Beside her, Tyler pulled up his mask. She did the same. The two highwaymen took their pistols from their holsters and cocked them.
They could hear the huff of tired horses labouring up the rise, see the waggling beam of the coach lanterns. She was bereft of time and feeling. She followed Tyler out into the open.
The coach dragged to the breast of the hill. It was enormous, pulled by giants. She and Tyler were puny.
‘Rein in.’ Tyler’s voice rasped over the rattle of wheels.
Why should it? Why doesn’t it mow us down?
She was yet to learn how dreadful masked figures in the road looked to two weary men on a coach-box, how flimsy the coach company’s uniform greatcoats became at the sight of pistols, how little the pay of ten shillings a week compared to braving a bullet, what value – now they might not see them again – bestowed on wife and children at home.
The driver reined in.
‘Throw down your arms.’
She saw the white flash of the guard’s eyes as, slowly, watching Tyler, he bent down to the shotgun at his feet, then let it drop.
‘Down.’ The two men clambered down. Cecily moved to the left of the team, to guard the offside door in case one of the passengers made a break for it. She heard Tyler’s command, ‘Out,’ listened to the grumbling and shrieks as the bleeders descended, waited for his all-clear in backslang. ‘Secart.’
She moved to the onside to saw at the team’s traces with Tyler’s knife. Thick, encrusted leather resisted its sharpness. The horses’ necks were foamed, steam rising from their coats in the fermented smell of sweat; they were glad to stand while she fumbled and cut. One piece of harness fell to the ground, she began on another strap, making a better job. She was through. If anybody drove the team now, it would merely circle. She nodded to Tyler and nudged the mare to stand alongside him in front of the line of passengers with their hands in the air.
By God, they were obeying. They were afraid. Afraid. Underneath her mask her teeth bared. Here’s for you, Walpole.
‘This’ll not hurt, ladies and gentles,’ Tyler sang out, cheerfully, ‘not iffen you do as you’re told. My apprentice here will come behind you for your offerings. Hand ’em to him backwards and we’ll all be neat as ninepence, as the saying is.’
Cecily dismounted and walked behind the line of passengers – ‘Never get between a bleeder and my gun’ – taking the proffered valuables.
There were six bleeders. She had no compunction. In the tension beforehand her nerves had formed the image of Walpole, and six Walpoles was what she saw. Those who glanced behind them and looked into the eyes above her mask recounted the experience ever after, taking their similes from the animal world.
She snatched a heavy purse from a fat Walpole in velvet and tapped her pistol into his neck when he wasn’t quick enough with his timepiece. A thin, elegant Walpole yielded two rings as well as a purse and a timepiece. A grumbling Walpole had a snuff box. She was only prevented from half strangling a short, stout Walpole in shawl and bonnet, who produced merely coppers, by Tyler’s intervention: ‘Leave the soul her basket, lad.’
Cramming the gains into her saddlebags, she got back on the mare. Together, pistols pointing, she and Tyler backed their mounts until they were in the shadows of the hangar. A volley of blasphemy blasted after them.
‘Ride.’
They turned and rode. Through moonlit tracks, cantering between trees, taking meadows at the gallop, they rode.
‘Easy. Easy.’ Cecily’s howls of triumph woke the ghosts of long-dead wolves and flapped owls out of their branches while Tyler came after, smiling the smile of an indulgent mother.
Back at the inn she demanded that they pull up another jack the next night. ‘You hold your horses,’ Tyler said. ‘We don’t do nothing without we reconnoitre. Army term that is, means know your ground. S’pose we run into other padders? Can get nasty, that can.’ As an extra caution he made her look at Ned’s leg. ‘Know what that is?’
‘A bullet wound.’
‘No, it ain’t. It’s luck. Could have been higher. Could be you next time. You pay attention. You’re gettin’ boastful.’
Ned’s leg wasn’t healing, mainly because Dolly, of whom he was afraid, hadn’t let him rest it, instead insisting he clear the rubble from the taproom and one of the bedrooms.
‘Lemuel and me ain’t rats,’ she said, when Cecily scolded her. ‘We can’t live in shit while you’re away doing whatever you’re doing.’
