The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne

by Jonathan Stroud

  The evening after it happened, Albert skipped stew and went down to the dayroom to take a look at the mess. They’d propped a board against the entrance, where the door had been, but he slipped behind it and took a tour over the crunchy black floorboards, past the rubble and molten glass, the half-burned sofas, and all the rest. The collapsed ceiling had been cleared away, and you could see the untouched spot where the kid had been standing.

  The western window had been just outside the sphere of influence, and it looked untouched, the glass still in and the bars unbroken. But Albert noticed the evening sunlight coming through a tiny crack between the brickwork and window frame, and when he pushed at the frame, the whole thing shook like a rotten tooth. Standing close, he could feel a little breeze coming through it, fresh and soft as a child’s breath.

  That was worth knowing about. It made his heart jump inside him.

  He guarded his secret carefully and told no one, scarcely even daring to think about it. But Dr. Calloway could never be fooled, not entirely. She or someone noted his distraction, caught the way he lingered in the grounds after roll call, gazing out over the walls to the hills beyond. And before long, he was summoned to her study.

  “Are you restless, Albert?”

  “Restless, ma’am?”

  “Thinking of leaving us somehow?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, Albert….” She moved her hand across the desktop to touch the birch cane lying there. The bars in the study window were parceling out the sunshine on the desk into little squares, and Dr. Calloway’s fingernails shone as they made slight adjustments to the position of the cane. “If you’re going to lie,” she said, “don’t do it in a way that demeans you. Make up something magnificent—something that gives us all joy. We have seen you looking beyond the walls. You’d like to go out there?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.” Sensing a trap, not wanting to be too eager, nor denying it, either. Not knowing what she was likely to believe. “Sometimes I do. I like the color of the trees. But Matron says there are nasty things in the woods, and I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be safe for you to go out,” Dr. Calloway said. “And you’ve got trees on the grounds of the house.”

  “Yes. I like our apple trees. But I wish they had birds in them.”

  She glanced to the window, at its segments of blue. “Don’t you see birds in the sky, Albert?”

  He nodded. “I do, but the guards shoot them if they come too close.”

  She said something else, but Albert’s mind had jumped to the toothed bird he’d found when he was little. Most of the birds the guards killed fell outside the walls, but this one had dropped between the laurel hedge and the wall. It was old, the flesh black and shrunken, the eyes gone, the feathers a blue-black sludge. But the tiny jagged spurs in the loosely gaping beak were as sharp as knives. He had touched one with a finger and it had drawn blood. That beak fascinated him. The lower half was almost coming off, so he had twisted it clear and put it in his pocket. He’d gone back to see the bird again a few days later, but they’d found the carcass by then and cleared it away.

  He realized the woman was waiting for him to reply.

  “Sorry, ma’am, I missed that.”

  The small red mouth became a line. “Is your restraint covering your ears? Has it slipped a bit? Do I need to make it tighter, Albert? I can tighten the screws for you. Tighten them so your head bleeds.”

  He shuddered. “No, please—you don’t need to do that.”

  Her hair was pale as crushed straw, but there was a square of sunlight on it, igniting it like fire. She sat forward in the chair. “I was asking, Albert Browne, if you were happy here.”

  “Yes, Dr. Calloway.”

  “Do you take your pills like Matron says?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I do. Every night.”

  “That’s good.” But she was looking at Albert like she was not quite sure, and he could see she was going to say something else pertaining to it, so he cut in quick.

  “They taste awfully bitter,” he said. “Especially the blue ones. But I crunch them all up anyhow.” He gave her a smile, kind of weak and loose at the edges, both long-suffering and eager to please. That smile worked a treat on Old Michael and the nurses, but Dr. Calloway just looked at him with her soft black eyes, and Albert began to think he’d overdone it.

  “You don’t want to chew them,” she said. “Just swallow them down with your milk. They don’t taste of anything then. I’ll have to get Matron to help you, make sure you do it right.”

