The Accidental Highwayman (17 page)

“I see,” said Prudence.

“Was she correct?” Morgana blurted out, in a very human manner.

“All in good time, young lady,” said Prudence.
Young lady!
thought I.
She's older than your grandmother!
But Prudence turned to Lily again and said, “What is the name of this rug?”

We all looked down at our feet, and there was a great blonde animal skin with short, coarse hair, the skin covered in the sort of tattoos that sailors get, of ships and knotted ropes and birds on the wing. You can imagine my surprise when I recognized it myself!

“Frieda!” Lily and I cried at the very same instant. We stepped off the rug right away. It didn't seem decent to stand on a deceased colleague.

“That's your answer?” Prudence said.

“Who else could it be?” Lily reasoned. “Frieda the Tattooed Camel. I think my own name's wrote on there somewhere, pricked in hindia hink.”

“I'll vouch for old Frieda myself,” said I. “I know she's got that one right.”

“Unfortunately,” said Prudence, “Frieda the Tattooed Camel is fairly well known, and therefore this has proven the weakest of the three questions. Several women have gotten it right, none of them the niece. Now here is the third question: How wide is forty-two?”

Well, that question stopped me cold. The others hadn't been riddles. This one sounded to me like a trick—something a Faerie might come up with. Morgana and I raised our brows together, and I could see she was as confused as I, although prettier at it.

But Lily, after only a moment's thought, snapped her fingers and said, “As wide as a circus-ring. Forty-two feet. Uncle Cornelius had a hippodrome, you see, and it was designed after Philip Astley's trick-riding circus in London
*
. So the horse-circuit, or circus, was forty-two feet across.”

There was a long, tense silence. The rain beat at the windows and the flames beat at the coals, but the four occupants of that room were absolutely silent. Then Prudence spun the globe beneath her fingers once, twice, and again, as if each revolution represented one question.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “You had better go.”

*   *   *

A large and ominous footman saw us to the door. We sloshed our way around to the barn, which communicated with the house by a passageway on the upper story. Lily was so miserable, gin-soaked, and worn with sorrow she could hardly walk, and Morgana, although by far the least sturdy of the pair, was bearing her up. Midnight and Fred were standing inside the barn door, Fred tickling Midnight's nostrils with a wisp of straw.

“We should at least wait out the storm in here,” Morgana said. “Th'art both soaked.”

“That footman means us no good,” I said. “If we're not out of here in five minutes, he'll throw us out. My master could have thrashed him, but not I.”

I wanted to find the stairs inside the barn and rush up there into the back of the house straightaway, to introduce Lily to her uncle; but according to Prudence he hadn't any wits left and would not recognize his own mother, let alone a wayward niece from ten years before. In fact, I had earlier attempted to go up the stairs inside the house itself, but the footman—a burly, red-haired fellow with enormous arms and a lace jabot—had emerged from a back room and escorted us out bodily.

Yet when I found a steep flight of steps at the rear of the barn and prepared to mount them, it was Lily who said, “Don't trouble him.”

“But you answered the questions correctly. You said so!” I cried.

“I could have been lying,” Lily said. “I could have lied about this entire business.”

But you didn't lie, Lily,” I protested. “I've known you since I was a small boy and can assure you, if you knew how to lie you wouldn't have suffered so many romantic disappointments!”

That got Lily weeping again. I gave up. While Morgana tried to console her, I put the saddle back on Midnight.

Then I turned to them, very serious now: “Lily, there's something you should know. I wasn't going to trouble you with it, because I thought you'd soon be reunited with your uncle. However, things have changed. There's little time. Morgana, who has been your constant companion the last two hours, is fleeing an unsuitable arrangement, as I told you. But there's more to it. The instigator of the situation has a lot of armed and dangerous servants, who are in pursuit of her. We must make the shore of the Irish Sea without being detected by them, or all is lost. So we cannot take you with us. I'll accompany you back to the village, but then we must part ways.… Oh goodness, look. A bee.”

For just as I was finishing up my speech, I spied a solitary bee walking crookedly atop a tack-box near the door.

“Yes I
know,
” said a disembodied voice, seething with frustration. “I've been trying to read it ever since you came barging in here!”

With that, Willum appeared from atop a beam over the barn doors. “Your Royal Highness? Yes, I know. I just did another ruckins in front of a mortal in
direct
defiance of the eighth verse of the tenth chapter of the Eldritch Law. But I have simply
got to read that bee
!”

 

Chapter 18

THE IMPRESARIO'S FLIGHT

L
ILY, WHO
had run out of other emotional effects to achieve, screamed at the top of her lungs and fainted. Morgana didn't say a word, instead fixing Willum with the same cruel stare she'd given me in the snug of the public house. Then she turned her attention to reviving Lily.

Willum, for his part, flitted down to the tack-box. “You were standing directly in my line of sight,” he snarled at me, and then bent down to examine the bee's erratic course, left-right-up-down in various patterns. “Go back to the beginning, you daft insect!” he cried.

I didn't see any change in what the bee was doing; it resembled a very small quadrille.
*
But presently Willum looked up, his face and bottom shining with hope, and said, “It's Gruntle! He's alive, but can't fly. He hid from the goblings at the far edge of the river and got across on a dung cart. Now he's in a farmyard, and he can't get away on foot because there's a dirty great cat prowling around. We must get to him!”

