Fled Read online

  A small thought emerged through Jenny’s sudden, brutal fear. This is someone who sets store by courtesy. Someone who would be expecting an apology.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to wrong you. It came upon me, sudden, a boy who was all but begging for it, and when I saw the food I could get for my mother, I kept doing it. I meant no offence.’

  The man laughed. ‘You didn’t mean it, and you are only doing it to feed your mother. Are the prisons not full of people who have said exactly that? Do the tongues which spoke those words now lie still in the mouths of those who dangle at the crossroads? No, the law does not accept that as an excuse, and neither do I. Amends will have to be made.’

  ‘But how am I . . .?’

  ‘You will continue as you have been – picking up the easy targets, getting what you can. You will bring me your catch, and I will tell you where best to dispose of it. You will bring me everything you earn for, say, a half a year. You can keep enough for food. After that you can keep half.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have, I know. I’ll stop, yes? I’ll stop picking off the easier travellers, leave them to you. I’ll find other work, and you’ll not see me again.’

  ‘That is not how I do business,’ the man said, stern suddenly, speaking like a disappointed reverend. ‘You have started on this path now, and you cannot leave it. Should you try – should you decide to wait, say, more than a week between catches, I may find myself arriving at the Trelawney house, talking to your mother. You are not the only footpad in these woods, Jenny. Some of them are from Penmor, and recognise an unusual girl like you.’

  ‘You’re no better than an excise man,’ she said, and then gasped at her own words. Goading someone like this might be fatal.

  He laughed, though. ‘Yes, I am. I’m only taking some of your earnings – I’m not asking the baker for some of his too, so he has to charge you more. It is the best bargain you will get, Jenny. Especially when the alternative is, well . . . I know where to hide things.’

  ‘Where are you hiding your name?’ she said. ‘How am I to find you? I fancy you wouldn’t like it if I came into the Plymstock asking for Mr Thief.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. Confusing, too, as there are many who would answer to it. I have not gone by the name I was born with for some years. You may call me Mr Black. Best not to use that name to anyone else, though. When you come to the Plymstock with your takings, you’ll see me easily enough, or I’ll see you. Please, do not let more than seven days go by before you find your way there.’

  Jenny had enough left – just enough – to replicate the wages she would have earned at an inn. She told her mother, as the days lengthened, that she might have to start staying overnight at the inn. Would Constance be all right? Constance nodded – she required little in terms of company, conversation, now.

  Her mother did reanimate, a little, when Dolly came home for a visit. Constance seemed to enjoy hearing about her elder daughter’s work, the pretensions of the house and its owners, and the clothes of the women who lived there and who visited; they wore more money on their backs than Constance would see in a lifetime.

  Afterwards, Dolly and Jenny went down to the water and sobbed into each other’s shoulders. Dolly shed quiet, restrained tears. Jenny snorted and gulped.

  ‘You mustn’t let people see you like this, you know,’ Dolly said. ‘Bad for your reputation.’

  ‘Mother would be delighted with that,’ said Jenny. ‘Anything to prove I’m not a boy.’

  ‘Is she still . . . well, there?’ asked Dolly. ‘Every time I visit she seems to have faded a little. Unless I caught her in a particularly glum mood.’

  ‘No, no, you haven’t. She’s more there for you than she usually is. She does what is required to keep herself alive, and I worry that she’ll decide even that is too much of an effort.’

  ‘The laundry looked in good order, though.’

  ‘I do it, Dolly,’ Jenny said. ‘She would lose the business, otherwise. And I won’t have all the neighbours gossiping about how Constance Trelawney is a ghost who never raises a hand anymore.’

  Dolly nodded, then wordlessly hugged her sister.

  ‘But Doll . . . there might be a problem. I might need to spend more time at the inn. Don’t know whether I’ll be able to keep it all up.’

  ‘Jenny, you know I can’t come back more often. I’d love to . . .’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m not asking you to. But could you talk to her? I’ll go outside, so she won’t feel she has both of us to contend with. Maybe she’ll listen to it, coming from you. Realise there are things she needs to do if she wants to keep living.’

