The Highwayman and The Lady (Hidden Identity)

by Colleen French

  She shook her head. "I can't take your money, Monti. It wouldn't be right. I have some saved. My money, not Kincaid's. I won it gambling."

  "Let me pay your passage." He took a sip of his ale. "Please? It will make me feel better."

  She turned back to the hearth, massaging her temples. She felt as if she'd been wrung out on Saity's washboard. "We'll talk about it later. I can't think. Nothing makes any sense in my head right now."

  "Well, the best thing for us to do this moment is to get you home to bed." Once again, he was the confident, cheerful Monti she knew.

  She turned back. "You think it's safe?"

  "Rutledge didn't follow us. By the luck of the stars he's only seen you with me, so he'll not be able to make the connection between you and his dear nephew." He reached for his coat and her cloak hanging near the door. "It'll be safe enough. Tomorrow we'll go to Saity's, and if she's not yet gotten information on your passage to the colonies, I'll see what I can do. I have a friend or two down at the wharves."

  Meg turned to let him slip her cloak over her shoulders. She was dead tired and her breasts were achy. She knew she was pregnant for certain. "I'll never be able to thank you for your help, your understanding." She stopped in the doorway. "And you won't tell Kincaid, not ever?"

  He caught a lock of her dark hair and let it go to watch the curl spring back. "I wouldn't hurt him like that. I wouldn't hurt you." He gestured with a sweep of his hand. "Now, shall we go?"

  Meg stepped into the upper hallway of the tavern, a sense of relief washing over her. Everything is going to be all right, she told herself. It will all work out. At least as well as it can at this point . . .

  Twenty-four

  Kincaid stood in the front hallway that, despite the sunshine of the afternoon, seemed dark and sorrowful. Just stepping over the threshold made his stomach queasy.

  Rutledge Castle. Home.

  He smirked. Home? Not hardly. The word home conjured thoughts of warmth, kindness, a haven in one's mind. Home made Kincaid think of Meg, of the sweet smell of her skin just after she's bathed, the taste of her mouth on his, the sight of her barefoot, in her shift, pouring coffee for him in the morning. This place, this vault, brought no such feelings of warmth to him. This place made his skin crawl.

  "The . . . the master ain't in, my lord." The servant called Sam stood in the shadows near a full set of armor said to be worn by one of the Randall men in the middle ages. "He . . . he's gone to London. Sh . . . should I send word y . . . you've returned home, my lord?"

  Kincaid squinted in the darkness. "Come closer man." He waved his hand impatiently when he balked. "By the king's cod, I'm not going to strike you! I just want to see your face."

  Slowly, Sam came out of the corner, followed by his shadow Tom.

  "Now, listen up, men. There's no need to send word to my uncle that I've arrived. We've already met up in Londontown. I simply want to wander around my childhood home. I want supper with a decent English ale and a bed free of bugs. I'll be gone in a day or two."

  "I . . . we'll make up your old room, my lord," Sam said, seeming a little more at ease. At least now he wasn't cringing with each word Kincaid spoke.

  Kincaid frowned. Just the thought of that dreary room he'd spent so many lonely hours in made him uneasy. "Good enough. Now see that my horse is cared for. You're dismissed."

  Kincaid watched as the two men hurried, single-file down the back hallway toward the bowels of the castle. For a moment he just stood there, staring up at the weapons that lined the wainscot-paneled walls and ceiling in typical English fashion. So many years of Randall history, so many years of unhappiness, he mused.

  At least he had managed to break the chain. Thanks to Meg he would never be unhappy. Not as long as he could hold her in his arms. And now that he had her, he intended to hold her for an eternity.

  Kincaid wandered down the hall. The wall decor changed from swords and knives to huge portraits of ancestors dead and gone. They were a prim lot, mostly sour-faced, with their stiff collars and haughty brows. As Kincaid walked through the gallery, he watched the eyes watch him. When the deformities had appeared in the family tree some two hundred years ago, the portraits were painted less frequently. There were many women on the wall in their dull gowns, but fewer men. Occasionally an uncle or a grandfather had his portrait painted from a different angle to disguise the facial deformity that often occurred.