‘You know what I’m doing.’
‘No, I don’t.’ Dolly had withdrawn the hem of her garments; her own dishonesty allowed petty cheating, doing people down and bilking bailiffs’ men but not highway robbery. Neither then nor later would she allow the subject to be discussed in her presence.
She was right, though: they couldn’t squat in rubble. On the other hand, making the inn fit to live in would require help which, in turn, would reveal their presence in it.
Cecily took the problem to Tyler, who said: ‘We’ll ask the fencing-master when we see him.’
A fence wasn’t the sort of help Cecily had in mind. ‘Is he local, then?’
‘Ain’t he, though.’ His wink said she’d get no more out of him.
They robbed the Peterborough coach just north of Baldock three days later, another from Anglesey at Markyate two days afterwards and another south of Hatfield the following week.
On each of those nights, before she went to sleep, Cecily’s body shook with terror as, recreating the scene, she made a mistake, a bleeder produced a gun, a knife; she had to shoot.
The routine simplicity of the reality was horrifying. Her victims’ obedience haunted her, not out of pity but at their potential for harm. Something could have gone wrong. That it hadn’t was nearly as dreadful as if it had.
This was reaction: while the robbery was in progress she was suffused with the ferocious glee of a bully.
The hoard in the rafters of the inn became sufficiently large for Tyler to declare it ready to take to the fencing-master.
That night, following Tyler on his horse with bulging saddlebags, Cecily on her mare crossed the Great North Road and for the first time took the track opposite her inn, breathing air sweet with blossom and cow-pats. The track led through a ford and past a pond, wandering uphill all the time towards the crest in can’t-be-bothered aimlessness.
At the top they rode north along one of Hertfordshire’s heights. To their right the ground dropped away in the moonlit stripes of a common field before undulating away to the flatness of East Anglia.
‘Datchworth,’ said Tyler.
Cecily wore highwayman kicks as a precaution but had to resist the impulse to take off hat and wig and give her hair the freedom of the night breeze.
There was no light to the east except the moon’s but on her left, beyond a small, plank bridge crossing the gleam of a moat, a rushlight shone in a churchyard where a figure was sharpening a scythe on a tombstone. It called out, ‘Who’s ’at?’
‘Tyler. Is he home?’
‘Yep.’
They circled the moat through trees to where a lantern hung from above a gate which had specifically ornamental pillars. ‘Tyler,’ said Cecily, alarmed, ‘this is a magistrate’s house.’
‘Ain’t it, though.’ His voice was amused.
Across the moat by another bridge into a cluster of barns towards a porch and light beaming through leaded windows. They dismounted and tied the horses to a hitching post. A thin woman clicked her tongue at them but led the way by a flagged passage into a room musty with books where a small man sat reading by a fire, a glass at his elbow.
‘Sergeant. Delightful to see you.’
‘Evening, Colonel.’
‘Rum, I think, my dear. Do you think rum, Sergeant? Does your lad think rum? Yes, definitely rum.’
They drank rum with sugar and lemon, Tyler seated opposite their host, Cecily keeping to a stool in the shadows, endeavouring to believe what she heard and saw.
T
he colonel was dressed like a pasha with a Turkish turban on his bald head and curved slippers on his tiny feet. The only suggestion of the military was a patch he wore over one eye. Like his house, he was elderly and glowing. ‘Juvenal,’ he said, laying aside his book, ‘such a joker. You must read him, Tyler. What would we do without his quis custodiet ipsos custodes, eh?’
‘We’d be lost, Colonel.’
‘We would, we would. Now then. Don’t tell me you’ve been finding things again?’ He wagged a miniature finger.
‘Funny enough I have, Colonel.’ Tyler tipped the contents of the saddlebags on the mat before the hearth.
‘What a lot of things, what a lot. Lying beside the road, were they?’
Tyler nodded.
‘You know, Sergeant,’ said the colonel, blinking at the heap, ‘one can’t help wondering if this isn’t stolen property. Filch is the word, I believe. Some robber’s hoard that he dropped in his escape.’
‘I wondered that myself, Colonel.’
