Blood Royal

by Blood Royal (retail) (epub)

  ‘You was frit?’ Tyler told her. ‘What about us? Thought you was the bloody beagles.’

  Whether the two women’s peril would have been greater if they’d been less obviously poor, Cecily didn’t know. There was no sexual danger: Tyler, the leader, was intrigued by her, but not as prey. He expressed amazed admiration at her profession to the Prince of Darkness. ‘Never heard the like,’ he kept saying. ‘Chilled me to the crackers as the saying is.’

  The three were treated as benighted travellers. Tyler and his brother, Ned – ‘Nebuchadnezzar for short’ – built a fire, toasted bread and cheese on it for all of them, brought straw for their beds and produced a firkin of ale. Ned did most of the work. Self-contained, seemingly less intelligent than his brother, though older, he whistled tunelessly and limped handily, like an ostler.

  Cecily’s attention was on Tyler, as his was on her. Excepting her nurse, she had not before felt affinity with one of the lower orders, but with Tyler there was at once rapport. It was a sign of her dislodgement from her old self that she felt it now, but it was more than that: deep called to deep with a disregard of boundaries which was new to Cecily and with Tyler was a way of life. Medium height, thirty, perhaps forty, years of age, plainish, brownish, his appearance was so unexceptional most people forgot what he looked like when he was out of sight. He traded on it. Even his speech, while it belonged below the salt, had gained so many accents in his travels that none was identifiable.

  When she spoke to him Cecily found herself cutting through niceties, as if using a langue de guerre known only to them.

  ‘Me?’ he said, when she asked what he did. ‘I work the roads. Gentleman of the high pad, like.’

  It was to be more than fifty years before the Newgate Calendar, protesting that it was an Awful Warning of the Progress and Consequence of Vice, gave details of the lives and cant of rogues to an eager public, but they were already common knowledge in prisons. And Cecily had been in prison. ‘A highwayman,’ she said.

  He nodded; he knew she wasn’t shocked. ‘And you, Duchess? Hunting lady are you, if I may ask?’

  ‘I have hunted.’

  ‘Kept your own horses, I dare say? Servants too, I’ll wager.’

  He nodded again as she nodded. It was enough for now.

  They ate supper in a limbo, Dolly too despairing to wonder what would happen next, Lemuel content with food and warmth, Cecily appalled but stirred by the promptness with which the Devil had answered her call, and watching his hoofs.

  ‘What’s the matter with Ned?’ she asked. The man was wincing.

  ‘Needs rest,’ Tyler said.

  ‘He needs a bandage,’ Cecily said. There was blood seeping through a tear in Ned’s breeches. ‘Dress it for him, Dolly.’

  ‘What, him? I ain’t—’

  ‘Dress it.’ They kept a supply for Lemuel, who often stumbled.

  It seemed in the order of things to watch Dolly treat a wound on a man’s leg that had been clearly scored by a bullet.

  After the others had gone to sleep, it fitted into the same alien recognizability of the night that she should stay awake to listen to Tyler on the art of the highway pad.

  ‘See, Ned’s heart ain’t in it. He’s horsy, our Ned. Horses, horses with him. At bottom he’s honest. Ain’t had my education, ain’t been where I been. Don’t pay attention. And, see, on the pad, you don’t pay attention you get shot. Or the judge hands you a hemp collar.’

  Tonight, Ned had not paid attention.

  Highwaymen who worked alone, Tyler told her, made a fatal mistake – ‘Three months an’ they’re dancing the gallows’ waltz’ – because there were crucial moments during a hold-up which demanded the presence of an accomplice, in Tyler’s parlance a ‘cove’.

  He enumerated them on his fingers. ‘One, when you orders ’em to throw down their guns. Coachmen – we call ’em “companions” – first. Then “bleeders”, that’s the passengers. You’d be surprised how many of them innocent-lookin’ prickers go armed. Two, tipping the cole. Taking the valuables. Three, cutting the leaders’ traces so they can’t follow. All them times your peepers is off ’em, and when your cove’s peepers needs to be on ’em. See?’

  She saw. ‘How long have you been on the pad?’

  ‘Year.’ He expected her to be impressed. ‘Six months more an’ Ned and I buy an ale-house. You don’t want to pad longer’n that. Too chancy.’

