The Highwayman

by Doreen Owens Malek

  “We are relations, but there is little bond of affection,” Alex said, careful not to reveal too much. Telling Burke the unhappy facts was one thing; telling Rory was quite another. “As I child I never knew him, and I was visited on him like an unwelcome guest when my parents died. He was an old bachelor unused to children. . . .” She stopped. “Suffice it to say that Burke feels more for any of his men here, brother or not, than my uncle feels for me. ”

  “Then why should he redeem you?”

  “He has always been most careful to maintain appearances. He would not want it said in his circles that he neglected his care of me. Lord Essex would most certainly not approve, and he is an intimate of the queen, who is watchful of the Howard branch of her family.” Would to God that it were true, Alex added to herself.

  Burke stirred, and they both looked at him.

  “He should be more peaceful soon,” Alex said.

  They settled in for the vigil.

  * * * *

  The sun had just risen when Alex scraped off the poultice and saw the gray, ragged tip of the arrowhead protruding from Burke’s wound. She leaped up and threw her arms around Rory, forgetting his enmity for her, forgetting everything except her hope for Burke’s recovery.

  Rory prised her arms loose from his torso and said gruffly, “Now?”

  “Yes, yes! Pull back the flaps of the tent, I’ll need as much light as possible, and I want to give him another dose of the sleeping potion so he’ll not feel the probing of the wound much.”

  “He’ll feel it.”

  “The worse danger is in the poisoning that might come after,” Alex said, crossing herself to ward off the bad luck.

  Rory made a corresponding sign with his hand. Whether it was a supplication to one of his old gods or a confirmation of Alex’s offering to her own, she had no idea.

  Alex knelt next to Burke and washed his wound as well as she could, hesitating as his eyelids fluttered but did not open. Rory heated a pair of tongs in one of the campfires until it glowed white, and Alex used the instrument to remove the arrowhead. Its exit was followed by a rush of blood and pus, which Alex wiped away, and even in his drugged state Burke bucked when she pressed the dressing against the tender edges of the reopened flesh.

  She signaled to Rory to hold his cousin down while she worked.

  “Which herbs are in that mixture?” Rory asked, watching her.

  “A blend of those you gathered with me last night.”

  Rory shook his head. “It seems like witchery to me.”

  “Not witchery, but medicine. The priests in the monasteries recorded their homely cures before the dissolution, and their books came into the hands of the queen’s physicians. The remedies I’m using are well known in court circles.”

  “An English cure for his tough Irish hide. There’s some humor in that, isn’t there?”

  “I’ll laugh when he’s well. Until then I intend to pray.” She sat back on her heels and stroked Burke’s forehead.

  “What do you think?” Rory asked.

  “He’s hot,” she said, frowning. “Go and get some cold water from that brook where you took me to bathe. The coldest water, where it runs on the rocks.”

  Rory obeyed without question, taking up the cauldron from the floor and dumping its contents outside the tent. Alex fixed her gaze on her patient.

  True to her word, she began to pray.

  * * * *

  Despite Alex’s best efforts, Burke’s temperature began to climb, and he was delirious for two full days. During that time she hardly slept, constantly bathing his face and changing his dressing when needed. When he thrashed and tossed she tried to hold him, but even in his illness he was fearfully strong, and sometimes she called Rory to help her. Rory kept the rest of the men away. Alex couldn’t imagine what he was telling them, but she didn’t care. She needed time and quiet, and he made sure that she got both.

  Burke seemed to exist in a state of suspension, no worse but no better, until his fever finally broke on the morning of the third day. Alex came alert suddenly from her dozing and noticed that his entire body had broken out in a cool sweat and he was no longer restless. She was watching his face when he opened his eyes and looked at her. She could tell by his expression that he knew who she was.

  “Are you feeling better?” she whispered.

  He raised his hand slowly and touched her cheek. Alex covered it with her own much smaller one. She didn’t realize that she was crying until her tears fell on his fingers and ran into her mouth.

