Fled Page 2

  ‘Try not to let anyone see you,’ her mother would say. A girl with a reputation for doing men’s work might have difficulty finding a husband, particularly when that girl was already known as something of an odd one.

  Jenny took her time, telling herself and her mother it was because she wanted to do the job right, get as good a price as possible. But she knew, as did her mother, that she was using the time to say goodbye.

  Then the boat was fixed. Then the boat was sold. It brought in enough money to push away immediate penury, and Dolly took a position as a cook in one of the grand houses of a family who made gold from tin. But even with the wages she sent home, they would soon be in trouble again.

  There was no work to be had, at least not in Penmor. Jenny was known everywhere as an unpredictable girl with an unladylike mouth.

  Her mother didn’t scold her for being such an unsuitable prospect. A dressing down would have required an interest in the outcome, and Constance seemed to believe that she no longer had a stake in anything, including her own survival. She continued taking in laundry but didn’t give it the care she once had, so it was often returned late and in a poor state. Before long, she had only her own washing and a few items brought in by customers who wanted to show support, who believed her malaise was temporary.

  Jenny had no such belief. Not on the days when she went out to pry limpets from the rocks and returned to find the fire unfed and her mother sitting, shivering and immobile, in the fading light.

  ‘I’ll go into Plymouth, shall I?’ Jenny said to her one night, mainly to throw a stone in the silent pool between them. ‘Might have better luck there, when it comes to work.’

  ‘No one will know you there,’ said Constance, keeping her eyes on the section of floor where Will had briefly lain on his journey from the ocean to the cemetery.

  ‘That is probably all to the good, Ma.’

  By lunchtime the next day, Jenny was further from Penmor than she’d ever been on land, although not nearly as far as her father had sometimes taken her out on the boat. She was not concerned about being robbed by a highwayman, who were said to be common in these woods; it would be plain to anyone hiding in the closely packed, crackle-branched trees that they weren’t likely to get much of a bounty from this girl in her rough skirts, which might once have been blue and were perhaps not quite heavy enough for the advancing cold of autumn.

  Still, when she heard hoofbeats and felt their vibration becoming stronger, she forced herself into an echoing trot, eyes on the road where forest creatures had excavated holes, perhaps for the pure delight of seeing travellers trip. As Jenny looked a bit too far ahead, she didn’t notice a particularly narrow rut at her feet until it had snatched her toes out from under her.

  The horse pulled up beside her. It was a sturdy animal, not the kind a lord would ride but better than most she’d seen. The rider – perhaps not richly dressed, but warmly so, in the kind of well-made clothes merchants favoured – dismounted and walked over to her. He didn’t reach out to help her up. He put his hands on his hips and stood there, bent over and staring, as though trying to decide how best to use the grimy girl that providence had thrown into his path.

  He is appraising me like he’d appraise a coat or a hog, she thought. He is deciding whether I have any value, and I will not get any say in it. She tried to stop her body from tensing, from betraying her intention to jump and swing and run.

  But now the undergrowth was shifting and crunching, leaves being disturbed. When the merchant saw her glance over his shoulder, he half turned towards the sound. Another man, taller and broader, in shirtsleeves that would offer no protection from the oncoming winter, had stepped into the road behind the merchant. The second man, his features concealed by a broad-brimmed black hat, had grabbed the reins of the horse between one of Jenny’s breaths and the next.

  He smiled at the merchant, inclining his head slightly. ‘I prefer not to stave anyone’s head in, particularly this early in the day,’ he said, and Jenny noticed a club in his belt coated with dark stains, likely the result of past stavings.

  His mark clearly knew this dance. He swore and spat on the ground, narrowly missing Jenny. Then he started forward and reached into his jacket, drawing out a short, pitted blade.

  Jenny doubted he could overwhelm the thief, not with a knife that would have trouble cutting an apple in half. But she hadn’t liked the way he’d been examining her before they were interrupted. So she reached out, grabbed his ankle, and pulled.

  The man was not quite quick enough to put his hands out as he fell, winding himself so that he lay face down, head to the side, gulping lungfuls of highway dirt.

  The thief moved smoothly towards them both, fluidly drawing the club out of his belt. In a few seconds, he had one foot planted on either side of his victim. When the merchant rolled over, he found the club inches from his nose. The thief said nothing, and didn’t have to. His victim inched backwards, trying to get far enough from between the man’s legs to sit, stand and run.

  ‘Your jacket,’ the thief said.

  The smaller man, still wriggling backwards, allowed his momentum to draw his arms out of the jacket. His shirt, which had been hidden, was covered in brownish and yellowish stains. He left the jacket on the ground and stood, the tip of the club tracking his nose.

  The thief bent to pick up the jacket, running his arm through the loop of the horse’s reins as he did so. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and the smaller man turned and ran in the direction he’d come from.

  The thief didn’t seem to notice Jenny. He walked to the saddlebags and drew out a purse, hanging the jacket over the pommel and mounting the horse in a smooth, practised arc.

  Jenny got to her feet, thinking to step to the side of the road among the bushes, but the thief turned in the saddle and threw something in her direction. She flinched, and he laughed and inclined his head to where the object lay on the road. It was a silver coin.

