The Accidental Highwayman

by Ben Tripp

  “Both of you conceal your feelings. I am not deceived.”

  “Oh, I see,” said I. “Is this your fiancée?”

  “She was,” said the captain, scowling. “I have brought her here to reconsider her misplaced affection for a murderous dog.”

  “I do not recognize this young man,” the lady said. “Were he Whistling Jack, I should say he may be a murderous dog indeed, but not to me. He was ever so kind and well-mannered, and handed me down from the carriage most courtly. He complimented my jewels as he took them off me, and looked upon me and said I needed not such bright baubles to ravish the eye. Can you imagine! What a charming thing to say. He took the contents of the cash-box at my feet and said I must be a lovely dancer, for my foot was so well-turned. Never raised his voice, unlike some. Never made a demand, but always a request. I know a gentleman when I meet one, and Whistling Jack was the gentlest.”

  “That will do,” said the captain, his face approaching the color of roast beef as mentioned by the judge. But the lady wasn’t finished. Evidently this interview had unsealed some inner dam of emotions.

  “It will not do, Captain. You cut a fine figure upon a horse and look very well on a lady’s arm with your martial demeanor. But there’s more to winning a woman’s heart than that. In any case, this isn’t him. Whistling Jack is as old as you, Captain. This lad is the age of my niece Fidelia—sixteen or seventeen, not a day more.”

  “Enough!” he spat, and rattled his sword to emphasize the point. “This is he. I pursued him all the way across England. I know him, and I know his horse!”

  “Perhaps he borrowed the horse. Think what you will. You dragged me all the way here to this dreadful place. You insisted. This interview is nothing to do with me. Unfortunately, neither is this young fellow.”

  I bowed to her, grateful that one person, at least, knew me to be wrongly accused. And grateful, too, that she thought so well of Master Rattle—even at his very worst. The captain had not told me her name, probably to keep me from using it in some swooning speech to renew my grasp upon her affections, but whosoever she was, I hoped she would find a better match than Sterne.

  Chapter 32

  TIDINGS FROM AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

  ON THE final day of my captivity, the gaoler’s assistant, a Mr. Ratskalp, came down the companionway to the third deck where I lay, and addressed me thus:

  “You, Whistlin’ Jack! Stir thyself.”

  A couple of soldiers came down after him and unlocked my leg-irons, then retreated double-time, to be sick on the top-deck from the stench below. I could not stand, so the ship’s surgeon took one side of me, and Mr. Ratskalp the other, and they hoisted me up to the outside world, which I had not seen since my interview with the captain. I was blinded by the sunlight, although it was an overcast day, and the cool, fresh air set me to shivering so that my teeth rattled like dice in a cup.

  “Ye’ve got a visitor,” said Ratskalp, drawing a dead fish out of his waistband. “Need a bathe.” He proceeded to scrape the scales from the fish with his black thumbnails, while a couple of emaciated crewmen threw buckets of river water over me, then plied my bite-pocked flesh with gray mops until there were patches of skin visible through the grime.

  Then they clad me in a canvas shirt and galligaskins*, none too clean and large enough for three of me, but better than the rotting clothes I wore below the deck. “For good appearances,” Mr. Ratskalp explained. “Mustn’t alert the public to the conditions on these ’ere barges. There mote be an outcry, and then humane prison policies follow, and me out of a job.”

  With that, he bit the head off his fish and directed me to the soldiers. They lowered me into a jolly boat, and I was rowed ashore in chains.

  The visit was conducted in a fortified structure, once a customshouse, with bars on the windows and a fortified wall as tall as the eaves, only a few feet from the building; so the effect was of sitting at the bottom of a stone well. I was arranged behind a timber partition with bars set into it by way of a window, and shortly thereafter, my visitor was shown to a chair on the other side of the barrier.

  “Narn,” the visitor said, sitting down but getting no shorter. “Narn good came of ’ee.”

  It was Magda the witch. She was dressed now (beside her rags) in a flowered shawl of the type fashionable during the reign of James II. From beneath her skirts peeked out a familiar friend: Demon the French bulldog. When he saw me, he let out a catcall of delight and sprang against the barrier between us, hopping on his hind legs. I confess tears pricked my eyes when I saw that stout little fellow. Magda gathered him into her lap, whence Demon stared at me for the rest of the interview in the same manner he did when it was time to go for a walk in the countryside.

