Highwayman- The Complete Campaigns

by Michael Arnold

  Lyle arched an eyebrow. “And I suppose that I am St Peter's church, yes?” he said wryly. “A monument to memories stifled and concealed.”

  Spendlove pursed his lips in an expression of innocence. “Your words, Samson. Not mine.” He winked. “But the murals here will one day bask in daylight. I pray what is buried in your soul will find its own way out.”

  “One day.”

  “And until then?”

  “I have made my bed and I shall lie in it.” Lyle opened the door. The wind threw it wide, almost wrenching off his arm to press the point. He hissed as white-hot pain lanced his left shoulder blade.

  “Samson?”

  “It is nothing,” Lyle said. “I was wounded, before Christmas. Pistol ball. It heals nicely.”

  “Jesus love you, boy,” Spendlove replied, shaking his head in astonishment.

  “Come.” Lyle staggered out into the rain-lashed open. The gloom was gathering apace. “It grows late, Master. These roads are not safe.”

  “Should I fear highwaymen?”

  Lyle grinned. “Footpads, I was going to say.” He had to shout to be heard, gripping a fistful of his hood just to keep it up. “Plenty shelter in the high hills. I would escort you back to Chalton.”

  The old man indicated a lone, open-topped carriage down on the road, its single palfrey sheltering beneath a tree. “I have my trap.”

  “And I my horse,” Lyle said. “Poor devil's tethered 'neath a tree. Charred black by lightning by now, I shouldn't wonder.”

  “Let us travel together, then,” Spendlove demurred, resigning himself to company. “There is a small gathering at the inn. Well-wishers, you understand. You remember the Red Lion?”

  Lyle laughed. “I have become an outlaw, Master Spendlove, not a half-wit.”

  A cinder path took them to a beech tree, alone on the grassy hillock, its crooked branches making defiant gestures at the darkening skies. Lyle led the way, dipping his head against the rain while the bell sang on.

  “Chalton will be busy,” Spendlove muttered at his back, rapid strides crunching in the dusk. “You'll be seen.”

  “I am seen a great deal,” Lyle said, squinting into the tangle of low boughs under which his pale horse shifted uneasily. “Context is all. If they do not expect to see a notorious highwayman, they will not see one. Besides, those who knew my face before the wars are few and far between. And I, of course, am hardly the fresh young stripling that once they knew.”

  “You have not changed as much as you might think,” Spendlove replied. “You're as cocksure as ever and that's a fact.”

  Lyle smirked into the driving rain. “I feel I have changed a great deal but perhaps I delude myself. And what of little Botolph and Amelia?”

  “They will be there,” Spendlove said, presumably meaning the alehouse in Chalton.

  “How do they do?”

  “Grown now, almost. Amelia turned eighteen, July last. A man could not wish for a better daughter, though, Jesu forgive her, in possession of a loud mouth and a hot head,” he chuckled, “not so dissimilar to your own.”

  “Her mother was the bold one, as I recall.”

  “Aye,” Spendlove agreed with an aching sigh, “bold and courageous was dear Ursula.”

  “Botolph was the younger of the two,” Lyle remembered.

  Spendlove nodded. “By three years. A gentle lad but a good one. I thank the Lord for them both daily.”

  “I can trust them?”

  “You can.”

  “Then I look forward to paying my respects.”

  They were ten yards out from the tree but Spendlove halted. “You intend to step foot in the tavern? This is folly, Samson and no mistake.”

  “If I am recognised, I will depart,” Lyle reassured him, “after a positively Shakespearean display of blackguardly roguishness, of course. One mustn't have you implicated, after all. Perhaps I shall relieve you of a groat or two and you can play the stoic victim.”

  Spendlove fiddled with his hat, worry etched on the deep fissures of his face. “It is no laughing matter, Samson and...”

  A raised palm cut him off. Movement had caught Lyle's eye. He stared through the blurring rain. His horse, Star, was there, the big stallion's grey coat a pastel smear amongst the gnarled tangle of branches but something was out of kilter. Something in the beast's movement, an odd crabbing, as though Star were shying from some danger at his flank.

