Glimpse (19 page)

I drew my knees up to my chest and hugged them. ‘Her name’s Meg Sanders. She’s old; she came to the inn decades ago. She didn’t tell me much.’

‘How does she know about Philip? Is he spirit, like me?’

‘She didn’t say.’

He nodded. Then he wiped his hand over his face and exhaled. ‘It’s so long since I’ve heard his name.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. But I know so little about you.’ I didn’t know how to explain. ‘I have no context for you, Zachary. I don’t see you with other people. I don’t get to hear what other people think of you. I only see you in the dark, at the inn. You need to tell me more about yourself.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything.’

‘So many years have passed since I last told my story.’ Zachary bent his knees and draped his arms over them. ‘But I will tell you what I can remember.

‘My life ended at an inn, and it began in one too,’ he said. ‘My parents owned an inn near London, on Hounslow Heath. It was smaller than the Highwayman, the number of rooms was only enough for our small family and a few travellers, but the bar was constantly busy.

‘My childhood memories are not fond. It was both hard work and dull; harsh by today’s standards, but common enough for the time. When my brother Philip was ten years old and I was seven – which was when my parents judged us old enough – they had us working in the inn: sweeping; waiting tables; serving drinks; taking guineas, which they were always careful to check at the end of the night.

‘Our parents’ lives revolved around money. Everything they did, everything they made Philip and I do, centred around it. I could not fault them for that, they made sure we had clothes and enough in our stomachs, but love and affection—’ he pulled a face ‘—was lacking. I had my brother to look up to, but he had no one.

‘I could see the strain it put on him. As the years passed, he changed. He developed a hard shell and, in the absence of other ambitions, he became as obsessed with cash and appearance as our parents. When he grew into adolescence, he lost interest in me altogether, and instead spent his free time in the bar making merry with the drinkers.

‘His favourites were the highwaymen. “Heroes on horseback”. “Gentlemen of the road”. To Philip, they represented everything we lacked in our own lives – freedom, glamour, danger, vigour, romance. Hounslow Heath was infested with highwaymen, he had no shortage of examples to envy, and he became obsessed. If someone who had been robbed came into the bar, he would be at their table in moments, absorbing the grisly details. If an actual highwayman came in, I would be running the bar by myself for the night. And that happened frequently.’

‘Didn’t your parents report them?’ I asked.

‘No. Highwaymen were good business. They spent a lot of cash and told amusing stories. They had a kind of following. My parents made extra guineas selling information to them: which of our customers were most worth robbing, who would put up a fight. I have no doubt they got a few people killed they’d fawned over in the bar the day before.

‘One of my parents’ regulars was a highwayman called Sawney. He was a particular favourite of Philip’s. Sawney would sit in the corner, drinking his port and swishing his ridiculous curled locks, and the women – and Philip – had eyes for no one else.

‘I should have seen it coming. One cold night in the spring, Sawney was prancing around the place even flashier than usual, doling out his stolen money and poor advice. He told my brother he was wasted on inn-keeping, that he would make more money in one night as a highwayman than he could in years slaving for my parents. No doubt he was trying to flatter his way to a free tankard-full; but it was all the encouragement Philip needed. He came to me that night and told me he was leaving.’

‘To be a highwayman? So it was your brother’s idea?’

Zachary nodded. ‘He was going to be “a gentleman of the road”. Those were his words. But he didn’t have the guts Sawney gave him credit for. Highwaymen always worked alone, but Philip persuaded me we would do better as a pair; that there would be no risk of disloyalty between brothers; that he’d miss me if I stayed. I knew he was frightened. And I certainly had no love for my life with my parents. So we left together.

‘Our first night as highwaymen was a shambles. Philip was clueless, despite all his time spent listening to their stories. I was barely sixteen and had done nothing more than wait tables. We were a mess. We stole two horses from our parents’ stables and had one rifle between us, which neither of us knew how to handle properly. The only person we dared detain that night was a postboy travelling on his own. He wept the entire time the robbery was underway. Our first major problem arose when we had to conclude it. I’d barely considered the realities of what our new lives would mean until that moment; I’d thought only of following Philip.

