The Highwayman (13 page)

Farah seized upon the sunlight with a mad desperation, and pulled the heavy doors of the keep open. The two footmen stood as sentries on either side, and they moved to stop her, but paused as though someone had given them a staying command.

Farah launched herself past them, running blindly for a gazebo perched on the edge of the tallest rocks, and shaded by a copse of trees. From the vista, she could stare across the channel and see the black rock and green mosses of Scotland's Highland shores. She watched the churning waves break upon the cliffs with power enough to crush the mightiest of ships. The shards of her churning emotions were tossed about thusly inside of her. And, for the first time since those months after Dougan Mackenzie had died, she cried with all the strength her broken heart could muster.

*   *   *

Dorian stood in the archway of his castle and watched the woman flee as if for her life. “Let her go, Walters,” he ordered, stopping his cook from going after her and hauling her back.

“Name's Frank,” Walters insisted, though he obediently returned to Dorian's side.

It took a moment for the words to penetrate Dorian's concentration, so focused as it was on the retreating form running with desperate abandon toward the pavilion, her skirts the color of sea foam billowing out behind her.

Finally, he glanced over at his biggest and most pliable employee. “Frank?”

Walters inclined his head toward the pavilion. “She named me this morning.”

“Of course she did,” Dorian muttered.

Walters looked after her, as well, his doe-brown eyes becoming very troubled. “What's wrong with your Fairy, Dougan?”

Dorian sighed, running into this problem more often than he cared to. “It's me, Walters. It's Dorian. Dougan is dead, remember?”

“Oh.” Confused, the giant man took a long moment to study his features, his brows drawn together. “I forgot. I'm no good at remembering things.”

“It's all right,” Dorian soothed.

“She misses Dougan,” the big man said, sniffing down at his muffins.

“Yes. Yes, she does.”

“I do, too, Dorian.”

Dorian could feel a familiar darkness surge in his veins. These days, it was tinged red, for blood, with a greater frequency. It no longer disturbed him, he told himself as he retreated to his study. “We all do, Frank,” he said before he closed himself in. “We all do.”

 

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

It was Murdoch who nudged her limp, despondent form from the planks of the pavilion and tutted over her until she allowed him to guide her back inside. The arm that kept her upright was solid beneath his suit coat, and he all but carried her up the steps.

“I've drawn ye a warm bath, lass, and found ye something suitable to wear whilst I launder yer dress.” Absurdly, he reminded her of a clucking mother hen, hovering nervously over her chick.

Farah nodded her thanks, her throat still too raw to say much of anything.

He went on, deciding to ignore or forgive her escape attempt, solicitous as ever. More so, now that tears streaked her cheeks and reddened her eyes. Once ensconced back in the bedroom, Murdoch relieved her of her shawl and purse, setting them on the jewel-blue chair.

“Did Blackwell frighten ye?” he queried with a false brightness. “Because although he's a dangerous-looking bastar—er—villain, he's really not so—”

“You were in Newgate with Dougan Mackenzie.” She didn't pose it as a question, more of a soft declaration, one he couldn't deny without perjuring himself.

Murdoch froze. His stout form working through a shiver as he found something arresting about her shawl draped across the chair. “Aye,” he gruffly confirmed. “For five long years.”

“What was your crime?”

He turned to her slowly, his face a mask of shame and pain. “My only crime, dear girl, was love.” He must have read the lack of comprehension on her face, because he continued. “I had a prolonged affair with the son of an earl from Surrey. When his father found out, charges were brought against me, and the man I loved turned on me in court, branding me a … predator.”

Farah's already bruised heart jolted as another pang pierced it through, this one for the torment mirrored at her in the features of the wide Scotsman. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, surprised by how much she meant it.

“It's ancient history, now.” He shrugged, summoning a wan smile for her.

“The past can long stay with us, Murdoch,” she murmured.

“Right ye are, lass.”

“Were you and Dougan … friends?” Farah ventured, knowing his rendering of the past would be kinder than Dorian Blackwell's.

Murdoch shifted, retreating to the washroom door. “I owe him my life, many times over. And, as such, I owe my life for yers, as well.”

