‘All right by me.’
‘After all, why the coach trade? It’ll be more work, more trouble than we need. So let’s not do it.’ His silence made her cross. ‘Eh?’
He lifted up his lantern so that they could see each other’s faces. ‘Look, Duchess,’ he said, ’you ain’t no common woman. You didn’t want for to be a landlady of no inn, but now you are a landlady you want for your inn to be a great un.’
‘Are you implying I’m ambitious? For a damned inn?’
He shrugged, in no good temper himself. ‘Some of it’s for that revenge you wanted, some of it’s because it’s the way you are. Now, we going or ain’t we?’
He knew her uncomfortably well, better than she knew herself. ‘We’re going.’
‘Right, then.’ Together they rode off by the meadow path.
Other than as the Belle Sauvage’s sleeping partner, Tyler had proved a disappointment. Cecily had expected him to work with her at the inn like Ned, though at a higher level. He was, after all, an investor – part of their mutual robbery money had furnished the Belle.
He’d tried, becoming the inn’s buyer of liquor, a subject on which his varied life had made him knowledgeable, but advising customers on their choice of wine, ale and spirits had not been his forte: he’d been ill-at-ease, almost sullen. Gradually, though he continued to choose the inn’s liquor, he retired into the background until he’d disappeared from the public rooms.
Unlike Ned, he refused to live at the Belle. Cecily still didn’t know where he did live – somewhere in the forest, she supposed – nor with whom, though he made occasional references to a ‘she’.
His explanation was that respectable company made him uncomfortable. ‘One of ’em might recognize the voice that padded ’em, as the saying is.’
‘You said you liked risk,’ Cecily had protested.
‘Not that sort.’
She’d come to think that the risk he did enjoy was flouting authority: unless he was riding along the high, thin ridge of illegality, life lost its savour for him. His spirits were already rising as they turned north along a track parallel with the Great North Road.
The spot where they would pull tonight’s jack had been selected with extra care: it had to be far enough away from the Belle to dismiss suspicion, but near enough for the benighted passengers to reach it. They’d chosen the hill to the south of Stevenage.
As they waited for the north to south coach, under a huge pumpkin-coloured harvest moon, Cecily felt the familiar weakening of terror, redoubled this time by the intervening period of respectability since she’d experienced it last.
Yet she knew Tyler was right: neither she nor the inn could continue as they were. The Belle Sauvage deserved better than to be a wayside tavern and she deserved her revenge. Each time she woke up, sweating, from a Fleet nightmare, each time she looked at the wreck of her husband, when she thought of the gallows that had nearly claimed Cole Packer and was claiming men like him every day for even slighter crimes, she begged the Devil to whom she had sold her soul to keep his part of the bargain and help her punish the perpetrator.
Walpole had sent her down to hell with no more thought than he’d skim a pebble over the sea, and hadn’t even watched to see if she’d bounce. She’d begun her rise out of the abyss, but there was a long way to the surface before she could reach for her enemy’s throat.
The jack was coming up the hill: she felt the tremor. Her saddle creaked as she shifted, forcing herself to sit straight.
She whispered her battle-cry: ‘Walpole.’
‘Walpole,’ muttered back Tyler. They put on their masks, took out their pistols and rode out into the middle of the road.
It was business as usual. The Walpoles lined up against the coach, protesting and afraid. What was different this time was that a female Walpole held a baby. ‘Not the rattle,’ she begged, as Cecily reached for it. ‘Not her rattle. Her father gave it to her.’
Cecily snatched the toy from the child’s fist. It was silver. ‘He gave you the baby,’ she hissed. ‘You got enough.’ The woman was younger than she was. Walpoles had children.
This time, another departure from the usual, she and Tyler backed their horses down the road instead of into the forest. Fifty yards, seventy-five… a hip flask they’d taken became dislodged from the sack Tyler was holding and fell into the road, clanking against an exposed flint.
They turned and cantered south, other valuables falling at intervals behind them. Once they were out of sight and bullet-range they were able to place the articles where they wanted. ‘Not too reg’lar,’ Tyler said. ‘There’s supposed to be a hole in the sack, not a bloody hopper.’ He watched while she laid the silver rattle carefully on the grass that grew between the road’s wheel ruts.
