by Jan Needle
Behind them in the trees, Wrathall watched as Stavely and Matthew moved slowly off up the road. Then he hurried back to the farmhouse and posted his sentries in case the Milburns tried a night sally to oust the intruders, and saddled up a horse. Within the hour he was standing in the library of Sharpe Hall, making his report to his employers.
"He's taken it so far," he admitted to the unnerving stare of Lady Sarah, running the brim of his hat between his fingers and wishing he felt he cut a better figure. That was the effect that Sarah Sharpe had on people.
"Tomorrow he's to ride to Kendal to see the justices. He'll probably have the deeds with him. At any rate, we couldn't find them."
Sarah Sharpe put down the delicately cut wine-glass she had been holding and dabbed at her lips with a lace handkerchief. She was not pleased and, when Lady Sarah was displeased, it was time someone was hurt.
"Take two men," she said in a fluting voice, "and make sure Milburn never gets to Kendal. If he has the deeds on him I want them. If not, find out where they are and go and get them. Now, get out."
Wrathall was sweating badly. Throwing a dispossessed family out of its home at his mistress's orders was one thing. Taking to the high pad and with armed accomplices was quite another. They had hangings in chains for that kind of thing - and the process of extracting confessions beforehand was something he would rather not think about, much less face.
"How... how far does your ladyship want me to go in this matter?" he asked hoarsely.
His employer stood up slowly. Grasped in her delicate fingers was the same riding-crop with the loaded pommel she had been using that day.
"How far?" Her lip curled with such blatant contempt that Wrathall's very soul shrivelled within him. "I wish you to go as far as is necessary to bring me those deeds tomorrow. Just that far and no further. Do I make myself clear?"
Wrathall wanted no more than to get out of the room, now. He nodded dumbly. But it was not enough. "Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes, milady."
"Louder?" She was standing in front of him now, looking up into his beefy face with a kind of hardened eagerness which he did not fully understand.
"Yes, milady."
"Yes, what?"
"Yes, milady." What on earth did the woman want him to say?
"Yes, milady, what?"
"Yes, milady, I understand..." frantic now to find the form of words she wanted.
"Yes, milady, you understand what, oaf?"
"I understand what you want me to do."
"And that is... ?"
"To stop Matthew Milburn and get the deeds, whether he has them on is person or not."
The loaded end of the quirt smashed into his crutch with such force that for a long, agonised moment he felt nothing at all of the pain. Then it hit him so hard that he simply dropped to the floor, hands buried between his thighs, as incapable of speech as though he had been gagged.
Tears spurted out of his tight-closed eyes. His kidneys felt as though they had been ruptured. His breath rattled feebly in the back of his throat. With a sick conviction, he knew that he would not be able to walk or pleasure his wife for a week.
Faintly through the mist of pain he heard that tinkling bell-like voice still talking above his head.
"What I wish you to do, Wrathall, is to kill him. After you have found the deeds, you are to kill him. Do you understand?"
Somehow, through the sickness of his pain, he found the sense to squeeze out a "yes, milady."
"Torture him to find out where the deeds are. Then kill him."
"Yes, milady," wrenched again from his grinding teeth. "Good. Now get up and get out. "
Forcing himself to his feet, even doubled up, was one of the bravest feats he had ever accomplished. But staying there in that room with that ephemerally beautiful woman was unthinkable.
Lady Sarah watched the hunched figure staggering from the room, every step a visible torture, and hissed exasperatedly between her teeth.
From the back of the room, where the light from the lamps did not reach, there was a rustle of movement, and Jonathan Bright's voice whispered across the fireplace.
"Deuced hard on the oaf, weren't you, Sarah?"
She swung on him. "Without those deeds, our plans are nothing, Jonathan. Without them, the Milburns can claim possession when they like. I was so certain that Wrathall would find them in the house - these old hill farmers trust to nothing but their own strongboxes.
