Lady Sherry and the Highwayman (16 page)

“Snooping,” said Sherry bitterly. “Prying. Meddling. What’s this about calling in Bow Street? Why should Christopher become so upset? Good gracious, it’s the middle of the night!”

So it was, and Daffodil shared her mistress’s misgivings. She, too, glanced surreptitiously around the book room. “Oh, milady, there’s been a robbery! The front door was found unlocked and Barclay’s keys have been nicked right off their hook!”

“A robbery?” Sherry felt weak with relief. Micah had not fled the book room on Lavinia’s invasion and consequently been caught. Then she and Daffodil exchanged glances, both stricken by the terrible suspicion that the highwayman whom they had sheltered and protected had chosen to repay them in this cruel way.

“A robbery?” Lavinia had taken advantage of her companions’ abstraction to hide Barclay’s keys in the bodice of her nightgown. But how was she to explain to Sir Christopher her presence in his sister’s book room?

There was one sure way to win his sympathy. “A robbery!” Lavinia cried again, and gracefully swooned.

Chapter Sixteen

As matters evolved, Sir Christopher did not call in Bow Street, to the great relief of several members of his household, because it seemed a trifle absurd to report a robbery when nothing seemed to be missing from the house. For this queer circumstance, Lady Childe provided an explanation: she had been drawn from her bed by noises heard in the night, had gone to investigate and in so doing had obviously frightened away the thief. She was, in short, a heroine, as Sir Christopher pointed out.

This ramification had not occurred to Lavinia, but she took full advantage of her heroic status to retire to her bedchamber, prostrated by excitement, with her worried and admiring spouse attached firmly by her side. Having secured this captive audience, Lavinia availed herself of the opportunity to complain—in the most delicate manner—about the unfortunate repercussions of Sherry’s sojourn in this house. Not that Sherris could be faulted for it, dear sweet creature that she was. Indeed, if any fault could be laid at Sherry’s door, it was that her heart was perhaps a teeny bit too generous, too large. Not that Lavinia would ever utter the horrid words “I told you so,” but she
had
felt that it might not be entirely prudent to introduce Daffodil into the household. Perhaps the girl did have a flair for fashion, a passion for pretty clothes; she also had an unfortunate history and background and moral character. Though others might blithely assume that the chit had reformed, Lavinia was not so gullible, and frequently reassured herself that her jewels were intact, as well as the family plate. As for this current contretemps, Lavinia wasn’t certain that Daffodil wasn’t somehow involved, might even have unlocked the front door so that some of her vulgar low-bred friends might sneak into the house, heaven only knew for what purpose, perhaps to murder them all in their beds!

Clever as this ploy was, it fell on deaf ears. Sir Christopher had been stricken all aheap by his darling wife’s unsuspected bravery, and was not at all surprised that reaction should now have set in and she become semi-hysterical as a result. “There, there!” he said, and patted her. “Least said, soonest mended, after all!”

Lavinia, quite naturally, was not appreciative of this attitude. She flung herself away from her spouse across the bed, at which point Barclay’s key ring fell out of her nightgown and onto the rug. Sir Christopher bent and picked it up. “By Jove! Barclay’s keys! How the devil did they get here?” he said.

If ever Lavinia thought quickly, she did so then. A notion brilliant in its simplicity struck her. “Prinny!” she gasped.

“Prinny?” Sir Christopher looked with concern at his wife, who had apparently been more overset by her adventure than he’d previously realized. First she went into raptures about that dastardly highwayman, and now she seemed to fancy the Prince Regent as a houseguest.

“Not the Prince Regent!” cried Lavinia, when her doting spouse aired these views. “Prinny. The dog, the hound! You must remember, Christopher; you gave him to me!”

So he had. Now he remembered the great, frolicsome beast that had not turned out to be one of his better-chosen gifts. So it was the wretched dog who’d nicked the butler’s keys and caused all this brouhaha, had ruined a good night’s sleep for the entire household. Who, furthermore, adorned every object with which he came into contact with spittle and dog hair.

Clearly, the beast was in need of chastisement. Sir Christopher set out to track down the culprit, leaving Lavinia to sink back with exhaustion upon her pillows and beg in weakened tones that her maidservant should fetch her vinaigrette.