  Kincaid stopped to stare up at a portrait of his father's father. Albert Randall had his picture painted from one side, his disfigured mouth shadowed with the oils of the paintbrush. Kincaid touched his own perfectly shaped mouth gingerly. He had often wondered how he had escaped the Randall curse. His mother had whispered to him when he was a small boy it was because his heart was pure that he had not been vexed.

  "Poor, ugly bastard," Kincaid murmured, passing his grandfather's portrait. By all accounts by Kincaid's father, Albert had been a raving lunatic. An evil, cruel man. Kincaid couldn't help wondering just how bad the man had been if his own father thought so.

  At the front staircase Kincaid halted to stare up the winding banister. He remembered sliding down that banister on his mother's lap. He smiled. When he closed his eyes he could still hear her laughter echoing in the empty hall. He had so few good memories of this house. She had died shortly after that in childbed and then there had been no more laughter for many years.

  He started up the staircase. Not until the girl came . . . Margaret. She had laughed. He remembered hearing her when he passed the nursery wing on his way to meet his own tutors. He had only caught a glimpse of his father's charge a few times. She had been a slight, pretty blonde with the saddest green eyes.

  Kincaid took the steps two at a time. What had happened to turn that innocent young girl into a murderer? His father had taken her in as an orphan, fed her, clothed her, educated her, and then married her. She should have been nothing but grateful.

  "Grateful?" he muttered under his breath.

  Was that how he felt about his father? Had Philip ever once given anything without expecting something in return. Had he ever given anything, even the basic necessities, without rubbing it in Kincaid's face? Hell, he could hear him ranting and raving. Even after all these years Philip's degrading voice still haunted his memory.

  At the top of the steps Kincaid turned left down the dark corridor that was cold even for early May. Entering the west wing, he stopped at a closed door. His father's bedchamber.

  So pretty little Margaret had lost her head, his uncle said. No one would ever truly know what took place behind this door that set her off. Kincaid was a fool if he thought he could believe anything Percival said. Perhaps in the daze of childbirth, in the pain in producing yet another stillborn heir to the Randall name, she had lost her mind. Perhaps Philip had baited and badgered her as he so often had Kincaid.

  There were times when Kincaid could have killed him . . .

  He pushed open the door.

  The heavy crimson drapes were drawn. The bed had been stripped of its feather tick and linens. The room smelled of mildew . . . and ugliness.

  Kincaid went to the window and threw open the drapes, dust billowing up. He rubbed his nose and then pushed open the lead window frame to let in a breath of the fresh countryside air.

  With a sigh he turned around. That was better.

  For a moment he just stood there staring at the room—the walls, the dusty furniture, the floor. Near the end of the bed he noticed a dark stain on the floorboards. Blood?

  Anger made him tense again. What was wrong with him that he could possibly think the woman had been justified in her evil deed? It didn't matter what kind of bastard his father had been. She shouldn't have murdered him . . . she shouldn't have.

  Kincaid walked to the mantel where there were two tiny portraits in gold frames. One of Philip's first wife, Mary, Kincaid's mother, the other of his second wife, Anne. What a sick bastard to openly display the faces of previous wives before Margaret.

&n
bsp; So where was the third portrait he had hoped he would find? What kind of woman had Margaret grown up to be? Was she ugly and pinch-faced, or had she blossomed into a beautiful woman? He guessed she was beautiful. His father liked his women young and beautiful.

  Kincaid picked up the small oil painting of his mother. This was what he had come for, really. He walked out of the bedchamber, leaving the door open, not looking back at the blood-stained floor.

  Kincaid continued down the hallway, meaning to go to his own bedchamber, but something made him pass it. He followed the corridor and its twists and turns until he found himself in the east wing. Here had been the nursery. Here was where Margaret had lived in the time he had occupied the castle.

