Chapter Two
Lord Beckenham expressed extreme anger when he heard their account of what had happened, ranting—in the most genteel manner, to be sure—as was so often his way.
He was not angry with his servants, who, Victoria hastened to assure him, had displayed great courage or, indeed, with Victoria herself, whom the others praised most generously for facing down the ruffian and protecting her charges.
Rather, he aimed his ire at the king’s men who were supposed to keep the roads safe for law-abiding landowners.
“What is the matter with them?” he seethed, tossing his hands in the air while Lady Catherine quietly seeped tears. “They’ve been informed that this brute is operating in the area, have they not? Why haven’t they captured him?”
Samuel and the others described to Lord Beckenham the fearsomeness of the bandit’s appearance, how swift was his steed. The way he had seemed to materialize out of the moonlight and then disappeared back into it.
So, they were going to make a tale of the episode, were they? A mythic encounter.
“Thank goodness,” Lady Catherine said at last, “no one was hurt. You are not wounded, Deke?”
“Nay, mistress. He did not touch me.”
Victoria barely listened to the conversation, lost in the shock that held her. The disbelief. The entirely unreasonable desire to believe. She wanted nothing more than the privacy of her own small room, where she could debate within her mind whether she’d seen what she thought she had.
When Lord Beckenham sent the girls up to Missy’s rooms with Lady Catherine’s own maid in attendance to provide comfort, Victoria hastened to follow to her own, but not before Lord Beckenham stopped her.
“Miss Henshaw, thank you for your courage. But I do say it was foolish of you to step out and face an armed bandit as you did.”
“My lord, I thought only of protecting my charges.”
“I appreciate that. It could have ended quite badly.”
“He would not shoot a woman, surely?” He would not. Though others had decried him, he had his own brand of honor. That she knew, even as she knew him.
She knew him.
How the black hair grew in a wee ruff on the back of his head that, despite the sleekness of his mane, would never lie down properly.
The breadth of his shoulders and the strength of muscle and sinew beneath that tanned skin.
The way his eyes smiled and sparkled in sunlight and the quickness of the mind behind them.
But it hadn’t been him. It couldn’t be him. Just a momentary madness on her part fueled by the stories the girls had been sharing. A trick of the moonlight fooling her into thinking that a random, black-haired highwayman was the man she had loved.
And loved still.
In her chamber she paced, trying to talk herself into a measure of reason. The room didn’t allow much movement, and she went from the bed to the window again and again, pausing to look out as if she thought—
But no. She had put such romantic notions behind her when she was scarcely older than Missy. Put them away with her hopes and dreams for a happy future.
She had no such hopes now. They had died with Jamie.
Jamie.
A sudden rush of tears blocked her throat. She had not wept for any reason, not for years. Instead, she accepted her fate, that which had brought her here.
Her father—the same man who had told her all those years ago that Jamie Houghton was dead—had wanted her to marry.
Someone suitable. He had presented candidate after candidate, desiring to get the eldest of his daughters well wed so he might move on to the others.
A miller’s son from over Ripon way. A schoolmaster from Leeds.
The son of a colleague who intended to follow his own father’s footsteps into the clergy.
She’d refused them all.
Her father had become impatient and demanded a reason why.
She’d lied and produced various excuses, because she couldn’t tell Father the true one.
After she’d kissed Jamie Houghton, after she’d lain in his arms through summer afternoons watching the laughter come and go in his face, the light in his eyes, no other man would do.
Besides, she was no longer an untouched girl. She had given herself, body and soul, to Jamie Houghton.
The highwayman—that could not possibly have been Jamie. Though…he’d been a dab hand with horses, had Jamie, and had ridden like the wind. The son of an ostler, he’d grown up helping his father look after the horses at the Crosskeys Inn, where they lived.
Was the son of an innkeeper not good enough for the daughter of a vicar?
She’d asked herself that question scores of times.
Jamie’s father, Rafe Houghton, did not own the inn—that belonged to Jamie’s mother, who, like Victoria’s own mother perhaps, had married beneath her station, taking for a husband the wild gypsy lad who’d worked for her father.
It wasn’t Jamie’s station in life that had outraged Father, so much as his gypsy blood. Let that be admitted straight out.
Martha Houghton, Jamie’s mother, was an educated woman who ran the Crosskeys with a deft hand.
She’d educated Jamie also, along with his two brothers.
Taught them to read and write, broadened their horizons by providing them books.
Jamie’s brothers, William and Sylvester, had shrugged off most of her efforts to educate them. With Jamie, though, it had stuck.
He’d had the soul of a poet, her love.
The first time she’d seen him…
She and Father had stopped at the Crosskeys when their mare fell lame on the way back from visiting a parishioner.
Jamie had been sitting in the sunlight outside the inn with a book open on his knee, so absorbed that he’d failed to hear when Father hailed him.
When he looked up, the light filling his face…
She’d been lost from that moment on, she might as well admit.
She paused now, back at her window, trying to see something beyond the glass, which, just like that in the coach, showed her only a grim reflection.
She’d been pretty, back then. My nut-brown maid, he’d called her, for yes, her curls had been the color of a hazelnut. Her face fresh and rosy. And when her eyes met his, she’d caught a hint of his joy for life, and his wildness.
No more.
She seated herself on the edge of her bed and once again went over the encounter in the moonlight. The bandit had resembled Jamie, yes. But had that been his voice?
Nay, surely not.
Jamie Houghton’s voice was something she could not forget. Soft in its wooing. Musical with laughter. A purr in her ear when they…
No, do not think of that.
The highwayman’s voice had been bold and rough. Gravelly. Nothing like Jamie’s.
But…
The words he had spoken there before he rode away…
Well, because ye ask so politely.
Those were Jamie Houghton’s words, right out of his mouth.
Kiss me, Jamie.
Aye, because ye ask so politely…
Laughter had accompanied those words then. Gentle teasing, the product of love.
A thought struck her, hitting hard. If that had been Jamie out on the moor tonight, if he had by miracle or black magic returned from the dead, surely his family would know. He would not fail to see them, if he’d returned.
All she had to do was go to the Crosskeys, and discover whether her heart argued a truth, or a lie.