The Devil's Luck (A Charlie Raven Adventure)

by Jan Needle

  "If we're asked, we all know who done for this poor feller, don't we?"

  The nods were more enthusiastic this time. His friends were following his train of thought nicely, now.

  "So there's no blame can attach to a bunch of lads who happened along a lonely road, found two poor gentlemen what have been set upon by Sir Jonathan Bright and took the survivor 'ome, is there?" Barney was warming to his theme, now.

  "But 'oo's going to ask us about it?" One of his colleagues was not entirely satisfied with the plan.

  "Nobody, yer turnip, this is in case anybody should ask us!"

  "Oh." There seemed to be no answer to that, but the aggrieved man was still mulling it over in his mind as they mounted their horses and rode away. So distracted was he that he failed to notice as his horse's shadow passed over Matthew Milburn that the "corpse" shut its eyes as he passed.

  Later, when the mystery of the Milburn holdings came up again, he was to remember that he had never checked to make sure the corpse really was a corpse.

  A phrase which would bring the moment to mind was a simple, memorable one.

  "Never count a Milburn dead until you've seen him buried."

  The atmosphere in Sharpe Hall was thick enough to cut with a blunt butter-knife, and Jonathan Bright was watching his step more carefully than usual.

  Sarah Sharpe needed handling with a fine and delicate hand, like a highly-bred horse, and like many another horseman Jonathan Bright was getting fed up with riding and wanted to step out of the saddle for a while. But Sarah held the key to success and riches, and without her his gambling debts - and certain other matters - would bring him down. Jonathan Bright had inherited an old title and an old Hall in Hertfordshire, and an old parcel of debts to which he had enthusiastically added over the past 30 years.

  Now he needed a coup of some kind to restore the family fortunes, the family seat and the family purse. Through Sarah Sharpe he had found one.

  Most of Britain's Navy was grown on the hills and mountains of Britain. Often grown to shape by skilled foresters working with the shipwrights. From Westmorland came the planks to clad the ships. Most of those planks - or at any rate many of them - came from the hillsides around Sharpe Hall and higher up around Shap Side farm and the Stavelys'.

  A combination of either Shap Side or Stavelys' and Sharpe Hall would mean a virtual monopoly of wood-prices from this end of the district. That meant profits which might be counted in tens of thousands a year.

  The trouble was that the woods on Sharpe Hall had been stripped too savagely in recent years. Whereas the Milburn holdings higher up, which grew a hardier mountain oak, had been carefully and sparingly cropped. There was plenty of fine oak left up there and, if a man wanted a quick profit and was not too choosy about felling out the best growth, Bright calculated that within five years there would be few trees on Shap Side, but there would be more ships in the Channel Fleet and the affairs of Jonathan Bright, gentleman, would be in fine fettle.

  All of this plan, however, depended upon using Sarah Sharpe's land and men, which in turn meant sharing the whole thing with Sarah Sharpe.

  Sarah was eager enough to join in the plan, of course. Where the lovely lady of Sharpe Hall was concerned, there was no sounder argument than the ring of guineas falling one upon another into a bank account.

  But the rub was that Lady Sarah was not by any means pushed for money. On the contrary, her father, Numerator Sharpe, a man dark and narrow of face and mind who counted riches more desirable than a place on the right hand of God, died leaving her one of the richest women in the North.

  His other legacy was his dark and narrow mind in a body so desirable that most men happily overlooked Sarah's obsession with possessions until it was too late.

  Sarah joined with Sir Jonathan Bright in his schemes for two reasons. One was that they would show a profit and add to her already sprawling lands. The other was that Jonathan Bright was a jewel to add to her personal following. A twisted and sadistic mind herself, she recognised the same dark traits in him, and like called to like.

  Sarah was not, however, a patient being. Having committed herself to the course they now followed, she was eager to see it through and to hear the soothing whisper of incoming profits.

