The Landlord's Black-Eyed Daughter (12 page)

Blinking furiously, Elizabeth saw the highwayman veer away.

Walter fired.

Horse and rider abruptly parted.

“He's down!” Walter exulted. The carriage lurched to a halt. He and Lawrence leapt from the chaise.

The air appeared to breed riders everywhere, all racing toward the fallen highwayman.

Elizabeth slumped against the seat, gulping in the acrid odor of sulfur. Her heart slammed against her bodice. She heard the excited babble of voices, the labored breathing of the carriage horses, the jangle of their harnesses. What if Rand had been the highwayman? What if she had watched Walter kill him?

Dorothea eased up from the floorboards. “Is it over? Has anyone been hurt? I pray the blackguard's still alive so that he can lead us to our… your money.”

'Tis Rand,
Elizabeth thought.
They killed his partner and he came after Walter for revenge.

But how could Rand know that Walter was escorting them home?

Her chest felt so constricted she could scarcely breathe. The downed highwayman must be Rand. Earlier, she had experienced a premonition, just like her Aunt Lilith was always talking about.

Elizabeth saw Walter stride toward her. “Do you know the man's identity?” she asked. “You… you didn't kill him, did you?”

“I merely grazed him, my dear. He'll be coming 'round any moment. Then we'll be able to question him.” Walter grasped her hand. “Come with me. Perhaps you'll be able to identify the thieving bastard. After all, you were as close to him as we are to each other right now.”

Closer,
she thought.
Much, much closer.

“I'm afraid to look,” she cried. “I mean, I'm much too overcome. My heart couldn't stand any more excitement.”

“I'll have a look at him,” said Dorothea, gathering up her rumpled skirts and bounding from the opposite side of the carriage. “That man has a few things to answer for.”

“My dear fragile Elizabeth.” Walter lifted her down. “Never fear. You'll be safe with me.”

Yes, she thought. Perhaps she should know. It couldn't be Rand. And if it was, she could save him. “No, he's not the one,” she would say. “You must be mistaken.”

But any reprieve would be short-lived. Walter ruled the Dales. This wasn't London. A trial, if there was a trial, would be brief, orchestrated by Lord Stafford. He would surely hang Rand, with or without her identification.

She stumbled upon the ruts in the road. Ahead, torches pinpointed the location. Darkened figures, like silhouettes upon a wall, circled the fallen man. From a far distance, the peal of church bells chimed the hour. Midnight.

Smoke rose like wraiths from the flickering lights. The torches lit up the dark as they snaked down an invisible hill, bringing her… bringing her… what?

Her surroundings seemed to recede into a vague netherworld, and she trembled. She remembered the praying monk inside Walter's garden cell, and she realized that clergymen carried the torches down the hill—a long line of cowl-clad monks.

How could she possibly know this? A feeling of dread, unlike anything she had ever experienced before, immobilized her. She swayed against Walter.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “There, there,” he soothed, his arm encompassing her waist.

She felt disoriented, uncertain of time and place. She also feared she might faint.

“There, there,” Walter repeated.

Elizabeth heard him, but his words didn't register. Her mind was numb with horror. She couldn't look at the fallen man. She knew exactly what she would see. What she had plotted to see. What she would see forever more in her nightmares.

Walter drew her forward. The circle of men parted, giving way. The torches wavered, then steadied.

Elizabeth gazed down at the body. She screamed. And screamed. And screamed.

***

Gradually emerging from her fog of shock and terror, Elizabeth heard Walter and her parents conversing in the hallway beyond her bedroom.

“I don't know what happened to her, the poor thing,” said Papa. “This is so unlike Bess.”

“Perhaps,” Walter said, “she was overcome by his monstrous size, or his cursing.”

Dorothea laughed. “Elizabeth has never been squeamish, Lord Stafford. I've heard her swear like a stable hand, so I cannot understand why the sight of the highwayman would distress her so. Even if she recognized him as the man who robbed her, she hardly seemed all that upset following the initial robbery. Why would she suddenly turn into such a… well, female?”

“She was behaving like a female even before she looked down upon his features, Mrs. Wyndham. I suspect Elizabeth craved my protection, which is how it should be. The weaker sex must be defended to the last man.”

“Quite right, m'lord. While we were cowering together on the carriage floor, Elizabeth whispered in my ear. She said that you were her salvation. Those were her very words.”

