Immortal Warriors 02 - Secrets of the Highwayman

by Sara Mackenzie

  He should go after her, just to be sure.

  Nathaniel left the attic without a second glance.

  Melanie was sitting on the sand, arms looped about her bent knees, staring out to sea. The salty breeze had helped clear her head, but she still felt woozy. Not herself. Maybe she was coming down with something. It would almost be a relief if that was all that was wrong with her. She’d choose the flu over a malevolent manifestation any day.

  “This place isn’t any different from the last time I was here.”

  Melanie turned her head. Nathaniel was standing a few feet away and he’d changed his clothing. She blinked. He wore black trousers and boots that came to his knees, a white cotton shirt, open at the throat, with ruffles down the front and on the cuffs. He looked like a cross between a highwayman and a pirate. The effect was devastating.

  Melanie felt something flip over inside her. “Where did you find the new clothes?”

  “In the attic.” He raised his arm and sniffed his cuff. “I smell like lavender…they must have used it for the moths.”

  You look like heaven.

  “I found a cutlass, too, but I thought I’d better leave it up there.”

  “Yes. People don’t walk around waving cutlasses these days. Unless, of course, they’re pirates.”

  Nathaniel was observing her curiously, as if he wanted to read her mind. “What is it?” he asked in a deep, quiet voice. “You look different.”

  “Different?”

  “Yes.” He was frowning, and abruptly Melanie turned away and pretended to count the seagulls.

  He sat down on the sand beside her, mirroring her pose, with knees bent, his arms draped over them, staring out to sea. She risked a glance at him, but his profile told her nothing other than that he’d used a razor.

  “There’s going to be a storm,” he said.

  “I know.” Melanie bit her lip as soon as the words slipped out. “I dreamed about Ravenswood last night,” she said quickly, before she could change her mind. “I went back into the past, only this time it was just me. It was the night of the Yuletide Ball, and you were there, dancing with Sophie. You looked…happy.”

  Nathaniel was intent on her now; she had certainly captured his attention.

  “I didn’t stay for the ball, I just looked in the door, and then I went to the servants’ bedrooms. Major Pengorren was there with someone called Dorrie. They were having sex…” She stopped, wondering how it was possible to convey the sheer awfulness of that scene to someone who hadn’t been there.

  “I remember Dorrie,” he said softly. “Curly fair hair, sweet-natured. Her father drowned, leaving a wife and several young children, and Dorrie came to work for us when she was quite young herself.”

  Melanie shot him a look.

  “No,” he said dryly, “I didn’t take Dorrie to my bed. She was too sweet for me.”

  “Right,” she shrugged as if she didn’t care. “That’s what made it so horrible. She was so sweet and he was so skanky.”

  He frowned. “Skanky?”

  “Squirmy, horrible, nasty.”

  “Ah. I see.” He thought a moment. “And yet Hew Pengorren was loved by everyone.”

  “They believed they loved him. I think he made them believe it.”

  “How, Melanie?” He sounded as if he was really interested in her opinion.

  She waved a hand. “A magic spell?” she said, making a joke of it, but it fell flat.

  He gave it his full consideration, and she wasn’t sure whether that pleased her or just embarrassed her more.

  I’ve seen him before. The words were on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t speak them aloud. It was as if by not saying them she could go on pretending. Because if she had seen him when she was a child, then what did that say about Pengorren and the danger she was in?

  “You told me that before she left Ravenswood, Miss Pengorren replaced Major Pengorren’s portrait with my own,” he said quietly. “I was up in the attic a moment ago, but Pengorren’s portrait isn’t there. Do you know where it is?”

  “No. Why?” she asked, puzzled by the connection between her dream and the portrait.

  “I thought it might be significant.”

  “Eddie would know where it is.” She dug her fingers into the sand beside her and let it trickle out again. “Remember, if you come face-to-face with him, then you’re a distant relative from the wrong side of the blanket. I don’t think you should try and tell him the truth. He’d get you locked up.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I remember, although why I should have to explain who I am to a caretaker—”

  “You’re very arrogant,” she cut him short. “The days of the lesser classes being seen and not heard are over. Most of us believe we’re all equal.”

