Lady Sherry and the Highwayman (21 page)

Lord Grenville smiled. “You exaggerate. The sad truth of the matter is that I am the black sheep of the family.”

Sarah-Louise tapped his arm with her fan. “Whatever you may call yourself, sir, you tell a rousing good tale! Come let me make you known to Lady Sherris Childe, who will be very interested. I warn you, be careful not to be
too
interesting or you may find that she has put you in a book.”

He limped forward and bent over Sherry’s hand as Sarah-Louise performed the formal introductions. “Lady Sherry,” he murmured, “I am charmed. I have long been a great fan of your books.”

The wretch! How dare he appear so brazenly in the box and speak to her, play off his games in front of a magistrate? “I did not know,” Sherry responded tartly, “that my little stories had such a wide readership that you might find them in even, er, exotic climes!”

He released her hand. “Oh, yes. I daresay you would be surprised at the diversity of your readership. I am especially looking forward to your current novel, which I hear concerns a highwayman.”

A highwayman! Now he was so bold as to walk up to her and speak of highwaymen! Andrew interrupted with a question, saving Sherry from having to make a reply. As unobtrusively as possible, she stared at Lord Grenville—also known as Captain Toby and Micah Greene.

Her thoughts were in a whirl. Sherry was relieved beyond measure to see Micah hale and unfettered by the shackles of the law, and at the same time she wished to box his ears. What did he mean, parading himself like this for all the world to see? Didn’t he realize that he might be recognized? But perhaps in his very boldness lay safety. Who would expect a highwayman to pose as a peer of the realm?

Intermission ended then, and Lord Grenville returned to Lady Cecilia’s box, and the members of Lord Viccars’s party turned their attention to the stage in anticipation of enjoying the performance. Mr. Kean did not disappoint. He paced and declaimed; his harsh voice cracked like thunder, turned gentle as a kitten’s purr. His eyes were fierce, frightful, melting—it was said that small, ugly Mr. Kean could express as much in a few moments as most actors could in a night.

The audience responded with almost hysterical enthusiasm. Sarah-Louise clapped her hands and shouted as enthusiastically as if she’d been sitting with her servants in the gallery. Even Lavinia forgot about her queasiness and Andrew about his
petite amie,
and Sir Christopher conceded that this evening’s entertainment had been a bit of all right.

Only Lady Sherry was lukewarm in her response, but this was not in response to any histrionic lack in the great Mr. Kean. Sherry’s thoughts were still of Micah, and her attention was more for him than for the actors on the stage. What a rogue he was! No doubt he would lay claim to a fair portion of the Grenville fortune and then disappear. He could not expect to carry off the imposture indefinitely. Yes, and if Micah was here, looking for all the world like the peer of the realm to whose inheritance he’d laid claim, then who languished in Newgate in his place?

Chapter Twenty-one

Lady Sherry retired to her book room early the next morn, inspired by these recent developments not to put pen to paper on behalf of Ophelia and Captain Blood but to drop her chin into her hands and stare gloomily into space. In this pursuit she was interrupted by Daffodil, who entered without so much as a knock. For this rudeness she may be forgiven: Daffodil’s attention and energy were entirely taken up in trying to exercise some degree of control over a large, exuberant, and very dirty hound.

“Mercy!” cried Sherry, as she tried to fend off the beast, which seemed determined to knock her off her chair. “Wherever did he come from?”

“Devil if I know.” In an effort to dissuade the dog from crawling into Lady Sherry’s lap, Daffodil grasped his plumed tail and yanked. “He turned up in the garden this morning. What’s more, milady, Ned did not!”

“Yes, and I’m glad to see you, too!” Sherry tried, not entirely successfully, to fend off Prinny’s great damp tongue. What advice had Micah given her about controlling him? That it all depended on the tone of voice? Sherry made her own voice very stern. “Oh, do get down, you wretched beast!” To her surprise, the dog left off his demonstration of affection, and strolled across the room to collapse upon the settee.

Sherry then returned her attention to her abigail. “Why should Ned have been in the garden? He’s not a gardener; he’s a groom.”

“I know what Neddy is!” Daffodil retorted irritably. “None better, even though I would rather not. He should have been in the garden because he always
is
in the garden at that time of day.”

