Kat, Incorrigible (26 page)

Oh, Lord.

I turned around, taking a deep breath for courage.

In the golden light of the hall, the highwayman looked different. Even bigger, if possible, with bulkier, heavier shoulders than I’d imagined in the darkness. His broad, weathered face looked older than I’d expected too—he must have been at least as old as Stepmama. And I mean Stepmama’s true age, not the age she claimed to be.

But he didn’t look any less dangerous out of the forest, especially as he swung around to face me, his pale green eyes wide and wild in the golden light. “I asked you a question,” he growled.
“What have you done?”

“Nothing bad,” I said. His hands were hidden underneath his threadbare black greatcoat; I kept my eyes on where they ought to be, searching for the telltale shape of his pistol underneath the cloth. “I couldn’t just stand there and let you shoot me, could I?”

He started toward me. He walked like I imagined a prizefighter might walk, or a tiger out in the jungles of Asia: with a predatory, rolling stride that made goose bumps rise on the back of my neck. “I’m the one asking the questions, Miss Katherine,” he said. “Not you. And I’d strongly suggest you answer me.”

I backed away from him. My thin evening slippers
whispered against the golden floor. Thank goodness the hall was so big; at least he couldn’t back me against a wall. I was smaller and lighter than him. Maybe I could outrun him … but I didn’t want to test it.

I smiled at him as innocently and sweetly as I could. “Don’t be angry,” I said. “We can go back any time you want, I promise. All you have to do is—”

“Don’t you tell me what I have to do!”

He leaped for me, and I bolted. I was halfway across the hall before it hit me.

“Your pistol’s empty!” I panted. I stopped, balancing on my toes. He was still ten feet away, closing in fast. I put out my hands in a
wait
gesture. His eyes narrowed, and he slowed but didn’t stop. “I heard you fire the shot.”

“So?” he said. “I don’t need a pistol. Not against a slip of a girl like you.”

“I brought you all the way here by magic,” I said. I jerked my chin up to look as haughty as I could. “That means I’m a witch. A very powerful witch,” I added. “So what do you think you can possibly do against me without a pistol?”

He snorted. “If I’m no danger to you, lass, then why were you running?”

“Ummm …” I blinked.

“Thought as much,” he said.

“Did you indeed?” another voice said mildly.

We both spun around to face the new arrival. Mr. Gregson polished his spectacles as he smiled at us. “I rather
thought you might arrive here in the end, Katherine,” he said. “But I must confess to being rather curious: Where did you find this gentleman? A second highwayman, I presume?”

“Ah …,” I began.

“Who the devil are you?” the highwayman said. His huge fists clenched menacingly. The sight made me wince, but Mr. Gregson didn’t seem to notice.

“So,” he said to me, “I believe this leaves us with two questions to resolve. What have you done with Sir Neville’s foolish younger brother, and what exactly do you intend to do now?”

“Um,” I said. I looked from one to the other of the two men. “That is to say …”

“I don’t know what the devil you two are on about,” the highwayman began, “but—”

“I can, of course, take care of this little matter for you,” Mr. Gregson told me, “but only if I know that we are both on the same page, so to speak. If you asked me, as your new tutor, to step in and help you—”

“I think not!” I said.

“Are you threatening me?” the highwayman said to Mr. Gregson. “You puny little—”

“I hope you’re aware that time passes differently here than in the more ordinary world,” Mr. Gregson said to me. “So while you may think you have plenty of time before your followers arrive at Grantham Abbey, you might be surprised to learn—”

“Oh, Lord!” I said. When they found Mr. Collingwood missing …

“Precisely,” Mr. Gregson said. He put his spectacles neatly into place and smiled indulgently at me. “It has been quite an amusing little struggle, Katherine, but I think it’s finally time to accept the truth, don’t you? All you need to do is agree—”

“Never,” I said. “I’ll take care of this myself.”

He blinked. “And how, might I ask—”

“Like this,” I said, and reached for that still point inside me, the point I’d found by accident the first time I ever had to escape from the Golden Hall.

The last sight I had was of Mr. Gregson’s shaking head. The expression on his face made my teeth grind together.