  “You sound like a French revolutionary,” he said. “Liberty, equality, fraternity!”

  “Maybe the revolution wasn’t so bad.”

  He snorted.

  She watched him carefully, thinking he might be terminally insulted by what she’d said—after all, he was an English gentleman from the early nineteenth century, with all the hang-ups and prejudices of his time. But he wasn’t. He was smiling at her and shaking his head, and she realized that she hadn’t dented either his pride or his self-esteem. Nathaniel Raven was confident enough to be impervious to her criticism. Well, that wasn’t a bad thing, was it? Melanie accepted that she was touchy enough for both of them.

  Which made her the exact opposite to Nathaniel.

  Seventeen

  Magic.

  Melanie had reacted as if he’d laugh at her suggestion, but Nathaniel had learned not to dismiss anything, no matter how far-fetched it might seem. Pengorren definitely used something to blind people to his true nature, and his true purpose, so why not a magic spell? And as for Melanie’s dream—if that was what it was—Nathaniel accepted the picture she drew of Pengorren seducing Dorrie. The man he had come to know would have had no compunction in using sweet Dorrie, just as he used Sophie and Felicity.

  His gaze slid back to Melanie, and lingered. She was different. After her experience last night he would have expected her to be white-faced and ravaged, but instead her skin glowed, and even though the sun wasn’t shining, her hair was. When she turned her head, strands of it drifted out, gleaming like liquid gold.

  His heart began to beat in a slow and sensual rhythm, as if in response to some invisible siren’s call.

  Did she feel it, too? She was staring out to sea. They were sitting close together, so near they were almost touching, and yet a chasm lay between them. Work together, the queen said. Nathaniel had resisted her demands but now he was getting desperate. His time was running out, and soon it would be too late.

  “The thought of your seeing Pengorren in your sleep makes me extremely uncomfortable,” he said, trying for the honest approach. It had worked before.

  She laughed without humor. “Here’s something that will make you even more uncomfortable. In my dream last night he called me by my name.”

  Unfamiliar cold anger built inside him. “It’s almost as if he’s set his sights on you, Melanie. As if, for reasons we still don’t understand, he is calling to you from the past.”

  “But that’s impossible, surely? The idea of Pengorren’s sending messages through time…” She shivered, and a breeze hissed in from the water, stirring her hair. She pushed it back. “Last night in my dream, it was as if he was playing a role. He was there with Dorrie, doing what he did in 1813, and at the same time he was fully aware of me and who I was. Just like you, Nathaniel, when I went back through time. You were there, being Nathaniel Raven in 1813, and yet you knew you were taking part in a scene that was nearly two hundred years in the past.” She took a deep, uneven breath. “There’s something else. I should have told you this first, but I didn’t want to believe it…” She frowned. “It’s about Pengorren. I’ve met him. Not at the Yuletide Ball. It was when I was a child, here on the beach in Cornwall. He came up to me and asked
my name, and when he touched me I felt as if he was drawing out my strength, my being, my…my soul, for want of a better word. I only remembered this after my dream last night, and at first I thought my brain was confusing the faces, that I was making it up. But I’m not. It was definitely him. I must have blocked it out, or pushed it to the back of my mind, but last night I remembered everything. It was Pengorren, and that’s why he knows me,” she finished bleakly.

  “You think that’s why you’re here now? Because of your connection with Pengorren?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think he’s able to move back and forth through time?”

  She glanced away, out to sea again. “Yes, I do.” Her mouth was set in a line, her hands clasped tightly between her knees.

  “We have to face this, whatever it is. We need to be prepared.” He wrapped his fingers around her arm and found she was rigid with tension beneath the sleeve of her top.

  “It’s my imagination,” her voice trembled.

  “Melanie, your imagination can’t hurt you.”