  With a friend from Court recently appointed to the Kendal justices, it had not been hard to lay the trumped-up complaint against old Matthew Milburn, though she had to admit that she had been away too long and had forgotten about the Milburn son.

  Matthew's intervention had disturbed her and unlike Bright she was not sorry he was dead. The brawny, handsome young man with the felling-axe swinging from his fist like a toy had disturbed her more than she liked to admit. There was something dogged, something indomitable, about the square, handsome face on the corded column of neck. And those shoulders... Sarah Sharpe repressed a most uncharacteristic shudder and resolved to make sure young Milburn was buried hard by the church wall at Crook, near which church their encounter had taken place.

  Moved by the thought, she decided to take matters in her own hands and arrange for the body to be found. Against the wishes of Jonathan Bright, who counselled that the less connection they were seen to have with the affair the better, and went back to studying his slip of paper, she called for Barney and told him to go and "discover" the corpse and carry it on to Crook for examination by a magistrate and subsequent burial. He was then to report the presence on the high road of footpads and return to the hall for further instructions.

  It was not until he returned to report that the body had disappeared that she began to have the first real misgivings. "Gone? What do you mean, gone?" she rasped, the bell­like tones gone from her voice.

  Barney, a blunter instrument by far than Boss Wrathall, spread his hands in amazement.

  "Just gone, my lady. There was the patch of trampled grass, and you could see where he'd been because there was blood on the ground. But 'e'd gone complete. So's 'is 'oss."

  "Had someone else come along and found him, then?" Barney shrugged.

  "I dunno, my lady. I couldn't see no other tracks around, but then, the ground was all torn up round there anyway, and the road wouldn't show any tracks. None you wouldn't have expected, anyway."

  She bit her lip and gazed at him doubtfully. Barney was not intelligent enough to sense the undercurrents of savagery as had Wrathall. So, unlike Wrathall, he did not cringe at her glance but waited stolidly for his next orders.

  "Go back and have a look around. Perhaps he wasn't quite dead and managed to crawl off somewhere," she said. "Look in those bushes beside the road and look further back along the ditch."

  Barney pulled his forelock, bent his head and left, with his boots clumping on the polished floorboards between the rugs in the hall. With the unthinking instinct of the countryman, he never placed a booted foot on the carpet, lest he should dirty it.

  Sarah took herself to the library in search of Jonathan Bright.

  She found him poring over a calf-bound tome from one of the high shelves neither she nor her father had ever touched. They were nevertheless carefully dusted once a week and kept in good repair - heaven help the staff, else - for the use of visitors, and simply because they were hers and had, like everything else she owned, to be carefully cared for.

  "What do you think?" she said as she swept into the library. "I sent Barney to keep an eye on Milburn's body, and he came back to say it's gone."

  "Hmmm?" Bright was bent over one of a series of sheets of paper all of them covered with a tangle of numbers and symbols.

  "Milburn's body. It's gone."

  Bright's head snapped up suddenly. "Gone? You mean someone's taken it?"

  "What else could it be?" Lady Sarah was more than vaguely uneasy, now. Her hands began to twist themselves together. "Dead men don't get up and walk off, do they? Do they?"

  There was a faintly hysterical note in her voice, now, and Bright was reminded that her particular thread of insanity was quite close to the surface. It might not be th
e only one she had.

  "Don't be ridiculous," he snapped. "Either someone has happened along and picked him up - in which case the less we know about it, the better. Or he wasn't in fact dead when that dolt Barney told me he was.

  "Blast his eyes, I'll have his lights for that!"

  Bright put down the book on which he was working and strode towards the library door. Lady Sarah was turning to go with him when two things stopped her.

  "I've sent Barney out to see what he can find," she said.

  "What's this you're doing here?"

  Sit Jonathan turned back at the doorway. "An attempt to work out what those numbers mean. I found a copy of Asmodeus' Numerology among the occult books on your shelf. But I don't think it will help in this case."

