by Natasja Rose
The Highwayman’s Legacy
By
Natasja Rose
Copyright©2015 by Natasja Rose.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN: 978-0-9943889-0-2
Previously published on Readwave under the pen-name Natasja
Prologue
And still on a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon, tossed upon the cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor,
The highwayman comes riding
Riding, riding,
The Highwayman comes riding, up to the old Inn door
And over the cobbles he clatters, and clashes in the dark Innyard
And he taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred,
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there,
But Bess, the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's black-eyed daughter
Plaiting a dark red love-knot, into her long black hair
- The Highwayman, by Alfred Noyes, 1906
Chapter One
The sky was a lovely shade of blue, though the clouds looming in the west suggested that it might not stay that way for much longer, and the crisp Autumn wind plucked at their clothes and turned their cheeks pink. Hand in hand, they strolled down the cobbled path, until
Rage.
Rage and overwhelming grief,consuming him.
Grief, at the loss of half of his heart, of the pure, innocent soul that loved fiercely and was loyal to the death. Rage, against those who had sinned greater than any crime he himself had committed, rage that blocked out thought and reason and left only a thirst for revenge.
They had been so careful to keep his activities away
Three feet of razor-sharp steel pointed up at the sky, a sky as grey and cold as a world without his love, his scream of anguish a wordless vow of retribution.
He saw them ahead, and…
Tina swore loudly as she jerked and cracked her head on the raised lid of the tour bus storage trailer.
Of an entire several miles of road, around which a small town had sprung up between then and now, a violent death just had to have occurred on exactly the spot where the trailer lid had been left open under the eye of the driver, in case anyone wanted to put purchases into their suitcase. Why had she ever thought, even for a millisecond, that this Historical trip would be a good idea for a person who saw violent ghostly deaths, rather than a Terrible Life Choice, again?
A pair of gentle hands guided her back out from under the lid, brushing aside Tina's ash-blonde hair as the owner of the hands gently probed for a goose-egg. Tina swore again as they found it, and could almost hear the disapproving frown at her choice of words. She turned to glare, "That hurt!"
The brunette beside her frowned. "It isn't serious, and there's a butcher across the road. I'll see if I can't get some ice for it."
She was already walking away, automatically looking for the almost non-existent traffic between the rows of shops, before Tina could protest that she didn't want ice on her head if it had been anywhere near a dead animal, and the blonde woman sighed.
Oh, right, that was why she had agreed to the trip.
Christina Barnes was on a tour of 'Historical and Notable Places of England and Scotland' because her best friend Elizabeth Hall was a history nut and had managed to find a two-for-one deal at the travel agents that coincided with the two weeks paid leave (plus weekends, as a thanks for taking her holiday in late spring, rather than summer when everyone else was fighting for annual leave over Christmas) and Tina's current client going on a month-long holiday of their own.
Tina didn't need to be psychic to lay even odds that the two-for-one deal was something to do with the Managers of the travel company owing their son's graduation from university to five years of Tina's tutoring and Lizzy's plethora of random but relevant facts as extra credit when he ran into assignment trouble.
This was good, because being psychic had caused Tina enough problems already.
The best thing about living in Australia was that Aboriginal people merged into the Dreaming upon their death, rather than lingering as ghosts, which meant a much lower risk of randomly witnessing a centuries-old massacre, of which there had been many. (Tina had theorised that it might be the same in areas whose main religion believed in reincarnation, but had yet to test the theory) Places where convict rebellions had been defeated were easy enough to avoid, and Port Arthur was a double ‘no-go’, as far as Tina was concerned, what with both convicts and the 90’s massacre. As a rule, Tina paid very careful attention to the news whenever there was civil unrest, but overall, it was rare to come across scenes of ghostly gruesomeness.
This tour had dramatically emphasised just how rare those scenes were back home compared to the rest of the world, and just how much of a nuisance her psychic ‘gifts’ could be.
Oh, she wasn't the kind of psychic that told fortunes at fairs, or did a bit of research before holding séances for the particularly gullible, though she admired those ones for managing to keep a straight face through the whole thing. Nor was she the kind of psychic who claimed to be able to divine the location of riches by reading auras and speaking to the dead – though to be fair, those psychics could listen to the examples of centuries of charlatans and read body language in order to find riches by staging 'reality' TV shows and telling rich people or large audiences what they wanted to see and hear.
No, Tina's talent stopped at flashes of memory at places where someone had died horribly or in a particularly spectacular fashion.
Well, that was how it normally worked, at least. It seemed to be growing stronger, recently, expanding to include people who had died feeling strong emotion.
