His Mask of Retribution. Margaret McPhee
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‘Why did you help me?’
The question, so softly uttered, cut through everything else.
He turned then, and looked at her, at the temptation she presented: those eyes, so soft and dark as to beguile a man from all sense.
‘Why would I not?’
‘You hate my father.’
Hate was too mild a word to describe what he felt for Misbourne. He paused before speaking, before looking into the eyes that were so similar and yet so different to her father’s. ‘Regardless of your father, while you are with me I will keep you safe.’
Safe. It had been such a long time since Marianne had felt safe. There had been times that she had thought she would never feel safe again, no matter how well guarded and protected she was by her family. She studied his face. In the shaft of morning light his eyes were golden as a flame. He was a highwayman. He had beaten her father and abducted her. He was holding her prisoner her against her will. She had watched the most brutal of London’s lowlife cower before him. He could be anyone behind that dark silken mask. But whoever he was, he had not used her ill, as he could have. He had brought her candles to light the darkness. And he had saved her. He had saved her—and he had bested seven men to do it.
She met his gaze and held it, looking deep into those amber eyes, trying to glean a measure of the man behind the mask. He was not lying. A man like him had no need to lie.
The expression in his eyes gentled. His hand moved as if he meant to touch her arm, except that he stopped it before it reached her and let it drop away.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
She stared up into his face and could not look away. And the highwayman held her gaze.
‘Yes,’ she said at last and nodded. ‘I am fine.’ She had said those words so many times in the past three years, but only this time, standing there in a shuttered bedchamber with a masked man who had abducted her, was she close to telling the truth. ‘The letter that you think my father holds.’
He gave no response.
‘I know you believe he understands…’ She saw the flicker of something dangerous in his eyes, but it did not stop her. ‘Will you ask him again and tell him exactly what it is that you seek?’
‘I have already done so.’
She gave a nod and relaxed at his words. ‘I heard you and your accomplice talking about a document…He will give it to you this time.’ Her father would give whatever it took to redeem her. ‘I will stake my life upon it.’
The highwayman said nothing. He just looked at her for a moment longer and then walked away, leaving her locked alone in the bedchamber.
Five minutes later Marianne heard the thud of the front door closing and the clatter of a horse’s hooves trotting away from the house. She knew that it was the highwayman leaving. The accomplice’s footsteps sounded on the stairs; she heard him come along the passageway and go into a nearby room. There was the noise of cupboards and drawers being opened and closed, then the accomplice unlocked her door, knocking before entering.
‘If you will come this way, my lady, I am under instruction to show you to another room in which you might spend the day. One in which the shutters are not closed.’
He took her to the bedchamber on the opposite side of the passageway. The daylight was light and bright and wonderful after the dimness of the yellow chamber. She blinked, her eyes taking an age to adjust. The walls were a cool blue, the bedding dark as midnight and the furniture mahogany and distinctly masculine in style. Over by the basin she could see a shaving brush, soap and razor blade, all set before a mirror, and she knew whose bedchamber this was without having to be told. Her heart began to pound and butterflies flocked in her stomach. She hesitated where she was, suddenly suspicious.
Something of the apprehension must have shown in her face for all she tried to hide it, for the accomplice smiled gently, reassuringly.
‘He thought you would prefer the daylight. The sun hits the back of the house in the afternoon.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You need not have a fear, lass. I am to take you back to the yellow chamber before he returns.’
She looked round at the accomplice and the grey mask loosely tied to obscure his face. ‘Could you not simply have removed the nails from the shutters?’
‘No, Lady Marianne.’ The accomplice glanced away uneasily.
‘Because it is at the front of the house,’ she guessed, ‘and you fear that I would attract attention?’
‘It is rather more complicated than that. The shutters must remain closed. Those in the master bedchamber too.’
‘The yellow bedchamber…’ She hesitated and thought of the hairbrush. ‘It was his mother’s room, was it not?’
The accomplice gave a hesitant nod.
‘And this is his house.’
He looked uncomfortable but did not deny it. ‘I must go,’ he said and started to move away.
‘You said he was a good man.’
The accomplice halted by the door. ‘He is.’
‘What he did to my father on Hounslow Heath was not the action of a good man.’
‘Believe me, Lady Marianne, were he a lesser man, your father would be dead. Were I in his shoes, I don’t know that I could have walked away and left Misbourne alive.’ He turned away, then glanced back again to where she stood, slack-jawed and gaping in shock. ‘For your own sake, please be discreet around the window. Being seen in a gentleman’s bedchamber, whatever the circumstances, would not be in any young unmarried lady’s favour.’
He gave a nod of his head and walked away, locking the door behind him.
What had her father ever done to deserve the hatred of these men? Her legs felt wobbly at the thought of such vehemence. She needed to sit down. She eyed the four-poster bed with its dark hangings and covers—the highwayman’s bed—and a shiver rippled down her spine, spreading out to tingle across the whole of her skin. She stepped away, choosing the high-backed easy chair by the side of the fireplace, and perching upon the edge of its seat.
Marianne glanced at the window behind her and the brightness of the daylight. The accomplice was right. Especially given it had been little more than a year since the Duke of Arlesford had broken their betrothal. The scandal surrounding it still had not completely died away. One word of her abduction, one word that she had spent the night in a bachelor’s house without a chaperon—no matter that she was being held alone in a locked room—and her reputation would be ruined to such an extent that none of her father’s influences could repair it. The irony almost made her laugh. Especially when she contemplated the darkness of the truth. Even so, she rose to her feet and walked to the window.
The view was the same as that of a hundred other houses in London—long, neatly kept back gardens separated by high stone walls, backing on to more gardens and the distant rear aspect of yet more town houses, all beneath the grey-white of an English autumn sky. There were no landmarks that she recognised. The catch moved easily enough, but the window was stiff and heavy and noisy to open. She did not slide it up far. There was little point, for there was no hope of escape through it. The drop below was sheer and at least twenty-five feet. She closed the window as quietly as she could and turned to survey the room around her.
It was much smaller than the yellow bedchamber and almost Spartan in its feel. Aside from the bed there was a bedside cabinet upon which was placed a candle in its holder. Against the other walls stood a dark mahogany wardrobe, a wash-stand and a chest of drawers with a small peering glass and shaving accoutrements sitting neatly on top. A dark Turkey rug covered the floor, but there were no pictures on the wall, no bolsters or cushions upon the bed. There was no lace, no frills, nothing pretty or pale. It was the very opposite of Marianne’s bedchamber at home. It was dark and