Lavinia was not left long to catch her breath, however. A thorough search of the house, including Lady Sherry’s room, revealed that Prinny was nowhere to be found. “Maybe he was stolen,” Sir Christopher conjectured at the close of these investigations. “It
was
a valuable beast.”

“Stolen!” Lavinia sat abruptly upright. Previously, when she had claimed to be a heroine, she had thought the whole business to be a hum based on her appropriation of Barclay’s keys. Now that it appeared otherwise—if Prinny had been stolen, then there
had
been an intruder in the house and Lavinia had been in mortal peril—she let out a shriek and swooned.

This swoon was one too many for Sir Christopher to bear with equanimity. Sensibility was an admirable thing in a woman, but his Livvy was carrying it to excess. Never, to his recollection, had he seen anyone so sorely pulled about.

No, and he didn’t care for it. “Get that damned sawbones here on the double!” he snarled at Lavinia’s maidservant, and waved away the burnt feathers she’d brought to wave beneath her mistress’s nose, and patted his wife’s hands clumsily between his own. The maidservant sped to execute her errands and at the same time spread intimation of further disaster through the house.

All within waited with breathless anticipation for the sawbones’ verdict, which when it finally came caused no little sensation: Her ladyship was discovered to be in an interesting condition. There was to be an addition to the household. The doctor made reference to the prospective patter of little feet. By which he did
not
refer to the footsteps of that misbegotten hound, whose salutations he was grateful to be spared this day. So saying, he took his leave.

Finally, the household settled down to a semblance of its usual daily affairs. The servants set about their duties and served up a tardy dinner, which Sir Christopher tenderly spoon-fed to his wife, who was nearly as overwhelmed by the glad tidings as he. In all her wildest longings for a weapon to use against her sister-in-law, Lavinia had thought of nothing so effective as this. Naturally, Christopher would not wish the bearer of his future heir to be upset. Lavinia smiled tenderly at her spouse and uttered a fragile sigh.

Lady Sherry, meanwhile, had withdrawn to her bedchamber with Aunt Tulliver and Daffodil, who had combined efforts to make her presentable for an evening party she had promised to attend. “No, milady, you shan’t cry off!” decreed Daffodil as she applied her foot to the small of her mistress’s back and pulled smartly on the laces of her stays. “You promised that you would go, and so you must, before poor Lord Viccars thinks you’ve changed your mind and wish to break off with him. Anyways, it will do you good to get out of this house and away from Her Highness’s high flights!”

Sherry did not comment. To do so would have been difficult, lying facedown as she was upon her bed while Daffodil attempted to compress her waist into a circumference several inches smaller than nature had intended. Sherry’s thoughts were not happy ones. Her highwayman had gone, leaving behind no trace, nothing to indicate that he had been anything but a figment of her imagination. She would never see him again, never know what had become of him.

Daffodil at last tied the laces to her satisfaction. She helped her mistress to rise from the bed. Daffodil knew by way of the household grapevine—by way of Lavinia’s maidservant, in point of fact—what accusations had been made of her and as a consequence angry enough to spit nails. Perhaps Daffodil was less than perfect and in the past had done certain things that she should not, but she had nobly withstood temptation the entire length of her residence in this house. And this was her reward for such self-sacrifice, Lady Childe saying that she must have left the door open for her friends to come and pillage the house. As if she would! It made Daffodil almost wish she had taken Lavinia’s jewels and hid them somewhere, just for the pleasure of watching Madame High-in-the-Instep go off in a conniption fit.

Aunt Tulliver interrupted Daffodil in the midst of airing these feelings. “What a rumption!” she said. “And all over a hound, because that witless female don’t know there’s nothing else missing from her house. But we know better, don’t we? And
I’d
like to know why our friend left so quick. His leg wasn’t healed yet. And nary a good-bye or a thank-you did he say to any one of us.” She cast a keen look at Lady Sherry. “Or did he?”

Sherry avoided meeting the old woman’s shrewd gaze. She walked to her dressing table. “He said nothing to me.”

“Humph!” Tully hadn’t reached her advanced age without gaining considerable knowledge of the world and what went on in it, especially as concerned those matters that touched the human heart. “I’m not convinced that it wasn’t all a hum. There was something not quite right about him, if you take my meaning, and about him meeting up with you like that.”