‘Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator. Do you think the traveller with empty pockets sings even in the robber’s face, Sergeant?’
‘Get on with it, Colonel.’ Tyler was beginning to tire.
The little man wasn’t. ‘Small hope, I think, of finding the owners now. One could advertise, of course, but in the meantime the finder must be rewarded. I shall take them off your hands. Ask my wife if she’d bring the scales, will you? Two shillings an ounce for silver, three for gold is fair, I think. Don’t you think that’s fair, Sergeant?’
The woman who’d let them in brought disapproval and a pair of scales to the fireside, then left them to the weighing of the filch. Cecily watched it with rising anger. The little pricker was robbing them. Timepieces with jewels were worth considerably more than their weight at two shillings an ounce, so was the silver-crested snuff box she’d taken off a lordly Walpole at Markyate. When it came to the ring from Peterborough, she intervened. ‘Oh, no, you don’t. That’s a diamond.’
‘Glass, I think. Don’t you think it’s glass?’
‘Diamond.’ She picked it up and scored his wineglass with it. Then she remembered she wasn’t wearing gloves.
The colonel sat still for a moment, peering at her from his one eye. He reached for her fingers and pressed them to his lips. ‘Non Angli sed Angeli,’ he said. ‘Tyler, Tyler, you let me give rum to a lady? Champagne, we must toast this moment in champagne.’
‘We’ll have a fair price instead,’ Cecily told him.
He was a true fence: there were the difficulty of disposal, the glut since the South Sea crash, his expenses, the risk, etc. But he was facing a woman who’d sold her soul for those trinkets and knew the value of it – and them. Eventually he handed over a hundred pounds, a quarter of what the heap was worth but more than Tyler had expected.
‘And you’re a magistrate?’ Cecily was still incredulous.
‘I have the honour to have been appointed by Her late Majesty to keep the peace in this area which, I am happy to say, I do.’
Mainly because their bargain was that Tyler operated out of it.
His name was Grandison. He was also a Mason, a member of the Hertford Society of Poetic Appreciation and Philosophy, toxophilist, master of the Stevenage Hunt, lord of this manor of Datchworth, a hundred acres and forty-nine villagers, the second son of a knight, who’d despised him, a disappointing husband.
It was impossible not to like him: he expounded his provenance and failures with devastating frankness and good humour, sometimes standing up and spinning on his small feet in joie de vivre.
A grasping fence, but a generous host: they drank champagne from French crystal and they drank it to ‘Confusion to that arch-villain, Robert Walpole, and all Whigs’.
He was one on his own but if there was a type under the eccentricity it belonged to that of the passed-over second son, the misfit who never won the approval of his parents, a spirit larger than its body, possessing a taste for literature and beautiful things beyond his income. Hence, Cecily supposed, his complacency in fencing stolen goods.
Unselfconscious, he sprawled at her feet murmuring: ‘I adore you, my Penthesilea, my beauty in male attire. No, no, not Amazon. A moon goddess. Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’
Cecily shifted him off her boots. ‘Get up, sir.’ She wasn’t discomfited: he reminded her of Lord Hervey miniaturized.
He was also kind. When Tyler told him that Cecily was in residence at the Bell, his concern was for her comfort. ‘You shall have the Packer brothers. Good lads, though troublesome when unoccupied, as they are until harvest. The Packers, don’t you think, Sergeant?’
As she and Tyler wandered back down the hill, Cecily asked: ‘What do Grandison’s villagers make of him?’
‘They’re used to him. He’s a good squire. Sees ’em right, cares for the young ’uns – which is only fair seeing as he’s fathered quite a few of ’em.’ Tyler was anxious to dispel any doubts about his fence’s masculinity. ‘Very susceptible to a pretty pair of saucers, is the colonel. There’s more than one maid gets talked into the hay by his flummery.’
‘How did he lose his eye?’
‘French cavalryman’s lance. Blenheim. Saving my life, mad little bugger.’
Next morning the Packers, four of them, reported for duty, standing before Cecily in a line of descending age and height which still counted in the youngest and shortest at six foot tall. What do they feed them on in Datchworth? They stared over her head with the animation of oxen. ‘Ah,’ she said. She didn’t know what to do with them.
