Lady Sherry and the Highwayman Read Online Free Page A

enthusiastic game of toss-and-fetch with an intimidated under-gardener.
    “Lawks!” Daffodil sighed, her hands pressed again to her breast. “It’s a right good thing you showed up when you did, milady. I don’t mind telling you I was all of a muck of sweat!”
    Sherry found the pruning knife on the floor beside the highwayman, who appeared to have taken leave of his senses once again. The knife was miraculously free of blood. However,  the wound in his leg had begun to bleed again.
    Though Sherry was far from expert in such matters, she knew the bleeding must be staunched somehow. She looked at Daffodil, who was gazing wide-eyed and somewhat wistfully at the fallen highwayman. It was a trifle lowering to recall that the abigail had been mistaken for the mistress while Sherry had been mistaken for the maid. Not that the highwayman’s misapprehension had been without foundation. Daffodil’s high-waisted gown with its short, puffed sleeves—rose-pink in color—was all the crack.
    Sherry wasted no further time in lamenting the deplorable condition of her own well-worn riding habit, which had not benefited from exposure to hedges and Prinny and gingerbread. She lifted her skirt, removed her petticoat of thin India cotton, and began to tear it into strips. “Here!” she snapped at Daffodil. “Help me with this.”
    Cautiously, awkwardly, Daffodil knelt on the other side of the fallen man. Her modish gown was not fashioned for such maneuvering. Also, she did not trust the highwayman not to awaken suddenly and manhandle her again. “Prime and bang up to the mark!” she observed as she stared down into his unconscious face. “I wish it’d been me he made off with!”
    This remark put Sherry further out of patience. Daffodil, no few years younger, had obviously not passed the age of indulgence in romantical high flights. Nor, apparently, did she considering anything amiss in nourishing a tendre for an inappropriate object. Lady Sherry, whose sensibilities were far too mature to be overset by the sight of a handsome face, felt like shaking the minx.
    She looked again at Captain Toby. Although the wound in his thigh was a nasty one, he didn’t look in imminent danger of bleeding to death, at least to Sherry’s admittedly inexperienced eyes. “There!” she said as she tied off the improvised bandage. “Hopefully that will staunch the bleeding until Tully can take a look.” And hopefully the wound would not be beyond Tully’s healing abilities. “Pray stop air-dreaming, Daffodil, and help me get him into this dress.”
    It was not an easy task to garb an unconscious highwayman, the two women soon discovered, although perhaps the task was less difficult than if he had been able to protest. Daffodil set about it with a tenderness that made Sherry recall irritably all the garments into which she herself had been willy-nilly thrust. Had she done the right thing in bringing Captain Toby here? Sherry mourned the loss of her earlier clarity of mind.
    “One can’t blame him, not really,” she said aloud, “for taking to his heels when he had the chance. The man could hardly relish the prospect of being hanged. And he didn’t do anything so truly dreadful in the first place. He didn’t hurt anyone other than in their pocketbooks, and he didn’t rob anyone who couldn’t bear the loss. One might say he wasn’t so much robbing unwary travelers as expressing his discontent with the way things are.”
    Daffodil wasn’t at all discontented with the way things were, not at this particular moment. She relished the notion of a handsome highwayman hiding in the book room, where she could go and flirt with him whenever she was bored. “Just like Robbing Hood!” she said approvingly as she smoothed Aunt Tulliver’s gown over his muscular chest.
    Robin Hood? Lady Sherry was not prepared to go as far as that. Perhaps she might have indulged in similar thoughts earlier, but that was before the wretch’s intrusion into her