The Accidental Highwayman (31 page)

Then there was a deafening thunderclap, and a flash—not of light, but of darkness—and all the enchanted creatures, every pixie and mantigorn and gryphon, were gone in a spray of foul-smelling sparks. The cold fog crawled away like a devilfish. There was only the stampeding crowd at every gate and doorway, the wreckage, and the fire.

I whistled as loudly as I could for Midnight. When he came to me, shaking wee arrows off his flanks, I sprang none too spryly into the saddle, determined to give chase, no matter where the creatures had taken Morgana. Red-coated soldiers were pouring into the square now, in opposition to the jostling crowd. I cared nothing for them. They were but mortal men. I rode straight through them, shouting wildly. There came a great rattling and clanking ahead, and the gates of the town were sealed shut by the iron portcullis that descended from the stone ramparts. Midnight drew up only inches from the bars; redcoats seized his reins and I was dragged from the saddle.

Heavy hands fell upon my shoulders. Muskets surrounded me like a fence of pickets.

“Whistling Jack,” said Captain Sterne. “It's been a merry chase.”

 

Chapter 31

CAPTIVITY

Y
OU WOULD
not call me an oversensitive man, I think. I have demonstrated well enough my immunity from subtle influences. But there was nothing subtle about the next month of my life, and had I been as nerveless as an anvil, yet would I have been miserable. The very tumbril that had borne those unfortunate highwaymen away in their cage some weeks past now bore me. Through every town and hamlet I rolled in that ignominious iron pen, attended by the man who regarded me as his worst enemy.

How many eyes fell upon me, filled with disgust and fear? How many mouths shaped vile calumnies and flung them in my ears? For that matter, how many spoiled eggs did the young boys throw? I think it was the boys I disliked the most, because if I'd been one among them, I'd have done the same thing. They were reminders of my own beginnings, and reminded me how low I had fallen since. At any rate, I had a good long tour of the countryside, and if it hadn't been for the frequent rains that slashed down upon ox-wain and cage alike, I dare say I'd have suffocated from my own smell.

Captain Sterne had refused to hear anything but that I was Whistling Jack. I told him those parts of my tale that didn't require mention of magical people, but there wasn't enough to it to exonerate me. I was guilty; I was his foe. When he wasn't riding along ahead behaving as if he would soon slay me with his own hand, he was riding beside my cage, conversing with me about the experience of death by hanging.

“The tow
*
, you see, is a coarse one; it prickles as it rides the neck,” he said one afternoon, as we passed through some dull country of bogs and sheepfolds.

“Yes, I know,” said I. “And when the nightcap goes over my head, I'll smell the last breath of the man hanged before me inside it.”

“Yes! And then—”

“And then the knot of the rope is cinched tighter than a stirrup iron, so I can sample what the next few minutes will be like,” I said.

“Will you stop finishing my sentences!” Captain Sterne barked. “It is a most irritating habit.”

“But,” I said, reasonably, “you've already finished them often enough.”

“Anyway, I'll be glad to see you swing,” he muttered. “I shall be bringing someone of particular interest to your execution. She was very taken with you before, but I think she'll soon see I'm the better man.” With that, he spurred his mount to the front of the column of troops escorting me to London.

But none of these indignities meant anything to me at all, compared to the anguish of my heart. In all the time I'd spent with Morgana, I had not understood what my heart already knew: I loved the girl. All my confusion and irritation came from it. And the worst torment of this revelation was knowing that I would die without being able to confess my passion.

My mind revolved around this unhappy point in much the same way the string with which I measured out my riding-circuses revolved around the stake. It never got nearer or farther from the locus, but circled it endlessly. I recalled a thousand little incidents that should have told me of my romantic affliction. Why else had I so often gazed upon her with delight? Why else did I find it charming when she smote me with a caprizel, or laughed, or gave me some trifling compliment?

I'd blamed her for bewitching me! I had thought it was magical influences distorting my mind. But all the while it was my own fault. I loved her more than all the things in the world. I loved her more than Midnight. But, being unfamiliar with the romantic illness, I had not known it for what it was.

