The Devil's Surrogate (4 page)

'Maybe she
tried and simply could not run fast enough,' Hart suggested.

Sergeant Paddy
Riley nodded, sagely. 'Ain't easy fer a lady to run fast in skirts,
and not that much better if'n she wears breeches, I'd say. Running
ain't woman's work, that's what my ma used to tell me, anyway.'

'Thank you,
sergeant,' Hart retorted a bit acidly, 'your homespun family
philosophy and wit are hardly called for here, I think.'

'Maybe not,
sir,' Riley replied, unabashed by the intended rebuke, 'but there's
maybe a few homespun skills that would be welcome. Sean Kelly and
meself could get ourselves in there, I reckon, unless they've got a
whole regiment of those bastards wandering around the woods.'

'And what good
could two of you do?' Hart asked impatiently. 'All that would
likely happen is you'd get caught, or shot, and that would leave me
with two less men. We've already lost Hollis. Isn't that bad
enough?'

'Certainly
it's bad, captain sir,' Riley said. 'I've known Hollis since he
first joined up, as it happens, and a nicer lad you couldn't wish
for, not even when he was in his cups, but that's a soldier's lot
and we all accept it when we take the shilling. On the other hand,
sir,' he continued, leaning forward in his chair, 'maybe this
Grayling place isn't quite the ground for ordinary soldiering, eh?
No self-respecting general would commit his troops into woods like
those, not when every tree and every bush could be hiding a musket
primed and ready. No, captain, begging your pardon, there's a time
and a place for everything, and a reason for some, and woods were
made for poaching, just as sure as me name is Patrick Michael
Flaherty Riley.'

'And just as
sure as you probably grew up feeding your family on rabbits that
didn't belong to you, sergeant?' Handiwell interjected, quite
unable to keep the grin from his face despite the gravity of the
situation. 'Kelly too, perhaps?'

'Without it
we'd have all starved, and without being caught I reckon neither of
us would be in this damned army, begging your pardon, sir,' Riley
retorted, but his own grin belied the supposed apology in his
words. 'The two of us could slip in there, I reckon, though we'd
need to be borrowing some more suitable clothing. These damned
tunics are far too bright. Something nice and drab would do the
job, I think.'

'I'll see what
I can find for you,' Handiwell said without waiting for further
comment from Hart. 'Meantime, perhaps Anne would be so good as to
see what might be available for breaking our fast. This could be
yet another long day, if I'm any judge of these things, and it
could be many a long hour before any of us gets the chance to eat
again, at least when it comes to a decent hot meal.'

Paddy Riley
nodded. 'It might also be a good idea if we took the young Blaine
boy along with us,' he suggested. 'He seems to know this country
better than most know the back of their hands.'

'But he's only
a scrap of a lad!' Anne Billings protested, halting in the doorway
on her way to the kitchen.

'But a cunning
wee lad, to be sure,' Riley said. 'Believe me, young Toby will be
more use than a whole company of troopers out there in those woods
and he's less likely to come to any harm than either Kelly or
meself. The boy's a survivor if ever there was one, and believe me
mistress, it takes one to know one.'

To the
surprise of both Hannah Pennywise and James Calthorpe, the little
side door of the church was unlocked and the handle turned easily
in the old woman's grasp. She looked back at the young man's
petrified face, and grinned. 'Careless of the bastards, I'd say,'
she declared in a harsh whisper, 'but we'd better go careful,
nonetheless. It may be some sort of trap. That Crawley devil is no
fool even if Wickstanner is, and his sort don't go around leaving
doors unlocked as should be locked, not by mistake, anyways.'

James gripped
the unfamiliar weight of the pistol in his right hand and swallowed
hard as he tried to stop himself from trembling. 'Perhaps I should
go first,' he volunteered gallantly. 'I've got this, after
all.'

'And I've got
this one, don't forget,' Hannah muttered, drawing the smaller
pistol from beneath her shawl and shaking her head. 'No, you stay
behind me, my young lad. The world won't miss one more old woman,
but it hasn't got so many bright young men it can afford to waste
one so willingly, and while my Matilda will no doubt mourn my
passing, in the long run she'd mourn yours more. Besides,' she
grinned, 'while they're wasting time trying to pot me, it'll give
you a chance to take proper aim, and I daresay you can shoot
straighter than me?'