  Lyle ran. The wind snatched back his hood. The rain streaked his face. He ducked under the first bough, skirted another and he was into the patch of bare earth around the beech, a clearing rendered flat and barren by the tree's canopy. Star was there, attached to the truck by his reins but he was not alone.

  “Put your sticky paws where I might see them, friend,” Lyle ordered, lifting his voice above the rush of raindrops on leaves. He came to stand some half-dozen paces from the man who had been rifling through his saddlebags.

  The man was short and wiry, clothed in rough apparel little superior than those of a beggar. His head was covered in a woollen cap, the sides unfurled to shield ears and frame a face that was pinched and rat-like. He was clearly startled but he managed to produce a short, curved knife from the snapsack slung at his shoulder. He jutted out his narrow chin and sneered. “Or what, friend?”

  Lyle thrust a hand into the folds of his cloak and pulled the pistol from his belt. “Or you shall witness my weekly shooting practise at uncomfortably close quarters.”

  The man – who, to Lyle’s reckoning, looked to have seen a handful more years than his own twenty-seven – let his mouth loll open, exposing the remains of blackened teeth and diseased gums. He spoke with a broad northern accent that was marked by a high-pitched whistle on the letter 's'. “What is that thing?”

  The thing in question was one of Lyle's most cherished possessions. Created for a wealthy Frenchman by a Rotterdam gunsmith, it had found its way to him after a brawl in a Rennes alehouse during his time in exile. Longer than a typical English flintlock, the weapon was no less wieldy, its balance and workmanship exquisite. But what made it truly special was its ability to fire two shots in quick succession. “Double barrelled pistol,” Lyle said, turning his hand a touch so that the reedy man might see it with more clarity. “Two strikers, two muzzles but the same lock, cock and flint.” He trained the gun on the man's face. “One bullet for each of your eyes.”

  The stranger edged away from the horse but did not relinquish his blade. Around the hilt, his knuckles were white where he gripped and Lyle noticed that he was missing his two middle fingers. His eyes, gleaming brown beads beneath the edge of the brown cap, flickered restlessly between Lyle's face and the twin muzzles. “You'd kill a man in a church yard?”

  “You'd rob a man in one? Besides, where better, sirrah?” Lyle jerked back his head in the general direction of St Peter's. “I believe the gravediggers are still here, as luck would have it. The ground's nice and malleable and I'd be delighted to lend them a hand.”

  The fidgety eyes narrowed a fraction, the thin upper lip curling. “Trust your powder to burn, do you?”

  Lyle shrugged. “Do you trust that it won’t?” A tightening of the northern fellow's expression spoke for his indecision and Lyle twitched the pistol. “Put the blade down, man, for Christ's sake.”

  Down it went, landing on its side in the leaf mulch. Down, too, fell its owner’s façade. “I meant no harm, sirs,” the three-fingered man blurted, his bluster leaking rapidly away while his gaze darted beyond Lyle's shoulder.

  Lyle looked round to see that Spendlove had managed to pick his way beneath the beech's knotted limbs. “A would-be thief,” he announced, throwing his gaze quickly over the horse to ensure nothing was missing. One holster was necessarily empty, its occupant currently in his grip but the butt of the second pistol, a regular flintlock, was present. Lower down, fastened in a leather loop, there glinted the fearsome war-hammer he had carried since the late rebellion, while his saddlebags did not appear to sag with tell-tale emp
tiness. He returned to his captive. “And what is the thief’s name?”

  “Thief, sir?” the man carped. “No no, not I.”

  “I suggest you return whatever trinkets you may have stolen,” Lyle went on, ignoring the mealy-mouthed protest, “and tell me what business, other than the obvious, you have hereabouts.” The villain, he decided, obviously required a timely reminder, so he moved the folds of his cloak aside to expose the hilt of his sword. “I am on familiar terms with Colonel Maddocks, if that serves to jolt your memory.”

  The words worked as surely as any dagger thrust. Foreboding etched itself into the northerner's sharp features. “The commander hereabouts?”

  “You have heard of him, then?”

  “Aye, sir. Who has not?”

  “An old acquaintance of mine,” Lyle said, which, in the most basic of terms, was true enough. It rankled to invoke the name of his nemesis and he heard Spendlove shift his feet. He turned to shoot him a wry glance. “Needs must when the devil drives, Master.”