  Magda’s stone eye regarded me as intently as the living one. I confess I was happy to see her, although she was in some fashion the author of all my miseries. I imagined her to be what old aunts were like.

  “Magda,” said I, and it being the first word I’d spoken in a week, it came out as a rasp, like filing a nutmeg.

  “Nowt escapes yer keen eye, boyo,” she muttered. “List! I ain’t got time for the chatterin’ nor idle talk—and nor does ’ee, for thou art hangin’ soon. The darter of me heart, my Princess, she’s near to be wed, and not a Faerie but ’as ther courage nor stop the nupterls, for the king is punishin’ one and all for the uprisin’. With tharn dear girlie carptured, the rebellion’s afeared ter act. Elgeron’s bedoubled the punishments and set that narsty bit o’ work the Arn-Eyed Duchess uparn the land. Nobbut the wind dast oppose ’er. So it’s up ter ’ee to stop it.”

  “The Duchess?” I cried, and coughed like a consumptive. “She’s working with King Elgeron? Last I saw, their monsters were at war with one another.”

  “Yar,” said Magda. “’T’were the Duchess got to Princess first, and made a bargain wi’ King to get ’er soul back in return for tharn poor girlie.”

  “A ransom. Do you know how we were found out?”

  “Two ways, two ways. King’s spies was everwhere. They o’erheard tha old madman of yourn tellin’ the story of yer journey ’pon the stage. But Duchess, she already knowed. She reached through and snartched tharn toroise comb orff table, took it through yon lookin’ glarss, and passed it back. Then it were a sigilantum, and ever nor then, she allus knew exactly where you was.”

  “So when we thought Lily had merely misplaced the comb, it was … on the other side for a few minutes? Pulled through by the Duchess?”

  “If only tha had thourght a wee bit harder!”

  I was eager to change the subject away from my ignorance. “And how fares Morgana? The Princess, that is?”

  “Miserble,” Magda said. “If ye ’ad any sense, ye’d stop of the weddin’ and arsk her how she be yersel’.”

  I felt it was time to explain my circumstances.

  “As perhaps you know, but cannot see, your sight being limited, I am not at liberty, but barnacled with irons on legs and wrists and confined upon a prison barge, and have an appointment to be hanged tomorrow at Tyburn. So with such sorrow and regret as I cannot express, I am unable to be of help.”

  “But ain’t you learned of nothing?” the witch protested. “Give you my tooth, did not I? You’ve all yer needs to be free of this place, but tha’ carnventional human mind nor yourn thinks arnly on what you see, not on what be possible, nor what ’ee might wish.”

  I shook my head. “Even if I did escape, dear Magda, then what? I am a ragged pauper again; I have no means of anything, not even survival. How should I effect a rescue of the Princess? And all your little rebel feyín, I presume, have been captured and turned into moths for their troubles. Allow me to go to my fate, and Morgana to hers, and there’s a sad end to the business.”

  The witch leaned close to me. Demon stretched his bull’s neck to get close, too. We had already been whispering, as there was a guard standing at the door; in my condition I couldn’t raise my voice if I tried. But now she pitched her voice so low it was more
like a feeling than a sound. Which it may have been. She could have been projecting her voice into my very mind.

  “Boyo,” said she. “Narn. Ye knows not the upshot of the capturin’ of the Princess. Knows ye the goblings came on their griffs, and with ’em the mantigarns and pixies alike, and fell right among your manling folk. Well, it’s one thing for common Faerie ter break the Eldritch Laws. It’s anarn for the King to do it, nor that’s his privilege. ’Is servants erased all the manling membries and replaced ’em with membries of a fire, norstead.

  “But when King done this thing,” she continued, “the Faeries what dwells here in your world, they stopped workin’. They ain’t spilin’ milk nor poxin’ cows, they ain’t turnin’ leaves brown nor makin’ flowern bloom. They refuses to work! The revorlution has begun.”