“Not quite right about it?” echoed Sherry, puzzled. “What do you mean? It was the most accidental of meetings. No one knew that I was going to be there. The thing could not have been contrived. Anyway, why should it have been?”

Tully left off fussing with Lady Sherry’s party dress, and sank down into a chair. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll tell you this much as should know, ‘tis never wise to bet against a dark horse!”

A brief silence descended upon the bedchamber, no one caring to ask Tully to explain her enigmatic remark. Sherry sat down by her honeysuckle-wreathed mirror, and watched as Daffodil began to arrange her hair. “Say what you wish,” the abigail muttered. “
I
thought he was all the go!”

“And so he was. Prime and bang up to the mark!” retorted Aunt Tulliver from the depths of the chair into which her bulk had settled so thoroughly that anyone glancing at her retained an impression primarily of a pink and green turban and red shoes. “Which is how he set the household by its ear.”

Lady Sherry had been involved in sufficient set-tos for one day—perhaps even for one year; she was not naive enough to think that Lavinia would not somehow take her revenge—and quickly intervened before her two retainers could come to blows. “I’m afraid I’m responsible for that. Or perhaps Lavinia is because she did not stay snug in her bed. It hardly matters.  Micah is gone now, and we can relax. It doesn’t matter even if Chris does call in Bow Street, because we’ve nothing to hide.”

This was a pleasant notion. Unfortunately, both Daffodil and Aunt Tulliver knew it wasn’t true. Their glances met. “You’d better tell her,” Tully said.

“Tell me what?” Sherry realized the answer even as she spoke, as she looked at the pert and mischievous face reflected near her own. Not only to her had the highwayman made advances; Daffodil would be much more his type. Probably he wouldn’t have made advances to Sherry at all if she had not practically hurled herself at him.

It was a very good thing that he was gone. And she would bite out her tongue before she told anyone what had transpired between them in the book room the day before. “You mean that the man was an arrant flirt? Heavens, I knew that!”

“Oh, he weren’t no flirt.” Daffodil applied her brush to Lady Sherry’s hair with rather more force than was strictly necessary. “Leastways, he didn’t flirt with me, and I’ll say as shouldn’t that he could’ve if he was of a mind! But he was right good company even if he didn’t throw the hatchet at a girl, and for the life of me I can’t figure why he left in that queer, abrupt way. Taking Prinny with him yet!”

“All my eye,” muttered Aunt Tulliver. “More like the beast took himself along.”

For a foolish moment, contemplating the adventures Prinny must have in the company with Micah, Sherry envied the dog. She was also very curious about something Daffodil had said. Micah had not flirted with her? Could that be true? “There’s no need to try to pull the wool over our eyes, Daffodil,” she said. “You would be neither the first nor the last to find yourself in amours with a man who wasn’t all that he should be.”

Daffodil set down the brush, satisfied at last with her arrangement of Lady Sherry’s curls, and reached for a pretty little pot. Then she attempted to repair the ravages of the day by the discreet application of a little rice powder and rouge. “Yes, well, that’s what I was wishful of speaking to you about, milady!”

So it was true. He
had
trifled with not only mistress but also abigail. Lady Sherry was filled with sorrow and indignation at the ignominy of woman’s fate. With false deceivers lurking in every bush, how could one be expected not to go astray? “Oh, Daffodil!” she cried, and turned on her stool to grasp her abigail’s wrist. “I am so very sorry! Had I known that this would happen, I would not have had him in the house! I would never have gone out that morning, and indeed I wish I hadn’t, because if I hadn’t, none of these horrid disasters would have taken place!”

Though Daffodil was still of tender years, in some areas of experience she was almost as old as Aunt Tulliver. Therefore, she understood why Lady Sherry spoke as she did and on whose account. “Oh, milady!” she protested. “It’s Ned as is the bad lot, not anybody else.”

Sherry was relieved to have her thoughts take a more pleasant direction. “Well, at least
that
trouble we no longer have on our dish! How fortunate that Christopher is turning out to be such a miser, or Lavinia is persuading him to be so! Ned can no longer threaten us, because what can he say? Who would believe him if he went about saying we’d hidden a highwayman in the attic? There is no proof of such a thing. People would think he was queer in
his
attic, most likely.” She smiled for the first time in many hours. There were no answering smiles on the faces of her companions. “Well, wouldn’t they?”