The Highwayman's Curse (2 page)

S
eeing my surprise, Bess continued. “We cannot return him to his home.” She placed her hat over her man's pigtail. “It is too dangerous by far. What if his family choose not to believe our story? There is a murdered man down there. The boy acts as though he thinks we are the murderers and—”

“The boy is merely terrified. He must understand we were not to blame.”

“We know nothing of these parts. We know not whom to fear, who would be our friend. He will hinder us. What if we are pursued? How will we flee? How fight?” She placed her pistols in the belt of her breeches.

“He is a child. How can you consider leaving him to die? And die he surely will.”

“This is foolish! Why should we risk our lives for a child who is nothing to us? If the men who slit the old man's throat pursue us, then we will all die. If we leave the boy here, he may be found by those who love him. And we'll be far away.”

“Where is your heart?” I retorted, angry now. How could she be so cold? This was not the Bess I knew. She who had been cared for by a woman who had no need to do so, who owed her nothing, when her father and mother died at the hands of the cruel redcoats, and Bess only seven years old? I knew Bess had a hard place in her heart, a steely determination, but I had not thought her cruel.

“My head rules my heart,” she answered, calmly, though I saw something like anger flash across her dark eyes. “It's too dangerous to take him with us. It's for the best, whatever your heart tells you.”

“He's ill, Bess! Did I leave you when I found you injured, even though you had threatened to kill me? I knew nothing about you, and staying with you carried risks. If I had left you then, you would have died for certain. And when you killed the redcoat – I could have run away then and saved myself. But I stayed and helped you. Should I perhaps have listened to what my head told me then?”

A sneer crossed her face now, though it was fused with anger. “And where would you be if you had gone away on your own? A rich boy far from home, on the run from soldiers? Would you have your own horse now? Would you have your freedom? Or would you have returned to your father? Your father, the man of justice.” That last was too close to truth, too raw with pain. But I liked not the bitter quality to her voice. Were we not friends?

She was right, I knew, but I too was right. We had need of each other. We had been thrown together by chance. If only Bess would be easier, softer … but then, if she had been softer, she would not have been leading the adventurous life of a highway robber. And I would not have met her, strange though that encounter had been. I would be on my own, wandering, or imprisoned, or hanging at the end of a noose for thievery. She was right: I needed her.

I wished, though, that she did not recall to me my father. Sir Charles de Lacey, High Sheriff of Hexham, corrupt Member for Parliament. The man who was already hated throughout the north of England for his callous hanging of an innocent old man only a few weeks earlier and for ordering the deaths of angry rioters. Was he any better than the men who had cut the throat of that shepherd?

I regretted nothing of what we had done at that time. I did not regret fighting, and defeating, my hated brother, and showing my despised father that I was no longer his son. That I would make my own way and find my own life.

But, for now, we had to decide what to do with the injured boy. And I knew that on this matter I was right.

“He will be of use to us,” I argued. “His people will thank us for bringing him back safely. We have need of friends in this place.” I still felt anger at Bess's words, but I would keep my feelings inside. We were tired, too tired, and we had been through much together. It would not do to quarrel now. “We cannot leave him, Bess. I will not stand for that. It's not right. My heart says so and what are we if we have no heart?”

She shook her head but answered thus, “Then on your head be the consequences!” And she shrugged, but I understood that she would do as we agreed. Her anger had been quick to start, but its strength had burnt out as fast. Her face once more looked tired, drained of vigour and expression.

I had thought to place the boy on my horse but Bess stopped me. “Merlin is calmer, less inclined to shy. The boy should go with me.” She was right and so I agreed. Together we gently lifted the child onto Merlin and she climbed up behind him into the ample saddle. When she was ready and the boy was as secure as we could make him, I mounted Blackfoot, and we made our way slowly down the path towards the road.

There was a silence between us and then Bess spoke. Her voice was somewhat strained. “I am sorry. I regret my words. I'm glad you stayed with me and I'm sorry I did not thank you properly.”

Hiding my surprise, I smiled at her, then turned away and smiled to myself.

She had not finished voicing the thoughts in her head. “But I still believe you to be wrong. That it is foolish to take the boy. I warrant you I'm right.”

I ignored her words. I preferred to remember her apology.

A soft and watery sun warmed our faces as we rode down the slope, and my spirits lifted. Here in Scotland, the land of Bess's ancestors, the country of her beloved father, the notorious highwayman, we might find a home and, perchance, a peaceful way to live.

I would put behind me the terrors of the last few weeks and the cruel deaths we had witnessed. We would forget our pain – the shame that I had felt when I had discovered my father's corruption, and Bess's despair and anger when the redcoats burnt down the cottage where she held the memories of her murdered father.