  Now it was her turn to smile, and it was a brisk one with a hard edge. She made a note on the paper set out on the desk, the pen moving swiftly in her pale white hand. The skin was as thin as baking parchment. You could see blue veins under the surface. Like her face and neck, her hands were without blemish, with none of the birthmarks so many guests had.

  She put the pen aside. “Why do you think we do this?” she said. “Keep you here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We are protecting you. We keep you safe.” She swiveled her chair round, smoothed down her dress. “Since you like windows, Albert, you may look out of this one.”

  From this height you could see above the outer walls, above the gatehouse, see where the white gravel track ran away between thick bushes along the curve of the hill. The land close to the walls had been cleared for security reasons: it was black and torn and studded with the carbonized roots of trees. Beyond rose brushwood, then forest, dark green, fading into the blue distance across successive waves of hills.

  “Matron is right,” Dr. Calloway said. “The land is wild and strange. A bad thing happened long ago, Albert, and its influence is still with us. The world is changing. It’s changing much faster than it should. Animals and humans are changing too. There are giant wolves and bears and other carnivorous beasts in the forests, and of course there are the Tainted, who lie in wait to devour the traveler. True humanity is in retreat, and you would not last five minutes beyond our walls….” The pale, heart-shaped face gazed up at him. “Are you not pleased at the way we look after you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Albert said. “I’m truly grateful.”

  “And it is not only the beasts and cannibals that would kill you, but ordinary English men and women too. They are threatened from all sides and do not look kindly on anything out of the ordinary coming past their walls. Your terrible illness would arouse them to violence.”

  “How would they know?”

  She laughed softly. “I should think the metal restraint on your head might give them a clue. And if that were removed…well, Albert, you know the harm you’d do. You have no control, no willpower. The wickedness in you would come out at once, like it came out of that stupid boy the other day.” A spasm ran through her, perhaps of disgust or irritation. “Did you speak to that boy, Albert?”

  “Once or twice, Dr. Calloway.”

  “You should not have done so. Like him, you are disgusting and you are deformed, and until you respond to treatment, you must remain here at Stonemoor. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Dr. Calloway.”

  “What are you?”

  “I am disgusting and deformed.”

  “That is exactly what your parents said when they gave you to me, years ago. There is no place for you anywhere but here. Do not let me catch you thinking of the outer world again.”

  And he didn’t let her catch him. But when they reopened the dayroom, a few weeks later, the crack beside the window was still there. They’d missed it, which was unlike them. Albert was careful not to go near it in the coming months, except occasionally, as when closing the curtains. When he did so, he felt the breeze again. It blew on his skin if he put his cheek close to the plaster, and for an instant he’d capture the scent of the beech woods on the hill below the house, all le
afy and sappy and somehow green.

  Better than that, the window still shook when you pushed.

  Some nights last forever; others run past like water through the fingers. In no time at all, this one was gone.

  Lying where he was on the moving deck, Albert could hear the swirl of the river and Scarlett’s occasional ragged snores close by. Otherwise there was a deep, wet silence. His eyes were open, but he saw nothing. The dawn had arrived cloaked in granular, gray fog, which enfolded him like a shroud.

  His head felt raw and empty, as it always did after the Fear had been at work. A residue of it was still pressing inward on his chest. Staring into whiteness, he thought of the pale-haired woman in the long black coat. She was striding toward him surrounded by pillars of fire. To Albert, she almost seemed of the fire, darting this way and that with inhuman speed, growing in size, getting ever closer….

  He shut his eyes tight. She was going to catch him. All his life, she had known everything he had done, everything he wanted to do. He had never been able to escape her, and he wasn’t going to manage it now.

  What a punishment she would have waiting for him back at Stonemoor!

