The Highwayman by Doreen Owens Malek Page A

with him, even if it meant living in camps like this one, going deep into the Irish countryside, never seeing England again. All her previous experience of life was muted—her time in her parents’ house and later with her uncle—as if it had never been.
    “No more of that gruel,” Burke announced to her as she entered the tent with a bowl of marrow and curds on the fourth day of his recovery. “I’ll have meat or naught at all. I’m being fed like a nursling. And leave off with that flower potion, too; it keeps me in a fog.”
    “You seem the better for both,” Alex said, setting the bowl on the floor and postponing that argument for later.
    “And I want a glass to shave. I feel like a beggar at the manor gates. All I lack is a stump.”
    “Why don’t you grow a beard? I’ve taken note that everyone else in camp has one.”
    “I had one. It itched.”
    “Liar. You’re vain.”
    He gave her a disgusted look.
    “Vanity is a great sin,” Alex said. “You want to look out for your soul and compose yourself in modesty.”
    “And I need to cut my hair. I’ll be mistaken for a maid.”
    “Some hopes with that beard. And that size. The woman never lived to come near your shoulder.”
    “Tell Rory I’ll go to the brook and have a wash,” he said.
    “I will do no such thing. You’ll rest for two days more before you go anywhere.”
    “You’re a tyrant, and I vow you’ll pay for it once I’m back to myself again.”
    “Until then, you’ll do as I say. I’ll cut your hair and shave you when you’re up and about.” She smiled. “I’ll crop that mane and give you curls like Alexander.”
    “Who’s that? Your father?”
    “No, but my father named me after him. He was the greatest leader of ancient times, in Greece, more than three hundred years before the birth of Christ.”
    “And what did he do?”
    “He conquered the entire world, as much of it as was known to him, all the way to Persia.”
    “Persia?” he said doubtfully. “Where is that?”
    “A long way from here,” Alex replied, at a loss to describe the immense distance she had once seen on her tutor’s cartograph. “Many times the distance from England to Ireland.”
    “And were the Persians, whoever they might be, difficult to conquer?”
    Alex nodded. “They fought him from their elephants.”
    “Elephant? Is that a sort of fortress?”
    Alex giggled. “An elephant is an animal, as high off the ground as one man standing on another’s shoulders, with a long nose like a pig’s snout that reaches all the way to the earth.”
    “From that height?”
    “Yes.”
    He snorted. “You mock me. There is no such creature.”
    “But there is. I’ve seen drawings of them.”
    “You must think me dull-witted,” he said, hitching his shoulder in irritation.
    “Certainly not. But since I’ve seen the pictures, you might forgive me for believing.”
    “I’ve seen drawings of the green men said to come out on the lawn on midsummer eve at midnight and grant the beholder three wishes. That doesn’t mean I believe in them. Why am I talking to you at all? A woman who thinks the people in the Welsh Marches have webbed feet!”
    “I was telling you of Alexander,” she said, dropping the subject of elephants.
    “So you were.”
    “He reached the limits of the world before the age of thirty. He died at thirty-three, weakened by old wounds and poisoned, it is often said, by tainted water. My father was a student of history and a great admirer of his.”
    “For his victories?”
    “For more than that. My father thought he was very forward looking, a man out of his time. He told me stories of him when I was a child. But after he died and my uncle took charge of my care, my new tutor instructed me in wifely duties only. I heard no more then of Alexander,” she ended sadly.
    “Why do you remember all this so well?” Burke asked. “You must have been very young when you heard about him.”
    “I was young but often left alone to