Normally, this would have been dangerous work, in full view of passing traffic. Tyler and Cecily had chosen their night carefully: the north–south coach would have been the last to pass this way until morning, commoners were too tired from harvesting to venture abroad and most of the local gentry were bacchanaling at the Belle. The road was deserted, the stolen pieces showing up well under the bright moon.
They dropped the last, a snuff box, a little way into the mouth of the track to Knebworth House. A few yards further on, Tyler’s gelding made its own contribution to the subterfuge. The two highwaymen regarded the steaming heap with admiration. ‘Proper padder’s horse.’
As they rode up the track and made the long circle back to the Belle, Tyler said: ‘You’re still young, Duchess. It’s not too late.’
‘I’m twenty-five.’
‘Young enough.’
‘Have you got children, Tyler?’
She was breaking their rule, but he was sorry for her. ‘Boy’s in the army. Girl’s married. Haven’t seen ’em in a bit.’
‘I envy you.’ She could say it to nobody but him. She shook her head. ‘If those bleeders go back to Stevenage for the night, I’ll shoot the bastards.’
At the Belle, the Green Room still resounded with uproarious Tories. Cole Packer lit her upstairs. ‘Squire Leggatt fell off the roof, but he ain’t hurt much. They been goodish, on the whole.’
‘Where’s the Scotsman?’
‘Gone to bed.’
‘There may be late guests arriving tonight, Cole.’
‘Thought there might be.’
While she changed, she watched from her window. Where were they? A near-sighted ox with a limp could have followed the trail quicker. Well, if they’d gone north, to Stevenage, on their head be it: the White Lion was ghastly.
At last, the light of a coach lantern wavered on the yard’s open gates, there was the sound of discussion and they came straggling in, two coachmen, eight passengers, most silent with exhaustion, one of them hysterical. Cecily met them, tidying her carefully disarranged hair. ‘Of course, of course. How dreadful. What is the world coming to? Hanging’s too good for them. Enter and welcome. We have company already, so we can find you some food. And beds, yes indeed. Oh, you poor dear… and a baby too. Isn’t she bonny?’ She took the little fist that held a silver rattle and shook it gently.
She especially fawned on the coachmen, refusing payment from ‘such brave men or what is Christian hospitality about?’
‘Better bub and grub here than the old Fighting Cocks, eh, Cokey?’ one of them asked his companion, tucking in. ‘It’s dog stew at the Fighting Cocks.’
‘You’re kind to say so,’ said Cecily. ‘And is the hill up to St Albans as steep as they say?’
‘Killer,’ said Cokey. ‘Company’s lost more ’osses gettin’ to the bloody Cocks than we’ve had hot dinners, ain’t we, Rick?’
‘An’ highwaymen behind every bush on the Heath,’ said Rick.
‘Killers an’ all,’ Cokey said, ‘not like the amateur bloody tumblers you got round this way.’
‘We should stop here, Rick. Better vittles, better road. Only twelve mile from Albans…’
‘I hadn’t considered the coach trade,’ s
aid Cecily, brightly.
‘Profitable, lady, very profitable. You should think on.’
‘I will,’ she said.
‘I don’t know what this is,’ said Cokey, mopping new-baked bread in his ragoût, ‘but it’s tasty.’
‘It ain’t dog stew,’ she told him.
Going to the kitchen, she met Archibald Cameron leaning on the door-frame. ‘Fortunate ye had enough food in,’ he said.
She avoided his eyes. ‘Indeed.’
‘And beds made up.’
‘We were expecting Squire Leggatt and the others to stay over.’
He nodded towards the taproom. ‘Attacked by two highwaymen, they tell me.’
She met his eyes. ‘Fortunately, they got all their property back. Excuse me, I need more hot water for the brandy.’
As she pushed past him, he grinned and took the jug from her hand. ‘I’ll fetch it,’ he said. ‘Ye stay in there and win.’
Before they rose to go to their beds, the travellers drank to the Belle Sauvage and even to the ineptness of the highwaymen who’d led them to it.