  ‘I’ll try, of course,’ said Dolly. ‘Although there are times when it’s unwise to push through to a choice between living and dying. Which inn is it, by the way?’

  ‘Oh, a small one between here and Polkerris. Not easily seen from the road.’

  ‘Why on earth would anyone build an inn where it’s not easily seen?’

  Jenny shrugged. ‘It is known, this place. To those who know such things. I wouldn’t be surprised if the owners pay some of their well-connected customers to talk up the place.’

  After Dolly spoke to Constance, she shook off enough of her despondency to pay more attention to the laundry. But she still gave no sign that she might fret at Jenny’s absences. Whenever Jenny said goodbye, Constance simply nodded, her eyes fixed on the dying fire, making no move to replenish the wood. Jenny wondered if her mother would simply sit there until she died, if she had no one to raise her from her chair and make sure she ate.

  Jenny’s money was dwindling; she needed to get out from under Mr Black long before a half year was up. She’d started to spend nights away from Penmor, but not on straw on the floor of a pub – she found hollows, ledges, small caves where she could shelter. The one part of her haul she kept back from Mr Black, when she went to see him in Plymouth, was a flint she could use to kindle fires. She took care to keep them small enough to avoid attracting attention; she was reasonably sure she wasn’t the only person who spent nights in the woods.

  She would get up with the sun to rob early morning travellers, occasionally coming upon other forest-dwelling bandits, snoring and drooling into the dirt, while on her way to take up her roadside vigil. She would always station herself as far as she could towards the start of the road so she could pick off travellers before anyone else got to them.

  But she was still nowhere near paying back Mr Black.

  He came and found her, every now and then. He’d be waiting when she woke up, stiff and cold and with dirt rubbed into the creases of her face. He was too large for the leather jacket he had stolen, ramming his thick arms into its sleeves, but he seemed quite attached to it, even as the seams began to complain and come apart.

  Whenever Jenny had money, she gave it to him. More often than not, these transactions took place at the Plymstock, where he was well known.

  ‘That your ponce?’ the innkeeper asked her once, seeing her look around and fixate on Mr Black.

  ‘My ponce?’

  The keeper laughed. ‘Never mind, you’ve answered my question.’

  She wasn’t the only thief Mr Black was running, far from it. She’d seen them come into the inn: men and women, mostly young but with the occasional respectable-looking matron. They would walk in and blink away the sunlight, turning their heads in the vain hope that no one would notice, stopping when their eyes came on Mr Black.

  But he still liked paying the forest visits. He told Jenny that it kept people honest, made sure nothing was being held back.

  ‘I can’t get enough money,’ she said to him one morning. ‘I won’t be able to pay you three pounds before my family’s money runs out, and I’m no good to you dead of hunger.’

  He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘A better road is what’s needed,’ he said. ‘A better road and a sharper knife, and some company. Oh, and some breeches.’

  Jenny had still been spending the occasional nigh
t at home. She would wash when she could find the water after rain, getting rid of the smell of the forest and the pervasive dirt that hid beneath its fallen leaves.

  Her mother seemed to be improving. The coughing sickness that visited Penmor most years had taken Mary Tippett with it, and Constance had been spending some time with Howard, helping to console him and seeing to his domestic duties.

  Jenny told her mother that she’d found another position, with better money but further away. She would visit when she could, but it might not be for weeks. Constance nodded, embraced her daughter and told her to be good. She didn’t weep as she’d done when Dolly’s departure had created a hole in their now permanently ruined family.

  A better road, Mr Black had told Jenny. It was a fair distance from Penmor, the road that delivered passengers from the ferry into Plymouth.

  ‘You mentioned company,’ she said to him.

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘I also mentioned breeches.’ He handed them to her, the type a farm boy might wear, slightly too big. ‘Easier to leg it in these, should the need arise. Cover your head, too – no need for anyone to know you’re a girl, at least from a distance.’

  He led her out to the Plymstock Inn’s stables. As they approached, Jenny noticed two stablehands. One was standing and pacing, while the other sat on a stump and idly whittled with a knife nearly as blunt as hers. The lad looked up. The skin was clear of stubble but pitted by a childhood bout of the pox. The hair, unevenly hacked – quite likely with that blunt knife – fell to the shoulders. The eyes were round and brown.

