Folly's Reward Read online

  “A proper end for such a villain.”

  “‘Thither came ladies from all parts / To offer up close prisoners hearts / which he received as tribute due, / And made them yield up—’” Hal stopped and grinned. “Alas, it becomes just a little indelicate, Miss Drake.”

  She could see that he was teasing her. It left her a little lost, but she met the challenge with one of her own.

  “My father was a doctor. I am not naive, nor a shrinking violet. You cannot stop now.”

  He laughed. “‘And made them yield up love and honor, too.’ But only symbolically, we must assume, for the gallant Du Vall would have been in chains. Of course, he could have kissed them—if they cooperated.”

  Prudence hated her betraying high color. He must think her a bluenose. “Unless he could afford a private room off the jailer’s yard?”

  “Either way, he was hanged at Tyburn. Do you suppose I am one of his company, and a wanted man?”

  “I don’t care who you are, sir, as long as you’re not a danger to Bobby and me.”

  Prudence wished fervently that he had never come to Argyleshire and that he would go away soon.

  “Ah! But why should anything or anyone be a danger to you and a five-year-old boy, Miss Drake?”

  Fortunately she did not have to reply. A rattle of wheels echoed up the driveway. Mrs. MacEwen and her maid were returning from town with the shopping. Their gig stopped at the gate. Mrs. MacEwen smiled at Prudence as Mr. MacEwen came up to join them, but there was a genuine worry in her eyes.

  “We have a problem, Mr. MacEwen,” she said. She was avoiding Hal’s gaze. “That report about the ship from France that went down was, by the blessing of Providence, false. Not that I can think it right that our ships should visit France at all. Be that as it may, she was driven north by the storm, but she came into harbor three days ago. Battered and torn, Mr. MacEwen, but with all hands—and all passengers, not a one lost overboard.”

  “Did she?” Mr. MacEwen asked thoughtfully.

  Now everyone was looking at Hal. He leaned back against the gate and folded his arms across his chest.

  “How very awkward, to be sure,” he said. “In that case, where did I come from?”

  “Which is the very question that I would like answered, sir.” Mrs. MacEwen’s voice was edged with disappointment. She had fallen very completely for the handsome young stranger. “For unless you came from a shipwreck, it seems very ill-mannered to be found half drowned on the beach.”

  She whipped up her horse and drove on into the yard.

  “Alas,” Hal said with a quiet laugh. “‘Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows.’”

  Prudence glanced up at him. He seemed only amused by this disastrous news. How could he be so cavalier about it? She turned away to follow Mrs. MacEwen into the house.

  And it said absolutely nothing about him that he knew Shakespeare. Who wouldn’t recognize The Tempest?

  * * *

  “So, we have a conundrum,” Mr. MacEwen said with a considered look at his guest. “There are no other ships reported missing.”

  “‘This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod,’” Hal quoted lightly. “If I was not lost from that French ship, then how did I end up here?”

  Mr. MacEwen glanced down at the pistol in his hand. The beauty of it moved him as it always did, and this young fellow understood that, understood his passion for perfecting the craft, for inventing the ultimate improvement. He made up his mind in that instant.

  “Never mind, lad. We’ll get to the bottom of it soon enough. And in the meantime, how would you like to work for me on a permanent basis? You seem to have a very pretty knowledge of firearms. And though I’m supposed to be a retired man, and the pistols only a hobby now, I have some experimental work in hand that might interest you. There are some ideas about for a whole new mechanism that’ll make our flintlocks as outdated as the matchlock.”

  “I cannot commit to anything, Mr. MacEwen.” Hal was suddenly serious. “I know you will allow me that under the circumstances. But I will freely help you as long as I’m here.”

  His glance followed Prudence as she walked into the house. “Miss Drake is not too happy about my presence.”

  “You would not stay for one more day if I thought you were making her truly uncomfortable,” Mr. MacEwen said. “But don’t mind her, Hal. She’s just nervous about the lad.”

  “Would you think me impertinent if I ask why they are here? It seems a little unusual. I gather that Bobby is an orphan?”