  Spendlove held his peace. The increasingly nervous looking captive began to babble. “Jesu. I... I am sorry, sirs, forgive me. Forgive me, do. Maddocks is a terror, they say.”

  “Out with it, man,” Lyle snapped. “It is getting dark and I am growing bored. What is your name?”

  “Whistler, sir.”

  “Whistler.”

  The frightened fellow nodded rapidly. “On account of...”

  Lyle interrupted him, “I have no doubt as to the provenance of the name. What do you do with yourself, Whistler, when you are not creeping about these hills?”

  “I labour, sir.” Whistler dug one of the remaining fingers of his right hand under the edge of his hat and scratched his temple. “Have dug ditches, knapped flint and worked the salt pans down at Hayling. Anything will serve, long as it puts food in my belly.”

  “Including thievery.” Lyle looked directly at the mutilated appendage. “Not your first offence, either.”

  “Only when I have no other recourse,” Whistler opined, unable to keep his eyes from straying between Lyle's sword and firearm. “I am hungry. What is a man to do?”

  What indeed, thought Lyle, as he smothered the pang of hypocrisy that rose like damp through his bones. He told himself that his own crimes were of an altogether different substance. One of vengeance rather than simple larceny. Somehow innately more righteous. But, looking at the pathetic creature before him – drenched, hungry and frightened – he could not help but think that no man's circumstances were ever truly simple. “Where are you headed?” he asked eventually, filing the sharper edges from his tone.

  “Portsmouth,” Whistler said, exploring his armpit with his complete hand in search of an unseen louse. “There to seek work.”

  Except that possession of all five digits did not necessarily make Whistler's left hand any more useful. Lyle saw the scarring on the palm and ordered the man to hold it up. “What happened there?”

  “A burn,” Whistler mumbled, keeping the raised fist balled.

  “A brand,” Lyle replied.

  Behind him, Spendlove enquired, “As punishment? Theft again?”

  Lyle shook his head. He had caught a better glimpse before Whistler had grown wise to the scrutiny. Now, as he considered the doleful fellow without the focus upon his attempted robbery, he saw the man behind the misdeed. “That cap,” he pointed at Whistler's head, “is a Montero. An infantryman's staple. See the flaps folded down against the ears? Useful as a blazing hearth on a long winter's march. Open your hand fully, Whistler.”

  The fingers slowly peeled back, staying curved like talons. It was clear the palm could never again become entirely flat. Spendlove stepped closer. “What is that mark?”

  “Desertion,” Lyle answered grimly, for he had seen such marks before. Whistler's hand had been placed on a tray of red-hot iron that was shaped like a glove and had been branded for all the world to see. A symbol of punishment but also of ownership. The fingers were covered with small blemishes, like smallpox scars, where searing metal studs had pressed against the flesh. The palm, however, bore far more elaborate markings. “Note the letters 'C' and 'R',” Lyle said, “either side of the crown emblem?”

  Spendlove looked up at him open-mouthed. “Carolus Rex?”

  Lyle nodded. “King Charles.” He asked Whistler, “A Cavalier, then?”

  Whistler inspected his blighted palm for a second, before confirming, “Sir Allen Apsley's.”

  “Foot?”

  “Pike.”

  “What happened?”

  Whistler's bottom lip trembled in the hoary gloom. “I were a’feared.” His eyes glazed as they peered into the past. “You cannot know what it was like.”

  “I know well enough,” Lyle replied. “When did you run?”

  “After Hinton Ampner,” Whistler said, his voice a monotone, still immersed in a flood of memory.

  “Hinton Ampner?” Lyle echoed incredulously, for it was a place he knew well. A tiny hamlet on the Winchester road and seat of one Sir John Hippesley, a Roundhead during the civil wars, whose rebellion against the crown had paid dividends under the Protectorate. Only last year Lyle had visited Hippesley's grand house, there to infiltrate a masquerade in order to steal an important document. But it was not a country manor that had made Whistler abandon his post and Lyle recalled the name of the next village situated on that busy highway. “Cheriton,” he said. “There was a battle at Cheriton. Parliament took the field.”

  Spendlove nodded sagely. “I remember it well. The rebel news-sheets made much of it.”

  Lyle frowned at Whistler. “You must have been very young.”