I was not running away, no matter what he might think. I would take care of the highwayman later. But first I had to save Mr. Collingwood and my sister’s future happiness.

I prepared to land in the dark forest.

Instead I hit a hard stone floor, arms first.

“Miss Katherine!” Mr. Collingwood’s voice came out between a whisper and a squeak behind me. “Where did you come from?”

“Magic,” I said. My voice came out as a groan. My elbows throbbed with pain. I pulled myself up carefully, massaging them and peering through the smothering darkness. The air smelled stuffy and confined. I reached out and felt cool stone walls on either side, barely three feet apart. “Where are we?”

“Inside the manor,” he said. “But you—where—how—?”

“I know,” I said. “I disappeared. But I’m back now. You must have brought my mirror with you.”

He held it out to me, glimmering in the darkness. “I picked it up from the ground when you vanished. But Miss Katherine, you—look here, it isn’t possible, but I actually saw you—”

“I’m fine now,” I said, as I took the mirror. “I’ll explain it all later. But this can’t be the manor. Unless—” A horrible thought struck me. “You haven’t been thrown into the dungeon, have you? Is there a dungeon in Grantham Abbey?”

“I—I don’t know,” Mr. Collingwood said. “But no, I haven’t been. We’re in the servants’ corridor, behind the walls of the third floor. Hiding. I haven’t been taken prisoner. Not yet.”

“Then you won’t be,” I said, and brushed the dust from my white evening dress with a few brisk strokes. “I’m here now. I’ll take care of everything.”

“Er …” I couldn’t see his face, but his voice positively dripped with doubt.

I sighed. “You were so brave when you were wearing the highwayman’s mask. Don’t you remember?”

“Please don’t mention that,” Mr. Collingwood said. “I don’t know what came over me. Your sister was most shocked by my behavior. If you had heard what she said to me when she realized who I was—”

“Oh, I can imagine,” I said. “But don’t worry about that. She’s not here now, so just pretend you’ve put the mask back on, and—”

“But that’s exactly the problem!” Mr. Collingwood said. “She is here now. They’re all here now!”

“So? All you need to do is take off your cloak and greet them as if nothing was amiss, and no one will—”

“You don’t understand,” Mr. Collingwood said. “I was coming up through the back staircase to make my way back into my room undetected and pretend I’d been here all along. When I opened the door, I saw Neville coming out of my room, with two other gentlemen behind him, looking grim. And Neville said”—Mr. Collingwood’s voice deepened into his brother’s unmistakable growl—“‘We’ll have him when he finally slinks back here to hide.’”

“Oh,” I said. That did sound bad. I started to frown, but it hurt my aching head too much, so I stopped. “I don’t understand. How did they get here so quickly? Even after we were held up, we should have been faster—”

“Miss Katherine, it has been two full hours since we were held up,” Mr. Collingwood said. “I didn’t arrive at Grantham Abbey until just twenty minutes ago.”

“What on earth were you doing, to take so long?”

“Searching for you, of course!” he shouted, straight into my ears.

“Ouch!” I said, and stepped away.

“Forgive me,” said Mr. Collingwood more quietly. “I
should not have spoken so to you. But it was not a pleasant experience. The idea of telling Miss Stephenson that I’d lost you—”

“I wasn’t lost,” I said. “I left. You didn’t have to worry about me.”

“You vanished before my eyes with a highwayman who meant to murder you.”

“Oh, well, I took care of him,” I said, and tried not to think about where the highwayman was right now. At least he couldn’t do any damage in an empty hall without any weapons, no matter how angry he might be. I couldn’t imagine that Mr. Gregson would let him. Of course, Mr. Gregson was probably on his way here himself to give me a piece of his mind. So all in all, it was best not to think about him, either.

I sighed. “Do you think Sir Neville will be forgiving, since you are his brother?”

“You must be joking,” Mr. Collingwood said.

“Why? Of course, I know brothers can be annoying from time to time,” I said, in a true masterpiece of ladylike understatement. I thought of Charles’s gambling debts, and my teeth ground together. I forced them apart. “But still, family is family. He might be as angry as anything, but he can hardly call for his own brother to be hanged.”