  “Aye, poor lad. Prudence is all he has left, but for an old granny. I knew Miss Drake’s father, sir. We’re old family friends. She just takes the boy for a little holiday by the sea, away from the cailleach.”

  Hal raised a brow. And in that moment Mr. MacEwen knew with certainty what he had suspected from the start. This young fellow might be lost and bewildered as to his place in the world, but when he came into his senses, he was going to discover that it was a very high place indeed. Nobody but a lord, and one who had gone through the cruel rigors of an English public school, could raise one brow in quite such an insolent way while pretending it was merely curiosity.

  But Mr. MacEwen was not to be intimidated. “Cailleach,” he repeated. “Old woman, beldam, the lad’s grandmother. Miss Drake is in her employ, sir. There’s no mystery to it.”

  “No,” Hal said innocently. “I didn’t suppose for one moment that there was. Does Miss Drake have family of her own?”

  “She has one brother at sea and another in India, a sister who teaches school in Edinburgh and one married in Wiltshire. That’s all.”

  “Then her parents are not alive?”

  But Mr. MacEwen would give nothing else away. “No, they are not,” he said.

  And he began to talk about guns.

  * * *

  Mrs. MacEwen’s maid met Prudence in the hall. Her face was filled with honest concern.

  “I didn’t like to say anything in front of that Hal fellow, ma’am,” she said. “And I’ve not told Mr. or Mrs. MacEwen, not wanting to worry the decent bodies, but you asked me to keep out a weather eye and I thought I should tell you. A man has been in the village, a stranger to these parts. He wore a patch over one eye, like an old soldier or a villain. He asked after newcomers to the area, asked if anyone had seen an unfamiliar gentleman, but when it was mentioned that you were the only stranger here, he seemed to know your description already: yellow hair, hazel eyes, less pretty than some—and he had a complete portrayal of the boy.”

  “Oh, dear heavens!”

  Her heart seemed to stop in her breast. Prudence sat down.

  Months earlier than anyone would have thought possible, they were run to earth.

  * * *

  Bobby did not want to go. He did not want to leave the silkie man that he had found on the beach. This was why! This was why she had begged Hal not to engage the child’s affections. Bobby cried piteously into Prudence’s shoulder as she rocked him in her arms in the dark nursery. She had already packed up their few bags and made up a little package of food from the kitchen. And of course she had the purse full of coin that Lady Dunraven had given her.

  Dear heavens, Bobby had lost everything in his short life: his mother when he was a baby; his father, wasting away from consumption only the previous winter; his home in London, then at Dunraven; and now he must lose the kindly company of Mr. and Mrs. MacEwen—and must be torn away from the unprincipled man he had befriended.

  The child had only herself, a hired governess, between him and desolation.

  She sang a snatch of the song about the silkie under her breath. “He’s taken out a purse of gold and laid it on the nurse’s knee / Give to me my bonny wee son and take ye up your nurse’s fee.” It was more of a croon than a song, but when she reached the next verse—“I will fetch my bonny wee son and teach him how to swim . . .”—Bobby objected.

  “Don’t sing it! Hal will teach me,” Bobby wailed. “
Hal will take me far out to sea, beyond the foam and the waves. I want Hal. I found him on the beach. He came here for me.”

  His sobs wracked her heart.

  Eventually Bobby fell damply asleep. The rest of the household had gone to bed. Silently she slipped down to the stable yard and harnessed up the governess cart. A short note to Mr. and Mrs. MacEwen lay on the mantel. Prudence would not involve them further. It was a note they could show to Black Belham himself if he came here. It would absolve the MacEwens of blame, and prove that her destination was unknown to them. She would send a letter to Lady Dunraven from Glasgow. She was pursuing their second plan now.

  Another trip packed the cart with the bags and provisions. Then she carried the sleeping child down through the silent house and tucked him into the little bed of blankets she had made in the cart.

  As they passed Hal’s window, the horse’s hoofs echoed with a thunderous clangor in the stone yard. Prudence felt frantic with fear. She ought to have muffled the nag’s feet with sackcloth.

