wondered belatedly if Lavinia had wished that her sister-in-law similarly stay home. It seemed a trifle absurd to refuse to attend a party held in one’s honor simply because a member of one’s family was increasing, but perhaps that was the way things were done in the more refined strata of the ton.

  Had she not already quarreled with Lavinia, Sherry might well have voiced that unkind comment. However, she did not wish to make matters worse. “I am sorry you are feeling poorly,” she murmured. “Christopher, I understand you are to be congratulated.”

  Sir Christopher looked up from his plate, on which were piled Scotch eggs with chopped anchovy and gravy, fried yellow-brown. “Don’t know why I should be congratulated! Livvy did half the work,” he said, and chuckled at his wife’s embarrassed face. But he didn’t mean to make her cross or to prompt any more of the strange fantasies that seemed to plague females who were enceinte, so he engaged his sister in humorous reminiscences of their shared childhood.

  Lavinia was not entertained by her husband’s little stories. Lavinia truly was in an enfeebled state of health. Attendant upon the discovery that she was in an interesting condition had come all the less pleasant side-effects of that state. So very queasy was Lavinia that she was breaking her fast this morn with only barley water and toast. Therefore she was not in charity with her fellow diners, who were setting to with good appetites while she exercised all her will power in an effort not to cast up her accounts.

  Furthermore, she was not enjoying her husband’s story of a childhood adventure in a blackberry patch. “Christopher, this is very bad of you,” she said when he paused to take a mouthful of cheese toast. “You know I got up out of my sickbed only to hear about the party, and now you are monopolizing poor Sherris so she can’t say a word. How I wish I could have gone! I hope you explained to dear Cecilia why I could not attend.”

  Sherry spread orange marmalade on a biscuit. “What we should have done was postpone it,” she said. “Until you felt well enough to attend.”

  “Postpone it? How absurd you are!” Was Sherris being sarcastic? Lavinia recalled that this thankless creature had already called her a Polly Pry, and sniffled. “First I am awakened by noises in the night, and then poor Prinny is found missing, and then I have to miss your party, to which I was so looking forward— I think I might be entitled to a little sympathy!”

  “There, there!” Sir Christopher put down his cheese toast and patted his wife’s hand. He wondered if he would have to spend the next several months listening to absurdities like these. Yet even if pregnancy did turn his usually lucid Livvy into an adorable cabbage-head, it was a small price to pay for an heir. “We’ll get you another hound.”

  “I don’t want another hound!” Lavinia protested, smitten by a vivid memory of the previous hound’s less lovable qualities. “Nor do I want any more people breaking into the house. Sherris, that girl of yours—”

  “Daffodil had nothing to do with that business.” Sherry set down her cup of chocolate into its saucer with a thump. “As you well know, Lavinia. Those noises you claim to have heard were probably no more than—”

  “Mice!” shrieked Lavinia, who well knew that Sherry knew she’d heard no noises and didn’t wish that intelligence made public, especially within the hearing of Sir Christopher. “Oh, never say so! My nerves cannot withstand these continual shocks. I keep teasing myself with thoughts of poor Prinny and what sad fate may have befallen the poor thing.”

  Sherry pushed away her plate. “He’ll turn up,” she said.

  “Turn up?” echoed Lavinia. “I should think he will not! That hound was valuable, Sherris. You might show a little more sympathy for my grief. Yes, and the strain all this has put me under—in my condition! Strangers prowling about the house!”

  Sherry could not argue with this statement. There had been a stranger on the prowl in Longacre House. “I doubt that the dog was stolen,” she said dismissively. “He probably just ran away.”

  Lavinia liked this theory little better. “I have not the most distant guess why Prinny should do such a thing!” she said icily. “Surely you do not mean to suggest that he was unhappy here with us. That he was mistreated. I’m sure I never did such a thing. Indeed, if anyone is to be accused of unkindness— Everyone knows poor Prinny spent most of his time with you!”

  Lest she succumb to the temptation to skewer Lavinia, Sherry set down the marmalade knife. “This is beyond absurd.”

  So it was. Sir Christopher was startled to hear his wife talking such nonsense. “I had some interesting news this morning,” he ventured, in an attempt to restore the peace. “That highwayman fellow has been captured. He’s tucked away all right and tight in Newgate. There’ll be no escape for him this time!”