She was captured now, in the hands of her father, or of that fearsome One-Eyed Duchess. Would her father shut her up in a dungeon and force her to marry? Would the Duchess tear out her soul? What would become of those who had assisted her flight, especially Willum and Gruntle? I could not rest for thinking of these things, and when they briefly left my mind, I saw only Morgana, with those shimmering wings of radiant light, in the moments before her apprehension. If only they had been real wings that could bear her away! But all was lost, except me. I had been found.

*   *   *

When my foul cage reached the City, the prisons were full to overflowing, so I was assigned to one of the prison ships that wallowed in the River Medway. These hulks are floating hells; I shall describe the one in which I was shackled only as much as required to convey my tale, as a full account of such earthbound horrors would make the supernatural horrors to which I had recently been introduced, and the description of which is the purpose of this narration, seem paltry by comparison.

Hundreds of prisoners, scurf'd
*
for every imaginable crime, dwelled below those decks in almost perfect darkness. The hulks were decommissioned naval ships, demasted, so they were nothing more than immense wooden slop-buckets floating on the tide. Were it not for the gun-ports, we would all have suffocated within a few hours. As it was, the air was so putrid belowdecks that a candle would not stay lit: There was not enough good air to nourish the flame. Beside the reek of disease and filth, and the exhalation of a thousand rotting mouths, there were vermin. The hull was alive with lice, fleas, and rats.

Only a few days after I arrived in London, I enjoyed a brief respite from the prison ship in order to visit the court. There I was sentenced, alongside a number of less famous criminals, to death. This was no surprise, as in those days a man was generally found innocent, transported to America, or hanged, rather than fiddling about with intermediate sentences. And I was so obviously guilty that no evidence, testimony, or examination was required.

The judge, a crimson-faced man of immense girth, made a long and tedious speech aimed at my master, but addressed to me. I don't know why he bothered speaking of reforming my corrupted spirit when it was so shortly to depart. My sentence came just before lunch, and delayed the meal, which I think may have influenced the judge's remarks. I provide only the last of a long summation here, delivered from beneath a caxon of curled horsehair:

“Like a ripe pear, Mr. Whistling, you are soon to be plucked from the branch. But the branch from which you dangle shall be the leafless limb of the Tyburn Tree, which has been nourished at the root by the very blood of Cromwell.
*
Like a pear, I say, but your face will be the color of a plum, and your head swollen similarly, so that you will also resemble a roast of beef; as the pheasant hangs until its flesh has become fragrant, so shall you hang, and the aroma of you, as of a good Stilton, shall waft across the road there, where there is an inn that does fish very well.

“Cruelly have you plied your trade upon the road, robbing many a fine coach that was stuffed with riches as a suckling pig is stuffed with apples, leaving nary a crust of bread behind. Why, you may not have heard, but the fine officer who apprehended you was deprived of his beloved's heart by your predations. How couldst you pluck such a succulent potato from his very dish? What pangs he has endured, what hunger gnaws at his soul! He is starved for love, and it is all because of you. I sentence you, sir, for your menu of crimes, to be hanged by the neck until dead, so help you God. Right, that's done. Lunchtime.”

*   *   *

The court was pleased to execute me on a separate day from the others to facilitate public participation. Mass hangings always fall behind schedule. I had a fortnight to enjoy my thoughts until then. Two weeks of jolly captivity, then the rope.

So it was, with my nostrils filled with stench, my skin with bugs, and my ears with the wails of lost and dying souls, I whiled away thirteen days. During that time I drank as little of the vile water as I was able, and ate as little of the heaps of refuse with which they fed us as I could, and so languishing, began to drift in and out of consciousness, meeting old friends and enemies in waking dreams.

Captain Sterne visited me once, and I was escorted to the top deck for the purpose. There was a lady beside him, some years his senior, and by her costume provided with considerable wealth. She was blushing from her neck to the top of her head. Both of them kept scented linen pomanders under their noses to conceal the noxious stink rising from beneath the deck.