"Yet he missed them somehow. Young Milburn will have em. And once he gets to the justices in Kendal with the deeds in his hand they'll know there was no mortgage. And without mortgage we have no right to the farm."
Jonathan Bright poured himself a glass from the decanter and admired its colour against the lamp.
"You keep a good cellar, Sarah, demme if you don't," he said musingly. "Did it occur to you to ask the old man when he was arrested where he kept the deeds?"
Lady Sarah made an impatient gesture. "There were too many people there. How could I mention deeds I was supposed already to have myself?"
Bright shrugged his shoulder. "Then we must wait and hope that your dog, Wrathall, can make young Milburn talk. Somehow, I have doubts on that score."
"Then go yourself and make sure."
Bright looked at her with bottomless eyes. "That's what I intend, my lovely. That is precisely what I intend. It was entertaining to watch you rearranging the feller's unmentionables. But it will hardly make him more patient with young Milburn, and I fear patience is going to be necessary with that one."
She pulled her skirts about her and sat down. Even in the soft light from the oil-lamps he could see that she was restless. For the millionth time he wondered that a woman so breathcatchingly lovely could also be the most ruthless and determined creature he had ever encountered.
For months he had laid siege to her, sending her flowers and notes, before she would even meet him. She was rumoured in polite society to have been the Prince Regent's mistress -though he knew, now, that at least was a lie.
Sarah Sharpe was no man's mistress, nor ever would be. She took her pleasure in a very different way. If she had a lover, it was her whip. Oh, she might grant her favours to one man or another, but Jonathan Bright would never be one of them.
"Necrophilia has never been among me pleasures, and I see no reason to change me tastes simply because the cadaver's got silver hair," he had remarked in White's once. The remark had been reported to Sarah by a delighted admirer and she had laughed loud and long over it. But she had made him pay for it later, in many little ways.
There were few people and fewer threats that frightened Jonathan Bright. But the wrath of Lady Sarah Sharpe was one of them.
He poured her another glass of wine and stood it on the small table by her elbow. Absentmindedly she picked it up and sipped at it. After each sip she dabbed her lips with a scrap of lace-edged muslin. Three men had died smuggling that lace across the English Channel and the fact made it her favourite decoration. It added, she remarked, an extra piquancy to the thought that it now edged her handkerchiefs.
"It's no good, Jonathan," she said, suddenly. "Wrathall will make a mess of it. He's bound to."
Bright abandoned his musing. There was decision in Sarah's voice and he had a nasty feeling he knew what that decision was.
"We'll have to go ourselves," she said. "Otherwise we are liable to finish this business with a corpse on our hands and no deeds."
Jonathan Bright leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece and fluffed out a ruffled shirt-cuff. From the moment the word torture had been mentioned he had been expecting this decision. Whether or not Wrathall could be trusted to administer the right amount of torture to secure the deeds without killing the owner in the process was questionable. Personally, Bright suspected not.
But that was why he had volunteered to head the enterprise himself. Experience had taught that strong men were vulnerable to particular kinds of torture, and he was skilled at most.
Lady Sarah, o
n the other hand, tended to lose control of herself when in the process of inflicting pain and might easily make as bad a job as the wretched Wrathall.
Nevertheless, he sipped his wine and gazed into the fire.
"Very well, my dear," he told her. "Let it be so."
Matthew Milburn watched the little party of horsemen coming towards him along the road without very much surprise. Stavely had explained to him that without the deeds Lady Sarah's claim on his father's property would be highly unlikely to succeed. So he had expected them to make some effort to recover the documents.
Wrathall and the bully-boys he had expected to see and he eased back on the hammer on his Manton doublebarrelled flint-lock and blessed his foresight in bringing both. He was going to need four barrels before this was over.
But he had hardly expected Sir Jonathan and Lady Sarah to be witnesses to highway robbery. It was a hanging matter and few men ever took up the high pad in the Kendal district with any success. The countryside was too wellknown and the inhabitants too familiar with it and one another to allow concealment for very long.