'Um, well, I
don't know,' James stammered. 'I mean, I've shot a pistol before,
of course, but never, well, never at anything that was alive and
moving.'

Hannah's
eyebrows lifted. 'What, not even a rabbit? No, I suppose not. Too
many hours at your schooling I reckon, and a father with no need to
put free meat on the table. Ah well,' she sighed, 'just you make
sure and take good aim when the time comes. Make sure your first
shot counts because you won't have time for a second. And don't,'
she added grimly, 'try shooting the bastard in the head. Far too
small a target, and it can move too quickly. Aim about here.' She
prodded James so fiercely in his stomach that he let out an
involuntary gasp. 'Then, if you aim too low,' she chuckled, 'you'll
like as not shoot his bollocks off. Stomach or balls, it's all the
same, and when one of them goes down making all sorts of noise, the
others, if they're there, get less brave, and maybe that'll give us
time to reload.'

'You seem to
know a lot about these things, Mistress Pennywise,' James said
falteringly.

Hannah
grimaced and winked up at him. 'These eyes have seen a sight too
many things over the years, and this head has maybe taken in at
least twice as many as ought to be good for a person's sanity. Now,
enough of this talk and let's see what's skulking on the other side
of this here door, shall we?'

Slumped into
the corner of the damp smelling crypt chamber, Harriet fought
desperately to shut out the images and recollections of the way in
which Crawley had used her, and the way in which, when he had spent
himself, he had simply discarded her like an unwanted jacket and
strode from the room. Perhaps death would be far preferable to this
horror, she thought. The brute had said the way in which he and his
men hanged their victims was quick and painless, although how he
could be certain of the latter assertion she had no way of knowing.
Yet even death by slow strangulation had to be better than this
death of a different kind, the slow and tortuous murder of all her
beliefs and values.

With a groan
that became a sharp gasp as the wicked metal barb dug into her
tongue, Harriet forced herself up into a sitting position. Her
wrists were once again shackled at either side of the thick waist
belt, but her arms were of little more use to her now than when
they had been fastened behind her back. Her ankles remained
shackled by the short chain, which had now been attached by means
of a length of thick rope to a heavy ring set into the stonework a
few feet from where she sat.

Above her head
pale light managed to filter in through the narrow and grimy strip
of glass, glowing green as it forced its way past the weeds and
grass which grew up against it on the outside, so that the entire
chamber took on a spectral atmosphere that was as depressing as it
was frightening. Somewhere out there lay the real world, the world
Harriet knew and which, until such a short time ago, held as its
worst prospect a marriage to Thomas Handiwell to save Barten Meade
from bankruptcy, and her father from the poor house hospital the
army had set up with so much trumpeting, but which Parliament had
failed to maintain with sufficient funding. Now, it seemed, if she
ever got out of this horror chamber, all that was left her was to
stumble naked in her chains to Crawley's scaffold, to die as
Matilda Pennywise at the hands of a perverted rogue, probably to
the jeering accompaniment of most of the village men folk. If only,
she prayed, there was any way she could let someone, even Crawley
himself, know of this awful travesty and tell people that this was
not even a mistake but a deliberate act by Thomas Handiwell's own
daughter. The world had gone mad. Greed and fear, superstition and
myth - what price now the bright new age of reason? What price now
on the life of a poor wench whose only sin had been to miss church
in order to care for a sick father and a struggling farm?

'By the eyes
of Hester, what devil's work is this?' The sight that greeted them
in the main church visibly stunned Hannah Pennywise, not known for
being a woman who was easily shocked.

James
Calthorpe put out a hand to steady her, at the same time waving the
pistol in a defensive arc about them. Nothing moved, however, and
the thick walls and glass meant that even the sounds of the morning
birdsong failed to penetrate the oppressive silence. James let out
a long breath and took a faltering step forward, his eyes growing
larger and rounder as he stared down at the corpse.

