“In the Americas, I can be what I please—no one would raise an eyebrow were I to set up as a wealthy horse-dealer in Boston or Virginia. But Jack Hal is too wel -known in England as a highwayman to be anything else.” He turned to face her, taking her hands in his. “Another lucky strike and I wil have enough gold to keep me honest for the rest of my life.”
“Take me to the Americas with you.” Her words were a whisper in the darkness.
“You…what?”
“Take me with you,” she repeated more firmly this time.
“I wil not be a burden on you. I have a few pounds saved.
They wil pay my passage with some to spare. And I have some knowledge of business dealings that might come in useful. After al , I have been an innkeeper al my life. I wil make sure your customers do not rob you.”
“You have a life here, a family, a good livelihood that wil be yours one day.” He gestured at the dark wal s that surrounded them. “You cannot want to leave al this, al you have here, and for what? For the uncertain life of an outlaw in a far away country, a country that is barely civilized?”
“I do not want to stay here, to be trapped as my mother was trapped, serving rabbit stew and ale to coarse, drunken ploughmen with one hand and fighting off their lecherous advances with the other. In the Americas, I can at least hope for something better.”
“You want to leave England forever?” Only direst necessity had impel ed him to book a passage across the seas. Surely Bess would not wil ingly toss away her past, as he had been forced to do? “To leave everything you have ever known behind?”
Her hand wound into his. “I wil not be leaving you behind.”
“I am only a man. There are plenty more in England better than I am.” He would not give up so much for a woman. Not even for a woman like Bess.
“But none who make me feel so alive. None that I like as wel as I like you.” Her words were a velvet whisper of temptation.
“You hardly know me.”
“I know that you are a good man.”
Her words proved how little she knew of him. His own mother had disowned him, and his father would turn in his grave to see him take to the road as a highwayman. She had made the decision for him. “I cannot take you with me.”
“Please.”
The offer pressed against his temples like the threat of a loaded gun. It was so tempting to give in to the danger, to take her away with him, to take with him a bit of home to cling to in a strange land. He screwed his eyes shut in the darkness, fighting the dangerous lure. “I cannot.” Bess deserved more than to be dragged into exile with him. “Or rather, I wil not. I have not yet sunk that low.”
“I see.” Her voice was curt, her words short and sharp.
“You wil take my innocence while you stay under my father’s roof, but you wil not saddle yourself with me for any longer.”
“You know that is not true.” For some reason, it was important to him that she understand his hesitation, that she know why he was refusing her company even though he would have given the world to be able to accept it. He took her into his arms, pressing her naked body close to his own. “It is one thing to seduce a beautiful and wil ing woman into my bed. It is quite another matter to steal her away from her home and family so that she wil never see them again.”
“Even if she wants to be stolen?”
He sighed. “Even then.”
She pul ed away from him. “I had not thought highwaymen would have so many scruples.”
Missing her closeness, he shrugged. “We are a strange breed.”
“Come back and see me before you go leave England forever,” she wheedled, as soft as butter now. “Give me one last chance to change your mind.”
“I wil not take you with me, Bess,” he warned her. His mind was not so easily changed.
“Then come to kiss me goodbye.”
That much, at least, he could promise her. “In four days, then, I wil come to say farewel . Three nights before my ship is due to sail, I wil come to say goodbye.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
Hunched in his dark corner in the corridor outside the stranger’s room, Tim permitted himself a smal smile of utter triumph. He’d known something was up when he’d spied Bess leaving her room and making her way to another part of the inn – a part she had no business to be in when night had fal en. Whore that she was, he knew she was creeping through the night to visit her lover. He could almost have stabbed her through the heart for her unfaithfulness to his devotion. Instead, he had fol owed her to catch her out in her sinning.
Thanks to her whoring nature and his sharp hearing, he now had al the information he needed to get his revenge on the stranger who had tried to steal his Bess away from him. He could hardly believe his luck. The stranger was none other than Jack Hal , a highwayman and a robber, and one who deserved to swing twenty times over for his crimes.
Oh, the perversity of women. Bess, his lovely Bess, had been spreading her legs for a common thief.
He, Tim, would be the one to make sure that Jack Hal paid for his crimes with his life. And he knew just how to go about it. The local magistrate was a rough man, and he hated gentlemen of the road with a passion. Like as not, he would hang Jack Hal from the nearest tree and ask questions afterward.
His boots in his hands, Tim crept down the stairs in his stockings, tiptoeing on the very edge of the stairs to stop them from squeaking. If he walked al the rest of the night, he would be at the squire’s manor by mid-morning.
He’d be missed for sure as soon as day broke, but there was no help for it. A brutal whipping would be the least of his punishments when he returned to the inn, but not even the thought of the cruel whip biting into the soft flesh of his back was enough to stop him. Not when he had vengeance on his mind.
He would brave even the vicious hand of the head ostler on a whip to make Bess his. Forever.
Once the stranger was hanging in chains at a crossroads, his eyes pecked out by crows and his dry bones rattling in the wind, Bess would need a comforting shoulder to lay her head on. He would wipe away her tears and soothe her wounded soul. In return, she would fal in love with him and he would take her to the forest and make love to her in the exact place the stranger had taken her. He would wipe out those memories with ones of his own making.