For the last few days, she had even been seeing a ghost riding ahead of the tour bus, as if leading them, which had never happened before. Maybe it was just a new development. Ghosts who had deliberately lingered, even unconsciously, could talk to her, if they wished, but those were rare, as the majority of ghosts were too obsessed with finding an end to whatever kept them bound to earth to consider that talking to some random person might offer a fresh insight, to Tina’s great relief. The last thing she needed was chatty ghosts deliberately seeking her out.
That was why the Tower of London had landed firmly on Tina's "Never Again List" after exactly five minutes, when she was forcefully reminded that a surprisingly large number of Historically Famous places are famous because of some kind of horrible tragedy, great battle or supposed haunting that took place there.
With the number of people who had been tortured, imprisoned and/or executed at the Tower of London, Tina had been lucky to go five meters without walking through a ghost, nearly all of whom were thrilled to explain their fate to someone who could actually listen. Whether the listener wanted to hear it or not.
Normally she managed to avoid this by staying near the gift shop, which most ghosts viewed with a kind of communal embarrassment-on-principle and vague annoyance at the exploitation of their history and death. Some ghosts, however, had either a total lack of shame (most notably Guy Fawkes), or enough issues to bother Tina anyway. At least they were interesting.
If she had been born only a few centuries later, Queen Anne Boleyn could have been an absolute powerhouse of a woman, and while Henry VIII's second queen said n
othing against her husband, even when he had her executed, Tina would bet that her death had less to do with suspected adultery and more to do with treason being the only way for the King to be rid of her, after breaking with Rome and creating his own Church to divorce Katherine and marry Anne in the first place, not to mention the Oath of Succession and the number of prominent people who had been executed for refusing to sign.
Charming, educated, multilingual, fascinating, and far too clever to risk her position with an affair, Tina really didn't understand why Henry would want to be rid of Anne in the first place.
Guy Fawkes had some amusingly creative insults for and about King James, a number of comments about the fellow conspirator who had been fool enough to give them away in an easily-intercepted letter that could be used as evidence, and was totally shameless about Tina's annoyed requests to leave her alone.
It was interesting that his cheeky smile was almost exactly the same as those masks, but Tina still found herself mentally cursing him to hell and back half an hour later. For a man who had lasted several days before even giving up his real name, let alone those of his fellows, Guy Fawkes was a surprising chatterbox.
A chatterbox with no shame and no concept of 'Too Much Information', at that! Tina could have cheerfully gone the rest of her life without knowing those things about Mary Queen of Scots, and it was a pity that no academic panel in the world would accept 'a ghost told me' when asking for sources for her information when she said that the bodies presumed to be the Princes in the Tower were actually the bodies of two random servants who had offended the wrong noble.
Tina had refused to risk a repeat and feigned sickness when they were scheduled to visit Newgate Prison.
Newgate was a prison where the prisoners had to rely on bribes and outside charity for food and basic amenities, and which housed mostly the lower class of prisoner, in more than one sense. Tina had no intention of trying to ignore starved prisoners (most of whom had lingered purely to make life miserable for the guards who had exploited them) shouting crude remarks as they died in riots or brawls, though she did feel a bit guilty about Lizzy's insistence on staying behind with her.
Tina had convinced two of the other tourists, a middle-aged couple who were nearly as History-obsessed as Lizzy herself, to get a historical guide book, complete with photos, as an apology for her friend. Lizzy had what Tina considered an obsessive love for history, the good, the bad, and the ugly and gruesome. That Lizzy would give up an opportunity that they probably wouldn't be able to afford again for several years and that she had been looking forward to for months, just because Tina was 'feeling off', wasn't a thing that Tina took lightly.
Sites of famous battles, especially massacres, were a whole different story. Even the more detailed war movies didn't really prepare you for what a battlefield was really like. She hadn't needed to feign sickness when they visited the site of the Battle of Stoke Field, where the forces of Lambert Simnel, pretender to the throne, had been crushed by King Henry VII.
The war-graves of Culloden, where the third Jacobite army had been crushed, was even worse, not least thanks to the thousands of yelling Scotsmen in full charge. It had taken everything Tina had not to bolt in the opposite direction, and she only succeeded because the bus was in her way.
Tina had taken one look at the first site, Stoke Field, turned green and threw up what felt like a week's worth of meals.
Severed limbs and heads, bodies with their guts spilling out from a belly-wound, or shredded by shrapnel, or flattened by a boulder… or the later confrontations, seen out of the window as the bus drove past, with soldiers scorched by backfiring muskets that they barely knew how to use, or that were improperly taken care of...
None of it was even remotely a pretty sight, and not worth the glory that the centuries-ago bards sang about.
There was the possible exception of Glengerry, at the Well of Seven Heads, whose laments for their missing bodies (wandering over the loch, crashing into each other and unable to hear their extremely frustrated heads shouting directions) were interspaced with rowdy drinking songs and the occasionally bawdy rhyme.
The only bright side that Tina could see was that it gave her an excuse to stay on the bus the next time, after convincing Lizzy that it was an overactive imagination and that she should go on and give Tina the edited version when the tour group got back.
