The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(82)

“That won’t be necessary,” Rob said. He didn’t want to drink the tea or eat the food from this place.

“Ah,” said Percy as the footman left, as if he finally understood that Rob didn’t want any part of Clare House. He returned to sipping his own tea. Rob didn’t have much sympathy for men who thought they were going to be dukes but then learned their fathers had been bigamous, but he found that he had a bit of sympathy for Percy and what he had lost. And for just a moment, Rob felt a pang for having upended this man’s life, or at least for the manner in which he had done so.

“I’m sorry,” Rob said. “For the blackmail. I’ve apologized to Marian but not to you. I’ve done a lot of terrible things but that might have been the worst. You were both victims of the duke and I made it worse.”

“You did indeed. Apology accepted,” Percy said and then looked away. Rob took the hint and returned upstairs to Marian’s chambers.

When he entered the bedroom, he found Marian sitting on the floor, wearing nothing but a shirt. Around her were scattered old papers. For a moment he thought that these were the manuscripts that they had taken from Fanshawe, but then he was struck with the truth.

“I meant to clean your knives,” Marian said. “I thought they might rust from the blood. But I found—” She smoothed her hand over the papers that were covered in her own slanted handwriting. “You told me to burn mine.”

“I didn’t follow my own advice,” Rob admitted. He didn’t understand why Marian looked so bleak. He crouched down on the floor beside her. “What’s wrong, darling?”

“I saved your letters, too. I hid them under a floorboard, but that morning in the carriage, the duke had them.” She skimmed her finger over the paper, along water blots, bloodstains, and creases. “It was all there in the letters, all the information he needed to figure out who had written them. He recognized your mother’s name. And even though she had been quiet for twenty-five years, the fact of the letters meant she might not be so quiet anymore.”

Rob didn’t need to ask what this meant. They already knew that the duke was more than willing to kill Percy; certainly he wouldn’t have stopped at killing Rob’s mother, or Rob himself, for that matter. Rob wondered how many lives Marian had saved by shooting the duke.

“That night, when I went to the hired room and found it empty, the first thing I did was burn the letters,” she said. That was undiluted regret he heard in her voice and he couldn’t stand it.

“I’ll write you a hundred more,” he murmured, and he hoped she heard all the promises he was managing not to make. He thought she did, because she pulled him down for a kiss. He kissed the hinge of her jaw, then her neck, then pulled back enough to talk to her. “Marry me. Or don’t marry me. Just say you’ll be with me. Every minute I spend away from you is second best.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I won’t marry you.”

“Then we won’t get married. Good.” It wasn’t quite a lie, because if she didn’t want to marry him, then he wouldn’t bother her with the notion. If she did, he’d marry her immediately. He’d devise different pseudonyms in order to marry her more than once in a succession of churches. He’d convert to different religions and travel to foreign lands to marry her in every way imaginable. “It’s a boring institution.”

She laughed, bright and happy, and he knew she could see right through him. Her laughter was rare and precious; it was the sound of church bells, the sound of coins dropping into a pocket, and he wanted to save it in a bottle and wear it close to his heart.



Marian pulled her cloak around her shoulders as she and Rob walked in the direction of the coffeehouse. It was windy and damp, what passed for a sunny day in the London winter. But they had endured worse; there was something almost comforting about being cold next to Rob, knowing that the warmth of his body was only a few inches away and that soon enough they’d be at a fireside.

“Would you mind if we stopped at the Royal Oak?” Rob asked, looking oddly shifty.

Marian agreed, and when they walked into the inn, they were met with a blast of heat and sound. Rob went off to talk to the couple who ran the place while Marian looked around. A pair of elderly dogs sat by a pair of equally elderly looking men; a harried looking mother tried to stop her children from jumping off their stacked traveling boxes; clusters of people played darts and cards.

Seated by the fire, she watched Rob laugh with one of the barmaids, shoot some menacing glances at a table of rowdy young men, then repair the leg of a chair. When he came over to her, he was smiling, and she found that she was smiling back at him. In the last two days, she had smiled more than she had in the previous two years, and that was with a gunshot wound. The level of contentment she was experiencing was probably unsafe.

“If you don’t object, I’d like to go back to Kent and bring your father and his household to live at Clare House,” Rob said when he sat beside Marian. “I’ll leave as soon as possible.”

Clare House would suit nicely for her father. It was comfortable and already had a full staff, and was near enough for Marian to keep an eye on him. Marian nearly insisted on accompanying Rob to Kent. But then she realized she had business of her own in London. She needed to speak to Richard and—well, perhaps not hold him at gunpoint, but do whatever the moral equivalent of that turned out to be. She needed to make it clear that if he so much as whispered a threat against their father he would be waging war not only with her, but with people more terrifying than she ever hoped to be.