The Highwayman (34 page)

He turned the color of a jaundiced turnip. “I—I doona know what ye mean, lass.”

“Oh, do give it up, Murdoch!” she huffed. “Now tell me which way he went.”

“Christ, Jaysus,” the old man moaned, looking quite unwell.

“Which way?” She brandished her unmentionables at him in a threatening manner.

Murdoch pointed out the west doors. “Follow the devastation,” he said rather dazedly. “Though when he's in such a state, I wouldna advise being in his path.”

Despite everything, Farah was unable to suppress a grin and planted a kiss on Murdoch's balding pate. “Don't follow me,” she ordered before dashing out.

The devastation did, indeed, mark a path toward her husband. Antiques were pushed over. Pictures pulled off walls. Priceless glass vases and stone statues lay smashed in the middle of the hallways.

Ducking into an unused guest room, she used her ruined undergarments to clean herself and discarded them in the rubbish basket before resuming her search.

The path ended at the back stairs, and Farah followed them down to where the garden door flapped against the storm.

Of course
, Farah knew exactly where she'd find him.

*   *   *

The stone walls of the terrace gardens stood higher and in better repair than those ancient mossy rocks at Applecross. It made sense to Farah, in a way, as she approached the man slumped against one. He stood higher, too, these days, impossibly so. But
this
sable-haired man was once a sable-haired boy she'd known better than any other, and he still retreated to cold stone walls in times of crisis.

His white linen shirt and dark vest were plastered to his torso and outlined powerful shoulders along with the dips and swells of thick arms. His limp hands dangled over splayed knees. Locks of hair dripped rainwater onto the grass beneath him, hiding his downturned face. The posture of defeat didn't diminish the potency of his masculinity.

An acute ache opened a pit in her chest and spread until she had to swallow to keep it down.

Here they were again. A cold storm. A stone wall. A wounded boy. A lonely girl.

“Tell me why you're crying?” She whispered the first words she'd ever spoken to him.

And he gave her the same reply, without looking up. “Go. Away.”

A ragged gasp escaped her and she rushed to him, sinking to her knees next to him in a cloud of expensive midnight skirts.

He snatched his hands back and fisted them at his sides. “I mean it.” The dangerous growl rumbled from deep in his chest. “Get out of here.”

She swallowed a lump of tender, painful joy. “Let me see your hands.”

He lifted his head like a man with the weight of a mountain on his shoulders and turned it on his straining neck to spear her with those unsettling mismatched eyes. He
wasn't
crying. Not yet. But muscles twitched in his face and his lips pulled into a hard white line as he visibly fought the pool of bright moisture gathering against his lids. “I'm warning you, Farah.”

“You should know me better than that,” she murmured, slowly moving her fingers across the grass toward where his fist clenched at his side.

Neither of them felt the rain or the biting cold as she picked up his big, white-knuckled fist. Her hands looked so small in comparison. Both of them clutching his one fist and still not engulfing it. Farah's heart didn't pound so much as it quivered inside her rib cage, struggling to move her blood through veins tight with hope and awe and terror.

Her long, slim fingers covered his thick, scarred ones and one by one, coaxed them to uncover his secret.

A breath as jagged as the long seam across his palm broke from her throat, then another. She could feel her face crumbling as hot tears mingled with the cold rain on her cheeks. The wounds Dougan had suffered the day they'd met. The scars she'd traced as a girl more times than she could count.

“Oh, my God,” she sobbed, pressing her lips to his scarred palm. “My God, my God.” The exclamation became a chant. A question. A prayer. Punctuated with kisses and strokes of her fingers as though his hand were a holy relic and she a pious disciple at the end of a long pilgrimage.

Finally she held it to her cheek as she sat back on her knees and stared into the face of the boy she'd given her heart to, and the man who'd begun to steal it.

His entire body shook, though his features were still as granite, but for a twitch in his strong chin he couldn't seem to control. He regarded her as one might a strange dog, unsure of whether its next move was to nuzzle or attack.

“Is it truly you, Dougan?” she pleaded. “Tell me this isn't some kind of dream.”

