Vanity (6 page)

“I see,” he said neutrally. There were thieves and rogues at every level of society, even at court, ready to prey on the unwary under the guise of friendship. “So your father lost everything.”

“Yes, but his
friends
appear to be doing very well,” she said bitterly. “They live high at court, and now inhabit my family home. They lent him money with the house as security to meet the original cost of his investment. Needless to say, they were very sorry when they were obliged to foreclose.”

Her mouth was tight, and he read murder again in her eyes. “The whoresons allowed him to take his books. But I daresay they had no use for them.”

“What of your mother?”

“She died when I was born. There’s only ever been the two of us.”

Silence fell, broken only by the spurt of flame as a piece of green wood caught in the hearth. A log shifted, and the highwayman rose from the table to mend the fire. “But why choose a life of crime? You’re presumably well educated—you could go for a governess.”

“Or a lady’s maid,” she said sardonically. “Yes, I suppose I could go into service … it would be the respectable way of dealing with our difficulties. But as I said before, I haven’t been educated to consider myself a servant. I’d rather die.”

Exultation surged in his veins. Octavia Morgan was made to be the perfect accomplice. But he merely said coolly, “Pride, Miss Morgan?”

“Do you not understand it?” she fired back.

“Oh, yes,” he said, straightening from the fire and turning back to the room. “Oh, yes,
I
understand it. But many would consider thievery more humbling than honest toil.”

She met his eye as he scrutinized her pale, set face. “Perhaps.”

He knew what she was thinking: that servants were
almost universally exploited and demeaned, the gap between them and their employers as vast as between a slave and his master in ancient Rome. If one were bred to the life, then perhaps one could live it with some self-esteem, but if one were not, then it would indeed be a living death.

“You don’t dream of revenge?” He raised an eyebrow.

“I might dream about it,” she said. “But I live too close to reality to indulge in fantasy, sir. I make shift as I can, and when things become impossible …” She shrugged and sipped her wine. “Why, then I turn to thievery. I do less harm than those who robbed my father. I take a little from many people … not everything from one. No one is ruined by my activities.”

“Nor by mine, I believe,” he remarked, returning to the table. “Do you care for some Stilton with Bessie’s apple pie?”

The change of subject was a relief, breaking the intensity of the last ten minutes. It had been a strange sensation to speak aloud the seething fury and to express the hatred she felt for the men who had ruined her own life as ruthlessly and indifferently as they’d ruined her father. But she felt oddly comforted by this near stranger’s attention, by the knowledge that he understood and the certainty that he didn’t judge.

“What of you?” she said suddenly. “What brought you to the road, Lord Nick?”

He cut into the latticed pastry of the apple pie without replying for a minute. Then he said offhandedly, “A piece of the past … a misunderstanding, if you will.”

“A misunderstanding?” Octavia looked at him in astonishment. “How could a misunderstanding turn you into a highwayman?”

“In much the same way that your father’s lack of understanding turned you into a pickpocket.” He slid a slice of pie onto a plate and passed it over to her.

Octavia hesitated, unsatisfied with this reply but sensing that it was all she was going to get. The confidences seemed to be flowing only one way. She shrugged and dug a spoon into the round of Stilton, placing a creamy blue-streaked
mound on her plate beside the pie. There was no point neglecting a good dinner just because her confidences weren’t reciprocated.

“Will your father be worried about you?” Her companion took a forkful of his own pie.

“What do you think?” she demanded. “When people are abducted, they usually leave worried people behind.”

“How worried will he be?” the highwayman asked steadily.

Octavia sighed. There seemed little point in exaggerating the situation; the highwayman wasn’t going to suffer any guilty pangs, anyway. “He’s not always aware of the time,” she explained. “His grasp of the past … well, of classical times … is very acute, but he doesn’t really live in the present. Mistress Forster will look after him, and she’ll no doubt assume I’ve taken shelter from the storm somewhere.”

He nodded. “I will return you home in the morning, if the storm’s blown itself out.”

“You are too kind,” she said, not expecting the irony to make much of a dent, but she had been forcibly reminded that her virtue this night was totally dependent on the good faith and moral principles of a notorious highwayman.

