The Locket and the Flintlock

by Rebecca S. Buck

  If the men knew just how deeply she felt, the sensibilities which taunted her daily, she suspected they would mock her. Even worse, disrespect and disobey her. And that could be fatal. To hide your true self was not so hard after all. Len’s life had depended upon it for a long time. Why? Beneath the kerchief tied about the lower part of her face, she smiled. She knew why. The air whistled past her ears and stung life into her cheeks. Her heart beat faster with the rhythm of the gallop. This was what it was all for. Freedom. She needed it with every part of her being. Of all the compromises she had made in her life, one she would not make. She would be free, or she would be dead.

  The horses barely needed guiding to find their way from the road and through the thick woodland, as they slowed to a trot to negotiate the more uneven ground. The hoof falls were softened to a rustling crunch-crunch-crunch by the winter carpet of fallen leaves. The tall trunks of trees loomed in the semi-darkness, not sinister here. These trees were their protection and their shelter.

  Ahead, flickering as it was obscured by a tree trunk and then revealed again, shone a dim yellow light. The group of riders, Len ahead of them all, made for that point of warmth in the pale cold of the night. It seemed to burn steadier and brighter as they approached.

  The riders emerged from the trees into a small clearing where a ramshackle building stood, which must have once been quaint and welcoming. Len did not know who had lived here or why they lived here no longer. She did not much care. The abandoned house was their refuge. A place to shelter them from the elements and the law. A reminder of her former civilised life she wished to relinquish entirely, yet was still pleased to indulge. The lantern she had left burning on a stake by the door flickered a glowing welcome.

  Len dismounted in one fluid movement. The flagstones of the yard at the front of the house were hard beneath the soles of her riding boots. She pulled the kerchief from her face and left it draped about her neck, glad to breathe freely again. Short, stocky William was by her side in an instant—having dismounted his own mare—to take the reins from her hand. He would see that her black stallion was fed and watered. She could have taken care of the horse herself, but William enjoyed showing her the courtesy, and she knew leadership demanded that she sometimes accept these gestures. The men all knew she was perfectly capable of performing every task they undertook on her behalf. She believed it was one of the reasons she had their loyalty and respect.

  She took the lantern from its hook and carried it into the house, a halo of light illuminating the small entrance hall and then the comfortable kitchen where the men spent most of their time. Embers still glowed orange in the grate. Before long a fire would be raging, and meat, if there was still any to be had, would be roasting. Len tried to remember how much food they had left. Starving men did not make good outlaws, they were too easily distracted, too slow. The life they made for themselves here was not a plentiful one. But it was still better than where most of the men had come from.

  Len set the lantern on the table and used a taper to light one of the tallow candles standing near her. The extra light made the room feel warm and hospitable, not a hideout but a home. The flame guttered in the draught as someone entered behind her.

  “Almost not worth the effort.” Julian’s voice was gruff and disgruntled.

  “That bad?” Len turned to him and watched as he removed his own mask, taking off his hat and hanging it on a hook close to the door. Two of the other men—tall, gaunt Isaac and small-framed but strong Peter—entered behind Julian and made their way to the fireplace, where Isaac began to encourage the embers to grow into flames. The other men, William and John, were still outside, seeing to the horses, perhaps bringing in more firewood. Len waited for Julian’s response, smiling slightly at his dissatisfied expression.

  “Two purses of coins, a few trinkets from the women—”

  “And a book of poems,” Len concluded for him.

  “That might be a treasure to you, Len, but unless you intend to burn it in the grate or give it to me to wipe my arse, I don’t much see the point in taking it, myself.”

  “It’s Byron, Julian. All the women are swooning for him these days.” Len watched Julian relax and smile.

  “I don’t see you swooning for him.”

  “I am not the swooning kind of woman.”

  “Not for noble poets anyway.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve had a faint moment in my life.” Len was mildly indignant, as she always was at any suggestion of her weakness.

  “No. That you haven’t since I’ve known you.” Julian reached into his pocket and drew out a handful of gold and jewels which glimmered in the light. He placed them on the table. Len glanced over them and tried not to allow sadness into her heart. She saw rubies and mother-of-pearl, quality gold. About the neck or in the curled hair of a fine woman, the pieces would be exquisite. Here, in the run-down hideout, they seemed to have lost some of their lustre, reduced to their component parts, their material worth, and robbed of their beauty. Such pieces needed pale skin, ringlets of fair hair, a delicate earlobe, the light of hundreds of wax candles in a crystal chandelier, to show them to their best advantage. Not a stained wooden table and the flickering flame of a stinking tallow taper.

  Before she could help herself—for she scorned such riches and the unfair society that provided them for some while others starved—Len reached out a hand and touched the ruby of a crucifix, sanguine and glistening disconsolately. The chain of the crucifix was tangled with another gold chain attached to a rather plain gold locket. Len noticed the break in that chain.

  “Why is this necklace broken?” She turned questioning eyes on Julian, who looked uncomfortable under her scrutiny.

  “Silly little rich girl wouldn’t take it off for me.”

  “So you snatched it?” Len did not hide her disapproval.