  ‘For your assistance,’ the man said.

  She bent over, keeping her eyes on him so that she couldn’t see exactly where the coin was, having to scrabble in the dirt with her fingers to find it.

  He laughed, almost indulgently. ‘I don’t intend to hurt you – you’ve nothing to steal, and if you have any charms that might interest me, they’re far too well hidden under those dreadful clothes.’ He urged the horse on, coaxing it to walk a few paces before suddenly pulling back on the reins. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘would you like more of that?’

  Jenny didn’t answer. She had no idea what he would expect in exchange.

  ‘I would pay handsomely for you to fall in the road again, the next time a horse is approaching,’ he said. ‘Far easier to stop them that way than by jumping out and trying to grab the reins. Had my foot trampled once, would rather not have it happen twice.’

  Jenny stared at this creature who discussed theft so casually, as though it was legitimate enterprise, as though he was musing on how to make a farm more productive.

  He was clearly tired, though, of waiting for a response. ‘I’m at the Plymstock Inn most nights,’ he said. ‘Don’t suppose you know it, but most will when you get to Plymouth. I’ll pay you well, as I already have.’ He turned, kicked the horse’s flanks and rode on.

  Jenny turned too, in the other direction, clutching her coin hard enough to leaving an imprint on her palm. She began to run, heedless of the ruts in the road, back to Penmor. She was anxious to be near houses and people, and away from stands of trees that might hold men far less polite than the one she’d encountered. Anxious, too, to bring home the silver trophy, to see if it was valuable enough to buy a smile from her mother.

  CHAPTER 3

  She had seen enough highway robbers slowly losing their flesh at the Four Turnings to know the risks.

  The noose, though, was not what prevented Jenny from going to the Plymstock and taking the thief up on his offer. He could hardly, she thought, be worse than the state-sanctioned thieves in government offices and on esta
tes around the country. But he would be no better, and she had no intention of exchanging one type of servitude for another.

  If she could operate in freedom, according to her own wishes, and at the same time dent those who enclosed lands or grew bloated on the proceeds of rotten boroughs . . . the idea, really, was alluring. And the threat of the noose was no more disturbing than the threat of drowning when at sea – a possibility that was always there, and easier to ignore because of it.

  Despite her excitement Jenny had decided, on the way home, not to show the coin to Constance. To return with such a prize might rouse her mother to ask questions. Jenny, more than most, was vulnerable to whispers. She told Constance she’d found work in an inn between Penmor and Polkerris, close enough for her to come home each day. Nothing fancy, without uniforms like Dolly wore, unfortunately. Washing, scrubbing floors. Not the kind of work to give rise to questions when she came home. Intimately acquainted with washing and scrubbing floors, Constance didn’t need to have those tasks described to her by her daughter.

  There was no urgency – the silver coin would last some time after she had made a few purchases in other villages, to break it down into coins of the type that wouldn’t raise suspicion. She listened to the highway’s heartbeat, watched the ebb and flow, determined who was likely to be travelling at what time of day, and whether anyone else was likely to be watching from the side of the road. But sometimes she found it hard to convince herself that she wasn’t about to take a step that could not be untaken, one on a road which could lead to her murder at the King’s hands.

  Jenny had never liked approaching the forest from the Penmor side. The Four Turnings had to be traversed to gain the trees, hardy specimens that had resisted the axes used to clear their cousins to make way for fields and mines all around.

  The crossroads was where they displayed the bodies.

  Occasionally someone from Penmor would find themselves at the end of a rope after being convicted of theft, poaching, smuggling, or any other act designed to transfer resources from the powerful to the powerless. They weren’t hanged in Penmor, of course; the village was too small to boast a gallows. Usually the job was done in Plymouth or Portsmouth or Exeter. But that didn’t mean the village which had spawned such sin should be spared the sight of what the King’s justice left behind. So every now and then, the justices at the assizes would suspend a strangled son or daughter of Penmor at the Four Turnings, to rot while serving as an example should anyone else be thinking of transgression.

  Many travellers crossed themselves or made less sanctified signs when they passed a carcass dangling there. Jenny would force herself to stare at the bodies, despite the inevitable creeping fear. She felt she owed them that much, that an averted gaze would be an insult; she imagined shadows climbing to the ground and dogging her steps.

  But the dead weren’t always there. Perhaps it was their absence that led Jenny to do what she did on the last day of June.

  She risked a trip into Polkerris, buying some cheese and bread. She would just, she told herself, walk in a little way, so she could eat in the shade and the peace. The woods, surely, would not take that as a promise, a sign of commitment. She found a flat rock a little off the road, and sat and ate. She stayed there for hours, taking pleasure in surrounding herself with an element that belonged to no one – despite what the lords thought – and would not submit to the excise men.

  There were others here, she could tell. She knew by the rustles, by the regular footfalls betrayed by leaves, and an occasional distant exhalation. They did not molest her, and she came to trust that they wouldn’t. Perhaps they felt she was one of them.

  She was, though, so intent on listening for footfalls from the forest that she nearly missed the ones coming from the road.

