Highwayman Lover

  * * * *

  As Charlotte shrugged her robe from her shoulders to climb into bed, she saw Edmond Cheadle’s knapsack on the floor by her wardrobe, where she had left it. Her curiosity roused, Charlotte carried it to her bed and sat cross-legged atop her coverlets, loosening the drawstrings that held the weathered pouch closed.

  Una had left her alone for the night, and Darton Hall beyond her closed chamber door was silent.

  Charlotte had no worries of being interrupted in her investigation, or being scolded for her nosiness. She turned back the front flap of the knapsack, and pulled the books and papers out. She studied Cheadle’s copy of Improvement of the Mind, finding it puzzling and somewhat surprising that the man would keep such an assortment of literature with him. Cheadle had not struck her as the sort for intellectual thought; he was a big man with a squared, strapping form, stern gaze and a quiet, somewhat brooding demeanor. Charlotte flipped absently through the pages of the book, and blinked in surprise to discover a square of paper folded and tucked about midway through the volume. She set the book down on her bed and opened the page.

  It was a clipping from a gazette, a small, brief article highlighting one of the earlier Black Trio highway robberies. Written in the slim margin of empty space beside the article: Suitable for our needs?

  Charlotte frowned, perplexed. Edmond Cheadle was a thief-taker by trade. She wondered if the note indicated he had come to Essex County for more than the driving of James Houghton’s coach. Maybe he had been drawn north from London by the prospect of capturing the Black Trio, and claiming the rewards.

  She set the article aside and turned through the book again. Toward the back, she found another scrap of paper tucked inside, this one no more than a hasty jotting, likely written in reminder: Oct. 26, 11 oc, W. Arms, Epp. Prop.

  Something about the note struck Charlotte as familiar, and after a moment, it occurred to her. She had received numerous, unwanted correspondences from James Houghton over the years; pathetic proclamations of his unfailing adoration, long and rambling attempts at poetry and even some brazen—not to mention repulsive—descriptions of what he longed to do to certain measures of her form with corresponding measures of his. She knew his writing well enough to recognize it.

  October twenty-sixth is tomorrow’s date, she thought.

  W. Arms, Epp. Prop. could have possibly been James’s personal shorthand for the Wake Arms, a popular inn and pub in the village of Epping proper. The Wake Arms was situated at the crossroads from London to Newmarket, as well as Waltham Abbey and Loughton, and regular, daily coaches stopped there.

  That makes a certain sort of sense, she thought.

  Cheadle was James’s coachman. James’s sister, Margaret was marrying in less than a week, and family and friends were arriving daily for the ceremony’s preceding festivities. The note must have been James instructing Cheadle to retrieve someone upon his or her morning arrival by daily coach from London.

  “Mystery solved,” Charlotte murmured, somewhat disappointed. As with anything else pertaining to James, even this was relatively transparent and easily deciphered. She tucked both of the notes back inside of Cheadle’s book and shoved everything back into the knapsack.