  "Maybe." Lady Sarah shivered. Even at the height of summer the stone-built walls of the Elizabethan Sharpe Hall seemed to hold a chill. Maybe the lack of love within them had left the old stones unmoved and unwelcoming.

  In any case, dusk was closing in. A muted, unseasonably early dusk. It was not yet nine o'clock and, at this season, Westmorland held the sunlight until well after ten.

  She stepped to the window and peered at the sky. Heavy, thick rainclouds had blown in from the sea as they often did during the summer, and hung, lowering like leaden ships' sails, cutting off the last glow of the sun.

  Then she froze for a long, suspended moment. Coming down the avenue of trees towards the high, lighted window of the library was a horseman. He rode with a peculiarly deliberate gait, and an unnatural posture, and he was riding with awful certainty straight towards her.

  Unable to move, even to speak, she heard the door open and close as Sir Jonathan went out of the room. She tried to cry out, to call him back, but all that came from her throat was a strangled, whimpering cry.

  Still the horseman came on, hunched and terrible, on his great black horse. Straight for the lighted window. Straight for her.

  The hair along the back of her neck prickled, until the sensation spread over her head, her hands and her ears. She could hear her own shuddering breathing.

  The horse was at the window now. The head of the rider slowly raised. She stared at it, eyes rounded, lips writhing back from her teeth as it came up, slowly, slowly.

  Finally, she faced it, eye to eye, with only the glass separating them.

  The hair was matted, muddy and blood-streaked. The nose was mashed shapelessly above a pulped and purple pair of lips. But the worst part of all was the eyes. Bloodshot and glazed, one drooping half-closed, they were eyes from under a shroud, and the ghastly pallor of the whole countenance heightened their horror.

  Lady Sarah Sharpe looked for a long, breathless time into the face of her victim. Then the rain which had been threatening all evening burst against the window and for a moment the ghastly mask was obscured.

  By the time the rain had filmed the window and the first fury of the storm was past, there was nothing to be seen, save a rain-swept avenue of trees, and the grass, bending under the wind.

  But it was a long time before Sarah Sharpe turned away from the window, and her expression as she looked with empty, frightened eyes around the library of books she had never read was devoid of everything except despair.

  If her victims were now going to seek her out even after their death, what hope had she for the future? Was there, indeed, a future for her after all?

  Dull, sightless eyes flickered in her imagination. A ripple of horror ran from the crown of her head to her feet.

  Three

  The first thing he could remember was pain. Pain which filled his head with a red throbbing. Pain which reached spiked fingers into his lungs at every laboured breath. Pain which filled the world and distorted his sight.

  He was lying flat on his back, in the grass of the roadside. He was almost naked and flies buzzed around his face. If only he could concentrate he could raise his hand and brush them away, but nothing seemed to work right. If only, just for one second, the pain would go away, he could work out what to do.

  A shadow came and went across his face. He forced open one eye, then the other. The second stuck, half open and half closed. He blinked and tried to make it work properly. But it would neither open nor focus as it should.

  A head wound, then. He had seen men with head wounds who lost control of their eyes altogether. At least he still had one left.

  Again the shadow ran across his face and this time he closed his eyes until it had gone. Somewhere near him a man was screaming, and there was a rhythmic, steady thumping. He opened his good eye and twisted his head slightly. The movement brought such pain that for a moment he fainted again.

  When he came round, two men he did not know were loading the battered bulk of Boss Wrathall onto a horse and talking in low voices.

  Perhaps it had been Boss Wrathall who had been screaming. Matthew, who had no liking for Boss, but did at least know him from years back, felt a momentary pang of pity. Whoever and whatever had made Boss scream like that must have hurt him very terribly indeed.

  He could hear the men talking, but their words made no sense to him. It seemed that they were proposing to leave him here. As their horses swung by him, he closed his eyes so as not to draw attention to himself. In any case, he was beginning to feel sick again.

