So she mused, thinking it no wonder that so many spendthrift sons of good family, so many people of all classes, in fact, from disbanded soldiers to scholars, took to the Road. It would be a new thing, she thought, her nostrils quivering a little, if a lady of quality joined the fraternity, not so much for love of gain, but because life was so cruelly dull and grey and empty…
And so it came about that the neighbourhood was scared that autumn by talk of the highwayman whose depredations were said to equal in daring any committed in recent years. He worked alone, always after sunset or at dawn, seldom spake, and seemed by his figure to be young, perhaps little more than a youth. Mr Riggs, riding home from a visit to his father-in-law, with his wife pillion behind him, had been waylaid in Carter’s Lane and obliged to hand over his purse and his wife’s pearl necklace. A coach containing Squire Mainwaring and his daughters, travelling home from the waters at Bath, had been attacked near Woburn by this same rascal (it was believed). The servants had fired on and missed the robber who, in return, had shot one of the servants in the arm and, in the confusion, had gone off with a small iron box containing valuables which one of them was holding.
The extraordinary quickness and dexterity with which this fellow worked was commented upon. It seemed that he could wrench an earring from a lady’s ear (no considerations of chivalry apparently deterring him) before she could let out a shriek, and it was seldom that he made his escape without bearing some trophy with him.
And in the dawn Barbara Skelton would trot quietly up the dark yew glades of Maryiot Cells, her lovely face uplifted to the cool air and the paling sky, her slender body sweating beneath her man’s coat from her recent exertions, her mind strangely relaxed and satisfied.
Young Lady Skelton sometimes lay very late abed those autumn mornings, her languor raising great hopes in her mother-in-law’s breast. And when she got up on these occasions she would go out, wearing her little black velvet coat edged with white fur, and a hood, her skirts tucked up to display her pretty silver-laced petticoat, pattens on her feet, and go for a long stroll down by the river. This too her mother-in-law approved of, for gentle walking exercise could not harm a breeding woman.
The good lady would have been less approving and considerably startled could she have seen her daughter-inlaw digging vigorously at the roots of the oak tree whose bough overstretched the path between the Abbots Pool and Purgatory. It was here that Barbara made the caches in which to conceal the jewellery and money that she had wrested the previous night from their lawful owners.
She had no very clear idea what she intended to do eventually with these valuables. Perhaps one day she would be able to dispose of them – money in abundance was never to be despised, as Sir Ralph’s frequent lectures since the Kingscleres’ visit on the subject of her gambling debts, and his insistence that in future she should confine her card playing to gleak11 and cribbage, reminded her.
Meanwhile it pleased her as she dug away at the moist, good-smelling earth with a little trowel and, slipping on a pair of gloves so that she should not stain her shapely white fingers, thrust the wrapped-up jewels and coins into safety, to recall the exploit of which they were the trophy; the restless wait in hiding, the breathless moment as the sound of hooves or wheels announced the victim’s approach, the plunge into the road, the shouts, the startled faces, the brutal joy of seizing this man’s purse, that woman’s brooch, the swift homeward flight across country by devious ways and tracks.
Winter came with its heavy rains, turning roads and ditches into a uniform quagmire of mud, and flooding them so badly that in places it was hard to see where streams ended and roads began. One night Barbara sank up to her saddle girths in mire. Few people travelled at night as the winter closed in, except those who were obliged to it by extreme urgency. Barbara settled down sulkily to months of inaction.
The winter had never before seemed so interminable; never before had she waited so impatiently for the spring. Of what use to her were sickly snowdrops and dangling catkins, when the lanes were still of the consistency of mud porridge? Only when several weeks of dry weather succeeded each other did her spirits revive.
The last few mornings had been frosty; in the wan March sunshine the daffodils shone strangely bright and golden in the milky grass. Old Lady Skelton trusted that this untimely frost would not harm her seedlings. Young Lady Skelton, walking out in her velvet cloak and hood, rejoiced to see how path and track had hardened up.
