Tully tucked in her chins and looked ruminative. “There’s nothing else for it that I can see. You’ll have to pay up.”
“If only I could.” Sherry leaned against the mantelpiece. She felt sick at heart. “You forget that my brother controls my purse-strings. We could not continue to reside in the country house after Mama’s death because my brother would not allow me the funds. And now— Not that Chris is ungenerous. He anticipates and provides for my every need. Or almost my every whim! Oh, what a curst dilemma! What possible reason can I give him for wanting five hundred pounds?”
Aunt Tulliver had no answer for this question. Neither did Daffodil, who had been following the conversation very closely from beneath the pillow Tully had flung across her face. Nor, obviously, did Sherry, or else she wouldn’t have asked the question in the first place. The bedchamber was quiet as the ladies waited for inspiration to strike. Then suddenly Daffodil flung aside her pillow and sat up. “I know!” she cried, triumphant at this opportunity to redeem herself. “We’ll tell Sir Christopher you want the money to buy your bride clothes!”
Chapter Ten
The following morning Lady Sherry made her way to the stables, desirous of having a word with Ned. She was especially desirous of discovering whether the dramatically-inclined Daffodil had exaggerated the seriousness of the situation.
This, alas, was not the case. Ned had arrived at a decision and from it he would not be swayed, no matter how great an effort Sherry made to turn him up sweet. Nor would he be moved by threats and pleas. Ned was sure he was very sorry to see her ladyship in a pucker, but he was very needful of getting his hands on some of the ready-and-rhino and there was nothing else for it but that she must knuckle down.
The conversation, entirely too distressing to repeat here in its entirety, continued for some few moments. At its end, Sherry conceded reluctantly that she would be granted no reprieve. She abruptly left the stables before she fell prey to a violent impulse to wreak bodily damage on her groom with the pitchfork that leaned against one wall.
Sherry made her way back to the house and into the kitchen, where she requested a tray to take with her to the book room as a midmorning snack. A pot of tea and a plate of seedcakes, a large serving of cold green-goose pie—she recalled that she was providing this repast for a gentleman not in the pink of health and additionally requested that the cook provide her with some of the excellent restorative that she always kept on hand. Cook agreed that Lady Sherry was looking a mite peaked and immediately put a large teacupful of her calf’s-feet jelly into a saucepan along with a half-glass of sweet wine, a little sugar, and nutmeg.
Lady Sherry watched the cook beat in the yolk of an egg and a bit of butter, then grate into the concoction a portion of fresh lemon peel. “I’ll take it up myself.” She grasped the tray and walked out of the kitchen, leaving the servants to agree among themselves that this was a very queer household. Lady Childe was the highest of sticklers and could not be pleased, but at least with Lady Childe one knew where one stood. Lady Sherry, on the other hand, didn’t seem to know her proper place.
The cook had the final word on the subject. “Lady Sherry is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring!” she announced with a shake of her head.
Sherry was aware that her brother’s servants didn’t approve of her country manners, and could not bring herself to greatly care. At this moment, as she continued down the hallway, Sherry was far more concerned about her own servant and his unexpected perfidy. How could Ned be so very unreasonable as to expect her to produce five hundred pounds in the winking of an eye? Even given an entire year, she had no notion how she might produce so much. Sherry supposed she would have to follow Daffodil’s suggestion, since she could think of none of her own. She had not forgotten that Daffodil’s clever notions were to a degree responsible for this wretched predicament.
Sherry detested the idea of prevaricating about a matter so serious as her own nuptials. And what was she to say to her brother when tradesmen failed to arrive with boxes containing the trousseau she had supposedly bought? For that matter, what was she to say to her prospective bridegroom, who had no notion that a trousseau was indicated posthaste? Unlikely that Chris could be persuaded to refrain from mentioning the matter to Andrew.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave!” Sherry murmured, greatly startling a young housemaid passing by her in the hallway. Deep in thought, Sherry continued on up the stairs and flung open the door to the book room, causing Prinny to leap alert and growling to his feet and Micah to come awake abruptly with a curse and a groan for his sore leg.