That was one of the best things about having Lizzy for a friend. Lizzy would worry, and had an sixth sense to rival Tina's mother for when someone wasn't telling the whole truth, but if you didn't want to talk about something, she wouldn't press. With Lizzy, Tina didn't have to worry about making up excuses for why she randomly shrieked and jumped away after leaning against a tree that had been used as an impromptu gallows, and since there were a few places where the hauntings were benign or interesting, she didn't have to use the 'sick' excuse often enough for Lizzy to become concerned about chronic illness.
That didn't stop the rest of the tour group from giving her funny looks, but since Lizzy didn't look worried, most of them just assumed that it was some kind of random spasmic twitch or food allergy.
At least this time, any disorientation could be blamed on a crack to the head, rather than an awkward explanation that she had experienced a semi-vision of someone dying.
Stonehenge had had some pretty graphic fates, too, though not nearly as gruesome. In fact, some of them verged on morbidly amusing, including a hunter run afoul of a deer who didn’t want his antlers used as a shovel, and one unfortunate who had been on the wrong side of a monolith when a rope snapped.
Tina would never admit it, but her first thought had been that he looked like one of the paper dolls she played with as a child. Her second thought was to wish there was a way to turn him solid, just to see if she COULD slide him under a door.
Then, of course, there were the group of architects, in varying types of clothing spanning about a thousand years, arguing about design and placement and materials, frequently becoming angrily confused due to the fact that not all of them spoke the same language or dialect. It reminded Tina more than a little of the last strata council meeting, where Mr and Ms Downstairs-and-right were fighting with Mrs Two-up-and-across-the-common over which flowers would look nicer in the garden, and ignoring Mr Street-entrance, who suggested individual box-gardens and getting back to actual issues, while the family from Other-end-of-the-hall, whose English was sketchy at best, merely looked confused.
Possibly the strangest thing, however, was the inhabitants of the 300 or so Barrows, most of whom had died in especially violent battles, and who didn't mind walking a mile of two to meet up with the people whose ashes filled the Audrey Posts and throw a wild party.
Tina had seen tamer Metallica concerts.
Watching Lizzy's rapt expression as she listened to the guide, Tina wished that her friend could see ghosts, too. Lizzy was also very creative, and loved theories of what something with an unknown purpose was used for. Tina had seen enough via psychic sight to simply raise an eyebrow and carefully look at something else, but Lizzy's scandalised expression upon seeing what the Alter stone was CURRENTLY being used for would have been priceless!
Lizzy was currently looking ever-so-slightly amused and mostly sympathetic, as opposed to the level of concern that made Tina feel guilty for not telling her the truth. Lizzy raised an eyebrow in a silent question. Tina shrugged, conveying that yes, her head was killing her, but she would be fine. They had been friends long enough that not all communication needed to be verbal, and body language would do. Tina changed the topic, rubbing her head. "What did the driver say?"
Lizzy glanced up at the sky, where clouds had gone from just blanketing the sky to looming with intent to storm. "Well, the Gap-Year students had better show up on time for once, because the bus is only going to wait five minutes, instead of half an hour while they finish trying on 'just one more dress'. There isn't even a hostel with any vacancies at this stop or the next, so he wants to get to the final
stop of the day before the storm hits."
Five of their fellow tourists were ex-students who had just graduated High School, and were taking a year off before they went to Uni or got a job or whatever else. They also had a bad habit of being chronically late when it came to meeting points and times. Tina and Lizzy had time-keeping skills bad enough that they normally sympathized and didn't complain, but no-one wanted to get stuck out in the middle of a storm, either.
Tina shrugged. That was another thing they had missed while researching the whole vacation. "Serves us right for timing our trip at the same time as a national music festival, I guess. It shouldn't take too long to get to the next stop, though."
Why the town council hadn't considered the effect on regular tourism when planning the music festival, or why the hotels, B&Bs and hostels hadn’t informed the tour companies they did business with, was beyond Tina's understanding. The café where they had eaten lunch even had a betting pool on how many tents were expected to ruin the landscape.
Lizzy looked back up at the sky. "If the weather holds. The driver said that there's a tourist town about halfway between the stop at Shrewsbury Castle and our final rest for the night, if the storm hits before we get to the hotel."
Shrewsbury Castle was one of the less trying destinations, as the comparatively small number of ghosts were too busy arguing about who they were besieging/defending against, and indeed, which war they were fighting, to bother her.
Tina wandered around the interior of the castle, took a few pictures and looked at some exhibits, because Lizzy was still throwing covertly-worried looks in her direction, before settling in at her usual location of browsing the gift shop and deciding to waste a few pounds on some tacky gift that Lizzy or a random family member would absolutely hate but have to pretend to enjoy.