  His parched lips moved.

  “Don’t try to talk,” she said.

  “Alex,” he croaked.

  “Yes, I’m Alex. Do you want a drink?”

  He closed his eyes and nodded.

  Alex got him the water and helped him to drink, holding his head and tipping the cup to his lips. “Not too much now,” she said when he tried to gulp it. “You can have more later.”

  He sighed as she eased him back onto the pallet. “How ... long?” he gasped.

  “Just a few days. Everything is fine. Rory’s been in charge, and he’s kept the men in hand.”

  “You?”

  “I’ve been right here, with you.”

  He closed his eyes again.

  “Go back to sleep, you need to rest.”

  He didn’t stir, and she thought that he had obeyed until she moved to get up and he caught her hand. She paused, and he pressed it tightly.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Thank you,” he murmured, and then fell asleep.

  Alex released his hand and pushed through the flap of the tent into the early morning sunshine. She blinked and wiped her damp cheeks with the back of her hand.

  Rory turned from the cookpot where he was preparing breakfast and met her gaze.

  “He’s not...” he said, alarmed by her wet eyes.

  “No, no, he’s better. He came out of it and spoke to me.”

  Rory rushed past her to see for himself. When he rejoined her, he was grinning. “He is better. Even I can see it.”

  Alex smiled and nodded.

  “All thanks to you,” Rory added. “You saved him.”

  “Oh, Rory, he saved himself. You know how strong-willed he is, and very hale. He just needed time—”

  “You saved him,” Rory repeated, interrupting her. “And from now on, you’ll have no more trouble from me or mine. I’ll stand with you against any who would harm you.”

  For some reason, this moved her as much as Burke’s recovery had. Sullen, childish Rory, loyal only to Burke and their mutual cause, was pledging his fealty to her like a knight kneeling before the queen. She began to get teary again.

  “Come along inside,” Rory said, clamping his hand on her shoulder. It was the first time he had ever touched her voluntarily. “Maybe in a while we can feed him some broth from the pot.”

  * * * *

  As soon as Burke began to feel better, he behaved like a child and wanted to be on his feet at once. This attitude persisted in spite of the fact that he almost fell the first time he tried to stand; Rory caught him and set him back down on his pallet. Burke thereafter grumbled that he was being treated “like a puking babe,” which was accurate since the first thing he ate came back up again. Alex was reduced to standing guard to make sure he stayed horizontal and inventing amusements to distract him from his desire to get up and take charge again.

  Although she saw as little of the men in the camp as she had before, she could tell that their opinion of her had changed from controlled hatred to grudging respect. Rory must have told them of her role in Burke’s recovery, and the aura of veiled threat she had sensed before was entirely gone.

  The atmosphere in the camp was not the only thing that had changed; Alex herself was different somehow. The man upon whom she’d depended for her very survival had almost died, and she’d saved him. When Burke finally came to after days of fever and looked at her and touched her face, she knew then that she loved him, and was
certain that he felt the same.

  Her conclusion was unshakable, even though she’d had little experience of any kind of love. Her uncle had always spoken of “romance” in sneering terms, as if it were an affliction of the weak, but Alex didn’t feel weak; she felt strong. Nothing and no one could keep her from Burke. Suddenly all the stories and songs made sense, the books she’d read since childhood and the lays of the minstrels sung at banquets and on feast days. Love had once seemed a distant dream, wonderful if ephemeral, but the reality was even more powerful. She would do anything to preserve it.

  Alex didn’t even question that her love was reciprocated. She could read Burke’s every expression and gesture, and she knew he had been fighting his feelings for her for some time. He’d give in to them, she would see to that. It wouldn’t be long before he recognized and admitted their mutual desire.