‘But Philip knew the reality. We had to shoot the boy, he said, so he couldn’t identify us to the thief takers. He didn’t have the nerve to pull the trigger, and I wanted no part of it whatsoever. So we tied the poor boy up and left him on the roadside, and started our careers with intimidatingly large rewards on our heads from the Postmaster General – one of the worst blunders a highwayman could make.

‘I realized then that Philip and I had doomed ourselves. We were wanted men, we couldn’t return home, but unless we could shoot to kill, we would not survive.

‘The knowledge made me nauseous. It made Philip angry. He took our money to the nearest town and procured two flintlock pistols. I determined I wouldn’t kill, whatever the necessity of it, but Philip, fuelled by anger, felt differently.

‘I tried to delay the “next time”. But the coins from the hold-up bled from our pockets. Philip wanted to emulate Sawney, and within a week of plentiful beer, excessively good food, the fashionable clothes Philip insisted on and stabling for the horses, our pockets were empty.

‘We chose a moonlit night to stage our next hold-up. We needed enough light to see what we were doing, despite the risk we would be more easily remembered. Philip insisted we hold up a coach – the more people we stole from, the more guineas we’d get, and the more time we would have before we had to do it again.

‘We concealed ourselves in the bushes by the side of a road. When a coach drove past, Philip burst out on horseback, his flintlock raised. After he got the travellers out of the carriage – three men and a lady – it was my cue to run out from the undergrowth and relieve them of their goods, while Philip held them at pistol-point. All was going well, until I approached the final man. He whipped a blunderbuss from his cloak. Philip shot him before the man could shoot me.

‘Philip yelled at me to get back. He dispatched the second man. Then the third. The lady cowered on the road, wailing. I demanded Philip stop – three men were dead and the lady was clearly defenceless – but he kept his pistol raised.

‘The woman entreated Philip to spare her. She told him she had two children waiting for her at the end of the road. She offered him everything she had. But I could tell he was going to kill her. He was crazed with adrenaline and power and fear; he didn’t look like my brother any more. I railed at him. It did nothing. I ran at him, but he refused to lower his arm. So I took out my own pistol and pointed it at him. I told him to drop his gun, or I would shoot him in the leg.

‘Philip ran forwards and shoved me. We fought, just like we had a hundred times before, but we’d never fought with guns between us. Somehow, my pistol went off. The bullet exploded in my brother’s stomach.’

Zachary paused. His voice was lower when he continued. ‘It took an unendurable time for him to die. The lady ran, and it was just Philip and myself, on the road in the dark, in the quiet, with three corpses around us. I’m unsure whether he could not speak, or simply refused to, but in any case he remained mute, only stared at me until he fell still. When I try to remember him now, that’s the clearest image I have of him – pale and sweating, pain and accusation in his eyes, staring up at me.’

I felt bruised, somehow. Tender and pained.

‘That’s horrific,’ I said. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t even imagine it.’ I leaned towards him, making him look me in the eyes. ‘It was awful of me to ask you to tell me all of this. I wish I could take it back.’

‘No.’ His eyes were flat as stones. ‘I didn’t intend to kill my brother, but, yes, I did kill him.’

‘But it was a terrible accident, and you were only trying to stop him shooting that poor woman.’

‘I attacked him when he was holding a gun. It was reckless. I’ve considered this countless times. If I’d only found the right words, or spooked his horse and made it run, or put myself in front of the lady, or prevented us from leaving our family home in the first instance, then—’

‘It was an accident,’ I interrupted. I thought of Dad, how he’d tortured himself for seven long years over Mum. It was tragic to think that Zachary had suffered guilt like that for over two hundred.

‘You were doing the right thing,’ I said. ‘You didn’t want to kill. He did.’

‘That’s as may be. But it’s not that simple. Philip was attempting to save our lives, harsh though his methods were. Yet I did not even inter his body. Another coach came by and I hid. The next day, his tarred corpse swung at the crossroads a few towns from here, a macabre warning to other highwaymen. It tortures me that he might yet be there now, in spirit, like me; I have no way of knowing. I abandoned him.’