And as for the ringing words of the curse that had been hurled at me as punishment for my father's crimes, they were mere words. “The devil take the sheriff's son!” Who was any man to say so? What strength did the devil's words have when God was on my side?

No power at all. If we always acted with justice and right on our side, nothing could hurt us. Nothing at all.

W
e were on the same path as we had ridden the day before, making our way back to the road which went from east to west. From the morning sun to our left, we were travelling almost due south. The sea glinted ahead of us.

How full of colour everything seemed, how rich and wet and fertile, compared with the stone-strewn moors around Carlisle, where we had escaped the redcoats, and the wild and windy land near Hexham where I had lived with my parents. The blue-grey of a pine forest in the distance, the bright yellows of young gorse bushes, splashes of sunlight on brown grasses, pinks and brightest greens all daubed the rolling layers of hills. Rivers and streams wrinkled the slopes, and sometimes they trickled across our path. The ground was often clogged with marsh grasses, and water birds flew up as we passed. Everywhere was the smell of wetness.

Hunger grumbled in my stomach and I thought of the few provisions we had remaining – we would need to find food before long.

Not a sound did I hear the boy make. Once I looked at his face. His head lolled weakly and his skin looked grey as hogs' lard.

I remained alert for anything to fear.

As we came near the good road – newly laid by King George's men, we had been told by a garrulous old woman from whom we had bought hot pies in a village the previous day – we would need to know which way to go. As if reading my thoughts, Bess spoke to the boy now. “We will take you home, but you must tell us which way.”

The boy seemed not to hear her. His eyes were closed. My heart lurched. I had had a tutor once who had died as silently as this, lolling in front of me as I dully recited some lines of Shakespeare and wished I could be somewhere else. Was this boy dying now? He must not! We needed him alive. If he died, what would we do with him? How would people not think we had caused him harm? And the old shepherd, too, when they found him.

“Bess! Waken him! He mustn't sleep!”

Bess pushed the boy's shoulder. And again. He stirred, opening his eyes. The fear in his face was pitiful and I turned away.

“Which way is your home?” she asked. By now we had come to the crossroad, where our path met the new road. One way went south-west before veering quickly to the west, the other east.

In a valley to the north-west, some distance away, I saw a tall tower, square, with parapets, and slits for windows. Perhaps you would call it a castle, though it consisted of nothing more than that tower and a low wall surrounding some small, separate buildings to one side. The tower itself stretched towards the sky. Near by was grazing pasture, enclosed by stone walls which I think were newly built from the look of them. Many sheep, their winter coats long and straggly, grazed there.

And that was when I was struck by a thought which I should have had as soon as we found the shepherd's body. If he had been a shepherd, where were his sheep?

I noticed the boy looking towards the tower, alert now, his eyes like metal, a crease on his forehead. He shrank towards Bess. What was in his mind?

“Which way must we go?” repeated Bess, with annoyance in her voice. And perhaps fear. I cannot speak for her but I know that I did not find it easy to put from my mind the memory of that old man's throat ripped open by a murderer's knife.

The boy, after some hesitation, pointed. Southwest. In that direction we set off, knowing not what we should meet. Or whom.

“On your head be the consequences,” Bess had said. I could not forget that.

And so it was that a rush of fear went through my body as I saw them first. Riders, five of them, approaching us fast.

B
ess and I pulled our horses to a standstill and they stood, tossing their heads and breathing hard. We glanced at each other. I pointed to my hat and she pulled hers down a little so that the corner covered her face the better.

We each kept a hand resting near a pistol. We would not draw our swords now – but would do so if it became necessary. Bess, I knew, would use the boy to her advantage – she would drop him or use him as a shield. As would I have done. Our loyalty to each other was greater by far than any care for the child. Though we may have disagreed on some things, we would act as one on this.

We must do what had to be done, and think afterwards. This was something I had learned by now.

Kicking our horses to a trot, we moved towards the riders. My heart beat faster. But I have known worse fear, much worse.

They were a ragged group. The leader rode a sturdy chestnut pony, bred for the terrain, thick-coated and shaggy-maned. The man wore loose trousers and a mud-brown jacket, a black scarf tied round his tree-trunk neck, a soft brown hat on his head, with thin dark hair hanging below it, and a beard flecked already with silver. He was perhaps thirty, or less, and I did not like his eyes: deep slits beneath hooded eyebrows. But then I did not much like the look of any of them. With mostly unshaven faces, hair loose about their shoulders, they looked as though they neither knew nor wished for soft comfort. One of them was much younger, of my age perhaps, his face smooth, though he looked as fierce and angry as the others.

Another man I noticed. Red-haired and wild-eyed he was, his beard licking his face like flames.

The hands on the reins were thick and gnarled and their horses were bedecked with weaponry: nasty-looking clubs and two long guns were visible. They rode well, one-handed, with long stirrups and longer reins, wheeling their ponies around roughly.