“The
bee
said all that?” I spluttered.

“They're good for a couple of long paragraphs. Now come on, we need a human to get rid of the cat and collect Gruntle. He's not a mile away. But we must hurry!”

“And hurry we shall,” said a high, wheezing voice above us.

Everyone turned to look, except Lily, who was still unconscious. On the upper-story hayloft, a door stood ajar that must have opened on the passage to the house. I saw wallpaper within. Before the door stood a thin, bent man with a white fringe of hair and white mustaches. He wore a soup-stained nightshirt and house-slippers. “I distinctly heard a feminine cry,” said he. “Hitch up that fine horse to the wagon, and let us away!”

“Uncle Cornelius?” Lily murmured as her eyelids fluttered open. “Is it you?”

“Great wheels of Parmesan cheese, is that young Myrtle?” the old man cried, and clambered down the steps to the ground floor of the barn. “Myrtle, the fire-breathing tiger-woman! Bless my barometer, it's good to see you. Now listen to me, there's no time to waste. We'll introduce ourselves properly later on, but that wicked nursemaid and her henchman—
henchman,
I say—will discover my absence in no time at all. Raise the stays, young man, and let's get ready.”

With that, the old gentleman hopped to the back of the barn—he had a strange, springing walk, his knees always bent—and grasped a large tarpaulin of canvas. This he dragged aside, revealing behind it a Burton wagon
*
of what later became known as the
Romanichal vardo
type: a little home on wheels of exquisite craftsmanship, elaborately carved, painted in red and green with cream-colored wheels, and all picked out in gold. Emblazoned on both sides in ornate golden letters was
PUGGLE'S SPECTACULAR
.

[   
A Most Extraordinary Conveyance
   ]

“Young man! Move!” he barked, and I sprang into motion. Despite his age and condition, the gentleman knew how to command.

“What art thou doing?” Morgana demanded as I struggled to get Midnight into the wagon traces.

“Escaping,” said I. “Mr. Puggle, for this must be he, has an idea, and I have a plan—and they amount to the same thing.”

The horse-furniture of the caravan possessed more straps and buckles than the cart at the Manse, but the principle was the same, and in a minute or two the great horse was casting me looks of disgust as he took his first few steps as a beast of burden. Meanwhile, Mr. Puggle had gone up the steps at the back of the wagon. We heard him rummaging around inside. He emerged at the front and took his place in the driver's seat, a transformed man.

He was dressed to the waist in a splendid if timeworn Prussian hussar's uniform that matched the wagon, with a tall bearskin hat and plume upon his head. The nightshirt hung out below his gold-frogged tunic, and his slippers completed the ensemble.

“Away with us!” he cried, and because he seemed so determined, and we needed so much to get away, and the red-haired footman was stomping across the side-yard with his arms in the air, we all tumbled into the caravan. I took up the reins, flicked the outraged Midnight forward, and we lurched out into the rain.

The footman had to fling himself aside from our path, and sprawled in the mud. It was good to see someone else do it for once. A moment later we were through the gate. At the front door of the house, Prudence the nursemaid appeared, shaking her fists and demanding the return of her patient. Midnight turned his nose toward the village, Mr. Puggle struck up a warbling old marching song in a mixture of Italian, French, and Spanish, and Puggle's Spectacular was on the road.

My plan was fairly simple: We would drop the poor old gentleman off at the public house, commandeer his wagon, and use it to escape
en masse
until such time as less conspicuous transport could be arranged. Our only stop would be to release Gruntle from his torment, wherever he was, and then we'd take a variety of side roads to evade pursuit. The vehicle, being unexpected, was unlikely to rouse the suspicions of any of our foes. Mr. Puggle, unaware of the betrayal I planned, was in perfect spirits.

But the nursemaid had pursued us into the street with an umbrella, shouting, “Kidnappers!” at the fullest extent of her voice, which was considerable. So it was that doors flew open at every cottage, and the cry was taken up by one and all. Men came out of their houses, stamping into their boots with greatcoats thrown over their heads, and took up the chase themselves. In a matter of a minute, half the village was in pursuit, with “Kidnappers!” ringing from every throat.

There was no stopping at the public house. Mr. Puggle, hereafter known as Uncle Cornelius, was coming along.

Fortune was with us: We outstripped our pursuers on foot, after which Willum sat on my shoulder and directed us toward Gruntle's location. This took us down obscure paths and lanes, the wagon rocking outrageously over the poor, muddy ways. Our pursuers were quick to find horses, and we heard them galloping up and down the better-traveled roads not too far distant. I have never been so grateful for the privacy of tall hedgerows as then. By now they were shouting accusations of murder, abduction, arson, and similar crimes, so there could be no hope of mercy should we be apprehended. But none of them spied us through the thickets, and then we were behind a row of hills.

“Is this the road to France?” inquired Uncle Cornelius.

“Yes,” said I. “The Irish part of France.”

“And is that your parrot?” he asked, indicating Willum, who had abandoned the eighth verse of the tenth chapter entirely, as far as present company was concerned.