Lady Sherry contemplated her abigail’s pink cheeks. “I see. The pair of you enjoy a little stroll together around the garden before embarking upon the arduous duties of the day.”

“Something like that, milady.” Daffodil saw no need to explain that those gentle strolls were generally not strolls at all and took place in the gardener’s shed. “But he wasn’t there today, nor is he anywhere else to be found. No one’s seen hide nor hair of him since yesterday. You’d given him the evening off, and he set out for that boozing ken he’s partial to and never did come back.”

“You’re certain?” asked Sherry. Daffodil vigorously nodded her head. Her source of information was unimpeachable, she claimed.

“Something’s happened to him!” she added. “I know it. Neddy was mighty wishful of getting a hold of that money. He wouldn’t play least-in-sight when he knew there was a chance of him getting paid.”

Lady Sherry had to agree with her abigail’s assessment of the situation. “It’s early yet. Perhaps he drank more than was wise and is sleeping off a sore head. He may yet turn up. We’ll wait awhile and see.”

Daffodil nodded again, this time less vigorously. “And if he don’t turn up, milady?”

Sherry sighed. “Then I suppose we’ll have to tell Christopher.’’

Satisfied, Daffodil left the room and went in search of consolation from her unimpeachable source of information, namely the recently hired footman with the shapely calves. Lady Sherry contemplated Prinny, who was dozing peacefully on the couch. What a strange coincidence that Prinny should appear in one moment and Ned disappear in the next, as if one had turned into the other as in some fairy tale. This was not a fairy tale, of course, and the exchange—however desirable from Sherry’s point of view—could not have been so pat.

Where could Ned have gotten to? Sherry could not think that his disappearance boded well. She wondered if a diabolic spirit might be at work against her. The thought of diabolic spirits recalled her current manuscript. In search of distraction from her unhappy thoughts, Sherry reached for paper and pen.

Some time passed. The book room was silent save for the sound of Prinny’s snores and the scratching of Sherry’s pen. Then a tap sounded at the door. Definitely a diabolic spirit was at work, or else Sherry would not have been interrupted at a moment when she was at last at charity with her manuscript.

“Come in!” she called, assuming that it was Aunt Tulliver who interrupted. “You may help me to decide whether I wish to dispatch Barnabas by way of a particularly nasty poison or whether I prefer to bludgeon him to death with a blunt instrument.”

Tully made no comment.  Sherry set down her pen. “Have you brought word of Ned?” she asked as she turned toward the door. Not Aunt Tulliver stood there, or Daffodil, but Micah. He was smiling. “Oh!” cried Lady Sherry, and then flung herself away from the table and into his arms, knocking over her chair in her haste. “You terrible, terrible wretch! To leave us like that! I feared that you’d been captured or were dead!”

Micah responded to this outburst in a most appropriate manner. So very close did he hold her that Sherry could hear his heart beating against her breast. Then he bent his head and captured her lips with his.

The embrace was every bit as wonderful as Sherry remembered it, and perhaps even more. When Micah would have released her, she put her arms around his shoulders and drew his face down to her again.

Prinny regarded these proceedings through one half-opened eye. He had been wakened from his nap by the sound of Lady Sherry’s chair crashing to the floor. It was very bad of his friends to wake him, but he knew how exciting these reunions could be.

Prinny decided he should add his own little bit of welcome. He lumbered down from the settee and, tail awag, padded across the floor. When his friends continued to ignore him, he inserted his head between them and emitted a reproachful
whuff.

Sherry was thus recalled to the present by a damp, cold canine nose. “I suppose we are to thank you for bringing Prinny back. Or perhaps for taking him in the first place. Why did you? I cannot imagine that he facilitated your escape.”

“Facilitated? Hardly.” Micah brushed a stray curl off her cheek. “It has been most interesting, lying low in London accompanied by a great brute of a hound.”

Sherry smiled at the vision thus conjured. “I thought perhaps I had imagined you last night. That perhaps you weren’t truly there at the theater. That perhaps there was a slight resemblance, which I magnified in my mind—in short, that I had turned lunatic! But it is you who are lunatic. How dare you walk in here so boldly? Don’t you realize what a risk you run? What if you are caught? I believe that one can be hanged for impersonating a peer. Not that it will signify to you, since you have already been sentenced to that end. Apropos of which, just who
is
that man in Newgate?”