She closed the drawer of the cabinet now and, strolling to the window, stared out across lawn and river. Outside the breeze would be sharp, but here indoors, with a fire still burning and the sunshine pouring through the leaded casement windows, it was easy to cherish the illusion that spring had come with warm finality. In the clear blue sky the pearly clouds sailed by.
The Dowager Lady Skelton said, ‘I believe that we may consider winter at an end at last. Do you mean to venture out, Barbara dear?’
Barbara laughed softly. ‘Yes, I shall venture out.’
3
MIDNIGHT ON WATLING STREET
‘One night’s good fortune under the stars.’1
The house was asleep at last. No, not the house but its inhabitants. Sir Ralph snored alone in his bed with the mulberry-coloured hangings; Barbara was a light sleeper, and her restless tossing and turnings (for it was at night that the futility of her existence gnawed at her most keenly) had so disturbed Sir Ralph that he had agreed, if somewhat grudgingly, to her suggestion that they should occupy separate bedrooms. Old Lady Skelton, having taken her nightly syrup of gilly-flower cordial, would be lying with folded hands, her face fretful but innocent under its nightcap, her dumpy, sturdy little body endeavouring in sleep to recover from the effects of all the strange potions with which she dosed it during the daytime. Agatha Trimble most likely would have sucked herself to sleep with a sweetmeat tucked in the corner of her large, ugly mouth. Cousin Jonathan would be a mountainous, snuffling lump of flesh under the bedclothes. Paulina might well have her smooth cheek pillowed on a book. In every attic and closet servants would be drowsing, except where some couples indulged their furtive amours.
The household was at rest, but the old house itself never slumbered. In the deep silence of the night there were strange little creaks and crepitations, as though Maryiot Cells stirred like an old rheumatic hound.
Barbara had no particular love for Maryiot Cells. She was its mistress, and so it had considerable importance in her eyes, but it was too old-fashioned for her taste, the symbol of her cramped and confined life. She would have fancied a handsome and symmetrical mansion in the fashionable style, but Sir Ralph, though he had allowed her in moderation to redecorate the house and had given her even greater liberty in the garden (provided that he had his hunting, hawking and bowling, he cared not how much his lady adorned the pleasure garden with orange and lemon trees in tubs, sundials, or yew clipped into fantastical shapes), would not allow her to alter the house itself in the slightest degree. The present structure had been built 140 years ago on the foundations of the dissolved monastery by his great-great grandfather. What was good enough for his forebears was good enough for him.
Barbara never speculated on the personalities of these past tenants of Maryiot Cells, whose portraits in stiff, ungainly Tudor costume, or in the still more ridiculous though less remote fashions of the Martyr King’s reign, decorated the walls of the Long Gallery. There was only one person dead or alive connected with Maryiot Cells who interested her, and that person was Barbara Skelton.
Nevertheless, she felt a certain hostility towards the house because she was vaguely aware that other personalities than her own, with their emotions, hopes and fears, had left their mysterious impress on its atmosphere.
She was not fanciful, but tonight it seemed to her that Maryiot Cells was more than ever watchful, as though it were aware of her secret purpose. She stood by the fireplace in her bedroom and, stirring the logs with her foot, provoked them into a flame that threw a faint war
mth on to the silk Indian gown which she had thrown over her night-shift.
She was ready for bed, her hair brushed and combed into a wreath of shining bronzen curls; even her hands – those hands that would soon be holding pistol butt and reins – had been rubbed with scented paste to keep them white and delicate. She had submitted to her waiting-maid’s ministrations with the same languid patience that she showed every other night, had bid her ‘good night’ in agreeable if absent tones.
Now she roused herself suddenly from her reverie, darted to the door and locked it, drew the rose-coloured curtains round the empty bed. She stood for a moment in the middle of the room, not so much listening, for she knew that the house was still, but savouring the intense secrecy of the moment. In all this great house, the tapestried figures on the walls, Venus, Mars and the other embroidered deities who stared at her stupidly, were her only witnesses.