  Bobby stirred and whimpered, but did not wake up. She tried to lead the horse toward the closed gate. The animal stopped stubbornly, not wanting to leave its companions in the stable.

  And Hal? Had the sound of the hooves woken him yet?

  Prudence tiptoed to the little room at the end of the stable and peeked in the window. On a cot against the far wall Hal lay as abandoned as he had seemed on the beach. His hair spread jet black against the pillow. Deep shadows lay under his jaw and beneath the hollow of his neck where it met his collarbone. In sleep he looked younger, but every bit as dangerous.

  She noticed with the smallest shock that Hal did not seem to be wearing a nightshirt. The strong curve of his naked shoulder disappeared under the sheet. It seemed a dishonorable and underhanded thing, even to check on him, but thank God he still slept!

  Prudence went back to the recalcitrant animal and took it firmly by the bit. Like the morning rooster shattering the dawn, the horse whinnied. An answering chorus of equine leave-taking rang from the stable. Oh, God! Everyone would wake up. Mrs. MacEwen would try to stop her. Who could really believe that a marquess would be prepared to murder a child for his inheritance? Mr. MacEwen would insist that she stay, the daughter of his old friend. He would think he could protect her.

  With frantic tugging and pulling, Prudence eventually forced the horse to leave the yard. She closed the gate behind her, climbed onto the box, and took up the whip. Now that it had met with a stronger will and left its companions, the horse went amiably enough down the lane.

  Prudence turned its head south. Toward England.

  The night shone clear and crisp with a high sailing moon, the road frosted and hard. But the day’s ruts had become treacherous traps for the wheels. She had gone perhaps five miles and was close to the stone bridge across the frozen burn, when she realized that the horse had begun to limp. This could be disaster.

  She climbed from the cart and ran her hand down the horse’s legs, just as the moon disappeared behind some great fist of cloud. Black silence streamed about her, the only sound the animal’s hot breathing, the only motion the little puffs of steam from its nostrils. She picked up its forefoot. And heard, as chilling as the clutch of stranger’s hand in a dark room, a rustle in the willows beside the road and the distinct sound of footsteps coming her way.

  * * *

  Hal jerked awake as the horses whinnied. A rush of images raced through his mind. Dear God, he had been dreaming again! A confused jumble of scenes, echoing with broken snatches of rhyme and a far-off sound of screaming. There was a young fellow who kissed / Madame in her shift, but he missed . . .

  Ragged glimpses of a small courtyard with a trellis covered in white roses; a blur of gaming tables and empty wine bottles and men shouting; a building burning fiercely, its timbers crashing down in sheets of flame; the shadowy faces of women. Some of them seemed very young, barely more than children, some bold-eyed and flirtatious.

  Only one entangled his emotions in a way that filled him with a longing he couldn’t understand. A beautiful face, calm and clear-eyed, graced by its frame of bright blond hair. She had been saying, “But I don’t think I can so easily forgive you,” before her features dissolved into the dream.

  Hal sat up in the bed and ran his hands through his hair. Who the devil was he? Why in Hades couldn’t he remember? And what the hell was he doing washed up on a beach in Scotland?

  A horse clopped from the courtyard into the lane. He sprang naked from the bed and crossed to the window. Moonlight cast its cold light over a slender figure climbing onto the seat of a governess cart. Miss Drake had just shut the gate behind her.

  Now, where the devil was she going?

  Without hesitation, he flung on his clothes: the old shirt that Mr. MacEwen had given him; the serge trousers and reefer jacket he had been wearing on the beach; his boots, shining now with the daily application of polish.

  The clothes were as much a mystery to him as the face in the mirror when he shaved in the morning—with a borrowed razor into a stranger’s basin. He left the jacket Mr. MacEwen had loaned him, and with a borrowed pen on Mr. MacEwen’s paper wrote a short note to his host.

  Hal strode out into the yard and glanced up at the moon. He owned nothing in the world, not even a name.

  * * *

  Prudence set down the horse’s foot and stared into the willows. She could see only blackness among the shifting, duplicitous stalks and treacherous leaves. She could hear nothing but the hammering of her own heart. The horse shifted a little and blew through its nostrils.

