The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(42)

“You know,” Marian said, “when you press your lips together like that and look dissatisfied with the world and everyone in it, you remind me of Percy.”

“I look nothing like Lord Holland,” he said too quickly. According to his mother, he had every reason to look like Lord Holland, and moreover Lord Holland’s father, but Rob absolutely refused to consider it. It was one thing to accept that his mother had been married to the miserable bastard but quite another to acknowledge that the man had sired him. Rob had always been quite content to assume that his mother had fallen pregnant by some anonymous and probably horrible man who paid for his mother’s favors; it was quite another to imagine that it was that particular horrible man.

It was altogether too much to imagine that Marian had married—or thought she had married—the same man and had a child by him. His mind simply couldn’t arrange those facts in a logical manner.

“But you do,” Marian went on. “It’s the cheekbones, mostly. But the cloud of irritation heightens the likeness.”

“You ought to tell your Lord Holland that he resembles me. He’ll be furious.”

“He will and I shall.”

This was probably when Rob ought to tell Marian the truth. For him not to tell her was a serious lie of omission. But he didn’t know how to even start, especially since he didn’t want to think about it, let alone talk about it. They were alone, so he leaned across the table and kissed her cheek, then scooped up his haversack and headed out to the stable.

He saddled and readied the horses. He would be taking both horses back with him, riding them in turns. When he returned to Little Hinton, it would need to be on the stagecoach, which was a dismal prospect but at least it would be fast.

Marian followed him out, the cat at her heels, looking every inch witch and familiar. She made straight for Gwen and stroked the horse’s muzzle in an offhand way, as if they had been horse and rider for a decade, rather than the lesser part of a week.

“Don’t let him stint on the apples,” she advised the mare.

“As if I would ever do such a thing.” He looked at her, as if he could burn the image of her into his memory. He had seen her in a silk gown and he had seen her in worn and dirty riding clothes. He had seen her covered in blood. And now he saw her in an ill-fitting borrowed gown with her hair crookedly pinned up. He wanted to see her a thousand more ways. He mounted the horse before he could tell her so. “I’ll be back on the fifth night.”

“So soon?”

He fully intended to return on the fourth night if he could manage it. “I don’t have that much to do in London.” They both knew that the real reason was that she would want the news he brought with him. She looked like she wanted to thank him, but instead she reached into her apron pocket and withdrew a pair of gloves. They were the gloves he had bought at the market in Sevenoaks, which somehow had been only a few days ago but felt like the experience of a prior lifetime. He felt like he had always been on roads and in inns and semi-dilapidated houses with Marian, and that everything else was a daydream.

“Yours have seen better days,” she said, still holding out the gloves.

He took his own worn gloves off and shoved them in his sack, then put on Marian’s. He flicked the brim of his hat and rode off.





Chapter 19




Rob was bleary eyed and in none too fine a mood when he arrived at his mother’s house. His first stop after returning the horses had been Kit’s, but Kit wasn’t home and the shop was already closed, so Rob had to go to the trouble of picking the lock and leaving a note, then dragging his exhausted body to his mother’s.

“If you’ll put me in the blue parlor, I’ll keep out of your hair until she has a minute,” he told the girl who answered the door. One of the rules governing Rob’s time at his mother’s establishment was never to refer to her as his mother. She insisted that nobody needed to know she had an adult son. Rob had been born when she was very young, and now she was a little past forty. Precisely how far past forty was a mystery even to Rob.

The girl gave him an appraising glance, then briskly led him not to the blue parlor, but to a storeroom near the coal cellar, having evidently decided that his bedraggled state did not meet the standards of the public parts of the house.

“You smell like horses and look like death,” announced his mother when she swept into the room in a cloud of perfume and silk. “Where have you been?”

“I took the lady into the country.”

“The duchess?”

“Technically, she isn’t—”

“Don’t split hairs with me.” She sank onto an overturned crate, arranging her skirts around her. “You took her into the country? Why? Do you simply enjoy vanishing and giving me more gray hair?”

“Because she needed me.”

His mother widened her eyes. “It’s like that, is it?”

“It’s not like anything.”

She remained silent, an old and unfairly effective trick.

“I admire her, all right?” he said.

“Don’t get her with child. She nearly died the last time and the midwife says she won’t make it through another.” She pursed her lips. “Not that the duke cared about that, of course.”

The sounds of the bustling house disappeared, as if he had stood too near a discharging pistol. His face was hot, and when he met his mother’s eyes he knew she could see everything that he was feeling. “I’m not going to get her with child.”