The Highwayman (12 page)

Farah couldn't fathom it, either, but still hadn't recovered her voice well enough to say so.

“We were inseparable after that, Dougan and I. We formed a band of boys who worked the railways, just the four of us at first, protecting each other when we could from the older men and sometimes the guards. Teaching each other how to survive in such a place. For seven years, we gathered favors, debts, allies, and a few enemies among the boys and men who came and left Newgate Prison. We were leaders among them, young and strong, feared and respected. They came to know Dougan and me as ‘the Blackheart Brothers,' as we both had black hair, dark eyes, and sharp fists.”

Now that Farah looked at him,
really
looked at him, she attempted to superimpose her memory of Dougan's boyish features on the sculpted, cruel face of the man in front of her. Couldn't be done. Though the hair was black, and the one eye was dark, the resemblance ended there. Swallowing, she forced her frozen tongue to form words. “How do I know you're not deceiving me?”

“You don't,” he answered simply. “Nor does it matter, because here's where all this information becomes relevant to you.”

“I fail to see how.”

“Let me ask you something,” Blackwell said intently. “How do you believe Dougan Mackenzie died?”

A knot of dread formed in her stomach. “I was told it was consumption that took him, that he fell ill and never recovered.”

“And who told you that?”

“The reception guard at Newgate,” she answered honestly. “The day it happened.”

Blackwell became very still, the hand on his glass turning white. “What were
you
doing at Newgate Prison ten years ago on the day Dougan Mackenzie died?” he demanded, emotion coloring his voice for the first time since they'd met.

“That's none of your business.”

“You
will
tell me, Farah, if I have to force it out of you,” he said through clenched teeth.

She blanched at his forceful use of her first name, but stubbornly pressed her lips together.

“Damn it,
why
would you go there?” he roared, surging to his feet and hurling his crystal glass into the fireplace. Farah flinched as it exploded against the stones.

He stalked to her chair, and to her everlasting shame, Farah cringed away from him in fear. He didn't touch her, though, just towered over her, panting and raging. “Why would you set foot in that wretched place on that day of all days?”

“I—I…” She could barely form a thought, let alone words.

“Answer me!” he bellowed in a voice that she swore rattled the windows.

Farah couldn't look at him anymore. Couldn't see the wrath piercing at her with an archer's precision. Couldn't face his lies, or more petrifying, his truths. “It wasn't just that day. I went to Newgate
every
night for seven years and left Dougan cheese and bread.”

“No.”
He retreated a step, staggered was more like it, giving her the moment she needed to gather her courage.

Farah stood, her head barely reaching his cravat so she had to crane her neck to look up at him. “You see, Mr. Blackwell, your kind are not the only ones who keep their promises. I, too, made a promise years ago, that I'd never let Dougan Mackenzie go hungry, and I kept that promise up until the day he … the day … he…” Her composure finally broke and she retreated to stand in front of the desk, swallowing frantic gulps of emotion.

He allowed it, gathering his own armor to him in front of her eyes in the form of cavalier tranquility. “He never knew that extra food was from you. We thought the other prisoners' families left it as offerings, or some kind of payment for our continued favors or good graces.”

“But I wrote him letters every week and delivered them with the food,” she protested.

“He never received them.”

That, alone, was enough to break her heart. Farah's shoulders lost all their ability to keep her head up, and she slumped over. “I thought I'd at least give him a little bit of hope. That he would know that, even locked away, he wasn't alone in the world.” She didn't look at him but for a glance from beneath her lashes. He still stood where he had before, with more information she didn't want, but had to discover, locked behind his cruel lips.

“Tell me how he died,” she ordered softly. “If not by illness, then by what means?”

“He was murdered.” With those three cold words, Blackwell pierced her heart.

“How?” she whispered.

“Beaten to death in the middle of the night by three prison guards.”

Farah clamped a hand over her mouth as the tartlets churned in her stomach and crawled up her throat with an acid burn. She swallowed, then again, grateful the food couldn't pass the lump of tears in her throat to end up retched all over the study's expensive carpets.