  A swell of agitation made him move. He levered himself into a sitting position, breathing hard, staring all about him. The fog was growing brighter. No longer solid, it was a thing of weaving threads and layers, which presently retreated enough for him to notice a large box or crate on the deck beside him. He sat his back against it and waited.

  By and by, another dark mass resolved itself into Scarlett’s sleeping form.

  She was huddled on one side, her head resting on an outstretched arm. Her mouth was open. Long strands of hair straggled across her face like riverweed. Her body and clothes were gray with ash. The bandage on her wounded hand was black. She was cupping the bag with the bank money tight against her chest.

  The vision of Dr. Calloway faded from his mind. He sat and looked at Scarlett instead.

  Over the past few days, Albert had seen his companion in a succession of different guises. She had been a sternly practical traveler, leading him through the forest. She had been a grumpy ascetic, meditating on her mat. In the forests above the river, she had been a cold-eyed sharpshooter, mowing down Dr. Calloway’s men without a second thought. In Lechlade, she had been first a merchant trader, selling holy artifacts of dubious provenance, then a bank robber of boundless grace and daring. And at the wharf side—what? She had steered him to safety yet again. She hadn’t needed to. She might have turned and fled.

  So many Scarletts in such a short time! It was only now she lay unconscious that these changes finally stopped; it was only now Albert realized how young she truly was. Scarcely any older than him.

  Around her head flitted a faint nimbus, a coronet of images; random, flickering, moving at bewildering speed. Albert didn’t try to sieve them. He could never get anything out of someone while they slept: it was all too messed up and confused. But he could tell when they were starting to wake up. He watched idly. And sure enough, the pace of Scarlett’s night thoughts began to slow. Coherence blossomed; clarity returned. He saw a child standing on a bright white road. The child raised its arm as if in greeting or farewell. The image vanished; and now the recent past asserted itself on Scarlett’s mind. He saw Lechlade burning; flames and explosions and raking gunfire; men leaping, screaming, dying; a man with bloody bubbles in his mouth; a demonic figure in a bowler hat pursuing her through the night…

  She coughed, spat, and opened her eyes.

  “Hello,” Albert said. “Sleep well?”

  As grunts went, it was expressive. He waited while Scarlett stared dully into the mists, gathering her thoughts to her as a confused old woman would her cats, to shore up her reality and prevent everything falling away. Ah, now she remembered. Now she was awake. She sat up, brushing ash from her face. If anything, she looked more disheveled vertically than she had lying down.

  “I know what you’re doing and don’t do it,” she said. “Where are we?”

  “In some fog.”

  “Aside from the fog. And where’s the old man?”

  “Asleep somewhere, I expect. It’s clearing now, Scarlett. We’ll soon see.”

  She nodded. Kneeling there on the sodden deck, wet, dirty, with a cut on her face and her black clothes pitted with burn holes, she didn’t look so great. But already her mind shone with energy and determination. She was imagining swift progress beneath blue skies, the sharp prow of the boat cutting the water into speeding foam….

  “We need to get the engine going,” she said. “Now it’s light, someone will find a boat that didn’t get burned. They’ll be after us soon.”

  Albert experienced a stabbing pain inside him. “Yes.”

  “The Faith House operative, Shilling. He definitely survived the blast. He’s very dangerous and very good. He killed two of the Brothers without breaking a sweat. He’ll be coming. I don’t know about the woman.”

  “Oh, she’ll be coming too,” Albert said.

  “You sure about that? She was standing very close to the petrol dump when it went up. Then a watchtower fell on her. She’s quite possibly dead.”

  He gazed at her bleakly. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  Scarlett shrugged. “We’ll find out. Did you see what kind of motorboat we’re on?”

  “No. It was all a bit smoky there at the end.”

  Her eyes flicked toward him. “Yeah…wasn’t it just? Well, it doesn’t matter which boat we’ve got, really, as long as it’s fast.”

