Page 11 of Escape of the Highwayman (Escape #3)

H aving purloined two boiled eggs, cold ham, a few mushrooms, and fresh bread and butter from the empty breakfast parlour, Chloe avoided her family, who probably assumed she was sulking over Mr. Black, and walked openly up to the stables.

She carried jugs and plates as though she were spoiling the sickly cat and her kittens.

In fact, she was hiding bandages, washing water, and human as well as feline food.

As she crossed the stable yard, she saw the grooms in the distance, gathered by the horse trough at the paddock fence, enjoying their lazy morning after their late night looking after the visitors’ horses and carriages.

They had already mucked out the used stalls indoors. Molly greeted her with impatient pleasure and Chloe noted with delight that some of the kittens had opened their eyes and were looking more like cats than insects.

But the biggest surprise was her highwayman. He was on his feet, leaning lightly on his walking stick, with his face and hair newly washed—his eyelashes glistened, and his hair was still damp and pushed off his face. He wore a kerchief around his throat. His eyes were clear and blue as the sky.

Despite his pallor and the shadows beneath his eyes, he looked healthier than she had yet seen him. He even bowed to her with unexpected grace, and suddenly she was overcome with shyness.

“How are you?” she managed in a bright voice, busying herself with setting down her load and pushing the cat away until she could set Molly’s food down too.

“Alive and well because of you,” he said. “I owe you far more than to still be here.”

“Then why are you?” she asked, slightly miffed.

He gave a lopsided smile that took her breath away. “Because I seem to be weak as a kitten. It exhausts me just to stand up.”

“Then sit down,” she recommended. “The grooms are all up at the paddock.”

While she untangled the cloth bag of bandages from the clean cup and plate, he eased himself to the ground with the aid of the walking stick which he then set down at his side.

When she glanced up, she found him watching her. “What?”

“I was never quite sure I hadn’t dreamed you. I seem to have seen you squabbling with a market seller, floating about in rather fetching night attire with your hair loose, and leading Cavalo to me through a forest, not—”

“Cavalo?” she interrupted, mainly to distract him from the flush mounting to her cheeks at his mention of her hair and night attire.

“My horse,” he said, with such loss in his voice that she wanted to hug him. But he smiled. “He is a clever beast. Someone will be very glad to look after him.”

“He would have led the constables straight to you?”

He nodded. “If I’m taken, I disgrace my family. I owe them more than that.”

“Then what on earth possessed you to bolt in that way? Are you really a highwayman?”

His lips curved into the faintest of smiles, half-amused, half-defiant. “Yes.”

She seemed to have trouble breathing, so she concentrated on practicalities. “Well, loosen your shirt for me, and you can tell how that came about while I change your dressing.”

She was not used to this oddly crippling shyness, nor this new awareness of his closeness. He seemed suddenly very large and powerful, despite his claim to be as weak as a kitten. There was nothing frail about the breadth of his shoulders or the muscles in his arm.

“You are a gentleman,” she encouraged him, unwinding the bandage. “And, I think, a soldier.”

“I am a gentleman by birth,” he admitted. “And I was certainly a soldier—against my father’s wishes, but I was so mad for my commission that he gave in.”

“How long were you with the army?”

“Seven years.” There was no obvious change in his voice or expression, yet she felt the pain, the loss. “I was invalided out after Salamanca. But I could not stay at home and do nothing.”

She began to bathe the wound which was gratifyingly dry. “I am not sure highway robbery was the best career choice you could have made.”

“It hasn’t worked out too well, has it?” He didn’t flinch.

“I hear you branched into burglary, too.”

“In retrospect, that was my worst decision.”

She paused in the act of drying his wound and forced herself to meet his gaze. “Did you really hit a lady over the head and abduct her?”

“Personally, no,” he said steadily. “But as the commanding officer, the responsibility is mine.”

She blinked. “How many of you were there?”

His lips quirked. “I can’t tell you that.”

She felt like slapping the dressing onto his shoulder, but she didn’t. She placed it gently and reached for the bandage. “How did you come to be in league with such terrible people?”