  “We’re thieves, Len, not gentlemen, whatever you like to believe.” Len saw Isaac and Peter looking in their direction. Julian was the only one of the men who would dare talk to her like this. Her oldest friend, he did not treat her with deference in the way they did and, indeed, thought it was one of his most important duties to remind her of reality when she apparently lost her grip on it.

  “So we are. And thieve we do. But not with violence unless it’s unavoidable.”

  “I was not violent. It is a fine chain and broke easily. You point your pistol just as readily as I do, Len. And you would use it if you were disobeyed.”

  Len was silent. Julian was correct, and she had no idea why she’d even begun this argument. She’d used violence—and the threat of it—to make her way in the world for years now. There was just something about the gold locket with its broken chain that she did not quite like to look at. And why had its owner been so reluctant to relinquish it, even fearing for her life? A brave woman, obviously. What did the locket mean to her? Unable to resist the urge, Len took the locket in her fingers. The metal warmed rapidly under her touch.

  She did not apologise to Julian. She didn’t even glance up as she heard her other men enter the room. “If you need me, you know where I am,” she said to Julian. Her dark cloak flowing behind her, boots loud on the floorboards, she strode from the room to the place she could be quiet and alone, the locket still in her hand.

  Chapter Two

  Three days later, Isabella Foxe—who had always been of a nervous disposition—was still unsettled by the robbery on the road. She had taken to her bed, much to Sir Spencer’s great concern. Though she conceded her sister was excessively pale, Lucia did not feel much worry on Isabella’s behalf. Within the week she suspected Isabella would be abroad again, calling upon their neighbourhood friends to tell them, undoubtedly with much embellishment, of their narrow brush with death.

  Sir Spencer still bristled with anger, and Lucia understood it was made worse by its impotence. A group of masked riders had taken money and jewellery—and one poetry book—from them and merely galloped away into the night. They were unidentifiable, untr
aceable, and probably counties away by now. The chances of Sir Spencer ever seeing any one of them on the gallows were slim.

  Lucia found herself more contemplative in the following days. She did not believe they had truly flirted with death on the roadside. The peculiar memory of the masked man seeming to smile softened the recollection and added an edge of intrigue. Who was this man into whose eyes she had stared? What had brought him to thievery? His voice had been that of an educated man. She could not help the curiosity. She might have predicted that an encounter with such outlaws, a pistol held to her breast, would terrify her in similar fashion to her sister. That it did not was puzzling.

  Lucia’s thoughts, as they often did, drifted to her brother, Georgie, somewhere in the battlefields of the Peninsular, a captain in Wellington’s army. Did he feel afraid? Her own fear returned when she considered that he most likely faced the barrel of a French musket every day. Death was so horribly final.

  Lucia rarely forgot how close the hand of the Reaper could be. She had been troubled by a particular fear of death since her five-year-old mind had first struggled to comprehend the notion her beautiful mother had fallen asleep never to wake, except with God. She had been frightened to sleep herself for much of the year afterwards, for fear she might not wake as her mother had not. Even now, all of these years later, when she was on the point of slumber, at that transient moment when the darkness falls over the vision and consciousness fades, sometimes she would start awake in a hot terror she was dying.

  This night she had not yet attempted to fall asleep. She had taken to her chamber at the front of the house after supper. She tried to concentrate on a novel her sister had recommended to her but could not. In the end, she lounged in the window seat and simply gazed across the parkland, watching the palette of the sky change with the set of the sun and the rise of the moon.

  Everything outside was silvery and pale. There was no wind, and the picture before her was so still it could almost have been a painting. From her window on the second floor of their modest, half-century-old, red-brick manor house, she could see the driveway. It took a winding path through sculpted shrubbery to the main gateway from the road. The entrance itself was hidden from view by a small, shadowy thicket of elm and birch trees. The whole of the small park was surrounded by a brick wall, six feet in height. From her vantage point, Lucia saw where it stretched out across the front of the land, marking the place where the road ran along the perimeter of the property.

  Again, through force of habit, Lucia’s fingers went to the bare place on her throat where her locket usually rested. She felt its loss badly, for now it seemed her mother had receded even more distantly into the past. She would have been quite happy to see the man who had snatched it hanging from a gibbet until the flesh rotted from his wicked bones.

  At that moment, a movement at the periphery of her gaze drew her attention. She made out a group of riders on the road on the other side of the wall, well illuminated by the light of the moon. She peered keenly at them. Six riders! One could plainly be seen to wear a tricorn and was mounted on a horse considerably taller than the others. Her heart pounded hard in her chest. Lucia knew at once with an unshakeable certainty that the group she saw were their assailants of three nights previously. She stared at them for a little longer, and then almost without a conscious thought of it entering her head, she had decided what to do.

  She discounted waking her father or the male servants. The risk of what she intended did not make her falter, although she had never considered herself a brave kind of woman. Bravery was not something regularly of necessity in her life. Possible consequences were of no concern to her. Retrieving her locket was all that mattered.

