He was silent a bit, and Melisande watched the hills turn purple in the fading light.
Vale finally said dreamily, “I remember he had a big trunk, leather-bound with brass. He’d had it specially made. Inside were dozens of compartments, all lined in felt, very clever. He had boxes and glass vials for various specimens, and different-sized presses for preserving leaves and flowers. He took it apart once, and you should’ve seen the hardened soldiers, some who’d been in the army decades and didn’t turn a hair at anything, standing and gawking at his trunk like little boys at the fair.”
“That must’ve been nice,” Melisande said softly.
“It was. It was.” He sounded far away in the gathering darkness.
“Perhaps he will show it to me when we visit.”
“He can’t,” he said from the gloom on the other side of the carriage. “It was destroyed when we were attacked by the Indians. Smashed to bits, all his specimens dragged out and scattered, completely ruined.”
“How awful! Poor man. It must’ve been terrible when he saw what had been done to his collection.”
There was silence from the other side of the carriage.
“Jasper?” She wished she could see his face.
“He never saw.” Vale’s voice came abruptly from the darkness. “His wounds . . . He never made it back to the scene of the massacre. I didn’t either. I only heard what had happened to his trunk months later.”
“I’m sorry.” Melisande gazed blindly out the black window. She wasn’t quite sure what she apologized for—the broken trunk, the lost artifacts, the massacre itself, or the fact that neither man survived entirely the same as before. “What’s he look like, Sir Alistair? Is he young? Old?”
“A bit older than me, perhaps.” Vale hesitated. “You should know—”
But she interrupted him, leaning forward. “Look.” She’d thought she’d seen movement outside the window.
A shot sounded, crashingly loud in the night air. Melisande flinched. Suchlike woke with a little scream, and Mouse jumped to his feet and barked.
A loud, hoarse voice came from without. “Stand and deliver!”
The carriage shuddered to a halt.
“Shit,” Vale said.
JASPER HAD BEEN worried about this very thing since night had begun to fall. They were in prime territory for a highway robbery. He didn’t much mind the loss of his purse, but he was damned if he’d let anyone touch Melisande.
“What—?” she began, but he reached across and laid his hand gently over her mouth. She was a smart woman. She immediately held still. She drew Mouse into her lap and wrapped her hand around his muzzle.
The little lady’s maid had her fist stuffed into her mouth, her eyes wide and round. She didn’t make a sound, but Jasper pressed a finger across his own lips. Although he had no idea if the women could see him adequately in the dark carriage.
Why hadn’t the coachman tried to make a run for it? The answer came to Jasper even as he ran through his options. The coachman had already admitted he didn’t know the terrain well. He’d probably been afraid of overturning the carriage in the dark and killing them all.
“Come out o’ there,” a second man called.
So there were at least two, probably more. He had two footmen and two coachmen, along with two men on horses, one of them Pynch. Six men in all. But how many robbers?
“D’you hear me? Get out o’ there!” the second voice shouted. One would be holding a gun on the coachman to kee koacontp him from moving the carriage. Another would be covering the outriders. A third would be in charge of relieving them of any valuables—that is, if there were only three. If there were more—
“Dammit! Come out or I’m coming in, and I’ll be shooting when I do!”
Melisande’s maid moaned, low and fearful, Mouse struggled, but his dear wife held him firmly and was silent. A smart robber would start killing the servants outside one by one to force them to emerge. But this highwayman might just be stupid enough to—
The carriage door was flung open, and a man holding a pistol leaned into the carriage. Jasper grabbed his gun arm and pulled hard. The gun went off, shattering the opposite carriage window. The maid screamed. The robber half fell into the carriage. Jasper twisted the pistol away from him.
“Don’t look,” he said to Melisande, and slammed the pistol grip down on the man’s temple, shattering the bone. He did it quickly again, three more times, vicious and hard, just to make sure the man was dead, then dropped the pistol. He hated handling guns.
From outside came a shout and then a gunshot.
“Damn. Get down,” he ordered Melisande and the girl. A bullet could blow right through the wood of the carriage. She didn’t protest and lay across her seat with the maid and the dog.
Running footsteps came nearer, and Jasper moved in front of the women, bracing himself.
“My lord!” Pynch’s broad face peered into the carriage door. “Are you safe, my lord? Are the women—?”
“Yes, I think so.” Jasper turned to Melisande, running his hands over her face and hair in the dark. “Are you all right, my dearest love?”
“Y-yes.” She straightened immediately, her back as straight as ever, and a pang tore at his heart. If ever she were hurt, if ever he could not protect her . . .
The maid was trembling violently. Melisande let go of the dog and pulled the girl into her arms, patting her back comfortingly. “It’s all right. Lord Vale and Mr. Pynch have kept us safe.”
Mouse jumped to the floor of the carriage and growled at the dead robber.
Pynch cleared his throat. “We’ve captured one of the highwaymen, my lord. The other galloped away.”
Jasper looked at him. Gunpowder blackened half of Pynch’s face. Jasper grinned. His valet had always been an excellent shot.
“Help me get this one out of the carriage,” he told Pynch. “Melisande, please stay here until we are sure it’s safe.”
She nodded bravely, her chin up. “Of course.”