As she’d expected, her companion was unmoved by her tone; indeed, he barely noticed it in his own exultant absorption. His long, slender fingers traced the diamond cuts in his wineglass, the firelight catching his amethyst signet ring, the red and blue colors refracted by the glass. Octavia Morgan could be the perfect accomplice for his long-awaited vengeance, and she had laid out for him the perfect motive to persuade her to join with him. He guessed that the promise of her own revenge would be more potent than an end to her financial difficulties, but the latter would be added incentive.

However, he was convinced she wasn’t ready for the proposal yet. She was an adventuress of a kind, but he sensed that her commitment to the dark realms beyond the law was not yet wholehearted. For all her hardships, she
hadn’t touched the desperation that pushed a man inexorably over the edge….

Octavia suddenly felt cold, as if a draft had touched her back. The highwayman was looking at her across the table, but he wasn’t seeing her. His eyes were as blank and flat as polished slate, and there was no expression on his face. She wanted to speak, to say or do something to break the dreadful masklike intensity as he sat gazing upon some grim internal landscape, but words wouldn’t come to her lips. Then his features came to life again, and his gaze became once more alert, once more recognizing her as his eyes rested shrewd and assessing on her countenance. And the silent assessment was almost as unnerving as the blank stare of before.

The highwayman was thinking that before Octavia Morgan would embrace their joint vengeance, she would need something to bind her to him, to make her see herself differently, to see herself as a woman who could perpetrate a deadly confidence trick on the vanity and twisted complacence of those who’d injured them both. He could see one obvious way to move her across the border into his dark world, to break the fragile chains of maidenly gentility.

“Excuse me for a moment, Miss Morgan.” He rose from his chair, offering a courtly bow before leaving the room.

Unnerved, Octavia abandoned her pie and propped her elbow on the table, resting her chin on her palm. She gazed out of the window. It was pitch-dark and the pane was crusted with snow. From the taproom below drunken voices rose in a raucous chorus of some ribald song, and there was a clatter as a chair went over. There was an edge of menace to the noise, a sense that whatever order was maintained could at any moment be plunged into anarchy. This highwayman’s haunt was definitely not a good place for a woman alone.

There was a scratching at the door, and Tabitha popped her head around. “Should I clear away now, miss?”

“By all means.” Octavia rose from the table and went
to warm herself at the hearth. There was a renewed chorus of shouts and crashes from below. “What’s going on?”

“A fight or summat,” Tab said, piling crockery onto a tray.

“Are there no women here except yourself and Bessie?”

“No, miss … leastways, not unless they brings ’em in.” She carried the laden tray to the door, adding matter-of-factly, “They does that oftentimes.”

“But what of you? Where do you sleep?”

“Me, miss?” Tab looked surprised at the question. “I sleeps with Bessie over the wash’ ouse … ’ceptin’ when Ben wants ’er of a night. Then I sleeps by the kitchen fire.”

No room in those sleeping arrangements for an extra female, however benighted.

“The fire’s been kindled in Lord Nick’s bedchamber for ye, miss, when y’are ready to retire,” Tab said cheerfully, following the thrust of the discussion, balancing the tray on her raised knee as she opened the door. “An’ there’s an ’ot brick in the bed, and I’ve passed the warmin’ pan ’tween the sheets, so it’s all snug.” She beamed as Octavia murmured a faint thank-you, then left, banging the door behind her.

“Do you prefer rum or brandy punch?” The highwayman returned in a few minutes, rubbing his hands together with an air of anticipation. “Bessie’s bringing the makings to the bedchamber so we may have a nightcap.”

“It’s too early to retire,” Octavia said hastily.

Lord Nick’s mobile eyebrows lifted. “It’s past eight o’clock, and I for one was up at three this morning to reach Tyburn by dawn.”

“As was I. But I am not in the least tired. You go if you wish. I’ll stay by the fire in here.”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said in the tone she’d been hearing all day. “I have assumed responsibility for you, my dear Miss Morgan, and you’ll spend the night behind a locked door in my company.” As if in orchestrated punctuation, renewed shouts and crashes came from downstairs, interspersed with the sound of breaking glass.

Octavia shivered. There seemed no way out of the situation.

“Come,” he said, holding open the door.