  In an instant, Lucia took up her warm outdoor cloak from the foot of her bed. Slipping out of the house unheeded was really a very simple matter. The servants were, by this hour, either slumbering or below stairs. Isabella had not left her bed all of the day. Her father’s chamber was at the opposite end of the passageway from her own, and he slept heavily.

  Quite why she felt compelled to such secrecy she did not consider closely. Somewhere in her heart she knew if she roused any of the men in the house, she would be sent back to her chamber and the matter taken out of her hands. It was a matter of principle that she do this alone, confront the man who had humiliated her and taken her most precious treasure from her. Pride drove her forward. Pride, and that dreadful secret need to know, that desire to understand more of the world she had glimpsed when she’d looked into the villain’s eyes.

  The night smelled of damp cold when Lucia opened the front door of the house. She stole across the courtyard to the entrance to the stables. The moonlight pierced the dusty air through the small arched windows and allowed her to make her way easily. She entered the first stall where her own favourite mare, a chestnut named Sally, was standing peacefully.

  “Hello, Sally,” Lucia whispered. She stroked Sally’s nose. Sally snorted softly but was not apparently disturbed by Lucia’s sudden appearance at this unaccountable hour. Murmuring platitudes, Lucia removed Sally’s bridle from its nearby hook and eased the bit into the horse’s mouth, the rest of the bridle over her head. Sally looked at her through only half-interested eyes. Lucia was very glad she had insisted, some years ago, that Jenkins, the old groom, show her how to place a bridle on a horse correctly.

  “Now we’re going for a short ride.” Somehow, being with Sally made Lucia feel safer than she would have done without her. She led her to the mounting block just outside the stable entrance and pulled herself tentatively onto Sally’s broad back. She clutched at the reins and a sizeable portion of the mare’s mane and clicked her tongue to encourage her forward.

  The first wave of anxiety did not engulf her until she turned Sally onto the driveway in the direction of the road. The park was suddenly large and full of shadows, which only deepened as she progressed. The thicket of trees hid the moonlight, and Sally’s hoof falls on the frosty fallen leaves sounded very loud. Still, she had to attempt this now she had come this far. To fail now would be a weakness she could not tolerate and would leave her with questions for the rest of her days, she was sure.

  Foxe Hall did not have a large enough park to require a gatehouse and keeper, of which Lucia was glad tonight. She urged Sally through the iron gate and let it close behind them, flinching as metal crashed against metal, a harsh sound that echoed in the night.

  There was a slight breeze on the road, and the air was bitter. Outside the gate, she was small and alone. But she felt a fierce determination like nothing she had ever felt before. The road appeared to be deserted in both directions, and she wondered if the opportunity had been missed. However, she had come this far. She turned Sally in the direction she had seen the shadowy riders travelling and encouraged her into a trot.

  *

  “We are being followed.” Len drew her horse to a halt and spoke urgently to Julian at her side. The other men stopped their horses alongside the pair who had been leading them. Her tone was calm, factual, with no trace of panic. She was only mildly alarmed. Melting away into the night was all too easy with the open fields and woodland surrounding them.

  “Are you sure?” Julian asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Out here? We’re miles from town.” This was Isaac, who sounded considerably more anxious.

  “It’s most like to be a farmer on his way home from the tavern,” Peter said in his thick local accent.

  “You’re right. Still, it does us no good to be seen by more eyes than we have to be.” Len considered for a moment. “Will you deal with it, Julian?”

  “Yes. William, stay with me.” Julian turned to the well-built man on his left side, who nodded his hatless head briefly. “You too, John.” John acknowledged the command with a brief gesture of his hand.

  “The rest of us will go back to the house.” There was some strain in her voice now, for she hated these moments. Her appearance never gave her away, but she dared not risk a situati
on in which she might be asked to explain herself, for experience had taught her that her voice could arouse suspicion. That she had to allow Julian to deal with such predicaments frustrated her endlessly, however much she trusted him. Sometimes it seemed she should really relinquish leadership of their group to her friend. But though Julian was solid and capable, intelligent and sharp-witted, he was not a leader. His temper was too easily frayed, his patience tried too quickly.

  “Yes. We will make out we are merely travellers. No doubt whoever it is will warn us about highwaymen and let us on our way.”

  Len smiled. “No doubt. For dangerous villains haunt these roads by night. Be safe.” Her first words were in jest, her final ones entirely in earnest.

  “You too.”

  Julian, William, and John turned their horses to face the direction they had just come from. Len nudged her horse into a trot, and the remaining men followed her lead. As a precaution, as soon as she could, Len steered them off the road and into the woodland, following a track made by the charcoal burners at first and then threading a path through the trees towards their cottage.

  Perhaps she had been foolish to ride along the main road in the first place. Certainly they could have kept to the shadows and not run any risk of being followed. But it had been a quiet night on the roads and so not particularly profitable, and the men were discontented. She had wanted them to reach their home comforts as quickly as possible, had been confident no one was abroad on this cold night to see them. A wave of anxiety swept through her at the reminder of how close to the edge they lived their lives. She quelled it swiftly. Julian and William had her complete trust, John was very capable, and she and the others were now merely shadows in the trees.