He turned his face from her, a drop of moisture leaving the corner of his eye and slowly following the blade of his cheek to join the rivulets of rainwater running down his jaw and neck.

“I am Dorian Blackwell.” His voice matched the stone, gray, flat, and cold.

Farah shook her head against his palm. “I knew and married you as Dougan Mackenzie, all those years ago,” she insisted.

His throat worked over a difficult swallow and he pulled his hand out of her grasp. “The boy you knew as Dougan Mackenzie is deceased. He
died
in Newgate Prison.” His gaze swung back to hers. “Too many times.”

Farah felt her heart become a fragile thing. More fragile even than the vases and sculptures that lay in shards along the expensive flooring of his home. “Is there nothing left of him?” she whispered.

He stared at a point over her shoulder for a moment, before reaching out.

Farah didn't dare move as he pulled a wet ringlet over her shoulder and wound it around his finger. “Only the way he—remembers you.”

Hope swelled and tears overflowed her lashes again, blurring her vision until she blinked them away. She felt like a woman ripped in two by opposing forces. Exquisite pain and agonizing elation. Dougan Mackenzie had been returned to her arms. Alive. Broken. Powerful. Unable to bear her touch. Unwilling to give his heart.

Were the heavens truly so cruel?

She reached up, smoothing the wet streams of his hair off his wide brow. “You don't look a thing like him,” she murmured with awe. “He was so small, his face rounder. Softer. And yet, I see him in your dark eye, that dear, mischievous, intelligent boy. So, you see, he
cannot
be dead. I must have known that somehow, all this time. It's why I never let you go.”

“That's impossible,” he said.

Farah lifted the hem of her blue skirt and found a white petticoat beneath that was not yet drenched. Gently, she covered a finger with the hem, much as she had when they were children, and knelt up to wipe the rainwater from his face.

After a cautious wince, he remained unmoving. Unblinking.
Unbreathing
as she parodied her prior ministrations to him from all those years ago.

“Of course it's possible,” she said. “It was your Gaelic spell that you said to me in the vestry at Applecross. Those last words.”

May we be reborn,

May our souls meet and know.

And love again.

And remember.

“
I
remember, Dougan. And I know
you
never forget.” She let the petticoat fall away and traced the lines of his brutal face with fingers soft as feathers, learning and memorizing this new incarnation of him. “My soul recognized your soul—and was reborn. I knew there was something behind those eyes, beneath those gloves, that would give back to me what I've been missing all these years.” Farah launched herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck and clinging like a burr. Their first kiss tasted of salt and desperation. Tears mingled, his or hers, she couldn't tell. Lips fused. Bodies melded. And finally, a miracle.

His thick arms encircled her, pulled her to him, then his hands plunged into her hair as he claimed her mouth with his tongue. He was as big and hard as the stone wall behind him, a mountain of ice melting beneath her warmth. But his mouth neither punished nor demanded. This time, his kiss was full of darkness and hesitancy. It was as if all the emotions he couldn't understand or allow poured from his mouth into hers in a tumble of chaos.

Farah accepted them all. Savored them. Would hold them and help him identify and sort through them later, when they'd finished discovering just who they'd become.

She felt safe here in the arms of this dangerous man. It was like returning to a home that had been destroyed and rebuilt. The same bones, same structure, but a new core that felt more foreign than if you hadn't ever known it from before. Walls and obstacles constructed by hands that were not her own.

But it didn't matter to her. She'd learn this man he'd become, renovate with her love what could be improved upon, and accept and adapt to what she could not repair.

“I love you, Dougan,” she murmured against his stroking mouth. “I've loved you for so long.”

He released her hair and shackled her shoulders with his strong hands, thrusting her away from him so abruptly she felt it in her bones. The scar interrupted by his eye was deep enough to catch the rain, and the expression on his face finally forced the storm's chill beneath her skin. His breath came in ragged pants, and his lips were colored with the heat of a kiss. But any other effect had disappeared, and that fact struck Farah's heart with dread.

