Page 11

Nine

Peregrine

“I’m plenty warm,” Alexander fussed as Peregrine tried to layer his coat over the one Alexander was already wearing. “You’ve built a fire big enough for a Viking hall.”

That demonstrably wasn’t true, but Peregrine didn’t argue, only settled back against the wall. There were chairs here, but he’d chosen the floor because then he could sit with Alexander between his legs and have him recline on his chest while they waited out the storm. It had begun raining outside, a thick, drenching deluge, and the coming of dawn did little to lighten the world. Peregrine was grateful to his past self for having the patience and foresight to keep this place well stocked with things for a fire.

“This isn’t a Viking hall,” Alexander said after a moment, squirming to get comfortable against Peregrine’s chest. “But it’s no shepherd’s hut either. Clearly, it was a farmhouse.”

“There was a whole hamlet here once. You’ll see the empty houses in the daylight when we leave.”

“An entire hamlet? Empty? Why do you think they left?”

Peregrine had refused to talk about his past for so long that he was surprised to hear the words fall from his lips. “Most of them couldn’t make a living here anymore and had to move. But the people in this particular house died.”

“Died?” Alexander said, clearly horrified. “Recently?”

“Six years ago now.”

“ How? ”

Peregrine looked over at the fireplace, crackling with a fire just as it had in his earliest memories. “The short answer is a fever.”

“And the long answer?”

Peregrine watched the flames dance behind the old firedogs, thinking of the day he’d gone to enlist, of his mother setting his coat and boots by the fire so they’d be warm when he left. It was strange how such a vast tree of catastrophes could come from a single seed. “The eldest son left them. Their father had been dead a while, and so he was the head of the family for a time. But he knew he would never marry, never sire children, and so he thought it best to leave the farm to his younger brother. He would go off and earn good wages to send home instead. But it’s nearly impossible to send letters to infantry when they’re at war, and so he didn’t know that the Duke of Jarrell had decided to enclose the common land shared by everyone in the hamlet. The land they used for farming, for grazing, for their living, was gone. They’ll hang a lowborn man for stealing more than twelve pence, but if a lord steals the income and sustenance from an entire village, he is given an Act of Parliament to do so and then he’s heralded as a reformer and a modern man.”

Peregrine took a long breath, the injustice of it burning him all over again. He had to make himself go back to the story, back to the house and the family who’d lived in it, otherwise he’d jump to his feet in a seething rage and go find the duke right then and there. “Half-starving, the sister found a way to approach the duke and plead their case. He offered her some small assistance in exchange for time spent in his bed. She agreed, because what other choice did she have?”

Alexander had gone still against his chest. “And then?” he asked quietly.

“And then the fever came,” Peregrine told him. “It took the mother and the brother quickly. The sister hung on, but by this point she was swollen with the duke’s child, and she never truly recovered. The duke, of course, wasn’t interested in a mistress who was pregnant or sickly, and so refused to help or even see her. It was beyond foolish to go to Far Hope the night she died, but she must have felt it was the only place she could go. Perhaps she thought if the duke could see her, he would take pity on her for the unborn child’s sake? Perhaps she thought a servant would help? No one can say. But whatever she thought, it didn’t happen. Even though the night was bitterly cold and she was very ill, no one admitted her into the house. The next morning, they found her with frost on her eyelashes and no breath left in her at all.”

Alexander’s voice was both sad and careful when he asked, “And the eldest son? The one who went to war?”

Peregrine took his eyes from the fire and occupied himself with Alexander’s hair instead, curling the silken ends around his fingers as he spoke. “He came home a year after the sister had died and learned the story from a neighboring vicar. He found his childhood home empty, his childhood village empty, and his family in their new graves. He learned that it was the duke who had enclosed the land, starved his family, coerced his sister into his bed and then left her to die. Everything the son had become a soldier for was gone, and all the blood and death and disease he’d endured because it earned money for his family was for nothing in the end. Nothing at all.”

Alexander moved so Peregrine could more easily stroke his hair. “But how did you decide to become a highwayman then?” he asked, pushing past the pretense that the story had been about anyone else. “The revenge—I see that well enough now. But why become the Peregrine Hind to achieve it?”

“It was an accident the first time,” Peregrine said, remembering a long-ago summer evening. He’d been staying in his vacant family home after learning what had happened, lost to his grief. “There was a riding party, out quite late. Your brother wanted to show his guests the enclosed fields, boast about how much his new flock had already earned for him, and so they were riding down my lane outside.”

Peregrine had stood inside his doorway like a ghost, watching as the duke had proudly told this fine, mounted party how much he’d improved the land, how he’d turned the commons from inefficient wastes into wool and then into money. And as Peregrine listened, the fathomless pain which had gnawed at him for days—which had stolen his thoughts, his sensations, even his ability to sleep and to feed himself—had forged itself into a blade, and that blade cut through his grief. That blade gave him purpose.

And that was when Peregrine had known he was going to kill the duke.

“Fine people are so careless,” Peregrine continued. “I watched as they milled around the shell of my dead hamlet, paying as much mind to me as they would one of the duke’s new sheep. They had servants behind them with a cart in case they’d like to stop and have a drink or something to eat, and the cart was loaded with silver and dishes. The silver alone would have fed the village for a year or more.” He paused, thinking of how it had felt to see the Duke of Jarrell call for an alfresco celebration of his successful wool venture, to see the servants open the lid of the chest on the cart and reveal gleaming silver and glass. To watch these people toast the destruction and the hunger and the death that had made the rich duke so much richer still.

It had felt like standing in front of his family’s graves all over again.