“I think nothing would give him greater pleasure,” Mr. Collingwood said.

“But—”

“Miss Katherine, did you not think it was odd that he didn’t recognize me in my disguise? That my own brother could not recognize my voice behind the mask?”

“Well …” I shrugged in the darkness. “
I
recognized you.”

“Quite,” said Mr. Collingwood. “Because you had—forgive me—paid some attention to me in the first two days of our acquaintance.”

“I had to,” I said. “You were mooning over Elissa, and she was mooning back. I couldn’t ignore you after that.”

“Neville can,” Mr. Collingwood said. “He’s spent his entire life trying to pretend I don’t exist. He was fifteen years old when I was born, and our mother died only four weeks later. I always thought he blamed me for her death, but lately, I’ve wondered if it was more than that. And Sarah said—”

“Who?”

“Sarah,” Mr. Collingwood said. “Neville’s wife.” He paused, and coughed uncomfortably. “Neville’s late wife, that is. Neville said she had to be kept secluded in the house because of the scandals she would have created if he allowed her out in Society, but if you had known her sweetness and goodness, and then seen the monstrous way he treated her—”

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard about all that,” I said. “But what did she say?”

Mr. Collingwood lowered his voice. “Miss Katherine,
what I’m about to tell you is the most horrifying of rumors, and if it is untrue, then merely mentioning it is a terrible slander of my brother’s good name.”

“Never mind that,” I said. “Slander away. What did she say?”

Mr. Collingwood’s whisper was so soft I had to strain to hear it. “Sarah said that she had come across my mother’s will, hidden in Neville’s own dressing gown, while he slept. She said he carried it with him everywhere, because he was so afraid of the servants coming across it in any other hiding place.”

“Your mother’s will?” I repeated. “But I thought—Elissa told me the whole reason you were penniless was—”

“Miss Katherine, as far as I or anyone else is aware, our mother did not leave any will at all!” Mr. Collingwood hissed. “Neville’s estate was inherited from our father. But the money to run it all came from our mother’s dowry, which my grandfather ordered in such a radical manner that she had a right to will nearly all of it away as she chose. Because no one ever found a will, everything went to Neville.”

“Oh,” I said. “
Oh
. But Sarah said … ?”

“Sarah said she saw the will,” Mr. Collingwood said. His voice was rising now in agitation. “She said it was properly witnessed and signed, and it left me half of my mother’s funds. That would be a fortune! The money she left—all of which passed automatically to Neville—makes him one of the wealthiest men in the country. Even half
of such an amount would be more than most men ever dream of.”

“But …” I gripped the mirror hard in my hand, trying to think clearly. “That makes no sense! If such a will existed, and Sir Neville found it—well, yes, I can see why he would have kept it secret from everyone else. But why wouldn’t he have destroyed it? Carrying it around everywhere might be safer than hiding it in the house for someone else to find, but it would be far, far safer to have burned it.”

“Perhaps he felt guilty,” Mr. Collingwood offered. “Perhaps it still burns at his conscience, and he cannot bring himself to—”

“Have you been reading Elissa’s gothic novels?” I said. “Because that doesn’t sound like Sir Neville to me.”

Mr. Collingwood’s sigh ruffled my hair. “No,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like Neville to me, either.”

There was a glum silence.

“It could still be true,” I said. “Perhaps we just don’t know the whole story. There could be some reason—”

“No,” said Mr. Collingwood. “No, you were right to rebuke me. It is a romantic, unlikely tale. It’s only …” He paused. “Neville never cared for me, never found me anything but an irritation and an inconvenience to him. I spent my childhood with tutors and then at school, rarely seeing my own brother, and knowing that I always disappointed him. Since I came of age, he’s kept me on a meager allowance—the merest pittance—and
acted as though he were granting me the highest of favors. He only summons me to accompany him for large house parties such as this one so he can maintain the appearance of family loyalty without ever having to talk to me. I suppose … I suppose I wanted to believe it was for some reason that would reflect badly on him, and not on me, for being such an unlikable brother.”