If they decided that they did not like us, we would stand not a chance.

We could rely only on the fact that we had a sick boy with us. Though, indeed, they might care nothing for such delicacies.

From their faces, and the way they pointed at the boy, they cared very much. And it was clear the boy knew them. He began to whimper, struggling against Bess's left arm which remained tight across his chest. One man said something but I could not tell what his words were. His accent was strange to me. Two men levelled their guns at us.

Bess put her hand on her pistol. “No, Bess!” I warned. No good could come of such an action, not with their numbers. I was glad above all that these were not redcoats – I could not have answered for Bess's behaviour towards them if they had been. Her hatred of the King's army had no limits.

“English?” asked the leader. The idea did not seem to please him over much. Nor did it please the others.

“Do you know this boy?” I asked, ignoring the question.

“Give him here!” snarled the flame-haired man. He was built like a boulder, his huge arms bulging under his rolled-up shirtsleeves, his waistcoat barely containing his muscled frame. In his mouth, I saw a hole where some teeth should be.

“What have ye done wi' him?” demanded the one with the dark beard, who seemed to be the leader, though I could not be sure – the red-haired man too had the demeanour of a leader. “We heard tell o' trouble and we have broken the Sabbath to come looking…”

“We found him injured. We rescued him.”

But the boy did not aid our situation. He gibbered and held out his one good arm towards the men and anyone would have thought that he was terrified of us.

“He has a broken arm – we tried to help him,” Bess insisted.

“Aye, and where's my grandfather? What have ye done wi' him?” demanded the red-haired man, his accent thick but his meaning clear enough.

Bess and I glanced at each other. The man with the dark beard snapped at us. “Tell us! Is he dead?”

I nodded. His face twisted and there was a groan from one of the men.

“We found his body…” I tried to explain, but the boy wailed and pointed at me and a muttering rose among the men, gruff words growled, so that I caught no more than part meanings here and there.

Bess and I moved our horses closer to each other.

One part I understood, some words spoken firmly by a pale-eyed fleshy man with no full beard, only a few curly whiskers protruding from his hat. “No' on the Sabbath.” And though I did not like his soft, round face, with its nasty thick lips and smooth skin, I gave silent thanks to God that it was indeed His day and that we might be safe from whatever these men planned for us.

Very soon we were surrounded, the men moving closer until we could smell them, see their angry eyes. Still we did not touch our weapons. The two guns were pointed towards us, and I know another man was behind us. Two men leapt to the ground. They lifted the boy from Bess's saddle and he cried out.

Within moments Bess and I had been relieved of our weapons. I would like to say we put up a fight but we did not. In previous circumstances, we have fought for our lives but this was not such an occasion. We were outnumbered and we both knew that our only hope lay in doing merely what we were told.

Two men kicked their ponies to a gallop and rode in the direction from which we had come. They went, I supposed, to find the old man's body.

Meanwhile, we were taken along the road, powerless, with two men riding behind us and one in front. Few words were spoken, and those that were had the thick accent of the area.

The strange ways of fate had brought us here, to a place far from what we knew. Fate, or the consequences of our own act of revenge. For we had indeed been taking revenge, settling a score, when we came near Carlisle. But settling that score had taken all our money and so we must, of course, turn to the only means of survival we knew – highway robbery. Then we had been careless – or too desperate – and the redcoats had pursued us. In a masterly act of deception of which I was proud, we had made them believe we were going south again to Carlisle and meanwhile we went where they would least expect us to – north, across the border into Scotland.

Would we live to regret this? We were strangers to these people. Were we also enemies? From the way the man had spat the word “English?” I think perhaps they had no liking for us. I did not know of such things. Would it help us at all that Bess's father had been Scottish? He had been dead for seven years or so, and had left Scotland some years before that. And we knew nothing about his family – for had he not disowned them, leaving them at a young age, preferring the life of a highwayman over his destiny as a churchman? I think it would not have helped to tell the men this – Bess's father, like mine, was high-born, and something in the roughness of these men told me that they would feel no warmth towards such as us.

The sun rose higher, and the air hummed with new life. The beauty of the day, the salty freshness of the sea, the mossy grass and heather pillowing the rolling slopes, all this formed a strange backdrop to my fears. It was as though the earth was melting into spring, leaving me behind in a dark, cold winter.

We rode for some time, which I guessed to be less than an hour. We made slow progress, for trotting caused too much pain for the child. No one spoke. Only the boy, riding with the man in front of us, occasionally made some noise, but never a word, merely a groan or a cry at some sudden movement. We passed no one. Since it was the Sabbath, I suppose everyone was at church or indoors at some honest pursuit.