And even though Pynch and the maid were watching, Jasper couldn’t help leaning over to kiss her hard. It had all happened so fast. If things had turned out a little differently, he might’ve lost her.
Jasper scrambled from the carriage, eager to meet the man who’d put his sweet wife in danger. First, though, he helped Pynch pull the kyncmbldead robber out of the carriage. He hoped Melisande hadn’t looked too closely. He’d crushed the robber’s cheekbone and temple.
Mouse jumped down from the carriage.
Jasper straightened. “Where is he?”
“Over here, my lord.” Pynch gestured to a tree by the side of the road where several footmen stood over a recumbent figure. Mouse trailed behind them, sniffing the ground.
Jasper nodded and asked as they walked to the group, “Anyone shot?”
“Bob the footman has a graze on his arm,” Pynch reported. “No one else was hit.”
“You’ve checked?” In the dark, with all the excitement, sometimes a man could be shot and not even know it.
But Pynch had been in the army as well. “Yes, my lord.”
Jasper nodded. “Good man. Have a footman light some more lanterns. Light drives away all manner of vermin.”
“Yes, my lord.” Pynch headed back to the carriage.
“And what have we here?” Jasper asked as he came on the group of footmen.
“One of the robbers, my lord,” Bob said.
He held a cloth against his upper right arm, but the pistol in his hand was steady and pointed at their prisoner. Pynch arrived with a lantern, and they all looked down at the robber. He wasn’t much more than a child, a boy not yet twenty, his chest bleeding profusely. Mouse sniffed the boy, then lost interest and urinated on the tree.
“He’s still alive?” Jasper asked.
“Just barely,” Pynch said impassively. It must’ve been his shot that had brought the boy off his horse, but Pynch didn’t show any pity.
Then again, this boy had held a gun on them. He could’ve shot Melisande. A horrible image of Melisande lying where the boy was rose up in Jasper’s mind. Melisande with her chest blown open. Melisande struggling to draw air into shattered lungs.
Jasper turned away. “Leave him.”
“No.”
He looked up and saw Melisande, standing outside the carriage despite his explicit orders to stay inside.
“Madam?”
She didn’t back down, though his tone was chilly. “Have him brought with us, Jasper.”
He stared at her, illuminated by lantern light, looking ethereal and fragile. Too fragile. He said gently, “He could’ve killed you, my heart.”
“But he didn’t.”
She might look fragile, but her core was made of iron.
He nodded, his gaze still fixed on her. “Wrap him in a blanket, Pynch, and take him up on your horse with you.”
Melisande frowned. “The carriage—”
“I won’t have him near you.”
She looked at him and must’ve seen she wasn’t getting her way in this. She nodded.
Jasper glanced at Pynch. “You can bandage his wound when we get to the inn. I don’t like lingering in this spot any longer than we have to.”
“Yes, my lord,” Pynch said.
Then Jasper walked to his lady wife and took her arm, warm and alive beneath his fingers. He bent his head and murmured in her ear, “I do this for you, my heart. Only for you.”
She looked up at him, her face a pale moon in the darkness. “You do it for yourself as well. It’s not right to let him die alone, no matter what he did.”
He didn’t bother arguing. Let her think he worried about such matters if she wished. He led her to their carriage and bundled her inside, closing the door. Even if the highwayman lived a few hours more, he could no longer hurt Melisande, and that was all that mattered in the end.
MELISANDE SIGHED WHEN the door closed to her inn room later that evening. Vale always acquired two rooms at the inns they stayed in, and tonight was no different. Despite the excitement of the near robbery, despite the dying robber—who’d been carried into a back room—despite the fact that the little inn was nearly full, Melisande still found herself in a solitary room.
She wandered to the little fireplace, piled high with coal, thanks to a generous tip to the innkeeper’s wife. The flames danced, but her fingers remained cold. Did the servants talk about their mistress and master taking separate rooms so soon after their marriage? Melisande felt vaguely ashamed, as if she’d failed in some way as a wife. Mouse leapt onto the foot of the bed and turned about three times before lying down. He sighed.
At least Suchlike never mentioned the sleeping arrangements. The little maid dressed and undressed her with unfailing cheerfulness. Although she’d been hard-pressed to smile this evening after their near robbery. She’d still been shaking from the shock, and she’d lost all her merry chatter. Melisande had taken pity on the girl and sent her down early to eat her supper.
Which left Melisande all alone. She hadn’t much appetite for the dinner the round innkeeper’s wife had served. The boiled chicken had looked delicious enough, but it was hard to eat knowing a young boy was dying in the back of the inn. She’d excused herself early and come upstairs instead. Now she wished she’d stayed in the dining room Vale had reserved for them. She shook her head. No use remaining awake. She couldn’t go back down now that she’d undressed, and that was that. Melisande pulled back the bedclothes from the sturdy inn bed, relieved to see they looked clean, and climbed in. She pulled the sheets to her nose and snuffed out the light. Then she watched the firelight flicker on the ceiling until her eyelids grew heavy.
Her thoughts floated and drifted. Vale’s bright eyes and the look in them when he’d savagely pulled the first highwayman into the carriage. Boiled chicken and the dumplings Cook had made when she was a child. How many more days they’d spend traveling rutted roads in the swaying carriage. When they might cross in kmign sto Scotland. Her thoughts scattered, and she began to sink into sleep.
