Lady Sherry and the Highwayman

by Maggie MacKeever

  Silence greeted this remark. Marguerite looked bewildered—Jeremy thought he would have to tell her not to let her mouth dangle open in that unattractive manner—and Lord Viccars like a man who’d received an unexpected reprieve. “Oh, my darling!” he murmured, and drew Marguerite into his arms. “I’ve been absolutely sick with fright. I confided in Sir Christopher when first I heard of this braggart.” He gestured toward Ned. “Which I certainly wouldn’t have done if I’d thought it was you he would arrest. And then you chose to confide in me, or so I thought—”

  It occurred to Andrew that the mystery was not altogether cleared up. With some reluctance, he put Marguerite away from him. “What were you trying to tell me, love?” And then he blanched, stricken by the realization of which red-haired female of his acquaintance had access to a gardener’s shed.

  Jeremy could not refrain from comment, being of the temperament that liked to rub salt in wounds and pull wings off butterflies. “In other words, it ain’t Marguerite who looks to dangle from the gallows but Lady Sherry,’’ he said, and availed himself of a pinch of Martinique.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Sherry spent a restless interval pacing her book room. When she needed advice most, she thought irritably, neither of her confidantes was at hand. For this, she could only blame herself, having dispatched both Tully and Daffodil to learn what more they could of Ned.

  Curse the wretch! Sherry’s position would not be half so bad save for his avarice. Excepting her decision to witness a certain hanging, that was. No time to waste, now, in contemplating might-have-beens. She must act. In what manner she was to act. Sherry wasn’t certain, however. She applied for inspiration to the decanter on the shelf.

  Christopher had said that he would take care of everything, and she had no reason to think that he would not. Christopher had also said that she must testify against Micah in return, yet Sherry could no more testify against the man who’d held her in his arms than she could fly to the moon, scoundrel though he might be. The man whose bare chest she’d caressed with her fingers, who—

  No time for these thoughts, either. Christopher would not take immediate action against Micah. He would first try to puzzle out this mystery of two highwaymen with the same name. As he had sternly informed his sister, one didn’t clap a peer of the realm into irons without being damned sure first that one could prove him guilty of a crime. Sherry had time warn Micah against his immediate arrest.

  She pulled a shawl from her wardrobe, flung it around her shoulders, and covered up her bright curls. Then she scribbled a note, lest Daffodil and Tully think she, too, had been kidnapped.

  If only Christopher had not demanded that she give him Andrew’s five hundred pounds. Sherry only hoped she would not have to offer anyone a bribe. She poked her head out into the hallway. Finding it empty, she warily descended the steep back-stair. Hopefully she could slip out of the house with no one—particularly Sir Christopher—the wiser as to what she was about.

  Heavy footsteps padded after her down the sidewalk. Sherry swung around, expecting to find her brother in irate pursuit, or, even worse, an officer of the law who would press upon her metal handcuffs that closed with a snap and a spring.

  Not Sir Christopher, nor any officer of the law, waited to accost Lady Sherry. She gazed without pleasure on a large, white furry mass. Aware that she did not look happy to see him, Prinny gave his plumed tail an apologetic wag. “Oh, very well! I suppose you have developed a taste for adventuring. What’s more, I don’t have time to take you back.” Sherry took hold of the dog’s collar. Prinny licked her hand.

  Through the London streets they walked, the lady and the hound. Sherry was oblivious to the racket of hooves and wheels and stagecoach horns, street vendors and musicians and market carts. Prinny was a great deal more curious about all these exciting sights and smells, but he was discouraged from exploration by his companion’s brooding manner and her restraining hand.

  Their stroll was not without direction. Bloomsbury, Cavendish Square—here among these older buildings was the address that Sherry sought. Unfortunately, she had no notion of the exact address. She glanced at Prinny. “If only you could talk!”

  Unfortunately, the hound could not, even with the best will in the world. Sherry stopped a hot-potato vendor and asked if he knew the neighborhood. The man allowed that he did. He also knew which was the ancestral home of the Grenvilles. Lady Sherry was practically standing on the front doorstep.

