The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(28)

“You’re not listening to a word I say.” She pushed her chair back, its legs scraping unpleasantly across the floor, then got to her feet. And once she had done that, she had no choice but to walk out of the room. There was nowhere to go, of course, which only made her feel even more of a fool. She cursed herself for not asking for separate rooms.

Instead she went where she had always gone when she needed to escape, apologizing to the stableboys who probably wanted to huddle over the brazier rather than keep an eye on a stranger. There were a good half dozen horses. She saw Gwen, who had to be sick to death of the sight of her, so she kept her distance. Breathing in the familiar scent of hay and horses and saddle soap, she leaned against one of the posts and closed her eyes.

And that was where Rob found her some half an hour later. He made a great big noisy fuss upon entering the stable, presumably to warn her of his presence and give her time to either flee or resign herself.

“It took you longer than I’d have thought,” she said, not bothering to open her eyes. “What did you do, check under every bed in the inn?”

“We’re not all as skilled as you at tracking people in the dead of night.” He leaned on the post beside her, close enough that the fabric of their sleeves rubbed together, but no closer. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you. All I meant to say was that I trust you had sufficient reason to do what you did.”

Marian sighed and wished she believed him. “You’re so eager to trust people.”

“I—what—” he sputtered.

“You lost all your friends last year. I think you don’t know how to even exist without being surrounded by people you love and trust. You’ve convinced yourself that I’m one of them. That’s why you wrote me back even when you must have known I was using your letters to follow you. You don’t know how to be alone.”

He was silent, but his body remained tense, and she knew she had hit a nerve. She told herself that she shouldn’t mind being a convenient way for Rob to fill an emptiness. She was used to being useful.





Chapter 12




Rob could not go to bed without visiting the kittens one last time, and Marian must have been in a conciliatory mood because she went with him, going so far as to sit on the clean straw and allow one of the bolder kittens to paw at the sleeve of her coat.

Rob sat beside her and produced his flask, holding it out to Marian. To his surprise, she took it.

“It seems like a night for hard spirits,” she explained, after drinking and passing it back to him.

“Because of the cold?”

“Because we’re both maudlin.”

Rob wanted to tell her to speak for herself, but she was right. He took a long drink of gin, wincing. A few good meals with decent ale or wine and now gin tasted like bile laced with arsenic.

“I’m homesick,” he said. “Not for a home—I haven’t had one of those in a long time. But for the way things used to be. I’ve made a mess of everything and I can’t go back.”

She nodded but didn’t ask him to explain. Likely she didn’t need to; between the contents of his letters and what she had seen while following him, she already knew the state of things.

“You love him very much, your Mr. Webb.”

“Not in the way you mean. Well, if I had known that he fancied men, then perhaps I’d have felt differently and made a fool of myself, but I—Christ, even though we weren’t like that, we were together.”

She held out her hand for the flask and he gave it to her. “There are different manners of being together,” she said after drinking.

Rob took the flask back and drank. “I’ve killed for him and I’d do it again,” he said. The gin was getting to his head, because he had never talked about this to anyone.

“Likewise,” she said tightly. That was the first she had said about her reasons for killing the duke and Rob knew better than to press for more. Instead he handed her the flask.

“You know, my letters weren’t only bait so that I could follow you,” she said some minutes later.

His heart thudded in his chest. “Oh?”

“You weren’t an entirely unengaging correspondent.”

“I’m staggered by the praise.”

“And you were one of only two people I could speak to about my predicament,” she said.

“The other was Lord Holland?”

“Percy, yes. As I said, Marcus knew as well, but we sent him all over Britain and France to wheedle his way into the confidence of the duke’s old cronies to see if they recalled anything about this Elsie Terry or Louise Thierry. I could hardly go to him and weep on his shoulder.”

Rob didn’t quite know where to start with that statement. He wanted to linger over the idea that she considered her caustic letters to have been the equivalent of crying on someone’s shoulder. And then he wanted to know all about how she had persuaded her brother—who was, by all reports, mild mannered to a fault—to engage in nothing less than espionage with a frankly terrifying cast of characters. But there was also the fact that she had apparently learned his mother’s real name. If she knew that much, it was only a matter of time before she found out that he was Elsie Terry’s son. The longer he put off telling her, the greater a betrayal it would be when she learned the truth.