‘I can’t understand it,’ Cecily said in her reply. ‘The Belle’s a safe house. There’s been no robbery here in years. Not like St Albans.’
As Rick helped Cokey to the stairs, Cecily reminded him: ‘You’ll commend the Belle to your company?’
He took the proffered sovereign with his free hand. ‘Depend on it, lady.’
She didn’t entirely. Following up the good report of the Belle the coach company would have received, she sent Archibald Cameron to negotiate with its owner, Mr Sherman, of Sherman and Sons, which operated from the Bull and Mouth at St Martins-le-Grand, asking to buy a share in their Great North Road coaches and offering to provide the horses for the stage north and south of the Belle in return for a proportion of the profit. ‘The Fighting Cocks takes a sixth, tell them I’m prepared to take a seventh,’ she instructed the lawyer.
‘That’s no’ much.’
‘It’s enough to begin with. By the time I’m finished I’ll be running my own coaches.’ If the company accepted her offer, she wouldn’t have to accommodate their passengers until spring – coaches didn’t run in the winter, the roads were too bad. ‘And point out how, er, free we are from robbery most of the time. And how gentle our hills are… They’ll have good report of us from the coachmen.’
‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, woman.’
She told him, then, that Hempens had been returned to her and at Michaelmas she would be joining her cousin Sophie there for a while. Cameron noticed the stiffness that had become habitual to her ebb from her face and body as she thought of the prospect. A salmon returning to its spawning ground, he thought. Who else will she meet there?
‘Is she the slip that mocked me all the way from Edinburgh?’
Cecily shied away from the subject of Edinburgh. ‘I’m hoping Dolly will come back to look after Lemuel while I’m away. Cole and Marjorie are capable of seeing to the local trade and Colonel Grandison will look in every day, yet I was wondering…’
She disliked asking him a favour but she was relieved when he said he would come up from London as often as he was able.
‘It’s a long step. Ye’re no going on your own, I trust?’
‘I’m taking Tyler with me.’
He seemed less than comforted by the information.
Chapter Eight
It was Tyler’s second visit to fenland. The first had been two days after Cecily received Sophie’s letter when she’d sent him to Hempens to tell Edie that the island was in Fitzhenry hands again, to ready the place for Michaelmas visitors and light the Lantern to guide them in.
‘Better give me a letter for her,’ he’d said.
‘Edie can’t read.’ Instead she entrusted him with her father’s heavy gold ring devised with the outline of a bittern, the family crest, which served as her seal and which Dolly had saved from the creditors.
Despite minute instructions, he’d got lost. The unremitting flatness of the land, its lack of prominence to give him bearings, the all-enveloping carr of alder, willow and bulrush in which droves and streams insinuated like escapers wriggling through undergrowth, had unnerved him, as had the apparent absence of living souls though, he’d thought, watching the jack-o’-lanterns glimmer and shift in the marshes, there’d been plenty of dead ones. Not a religious man, he’d found himself praying to be delivered from evil that stalked by night. People benighted in the fens usually did.
‘Might as well sent me to Africa,’ he accused Cecily on his return – not the first to ascribe black foreignness to that unmapped area of England – ‘an’ when I did see a African, the bugger looked like a nine-foot heron stalking against the sunset.’
‘They use stilts to cross the streams,’ Cecily said.
‘I know now,’ Tyler said. ‘Fair chilled me crackers then. Close to he still looked a bloody cannibal.’ Reluctant, in case the cannibal murdered him for it, but desperate, Tyler had displayed Cecily’s ring. Immediately he’d been escorted to spend the night in a hut, which he described as being made entirely of withy and reed, and from there, by boat, to Hempens. ‘You’re king-post thereabouts, Duchess. Didn’t understand half they said but they was very respectful saying it.’
I am Cecily the Wake.
With it all, he’d been intrigued by the land and its people. The draining of the fens instituted by the big estate owners had not yet affected the stretches around Hempens where the inhabitants led their water-borne lives untrammelled by authority.
It wasn’t that fenlanders were discreditable, more that they respected no law but their own; their rulers were not kings but weather and water-levels. They were up Tyler’s alley.