  ‘How much do you make in a night?’ It was his manner that was impressive: it had the conviction of a skilled artisan discussing his craft.

  ‘Depends. There’s some just got fluff in their pockets. Most’s got a reasonable tattler. Occasional, one of your coolers’s wearing ear-bobs, rings and such.’ He glanced sideways at Cecily. ‘It’s the fencing, see. I got a safe fencing-master but he’s making cheese out of me along of I can’t tell when jewels is jewels or when they’re glass. And Ned don’t know a sapphire from a snaffle, as the saying is.’

  He fell silent and for a while they listened and watched the moonlight come and go through the open rafters as the wind softly dinged the bell on the roof and curved the smoke of their fire. Cecily sensed that Tyler, like a good horse-master, was letting her graze.

  She supposed she should be shocked. Here was a man who took innocent people’s possessions away from them – and discussed it as if he were a cooper explaining the making of barrels. Was it a sign of how quickly the Devil had possessed her soul that she wasn’t shocked? Perhaps. Or perhaps she had joined the ranks of those so dispossessed that robbery was an alternative, and necessary, form of survival.

  Moon men. Shakespeare used the term somewhere for night villains like these. One of the histories, she thought it was.

  ‘See,’ said Tyler, pulling his ear, ‘gentleman on the pad, he needs a reliable cove, educated, like, clever.’

  The fortune of us that are but Moon’s men doth ebb and flow like the sea. That was it.

  ‘Or a covess.’

  He’d said it at last.

  She turned to look at him, searching for what it was that had cut off this most ordinary-looking man from the very root of convention that he could discern in her, a woman, a suitable partner in crime. The same knife that had so cut her from everything that held her to the normal, she must suppose.

  He met her eyes. ‘See, there I was, perched in them rafters like a pricking seagull, wondering if you was the hue and cry, wondering what the Devil I’d do while Ned rested. And then you said what you said. Gawd. Fair froze me fetlocks, as the saying is. But Meant, that’s what it was. Meant.’

  She had answered his need as he seemed to be answering hers.

  ‘Are you the Devil?’ she asked him.

  He sighed. ‘Reckon I must be.’

  Cecily woke up the next morning to find that she’d bedded down among rubble near the skeleton of a cat. There was no sign of Tyler or Ned. Or, for that matter, of Dolly and Lemuel, but there were sounds of activity somewhere.

  Aching, cold, she went to the front windows to see what could be seen in the dawn. Everything was quiet. A wagtail drank from a puddle formed in a rut. Yet that wide track beyond her forecourt was the Great North Road. With Watling Street, some miles to the west, it was the artery that pumped life back and forth between London and the north.

  Opposite, leading off to the east, was a smaller track, which wandered between fields and copses. On a hilltop a mile beyond, perhaps where the track led to, she could just see the stump of a church tower. There was no traffic. If there were villages around – and the only sign of one was the distant tower – they kept their activity to themselves. Her inn was nobody’s destination. She wasn’t surprised. Cameron, the fool, had bought her a ruin.

  The grey March morning breeze scuttered brief showers across the yard outside. She found Dolly at its end in what had been a sizeable kitchen. The mantel above a fireplace that could have accommodated a cart was still in place, but the doors to the brick bread-ovens had gone, like the spits and jacks. Dolly had got
a fire going in the great hearth and improvised a tripod out of iron spars from which hung a pail of simmering porridge. She was busy with another pail, some roots and pieces of raw pork. Lemuel huddled by the flames, watching her.

  ‘Them blaggers left it us,’ she said, when Cecily inquired.

  ‘I thought I’d dreamed them.’

  Having something to do had returned Dolly her poise and therefore her aggression. ‘They’re villains, you know that, don’t you? Don’t you? Robbers.’ She turned back to her cooking, grumbling. ‘Bargaining with Old Scratch. What got into you? Talk of the Devil and see his horns, and so we bloody did. Well, don’t come whining to me when he collects his dues. An’ he will. You don’t cheat the Devil.’

  ‘Something had to be done.’ Cecily squatted down to peer into Lemuel’s face. It was the colour of putty except for the shiny red crescent beneath his eye where the skin dragged down. The good side of his mouth turned up as he tried to smile at her.