  “Too damned young,” Whistler replied with the ghost of a shudder.

  “It is often thus.” And Lyle could not prevent his own mind tumbling back through the years to a little place in the Northamptonshire wilderness. A place called Naseby. He had been sixteen, green as cabbage and frightened as a spring leveret. The blinding smoke, the stinking sulphur, the screams of grown men, the hoof-shaken ground and the heart-stopping drums. He had held his nerve. Kept the line. Followed orders and ignored the stench of his own piss as it warmed his breeches. Naseby had been hell on Earth. How close had he come to raking spurs into his mount's flesh and bolting for the hills?

  Whistler swallowed thickly, his Adam's apple bobbing in that reedy neck. “My chin needed no blade. My voice high as a woman's. The guns. Jesu but they were loud. So loud.”

  “You retreated in good order,” Lyle said, dredging up what detail he could from the back of his mind.

  “The king's men, for certain,” Whistler's reply was rueful. “But not I. I dived right under a hawthorn hedge, curled up like a new-born pup. No one noticed me. Not even the Roundheads as they swept through. Night fell, I was alone. Freezing my stones off but breathing yet.”

  “Never to return to Sir Allen's colour.”

  “Or so I thought.” Whistler gave a wry smile. “Only to be snared like a coney outside Winchester.”

  “You were recognised?”

  Whistler nodded. “One of the prison guards claimed he knew my face. I swore blind they had the wrong fellow. How could he prove it? In the end it did not matter. The example was all.”

  “Fortunate you were not hanged.”

  “Fortunate? Maybe.”

  Lyle sighed. He felt suddenly tired. With a jerk of his chin he indicated the way down to the road. “Begone, Whistler, before I change my mind.”

  “Gone, sir?” Whistler echoed as though he were a halfwit. “Truly?” He pressed his mutilated hands together like a penitent. “By God, sir, you are the Samaritan from the Book of Luke, leapt from the very pages. Nay, sir. An angel.”

  “Begone, sirrah,” Lyle snapped, thrusting the pistol in its saddle holster, “before I deprive you of that yapping tongue too.”

  “I will.” Whistler backed off, shuffling and bowing at the same time. He stooped to snatch up a threadbare snapsack from amongst the beech’s roots. “That I will. I beg
your forgiveness again.”

  Then he was gone, leaving Lyle and Spendlove standing beside the grey stallion, the only sound the hiss of rain on the canopy. The light was failing quickly now, darkness dimming the church to little more than an outline.

  “You think me a hypocrite,” Lyle said, impulsively wishing to deflect his old master’s disapproval. “I take only from government men.”

  Spendlove shook his head. “I think you too soft, Samson.”

  Lyle gave a short grunt of laughter as he clambered into Star's saddle. “There but for the Grace of God, Master Spendlove. There but for the grace of God.”

  “It was God’s grace that made you keep a loaded pistol.”

  Lyle grinned. “It wasn’t loaded.”

  Spendlove’s little pony, slopping bravely through roads that were now mere funnels of filth, made laborious work of hauling the trap and its rider up the hill to Chalton. The thatches of the village, nestled as it was amongst thick woodland, were all but invisible in the encroaching dusk but the square tower of St Michael and All Angels, one of the hamlet's two prominent structures, climbed over the swaying branches to guide them home.

  The second noteworthy building could be heard before it was seen. The Red Lion, a tavern situated opposite the church on the far side of a triangular patch of lawn, was Chalton's beating heart. Like most of the surrounding homes it was a marriage of timber and thatch, though much larger than its neighbours, with rain-streaked windows all aglow and smoke tumbling thick from the chimneystack to mingle with the brooding sky and fragrance the air. The sounds of music and of laughter drifted down to them as they climbed, the weary traveller's siren song.

  Lyle gave Star a final, gentle word of encouragement. The stallion, forced to drop pace to keep with the much smaller pony, snorted irritably, a spray of raindrops jetting from his muzzle. Lyle laughed. He breathed deep, letting the heady odour conjure warmth in his mind though there was none in his body. Water dripped from his hood as he rode, tapping rhythmically on the leather tops of the tall riding boots. Star shivered and he reassured his old companion with a soft voice and a patted neck.