Micah left off scratching Prinny’s ears, limped to the bookshelves, and removed the decanter. “Ah! So you went to visit me,” he said.

Sherry accepted a glass of port. Never had she felt so great a need for a restorative. “Tully went to see you,” she retorted. Reason had asserted itself over emotion now, and Sherry didn’t mention her own part in that fruitless expedition. “What are you calling yourself now? What am I to call you? Lord Grenville or Captain Toby?”

He moved toward the library table, glanced at the manuscript strewn there. “Micah will do. You’ve been working on your book.”

Sherry watched him. How she had worried about this man. Now she was made very cross to see him sound in body, if not in mind. She supposed gloomily that she might have trusted herself to fall in love with a madman. “Micah, what are you up to? When you were introduced to me as Grenville, I was so startled I almost gave you away.”

Micah’s attention was on the manuscript. “You would not do that.’’

How sure he was of her. Sherry conceded that he had reason. She could hardly kiss a man as she had this one and then turn him over to be hanged. “Perhaps not, but others might. Surely this Grenville person must be known to someone.”

“I shouldn’t think so. He’s been out of the country.” Micah gestured toward the manuscript. “If you want my advice—”

“I don’t!” retorted Sherry. What good to her was the advice of a man of obscure origins and doubtful morals, who had abandoned a career on the high toby to embark upon an imposture that would allow him to squander yet another fortune, and this one not his own? “What have you done with Ned?”

“Ned?” Micah raised his brows. “Who is Ned?”

“You really don’t know, do you?” Sherry sank down onto a chair. “Ned is my groom, and now he’s disappeared. I can almost be grateful for it, since I had to borrow five hundred pounds from— Never mind that now! The wretch knew that we had hidden you here and demanded to be paid off.’’

Micah was frowning now. “You should have told me of this. Now this groom has disappeared? With five hundred pounds?”

“No. That is one consolation, at least.” Sherry wondered what Andrew would say if she returned his money and claimed to have been mistaken about her gambling debt. Probably think that
she
was a lunatic. “That’s what makes it so very strange. Ned knew I was to have the money from—um, last night, but he hasn’t shown up to claim his prize. One cannot help but fear foul play.”

Micah studied his port. “One might say that he deserved to meet with foul play.”

“One might!” snapped Lady Sherry. “I, however, am neither an impostor nor a thief, and though I would be perfectly happy to never set eyes on Ned again, I wouldn’t wish him a penny of the worst of any ill wishes on my part. Oh, let us not quarrel! I do not mean to rip up at you, but all this has been a trifle much to bear.”

If Micah was angered by Lady Sherry’s unflattering assessment of his character, no sign of it appeared on his swarthy face. “No wonder you’re looking burnt to the socket,” he said. “You should have told me the man was blackmailing you. I would have gotten you the money to buy him off. It seems a fair enough exchange for the safety of my neck.”

And where would Micah have gotten the money? From whom would he have stolen it? More than a table’s width separated them, Sherry realized. They stood on opposite sides of the law. True, her own recent actions had not been entirely aboveboard, but those minor transgressions had been fraught with guilt, an emotion to which Micah would be alien.

“You got the money from Viccars. He’s not the man for you, you know.” Micah tapped Sherry’s manuscript. “He doesn’t have an ounce of adventure in his soul.”

Sherry suspected that this assessment of her fiancé was uncomfortably close to the mark. Micah was a shrewd judge of character. Such astuteness must be a great asset to him in his adventurer’s career. “I suspect I’ve enough adventure in my soul to do for both of us,” she said dryly.

“My love.” Micah moved around the table and caught her by the wrist. “You don’t know what adventure is. You would like to, I think, but you’re afraid, and so you write your books. If you marry Viccars, you will continue to long for adventure. You will not mention your longing to him, for fear he would be shocked—and you’re correct; he
would
be shocked—and he will not supply it to you, and you will both be unhappy, which will be very sad.”

Sherry thought this entire encounter was very sad. “You seem to know a great deal about Lord Viccars. Yet you have barely met.”

“I’ve known a hundred like Viccars.” Micah stroked his thumb against her wrist. “They are no more adventurous even when they travel abroad.”