Anabel’s dark blond hair was upswept with gold beads and pearls, a few loose curls framing green eyes, and she had a rope of pearls gleaming on her neck. At nineteen, her skin was clear and her features pleasingly fresh. Because she had been alerted to her looks by others from a young age, Anabel had learned a long time ago how to best maximize the effect.
Her slender figure, trim after a season filled with dancing, was elaborately laced into a new dress the color of corn silk and edged in gold, shot through with intricate embroidery. The dress was modeled on the latest cuts out of Paris, and Anabel’s final fitting had been today. Considering the clothier’s reaction, she knew she could anticipate Lord Houghton’s, but she had not taken so much care to please him.
While her presumptive suitor saw this as the appearance that would make their new status official, Anabel had put all her energy into preparing for the last public night she would have to herself. After tonight there would be no excuse not to wear the heavy engagement ring that weighed and tugged on her small hand. After tonight Anabel would never be thought of as Lady Mayward again, so she dressed finely enough to give everyone something to think about and someone to remember.
Anabel tugged her golden shawl in close but could not deflect the man across from her.
Lord Mayward smiled up at the young people as the carriage lurched around a bend. “Quite a party it will be, eh? We’re like to see all the good crowd. This is the only event of any significance before court shuts up for winter.”
“We all deserve hibernation,” said Anabel tightly. “We have been positively beastly with the excesses lately.”
Edwin Houghton disagreed. “Life must be lived to the fullest, my dear,” he said with too-easy familiarity. “Why should we deny ourselves our provincial pleasures? The poor, the servants,—they all look to us to know how to feel and how to conduct themselves. If we are easy and free spending they celebrate with us. When we are shut up and stingy, they suffer.”
Lord Houghton gleamed with preparation for the party. His brown hair was set and plaited with ribbons, his gaudy suit tailored to the latest style within an inch of its life. His leather boots were tall and supple and shone. He wore several rings, a family crest around his neck and a round gold watch on his jacket. Anabel knew that the India sapphire-encrusted snuffbox in Houghton’s pocket was worth more than all the money his coachman had ever encountered.
She turned slightly away from the chiding economics lesson, but she was starting to feel uncomfortable about showing off with the gold silk and jeweled dancing shoes. She knew she looked beautiful, but she was afraid of seeming too well-matched with her intended.
Oh! The whole thing was insufferable, really. Anabel had begged and pleaded with her father when he first spoke of Houghton’s suit. For a while her father had been indulgent and had been persuaded and put him off. But Edwin Houghton had been unruffled. He was patient to a fault. He had a bottomless income at his disposal. And he was very persistent.
When his offers finally became too insistent and too generous to refuse, Lord Houghton had claimed the right to inform his future bride. They had met for a stiff-backed tea that ended with his declaration of love and intentions toward her.
Anabel, who had been dodging his proposal for months, was forced to sit with a pasted-on smile and let Edwin Houghton finally put that ghastly ring on her finger. Then he’d gotten up from kneeling, his eyes aflame, and tried to kiss her shocked mouth. He was suddenly very impertinent indeed, laying his hands on her, forcing the press of his lips and fingertips.
Anabel had still been dazed by the prospect of marriage. Her new fiancé’s rude familiarity had taken a moment to intrude. Then she tore from his embrace, turned her wrist and slapped him soundly. It had been the best part of the whole day, the slapping.
Lord Houghton had stepped back, his cheek reddening, but he’d grinned a sort of smug approval. “Good,” he said shortly. “I had always heard that you were that impossible thing, that unicorn, a virtuous noble girl. It is good to see that you are still that.”
Now he looked at her from across the carriage with eyes even hungrier than on that awful engagement day. Anabel didn’t understand how she was supposed to pass another five minutes in the man’s company, let alone a lifetime. She shivered and felt sick from her nerves and the motion of the carriage’s pitches and turns.
Breaking from their steady pace, they heard the horses rear up, and the carriage jostled and crashed with a monumental lurch. Anabel and her father were thrown forward, while Houghton clung to his seat and slid around in terror. For an awful moment Anabel thought the carriage was going to tip, her world upended entirely, but in a moment they had stopped rocking and stood still.
Shaking, she picked herself up, then helped her father reclaim his seat. The older man was a little shocked but otherwise unhurt, and began to occupy himself in brushing dust from the sleeves of his velvet jacket.
“Sam,” Lord Houghton barked at his coachman. “What is the meaning of this? That jolt was unacceptable.”
There was only silence from the front of the carriage, silence from the woods beyond, and Anabel’s heart was in her throat. What if something had happened to Houghton’s normally steady servant? They should help the man—
Then, out of the fog that enveloped the carriage, a distinctive voice came steadily: “Stand and deliver!”
Anabel gasped by the window; she couldn’t help herself. She hadn’t imagined it—all the color was draining from Lord Houghton’s face, too. Her father stopped dusting his sleeves.
A mounted figure rode free of the fog on a dark brown horse. His clothes and mask were black, and sandy hair glimmered from under his hood. The figure moved closer as the carriage’s occupants stared, paralyzed and transfixed.
“Sam could not come,” explained the man. “He’s tied up at the moment. My dear wealthy people! Kindly stand and deliver. Your money or your lives.”
He had a heavy French accent, as though all of his vowels had been dipped in cream. She was reminded irresistibly of the notorious highwayman of old, Claude Duval, who had stolen as many longing looks from ladies as he had purses. Anabel’s heart, already put-upon, beat faster. Her pulse raced in her ears.
A highwayman! All her life she’d heard tales of “the gentlemen of the road,” who made their fortunes plundering plum stagecoaches. The aristocrats hated them on principle, hated them for being their targets, and would hang the “gentlemen” to widespread display whenever one was caught.
But Anabel’s housekeeper had also told her other stories about highwaymen when she was a girl, about men that she’d called “knights of the road,” men who defied authority and stole flagrantly from those who could handle having their purses lightened. Anabel had been whispered stories of famously chivalrous highwaymen from the century before, those who had gone about the business of robbing like true gentlemen.
She could only hope that the stories had some kernel of truth to them, for the man approaching had a pistol so polished that it gleamed even in the faint moonlight. But he was smiling a little below the mask. Anabel’s heart beat with hope and fear all at once.
He steered the horse closer, coming up flush with the carriage. Then he dismounted in a smooth flourish and opened the carriage’s door with an even smoother one.
“Sir,” he said to Anabel’s father, “the contents of your purse and pockets.” His eyes had keenly and coolly appraised their situation at first glance. “Mademoiselle, your lovely jewels. Sir—” and he cast a look of disdain along with the word, when his eyes fixed on Lord Houghton “—normally I would not know how to address a man wearing so many illustrious insignias of his worth. But since they will do me credit, I must thank you.”
Lord Houghton was sputtering pure outrage coupled with fright at the introduction of the pistol.