“How is that?” she whispered, uncomfortable with the veneration on his gentle face.

“Well, ye're his Fairy, of course, his lady wife for all intents and purposes. We promised Dougan Mackenzie that we'd find ye. That we'd protect ye. That, if we could, we'd give ye back the life that ye're owed, the life he would have wanted for ye.”

Tears threatened again and Farah fiercely blinked them away. “He told you about our handfasting when we were young?”

“Aye, it was one of our favorite stories.”

“Truly?” A soft wonder began to expand through her chest and she seized upon it. “Are you saying Dougan told you stories about me? That must have been incredibly tedious and uninteresting.”

Murdoch came forward and gently took her hand, drawing her toward the adjoining washroom. “Ye canna understand what prison is like, lass. When a single night passes in fear and despair, a week might as well be a lifetime, and a year becomes an eternity.”

Farah's bare toes curled against the cold white marble floors of the washroom, streaked with silver and blue. Gilded silver mirrors and dainty white furniture upholstered in the boldest cobalt littered the room almost to excess. More windows spilled sunlight through gauzy sapphire curtains that fluttered in a spring breeze. A porcelain bath stood on a dais surrounded by the softest blue paisley rugs.

Murdoch busied himself by dragging a silk-and-iron changing screen from the corner and placing it next to the bath, talking all the while. “In Newgate, a story to make the time pass with greater alacrity has more value than gold.” He draped a large robe of heavy blue fabric over the silk of the screen. The draw of the steaming bath overcame her misgivings about disrobing in the same room with a relatively strange man. Of course, this would never be done back in London, but when one was a prisoner of the Blackheart of Ben More, one didn't worry about paltry scandals.

“Thank you.” Stepping behind the screen, Farah undid laces of her bodice and pushed her dress from her shoulders. She could hear Murdoch bustling about the room, keeping himself busy for her benefit, she guessed. “Would you tell me about it, Murdoch, your time in Newgate with Dougan?”

The restless movement ceased and the older man gave a gusty sigh, or maybe it was whatever dainty chair he lowered himself into that produced the sad noise. “As I said, the nights are the worst,” he began in a faraway voice. “The hours of darkness break even the bravest of men, let alone frightened wee boys. We'd be finished with a day's worth of work on the railway and return to our world of iron bars too exhausted to move, let alone defend ourselves from the dangers the night might bring. The sounds. The cries. The whispers from the shadows … they're dreadful. If ye didna have friends to help protect ye…” He trailed off, leaving the rest to her imagination.

“I'm sorry,” Farah whispered, stepping out of her skirts, and draping the stiff dress over the sturdy screen.

“Thank ye,” Murdoch acknowledged. “By the time I arrived at Newgate, Blackwell and Mackenzie had been there nearly three years. Thick as thieves and twice as shrewd, they were, each of them dark as the devil and just as ruthless. It always amazed me that ones so young could learn such cruelty.”

Luckily, Farah's corset was laced in the front, and she went to work on that as she absorbed Murdoch's words. “It's hard for me to imagine a cruel Dougan,” she admitted. “But … he was kind to you?”

“Eventually,” Murdoch said evasively. “But once I proved myself useful, I was taken into their gang's protection and that made life much easier for me, most especially at night. As ye likely know, Dougan had a gift for words and an eerily accurate memory. On the darkest and coldest of nights, he'd tell us about books he'd read with ye, and often he'd be sidetracked from the memory of the book and just go on about some adventure or another the two of ye had together.”

“He did?” Farah breathed, pausing before peeling off her chemise and exposing her breasts to the chilly air. Once she'd finished that, she bent and tucked her only treasure beneath the washroom rug, not wanting anyone to find it.

Warmth stole into Murdoch's voice at the memory, and Farah's heart clenched at the picture of her Dougan not yet a man, and yet not a boy, regaling a room full of hardened prisoners about the graveyard capers and bog adventures of a ten-year-old girl in the Scottish Highlands. “He described ye so many times, I feel as though any of us would have recognized ye had we seen ye on the streets. He told us of yer kindness, yer innocence, yer gentle ways and boundless curiosity. Ye became something of a patron saint to us all. Our daughter. Our sister. Our … Fairy. Without even knowing it, ye gave us—him—a little bit of sunshine and hope in a world of shadow and pain.”