Elizabeth wanted to shove those very words back down her stepmother's throat, but she was afraid to open her eyes. She might see something horrible in what she had always assumed to be her safe, comfortable bedroom.

I am going mad,
she thought.
They shall lock me away, and I shall be alone with my imagination and that awful thing.

She finally raised her lashes when she heard the door creak open.

Her father entered with a sleeping potion.

“No, Papa, I don't want to sleep. I might dream about it.”

“What? Please, Bess, tell me what has distressed you.”

She slumped back onto her pillows. How could she explain? How could she tell her father about something that hadn't even been there? Perhaps the torch lights had unnerved her. Perhaps her imagination, primed by thoughts of Midsummer's Eve, had deceived her. And yet, even now, she knew that she had seen a body sprawled upon the ground. It had been clothed in a scarlet cloak, or maybe a surcoat—she could not be certain. Nor could she tell whether the scarlet color emanated from the man's clothing or the man's blood.

Elizabeth was only certain of three things. The man's black hair and black beard, and the fact that his head had been severed from his body.

August–November 1787

With a heavy sigh, Elizabeth examined the words she had just penned:

You have been mine before,

How long ago I may not know,

But just when at that swallow's soar

Your neck turned so,

Some veil did fall—I knew it all of yore.

As she replaced her quill and paper inside her writing box, she wished some veil truly would fall. She often felt overwhelmed by loneliness, as if Rand had died rather than disappeared. While she realized full well that these feelings were out of proportion to reality, logic could not mend the gaping hole in her life.

My logical Bess.

At first her memories of Rand had consumed her. The lush, golden moon. The scent of wood smoke. The crackle of the bonfires. The carnal screech of the fiddle. Now her memories comforted her, even though she sometimes believed that Rand had been conjured up from a dream.

More recently, she had been plagued with dreams of another kind, so wrenching that she had begun to dread the night. Upon awakening, she couldn't remember their content, only the emotions they evoked. She was fairly certain her dreams weren't about the headless man, for she had attributed that apparition to Midsummer's Eve and her Aunt Lilith's influential tales. So why did she experience such abject fear? Why did she perceive a ghastly horror so intense she felt hollow inside?

Nay, not hollow. Drained.

With a sigh, Elizabeth locked her writing box. Then she stood and brushed the dirt from the back of her skirt. She yearned to stay, but the peel tower was two miles from the inn and she had promised to serve Lord Stafford pork chops from a slaughtered ground squirrel.

Pig,
not ground squirrel.

According to the locals, a woolbird was a sheep and a ground squirrel was a pig and a three-legged mare was nothing more than a gallows.

God's teeth! She was so tired of the Dales, so tired of the “exotic” names applied to animals and instruments of death.

Furthermore, she didn't want to serve Walter anything, especially herself. After formally proposing marriage, he had talked at length about traveling to London for their honeymoon.

She desperately needed to visit London, but not with Walter Stafford.

She desperately needed to pay Charles Beresford a visit!

Since the Gentleman Giant's execution, her writing had been practically nonexistent.

Zak Turnbull, not the Gentleman Giant,
Elizabeth amended. Zak Turnbull had refused to reveal the identity or the whereabouts of his companion, yet he had shouted his own name just before the noose tightened around his thick neck.

On the day of the hanging, Elizabeth had developed a blinding headache, so painful she had “forfeited the festive event.” Father and Dorothea had been properly sympathetic, but Walter had kept silent, his mahogany brows cresting. Afterwards, Elizabeth had sought out Tim, her ostler. According to Tim, the condemned man had shouted: “Don't forget me name, Stafford. 'Tis Zak Turnbull, an' I'll haunt ye 'til yer own bloody death.”

Now Turnbull swung from his cage atop Roova Crag.

Rand had apparently left the Dales. Nobody had sighted him, not even at the hanging, much to Walter's disappointment and chagrin. Certain the Quiet Companion would attend, Walter had posted a dozen armed sentries.

Elizabeth's thoughts returned to London. Beresford had not posted her eight hundred pounds and the mortgage deadline rapidly approached. Surrounded by the accouterments of wealth, her publisher might not have believed that his successful authoress was penniless. She had sent him another letter, her third.

Walter had repeated his suspicions that her account rendering looked fraudulent, but he was wrong. He had to be wrong.

If she traveled to London, she might not feel so trapped by memories and melancholia. After retrieving her money, she might even recover from this accursed inertia.

