Free Lady Sherry and the Highwayman by Maggie MacKeever

of action now was to go to Sir Christopher and make a clean breast of the affair. Sherry was sadly lacking in courage, alas. Even if her brother were able to prevent her incarceration in Newgate, he would doubtless tell Lavinia of Sherry’s folly, and Lavinia would in turn tell Lord Viccars. Anticipation of Lord Viccars’s resultant revulsion of feeling cheered her little more.
    Then there was the thought of the highwayman himself.  She had been trying for what seemed an eternity not to think of what might be going on abovestairs, lest some guilty admission slip from her careless lips or her thoughts be read. Sherry thrust her key into the lock, glanced up and down the hallway to make sure she was not observed. This was a strange hour to visit her book room; she normally courted her muse much earlier in the day.
    Sherry opened the door, backed into the room, then turned—and found herself staring down the muzzle of a pistol for the second time that day. This time the pistol was clutched by no highwayman but by Aunt Tulliver instead. Behind her, Sherry glimpsed Captain Toby stretched out on the settee, looking unnervingly like a corpse on view, as did Prinny, who was stretched out on the floor beside the sofa, or at least as corpselike as was possible for a dog so obese. Prinny opened his eyes and observed Sherry, toward whom he nourished a grudge so severe that he closed his eyes again without so much as a welcoming twitch of his plumed tail.
    Tully lowered the pistol. “Stab me! I’d just closed my eyes for a minute and then the door opened— Well, I don’t mind admitting I thought I was done for! Come to think of it, you was almost done for yourself. I could have put a hole in you as easy as winking, and even you couldn’t hold it against me under the circumstance.”
    “I’m sorry.” Sherry was stricken with guilt by the sight of Aunt Tulliver, wig awry, clutching at her chest.
    Was there no one of her acquaintance whom Sherry had not mistreated this horrid day? She walked across the room, looked down on the unconscious highwayman and the bloodstained bandage wrapped around his leg. “He looks so very pale.”
    “So would you look pale if you’d just had a bullet dug out of you.” Aunt Tulliver adjusted a pillow behind the highwayman’s head and picked up a bowl of bloody water and rags. The room stank of the gin with which she’d rendered him sufficiently senseless to probe for the bullet in his leg. Her gin, in point of fact, from her private stock; for though Tully might have a taste for most alcoholic beverages, she preferred that fiery liquor known commonly as Strip-Me-Naked or Blue Ruin.
    Lady Sherry looked worried, as well she might. The highwayman, and the book room, was no reassuring sight. But Tully knew a fair bit about medicine, due to the circumstance of having nursed three spouses through illnesses that proved fatal (though that was not her fault) and to the additional fact of having a very inquiring mind. Tully was curious about everything from the mating habits of cuckoos to the latest scandals of the haut ton and claimed to see a distinct similarity between the two; she was interested in medicine, and in anatomy in general, and was not so very old that this scoundrel’s well-knit anatomy did not strike her as very interesting indeed.
    Nor was Tully so very old that she failed to see which way the wind was blowing. This rogue had made off with Lady Sherry at gunpoint and so she wished to save his neck. It made perfect sense. In a hen’s foot! Lady Sherry was as great a pig-widgeon as her abigail, both of them betwattled by a handsome face. Aunt Tulliver had been in the world a great many more years than either of them and was therefore considerably more skeptical. Certainly this highwayman fellow was as handsome as Adonis; but Tully could not rid herself of the feeling that something about him was not right.
    She would not voice these doubts, not yet; Lady Sherry had quite enough already