  This was a woman, Jenny realised. Her loose shirt hid her breasts, but she sat with her knees together, not spread wide the way a stableboy would. Keeping her legs together was probably the only injunction from her mother that this woman still followed.

  Jenny turned her attention to the other stableboy, seeing that this was also no boy. Shorter than Jenny by a hand and a half at the least, the second woman had smooth skin and matted hair tied back in one of its own tendrils.

  Mr Black addressed himself to the woman on the stump. ‘It was help you wanted, Elenor, and here is help . . . It is Elenor this week?’

  ‘Elenor will do,’ said the woman. ‘And she will be no help to me in skirts.’

  ‘That can easily be changed, and will be.’ To Jenny, he said, ‘Go in there and get those breeches on.’

  ‘It’s a stable,’ she said. ‘There’s a horse in it.’

  ‘He won’t mind.’

  ‘If she’s scared of horses,’ Elenor said, ‘what will we do when a cart comes by?’

  ‘You can stop whining and all. Haven’t I got what you keep asking for?’

  ‘If it’s two of the same, they’ll be turning me off and showing me at the crossroads before the week’s out.’

  Jenny listened through the stable wall as she shed her skirts next to a whickering dray. Two of the same. The other girl must not be to Elenor’s liking any more than Jenny.

  She came out, holding her skirts in a bundle. ‘I have no fear of horses,’ she said. ‘I have fear of starving, and of lippy women.’

  Elenor smiled, and her breath whistled through a missing front tooth. The contraction of her mouth produced an effect more sinister by far than Jenny’s well-practised mean smile, and Jenny was reasonably sure this was Elenor’s intent.

  The other girl smiled too, welcoming and hopeful and perhaps slightly nervous.

  ‘This is Beatrice,’ said Mr Black to Jenny.

  ‘Bea, if you like,’ she said.

  ‘Bea’s only done a few,’ Mr Black told Elenor. ‘You have to be patient.’

  ‘I’ll need the patience of the Blessed Virgin herself,’ said Elenor. ‘You know she tripped, last time? Just lay there. The cart drove around, but the driver could easily have stopped, tried to arrest us both. If there’d been more than one of him, I think he would have.’

  ‘Harder to apprehend three than two,’ Mr Black said, ‘and this one, I can tell you, generally only trips when she needs to.’ He gave Elenor a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. ‘Dinner,’ he said. ‘Off with you now, all of you.’

  ‘Are we not staying here?’ asked Jenny.

  Elenor’s vulpine grin appeared again. Mr Black ignored the question and stalked back into the inn, the transaction complete.

  ‘Slept in the woods before?’ Elenor asked Jenny.

  ‘Yes. Lots.’

  ‘Better than this one,’ Elenor said, inclining her head towards Bea. She handed the bundle to Jenny and started walking out of the yard. ‘Quick as you can, come on now. Harder to find the place in the dark.’

  The place, after an hour’s walk, turned out to be a small clearing in the forest, with the remains of a fire at its centre, ringed by trees and small piles of human shit.

  Elenor handed out the bread Mr Black had given her, tearing it into three parts in a way that seemed very inexact and ended with her getting the largest chunk. This was something, Jenny thought, which would need to be addressed. But not tonight.

  ‘What’s your village?’ she asked Bea.

  ‘We’ve no village, none of us,’ Elenor said, before Bea could do more than open her mouth to answer. ‘We are of the forest. We are no one.’

  CHAPTER 5

  Jenny was getting used to waking much colder than when she’d gone to sleep, and to moving her limbs as quickly as possible, before she was fully conscious, to get the blood flowing.

  Her hair, matted as it was, tended to snag leaves and small twigs. She would run her hands over it, on waking, to see what she had managed to snare in the night, what offerings needed to be returned to the forest floor. The dirt, the blackness which got ground into the invisible creases of the face – well, that could be seen as an advantage. From a distance, she might look like a boy desperate for his beard to grow as a way to impress the local lasses.