“Why?” she gasped.

“That is the eternal question, isn't it?”

Farah was too shocked, too disconsolate to be angry at the lack of emotion in his voice. She couldn't be sure how long she stood staring at the hem of her lovely dress, one she'd had on for much too long that now felt tight and confining and bit into her skin. She wanted to be rid of it. To be rid of this room, of the past, of everything. She wanted to be back in her office, where she ought to be, shuffling paperwork and making ordered sense out of chaos. Pretending that she had no time for emotion, for grief, for guilt, only responsibility and an endless list of things to do to keep the dissonance of her thoughts occupied.

She didn't hear Blackwell approach until he was standing beside her.

“Why are you telling me this now?” Her question came out more of an accusation.

He submitted her to another one of his protracted silences before finally answering. “Because I've owed Dougan Mackenzie a debt, one it has taken me ten years of careful execution to repay. When I saw you in the strong room, when I realized who you were, I thought, who better to share his revenge with than you? You can help me wreak vengeance on everyone who tore your lives apart all those years ago.”

Farah stared at him, searching for a lie on his pitiless face. Finding none, and still doubting her instincts. Dorian Blackwell was a thief, a liar, and a criminal. Could she believe him? Was he, even now, playing some kind of terrible, merciless game?

“Take my hand, look me in the eye, and
promise
me you're not lying to me.” It came out more of a plea than a command. Morley had told her once that one could detect a lie by the tension in a man's hand, the dilation of his pupils, and the direction of his gaze. Farah was not skilled in the practice, but she wanted to try.

Blackwell regarded her offered hand as though she presented him a slug or a spider. “No,” he said shortly.

“Then you
are
lying,” she insisted.

“No.”

“Prove it,” Farah challenged. “Why would you deny this innocuous request if you have nothing to hide?” She thrust her hand farther toward him, and he barely concealed a flinch.

“I have plenty to hide, but in this, you can be assured I am in earnest.”

“I could never trust someone who couldn't even offer a handshake upon his honor.”

Blackwell considered her outstretched hand for a disturbingly long time. “I'm afraid I won't be able to oblige you.”

She let her hand drop. “I can't say I'm surprised.” So had he been lying about Dougan's death? About all of it? What should she believe?

After a time, he seemed to come to a decision. “I will, however, give you a gesture of good faith. I will give you information about myself that few beyond the two of us have ever or will ever know.”

Farah found the gesture odd, but she stood silently, waiting for him to continue.

“The years I spent in prison, shall we say … disinclined me toward any contact with human flesh. That is why I do not shake your hand.” He presented this information as though informing her of the weather but, for the first time, his eye did not meet hers. “I also admit that I'm not above lying to you to get what I want; however, in this I'm certain our purposes are aligned, and therefore I have no need to manipulate you. I think you want those who have harmed Dougan, and you, to pay for their crimes.”

“Revenge.” She tested the word, an ideal she'd always abhorred and yearned for at the same time. “And you consider yourself as what, some sort of Count of Monte Cristo?”

He gave a nonchalant shrug. “Not particularly, though the book is a favorite of mine.”

Farah frowned. “I thought you said you couldn't read.”

That Dorian Blackwell could laugh at a time like this astounded her. But he did. The sound so devoid of true mirth, it caused goose pimples to rise on her skin and her nipples to tighten painfully. It was a dark sound, like the rest of him, and it washed over her with chilling totality. “I don't see what's so funny, it was only a question.”

“You must think me a fool,” he said.

“I think you're a lot of things.”

He stepped closer. A moth's wing wouldn't have survived in the space between them, and still he never touched her, though she could feel the sensation of him on every inch of her skin.