  Oh, no. It couldn’t be. Sherry gazed up at an ancient stone mansion that might well have graced the pages of one of her books; three stories high, with large bay windows glazed in quaint patterns and a high-pitched, red-tiled roof. Square towers that were exaggerated bays stretched a story above the building’s main mass.

  Various familiar adjectives presented themselves as Sherry stared up at the great, dark, forbidding pile. In that list, ‘moldering’ and ‘haunted’ were foremost. She must not stand there gaping. Sherry walked to the front door.

  No one answered her summons. The house seemed deserted. Perhaps Micah, like Andrew, had chosen to dwell elsewhere than in the ancestral home.

  Surely not. A rogue bent on impersonating a peer would neglect none of the accouterments of the rank. Nor, most likely, would he know how a household of this size should be run. The servants were no doubt taking their leisure in another part of the house. Very well, then; Sherry would roust them out. Since no one had come to the front door, she would go to the back.

  There, too, she received no answer. Sherry glared with impotent fury at the locked door. It was very frustrating to rush to someone’s rescue and then find them away from home.

  She might have abandoned her mission then; she knew nowhere else to look for Micah, and this expedition had come to seem like less than a good idea; but Prinny had a more forceful way with doors than she did. The hound realized that Lady Sherry wished to gain entrance to this old building—why, he couldn’t imagine, but Prinny had long since decided that the ways of humans were incomprehensible to the canine brain—and he himself wasn’t averse to a good tussle with a rat or two. This house looked as if it might harbor any number of rodents. Prinny shrugged out of Lady Sherry’s grasp and leaped in abandon at the door.

  The portal opened inward with a creaking groan of wood. Prinny strolled inside.

  Sherry could not let a dog upstage her as regarded courage. Nor did she wish to seek him in the dark corridors of the old house. She hurried after him and caught at his collar. Behind them, the door swung shut, putting Sherry strongly in mind once more of ghostly specters and the like. She wondered if Lord Viccars’s ancestral home was as eerie a place as this. A pity, if true; Sherry’s stories would no doubt have benefited greatly from being written in such a malevolent atmosphere. Minus such touches as cobwebs, she amended, as she brushed one from her face. Plus candles, and the benefit of a room. She didn’t care to think what crunched on the cobbled floor beneath her feet. It sounded suspiciously like rodent bones.

  First, she must find a candle. Sherry pushed back her shawl as if that act would make it easier for her to see. Impossible in this gloom to determine if anyone was living in the house. Sherry could not imagine Micah in such a setting. But she had not imagined him either as a peer of the realm. “The kitchens, I think,” she murmured to Prinny, in the manner of one whistling while passing through a cemetery. It was logical to assume that one would find candles there. If the rats hadn’t gotten to them. Unlike her companion, Lady Sherry experienced no pleasure at the thought of rats. She drew closer to the hound.

  The kitchens were not difficult to locate. Sherry stepped into a large, low-ceilinged chamber, walked across the stone-flagged floor. In the dim light, she could make out spits and implements for roasting and grilling and a huge fireplace in which a man could stand erect.

  She moved to the ancient sideboard, rummaged among chafing dishes and graters, pot racks and dripping pans. A quick search unearthed candles in a drawer along with a tinderbox. Sh
erry released Prinny and lit a candle, tucked another in her bodice for good measure, as well as the tinderbox. The old place was drafty. She cupped her hand around the flame of her candle, then almost dropped it as a rough curse shattered the stillness of the old house.

  Holding the candle in trembling hands, Sherry spun around. A man was seated at the kitchen table. He had been sleeping until Prinny awakened him with an enthusiastic caress, because the dog was glad to be reunited with his old friend.

  Unfortunately, his old friend did not appear to share the hound’s joy. “Get down, curse you!” he snarled.

  It was the proper tone of voice in which to issue commands; Prinny dropped dejectedly to the floor. However, it was not the voice Sherry associated with that face. Now that she looked closer, even the face was not the same. The features were broader, coarser; the eyes were more hazel than green. And the pistol that was pointed at her was very wicked-looking, indeed.