Some moments later, order had been restored. Prinny had been persuaded against savaging the intruder, and Micah from crawling across the room to retrieve his gun from its hiding place on the library shelf. “Oh, do hush!” snapped Sherry to the pair of them as she set the tray down on the little table by the bed and dropped into her writing chair.
Micah regarded her with some perplexity. The females of his acquaintance did not generally walk into a room, plop down into a chair, then prop their elbows on a table and drop their head upon their hands, without so much as a word of greeting exchanged. The woman looked as if she was praying, which struck Micah as somewhat strange. Unaware that his benefactress was a novel writer, the highwayman did not realize that this supplicating gesture was the attitude his hostess assumed when courting her muse. Queer as she might be, however, he was grateful to this red-haired female and meant to be civil to her, no matter how great the pain of his wounded leg.
Discreetly, he cleared his throat. Sherry raised her head to look at him. Micah forgot his good intentions of only a moment past. “You look worn to the bone.”
Sherry lowered her chin again to rest on her clasped hands. “It needed only that. How kind of you to tell me that I am hagged. It is my own fault, of course. I should have known better than to go about such arduous tasks as rescuing highwaymen at my advanced age.”
Micah detected a note of sarcasm in her voice. He could hardly fail to detect it, his only physical deficiency being his wounded leg and not his excellent hearing.
He recalled his determination to do the civil. “I already thanked you!” he pointed out. So that he might better reach the tray of food, he attempted to sit up. His leg pained him and he winced.
Aghast at her thoughtlessness, Sherry pushed back her chair and hastened to his assistance. “I’m sorry! I didn’t think.” She drew the table closer to the sofa. “There!”
Micah did not lack for acuteness, when pain and gin didn’t dull his brain, and a good night’s rest had done much to restore his native wit. He would not now have mistaken his benefactress for a serving wench. Furthermore, it was obvious that something troubled her.
He hoped those troubles boded no further ill for himself. Before the lady could back away, he caught her hand. “What am I to call you?” he asked.
Again that tingling sensation where his flesh touched hers. It required all of Sherry’s willpower not to jerk away. Even as she wondered if she should reveal herself to him or not, she was telling him her name.
What strange power did this rogue possess? Sherry forced herself to look away, to concentrate on an ancient counting table with a checkered top where counters had once been moved about and accounts cast. She realized that the man was still speaking. He said she was to call him Micah. Why, then, was he known as Captain Toby? She dared to glance at him. “What?”
The woman appeared on the verge of flight, like some shy woodland creature caught by the hunters unaware. Micah was not accustomed to being regarded thusly by the weaker sex. With a wry expression, he released her hand. “Don’t fear; you’re safe enough with me. I promise you I have no designs on your virtue, ma’am. And even if I did, I could hardly act upon my impulses.” He glanced ruefully at his wounded leg.
This evidence of the rogue’s excellent intuition discomposed Sherry even more. “Here, drink this!” she said, and forced upon him the calf’s-feet broth.
O
bediently, Micah drank. The restorative had no pleasant taste. “What the devil is this stuff? Did you save me from the gallows just to try to poison me, ma’am?”
“Nothing of the sort.” Sherry wished he wouldn’t call her ma’am in that odiously respectful manner, as if she were his maiden aunt. “Were you to expire now, we’d be in even worse case, because I don’t know what we should do with a corpse. As for the other, I know you don’t— You couldn’t— I mean, I didn’t think you did— Oh, dear!” Cheeks aflame, she sank back into her chair. “After all, I’m hardly in my first youth!”
Micah looked up from the green-goose pie, which he was currently sampling, and which was very good. “Peahen!” he commented, none too distinctly.
Peahen? Had the man just called her a peahen? Sherry surveyed him with bewilderment. “I am past my first youth! Indeed, I’m quite twenty-seven years of age. What a very strange gentleman you are, Mr. Greene. If a gentleman you are! You speak like one, at any rate, yet no true gentleman would make reference to a lady’s age.”