So Matthew drew up his horse and cocked his pistols while his persecutors rode hell-bent towards him. For a moment he considered flight. But they had chosen their spot well. The dark woods stretched away to either side of the road in this little valley, though the rest of the road climbed across the high fells before dropping towards Kendal.
In this valley he could only retreat along the road. That was to invite musket-balls in the back. If he had to receive shot, he would rather it were from the front.
"Stay where you are!" roared Wrathall, as they clattered towards him. Matthew grinned to himself. Trust Wrathall to waste his breath. Matthew had made no move to do anything but stay where he was.
As they came into range, he raised his right pistol and fired a shot into the air. The approaching horses clattered uncertainly to a standstill. Wrathall and his men, whose faces he could see quite clearly now, looked disconcerted.
"What's the matter, Boss?"
Wrathall looked as though he needed time to think. He was plainly taken aback by Matthew's prompt production of firearms. Perhaps, thought Matthew, he expected other people to be as stupid as he.
"She encouraged you to be a thief, then she wanted you to be a horse-thief. Now she's turning you into a highwayman, is that the way of it, Boss?"
Wrathall looked trapped. Lady Sarah gave a hiss of exasperation and spurred her horse forward. Matthew kept his pistol pointed at her and watched her warily.
"You have some documents relating to property which belong to me," she said. "Hand them over, and I will put in a good word for you with the Kendal justices. Otherwise I shall hunt you down with the full severity of the law."
Matthew felt his breath taken away. How very neatly she had turned the tables! With his accusations of highway robbery he was pretty certain he could at least make Boss Wrathall have second thoughts. But if the boot was on the other foot, and she was accusing him of thievery, he could be in bad trouble.
"Come now, Lady Sarah," he said calmly. Inside he felt only a frustrated fury, but something told him rantings and raving was not going to solve this predicament.
"Come now, Lady Sarah, how can I have stolen the deeds to my own farm and land?"
Immediately he knew he had made a mistake. Her face was suffused with a look of triumph.
"So you have got them!" she crowed, and cannoned her horse, which had been edging stealthily forward, into Lucifer.
The Manton, which had been knocked skyward, went off harmlessly. As he fumbled for the second pistol, they were on him. Wrathall swept him from the saddle and he hit the road with a crash which knocked the breath from his body. The two men leapt from their saddles to fall on him - heavily.
Above the melee, he could see the fathomless eyes of Jonathan Bright staring down from his perch atop a fine grey. Over it all there was the silvery, tinkling laughter of Sarah Sharpe.
A boot crashed into his face, flattening his nose. Another rattled a tattoo along his ribs and he felt at least one splinter. Above the fight he could see Boss Wrathall's cudgel rise and begin its downwards course. He never saw it land.
Bright looked disbelievingly at Wrathall's frightened face when he made his report.
"Not there?" he said incredulously. "What do you mean, not there?"
Wrathall spread his hands apologetically. "I've searched all through his clothes, sir. There's not a piece of paper on him, saving this 'un."
He passed over a fold of crisp parchment, bearing a number written in black ink. It looked new.
Bright sat and stared at the number for a long moment and the lines which had shown momentarily on his forehead slowly flattened themselves out and vanished, leaving his face unmarked as a new snowbank.
Sarah Sharpe reined her horse over next to his and looked curiously at the paper. "What is it?"
He shrugged and put it away in one of the pockets of his striped silk waistcoat, behind the fob.
"Demmed if I can make it out, my dear. However, it's something we can ponder at our leisure, once the oafs laid to his rest!"
He spurred forward and leaned down to where Wrathall's men were quarrelling over the division of Matthew's coat and breeches.
"Bring him round," he said. "I want to ask him a few questions."
The men looked up, startled.
"Questions, sir?" said one he knew as Barney. "You'll get no answers out of 'im. 'E's done for, is that one!"
For a moment Jonathan Bright's head seemed about to explode with the frustrated range whirling about within it.
"Done for? What can you mean?" he roared.