  She tucked his shawl more closely about him and stood up. ‘Don’t make too much smoke. We don’t want anybody to know we’re here. What is that, anyway?’

  ‘Workman’s pail. Ma used to make one for Pa.’ She’d cut up vegetables, interleaving them with pork, and sealed it with a huff of pastry. ‘Good job one of us got enough nous to feed that poor brother of mine.’

  ‘Tyler gave you all that?’

  ‘Not him. The other bugger.’ Dolly tied a cloth over the top of the pail and hung it over her fire. She was more animated than she’d been for weeks. ‘Pump still works, thank Christ.’ She dusted her hands on her skirt. ‘You could make something of this place.’

  As she explored, Cecily realized you probably could – with sufficient money. Reduced to its bones, multi-roofed and short-walled, the building remembered medieval entertainment. Generations had been kind to it, adding on pieces to extend comfort, not begrudging the cost of masons and carpenters who’d known what they were about. Monkish stone gargoyles spouted rainwater at clogged drains, Jacobean finials adorned gable-ends, barge-boards were pierced with Tudor tracery. A once-espaliered pear tree and an apricot struggled for life against ivy. The horse-trough was a lead Roman cistern, too heavy to be stolen.

  Hugging the wall for safety, she climbed the outside stone staircase to a long balcony. Here, upstairs, were unexpected passages and levels, hidden rooms, stairways and attics.

  Two chambers, the largest, contained privies from the Middle Ages which had been built out into the wall – this part was stone – over corbelled pipes leading to a cesspit.

  Dolly found a cellar under a trap in the kitchen. At the far end of the yard was another arch leading to stables. It was topped by a loft reached by ever more lethal steps. Over the other side of the stable wall was what had been a kitchen garden.

  Cecily, venturing beyond the stables to an orchard, discovered an odd bridge crossing a stream and puzzled over the smoothly rounded holes in it until Dolly enlightened her: ‘Shit-house. Some bastard’s taken the hut down.’ The stream would have carried its burden into the woods, which covered the hill beyond the meadows lying at the back of the inn. Cecily followed it.

  In between showers the sun came out, warming a faint, elusive scent from clusters of primroses, yellowing catkins that wagged in the breeze. At the edge of the trees, she stopped and listened. Not woods, these. Forest. It had an echo, birdsong, of course, but also a thousand rustling, creeping creatures going about their business. Herne the Hunter’s land still. She turned back to the inn.

  Outside the taproom mullions, the Great North Road had come to life. Carters raised their whips in salute as their teams lumbered past each other. One was watering his horses at a pond in the inn’s forecourt and she experienced a second’s exasperation of ownership. ‘Who told him he could?’

  A hunt passed. A parson jog-trotted south. Nobody looked towards the building shielded in its trees: its decrepitude was part of the landscape. Old Rosy, whoever he’d been, had given it the coup de grâce of a diabolic reputation that averted decent eyes. The wind-blown bell hurried people by. She owned an invisible inn.

  Sad, though. The Roman cistern in the yard put the Bell among the ages. History made visible had marched back and forth before these windows. A centurion might have halted his men here and downed his Falernian before heading off to guard Hadrian’s Wall; from here monks could have tended pilgrims on their way to our Lady of Walsingham; even Henry II, that ceaseless voyager…

  There was a vibration in the stone sill beneath her fingers and in a spatter of mud and noise a team of four horses and their vehicle went by, weighted by the gradient of the hill and taking at speed the slow bend past her inn. It was there, it was gone. A coach.

  ‘Leaves St Albans at dawn,’ Tyler had said. ‘Next stop Buckhill.’

  If she wasn’t mistaken she’d promised to assist him, whose face she couldn’t remember, to rob such a conveyance tonight.

  This cold March morning there was none of the inevitability that had attended last night. But she knew she hadn’t been insane. What else could she do? Starve? Go on the parish? More preferably, hang herself? She’d be damned if she did. Well, she was.

  To Cecily, then, that she should commit highway robbery was less shameful than the indignities she had suffered since Edinburgh. It was aggression where everything else had been infliction. Her choice. Her spit in the face of society. Better to be shocking than pitied.

  If she were caught, she’d make a speech from the gallows that would echo down the Great North Road to Whitehall. You, Walpole. I robbed you.