The black
cassock and the long and slender, almost feminine, fingers told him
the body was that of the minister, Simon Wickstanner. Apart from
that, it could have been the corpse of any priest, for where there
should have been a head there was now only the ripped and bloodied
stump of a neck, the pool of blood covering the stone floor in all
directions emphasising the fact that the head had not been removed
easily or cleanly.

'Monsters!'
Hannah breathed. 'The dark ones have sent for their revenge, make
no mistake about it!' To James's surprise, the old woman crossed
herself and closed her eyes, her lips moving in a silent
prayer.

'No,' he
announced, regaining some semblance of composure. 'No, this is not
the work of any monster, not unless you count the monster who now
lies dead before us. Look, Mistress Pennywise.' He jabbed a
wavering finger at the ladder, and pointed up to where the rope
dangled, a small and bloodied noose at its lower end.

Hannah
eventually forced her eyes open again, and gazed upwards.
'What...?' she began, but then a light began to dawn in her eyes.
'But how...?' she muttered.

James shook
his head as if in bewilderment, but his educated and fertile brain
was already deducing. 'Suicide,' he breathed. 'The bastard hanged
himself!'

'But where's
his damned head?' Hannah looked wildly about them.

James grunted.
'It'll be here somewhere.' He stared upwards trying to picture the
scene. 'The fool tried to make his end quick,' he muttered.
'There's an execution method known as "the drop", in which they
drop the victim and the jerk of the rope snaps the neck, killing
him instantly. Only, if they make the drop too long...' his voice
trailed off.

'He made it
far too long then, by the looks of it,' Hannah grasped the
implication of James's statement with a turnabout leap that
staggered him. 'Ripped his fool head clean off... except it ain't
that clean.' She turned to grasp James by the arm, her bony fingers
digging into his flesh through his thin jacket. 'We have to go!
Come lad, let's get out of here!'

'But what
about Matilda?'

Hannah hesitated. 'Not now,' she urged, pulling him back with
surprising strength. 'If she
is
still here, there'll be locked doors for sure, and
Crawley and his damned murdering henchman won't be that far away,
but we cannot risk being found here like this. ''Tis one thing to
shoot that black-hearted bastard if he tried to cheat us on the
ransom, but another to be found here with a dead priest, no matter
how wicked that priest might have been in life. Nay lad, I tell ye,
we'll court more trouble than even I can face down if they find us
like this. Better to run now and let someone else make the
discovery. Besides,' she added, her eyes narrowing, 'even Crawley
won't risk trying to hang my Matilda just yet, not once news of
this gets out. Folks around here are a lot of things they shouldn't
be, and aren't much of what a body might wish them to be, but at
least they're respectful, so they won't go along with no hanging,
not until they've given this sod a decent Christian burial, whether
or not he deserves it.'

'But she may
be only a few steps from where we stand now,' James protested.

Hannah nodded,
but her resolve was as firm as ever. 'Aye, like as not she is, and
there she'll stay, at least for now. We get ourselves into a fight
with Crawley meantime, and he'll find a way to blame us for all
this mess. People say I'm a witch, and when blood flows and vicars
start jumping off ladders with ropes around their scrawny gizzards,
well, someone has to be at fault and I knows only too well who'll
be first up for the blame, believe you me!'

'Just a few
minutes, please!' James begged, but the old woman was adamant.

'No,' she
hissed, 'not now. Come on, you young idiot. Remember what they say,
"he who runs away, lives to fight another day".'

'But surely
that should be, "he who fights and—"'

'Bollocks! Go
tell your own grandma to suck eggs, but leave this old woman to
know what she knows and just get the hell out of here while we
still can!'

Ross McDonald
considered himself a Scot, even though his parents had left the
land of his birth when he was but a few months old and he had never
since returned there. He also considered himself a very fortunate
young man, being paid to do a job he knew many of his
contemporaries would have volunteered to do for free. However, he
was also certain of one very important thing - very few men could
have performed his duties quite as efficiently as he did, and
neither could they maintain the air of detachment that was the
essential ingredient in a good slave handler and trainer.