“I never claimed to be a gentleman,” retorted Micah, his words much clearer now that he’d washed down the remainder of the green-goose pie with a gulp of tea. As if determined to prove his lack of social graces, he then inquired how it had come about that Lady Sherry had reached so very advanced an age without being wed.
The man was incorrigible. Sherry could not help but smile. “Are you always so very outspoken?” she inquired. He merely shrugged and helped himself to another seedcake.
Oddly enough, Sherry did not resent his question, perhaps because her sister-in-law had so frequently given it voice. Stranger still, she considered the question worthy of reply. Micah was a good listener, interjecting comments that indicated his interest, and Sherry found herself telling him much more of her earlier life than she had intended.
Belatedly she realized that she must be boring the poor man. He was simply not so unkind as to tell her so. She fell silent.
Micah promptly disillusioned his benefactress regarding his capacity for kindness. “So you left behind your country pleasures and came to London to catch yourself a husband,” he commented, curiously disappointed to find her so ordinary a member of her sex.
“I came to London because I had no choice!” retorted Sherry, stung by the man’s censorious tone. The highwayman, she reminded herself. How dare he judge her? But then ,why should he be the exception? Sherry felt as if everyone were judging her these days. She thought of Lord Viccars and her impossibly muddled romance, and sighed. “To tell the truth, I liked country life very well. If I could, I would trade all these teas and balls and soirées that my sister-in-law so dotes on for a country fair with a traveling fiddler to play for the dances, and puppet shows, and gingerbread stalls. As for Almack’s, I think I would find more honest entertainment in a hasty-pudding contest or chasing a greased
pig!”
Micah quirked a brow. His benefactress had redeemed herself by denigrating the temple of the ton. “Did you participate?” he inquired.
“Did I— Don’t be absurd!” Perhaps she should have participated, Sherry thought. Even Lavinia would quail at introducing to polite society a sister-in-law who’d gone about chasing greased pigs. “Life used to be so simple. Perhaps it didn’t seem so at the time, but it certainly does in retrospect! But I don’t need to tell you that, do I? Life must have been a great deal simpler for you also before you were caught and sent to jail.”
“Simpler? You might say so!” Micah’s laughter was humorless. However, this subject was not one that he cared to discuss. He reached for another seedcake, only to discover that the remaining seedcakes, as well as the rest of the green-goose pie, had vanished from the tray. Prinny, stretched out on the floor beside the sofa, looking for all the world like a large, shaggy rug, emitted a gentle burp.
Micah regarded the beast with disfavor. Prinny was accustomed to seeing that expression on the faces of his nearest and dearest. Apologetically, he wagged his tail.
Lady Sherry was oblivious to this byplay. She was thinking very hard, remembering what Lord Viccars had said about the highwayman and how great a shame it was she’d had no interview. Here was her opportunity, and she must go about it tactfully. As shy as Sherry was about talking of her books, she’d discovered people were even shyer of her, afraid that she would translate them somehow into a character in one of her novels, with all their foibles and follies in plain view. Micah, she had already put between the pages of a book, for she had based a character on his exploits. Instinct warned her that he would not take kindly to that intelligence, or aid her struggling efforts by laying bare his soul for her to dissect.
Therefore she would not tell him. She would be subtle in her approach. “It was very brave of you,” she said. “To take to the road. Not that I am commending highway robbery, of course! Particularly when it is committed by some gay young blood who takes a purse for the mere fun of the thing. But I cannot disapprove of it entirely, either. Particularly since it is merely a symptom of a greater social ill! Consider Robin Hood, who took from the rich to give to the poor.’’
So his benefactress was one of those pitiful females who would go to any lengths to introduce some excitement into their dreary lives. Micah was disappointed in her for the second time that day. “Consider Robin Hood’s successors,” he said perversely. “They may have robbed the rich, but not in the interest of social justice, I think.”