“I thought, here is my chance to kill the duke,” Peregrine said. “He was right there, standing like a lazy pheasant in front of my family’s house, ignoring my presence and swilling wine. I’d newly come from the war, and I still had my pistols. I wouldn’t even have had to leave the house...”

“But you didn’t succeed,” Alexander surmised.

“I missed. Not by much, but enough to warn him. The entire party fled down the lane in terror, thinking they were all being hunted, and the servants ran on foot after them.”

“Leaving the silver,” Alexander concluded.

“Leaving the silver,” Peregrine said in confirmation. After staring at the booty for several minutes, Peregrine had decided he had no need of it. He’d found the other families who’d fled the hamlet and gave the silver to them in its entirety. “At first, I thought I’d stalk the road to find the duke again, get on with my revenge, and then I would—well, I wasn’t sure what I would do after. But it didn’t matter at first, because I couldn’t find him. Only other dawdling lords and ladies, slowly rolling through the hills with jewels and coins and anything else you could think of. All on their way to Far Hope, for one party or another. It was too easy, and out on the moors, it’s even easier not to get caught after, not if you grew up here and know where to hide. Not if you made friends in every town and village by giving away so much of what you’ve stolen.”

“And so you became a fearsome highwayman entirely incidentally.”

Peregrine leaned his head back against the wall, watching the rain sluice down the small window’s warped panes. “It was the only thing that felt right,” he admitted. “I had no farm left, no family, and I couldn’t make myself go back to the army. And I liked how it felt, taking from these people who had so much and giving it to the people who had so little. Soon others joined me, Lyd—your relation by marriage, you know—joined me too.”

“ Lydia ,” Alexander breathed, shaking his head against Peregrine’s chest in disbelief. “I hadn’t seen her since she was a girl, but I should have known it was her. No wonder she was so excited to rob Judith.”

Peregrine made a noise of assent.

“I know it means very little in the face of what you’ve lost, but I couldn’t be sorrier for what Reginald has done to you and those you loved,” Alexander said. “And thank you for telling me what happened, even though I’m probably the last person you want to share your past with.”

The rain was so loud, so insistent, but it was almost soothing now, like it was washing away everything that wasn’t this moment, that wasn’t Alexander cuddled sweetly against Peregrine’s chest.

“You’re the only one I’ve ever told the entire story to,” Peregrine said. “I don’t know why I’ve never told anyone else—I suppose because it hurt so much to think about. It hurt to think that I sailed off and left my family at the mercy of the world. I never even had the chance to apologize for how I failed them. Their graves were already sprouting grass by the time I’d returned.”

“Oh, Peregrine,” Alexander said softly. “It wasn’t your fault. If you’d been here, you wouldn’t have been able to stop Reginald either. In fact, you might be dead of that same fever too.”

Peregrine had to concede that this was true.

“And,” Alexander added, “perhaps it hurts precisely because you haven’t told anyone. You’ve been carrying it alone, when no one should carry something like that inside their own minds and nowhere else.”

“That’s very wise.”

“Well,” Alexander murmured, tucking his hands inside Peregrine’s coat, “people have always said that wisdom is my greatest virtue.”

“They have not.”

“You’re right,” Alexander said, clearly fighting a yawn. “You’ve already had my greatest virtue spending all over the wall of your family home.”

Peregrine snorted, and together they subsided into a gentle silence, which was all the gentler for the harsh rememberings which had come before it.

Peregrine was used to the past feeling like a broken mirror inside him, like what had happened existed only in shards and splinters in his memory, glinting and ready to cut. But this was the first time he’d ever told the entire story aloud, with all its crimes and abuses, and in the order that they’d happened. It slotted all his memories into their proper places, and now that he’d fitted the pieces of the mirror together, he could finally see what it reflected. Still horror, still pain—but it no longer felt like it was slicing him with every step he took.

He was still angry, yes, but now the anger was inside him, and not the other way around.

After four years, it was like a gift and being unmade at the same time. He felt picked apart at the seams; he felt like an unstitched doll, or the pieces of a coat laid out on a tailor’s table. He didn’t know what to do with himself. The only thing he did know was that the unstitching was all to do with the man in his arms, the man who’d made him smile and laugh and—and hope —after these many years of living in his broken-mirror world.

He held his lover, who’d now drifted all the way off to sleep, tighter and tried not to think about what would happen if Alexander left him. If he couldn’t keep this sweet, spoiled rake for his own.

The rain died down a few hours later, and Alexander stirred as Peregrine carefully extracted himself from their embrace and went to ready the horse. The younger man was yawning in the doorway as Peregrine approached with his saddled mount.

“We should go back to the priory,” said Peregrine.

Alexander blinked at him. His cheeks were flushed from sleep, his hair tousled, and his eyes pupil-blown from the dim interior of the longhouse. “Am I still your prisoner?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Peregrine said, just as quietly. “Will you try to escape again if you are?”

“Yes,” replied Alexander. “Will you try to catch me again?”

Peregrine looked at him. “Do you want me to?”

Alexander looked at the ground, his lashes long against his cheeks and his breathing deep as if he were confronting some uncomfortable truth. Finally, he answered. “Yes.”

Peregrine’s own breath stuttered and then filled his lungs, as if Alexander’s answer were the only air he needed to breathe. Whatever was between them wouldn’t end now, thank every god and spirit who’d ever been worshipped in these lonely hills.

With heady relief and an even headier greed coursing through his veins, Peregrine held out his hand to take Alexander’s, and with hands linked, they began to walk down the lane, Peregrine leading the horse behind them.