  It was a man, she saw as she crept towards the edge of the trees. A young man, thin and with an unlined face. He had a decent coat on: well made, a nice thick wool, with a handkerchief in the breast pocket. She knew such garments easily sank into the river of clothing sold second-hand. This was the best kind – good quality, but not distinctive. No one could point to it and say, with absolute certainty, yes, that’s mine, everyone has seen me wearing it.

  He was young and thin, true, but still likely stronger than her. However, she needed more money, and a coat, after all, was hardly a purse.

  She customarily carried a small knife in a leather pouch hidden in the folds of her skirts. It was far too blunt to be of any real use, and festooned with rust spots, but she fancied she could brandish it more threateningly than that merchant had wielded his.

  It came out of her pocket now. She looked at the spotted blade and asked herself whether she would really use it to threaten a spotted youth.

  Before she could consciously answer the question, she found herself stepping into the road.

  The young fellow stared, probably trying to make sense of the fact that a girl around his age was suddenly here, in the middle of the forest. As he did, Jenny realised she had no idea what to do next. She did nothing, then, but stare back: a frank gaze most boys hadn’t seen from most girls, at least not the kind their mothers would want them associating with.

  This boy’s eyebrows stayed clenched in a frown, but a tentative smile emerged. Jenny took a few steps towards him, and he didn’t move. He seemed to be wondering if an offer was being made, not suspecting a threat was coming instead. She quickly pounded out the few remaining steps that separated them, raised the knife and rested its rusted tip just beneath the lad’s ridiculously prominent Adam’s apple.

  ‘I’ll be taking that coat from you, my lover,’ she said, mimicking the greeting she heard older women give to returning sailors and market stall customers, an intimate word rendered meaningless by its liberal use.

  His smile disappeared, and she saw his fist beginning to clench. A nice boy, probably, but it could only be moments before he realised that he was the stronger of the two, and that the knife resting at his throat was impossibly blunt.

  She pressed it hard enough to hurt, hoping this would confuse his perception of its sharpness.

  ‘Now I wouldn’t want to be ruining the day by drawing blood,’ she said. ‘You simply need to take off that lovely coat – gently now, where you stand – and leave it on the ground, and away you go. Else I might have to call my brother out.’

  Oddly, this invocation of a long-dead boy made her feel far worse than stealing a coat at knifepoint. The young man didn’t know that Jenny’s brother had never walked. His eyes raked the trees, looking for a hulking enforcer who could come crashing out.

  ‘It’s all right, Nathaniel,’ Jenny said loudly, and already the lick of guilt was diminishing. ‘This one looks like he’ll be reasonable, so you can stow the club.’

  The lad did as he was told, then, shrugging the coat off and letting it fall.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jenny, still smiling. ‘Can I ask, where are you from and where are you going?’

  ‘Home to Polkerris,’ the boy said. ‘Where I have brothers of my own I can bring back.’

  She would sell the coat in Menabilly, then.

  ‘Best get about it,’ she said, lowering the knife. ‘Off you run, before Nathaniel joins us.’

  The boy did.

  She had made him do it, she realised. She had scared him so badly that he was probably still panting his way through the woods. He’d probably decided to turn Jenny into a strong man in the retelling of the story. She was not, among these trees, weak or poor. She was not a strange girl to be mocked but a shadow to be feared.

  Jenny picked up the coat. Well made, as she had thought. Nothing in the pockets, unfortunately, except the handkerchief. But it should fetch enough, for now. A garment like that, it wouldn’t last long in the marketplace, and Jenny wondered if she would have the opportunity to steal it again from its new owner.

  Often a week, even a fortnight would go by before a suitable candidate came down the road. Jenny had very specific criteria. They needed to be young, o
r small, or in some other way vulnerable. They needed to look as though they could afford to part with their coat or their bonnets or their purse – she had no intention of sending an impoverished girl or a starving boy further towards the grave.

  Then, suddenly, they’d be walking past. Usually boys only just grown to manhood, their muscles not yet having fulfilled their promise. More rarely a woman, forced by circumstance to tread the road alone, no doubt fearing an encounter with someone like Jenny. There were more of them, now winter was beginning to fade and the increased ration of daylight emboldened travellers to risk the forest road.

  So Jenny would smile a nasty smile, and call forth her dead brother, and take enough to make sure that Constance had more than limpets to eat.

  Until the day Jenny felt a hand on her shoulder and heard a rasping voice. ‘How discourteous. I invited you in the front door, but you’ve chosen to sneak around the back.’

  CHAPTER 4

  The highwayman was wearing the coat she’d seen him take. But he wasn’t wearing the broad-brimmed black hat that had shaded his features, and she could see bare patches of scalp showing through uneven hair, black threaded with grey.

  He smiled, then, and the odour of his ruined teeth assaulted her before he had a chance to. ‘What am I to make of this? Such an insult, to have my offer rejected in such a way. I thought, so I did, that I was dealing with a woman of principle. She’d rather starve in honest labour, I thought, than eat well dishonestly, and good luck to her. I can admire someone like that. But this – this is simply wrong.’