“You are a gentleman,” she prodded subtly. “You must have had some other motive for what you did than pure greed.”
Micah’s face twisted. “Don’t delude yourself, ma’am. Captain Toby has no conscience, social or otherwise. He does what he does for the pleasure of it and the profit. Nothing else.”
How strange to hear a man speak of himself in the third person as if he were talking about someone else. His conscience pained him, no doubt. And so it should, but Sherry saw no need for the man to wallow in his guilt. “Are you trying to frighten me?” she asked, in a tone calculated to indicate that she was nothing of the sort. “By reminding me that I have a hardened criminal hidden beneath my roof? Will you repay me by stealing the silver and murdering us all in our beds?”
Now he looked startled. “I didn’t say that. You’ve nothing to fear from me, ma’am.”
Curiously enough, Sherry believed him. No wonder her manuscript was proving difficult, because her hero was nothing like this highwayman. She foresaw massive revisions.
She also foresaw a pleasurable interval of plumbing the depths of the highwayman’s mind. Sherry remembered another bit of highwayman lore she would rather not have thought of just then, concerning the miraculous powers of a body that had been hanged. The mere wood chippings from the gallows were said to cure the ague and a splinter the headache, whereas the hand of the corpse was an excellent remedy for goiters and ulcers and cancerous growths. Sherry didn’t know how Micah felt about the matter, but she for one preferred that he should not benefit his fellow man to that extent.
He looked exhausted. “I’ve kept you talking too long!” Sherry said guiltily, as she rose from her chair, and picked up the tray.
Micah caught her hand again as she passed by the sofa where he lay. “You still haven’t told me what has you fretting your guts to fiddlestrings,” he murmured.
Sherry looked at his hand, so dark against her fair skin. Again she felt that giddiness. “It’s nothing to concern yourself about,” she said.
Anything that concerned this lady, and this household, must concern Micah as long as he was kept prisoner here by his accursed leg. He was so very tired just now, without energy left to pursue the matter. “Come back. Later.” He released her, and closed his eyes.
Sherry gazed down upon his face. The die was truly cast. She quietly closed the door of her book room and went in search of Sir Christopher.
Chapter Eleven
Lady Childe was reclining on her sofa, a very elegant piece of furniture in the classical mode, with a boldly curved headpiece a
nd a short armrest, a low, scrolled end and lion-shaped legs. In her pretty muslin dress, Lavinia looked very lovely, save for her expression of extreme discontent. Even a glance at her reflection in a pier glass, which assured her that she was as close to perfection as she had ever been, did not elevate her spirits.
Lavinia sighed, undraped herself from the sofa, and retrieved her needlework from a brass-inlaid mahogany chair. Her current project involved roses, daisies, and strawberry blossoms embellished with leaves and a realistic-looking caterpillar, all done in petit point. Alas, that occupation soon also palled. Fortunately, the butler appeared in the doorway then to announce the arrival of Lord Viccars.
Lady Childe promptly set aside her needlepoint. This eagerness on her part must not be misconstrued. Lavinia was fond of his lordship, but it was in the manner of fondness reserved for those persons upon whose knees one was dandled as a child. To her, Lord Viccars was an avuncular figure. He was also her confidant.
“How glad I am to see you!” she cried as he stepped into the drawing room. “Because, if not precisely blue-deviled, I am beset by ennui! Christopher is off dispensing justice, and Sherris is deep in a fit of creativity that apparently leaves her with neither the time nor the ambition to enjoy her family’s company. Do sit down, Andrew! We do not stand on ceremony, you and I. How rude I am to run on like this! It is just that I have grown very weary of my own company. We have missed you these past days. Of course you will have been setting your affairs in order, and forgot about your old friends!”
Lord Viccars murmured noncommittally and conceded to his hostess’s request that he should take a chair. Lavinia thought he looked somewhat startled by her comments. She could hardly say outright that she knew his romantic doubts had been laid to rest because Sherry had requested a sum of money with which to purchase her bride clothes.
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