Dolly did, putting them at ease and to work by shouting at them like a galley-master. Their usefulness was as great as their size: Cecily watched the eldest and largest, Cole, lift an errant oak beam from the taproom floor as easily as if it was a dandelion. Warty (who wasn’t) mended ceilings, Tinker retiled the roof. Like all Datchworth men, their nicknames related to incidents in their past, which set Cecily wondering about the youngest, Stabber, an excellent plasterer.
Basically, they were forest men who were able to survive when Grandison had no work for them by their customary right to collect its wood and turf, take any of its deer that wandered into their gardens – it was astonishing how many did – graze their cattle and geese on its grasses and fish its streams.
Dinner at the Bell was improved by the addition of venison and trout to its table, by rooks plucked for the pie, mushrooms and plover eggs – all gifts left in the kitchen by a surly Packer who refused thanks.
It was Tinker who made the discovery in the roof. He brought it down to the yard, unwrapping it from the cloth in which it had been tied.
Everybody gathered to look at a faded inn sign, still attached to the chains which had once suspended it. Some primitive artist had painted on it the semi-naked figure of a woman wearing feathers and a ferocious smile, holding a spear aloft.
‘What’s them words say?’ asked Stabber.
Cecily rubbed the dust off the letters with her apron. ‘The Belle Sauvage.’
‘What’s that mean when it’s at home?’
‘The Savage Beauty.’
‘Never knew that. We allus called that the Bell.’
‘No wonder that lost bloody custom,’ said Tinker. ‘Wouldn’t like to meet her of a dark night.’
It was too worm-eaten to keep. That night they put it on the fire in the taproom and watched it burn. Goose-pimples of superstition raised themselves on Cecily’s skin as the painted face gave her a last grin through the contortion of flames, like a message of approval from the Devil.
On market-day she borrowed a cart and horse from Colonel Grandison and took Lemuel and Dolly the seven miles into Hertford to buy provisions and rudimentary furniture out of her robbery gains. With the house being resurrected from death, it was impossible to conceal its occupation and, Cecily thought, unnecessary; to be persona grata with a magistrate and the Packers reduced the feeling that she had taken up occupation in enemy territory. Those who required her name were told
she was Mrs Henry who’d brought her disabled husband from London for country air.
Two nights later Cecily and Tyler were holding up a coach outside Hatfield on the Great North Road; the usual procedure, frightened Walpoles standing in a row next to sullen coachmen. She no longer looked at them.
It wasn’t until she’d remounted and was backing the mare into the shadows preparatory to riding off that one staring face in the line of staring faces, white in the light of the coach lamp, lost its Walpoleness.
On the way home Tyler said: ‘What’s the matter, Duchess?’
‘Back there. There was a man… I know him.’
‘Shite. Did he recognize you?’
‘I don’t know. No, I don’t think so.’
‘Who is he?’
‘His name’s Cameron. He could have been coming to see me – and Lemuel. He’s a lawyer.’
‘Shite.’
Next morning, just in case, to emphasize the absurdity of connecting Lady Cecily Fitzhenry with robbery, she dressed in her only remaining good gown. Peering into the flecked shard that was her looking-glass, she thought: Not a padder. But not Lady Cecily either. Her skin, eyes and teeth were still good but their character was altered by a battered spirit. She was twenty-one years old and looked thirty. She brushed her hair for the first time in days and covered it with a clean cap.
Dolly said: ‘What’s got you up like a Christmas beef ?’
It was a long day. Tyler had made himself scarce. Cecily told Ned, who was now living in one of the bedrooms, to hide the mare, then took Lemuel for a walk. They picked celandines and primroses to make unhighwayman-like posies for the taproom.
The lawyer arrived on a horse in late afternoon. He was his normal self, as far as she knew what was normal with him. ‘Who were yon gentlemen I’ve just seen leaving?’
Relieved, Cecily said: ‘Men from the village up the hill. They’re helping us get in order.’
‘Lord bless us for that. I thought they were bears.’
Dolly was delighted to see him: ‘You didn’t half buy us a pig in a poke, you. Look at the place.’ She took him on a tour of inspection.
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