  The crisp sound of the icy surface giving way beneath boots rang suddenly through the night. Prudence clambered back onto the cart and whipped up the horse. It balked, then lurched forward toward the bridge.

  “Alas,” a voice said merrily. “Your nag is gimpy. Perhaps he’s picked up a stone?”

  Prudence choked back a scream. Bobby woke and began to cry.

  A man stepped out of a gap in the trees, where a footpath from the MacEwens’ house ran up to the road. He caught the horse’s rein near the bit.

  Moonlight streamed out again from between the drifting clouds.

  “Oh, good gracious!” Prudence’s breath was still coming in gasps.

  “The night creates monsters,” Hal said with a grin. “As in fairy tales. Like creatures that shed their fur skin, the better to enchant women. Sorry if I scared you, Miss Drake, but this is rather an odd time to take a jaunt around the countryside, isn’t it?”

  Bobby sat up and wiped his face with his pudgy hand. Then he beamed.

  “Hello, Hal,” he said. “Are you coming with us?”

  Hal smiled at Bobby. “Of course. You didn’t think for a moment that you could leave me behind, did you? And I think you need me to see to your horse.”

  He took a knife from his pocket and efficiently dislodged a stone from the horse’s hoof. “There you are, old fellow,” he said cheerfully.

  Hal patted the animal on the neck. Then he grinned up at Prudence and climbed onto the box beside her. Bobby had dropped back into his nest of blankets and, with the ease possible only in a young child, gone straight back to sleep.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Prudence asked, choking back her tumult of emotion. For Hal had laid his fingers over hers.

  “I am taking the reins, dear Miss Drake. Otherwise you will have us all in the ditch.”

  She pulled her hands away. “You’ll do no such thing, sir.”

  The horse lurched across the road as he felt the tug at the bit.

  Hal caught the rein and directed him back. “I shall, indeed. For you are going to get into the back with Bobby to make sure he is covered against the cold, and I am going to be your coachman, guard, and ostler.”

  Prudence tugged hard and the horse jerked to a halt. “Let me make this clear, sir. I do not want company, yours least of all. I am in something of a hurry and I would be grateful if you would cease these unwanted attentions this instant
.”

  Hal burst out laughing. “Unwanted attentions? Good Lord, angel! I am not trying to kiss you, merely trying to drive the horse.”

  She knew she was blushing uncomfortably. “But I don’t wish it.”

  “Do you really expect that I shall obey such an absurd desire?”

  “A gentleman would,” she said stubbornly.

  “Ah,” Hal said. “And there you are wrong. No gentleman would allow a lady to drive alone and unprotected along what is little more than a track in the dark. It is a gentleman’s duty to be chivalrous, protective, and helpful to ladies. You shan’t deny me the chance to act the knight errant.”

  “But you don’t even know where I’m going.”

  “Well, you would seem to be going south. It lacks only an hour or two to midnight. According to Mrs. MacEwen’s maid, who is a fount of information and has filled me in on every detail of daily life in these parts, this is the road to Glasgow. From which noble city coaches leave every morning on their journey to Carlisle, but whence there are no coaches at all going north. Why on earth you should suddenly want to go to Carlisle in the middle of the night, I have no idea, but it’s not safe that you should do so with no other company than a child’s. Therefore, I am coming, too.”

  “You are not.”

  “You can’t stop me, angel. Besides, what will you do if the horse goes lame again?”

  “But why would you want to come?”

  “Why not? I have nowhere else to go.”

  It wasn’t fair. He was using the appalling circumstance of his shipwreck, if that was what really had happened, and the injury that had resulted in his loss of memory, to engage her sympathy.

  She glanced at his face. He quite obviously knew it, and had no qualms about so manipulating her. But he also looked confident, capable, and commanding. And there was a long, dark road to Glasgow ahead. The presence of a man was reassuring. Or it would be if the man weren’t Hal!

  “Your predicament isn’t my concern, sir,” Prudence insisted. “I don’t want company, and there’s an end of it.”

  Bobby whimpered and turned over. Prudence looked back at him. His small white hand lay exposed to the cold air above the cover.