She took a bunch of keys from a silver box and, carrying a lighted candle in her hand, went into the closet that adjoined her bedroom. Slipping her hands over the panelling she opened a little door in the wall. Perhaps this door had been originally intended as a secret mode of egress; if so its purpose had long been forgotten. Its existence was known to, but ignored by, the present occupants of Maryiot Cells. It led to a very narrow staircase in the thickness of the wall which wound up from the lower regions to a disused room above.
Young Lady Skelton slipped through the little door and, lifting her Indian gown to save its hem from the dust, went lightly up the narrow staircase. She unlocked the door at the top with one of the keys she was carrying and let herself into the room. It was small, a mere attic with sloping walls and ceiling. It was bare except for a table with a gilt mirror on it, a silk covered stool and a chest painted in the Dutch fashion with sprigs of spring flowers.
Barbara set the candlestick down on the table, and opening the chest pulled from it a suit of men’s riding clothes, boots, hat, belt, pistols, all the cherished accoutrements that she had laid away reluctantly for the winter. She handled them with a caressing eagerness that, fond as she was of the bravery of fine clothes, she had never accorded to lace mantua or embroidered sultane,2 for these things were the symbol of her partial emancipation from the dragging reality of life.
With the impatient but deft movements characteristic of her, she stripped off her Indian gown and silk nightrail, smiling down at her beautiful naked body, before clothing herself in her man’s attire. When she was ready, the long heavy boots pulled on, the over-large belt girded round her elegant waist, her wide-brimmed hat set jauntily on her head, she sat down at the table and gazed at herself in the mirror.
She loved her face in all its moods, but never better than in this strange, bizarre aspect; the green eyes wide and wild with excitement, the curious nostrils poised – you might almost say! – for flight. Her face looked back at her, daring her to bold and dangerous deeds, and it was then that she resolved to try her luck on Watling Street.3
Up till now she had avoided the important highway which led from London through St Albans, Dunstable and Stony Stratford to the North, keeping to the by-roads where she might hope to pounce on unwary and solitary travellers who believed themselves safer on these less frequented ways. On Watling Street she would be exposed to greater risk of detection and pursuit, but she could hope for a more certain prize. Nothing galled her more than to wait – as she had done on more than one occasion – hidden in thicket or ditch for several empty hours without reward. This thwarting of her talents, as she had grown to consider her aptitude for highway robbery, plunged her into an irritated and melancholy humour that was scarcely to be borne.
Carrying her saddle over her arm – not her crimson velvet one with a matching fringe, that she used when she rode abroad on her lawful occasions, but a serviceable leather one – she made her way down the staircase. It ended in a little cubbyhole or cupboard. With infinite caution she let herself out of this into a narrow stone passage. She was now in the lower regions of the house, and must take care lest a noisy movement roused one of the scullions sleeping by the fire in the great vault-like kitchen near at hand. The passage was very dark, but she slipped along it till she came to a low door, used mostly for bringing wood into the house. She unbolted this and was out in the cold starlit night.
The stars glittered with a brilliance that showed that there was frost in the air. Barbara, taking a deep breath, regarded the coruscating worlds above and thought what a fine and fit night it was for her purpose. She was standing among bushes. The dark irregular shape of Maryiot Cells rose behind her, ominous against the spangled sky. Below her, across the sloping grass, she could hear the river singing.
Fleury was out at grass. When she reached the meadow where he grazed she had only to call his name softly. He came to her at once, whinnying with delight. She shared his pleasure. To stroke his velvet nose, to saddle him, to spring on to his back, to trot gently across the stone bridge and down the dark gallery of the yew glades, to canter across the sleeping countryside – all this gave her infinite content.
She rode west, then crossing a river before reaching Fenny Stratford struck north, and passing Eaton and its church and Bletchley, reached the shelter of Rickley wood.