  As she spoke, a crosswind sprang up from the shore and blew across the river, helpfully dispersing the mist around them. Scarlett and Albert stood up stiffly, groaning at their many bruises, and inspected the vessel properly.

  “Ah,” Albert said.

  Scarlett’s face had sagged somewhat; she stood with hands on hips, just staring.

  It wasn’t a motorboat at all.

  It was a ramshackle wooden raft.

  On the plus side, it didn’t look like it would immediately sink. It was a large, rectangular construction, big-boned and ungainly, made mostly of long white tree trunks that had been lashed together with rope. But there was a distinctly homemade quality about the rough-hewn edges and the garish orange plastic floats fixed at intervals along the sides.

  Most of the deck was lined with smooth-cut wooden boards, only a few of which were broken in the middle. In the center, a squared area had been partitioned off; here wobbled a precarious tentlike construction—essentially a black tarpaulin balanced on four spindly poles. Inside this shelter were two folded deck chairs, a heap of cushions, and a great patched eiderdown, from underneath which the old man’s tufted gray hair could just be seen protruding.

  At the raft’s stern, an enormous and oft-repaired rudder protruded into the stream like a diseased limb, fixed to a simple wood-and-rubber tiller. Here too was a wooden box for the steerer to sit on, and also a number of empty beer bottles, studded with dew, that rolled and clinked as the raft drifted gently in the current. Toward the front of the vessel was a deck chair and a row of plastic boxes. A number of sizeable wooden crates took up the remainder of the space—it was against one of these that Albert had been leaning.

  Spread over everything was a thin coating of charcoal dust and fragments of black wood from the burning of the wharf. It was a picture of shabby desolation.

  Albert cleared his throat. “Well, it could be worse.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t actually know.”

  The view beyond the river was scarcely any more cheering. Damp and disused wheat fields, choked with scrub and sapling trees, showed amidst the mists on both sides. Either it was the very edge of Lechlade’s safe-lands or the abandoned property of some other town. There were no signs of human life. Albert looked back along the Thames into the dreariness and fog. Somewhere b
ehind them, Dr. Calloway was hastening on his trail.

  “The worst thing,” he said, “is how slowly we’re going. And the old gent told us it was fast.”

  Scarlett nodded grimly. “He did, didn’t he?” Stalking to the shadow of the tent, she took hold of an aged foot splaying from under the eiderdown and gave it a sharp tug. There was a raddled hacking sound. The eiderdown’s surface shifted; it was violently cast aside to reveal a distressing knot of hair and bony limbs, which unfolded in a complex manner to become the owner of the raft. The old man sat up, still coughing, blinking in the acrid light.

  “Yes? Who is it?”

  “It is your passengers again. We want a word with you.”

  “It’s a bit early for words, surely. The sun is hardly up.”

  “It’s up plenty high enough for us to see the grim reality of this raft, which you described to us as— What did he call it, Albert?”

  “ ‘The fastest and most reliable ship on the river.’ ”

  “That’s right. So before it disintegrates and we must swim for our lives, we’d like to discuss that little description with you.”

  Before the old man could reply, there was a kerfuffle at his side. The tiny pale-skinned girl sat up too, wiping sleep from her eyes with balled and pudgy fists. She glared at Albert and Scarlett with an expression of faint disgust. Then she prodded the old man and tapped her nose with a finger.

  He nodded. “In a minute, Ettie. I know, I know—I am hungry too. But there are these idiots to attend to first.” He ran a hand through his hair, which sprang back up as wildly as before. “All right, since you’re my valued customers, we can talk, though I don’t expect any complaints. Aboard the good raft Clara, I run a tight and classy operation. Now, turn westward if you will. I am standing up, and I have no trousers on. Also, I need to relieve myself into the river.”

  The old man made a decisive movement. There was an unwanted flash of nightshirt and gaunt, bare leg. Albert turned at speed. With poor grace, Scarlett did likewise. They waited, side by side, trying to ignore the vague sounds coming from behind.