Read Online His Mask of Retribution by Margaret McPhee - Free Book Online

mahogany and distinctly masculine in style. Over by the basin she could see a shaving brush, soap and razor blade, all set before a mirror, and she knew whose bedchamber this was without having to be told. Her heart began to pound and butterflies flocked in her stomach. She hesitated where she was, suddenly suspicious.
    Something of the apprehension must have shown in her face for all she tried to hide it, for the accomplice smiled gently, reassuringly.
    ‘He thought you would prefer the daylight. The sun hits the back of the house in the afternoon.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You need not have a fear, lass. I am to take you back to the yellow chamber before he returns.’
    She looked round at the accomplice and the grey mask loosely tied to obscure his face. ‘Could you not simply have removed the nails from the shutters?’
    ‘No, Lady Marianne.’ The accomplice glanced away uneasily.
    ‘Because it is at the front of the house,’ she guessed, ‘and you fear that I would attract attention?’
    ‘It is rather more complicated than that. The shutters must remain closed. Those in the master bedchamber too.’
    ‘The yellow bedchamber...’ She hesitated and thought of the hairbrush. ‘It was his mother’s room, was it not?’
    The accomplice gave a hesitant nod.
    ‘And this is his house.’
    He looked uncomfortable but did not deny it. ‘I must go,’ he said and started to move away.
    ‘You said he was a good man.’
    The accomplice halted by the door. ‘He is.’
    ‘What he did to my father on Hounslow Heath was not the action of a good man.’
    ‘Believe me, Lady Marianne, were he a lesser man, your father would be dead. Were I in his shoes, I don’t know that I could have walked away and left Misbourne alive.’ He turned away, then glanced back again to where she stood, slack-jawed and gaping in shock. ‘For your own sake, please be discreet around the window. Being seen in a gentleman’s bedchamber, whatever the circumstances, would not be in any young unmarried lady’s favour.’
    He gave a nod of his head and walked away, locking the door behind him.
    What had her father ever done to deserve the hatred of these men? Her legs felt wobbly at the thought of such vehemence. She needed to sit down. She eyed the four-poster bed with its dark hangings and covers—the highwayman’s bed—and a shiver rippled down her spine, spreading out to tingle across the whole of her skin. She stepped away, choosing the high-backed easy chair by the side of the fireplace, and perching upon the edge of its seat.
    Marianne glanced at the window behind her and the brightness of the daylight. The accomplice was right. Especially given it had been little more than a year since the Duke of Arlesford had broken their betrothal. The scandal surrounding it still had not completely died away. One word of her abduction, one word that she had spent the night in a bachelor’s house without a chaperon—no matter that she was being held alone in a locked room—and her reputation would be ruined to such an extent that none of her father’s influences could repair it. The irony almost made her laugh. Especially when she contemplated the darkness of the truth. Even so, she rose to her feet and walked to the window.
    The view was the same as that of a hundred other houses in London—long, neatly kept back gardens separated by high stone walls, backing on to more gardens and the distant rear aspect of yet more town houses, all beneath the grey-white of an English autumn sky. There were no landmarks that she recognised. The catch moved easily enough, but the window was stiff and heavy and noisy to open. She did not slide it up far. There was little point, for there was no hope of escape through it. The drop below was sheer and at least twenty-five feet. She closed the window as quietly as she could and turned to survey the room around her.
    It was much smaller than the yellow bedchamber and almost Spartan in its feel. Aside from the