  It had to be love, what else could make her feel this way? It was difficult now to remember how she’d felt in the beginning, other than mortally afraid of Burke and desperate to get away from him. Now, the thought of their being parted filled her with panic. She wanted to stay with him, even if it meant living in camps like this one, going deep into the Irish countryside, never seeing England again. All her previous experience of life was muted—her time in her parents’ house and later with her uncle—as if it had never been.

  “No more of that gruel,” Burke announced to her as she entered the tent with a bowl of marrow and curds on the fourth day of his recovery. “I’ll have meat or naught at all. I’m being fed like a nursling. And leave off with that flower potion, too; it keeps me in a fog.”

  “You seem the better for both,” Alex said, setting the bowl on the floor and postponing that argument for later.

  “And I want a glass to shave. I feel like a beggar at the manor gates. All I lack is a stump.”

  “Why don’t you grow a beard? I’ve taken note that everyone else in camp has one.”

  “I had one. It itched.”

  “Liar. You’re vain.”

  He gave her a disgusted look.

  “Vanity is a great sin,” Alex said. “You want to look out for your soul and compose yourself in modesty.”

  “And I need to cut my hair. I’ll be mistaken for a maid.”

  “Some hopes with that beard. And that size. The woman never lived to come near your shoulder.”

  “Tell Rory I’ll go to the brook and have a wash,” he said.

  “I will do no such thing. You’ll rest for two days more before you go anywhere.”

  “You’re a tyrant, and I vow you’ll pay for it once I’m back to myself again.”

  “Until then, you’ll do as I say. I’ll cut your hair and shave you when you’re up and about.” She smiled. “I’ll crop that mane and give you curls like Alexander.”

  “Who’s that? Your father?”

  “No, but my father named me after him. He was the greatest leader of ancient times, in Greece, more than three hundred years before the birth of Christ.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “He conquered the entire world, as much of it as was known to him, all the way to Persia.”

  “Persia?” he said doubtfully. “Where is that?”

  “A long way from here,” Alex replied, at a loss to describe the immense distance she had once seen on her tutor’s cartograph. “Many times the distance from England to Ireland.”

  “And were the Persians, whoever they might be, difficult to conquer?”

  Alex nodded. “They fought him from their elephants.”

  “Elephant? Is that a sort of fortress?”

  Alex giggled. “An elephant is an animal, as high off the ground as one man standing on another’s shoulders, with a long nose like a pig’s snout that reaches all the way to the earth.”

  “From that height?”

  “Yes.”

  He snorted. “You mock me. There is no such creature.”

  “But there is. I’ve seen drawings of them.”

  “You must think me dull-witted,” he said, hitching his shoulder in irritation.

  “Certainly not. But since I’ve seen the pictures, you might forgive me for believing.”

  “I’ve seen drawings of the green men said to come out on the lawn on midsummer eve at midnight and grant the beholder three wishes. That doesn’t mean I believe in them. Why am I talking to you at all? A woman who thinks the people in the Welsh Marches have webbed feet!”

  “I was telling you of Alexander,” she said, dropping the subject of elephants.

  “So you were.”

  “He reached the limits of the world before the age of thirty. He died at thirty-three, weakened by old wounds and poisoned, it is often said, by tainted water. My father was a student of history and a great admirer of his.”

  “For his victories?”

  “For more than that. My father thought he was very forward looking, a man out of his time. He told me stories of him when I was a child. But after he died and my uncle took charge of my care, my new tutor instructed me in wifely duties only. I heard no more then of Alexander,” she ended sadly.

  “Why do you remember all this so well?” Burke asked. “You must have been very young when you heard about him.”

  “I was young but often left alone to think, and I was captivated by what I’d heard. I looked up his image on the bookplates in my father’s library, before his books were sold with his entailed estate when he died. There were copies of Alexander’s likeness. He was fair, like you, with the same brown-gold hair.”

  Burke stared at her, listening.

  “He was clean-shaven also, in a time, like now, when the fashion was for beards.” She smiled. “Perhaps he was vain, too.”