  “You’re not Micah!” Sherry gasped. Tully had said the man in Newgate had the look of Micah. “You’re the highwayman who escaped from jail!”

  He indicated with a wave of his pistol that Sherry should take a chair. “And you’re Micah’s red-haired doxy that everyone’s so monstrous eager to meet.” With the pistol still trained on her, he reached for the jug that stood on the table, lifted it, and drank. “Fancy you playing right into my hands like that.”

  A number of thoughts, in this interval, passed through Lady Sherry’s mind. She thought of all the ladies over the centuries who had been given a choice of surrendering their jewels or their honor and who had often lost both in one night. Although this brigand who looked so much like Micah had made no threats upon her virtue, Sherry was aware that her situation was very grave. It seemed very likely that either he would shoot her or she would accompany him to Newgate.

  Sherry’s story-telling instinct did not desert her in this moment of great peril. If she was to go to the gallows, she would at least have some questions answered first. “Why did you become a highwayman?” she asked, resolutely ignoring his ominous comment about her playing into his hands. “Is it a family tradition, so to speak? If you are a highwayman! I suppose I should ask you that. Between you and Micah, everyone seems to be somewhat confused.”

  Her host drank again from his bottle, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “You’re a queer one,” he remarked. “But I don’t see as what harm there is in telling you, seeing as you’ll have no chance to snitch on me. Aye, I took to the high toby. Captain Toby, if you take my meaning, ma’am. A rum-paddler I was, too, until I got careless and had to hop the twig.”

  Sherry understood this to mean that Captain Toby had had to make a sudden departure from the scene of his activities. “You were in the military?” she asked.

  “Aye.” The smile faded. “I was with Wellington in the Peninsula. And nary a scratch of a wound did I have, though three horses was shot out from under me. I said then what I say now: I’ll die damned hard and bold as brass—but not yet. As for why I went on the pad, ‘tis simple: I was poor as a church mouse.”

  There was something queer about this tale, this situation. If Micah had sufficient money to pose as a nobleman, then why was Captain Toby so poor? Perhaps Micah’s charade was being financed by highway robbery. “And so you took to the road,” Sherry prodded. “It seems a great deal of risk to take for so little gain. For the theft of a few pounds, you could hang.”

  Captain Toby laughed. “Dance the Paddington frisk? Not I. Though Micah damned near did so in my place. I should have let him, curst interfering meddler that he is.” He looked at Sherry appraisingly. “He’ll meddle no more, I think. Not since you saw fit to pay a call.”

  Sherry didn’t like the sound of that. “Micah would be very angry if you were to harm me.”

  “Harm you?” Captain Toby looked indignant. “I haven’t harmed a woman yet. At least not in the way you mean. No, ma’am, I wish you no ill. But it’s time for me to shove my trunk, if you take my meaning, before I make a renewed acquaintance with the constables, and I’m out of twig. It hasn’t seemed exactly the right time to refurbish my purse by going back on the road. And old Micah’s proving damned unreasonable about the matter, saying I should turn myself in and take my medicine so as to let him off the hook.”

  Sherry followed these disclosures with considerable interest. “So Micah isn’t a highwayman?”

  “Old upright Micah on the scamp?” Captain Toby threw back his head and guffawed. “We may be related, ma’am, but we ain’t such close kin as that. Mayhap it has to do with me being born on the wrong side of the blanket and him on the right.”

  Sherry didn’t think it was altogether upright of Micah to pass himself off as Lord Grenville, but this hardly seemed the moment in which to quibble about such details. “So you are, er, illegitimate.”

  “No need to mince words, ma’am. There’s many as would tell you I was a right proper bastard, was you to ask. Which you won’t, of course, having seen the wisdom of keeping dubber mum’d.” He paused, listening. “Hist! What’s that?”

  Sherry heard it, too, a distant banging noise as if someone was assaulting the front door. Was it Micah? Sir Christopher and his constables? If only Sherry could gain possession of Captain Toby’s gun. Or Prinny choose this most opportune moment to fawn upon Captain Toby as he did upon everyone else. But Prinny had lost interest in the conversation and had gone off to hunt down rats, and Captain Toby gave no indication of the sort of carelessness that would enable her to take possession of his firearm. Instead, he grasped it all the firmer as he pushed himself away from the table and yanked Sherry out of her chair.