  When he awoke, it was mid-afternoon, he could tell from the position of the sun. Clouds were beginning to drift across the sky like cushions of smoke from some seaward bonfire. Their soft outlines didn't fool him. There'd be rain and wind before night. God help the seamen off the West coast in tonight's wind. They'd be better off in harbour or well out to sea.

  Something moved beside his head and hot breath blew over him. Lucifer was standing next to him and nuzzling his head with velvet nose. Thoughtful of the horse, but painful, he noted, pulling himself stiffly onto an elbow.

  The pain that ran instantly through his side shot him onto his back, sweating and swallowing. If he were sick, it would mean sitting up and bending forward, and he wasn't ready for that, yet. He wasn't ready for anything.

  A cloud passed across the sun and the chill of suddenly being in shadow reminded him of his predicament. He was naked and badly hurt and lying in the open. In his present state a short shower of rain would kill him with cold.

  There was a storm coming, he could smell it in the air and even the horse was getting uneasy about it.

  More carefully now he levered himself into a sitting position and took a long rest. Next to get onto his hands and knees.

  That took longer, and it was not until several minutes later that he stopped, sweating with pain and head hanging limply. But at least when he opened his good eye it was looking down at the grass.

  The pain, he noted, had diminished slightly and it was centred in three main areas. His head, his face and his left side, under the arm. He was tender elsewhere, to be sure. But those three were the ones which paralysed him when he moved.

  One part of him had stopped hurting for some reason. His back, which had been agonising when he was lying down, seemed to have become a lot easier. He looked down again and saw why. By some freak he had fallen full on one of his own pistols and had been lying on it ever since.

  Lucifer stood like a statue. He grasped the reins to pull himself upright and finished up leaning against the animal. He looked around, the scene swimming before his eyes with the effort of getting upright.

  Hanging from a bush not far away were his shirt and waistcoat. He managed a wry smile at the thought that this was twice in two days that somebody had stolen his clothes, then winced at the pain of his smashed lips and croaked as the wince made his ribs twinge again.

  By persuading Lucifer to get there, he reached the clothes and pulled them on. It wasn't easy, but he knew all about dying of exposure and that was all too easy for a naked man to do in pouring, icy rain. A shirt and waistcoat might not be much protection, but they were some.

  His high boots, predictably, were missing. So were his breeches and his coat. Once
again, that was predictable. They were fine well-made garments and, when he saw them walking about the district next, he would drum the sanctity of property into the wearer's skull.

  However, Lucifer did have a caped riding-coat strapped behind the saddle and there were shoes in his saddlebags so that he could change out of his riding-boots when he found lodging in Kendal that night.

  He retrieved the garments and put on coat and shoes; it was not easy, but once again he felt better for their comfort. Now came the job of getting onto the horse and setting out for home.

  He let the animal find its way to the edge of the woods and limped along beside him, following the fringes of the trees until he found one which was broken down.

  A struggling, sweating interval ensued, during which he managed to get one foot in the stirrup, while the other flailed around without support, and his injured side shrieked at him to stop.

  Then, with a click, he was sitting in the saddle. Not in parade-ground form, mayhap, but up there, nonetheless.

  As he sat there, breath labouring, in the skirts of the wood, Lucifer whickered slightly. Matthew swung his head in time to see a single horseman coming down the road, first at a trot and then, as he got nearer, slowing to walk and finally stop altogether.

  The man jumped from his mount and examined the grass verge. Matthew could hear him swear in a surprised voice, and held Lucifer's nostrils as the man cast about on the road and verge for signs.

  Evidently he found nothing, for eventually he stood in the middle of the road and scratched his head in perplexity. Then he remounted his horse and rode along the edge of the wood for a while in each direction, though without apparently seeing Matthew's tracks.

  Finally he rode off at a more urgent gait. Plainly going to report that all was not well.

  Equally plainly Matthew had to get under cover and that as quickly as possible. He could never wait out a rainstorm and, if his enemies were already quartering the countryside for him, the sooner he found help and company, the better.