  Even as she rehearsed the scene, she was comfortable in the knowledge that it was unlikely: Tyler had disappeared into the night like the goblin he was…

  He came back with Ned that afternoon, trotting into the stableyard by the woodland approach. Both were on horseback and Ned led a mare. They’d brought sacking for the windows so that light from the inn shouldn’t excite inquiry, brooms, shovels, bedding, food and drink, male clothing for Cecily, a pistol and a mask.

  When she showed him her father’s excellent pistols, he shook his head. ‘Boastful,’ he said. ‘Somebody’d remember ’em. You don’t want to be remembered no more than a tree in a copse.’ The attire, the horse, everything he’d brought for her was unremarkable. And she must wear gloves: ‘Them hands is too ladylike, as the saying is.’

  ‘Boasting’, as Tyler called it, was the downfall of most of his fellow highwaymen. They made a tavern their headquarters, buying drinks and women, living the short life of glory until some pricker betrayed them for the price on their head. ‘Ned and me, we don’t want the glory, we wants the cash.’ Cecily could have acquired no more cautious accomplices with whom to begin her life of crime.

  Ned insisted she make practice gallops on the plain bay mare he’d chosen for her, and himself adjusted the stirrups. (She took ‘chosen’ to be a euphemism for stealing but Tyler said, no, they’d bought the mare at Hertford market – ‘Nappin’s too chancy.’) She paraded in the ‘kicks’ to get used to the feel of breeches, learning to slouch and let her hands hang down. Tyler declared her hair boastful and produced a lank wig to cover its curls, an addition that altered her appearance amazingly.

  Nor were the preparations over when she and Tyler set out, which they did through the forest to the rear. ‘Know your retreat,’ Tyler said, ‘old army ruffle.’

  Their destination was Harpenden Heath, ten miles away to the west. Crossing the country by forest tracks and bridle paths that evening, the two highwaymen saw and were remarked by few people. Tyler pointed out landmarks by which Cecily could find her way back if they got separated, where it was safe to gallop once the moon was up, where it was better to pick their way.

  He made her jump a tree that had fallen across a narrow track so that the mare was used to it.

  ‘Were you in the army?’

  For the first time he was curt with her. ‘P’raps I was. P’raps I wasn’t.’ He’d shown little curiosity about her past, except to ask h
er on whom she had sworn revenge in her speech to the Devil. ‘Ain’t a local cove, is he? Only we don’t want no tantoblin on our own patch.’

  ‘Robert Walpole,’ she told him.

  He puffed with relief. ‘That’s all right, then.’ Prime ministers were everybody’s game.

  At Watling Street they took up position in a hangar of elms at the top of a rise. ‘Always pull your jacks on a rise, see, when they’re going slow. I known padders as was run over by the jack they was going to pull speeding down a hill.’

  Above them rooks circled and cawed against a greying sky, their beaks full of twigs. From deep in the trees they watched empty ox-carts plod towards the village, men and women sitting on the tailboards too tired from their day’s planting in the beanfields to look about them.

  Beside her the figure of Tyler darkened into a seedy statue.

  Lord God, if they were caught it would be assumed she was his moll. She could face the gallows but not the assumption that she’d sunk to bellying a common rogue. The mare tossed her head at a vibration of her reins. Cecily regarded her trembling gloves. ‘Hubris,’ she said. ‘I’m not a person for this. I’m going home.’

  He kept his eyes on the road. ‘Where’s home?’

  It was a hit. ‘Home’ was a mouldering inn and Lemuel sat in it, shivering and hungry. There must be other ways. But this was the one the Devil had put into her hand.

  She stayed on. The road emptied, rooks settled down on their untidy nests, the horses chewed on their bits, the moon came up.

  Don’t think. Her knees had turned fluid: she wouldn’t be able to control the mare. I am Lady Cecily Fitzhenry and I am about to rob a coach. How am I here? Walpole, that’s why I’m here. Walpole.

  Above all, she shared this moment with Guillaume. I’m fighting your enemy in my own way, my dear, my dear. Be with me now.

  There was a tremor in the tilth of the forest floor. Then she heard it. Away in the darkness, a dragon of hoofs, leather and wood was flapping its way south to its St Albans lair.