“Oh.” Farah again lost the battle to her tears, and she stood behind the screen, naked and shivering, her arms wrapped around herself as she drank in Murdoch's memories as though she could make them her own. She barely noticed her nakedness, as it was her insides that felt so entirely exposed and vulnerable. “Are you quite certain he was never angry with me? That he never—blamed me for his incarceration?”

The older man was silent for a time, and tendrils of panic snaked through her. “Please. You must tell me the truth,” she begged.

“Get in the bath, first,” Murdoch nudged gently.

Farah complied, stepping up and into the fragrant tub and lowering herself into lavender-scented water that lapped at her shoulders.

“The truth is, lass, that it would have killed Mackenzie to ever hear ye ask that question,” Murdoch continued when he seemed certain that she was situated. “It was only we who were closest to him who knew the particular depths of his fears for ye. He never told anyone but Blackwell and me yer name. To everyone else, ye were his Fairy, and that was all the information they ever got. He guarded ye like the jealous husband he was.”

“Our marriage was never legitimate, Murdoch,” Farah confessed, letting the hot water and lavender soothe the chill and the aches from her stiff muscles. “You must know that, as well.”

Murdoch's rude noise echoed off the stone and marble of the washroom, amplifying his contempt for her words. “Dougan Mackenzie was as faithful and devoted a husband to ye as there ever was,” he insisted. “And after all these years,
Mrs. Mackenzie,
seems to me ye've stayed as true a bride to his memory as ye would have if he was alive.”

Farah's hand skimmed across the still, clean water as his words pricked her with needles of guilt. “That's not entirely true,” she acknowledged. “You know that I—kissed another man the night you and Blackwell took me from my home.”

“Aye, well…” If a voice could convey a shrug, Murdoch's did so. “For a woman who, for all intents and purposes, had been widowed nigh on a decade, no one can blame ye for trying to fill the loneliness with company.”

“Your Mr. Blackwell certainly didn't see it that way.” It disturbed her to think of the master of Ben More whilst naked. Suddenly needing a vocation, Farah picked up a bar of soap that smelled like heather and honey and began to vigorously scrub the past few days away.

“Blackwell's as tied to Dougan Mackenzie as we all are,” Murdoch said cryptically. “He may be meaner than a coiled snake, and twice as deadly, but out of anyone alive, he's the best chance ye've got.”

“That's something else I don't understand,” Farah began, lifting a leg above the water to rub the bar of soap all the way down to her toes. “You all seem to be convinced I'm in some sort of danger, but I can't readily imagine what that would be, and no one is inclined to explain it to me.”

“Blackwell didna get around to that, eh?”

Farah pinched her lips together with a frown. “That was my fault, I suppose. I fled him before he was quite finished.”

“Ye wouldna be the first,” Murdoch grumbled, sounding more like an exasperated father than a loyal minion. A creak of furniture told her that Murdoch had risen and was coming closer. She tensed, but as soon as she heard him gathering her things from the screen, she relaxed again. “Mrs. Mackenzie…” he began.

“You might as well call me Farah,” she instructed, lifting her arms to pull the pins from her hopelessly disheveled bun and let her curls fall into the bath. “I feel we're far beyond societal constraints at this point, Murdoch.”

His pregnant pause conveyed a shifting reluctance that piqued her curiosity. “When it comes to the danger, I doona want ye to feel like it can touch ye all the way out here. In this castle, ye have nothing to fear.”

“Yes, you've said that already.” Farah dropped her head back, wetting her scalp, and began to work the suds through her thick waves.

“I mean to say, I know it doesna seem like it now, but ye can trust
him.
The rest of us, we'd lay down our lives for yers, but Blackwell … he'd do that and more. He'd rip the beating heart from his chest. He'd give up his soul if ye'd only—”