“I'll tell you this,” he began darkly, his eye swirling with all the intensity of last night's storm. “There are immense differences between the Count of Monte Cristo and the Blackheart of Ben More. Edmond Dantes was given his treasure. He never had to stoop to the things I did in order to take it. In prison, he was only whipped on his anniversary. He was isolated in his own cell, which Alexandre Dumas never imagined would be preferable to what
we
had to endure. He was never stabbed, raped, publicly flogged, humiliated, beaten within an inch of his life, or taken ill and left for dead.”

With every word, Farah's eyes widened and she again found herself cringing back, but he didn't allow her to retreat, bending until his compelling face was mere inches from hers. “And that is just what the gaolers did to me.”

She'd been able to control her tears until that moment, but no longer. They spilled over her lashes and washed down her cheeks, causing her breath to tremble in her chest and rattle through her lips. To no longer be able to abide the comfort of human contact. How did he stand it? No wonder he was so very remote. How could warmth touch your heart when it wasn't even allowed near your skin?

It could have been regret that softened his features, but it was still impossible for her to tell. “You're thinking of Mackenzie,” he murmured.

Ashamed that she'd been thinking of Blackwell and not her Dougan, Farah nodded, not trusting herself to make a sound.

For the second time since they'd met, he raised his hand to her face, only to pull it back again. “Is there no pity in your heart for me?”

Farah turned from him then, dashing madly at her cheeks. There was, of course, but she didn't dare show it to him. “Do you deserve my pity?” she asked, her voice thick with her tears.

“Probably not,” he answered honestly. “But the boy I once was might have.”

The next tear that fell was for him, though she'd die before letting him know it. “Dougan. He was—he was small for his age. So skinny and starving. It would have been easy for anyone to … to prey upon him.”

“It was,” Dorian confirmed. “But he learned quickly.”

The sobs she'd been fighting so valiantly began to burst into tiny explosions in her chest. They cut off her breath unless she let them free in a flood of hot tears and desperate gasps.

“His death was years ago.” Dorian's voice softened, and she dare not turn to him. “A decade at least. The pain cannot be so fresh as all that.”

She agreed. She'd thought that with time, the stinging grief and the crushing guilt would fade, but it didn't. It was as though Dougan Mackenzie refused to die, and because of it, she was doomed to relive the blessings and horrors of their time together again and again. “You don't understand,” she wailed. “It was
my
fault. My fault all of this befell him. Didn't he tell you why he was incarcerated in the first place?”

“He killed a priest.”

“For me!” She whirled around, shocked at how close he still stood. “He killed that priest for
me.
He was subjected to all the suffering and indignities you just described and more because he was only trying to protect me. You don't understand how much I regret that every day of my life! I think about it all the time. I hate myself for it!”

“He never blamed you.” For the first time since she'd met him, Dorian seemed to be at a loss. Unsure, maybe, of how to handle a distraught woman. But Farah didn't care, she was purging something so terrible in front of someone who may be an enemy, or might prove an ally.

“You can't know that!” she insisted. “It was just a few kisses from the priest, a horrid touch or two. If I'd never gone to Dougan that night. If I'd only submitted to a small ignominy … perhaps it would have saved his life. Perhaps we'd still be … together.”

“Never.”
Blackwell's features hardened again, and he looked as though he wanted to shake her. “Dougan would rather have submitted to his thousand tortures than to have you submit to one. He wouldn't have survived your suffering. He loves you that much.”

“Loved,” she sobbed. “
Loved
me, and because of it, he
didn't
survive! His love for me got him killed.” A smothering nausea overtook her, images of the boy she loved suffering in the graphic ways Blackwell described assaulted her imagination until she wanted to crawl out of her own skin to escape them. She needed to escape this room, to flee the darkness and the man who was shrouded by it. “Forgive me,” she gasped. “I—I must … go.” Her vision blurred by tears, she lurched in the direction of the doors, relieved that he made no move to stop her. Light flared through the windows of the grand entry and blinded her as she was so accustomed to the shadows. She caught the scent of muffins or toast wafting from the hulking figure silently shocked by the sudden opening of the study door.