Free His Mask of Retribution by Margaret McPhee

speak, just walked in silence. Even though the hour was early, the air stirred; London was awakening. A cart rattled by and two dodgy-looking characters passed from whom she averted her gaze. She was glad of the highwayman’s proprietorial grip on her arm.
    They kept a steady pace heading onwards. It was only when they passed the great church that she realised they were going to the burying ground.
    He led her through the gate and wove a path through the stones that marked the graves of the dead. The wind that howled across the ground was sharp, nipping at her cheeks and catching her hair, blowing strands of it across her eyes. Overhead, the sky was grey and dismal and the air ripe with dampness and the promise of rain. They walked on, their pace so brisk that she found herself slightly out of breath, walked on until they reached the larger stones and monuments erected by the wealthy. And then, quite suddenly, he led her behind a tiny mausoleum built in the style of a classical temple, the stonework of which was blackened by age and the smoke from London’s chimneys.
    ‘This is the place,’ he murmured, sliding a hand inside his greatcoat to produce a pocket watch. He flipped open the casing and checked the time. ‘Ten minutes,’ he said and the watch disappeared from sight once more.
    Ten minutes and then she would be free. Ten minutes and all of this would be over. She would be back with her father and she would never see the highwayman again. Never know who he was behind that mask. She leaned back against the wall of the mausoleum and watched him.
    ‘For what it is worth, I am sorry that you had to be a part of this, Lady Marianne. But you were the only way I could reach your father.’ His eyes held a sincerity she had not expected to see.
    ‘This document that you seek must be very important to you.’
    ‘More important than you can imagine.’
    ‘What is it?’ She asked the question with little expectation of a reply.
    He was silent for so long that she thought she had been right, but then he spoke. ‘It is the answer to a question I have asked myself for these past fifteen years.’
    ‘Fifteen years?’ Such a long time. Yet his eyes, his voice, his body, the way he moved—none were those of an old man.
    ‘June 1795,’ he said.
    ‘What happened on that date?’ She saw the flicker of pain in his eyes, there, then gone so quickly and replaced by such hard and utter ruthlessness that she felt shocked to see it.
    ‘Ask your father the answer to that question, Lady Marianne, and see what he says.’ That same half-whisper, harsher and angrier than ever.
    ‘You are wrong about him,’ she said. She did not know what lies the highwayman had been spun or why he had her father so wrong. All she knew was that she had to try, in these last few minutes they had together, to let him know the truth. ‘He is the best of fathers. I know you will not believe me, but he is a good man.’ She thought desperately of what she could say to convince him. ‘He is a governor of the Foundling Hospital and, although he took great pains to see that it was kept secret, he contributed much of the money for its chapel to be built. He gives freely to the poor, to widows and orphans especially, yet he makes no show of his charity, and he—’
    The highwayman gave a hard, harsh laugh of amusement and shook his head. ‘The irony is not lost on me, Lady Marianne.’
    ‘There is nothing of irony in what he has done.’
    ‘Indeed? Foundlings and orphans!’ In the space of a moment his eyes had darkened with the shadows that moved within them. ‘He is your father. Defend him all you will, but not to my ears.’
    She could feel the darkness that emanated from him, the barely suppressed anger tinged with bitterness. ‘What is this hatred that drives you?’
    ‘It is the desire for justice,’ he whispered.
    ‘More like vengeance for some imagined injustice.’
    ‘There was nothing imagined about it.’
    ‘What did he do to