  Kincaid didn't know why he wanted to see the apartments she shared with her nurse. What clue to the person she was now would he find after all these years? Still, curiosity got the best of him and he entered the nursery. The first room he passed through was the same room he had been tutored in as a small boy. That was back when his mother had been alive, long before Margaret had come. To the left was a room for babies with a cradle and a cot for a wet nurse. How many times had his father attempted to fill that infant's cradle only to be disappointed? The next room was where Kincaid's nurse had slept. The last two rooms were for Randall children.

  Kincaid pushed open the first door, but it was obvious no one had occupied it for fifty years. Inside the second doorway he halted, an eerie feeling coming over him.

  This was where Margaret had slept. He was certain of it. He shivered, despite the warmth of the garden sunshine that poured through the lead and glass windows. There was something so familiar to him about this room, and yet it was decorated entirely differently from when he had slept here as a little boy.

  The bed hung with wispy chintz bedcurtains, now moth-eaten and tattered with age. They were a pale green, green like the spring grass. The same material hung from the windows, ragged and still without a breeze to flutter them.

  On a table near the bed rested an old doll, its china face cracked. He picked it up, watching its head list to one side. Why had she left the doll here when she'd moved to his father's chamber, he wondered.

  Because she would have been a woman then, and women didn't carry dolls to their husband's bed.

  Kincaid returned the toy to its place, having the strangest feeling that here in Margaret's room he could hear her voice, or at least read her thoughts.

  He went to the linen press and opened the doors. It smelled thickly of rotting cloth. With one finger he lifted a stack of disintegrating cloth, old bedsheets, a torn shift. He was just about to close the door when his hand brushed something hard beneath a moth-eaten wool cloak folded neatly on the second shelf.

  Kincaid's brow furrowed. What was it?

  He slid his hand inside the envelope of the gray wool and, to his surprise, extracted a small, cloth-bound book. Leaving the door to the clothes press open, he walked to the window, blowing the wool threads off the cover.

  The moment he opened the book, he knew what he'd found. A journal. On the first page was the name Margaret Hannibal. It was dated December 21, the year of our Lord, sixteen forty something. The last number was too faded to read.

  Papa grows weaker each day, he read the childish scrawl. He no longer calls for my mother, dead all these years. Grandmama says our Lord will come for him soon . . .

  Kincaid flipped several disintegrating pages. He felt uneasy reading the girl's words that were obviously never meant to be shared.

  Still, he couldn't resist reading a passage here and there. Gone to the funeral today. Raining. Does God always send the rain for a man's funeral . . . Further on, . . . cannot believe Grandmama must go to heavens, too. And then where will I be? Alone without a protector.

  Kincaid carefully turned the pages, feeling more like a thief than he had ever felt on the highway. He was stealing this poor sorrowful girl's thoughts, her innermost fears . . .

  His eye caught the name Rutledge and he glanced at the words. "Arrived at Rutledge Castle today . . . Grandmama too ill to care for me . . . A great dreary fortress. No one is very kind and I am afraid . . ."

  He flipped to the last page with writing. To be wed today and wonder if it would not have been better to have gone to the sweet Lord with my Grandmama.

  Kincaid closed the book, bits of crumbled paper drifting to the floor. He would take it home to London with him and study it. Perhaps he could even get Meg to look at it with him. She was a woman. Maybe she could make out something of the girl's words. It wasn't that he expected the diary would help him find his father's murderess. The last entry was obviously on her wedding day, though there was no date. The murder had taken place some seven or eight years later. But perhaps somewhere in the scribbles would be some indication of Margaret's mental well-being. Had she been crazy as his uncle indicated?

  With a bad taste in his mouth, Kincaid left the nursery, closing the doors quietly behind him. He needed to get outside. He needed the sunshine. Meg was right. He never should have come.

  Kincaid followed the servants' hall out of the east wing and through the pantry, into the afternoon sunlight of the kitchen yard. Standing beneath a blossoming apple tree he took great gulps of the fresh country air. He'd seen enough. There was nothing here that would give him any clue as to where he could find the murdering Margaret. Now that he was here, all he wanted was to go home to Meg and rest his head on her breast.

  Kincaid picked up a twig and hurled it into the air. That's what he would do. He would go home to London this afternoon.

