The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(56)

A clump of snow fell from a tree branch and landed beside them, and as neither of them wanted the next clump to land on their heads, they ran the rest of the way home.

In the kitchen, they ate cold ham for supper and hurriedly cleared the table before Hester could return and be scandalized about a grand lady washing the crockery. The warmth of the kitchen did something to dispel the strange, hard intimacy they had shared outside, or at least to shift it into something more mundane. They stood side by side, their shoulders sometimes bumping, their hands sometimes brushing. Rob scoured the dishes and pots with wood ash from the hearth, and Marian rinsed them in a basin of hot water and dried them.

“Shall we leave tomorrow morning?” Rob asked, handing a bowl to Marian.

“First I have to make sure that everything is in place for Father to move. But I ought to be ready to leave a little after noon.”

“Move where?”

She sighed. “I don’t know where, or how, or with what money. But if I’m going to make an enemy of Sir John Fanshawe, then my father can’t be his tenant.”

She sounded dejected, so he changed the topic. “What I want to know is how we’re going to travel with that cat.”

The cat was engaged in his favorite pastime of winding himself around Marian’s ankles, and whether he did this out of affection or in a bid to trip her was anybody’s guess. “He’ll be a perfect lamb, just you wait.”

Rob gave it even odds that the beast tried to slit his throat before they got so far as Rochester. “I’ll be honored to be slain by such a worthy foe.”

“I wonder, though, if we ought to leave the cat here for the time being. He seems perfectly content, and it seems cruel to bring him to his third home in a fortnight.” They both turned to look at the cat, who was dozing by the fire, sated by the bits of ham Rob had sneaked him under the table in an ongoing but probably doomed bid to win the creature’s affections. “Besides, I can’t imagine that any cat would want to rattle around Clare House.”

She sounded as if she wasn’t relishing the prospect of returning to Clare House herself. He didn’t know what to say—he had no solution to suggest, no alternative to offer. She was the Duchess of Clare and that was her home. It wasn’t as if he could ask her to instead wander the countryside with him; he certainly couldn’t ask her to take her daughter and decamp to the room that Rob sometimes used over Kit’s coffeehouse.

He couldn’t offer her a better life or even a decent life; he couldn’t even come up with a way for them to spend much time together, unless Marian wanted to resume sneaking about London at night, and he didn’t think his nerves could handle the idea of her doing that.

This was the first time that he had ever felt that his way of life was in any way unsatisfactory. He didn’t wish that he had a house and a respectable position, exactly, but he felt every inch of the gulf that separated him from Marian.

He thought that if anything could have tempted him to confront his inheritance, it would be Marian. But that wasn’t even a choice—the idea of living as a duke was anathema to everything he thought was right and good. He imagined walking into a tavern or an inn and being recognized not as a friend, not as a fellow patron, but as the Duke of Clare. The idea made him feel faintly sick, as if he were killing off the person he wanted to be.

“What would you do if you didn’t have to go back to Clare House and you didn’t have to worry about anyone but yourself?” he asked.

“What a depressing question.”

“Indulge me.”

She dried a platter on her apron. “I’ve never thought of it.”

“Never?”

“You must have guessed that I’m not much given to flights of imagination.” She swirled the tips of her fingers in the cloudy water in the basin.

“Try.”

“Well, I’d say that your friend who runs the stables seems to have a plum job. He charges a king’s ransom and spends his time looking after horses.”

“What we paid was his special rate for pretending he never saw us.”

“As if I couldn’t do that, too,” she scoffed. “I’d make a specialty of hiring horses out to all manner of scoundrel.”

“I don’t think you’d much like most scoundrels,” he said darkly. “Neither would your horses.”

“I’d be very selective. Only the finest scoundrels.”

“You’d be good at it.” She’d be good at anything she turned her hand to. He only wished she were able to choose what that was. “Take the damned cat to London, Marian,” he said. “Just because a decision makes you miserable doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.”

“I beg your pardon.” God help him, he loved that she could say the most innocuous phrase in a way that sounded like the type of insult that usually preceded street brawls. “Are you accusing me of being a martyr?”

“I damned well am not. Martyrs seem to enjoy suffering. In all the paintings they seem to positively get off on it. But you certainly don’t. When you can’t make up your mind what to do, you choose the option that results in the least happiness and pleasure for yourself. It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“This is utter nonsense,” she said, but he didn’t think she sounded like she believed it. “Come upstairs with me,” Marian said when they put the last dish away. “And I’ll show you just how well I can make choices that please myself.” She cleared her throat. “If you like, that is. It was meant as an invitation, not a summons.”