And so she came to Watling Street. The highway lay empty and silent under the twinkling sky. Hard to believe that it was the channel for a vigorous and multifarious stream of human life. Its surface was as deeply rutted as a side lane; patches of loose stones, gravel and bundles of furze testified to the unwilling labours of the parishioners, the ‘King’s highwaymen’ (the ‘King’s loiterers’, they were jeeringly nicknamed) who had been recruited to repair it. In parts, trees and scrub threatened to overgrow the road. But Barbara regarded it with the eye of a marauder, not a traveller. Its very deficiencies might lend themselves to her advantage. The difference in outlook between the prey and the one who preys was a lesson that she was learning with ease and satisfaction.
Yet she chafed at her inexperience, as she rode along, half deciding on, then discarding, this or that lurking-place. There must be some art in all this; highway robbery surely had its rules as much as any other science. She wished to perfect herself in her chosen career. To match daring with a nice kill was her aim. She could only acquire this exact knowledge by practice. Meanwhile she must rely on her intuitions.
Finally she selected a spot that she believed would suit her purpose. The road, thickly wooded here, dipped into a little hollow; on either side a rough track wound away aimlessly, to all appearance, under the trees. In one of these, screened by the bushes and the bare but overhanging branches, Barbara took up her position and awaited her luck.
This period of waiting never failed to exacerbate her nerves and depress her spirits. Her wide-opened eyes strained into the shadows, as though by their intense staring they could conjure something out of nothing.
The sound of hoofs approaching roused her expectations, but her hopes drooped again as the plodding tempo announced a string of pack horses. Unmolested they passed her with their no doubt mean and commonplace burdens. Barbara sneered inside herself to think how their driver, shambling along unsuspectingly beside them, would stiffen into terrified attention if he knew what lurked in the bushes a few yards from him.
Another wait. The frosty sky sparkled unconcernedly above the shadowy, ill-defined world beneath. Barbara’s hands inside her riding gloves were stiffening with cold, her mind stiffening with tedium. She gnawed at her lower lip in chagrin. Must she go home unfulfilled and empty-handed? And on this, her first outing of the new year. Oh cruel!
And as she fretted through the vacuous moments, there came the sweet rumble of a coach’s wheels. Expectation flowed into her body, warming it with a physical glow. Whatever was coming along the highway, however well guarded, she was resolved to attack it. With a gentle pressure of her knees she edged her horse forward. A cumbrous shape was advancing along the road. It had not the appearance of a private equipage. Could this be the stage coach, delayed
beyond its usual hour and lumbering now with clumsy haste to safety? Barbara blessed her good fortune. This was novelty and the certainty of booty. Her body tingled with the familiar sense of excitement and power. Fleury pricked his ears; fidgeted with a rustle of twigs and withered bracken. Barbara breathed deeply once or twice to steady herself. Then as the coach approached in a surge of hoof-beats and rumbling wheels, she drew her pistol from its holster and urged Fleury forward. And as she swept down athwart the coach, shouting ‘Stand and Deliver!’ a masked horseman broke cover from the opposite side of the road and seized the horses’ heads.
This unexpected sight disconcerted Barbara, but only for a moment. The passengers of the stage, rudely jolted out of their drowsy security, were poking their heads out of the window, fumbling to hide their valuables, cursing or squealing, as their sex inclined them. Their confusion and alarm invited robbery. Barbara set about her business with her usual briskness. Forcing each passenger at the pistol muzzle to descend into the road so that she could the better see what she was about, she neatly collected purses and loose coins, pitilessly stripped jewellery off the ladies, removing as well from one woman a modish fur tippet that took her fancy.
To speak more than a few words in an assumed masculine voice was a strain, so she left unanswered her victims’ indignant protests. ‘You’ll hang for this, you rascal!’ ‘Fie on you, you wicked brute, to treat a poor helpless woman so.’ Her unnatural silence, accompanied by her business-like actions, produced an uncanny and alarming effect upon her victims and helped to paralyse their already feeble powers of resistance.
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton Page 12