So was their food – Edie’d fed him on lampreys. ‘Tasted them, have you? Ugly-lookin’ buggers, same as the people, but rich. Same as the people. Gawd, not a penny in their breeches but birds and fish beggin’ to be taken, as the saying is.’
‘I know,’ Cecily pointed out.
Tyler was not to be stopped. He’d supped taxless brandy and smoked dutiless pipes. ‘Smuggling? They invented it. Edie’s boys cross to France for the stuff easy as I’d sail our dewpond.’
‘I know.’
‘So why din’t you tell me? Think what they’d bring in for the Belle.’
Not all his news of Hempens was as happy. ‘Edie don’t live in the gatehouse no more,’ he told her. ‘He’s gone and pulled it down.’
‘Who pulled it down?’
‘Bleeder from Peterborough. Your creditor. As took it after the Bubble. Told Edie he only wanted the place for its stone.’
There was no rock indigenous to the fens, just peat and silt. Blackbirds and thrushes congregated at Hempens in order to crack open snails on the only stone for miles.
Tyler shuffled. ‘Duchess, he’s pulled a lot of it down.’
She steeled herself. What had not been taken from her these past years?
Even so, as Edie’s Edgar rowed them on to Windle Mere and the rank suffocation of the waterways gave way to a sniff of the sea that lay beyond the low hump of her island, Cecily gave a huff of shock as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
Against the sunset the shape that had been Hempens, always carried in her mind like an amulet, was a scarecrow, a plump old friend turned haggard by disease.
The medieval gatehouse was gone, so was the Jacobean gate, so was the curtain wall Hubert Fitzhenry had raised to guard the island from terrible Hugh Bigod in 1185. The deep-roofed grange was gone. The chapel built by Lady Priscilla Fitzhenry in the thirteenth century in penance for her husband’s sins – she’d had the stone brought by sea from Caen – was gone, its buttresses now arching against the sky, like skeleton ribs sticking up sideways in a desert. The cloisters where had walked the ghost of mad Great-great-aunt Matilda, she who had donned the habit of a nun after vowing to some eccentric god of her own – all were gone.
Denuded of their lovely corseting, the orieled gable ends of th
e house itself – its two flint wings raised at different Tudor ages – blinked at her with the embarrassment of one caught naked.
Whig, thought Cecily drearily, a Peterborough Whig. The price of stone more valuable than its grace. Not an ancient home to him: a mine to be plundered. Did the bastard take the tombstones as well? The Lantern…
She shook the boat leaning forward to pull at Edgar’s knee. ‘Did he pull down the Lantern?’ Though he could not have or Tyler would have told her.
The fenman jerked his head to his right. There it was still, beyond the twirl of Elizabethan chimneys, on the island’s far side: small for a lighthouse but significant enough in this vast flatness, a tower topped by an octagonal gallery of glass, like an upraised finger stuck into an eight-sided bolt.
Ah, well, she thought, comforted, we can rebuild the rest.
As long as memory ran, Cecily’s family had maintained the Lantern on Hempens, partly from philanthropy to warn shipping against the Snappers, the shoals that lay offshore and – with a secondary beacon – to act as a transit guiding vessels upriver, and partly from self-interest, to collect resultant light dues through its agents in the East Anglian ports.
The stone lighthouse that had replaced previous simple wooden beacons never recovered its cost: Trinity House had built a bigger, better light further down the coast and, in any case, the great storm of 1682 had shifted the seabed and so silted up the Windle that only shallow-draught boats could now gain Hempens and the mere beyond.
But the Fitzhenrys had still maintained it as a symbol of power, and for another reason. Every so often the Lantern flickered again – to guide in smuggled booty from France and Holland.
It wasn’t lit now.
Cecily jogged the boat again. ‘Tyler told Edie to light—’
‘They visitors come yesterday, bor.’
They were here. He was here. Guillaume’s face came vividly before her, fitting to completion the imagined hero she had tried to conjure when she was a girl dreaming her dreams at the top of the Lantern. He’d been the one she’d awaited.
If she’d arrived a day earlier, if she could have been here, dressed in her best, to call to him from the Lantern, what perfection then, returning at last to this depleted but still most beloved of homes to regain adolescent magic…
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