“I am Dorian Blackwell.” He shook her shoulders a bit, as though that would give his words more weight. “I have been for the entirety of my adulthood and will be until this wretched life is over.”

“How is that possible?” she asked gently, setting her hands on his chest to stabilize herself. Curious ridges in the hard planes of muscle called her fingers to investigate. Seams? Scars? She found herself firmly planted away from him as he prepared to stand.

“That's just another story full of blood and death,” he warned.

“Tell me,” she insisted, fisting her hands in her skirts, promising herself that no matter how badly she ached for it, she would not reach out until he finished.

The rain beat them with a steady staccato, dripping down the stones of the wall in dark streaks that evoked images of bloodstains. The grass beneath them cushioned the hard ground and fragrant hedges hid what walls could not. It was a lovely garden, just awakened to the first nudges of spring with blooms not yet blossomed. But as Dorian spoke, a grim pall covered the whole world, one that not even this lovely corner could brighten.

“I wrote to my father, the Marquess of Ravencroft, Laird Hamish Mackenzie, before they sentenced me. I begged him not only for help on my behalf, but also for his help in locating you. In keeping you safe.” His eyes touched her for a moment, but then swung to fix on a weathered hedge, stubbornly holding on to the barren kiss of winter.

“I never heard a word from my father, though as my situation became more desperate, I wrote to him more often. Turns out, instead of the paltry sum it would have taken to hire a lawyer for me, he paid exponentially more to his friend and associate Justice Roland Cranmer the Third to be rid of me. Cranmer, in turn, paid the three most corrupt and vicious guards in Newgate to beat me to death.”

Farah gasped, holding a horrified hand to her heart to keep it from bleeding out of her chest. “They—killed Dorian instead?”

“He happened to be working on a cipher for outside communication with my cell mate, Walters, and so we switched for the night, knowing the lazy guards had a hard time telling the difference between us.”

“Walters, you mean—Frank?”

His lids shuttered for only a moment. “Walters used to be brilliant and brutal and prone to manic episodes of extreme artistic genius. One of the best forgers ever captured. They tried to kill him that night, as well, but he survived to become the gentle simpleton you met. I suppose they left him alive because he can't remember what happened, and therefore couldn't speak against them.”

Farah couldn't tell which was more responsible for the moisture on her cheeks, the relentless rain, or her tears. “Dear God.” She sniffed. “Your own father caused all this?”

A frightening satisfaction lifted her husband's satyric features. “He paid his price, and was the first to experience my wrath. He funded my rise and, needless to say, there is a new Marquess of Ravencroft. His legitimate heir, Laird Liam Mackenzie.”

Farah didn't even want to know what happened to the old one, and couldn't exactly summon pity for the man who'd paid for the violent death of his own son.

“Liam Mackenzie is … your brother?” she breathed.

“Half brother,” he answered tightly. “I am only one of countless Mackenzie bastards out there. We tend to stay out of Laird Mackenzie's way.”

“Why?” Farah asked.

He looked away, signaling that the matter was closed.

She wisely moved on. “Now Cranmer's gone missing?”

“Dead. And they'll never find the body.”

Farah wasn't surprised. “How were you able to take on Blackwell's identity?”

His lip curled into a snarl of disgust. “There are no words to describe the filth of the railway mixed with that of the prison. Infection killed more men than violence.” He swallowed obvious revulsion. “We truly could have been brothers. The Blackheart Brothers. And we smeared our faces and skin with soot and mud to protect it from the sun and cold when we worked. The added benefit was often men didn't realize to whom they spoke if we weren't standing next to each other. I lost all traces of my Highland brogue and learned his mannerisms and accent very early on. Once I grew to roughly his size, there was no telling us apart.”

“Who knows who you really are?” she asked.

“Murdoch, Argent, Tallow, and—well—Walters is confused most of the time. We
were
the five who
ruled
Newgate. The fingers that made a fist.” He curled his fingers over his scar, squeezing until the creases whitened. “We all knew it was supposed to be
me
who died in that cell. And we all wanted revenge, so we took it. And we've never stopped taking since.”