  She gave a disbelieving laugh as she turned to him. “Then what’s happening to me? I’m seeing things, hearing things. It can’t be right.”

  Nathaniel took her face between his hands. “I don’t know what’s happening to you, Melanie, but whatever it is we’re in it together.”

  “Are we?” Her voice was husky with suppressed emotion.

  “Yes. You and me. Together we’ll get to the bottom of this mystery, and defeat Pengorren.”

  “So then you can regain what’s rightfully yours,” she said, as if reciting a fairy tale, “and we can all live happily ever after.”

  “You in your time, and me in mine.”

  She smiled, but he could see it was an effort—her lips trembled. Whether she admitted it or not, Melanie was terrified, and he’d always been drawn to beautiful women in distress.

  “I want to kiss you,” he said, and wondered why he was stupid enough to warn her. Now she’d tell him no.

  She blinked, and then she reached out her hand and touched his mouth with her fingertips. “Go on then,” she whispered.

  Nathaniel bent his head and claimed her mouth in a hot, desperate kiss. Her lips responded, returning his pressure, her mouth opening to his. Her arms slid around his neck, and she clung to him. She tasted sweet, as sweet as he’d remembered, and for a moment the kiss overwhelmed him. He forgot everything but wanting to push her back onto the sand and be inside her.

  “Melanie,” he murmured, and kissed her cheeks, her eyelids.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” she said, and now she was shaking. “I don’t understand what’s happening to me, or why. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of you and myself, and of Pengorren. That thing in the room—”

  “We’ll come through this,” he said harshly, as if he really believed it. He held her away, feeling the siren pull of her and resisting it, and when he looked into her eyes he was impressing upon her his own confidence.

  He believed in himself. And knowing it gave her courage. He might be the Raven, the reckless and daring highwayman, but he was also Captain Raven, the brave and gallant officer. And most important of all he was Nathaniel, who had come from the past to make everything right for those he loved.

  He was a hero.

  Why didn’t she realize that before?

  “We’ll work together,” she said, with hardly a tremor.

  “Yes, we will.”

  Melanie looked into his eyes a moment more, and then she smiled. “Come on then,” she said, getting to her feet, “I need to be doing something.” She turned toward the steps, calling back over her shoulder, “I’ll go and speak to Eddie about the portrait.”

  Nathaniel followed her up the cliff steps. “You’d think Miss Pengorren would have been proud of her namesake, so why take his portrait down in favor of an infamous highwayman’s? What did she learn, and how?”

  Melanie remembered then she hadn’t told him about the entries in the diary, and updated him quickly.

  “But we still don’t know who or what was visiting her in the night?”

  “Maybe she told Eddie?” Melanie said.

  “She was probably too proud, or too frightened, to admit anything was wrong.”

  “If it was the thing I saw last night, then I could understand her being frightened. But she also seemed to be drawn to whatever it was that was visiting her. As if she was revolted and yet fascinated at the same time.”

  They reached the top of the cliff. Nathaniel moved closer, but this time he resisted kissing her. “Go and see Eddie.”

  “Okay.”

  “Melanie, there’s something I should tell you.” His eyes were very serious. “I don’t know how long I have before I have to go back to the between-worlds. I don’t think it will be infinite.”

  “But…” She shook her head. “God, Nathaniel, we haven’t found out anything!”

  “We have. We’re making progress. I have hopes we will accomplish our task.”

  Melanie felt as if she’d been for a ride on a roller-coaster and left her stomach behind. “When? I mean, when is your time up? Does a gong sound or something? Do you get a warning, or do you just vanish?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say.”

  “Fabulous,” she muttered, so shaken she just wanted to get away from him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No. No, I’m not.”

  “Melanie, I promise you, I will see you safe…”

  But she left him there, walking quickly toward Eddie’s cottage. She’d known he wouldn’t be here forever, but she’d thought it would be months. Maybe even years. Now he was telling her it could be much sooner. She still felt the heat of his mouth on hers!