If she showed herself sufficiently grateful to him, he might even marry her and wipe away the stain of shame she had brought on herself through submitting to the stranger’s lewd embraces.
Yes, he would definitely make her his wife. As her husband, he would inherit the inn when her father died.
Such a dowry would help him overlook her sluttish behavior.
Once she was his wife, he would severely punish any tendencies to sin that he espied in her. He would be her conscience and her guide, and would lead her back onto the narrow path of righteousness. Once she was his wife, there would be no more smiling at strangers and enticing them with her sparkling eyes and her generous bosom. She would be as silent and demure as befitted a virtuous wife.
His wife.
Even when the night grew as black as the devil’s heart and he could barely make out the pale ribbon of road beneath his feet, even when he wanted to drop to the ground with weariness and to ease the ache in his blistering feet, the thought of Bess as his wife kept his stumbling onward.
Jack Hal would die, and then Bess would be his wife.
From the casement window, Bess braided her hair as she watched Jack ride off into the early morning light. He would come back for her. He had promised, and she had no choice but to believe him. If she thought he was going to play her false, she would run mad.
Deliberately, she shut her mother’s warnings from her mind. She was not her mother, and Jack was not a man like her father. He would come back to see her, even if only to kiss her goodbye before he sailed to the Americas – without her.
Even if he did not relent and let her come with him, she would survive. There would be no child from their liaison – the tel tale smears of blood that stained her thighs this morning were a welcome confirmation that she was not breeding. No child to force her into wedding a man from the vil age, bribed into accepting her with the promise of a large dowry.
She wiped a stray tear away from her cheek with the back of her hand. She would not cry over Jack – crying never did anyone any good. Besides, he would return as he had promised. There was nothing to cry over.
Nothing, indeed, to stop her from saving her pennies and booking her own passage to the New World.
Jack had long since disappeared into the fog of the early morning, but stil she lingered at the casement window, gazing out at the road he had taken. A man could make a new life for himself in a new country, so why could a woman not do the same? The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea. It would be an adventure, and her life so far had been singularly lacking in adventure.
She turned away from the window and pul ed on her gown with a grimace, her mind already skipping ahead to the mounds of sausages she would have to fry today. In the Americas, she would leave innkeeping behind for good.
With an unaccustomedly bril iant smile on her face for so early in the morning, she skipped downstairs to start on the sausages.
Jack wheeled out in front of the lumbering coach, a pistol held high in one hand. “Stand and deliver.” Pul ing tightly on the reins with the other, he made his horse rear up, her front hooves slashing the air in front of her viciously.
Unnecessary, to be sure, but theatrical enough to plant fear in the stoutest coachman’s heart.
Being a highwayman, he had discovered, was mostly about having nerves of steel and the ability to outface an elderly coachman who had no desire to tangle with an armed and dangerous robber. A decent horse with a good fast gal op and a pair of wicked-looking pistols, and any fool could make his fortune on the road.
His luck was in tonight. The coachman pul ed his horses to a halt immediately, pul ed a handkerchief from his pocket and waved it in the air as a token of surrender.
“Don’t shoot,” he cried, his voice breaking into sobs. “I’ve a wife and three daughters at home who’l starve without me.”
He tipped his hat to the man. “Don’t do anything foolish and I’l not harm you.”
The coachman was effusive in his thanks. “I’l do whatever you say, I promise. Besides, the old tartar in the coach has it coming to her, if you ask me.” The last he said in a low aggrieved mutter and fol owed it with a disgusted spit on to the grass.
“What is it, Jenkins?” A querulous voice came from inside the coach. “Why have you stopped here?”
Jack leaned over and wrenched open the door of the coach. Inside sat a very large woman, dressed in a monstrous purple and gold gown and wearing several pounds of gold chains looped around her neck, and three diamond rings on her fat fingers. Across from her was a pale, thin gentleman with a wispy goatee. “I fear, madam, you have met with a gentleman of the road. Your valuables, if you please.”
“A highwayman?” She gave a shriek that would have woken the dead and prodded the man opposite her with a fat finger. “Wel then, Hutton, what are you going to do about it, then? What are you going to do to save me from this vicious robber?”
Hutton coughed, patting his chest with a shaking hand.
“He has a pistol, ma’am.”
“I don’t care if he has twenty pistols. Are you going to sit there and let me be robbed in my very own coach?”
Jack doffed his hat. “Your purses, if you please. Hand them out the window.”
The woman glared at him. “I shal do no such thing.”
“And your necklaces. Several of them look very fine.”
She glared at him and did not move. “Certainly not.”
“I begin to lose my patience, madam. Coachman, cut loose the horses.”
Her face paled and her manner became somewhat less certain. “You would not abandon us here, in the middle of nowhere.”
“I most certainly would. Your purses now, if you please.”
Hutton handed over his first, the leather worn shiny with use. A couple of smal coins jingled disconsolately at the bottom.
“Yours too, my good woman.”
Her eyes nearly popped out of her face at the insult, but she dug a fat purse out of the pocket in her skirt and handed it over.
He flicked it open, grinning at the profusion of gold inside. That was more like it. “Your necklaces,” he said, as he tucked it away safely into his waistcoat.