Highwayman: Ironside (4 page)

"It
is magnificent," Lyle said quietly. "But look here. The
pièce
de
résistance
." He fingered the holes that had been pierced into the two halves of the shell guard. "Stars and hearts. Perfectly formed," he turned the hilt over to examine the opposite half, "and perfectly symmetrical."

"Pretty,"
Bella said, lifting an eyebrow sardonically. She plucked off her hat, batting it with her other hand to send plumes of dust into the cool air.

"What
was in that box?" Grumm asked impatiently.

"Hold
your reins, Eustace," Lyle chided, smiling as he caught the glint of greed in the old smuggler's face.

Bella
spat. "Paper."

"Paper?"
Grumm echoed disbelievingly, his head wrenching hard round at the mercy of his tick.

Lyle
raised a hand for quiet. "But what was written on it?"

She
shrugged. "Piss-all, Samson."

He
sighed. The girl had become his ward not long after Worcester, when Lyle still basked in the glory of revolution. The days when he had loved life, before things had turned sour between him and those for whom he had shed so much blood. She had been Dorothy Forks then. A snot-nosed urchin of six or seven, grubby-faced and barefooted. Lyle had been sent by his friend and master, General Cromwell, down to Portsmouth to issue special orders to the garrison. Now, four years on, he could not remember the content of those orders, only the road along which he had travelled and the brief rest stop he had made. It was near a little hamlet in a winding part of the road that was thick with forest and birdsong. Star had dipped his muzzle into a tiny, moss-fringed stream, and Lyle had sat back on his rump and let the canopy-split sunlight dapple his face.

"Give
us a groat, squire," the girl had said.

Lyle
remembered his eyes snapping open to gaze up at the feral face with its twinkling hazel eyes. "Give?" he had asked, amused by her precociousness. "You do not work for your keep?"

"Oh,
I work, squire. Work 'ard." She had been wearing a baggy shirt that was almost the colour of the soil at their feet, and she wriggled her bony shoulders once, twice, and the garment was bunched at her waist. "Work on you, if it please ya."

Lyle
had been astonished and repelled at once. "On me? Christ, girl, but you're a child."

She
had winked in a perverse attempt at appearing coquettish. "One what can polish your privy member till it gleams."

Lyle
had found himself on his feet, as though the very notion had put him on edge. "You do this often?"

"Aye,
sir, as oft as I must."

"Must?
Who puts you to such a task? What manner of man?"

The
man in question had appeared then, stalking round the bend in the road with a face ravaged by pox and sharpened by greed. He had grinned obsequiously upon eyeing the exchange, bowed low over his gnarled cane, and explained in more detail the services his girl could offer a fine gentleman with coin and discretion. Lyle had snapped the cane across its owner's skull, leaving him senseless in the long grass, and gathered little Dorothy up into his saddle. They had not parted since. He had insisted she learn her letters, and she had insisted he never address her by her old name again.

Bella
had travelled Europe with him in the intervening years, learning skills with weapons as well as books, yet she still wielded the brazen tongue that had so intrigued him at that first meeting. He watched as she went to fetch the sack into which the chest's contents had been thrust. "Piss-all to your eyes, maybe, but what exactly do they say?"

She
grimaced as she took out a handful of sheets. "It's just a bunch o' letters, Samson."

Lyle
held out a hand. "Let me see."

"Shouldn't
bother," Eustace Grumm muttered as he went to urinate against the barn. "It's too damned dark. You'll bugger your eyes."

"Aye,
I suppose," Lyle relented. "Back at the Lion then. We'll study them by candlelight."

"Don't
know why we didn't just ride there direct," Grumm said as he hoisted up his breeches. "Ale's what a man needs after a take. Gives him a thirst."

"Gives
a woman a thirst too," Bella agreed, nodding enthusiastically. "And we've some pigeon pie left over."

Grumm
grimaced, his tick rampant. "Mightn't be the case, young Bella."

"You
greedy old beggar," the girl said, an accusatory finger stabbed in Grumm's direction.

"As
I've told you before," Lyle cut in quickly, "we do not make for home immediately after a take. If we're tracked, then let them track us here."

He
felt a tremor then. It took a few moments for the sensation to filter up through his boots, but the feeling was so familiar that he knew instantly what it was. The others were staring at him. They had both come a long way since joining him in this new perilous adventure, but neither had stood on a battlefield and let the earth's vibrations whisper to them. Neither had that perception of danger that only experience could give. "To your mounts," he heard himself say.

"Major?"
Grumm asked, his bearded face suddenly tense.

Bella
stepped forward a pace. "Samson, what is it?"

"To
your mounts, damn you!" Lyle snapped suddenly, spinning on his heels to make for the crab-apple tree where Star grazed. "We are hunted!"

Bella and Grumm rode clear of the barn as soon as the horsemen were in sight. It was an oft practised ploy, for Lyle's pursuers seemed to grow in number and tenacity with every robbery he committed, and the only way the three of them could hope to even the odds was by splitting the hunting party. Thus the girl and the smuggler would ride in opposite directions, while Lyle would take a third route, and they would trust their skins to the speed of their mounts and the encroaching darkness, hoping to meet much later at the rendezvous point.

Lyle
cursed his nonchalance as he clambered into the saddle. Felicity Mumford had mocked him for playing at criminal as though it were a game, and, he inwardly admitted, it was a sharper thrust than she knew. He had become good at his new profession, and that had made him blasé, while his fury at the world had made him reckless. He had always insisted that Bella and Grumm conceal their faces during an ambush, telling himself that it would keep them safe, but deep down he knew that his own behaviour would eventually negate any such safeguard. Why had they spent so long at the barn? Why had he chosen to inspect his loot before they were safely back home? No reason, he chided himself as Star gathered pace to a brisk canter, beyond pure arrogance. He prayed they would make good their escape.