  She didn’t know whether to feel angry or frustrated, or just plain miserable.

  Eddie’s cottage was made of the same grey stone as the house. Smoke trickled from the chimney and the upper windows were curtained, but Eddie would be downstairs by now anyway. Melanie could hear the clack of his keyboard as she knocked, and then it stopped, and after a pause the door opened. Melanie blinked. Today he was wearing an Hawaiian shirt, complete with girls in grass skirts, and his hair was standing up as if he’d been running his hands through it. But his smile was friendly, and his eyes lit up at the sight of her.

  Or maybe he just wanted to knock off work.

  “How’s the book going?”

  He grimaced. “I’m too far into it to be able to tell.” His eyes narrowed slightly as he took in her pallor. “You all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” The irrepressible smile was back again. “Sorry, couldn’t resist.”

  “There was a rat in my room last night. It kept me awake.”

  “Oh. Not much I can do about them, and I have tried. Miss Pengorren used to go on at me about vermin, but she stopped toward the end. Must have got used to them.”

  Or maybe she found something worse to worry about.

  “Have you had anything published?” she asked politely, as he closed the door behind her.

  Eddie shook his head. “I was close but then Dan Brown had the same idea as me.” He winked, to show he was joking. “No, I’m afraid my stuff isn’t on the bestseller lists yet. I’ll live with it. How is it going with Ravenswood? I know there’s a ton of stuff in there, and some of it must be worth something. Pity there were no heirs. She left everything to charity, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. I rang Mr. Trewartha in Launceston. I’m expecting him in the next few days. He’s retired, but he’s familiar with Ravenswood, so he’s going to make an exception for us and take a look. I’m hoping he’ll agree to list the contents and give us some evaluations—”

  “Trewartha?” He thought for a moment and then shook his head. “Sounds familiar for some reason, but nothing to do with antiques. I don’t know anything about antiques.”

  Melanie eyed his shirt but decided not to comment.

  Eddie gave her a pensive look. “You realize that when Ravenswood’s
gone, I’ll be out of a job.”

  “I know, and I am sorry. Have you anywhere else you can—”

  “I have a sister in Scotland. It won’t be like living here, though, with Miss Pengorren.” He smiled. “She had a nasty tongue on her, tore strips off me sometimes, but you couldn’t help but admire her spirit.”

  “You said you were born on the wrong side of the Pengorren blanket,” she reminded him, hoping he’d elaborate.

  Eddie was pleased to accommodate her. “That’s right, I was. Long way back, though. Major Pengorren was my dubious ancestor. He impregnated half of Cornwall in his time. Right Don Juan he was.”

  She should have known; so much for the wedded bliss between Sophie and the major. Maybe it was Dorrie who was Eddie’s great-great-whatever-grandmother, although looking at him she couldn’t see much of Dorrie’s sweet blond looks in Eddie’s pleasant but plain features.

  “Do you know very much about Major Pengorren?”

  “I think he was well liked. Maybe he was one of those lovable rascals that no one can refuse. No woman, anyway,” he ended wryly, as if he envied the major his skill.

  “Maybe.”

  But that didn’t seem right to her. Pengorren wasn’t a lovable rascal, not from the snippets she had seen of him. He was an evil man, someone you would never turn your back on.

  “You mentioned last night that there was a portrait of Pengorren that used to hang in the stairwell. You said that Miss Pengorren replaced it with the one of Nathaniel Raven.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I can’t find it. It’s not in the attic. I was wondering whether you’d seen it around.”

  Eddie’s eyes widened, and then slowly his face turned red. “Oh bugger,” he whispered. “I borrowed it before she went away. I have it here. I thought it might give me some inspiration. For my book, you know? You’ll think I was going to steal it. You do, don’t you?”

  He was so genuinely mortified by his oversight that Melanie did her best to make the right reassuring sounds. “Perhaps you could give it to me now,” she suggested, after he’d apologized again. “I could take it back with me and—”