"'E's gone! Cashed! Snuffed it," repeated Barney, enjoyably. "When Boss rattled 'is thinker with yon bringme-down, he saw to the poor chap. 'E's dead!" He grinned affably up at Bright as though the matter had never been in Issue.
Bright swung from his horse and bent over the half-naked body on the grass by the side of the road. Sure enough, the pallor and the motionless chest told their own story. Blood flowed thickly and slow from the nose and the red marks along the ribs and face stood out like targets.
Bright turned back to Barney like a man in a dream, and as in a dream saw the affably stupid face turn white and terrified before his rage.
"Bring Wrathall... bring him here!" he hissed between stiff lips. In his head his own blood roared and pounded like a sea whipped by a gale.
His voice sounded high-pitched and squeaky in his own ears, and his limbs obeyed him only stiffly and unnaturally. At that moment Jonathan Bright was close to having his first stroke, though a merciful God never betrayed the fact to him. His medical knowledge was inadequate to warn him, and there was no-one else there to see.
Sarah Sharpe sat her gelding a few yards away and watched him curiously. She had never seen Bright betray his feelings like this before and she had a feeling something was about to happen which might be both entertaining and possibly later lucrative to her. Combining pleasure with profit - and preferably with pain - was Sarah Sharpe's devotion in life.
Bright became aware that Wrathall was standing before him and that the man was terrified.
"You killed him!" said Bright, flatly. A tiny whimper escaped Wrathall's lips.
"You killed him!" Bright repeated in the same flat voice and Wrathall screwed up enough courage at least to nod his head.
Bright raised his boot and kicked Wrathall with all his force, full on the right kneecap. Wrathall gave a thin scream and pitched over sideways, grabbing at his leg. Bright stood over him and began kicking.
It was several minutes before Wrathall, who was a strong man, stopped screaming and minutes after that before Bright stopped kicking and staggered to the side of the path to sit down. Lady Sarah reined her horse over to look directly down on the battered mass that had been her bailiff. She looked long and close and a tiny pink tongue flickered out between her shell-pink lips to flick away the tiniest, pearly drops of perspiration among the down o
n her upper lip. Lady Sarah had just been through an extremely emotional experience and the height of emotion it had raised in her had almost made her faint.
'Is... is he dead?" she asked in a husky voice totally unlike her normal belling tones.
"I dunno, my lady," rumbled Barney. But he leaned forward and examined Wrathall carefully. Then he shook his head.
"Not dead, but I'm not sure whether he's going to be grateful for the fact when he wakes up, my lady. He's sore hurt."
"Good!" She ignored the man's surprised look. "Throw him over his horse and take him home. His wife can clean him up if she feels like it." She began to turn her horse away, then was struck with a sudden thought.
"And when he wakes up tell him he's discharged and he's to be out of his cottage by the end of the week."
She joined Bright, whose surge of fury seemed to have passed, leaving him drained, as he climbed on his horse.
"What now?" she asked. Bright looked at her out of empty eyes.
"If we don't have the deeds, at least neither does he," he said. "And if anybody else shows up with them we'll simply deny they are the real ones. At that time, we can prepare a false set anyway."
"Will it work?"
"It will have to work," he said abruptly, swinging his horse away from her. "There's nothing else to be done." He clapped heels to his horse and rode away across the fells.
Thoughtfully and more gently, she followed him.
Behind her the would-be highwaymen loaded Boss Wrathall onto his horse in an embarrassed silence.
The mistake which had led to Boss receiving his kicking had, they maintained, been none of their doing. They had performed their work well. But they had still not been paid and, if Boss Wrathall was out of favour, who was going to pay them?
Barney put their misgivings into words.
"There's a stiff by the road and another that's damn' near a stiff going home with us," he said thoughtfully. "An' we all seen who done this one, didn't we, lads?"
His mates nodded assent. They looked puzzled.
"So what's to stop us swearing we seen the same feller do for both on em, eh?" Barney was well into his stride, now.