  “Micah!” whispered Sherry. Fortunately, at that same moment Lavinia cried out, “Christopher, surely they will not hang him now!”

  Sir Christopher frowned. “Highway robbery is a capital offense. The scoundrel should have thought of the consequence before the first time he put on a black crepe mask and took up his pistols in order to rob an innocent traveler. He’ll hang, puss, but he’ll have a grand time of it before, what with half of London clamoring to pay him a last visit. The female half!” He forced himself to chuckle and pinched her cheek. “Confess; you’d like to visit him yourself, you sly minx! Not that I’d allow such a thing.”

  “I visit—” Lavinia stared with honest astonishment at her spouse. “You must have windmills in your head!”

  This pretty declaration quite wrung Sir Christopher’s heart, and he pressed his wife’s hand against his chest. Sherry thought uncharitably that if she was forced to watch her brother making sheep’s eyes at his wife for another moment, she would become ill herself. If Micah had been recaptured it served him right for sneaking off like a thief in the night. As he would not have, had Sherry not told him to go away.

  She could not help but feel responsible for his current predicament. Sherry pushed back her chair and asked to be excused.

  Sir Christopher assumed his sister was going to her book room, inspired by his news to work on the tale of her own highwayman. “The scamp’s red-haired doxy is still at large,” he said helpfully. “It’s only a matter of time before she’s behind bars also, or so I hear from the officials at Bow Street, who have been given some very good information about the wench.”

  Though Sherry might have been expected to share Bow Street’s interest in that unfortunate female, she didn’t press her brother for further details. She withdrew to her bedchamber, to think and pace there.

  Aunt Tulliver entered the room some moments later, clutching a newssheet, which she promptly waved in Lady Sherry’s face. “I know!” said Sherry as she ceased her pacing at last and sank down in a chair. “He has been arrested. Just when I fancied I was doing a fairly good job of forgetting the wretch. We must do something, Tully, but I don’t know what.”

  “Nor do I, milady.” Flushed and breathless from her rapid ascent of the stairs, the old woman fanned herself with the newssheet. “It’d be a miracle if he escaped again. I fear this time that pretty scoundrel will dangle in the sheriff’s picture frame.”

  Sherry shuddered. “Perhaps he may yet make a recovery,” she suggested, though with faint heart. “I always wondered if
that first escape wasn’t somehow arranged.”

  “Fiddle-de-dee!” Tully had by now caught her breath. “Better you should think on whether he’ll betray us if the right questions are asked— and what you’ll say then!”

  “Betray us? How can you think for even a moment that Micah would do such a thing?” Unfortunately, memory served Sherry up just then with a description of the various means by which a prisoner in Newgate might be induced to say that which he would rather not. Micah would have his breaking point, as did any man. With sufficient inducement, he would betray them to spare himself further pain.

  Abruptly, Sherry stood up, moved to her wardrobe, and began to rummage through its contents. “Where is Daffodil?”

  Aunt Tulliver wasted no time in futile argument. It was perfectly obvious to her in which direction the wind blew. “Trying to turn a certain party up sweet,” she replied. “Are you forgetting that Viccars is to call this evening? With a certain sum of money to pay a certain party not to let the cat out of the bag? By the by, what did you tell him was your reason for wanting such an amount?”

  Sherry flung a shawl around her shoulders and placed a bonnet on her head. “I told him a clanker. Never mind that now. I must go to Newgate. If Daffodil cannot go with me, then I will go alone.”

  Aunt Tulliver sighed and heaved herself up out of her chair. “Aye. You’ll walk up to the gate and ask to see Captain Toby, which of course they’ll let you do without remarking the color of your hair. Thereby landing you in just the kind of trouble we’re paying a certain party to avoid! Adone-do, milady! Don’t fly into a pelter now. We’ll go to Newgate, all the same. I’ve a few words to say to that pretty scoundrel myself, and so I will, while you stay outside!”

  So it was decided, after a show of some reluctance on Lady Sherry’s part, but Tully was adamant about the terms on which this expedition would be conducted. The ladies slipped out of the house without attracting undue attention and set out.