“You know her,” said the captain.

“I confess I do not,” said I.

“Then you know
him,
” he said, addressing the lady.

“I never saw his eyes, but I do not recognize the lower parts of his face. His chin was not cleft before.”

“Both of you conceal your feelings. I am not deceived.”

“Oh, I see,” said I. “Is this your fiancée?”

“She
was,
” said the captain, scowling. “I have brought her here to reconsider her misplaced affection for a murderous dog.”

“I do not recognize this young man,” the lady said. “Were he Whistling Jack, I should say he may be a murderous dog indeed, but not to me. He was ever so kind and well-mannered, and handed me down from the carriage most courtly. He complimented my jewels as he took them off me, and looked upon me and said I needed not such bright baubles to ravish the eye. Can you imagine! What a charming thing to say. He took the contents of the cash-box at my feet and said I must be a lovely dancer, for my foot was so well-turned. Never raised his voice, unlike some. Never made a demand, but always a request. I know a gentleman when I meet one, and Whistling Jack was the gentlest.”

“That will
do,
” said the captain, his face approaching the color of roast beef as mentioned by the judge. But the lady wasn't finished. Evidently this interview had unsealed some inner dam of emotions.

“It will
not
do, Captain. You cut a fine figure upon a horse and look very well on a lady's arm with your martial demeanor. But there's more to winning a woman's heart than that. In any case, this isn't him. Whistling Jack is as old as you, Captain. This lad is the age of my niece Fidelia—sixteen or seventeen, not a day more.”

“Enough!” he spat, and rattled his sword to emphasize the point. “This is he. I pursued him all the way across England. I know him, and I know his horse!”

“Perhaps he borrowed the horse. Think what you will. You dragged me all the way here to this dreadful place. You insisted. This interview is nothing to do with me. Unfortunately, neither is this young fellow.”

I bowed to her, grateful that one person, at least, knew me to be wrongly accused. And grateful, too, that she thought so well of Master Rattle—even at his very worst. The captain had not told me her name, probably to keep me from using it in some swooning speech to renew my grasp upon her affections, but whosoever she was, I hoped she would find a better match than Sterne.

 

Chapter 32

TIDINGS FROM AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

O
N THE
final day of my captivity, the gaoler's assistant, a Mr. Ratskalp, came down the companionway to the third deck where I lay, and addressed me thus:

“You, Whistlin' Jack! Stir thyself.”

A couple of soldiers came down after him and unlocked my leg-irons, then retreated double-time, to be sick on the top-deck from the stench below. I could not stand, so the ship's surgeon took one side of me, and Mr. Ratskalp the other, and they hoisted me up to the outside world, which I had not seen since my interview with the captain. I was blinded by the sunlight, although it was an overcast day, and the cool, fresh air set me to shivering so that my teeth rattled like dice in a cup.

“Ye've got a visitor,” said Ratskalp, drawing a dead fish out of his waistband. “Need a bathe.” He proceeded to scrape the scales from the fish with his black thumbnails, while a couple of emaciated crewmen threw buckets of river water over me, then plied my bite-pocked flesh with gray mops until there were patches of skin visible through the grime.

Then they clad me in a canvas shirt and galligaskins
*
, none too clean and large enough for three of me, but better than the rotting clothes I wore below the deck. “For good appearances,” Mr. Ratskalp explained. “Mustn't alert the public to the conditions on these 'ere barges. There mote be an outcry, and then humane prison policies follow, and me out of a job.”

With that, he bit the head off his fish and directed me to the soldiers. They lowered me into a jolly boat, and I was rowed ashore in chains.

The visit was conducted in a fortified structure, once a customshouse, with bars on the windows and a fortified wall as tall as the eaves, only a few feet from the building; so the effect was of sitting at the bottom of a stone well. I was arranged behind a timber partition with bars set into it by way of a window, and shortly thereafter, my visitor was shown to a chair on the other side of the barrier.

“Narn,” the visitor said, sitting down but getting no shorter. “Narn good came of 'ee.”