  “And?”

  “Not so big as you, not above middle height, but very comely. The story goes that his games master believed in a strict regimen of sparse diet and little sleep for children, and this kept him small. He blamed his childhood for his size, which he felt was a failing. His greatest friend, Hephaestion, was described as taller and better looking, in which case he was certainly handsome. Alexander went near to mad when Hephaestion died, of physician’s neglect, so he thought. He gave orders immediately to hang the doctor.”

  “That was not wise,” said Burke. “So your hero had a flaw.”

  “Yes. I remember it because it seemed such a lack of judgment, as if he must have been quite driven from his senses.”

  “Great fondness followed by a loss can do that.”

  “True. He seemed to think he and his friend were twin souls, almost the same person. How you feel about Rory, I imagine. Or your brother.”

  Burke rubbed his shoulder, lost in thought.

  “Don’t touch that,” Alex said.

  “This bloody thing is putting me in hopes of an asylum,” he complained.

  “It almost put you in your grave,” Alex said. “And I must take issue with Rory. He once told me you stood wounds very well.”

  “He stands the wounds well,” Rory said, entering the tent. “It’s the mending he can’t bear.”

  “I’ll take a walk,” Burke announced.

  Alex rose as she and Rory exchanged glances.

  “Tomorrow,” Alex said. “And now you must rest. You’ve been listening to me babbling all this time when you should have been napping.”

  “She treats me like a stripling,” Burke said to Rory.

  “You’re behaving like an infant,” Rory replied.

  Alex sighed. “It’s time for you to sleep.”

  “Tell me some more interesting stories about your namesake.”

  “Stories?” Rory said, arching his brows. “Are we in an English nursery now, pestering the governess for bedtime stories?” He rolled his eyes and left the tent.

  Burke looked at her expectantly.

  Alex resumed her place on the dirt floor. She told him what else she could remember about the man who had changed history, back when Burke’s distant ancestors were still migrating from the banks of
the Danube, to keep him quiet until he fell asleep.

  * * * *

  Burke awoke in the middle of the night, sweating and parched, and reached for the deerskin flask Alex had left at his elbow, wincing as the movement stung his shoulder. He drank deeply and then considered his nurse, sleeping a short distance away, curled up on his tweed cloak.

  This must stop, he thought. He must get some exercise, find some way to relieve the pressure of her constant presence. He was not so injured after all, despite the protestations of his attendant. He was at least well enough to spend every waking moment when he wasn’t talking to her indulging in fantasies of making love to her.

  And sleeping was worse. Each night, like this one, he awoke, perspiring and dizzy with desire, from dreams in which he caressed her creamy skin and kissed her budding lips and the languid, heavy lids of her emerald eyes. He told himself that it was hopeless, that their situation made it so, but logic did not avail him. He told himself that sooner or later she would surely be restored to the English so his feelings were a waste of time. Lastly, he told himself that she was a child—which he knew was a lie.

  She was a woman fully grown, and she wanted him as much as he wanted her. He knew it from her furtive looks, the longing glances she had not the cunning to disguise, the way she trembled when they touched. But she was young and sheltered, and aside from all other considerations, this presented another problem.

  Burke had never taken a virgin in his life. From his fifteenth year he’d had ready access to the easy women who hung around the inland camps and asked no questions. His current favorite was Deirdre, an attractive hybrid with the ebony hair of the Spanish invaders, who bedded him well and regularly. He did not deceive himself that it was a sentimental attachment; she liked the honor of being chosen by the local chieftain and the considerable pleasure of coupling with his strong, healthy body. She milked him dry and then left him, satisfied, with no conscience about it whatsoever.

  Such would not be the case with Alexandra. She was no Deirdre to take her pleasure where she found it. And it was different for him, too. He wanted to be with Alex all the time. He found himself, in weaker moments, wishing heartily that he’d never sent a message to the castle that he had her.