I wanted to tell him I was sure Philip was fine, long gone to wherever spirits went to, but I couldn’t begin to fathom how the spirit world worked. For all I knew, Zachary might be right.

‘Didn’t his death make you want to stop being a highwayman?’ I asked, my voice soft.

‘It should have. Yet it was the event that made me a highwayman. I’d had my brother to consider before, now I had no one. Witnessing him die scoured every good feeling from my heart, leaving only desperation and self-loathing. I no longer cared if I died. It made me the perfect criminal.’ His smile was rueful. ‘I made a promise to myself that I would never kill – I’d be a ‘gentleman highwayman’ or die – but I robbed, I tied men up and gagged them, I slit bridles and let countless horses escape, I got in fights and broke bones. I was ruthless in every other way.

‘I was pursued and almost caught countless times. I passed numerous corpses swinging at crossroads, just like Philip had, and knew it was only a matter of time before I met the same fate. Yet I did not stop. I couldn’t. I had no home, no other means of making a living. I would always be hunted even if I did. I believed I’d sealed my fate.’

‘How did you get your scar?’ I looked at the jagged silver line on his jawline, resisting the urge to try to touch it.

Zachary put his fingers to his skin, as if he’d forgotten the scar was there. ‘That? A short knife. I was in the habit of checking for weapons before I took my victims’ goods, but on one occasion I was careless. The man tried to cut my throat. Luck was with me that I suffered no worse than this scar.’

I shuddered, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the scar’s blunt line.

‘Two years after Philip’s death,’ he continued, ‘my travels took me back to London, and who should I meet in an inn but Sawney. I always imagined the beating I’d give him if I saw him again, but I’d lost so much of myself by then, that I bought the man a drink. He hardly recognized me, but he remembered Philip. He laughed to hear how we’d followed his flawed advice, and that I’d become a highwayman with a reputation matching his own. He gave me a final piece of advice as a farewell gesture – how to make more money than ever. The Newmarket races.’

‘Newmarket? That’s near here, isn’t it?’

‘It is. It’s also close to where Philip died, but even that horror couldn’t stop me. I set off for Newmarket, planned a few hold-ups along the way to finance my journey, and when I drew near I stopped off at—’ He held out his hands, as though to encompass the whole room.

‘My inn.’

‘Your inn. It wasn’t named the Highwayman yet. It was the Honest Lawyer, and advertised itself with a painted sign of a headless attorney. I considered the sign amusing, so I stopped. I only intended to rest a night or two. The races were drawing nearer and I wanted my pick of the takings. But my room was comfortable, and I was growing tired of running. And then there was Bess.’ He smiled.

‘She was everything that the other girls I’d met since becoming a highwayman were not. She was beautiful, that goes without saying.’ Zachary glanced towards the painting on my dresser. ‘But more than that, she was . . . simply herself. She worked behind the bar, yet she wasn’t a slave for her parents, like Philip and I had been. She worked alongside them, as an equal and out of desire not duty. She was kindly and good, yet strong-willed – she would throw out bad guests, no matter how much money they had.

‘I would order extra plates of food, simply so I could be served by her. We’d talk and laugh. I had not laughed while sober for years and it truly brought my soul back to me. When we began spending our free time together, I extended my stay at the inn; I didn’t want to leave. During the races, I rode to Newmarket at night and would be back at the Lawyer, with my Bess, by sunrise.

‘She realized, soon enough, what I was of course. I had managed to keep it from her for a while, but she was a smart girl and knew me by instinct. When, eventually, she found me out, she did not become afraid of me, or act enamoured by my dashing career. She disapproved, but didn’t judge; she only felt fearful for me. For the first time in three long years, I’d found someone to care about, and someone who cared about me.

‘That was when I decided to end my days as a highwayman. But my purse was almost empty; I could not stop immediately. I allowed myself until the end of the Newmarket races to replenish it. I planned to stage hold-ups every night of the races until I had enough money to purchase an inn of my own, and then I would ask Bess to marry me.

‘She knew my intentions. She desired a life with me just as much as I did with her. She told me that she would wait for me, here—’ he looked up at my window ‘— watching for me to come back each night. And she did.’