  “That’s all very good, but I’m still hanging. Also, I threw away your tooth.”

  “Narn!” she fairly shouted. “It’s in yer pocket. Stupid boyo. Guards!”

  So saying, she demanded to be given release from that pestilent place. I didn’t bother to remind her that my present costume was not furnished with a single pocket.

  “Spare not the rope nor this one, lads,” said Magda, on her way to the door. “He’ll dance a pretty hornpipe on a sunbeam!” The guards escorted her away. Demon whimpered and struggled in her sticklike arms, endeavoring to get back to me. I heard him yowling all the way down the hall beyond my cell. Then the soldiers came for me.

  “She your sweetheart?” one of the men asked me, and winked. I had no idea what he meant by that until I saw there was a delicate paper rose in my hand. How it came there I did not know. I’d seen one like it somewhere before.

  * * *

  As they left me to rot away my last hours in the prison ship, I was still trying to recall where I’d seen such a flower. Then I remembered: There had been one in my master’s pocket the night he died.

  All of a moment, I understood that the plan between Magda and my master had extended well beyond kidnapping Morgana from the enchanted coach. It included provisions for his capture. But what could a paper rose and an old hag’s tooth do to spring me from this stinking oubliette, or loose my neck from the rope?

  [ The Paper Rose ]

  Chapter 33

  BEING AN ACCOUNT OF MY LAST HOURS

  THE OTHER prisoners, those who still had some of their wits, thought I had lost mine. There was a gun-port near my head, through which trickled a modicum of fresh air. A shutter was bolted over it at a slight angle to admit vapors, but not a human form, not even one of the emaciated creatures about me. I spent all of the afternoon of my final day with one arm squeezed through the gap in the shutter, holding the paper flower aloft. Every few minutes, I would retract my arm and inspect the flower, then thrust it back outside the hull again.

  After several hours of this, my arm numb with squeezing it through the gap and raw where the splintered wood of the port chafed at it, I withdrew the flower and found upon it the object of my intentions: a single bee.

  I knew not if it was the correct kind of bee, but I had no other, so I repeated my message to the little creature thrice, and apologized for the subterfuge of a paper flower, which could be of no profit to the insect. I released the bee through the port, and after it I dropped the paper flower, to drift away on the river. This accomplished, and ignoring my gaol-mates’ catcalls, I settled myself to wait.

  For a long while, my thoughts revolved around the absurdity of my situation. I’d been servant to a good-natured fellow who turned out to be, as well, a notorious criminal. I had impersonated him, and been mistaken for him, and been given his strange quest to complete. So doing, I became a criminal myself, in two worlds.

  Was I, therefore, a criminal? I’d done much wrong upon my journey, but for the right reasons. The law didn’t care about anything except the word of Captain Sterne. He thought me guilty and a peckish judge did not wish to waste time in cross-examinations. I was guilty. But I felt no guilt, only sorrow. These reflections went nowhere, but only around in circles. One conclusion I was able to draw: Whatever anyone thought, I was not a highwayman, unless by accident.

  Then Mr. Ratskalp came with his guards, and I was unlocked and taken up onto the dark top-deck. There, by lantern light, I was mopped once more, and lowered into the boat.

  An hour later, I had been transferred to a small, clean cell in a building, I know not where; it was so great an improvement over the prison hulk, which would have broken Jonah’s faith, that my spirits lifted a little. Hope was extinguished in my bosom, yet there was something of peace to be had thereby. A man who thinks there is a future must, perforce, be concerned for the future. I had none, and so had nothing to concern me. I’d paid already for my foolishness, and tomorrow I would pay for another’s, and there would be an end to me and my broken heart. I lay upon a bench and gazed into the shadows thrown by the sputtering tallow, and thought of little enough, unless it was a single dimple set beside a smiling mouth.

  A knock sounded upon the door. “It’s open,” said I, and resumed my reverie.

  There was a turning of locks and loosing of chains that went on for a good minute, and then Captain Sterne entered the little room, smiling indulgently. There was a large parcel wrapped in muslin and string tucked under his arm.