Star
burst through a stand of withered brown bracken and out onto the moonlit road. Lyle stood in his stirrups to squint at the approaching posse. There were six of them, and he knew their presence was unlikely to be mere coincidence, for they each wore scarfs the colour of saffron about their torsos and waists, the device carried by many of the men who served William Goffe, the new Major-General of Berkshire, Sussex and Hampshire. Such men were no longer simply the army - they were the law - and to see them riding in strength about a night-fallen backwater spoke of a purpose beyond routine. Orders were bellowed from the lead rider and the main group seemed suddenly to dwindle, the rearmost of their number peeling skilfully away. Good, Lyle thought. Divide and conquer. He raked his spurs viciously along Star's flanks and the big stallion roared its anger, reared briefly, and sped away. He twisted in the saddle to see how many of the pack remained. To his surprise, there was only one, and, though the distance was too great to make out the man's features, he could see enough of the rider to identify him. He was clad in the ubiquitous hide and metal of a cavalry trooper, his head encased in a helmet with a single sliding nasal bar and a tail of riveted steel sheets to protect his neck. In all this, the horseman might have been any nameless trooper thundering along this rain-softened bridleway, but for his scarf. Swathing his torso diagonally, fastened in a large knot at his side like a vast flower in bloom, the garment was made unique by a black smudge at the point where the voluminous material crossed its wearer's shoulder. Lyle could not see the detail, but he knew the device well enough, and the revelation gave him pause. He hauled on Star's reins, stooped forth to whisper into the skittish stallion's pricked ear. "I won't run from him."

Lyle
instructed the snorting beast to turn with deft movements of his wrists and thighs, and Star did as he was bidden, hooves sliding alarmingly in the mud. But he was steady enough, and soon they faced their pursuer, moving into a lively trot.

The
man in the orange scarf was at a gallop now, and his big black horse devoured the ground in a matter of moments. Lyle saw him draw a pistol and he produced the short English flintlock holstered to his left. He was reticent to fire, for Star hated the sound, and the report would doubtless tempt the rest of the posse back to his position, but the armoured man discharged his weapon immediately, its sharp cough making Lyle shrink low behind his steed's thick neck. Star bellowed like a bullock at Smithfield and it was all Lyle could do to keep control, but eventually he was able to straighten and take aim. He shot when the rider was still thirty paces away, knew he had missed, and dropped the reins so that he might draw his second firearm. His attacker had another pistol too, and it was fired quickly, the report agonisingly loud now that they were so close. Lyle ducked, even as his hand groped madly for the butt of his double-barrelled gun, but the lead flew over his right shoulder to smack into a tree some distance behind. Now he had the advantage, levelled his pistol, but the trooper raced past before he could cock the hammer, slashing at Lyle with a hefty looking broadsword, and the highwayman only just managed to avoid its murderous arc, the pistol skipping from his grip to tumble into a muddy rut.

The
foes wheeled about to face one another again. Lyle felt Star's huge bulk judder beneath him, and he knew the battle-scarred animal was beginning to panic. He had to forgo his blade so that he might cling on with both hands, desperate to keep himself in the saddle, even as the saffron-scarfed pursuer bore down again. He knew he would be skewered this time and, just as the horses were about to meet, he wrenched savagely on Star's reins, tearing the bit to compel the steaming grey away from the line of collision. Star slewed violently to the right, Lyle felt himself sway in the saddle, his rump sliding precariously out of position, and his thighs screamed in pain as he clamped them tight. Somehow he stayed on, the trooper's blade cleaving nothing but crisp air, and then he was into the trees, pounding along a narrow track that was fringed with tangled branches and perilously dark. He could not hear a thing above Star's thrashing breaths, but he twisted back to see that the armoured man had given chase, despite the risk to his own mount. Lyle leaned in to whisper encouragement in the horse's ears, and was immediately gratified to sense a calming in the frightened animal's demeanour.

"There
you are, Star, old thing," he said, slapping the stallion's hard neck. "Keep your nerve and we'll see what can be done."

The
trees thinned and the track widened until Lyle found himself in a small grove. It was skirted by ancient looking boughs, the kind Grumm often talked of when telling tales of the first people of his native Cornwall, and strangely illuminated by the moon. He let Star run across it but wheeled him around as soon as they reached the far side.

The
man on the black mount burst out from the woods to meet them and drew his horse to a halt. "I have you now, Lyle!"

Lyle
felt exhausted from the chase, but he forced himself to doff his hat in mock salute. "Well bless me, if it isn't the Mad Ox of Hampshire!"

The
trooper's face was bisected by the nasal bar and obscured in the horse's billowing breaths, but Lyle caught the flash of white teeth below a bushy black moustache as he sneered. "Have a care, sir, for the life of a brigand seldom ends well."

"Soldier,
Francis!" Lyle called back. "Not brigand."

"You
are outside the law!"

Lyle
laughed. "Because the law in this county is but one man; William Goffe. And you, Francis, are Goffe's creature."

The
trooper bristled, kicked forwards a touch, sword still naked and glinting. The black motif embroidered at his shoulder now resolving into the gaping maw of a roaring lion. "It is Colonel Maddocks to you, Lyle."

Lyle
drew his own sword now that he was confident that Star had found some semblance of calm. "And it is Major Lyle to you."

Maddocks
urged his mount to the right so that it walked the perimeter of the clearing. "You relieved Sir Frederick Mason of some valuables this night. I want them back."

"Not
possible," Lyle countered. A thought occurred to him. "You clung to my tail with impressive haste, Colonel. Too soon for Sir Freddy to have reported our encounter. Were you supposed to have been his escort?"