Elizabeth walked away from the peel tower, away from the coin purse still rotting beneath the dirt. The sky was an explosion of purple, lilac, red, amber, and orange, while the cottony streaks of clouds had deepened to black. She turned her face upwards, hoping to catch the colors on her cheeks and feel them upon her closed eyelids. Behind her, the jagged wall cast its cooling shadow. She sensed the tower's loneliness and its isolation, which matched her own. Opening her eyes, she spied a man striding across the valley. He walked with a limp.

“Rand!” she called.

He paused and looked in her direction before hurrying on.

Hiking her skirts, Elizabeth chased him until he vanished into the gathering darkness. She had not seen his features clearly, but she was almost certain the man had been Rand Remington.

Shortly thereafter, the robberies resumed.

***

A coach marked the Midnight Flyer rattled into the inn's yard. Vaguely, Elizabeth noted that all was hustle and bustle. Tim and several other grooms led horses to and from the rows of parked carriages. Coachmen blew their horns. Guards unloaded trunks and passengers. Servants lit the yard lamps.

Elizabeth waited impatiently for Walter, who was questioning the coachman of the Flyer, robbed on its last run. Walter was duly distressed over the presence of yet another highwayman, but Elizabeth didn't believe he had connected the latest crime surge with the Quiet Companion.

“I hope Lord Stafford catches the fiend before our ball,” said Dorothea, fluttering her hands. “Or perhaps the inconsiderate brute will suspend his activities for that one special occasion.”

Elizabeth disguised her grimace within a discreet cough. The Harvest Ball was the White Hart's annual subscription ball, held the first week in October, and Rand, or whoever, had successfully eluded Walter's patrols for weeks. Dorothea had porridge for brains if she thought Rand, or whoever, was philanthropic enough to take a breather.

“We'll capture him, wife,” Lawrence soothed. “Unlike the Gentleman Giant and his Quiet Companion, this one is careless and attacks far too often. Last week it was three robberies in one night. Sometimes he just tosses his ill-gotten gains along the side of the road, and we suspect he hands over all coins and bank notes to the locals, especially those in need. Obviously, this clod-pate is too stupid to realize that the point in robbing somebody is to enrich oneself.”

Elizabeth said nothing. If Rand was the highwayman, as she believed, he was probably making his presence known in order to bait Lord Stafford. Several times she had ridden out alone, hoping to find Rand, but she had found only rain showers, cold upon her face.

After Walter had finished, he and the Wyndhams rode toward Wyndham Manor. Walter was negotiating with Papa to pay the mortgage on Wyndham Hall and renovate the dilapidated manor house. Should Elizabeth wed Walter, the family's entire debt would be wiped out.

It might be nice to have Wyndham Manor brought back to life, Elizabeth mused. When Father had accrued his gambling debts, the manor had been put under the care of trustees. She had been born there, and her mother was buried there, but the Wyndhams had vacated it long before her novels had begun to show a profit.

She had a sudden thought. Suppose she agreed to wed Walter? Only she would insist that a clause be inserted into the agreement. If she paid Lord Stafford back within ninety days, the engagement would be null and void.

Why would Walter agree? He would. She knew he would, especially since he had firmly stated that Beresford was a cheat. Walter's pride would disallow any chance that he might be mistaken. Besides, he oft boasted that he enjoyed a challenge.

She would visit London directly after the Harvest Ball and reclaim her eight hundred pounds. No, her entire fortune. Then she would return to the Dales under armed escort, repay Walter, and that would be the end of it.

Belatedly dismounting, Elizabeth saw that Walter, Papa and Dorothea had lit lanterns. The eerie glow illuminated the outside of the tree-shrouded house.

“I'll be along presently,” she said, still thinking about her scheme. It was not unlike the move on a chessboard but she had never lost at chess. Her father had taught her the rudiments of the game, whereupon she had beaten him soundly the very first time they played.

“Don't wander a great distance, dearest,” Walter warned. “Remember. This is not far from the very spot where you were robbed.”

“I'm not likely to forget, my lord, and I can take care of myself.”

“I recall the last time you wandered off.” Lawrence's brow furrowed. “We found you screaming among the Fountains Abbey ruins. I thought we'd never calm you down.”

“I was ten years old at the time,” Elizabeth said, unable to keep the irritation from her voice.

“Some patterns of behavior never change, daughter. I've seen it in great generals who—”

“I assure you, Papa. I won't wander off.”