  A sound at the cellar stairs made him turn. The door of hewn wood and forged iron appeared out of a mound of earth near the entry to the kitchen. He remembered being forced as a child to go down into the stone caverns to bring up bottles of wine. Years after he left Rutledge for good, he still had nightmares about that cellar.

  But what was that sound? A voice?

  Kincaid walked to the oak and iron door that was latched from the outside. Now he heard nothing but the rustle of the leaves over his head and the trill call of a mockingbird.

  Just as he turned away, he heard the noise again. But he couldn't make out what it was. Could someone possibly be down in the cellar?

  Kincaid lifted the rusty latch, an ominous feeling coming over him. "Holy mother of God," he muttered, feeling like a fool. He was no longer a child that had to fear the darkness or the demons that hid below the earth in his father's cellar.

  Kincaid swung open the door and something leapt out. Startled, he took a step back, focusing on the black pit of the stairwell. "What the hell?"

  Meowww.

  An orange tabby shot between Kincaid's boots, making a beeline for the orchard.

  Kincaid had to laugh at himself as he closed the cellar door and dropped the latch. He'd been at Rutledge no more than an hour and he already had himself spooked. Was that what this place did to people? Spooked them? Made them say things they would never say, do things they would never do? Could that have been what happened to Margaret? Or was she the cold-blooded killer his uncle made her out to be?

  Kincaid turned away, presenting his back to the gray stone castle that loomed three stories overhead. He had only one stop left to make.

  "M . . . my lord?"

  Kincaid looked back to see Sam and Tom. They appeared out of thin air, just like the cat.

  "Sam?"

  "W . . . what you doing, s . . . sir?" He eyed the cellar door.

  Kincaid hooked his thumb. "Heard something in the dungeon," he said, making light of his own scare. "Thought it might be Old Knoll come back from the dead." Old Knoll was the name used for Cromwell when parents wanted to frightened their misbehaving children.

  "H . . . heard something?" Sam and Tom both stared at the door as if it would leap to life at any moment. "P . . . probably nothing. P . . . probably just . . . just a rat."

  "Actually, it was a cat."

  "Y . . . you went down t . . . there?"

  "Didn't
have to. Cat came up." Kincaid plucked an apple blossom from the tree overhead, thinking he would take it to Meg. If it didn't rain, he'd be home before she went to sleep. "I changed my mind about staying, Have my horse brought to me immediately."

  "Y . . . you're not spending the night, my lord?"

  Kincaid tried to remain patient. He couldn't figure out if the man was slow-witted or just scared of him. "Yes, Sam. I return to London today. You and the staff are taking fine care of my uncle's estate. I need see nothing more."

  Looking rather relieved, Sam and Tom hustled themselves across the garden in the direction of the barn. Kincaid had just crossed the grassy orchard when a stable boy appeared with his horse.

  Kincaid tucked Margaret's journal and his mother's miniature into his saddlebag. He kept out the apple blossom for fear it would be crushed. He mounted and waved a farewell to the two servants, who stood side by side like Siamese twins.

  Kincaid rode away from Rutledge Castle without looking back. Good riddance, he thought. If I don't set foot here again in this lifetime, it'll be too soon.

  He rode down the hill, away from the estate, toward the little village of Rutledge. Halfway between the castle and the cottages below, he veered right off the rutted road. Nestled in the trees was a small church and churchyard where he had attended private services as a boy. Here was where his mother was buried.

  Kincaid dismounted and tied his reins to the iron fence. He walked past the front door of the church that now barely hung on its hinges, around to the cemetery.

  "Not much of a man for God, eh, Uncle?"

  "What ye say, James?"

  Kincaid turned, startled for a second time in the last twenty minutes. Surely the ghosts of the graves weren't calling him.

  Upon closer examination he spotted an old woman hunched behind some mulberry bushes, tending to a grave marked by a crude wooden cross.

  The old woman cackled as she straightened her crooked back, bringing herself up to her full height of no more than four and a half feet. Even from where Kincaid stood, he could smell the cloves she wore around her neck.