Now we turned off the road, taking a track across some flat ground, with marsh grasses on one side and grazing land on the other. In front of us, the sea shimmered like freshly caught herring, the sunlight catching the flickering water.

A pair of curlews flew noisily into the air from their nest in some reeds a distance away and one of the ponies behind us was startled. An angry curse came from the rider and I turned to see one of the men pull a gun to his shoulder and fire into the air. The curlew fell to the ground, dead, and the men's cheering had a strange intensity to it, which I did not at that time understand.

Before us lay a small farm, a few low buildings sprawling, and as we came into the yard the smell of livestock was sharp and eye-watering. Two dogs – thin lurchers, scraggy and long-legged – came from behind one of the dwellings and began to run from one pony to another in agitation.

A girl of around my age, or a little younger, came from a byre, wiping her hands on her apron, turning to chase a cat from the doorway. Thick red hair fell from the twisted cloth that tried to hold it back and it cascaded around her shoulders. I glimpsed a cow within the byre, a milking stool beneath it, and a bucket to one side.

A woman ran from the largest building, a long, low cottage, calling something to the men. Her bare arms were red and strong, her face weathered, her waist thickened. A man walked towards us, quite slowly, a man of about fifty or more, muscular, though dragging one leg slightly. His beard was trim, and grey, and he had an air of dignity. The girl went to him, standing a little behind him. The woman ran straight to where the injured boy sat limply on a pony, supported by the rider.

With a cry she held out her arms. “My Tam!” The boy was passed down to her and she gathered him up in her strong arms, lowering herself onto her knees and murmuring into his ear. He seemed now quiet, too quiet. A dog began to lick the child's face and she did not stop it.

She glared up at us over the boy's sweat-flattened hair. Seeing us as prisoners, guns pointing towards us, she guessed we had had some hand in the child's injury.

“We found—” I tried to speak, to reassure her, to assert myself.

“Hold your tongue!” shouted one of the men.

“Thomas?” said the older man, simply. The man with the black beard began to answer, pointing to us.

“'Tis bad news, father. The worst. Old John – he is killed. Mouldy and Hamish have gone to find his body. These two…” But before he could say more, there was distant shouting from behind us and everyone turned as one towards the track along which we had come. Two riders, we saw.

I caught Bess's eye – I believe she was thinking the same as I: was this our opportunity to escape? But no – we both knew that we would stand no chance. We could do nothing more than hope and pray that we could persuade these people of our innocence.

Had Bess been right? Should we have ridden away and left the boy?

Two men kept their guns pointed towards us. The man with red hair – redder by far than my hated brother's weak orange hair – had removed his hat and now I saw a thin scar down one side of his face, from his forehead to the cheek, skirting his eyelid. He held his gun absolutely steady, his large finger wrapped round the trigger.

The other man, a round-shouldered giant of a creature, had a worried look, his eyes strangely gentle-seeming, very close together and shaped like thin almonds. Soft and sparse was the pale hair on his face, as though he had not begun to shave, though I thought him around thirty years old. His gun was not steady in his hands.

“Off!” shouted the red-haired one. Obediently, having no choice, we slid from our saddles. Standing there, with the horses towering over us, we were more powerless than ever.

With every effort to appear unconcerned, I watched the approaching riders. It was the two men who had left us at the beginning of our ride. They galloped towards us and very soon I could see that one had a burden slung over his saddle – the body of the old man, hanging limply, bent double over the horse's withers.

The legs hung at an angle only a corpse could achieve. A roar came from the man with the black beard – Thomas, the older man had called him – and he kicked his pony to a fast trot. The riders met him not far from the place where we all stood.

Wheeling round, he came with them into the yard, his feelings etched deep into his face. He leapt off his pony and rushed to the dead man. He grasped the body under its arms and hefted it onto the ground, lying it on its back. Kneeling beside the old man, he wept, brushing wisps of hair from the grim face.

Dead blood matted the old man's hair. The hands were white, though speckled with the brown spots of age, the skin too loose, the nails yellowed. One of the dogs cowered, whimpering, beside the body.

The young girl, too, had rushed to his side. She took the dead man's hands and rubbed them together. If she wanted to bring some life to him, this was a vain action, and she must have known it. The older woman, cradling the child, still knelt on the ground. The older man, standing near her, had not approached the body.

And now it was his expression that caught my eye. Nothing moved on that face – his jaw, his mouth, the flesh beneath his eyes, none of it moved. Not a word, a sound, was uttered. And yet in his eyes was a sadness deeper than words. The open grief of Thomas, the desperate actions of the woman, the tears I now saw on the reddening face of the girl, these were nothing compared with the sorrow of this one man.

And at that moment I knew – the dead man was this man's father. And seeing his silent grief, I was truly sorry about the old man's death.

But how could we persuade them that we had not been responsible? And if we could not…?