Still irritated, she watched Walter and her parents disappear inside the manor house. Their lights drifted through the windows from room to room, reminding her of the fox fire she'd seen over bogs and brakes and water meadows. Such lights were known as “corpse candles.” Since the flames appeared at the level of a raised human hand, a ghost was said to walk invisible, using the candles to light its way. The sight of corpse candles was said to presage death. A servant had seen such a light just before Barbara Wyndham's violent fall.

Abruptly, Elizabeth turned away from the flickering lanterns. “Where are you?” she whispered. “Why do you hide from me?” She tried to penetrate the darkness, to somehow mingle her thoughts with Rand's. Perhaps she might will him to come to her.

Walter appeared, instead. “Do join us, dearest,” he said, taking her by the arm. “This involves you, too.”

The interior, never spacious, seemed even smaller. Due to its tiny rooms, Wyndham Manor reminded Elizabeth of a labyrinth rather than a residence, and as soon as she walked through the doorway she felt suffocated.

“Do you enjoy being back in your childhood home?” Walter asked, a smile stretching his thin lips.

Somehow, Elizabeth managed a nod.

While Walter and the others assessed the years of damage, she climbed a staircase, then pushed open the door to a bedroom. She had been born in this room, which smelled of cold and mildew. Although she knew her mother had died here, she could remember very little about Barbara beyond the funeral and the watchers seated in the shadows, and she had to admit that Barbara herself might have been conjured up out of shadows. There was a portrait of Barbara inside the White Hart's parlor. A quilt she had sewn adorned Elizabeth's bed. And there were flashes of memories. A gentle hand caressing. A melodic voice reading bedtime stories. A perfumed handkerchief.

Elizabeth spat on her own handkerchief. She then rubbed vigorously at the dirt-encrusted window pane until she had clarified a small portion of glass. Her mother's grave was out there. Rand was out there, as well, and tonight she must find him. Motionless, she allowed the room's darkness and the night's darkness to wash over her. She must tap into Rand's mind, into some sort of consciousness that linked them together. She sensed the time for their reunion was at hand. She had sensed it all evening, which was why she had waited so impatiently for Walter.

Squeezing her eyes shut, Elizabeth concentrated. Finally one word came to her.
Abbey.

***

Built in the twelfth century, Fountains Abbey had been inhabited by Cistercian monks. It was located in the Skell Valley, which consisted of dense woods, uncertain terrain, and numerous springs. The abbey had fallen into decay, but Elizabeth thought its ruins looked impressive.

She walked across the tangled grass toward the cluster of buildings. Stone outlines from the chancel's trefoil arches and lancet windows created a chiaroscuro against the distant swell of the valley. An inky stain of ivy spread out across the abbey walls and overlaid the ragged rooftops. A lone church tower thrust above the other buildings like a fist brandished at the sky. The stars and moon were obscured by clouds, and the atmosphere was oppressively thick.

Entering a long vaulted cellar, she halted, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. At one time, part of the cellar had been used as the Cistercians' frater and she could visualize the white-habited monks drifting toward their dining tables. Only the renewed rustling of her gown and the distant murmuring of the River Skell disturbed the cellar's silence. Fountains Abbey possessed a tranquility which she attributed to the hallowed ground, or the souls of the dead monks.

As she neared the edge of the cellar, she heard her own footsteps, fluttering like birds caught in a net. She halted again. Her nape prickled. “Rand?”

“Turn around.”

She obeyed, and saw him step out from behind one of the columns. “I knew you were here,” she said, running toward him. “I felt you calling to me.”

Rand pocketed his pistol. “Sorry, Bess, but I wasn't thinking of you, nor anything else. I was asleep.” He enfolded her in a quick embrace before pulling away. “You tried hard enough to find me, haunting the roads until I considered robbing you again, merely to discourage your persistence. Why can't you let me be?”

“If you truly wanted to be left alone, you would not have returned to the Dales.”

“I've a score to settle with Stafford.”

What about me? Did you think to come back because of me? Even once?

Immediately, she realized that her silent queries were silly and senseless. What did she expect him to say? Yes, I thought about you when I ran for my life. I thought about you when they were choking the life from my cousin. You were in my thoughts, Bess, night and day. If Rand had answered thus, she would have regarded him as an insincere gallant.

By mutual, unspoken consent, they left the cellar and walked among the ruins. A small portion of moonlight filtered through the clouds, enough so that Elizabeth could drink in the sight of Rand. She rested her arm upon his. They might have been a lord and his lady strolling through their gardens.