  “Wait!” she pleaded as he dragged her across the stone floor toward the huge fireplace. “You said you meant me no harm.”

  “Nor do I mean to preach at Tyburn cross!” retorted Captain Toby as he pressed a certain stone above the fireplace. “You’ll find your way out soon enough—but not so soon I won’t have cleared out! Go on, get in!”

  Lady Sherry stared at the dark opening revealed by a section of the wainscoting that had swung aside. She was looking at a secret passage of the sort about which she had written so many times. Writing about a secret passage and exploring one were two entirely different things. Sherry had no desire to step into that dark, dank, and no doubt rat-infested space.

  She hesitated. The shouts from outside had grown louder, as if the persons who desired admittance were following Sherry’s path around to the back door. From somewhere deep in the house, Prinny added his barks to the din. “Oh, please, don’t make me go in there!” Sherry begged. “I promise I won’t say a word about you to anyone!”

  Captain Toby was not so green as to believe this promise. “When pigs can fly!” he growled, and pushed Lady Sherry through the opening, so roughly that she stumbled to her knees. Behind her, the panel slid shut, plunging her into the darkness of the tomb.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Sherry lit the candle that she’d had the foresight to tuck into her bodice and tried to recall what she knew about secret passages. She reviewed priest’s holes and hides in pit and chimney, entrance via flues and trapdoors, and medieval subterranean drains that could be used as exits in case of emergency. The dark space in which she stood seemed to be very deep. Sherry stepped forward to investigate and discovered a narrow, winding passage in the thickness of the wall. She supposed she should not be surprised to find such a passage in a house as old as this; and wondered where it might lead. One thing was certain: she was not going back into the kitchens. Sherry gathered up her skirts and tentatively began to mount the stairs. At least the passage led upward, instead of down into some clammy, rat-infested drain.

  She would not think of rats, not now. Sherry wondered why she’d never thought to use rats in any of her books. As an inducement to terror, rats surely ranked with ghostly apparitions and ominous noises and lights seen nickering at midnight in ancient houses’ abandoned wings.

  This particular ancient house appeared
to be abandoned. Sherry hoped its appearance was not deceiving. She was in no frame of mind to deal with homicidal monsters or avenging shades. How many times she had written about a setting such as this, a delicate heroine exposed to supernatural danger and shattering alarms? Of clanking chains and haunted chambers and even once a globe containing human ashes that had been discovered in a haunted maze?

  The heroine of that particular tale had been able to see visions. Lady Sherry wished she shared the trait. Despite the number of Gothic thrillers she had written, Sherry had never created an atmosphere so macabre as the one in which she now found herself.

  Furthermore, the candle stub was rapidly burning low. Sherry hoped she might find an exit before it burned out and plunged her again into the dark, and she was reduced to screaming lunacy. Captain Toby had meant her no harm? Perhaps he was under the impression that Sherry wouldn’t mind rats nibbling at her toes and bats jousting with spiders for the right to nest in her hair.

  At this horrid thought Sherry almost did scream aloud. She decided she would rather deal with ghosts than make the acquaintance of the rodent population of this house. And then she heard faint voices, as if wish had fostered thought. Sherry turned as quickly as she dared on the narrow step and peered back into the darkness through which she had come. She saw nothing but heard a scampering sound as if tiny—or not so tiny-rodent paws scurried away from the light. Certainly Sherry was not going back down the narrow steps to investigate! She turned back and continued to mount the stair.

  She came to a landing. The voices seemed louder now. Despite her dislike of cobwebs and their creators, Sherry leaned closer to the wall. What was this? A latch? Sherry lifted it and a section of the wall slid creakily aside, and she found herself standing in a narrow opening at the back of a cupboard filled with ancient clothes. Sherry gingerly pushed aside the garments. She was careful to keep her candle as far away as possible from the rotting material.