“They are not terrible people,” he said.

“They are men from all sorts of backgrounds who offered everything to their country, who were used up and spat out and left to rot without means or income. They have few skills but fighting, and no one will employ the one-armed, the blinded, the unsightly. So they, the true heroes of Cuidad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Salamanca, and all the rest, are reduced to begging in the street or thieving to feed themselves and their families. In what world can that possibly be right?”

His blazing gaze dropped, and under her hands, she felt him force the tension from his body. She realized she had stopped winding the bandage and continued.

“It is not right,” she said at last. Worse, she had not known, never even thought about what happened to soldiers and sailors injured in war.

“They do not have the luxury of a large family home and family wealth to fall back on,” he said more steadily.

“So they turned to crime,” she said, beginning to see how it had all come about. “But how did you fall in with them? Did you go looking?”

“No. I had just learned how to get on and off my horse without help and took myself for a long, euphoric ride. They held me up on the road.”

She caught her breath. “What did you do?”

“I told them off, because they were terrible at it. They were spread out across the road so that I could see them from miles away. If I had chosen to, I could simply have ridden off the other way. Or run them down and forced them to scatter. They might have got off a shot—because they did have an army rifle between them—but that would have brought people running from the nearby farmhouses, so they were almost bound to have been seen and described to the law. Also, some of them weaved about, getting in the way of the rifle’s line of fire.

They didn’t even cover their faces properly, and I knew two of them as my own men. ”

“But you didn’t know that when you first saw them,” she said shrewdly. “Yet you kept riding toward them anyway. Did you mean to run them down?”

His eyelids dropped, but only for an instant.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I had decided.

I was feeling...reckless, as I never was as a soldier.

But that didn’t stop my anger with their recklessness.

My own men recognized me, lowered the rifle and apologized before dragging off the others, who were inclined to be outraged.

So I tore them all off a strip and—er...

explained how it should be done. Inevitably, I ended up showing them.

“We made rough masks and used hats and mufflers to better hide our faces.

We found busier highways and places from which to observe, so that we could choose only the wealthiest victims. No point in risking your life holding up farm labourers who have nothing either, or other local people who are unlikely to be carrying money or valuables.

We sent only three men at a time—one to hold the horses, one to point the rifle, and one to collect the loot without getting in the way of the rifle.

We moved nearer London and made some good money around the main roads out of town.

“I kept telling myself my work with them was done and it was time to leave them to their own devices, only I never did. I knew better than to be too successful at highway robbery, even moving from place to place. And I had another idea about robbing a wealthy house or two during house party season, preferably during a ball or some such when the house was open and everyone occupied. It was a good idea in theory, but I had grown careless. I knew some of the people at the party, so I directed the—er...engagement from the outside.”

“And that was when your man assaulted that poor lady?”

“In his defence, he did not know she was female until he hit her—which he should not have done anyway, but he thought she was threatening his partner in crime. They didn’t want her to die, and they didn’t know how long it would be before anyone found her and looked after her. So they took her with them.”

He grimaced. “I was furious at the time. But it was I, by putting up at a respectable inn while I looked over the place we aimed to rob, who was the cause of the disaster. Someone there recognized me as a friend of his friend, and it turned out the poor lady we had assaulted was his wife. The hue and cry would inevitably be out for me, and I would lead the law straight to my poor fools. So we disbanded, and here I am.”

Absently, she drew his shirt back over his shoulder. His skin was warm and rippled under her touch. “You have told me everything but names.”

He smiled. “You are not buying Xanthippos Bear?”

“I would love to,” she said with regret, and his eyes crinkled into a smile. “But my money is on Jonathan Berry.”

“Then you win. I am already in your hands.”

She sat back on her heels, regarding him. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” He regarded his loosely clasped hands in his lap. “I think I have been a little mad over the last few months.”

“Can’t you go home?”

“Not until all of this dies down. I probably need to leave the country.”

How easy would that be, if the ports were looking out for him? “Or go to a distant part of this one,” she suggested. “What about Scotland?”