  “Ah, Jack,” said he, “well met. Soon you shall be dead, and my little list of names will all be crossed off, and I shall be promoted for my work to clear the roads. Then you’ll be a footnote to my entry in the history books.”

  “I congratulate you on your success,” said I. “Now, pray leave me. I’m preoccupied with other matters.”

  “Other matters?” said Sterne, looking about him in the bare, empty chamber. “If you don’t wish to have one last civilized conversation before you meet your maker, whom I daresay is impatient to mark the occasion with a flaming trident, then so be it. But it occurred to me you might wish to know how you were apprehended.”

  “Not particularly,” said I.

  Captain Sterne looked well infuriated by this, and so, after he’d sputtered a while and adjusted his periwig to a more martial attitude, he said, “Perhaps you’ll not be so flippant when you learn it was none other than your ex-sweetheart?”

  Well, as I hadn’t an ex-sweetheart, my curiosity was roused. “Who?” I inquired.

  “The Duchess of Redsea. She sent me a letter detailing the precise time and location I should find you, correct in every detail. It’s a miracle it found me, for I was bent upon your trail in the depths of the countryside. She expressed an interest in meeting me, in fact. I appear to be her sort of man.”

  That dreadful Duchess, thought I. It made perfect sense. She could have destroyed me at the time of Morgana’s capture, but like the ogre who stole her soul and set her free, the Duchess knew there was no sweeter revenge than to have your vanquished foe survive long enough to drain the bitter cup of defeat down to the dregs.

  For a moment I was all in a fury at the cruelty of her. Then it passed, for there was nothing to be done about it, and I was still a practical fellow by nature. Captain Sterne had been watching my face closely, but I think he saw none of the despair he’d hoped for, for his smile of anticipation melted into a frown.

  “I see you are not contrite. Truly I have never seen a more hardened criminal than you. Be that as it may, you’re in no condition to hang. Make yourself presentable, for I wish my own lady to see you at your best.”

  With this, he dropped the parcel upon the floor. “There will be washing-water brought up. Then you will, unless you’ve grown fond of your present stinking rags, change into the fresh attire I have brought. The public will be well pleased with the effect, and I know that the style is much to your taste. Anon.”

  With that, he smote his boot-heels together and left the room. A servant entered with a basin of hot water, a flannel, and a shilling’s worth of good soap. It took me five basins and most of the soap to get passably clean and free of infestation by biting insects; if only
old Fred had been there, he could have picked off every one of the little murderers in ten minutes. By the end of these ablutions my skin stung fiercely, but it felt delightful. Then, with my fetid rags carried away in the flannel by the servant, I was left alone, dressed as the Lord had made me.

  I opened the parcel, and within discovered the extent of Captain Sterne’s sense of humor. For he had provided me with an excellent replica of Whistling Jack’s costume, from the tall red-trimmed boots to the black redingote and cocked hat. He had even provided the mask to go about my eyes, should I wish to meet my death incognito. But he did not furnish me with pistols or sword. Although the barb of his mockery struck home, yet I donned the clothes, for truly had I none other. The pockets were all empty, of course, but for a few copper pennies, and I hardly know why I searched them—until the discovery, in the tail-pocket of the black redingote, of a slender object with which I was now well familiar, for it somehow never left me: Magda’s tooth.

  This time, I kept it.

  * * *

  You may read more detailed descriptions elsewhere of how those convicted to die are tormented in their last hours; it went much the same with me. Clergymen always come to offer rites, and are either sent away with abominable curses, or welcomed by the weeping penitent. For my own part, the visit was met with indifference. I think there was some reading from a book, either the Bible or Fielding’s latest novel*. I do not recall, for I wasn’t attending to the words.

  After that, another hour was beguiled with visits by persons of wealth and station. They stepped into the cell, well guarded, to examine the convict as an object of curiosity. I received a dozen or more such visitors, mostly ladies who had been robbed by my namesake and master. They seemed universally to have found him charming. None suspected I was not he, though I was not charming.

  It was also customary for a public reformer or two to come around for an interview, if they thought they could invent a conversation for the news-papers that would reinforce their position on capital punishment, pro or con. I disappointed the parties on both sides of the issue with my unresponsiveness.