  There was no bread left this morning. There had been some, before Jenny had gone to sleep. She had wrapped it in her skirts and used them as a pillow, breathing in the scent of sweat and salt, the ghosts of past catches. But the bread wasn’t there now, although her skirt was still rolled under her head when she woke up, exactly as it had been when she went to sleep. She looked at Elenor, raising her eyebrows.

  Elenor grinned, not spitefully but like someone trying to convince a friend that the joke they’d just made was indeed amusing. ‘Fairies in these woods, like as not,’ she said. ‘Bound to be. They can burrow their way in anywhere, and they do like bread.’

  ‘Yes, I’d heard,’ said Jenny. ‘Yes, it must’ve been the fairies.’

  Elenor looked back at her for another moment, then nodded. She went over to Bea, who was miraculously still snoring on a pillow she’d fashioned from a clump of moss, soft but wet so that when Elenor kicked her awake – gently, but still a kick – and she sat up, her face was covered in flecks of green and glistened from last week’s rain.

  They sat on small stones around the dead fire, Elenor occasionally poking it with a stick as though expecting it to flare back into life. ‘Foot travellers are beneath us now,’ she said. ‘I’d like to pay off Mr Black in one go.’

  ‘Me too – I owe him a little over two pounds,’ Bea volunteered. ‘I borrowed money, you see. Just to tide us over until my father got work. Only he didn’t.’

  Elenor stood, went over to Bea and cracked her across the face with the back of her hand. Bea didn’t retaliate, just sat with her palm pressed to her cheek, silently crying. Jenny wasn’t sure what made her angrier: Elenor’s violence, or Bea’s meek acceptance. But after the disappearing bread, Jenny wasn’t inclined to let Elenor take any further liberties, to slap the rest of them into submission. Jenny got up and walked over to Elenor until they were close enough to feel each other’s breath. ‘If you hit Bea again, you will find yourself waking up tomorrow without one of your ears,’ she said.

  It was bluster, of course, and Elenor knew it. ‘If Bea won’t keep her mouth shut here, she might open it in other places. Then we are all of us in da
nger. I’ll hit her as many times as I like until she learns that.’

  ‘That will work very well, of course – taking part in a perilous venture like this, with someone who hates you because you won’t stop whacking them.’

  ‘A few boats and I’m rid of you both,’ Elenor said with a scowl.

  ‘Boats?’ said Jenny. ‘Not many of them on the Plymouth road.’

  Elenor snorted. ‘We want someone rich, but not mounted or in a coach,’ she said. ‘There is only one place to find that. The ferry.’

  The ferry passengers tended to stay together on the road, in the hope of avoiding attack. They usually had plenty of company. The port of Plymouth seemed to attract ships from everywhere and nowhere. Carts brought goods down to the docks, to be loaded and sent wherever a ship could travel, or to receive the odd cargo that arrived from places like Spain, Italy, Virginia in the New World – tobacco or spices or strange, bright fabrics.

  A large group of foot travellers, mostly male, was just as difficult a quarry as a coach. Still, the three women went every day. They waited at the point where the trees began to cut off the sunlight, where the road could no longer be seen from the port. Day after day, well-shod bands of travellers marched past, some with pocket watches, some with expensively topped canes. All huddled into one another, brought to intimacy by the threat of the roadside.

  Now here came another batch, walking almost shoulder to shoulder with their demoralising solidarity. Prissy women, who clearly hadn’t come within shouting distance of a man before, now seemed happy to be wedged between male strangers. In their wake, as always, the passengers left three girls who were poorer than they’d been the day before.

  Elenor spat on the ground, as she always did, for its failure to give them an isolated target.

  Jenny cuffed her ear.

  ‘Didn’t think you objected to spitting,’ said Elenor.

  ‘I don’t, idiot. Look.’

  Rounding the corner, scurrying in an attempt to catch up with the other passengers, was a woman. Her skirts were clean and had been drawn slightly too tight to allow her a full range of movement. Jenny saw the edges of white petticoats beneath pale rose fabric, and a bodice of the same material. A reasonable amount of material was needed: this woman had a stout frame, and stoutness was a rarity. She wore a small bonnet – well made, beautifully decorated, distinctive. Expensive.