She brushed past him, conscious again of her bare legs beneath his robe, of her flimsy shift. She felt small and vulnerable in the voluminous robe, totally without the means to defend herself.

His hand was in the small of her back, urging her down the passage and around a corner, away from the sounds of the taproom. “It’s much quieter at the back of the house,” he said casually, reaching over her shoulder to unlatch a door. “Oh, good, Bessie’s left both brandy and rum for the punch. You must have a preference.” He pushed her gently ahead of him into the room and closed the door.

“Brandy,” Octavia said numbly, watching as he dropped a heavy bar across the door and turned an iron key. Impassively, he removed the key from the lock and slipped it into his pocket. He could not be expecting anyone in this house, where he was clearly a friend and honored guest, to break into his room in the night—so the lock was presumably to keep his unwilling guest within.

“You’ll find a commode and hot water behind the screen.” He indicated a worked screen in the corner of the room. “While you refresh yourself, I’ll prepare the punch.”

The room was large and well appointed, warmed by a fire and lit, like the parlor, with expensive wax tapers. There was a deep armchair with elbow pieces beside the hearth, and Octavia decided she would sit up there until dawn.

The highwayman was busy with his punch, considerately removing his attention from her, and she hastened behind the screen, grateful for the amenities it concealed. A freezing visit to an outhouse in the yard was an unappealing prospect at the best of times, let alone in a blizzard.

When she emerged, her companion was grating nutmeg onto the contents of a silver punch bowl. The air was sweet with the scent of warmed brandy, oranges and lemons, cinnamon and nutmeg. Involuntarily, Octavia yawned, realizing how bone tired she was. Her eyes darted longingly
to the deep feather mattress on the bed. Perhaps the highwayman would be chivalrous enough to allow her the bed and take the chair for himself.

“Come to the fire.” His smile was inviting as he ladled punch into a goblet. “Taste this and see if it needs any adjustment. There may be a want of nutmeg.”

It seemed pointless to resist the comforts offered in this cozy prison. Octavia sat in the big chair, curling her toes onto the gleaming brass fender, and took the goblet. “Plenty of nutmeg,” she pronounced after a judicious sip. “But perhaps just a touch of cloves.”

“Ah, I forgot the cloves.” He unscrewed a twist of wax paper and dropped a pinch of dark ground spice into her goblet. “Better?”

She sipped and nodded. “It doesn’t taste quite like cloves, though.”

“Oh, they’re a very rare variety, from the Indies,” he said, drinking deep of his own goblet before taking off his coat and sitting down to remove his boots and stockings.

When he pulled loose his neck cloth and began to unbutton his shirt, Octavia realized he was undressing for bed … right there in the middle of the chamber … right in front of her eyes. He was unfastening his britches. She stared, mesmerized as he pushed them off his hips. Candlelight flickered on his broad bare chest, and her eye moved inexorably downward, following the trail of dark hair snaking over his belly, down from his navel and into the waist of his woolen drawers that molded his hips and legs and clung tightly to a bulging shape…. She choked on her punch, turning her head away, eyes streaming.

The highwayman appeared not to notice. He crossed the room to a deep cherrywood armoire. Octavia wiped her eyes with her fingertips, but she couldn’t stop herself from peeping through them, gazing at the hard-muscled shape of his buttocks clearly outlined in the drawers as he stood with his back to her at the armoire. He took out a fur-trimmed dressing gown and slipped it over his bare torso before disappearing behind the commode screen.

Hell and the devil! Octavia pressed a palm to one
flushed cheek. He hadn’t seemed to give her a thought. He’d undressed as casually if he were in a brothel with a whore. But at least he hadn’t removed his drawers in front of her. It was small comfort. She took another gulp of her punch, and to her astonishment a little giggle developed in her throat. If she was totally honest, she’d enjoyed the spectacle. As fascinated as a rabbit in the eye of the cobra. What on earth was happening to her?

Another wave of tiredness washed over her, but there was a tingling sensation in her belly, and her toes were curling of their own accord around the fender. She felt both tired and strangely expectant.

Her companion emerged from the screen, still in his dressing gown. He moved around the room extinguishing the candles until only one remained by the bed; then he turned back the patchwork coverlet and glanced expectantly at her. “Miss Morgan?”