Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (19 page)

He acquainted her with many of the finer points of the profession: It was advisable to cut the traveller's girths and bridle. By muddying his boots a highwayman could give the appearance of having ridden a long way, though actually he might be drinking a mug of ale within a few miles of the robbery. If the traveller was attended by servants they must be ordered to ride ahead after the robbery, to enable the highwayman to make his escape. It was worth remembering that travellers were under the impression that by travelling at night or on by-roads they would escape the attention of the ‘Road Collectors'. You could not always judge a victim's potential yield by his or her outward appearance. A lady riding in a fine gilded coach might have nothing more than twenty shillings and a few paltry jewels about her, while a scrubby-looking grazier, returning from a fair, might ‘bleed' to the tune of several hundred guineas.

Then there were different methods of approach, to be suited to the different types of travellers. A courteous, ‘May I
beg the favour of your purse,' might have such an emollient effect on an agitated female that, in her relief at not being raped or murdered, she might give not only her purse but her concealed jewellery. On the other hand, it might be necessary to scare a more truculent male with a volley of oaths and a ‘Deliver or die!'

Barbara must remember that the most simple-looking travellers were often full of subtle crafts. To make a traveller take off his boots – ‘shelling the peas' as it was called – was routine work. There were dozens of other ways in which experienced travellers might attempt to defraud the gentlemen of the road.

A highwayman should make a rule of exchanging horses with the traveller if he were better mounted than himself. Coats, too, could often be exchanged to advantage, as long as the misadventure of Dick Adams was borne in mind who, having robbed a gentleman of gold watch, silver snuff-box and money, cast a covetous eye on his fine laced coat and saying, ‘Sir, you have a very good coat on. I must make so bold as to change with you,' stripped him of it, only to discover too late, to his unspeakable rage and mortification, that he had left his booty in his own coat.

Barbara learnt that behind the activities of the highway fraternity was an elaborate organisation of confederate innkeepers, ostlers, tapsters, chamberlains and chambermaids, besides the actual
fencing cullys
or receivers of stolen goods with their headquarters in London. Captain Jackson could give the names of inns in most districts in England where a gentleman of the Road could be sure of a welcome, and where there were privy hiding places for stolen goods or
for the highwayman himself. But for Barbara and Captain Jackson's present purposes the ‘Leaping Stag', where he had taken her that first evening, was a sufficiently convenient rendezvous, near enough to Watling Street yet in a retired and wooded spot, with a hostess who was a good friend to the brotherhood in general and to Captain Jackson in particular, who was not afraid to see pistols loaded in her kitchen, and who boasted that in a sudden alarm she could convey a fugitive ‘from chamber to chamber to the backside of the house and so away.'

Barbara listened attentively. She was ready to learn all that this man could teach her. It had not taken her long to gauge his character. Boastful, braggart, childishly vain and talkative, outwardly daring and bold, inwardly ill at ease and longing for reassurance, a mixture of insensitive brutality and careless good humour – she saw him with a clarity that her sensual thraldom to him in no way dimmed. When she told him, with a docility that delighted him, ‘I am content to be ruled and ordered by you in all things,' she was not being so very deceitful. For it was true that she needed him, needed him for his fine vigorous body as well as for his professional experience.

He had an endless store of tales, mostly relating to his own exploits, and to these Barbara gave doubtful credence. They were illustrative of his wit, his ruthlessness or his gallantry, according to the mood that he was in when he related them. Was it true that he had stopped Lady Castlemaine
²
and, relieving her of her jewels, informed the haughty favourite that it was his trade to rob one whore to maintain another? Had he really agreed to throw a main
for £150
³
with another of his distinguished victims, the Duchess of Mazarin,
⁴
and, having lost, gallantly allowed her to keep her winnings? Had he, as he related, had a swearing match with a well-known judge, a boxing match with an earl, and obliged a Bishop to preach an extempore sermon? And what of his tale that he had stopped a gentleman and his wife on the Bath Road and, on the man refusing to pay up, had taken his wife into a nearby thicket and ‘acted a man's part by her', informing the husband, as he collected fifteen guineas off him, that this was no more than was his due for he was not obliged to do his drudgery for nothing?

How many of these stories, growing more incredible as he helped himself to the wine, could be believed? Or which were borrowed from the experience of some other highwayman? Barbara neither knew nor cared, but when he told her that he had robbed on nearly every road in England she believed him, for when in action he displayed a skill and assurance that could only have been gained by long experience.

In fact he had been on the Road since the age of seventeen. In a burst of naïve confidence he had confessed to her that ‘Captain' was a self-bestowed or, as he put it, an ‘honorary' title. The son of a Shropshire butcher, he had run away from home at the age of fourteen, taking his father's savings with him. He had worked, or perhaps idled would have been a more accurate description, as a stable boy in various London inns. Then his upstanding appearance had got him the job of groom to a nobleman. In this capacity he had learnt to ride, to gamble and to imitate the vices and to some degree the deportment of his betters. But this situation came to an abrupt end when
he seduced her ladyship's favourite waiting-maid. He was dismissed, and left with some of his master's jewellery and gold plate. He joined the army as a trooper, was flogged for insubordination, deserted, and, for his part in a drunken riot, was consigned to the Poultry Compter.
⁵
Here he fell into the company of highwaymen, learnt what a profitable and gentlemanly trade highway robbery was and, in his release, took to the Road.

Such was his history, not precisely as he related it to Barbara, but as she shrewdly took it to be when stripped of the embellishments provided by his vivid imagination. Yet it did not hurt her pride to know that her lover was a man of base birth and rascally character. On the contrary, she derived a perverse satisfaction from feeling that in breaking thus, secretly and violently, from the traditions of her class and upbringing, she was revenging herself on Sir Ralph, on her in-laws, on fate itself for these five long, never-to-be-recalled years of her frustrated youth.

It seemed strange as a dream to Barbara, and with a dream's uneasy fascination, that she, Lady Skelton of Maryiot Cells, should ride out thus night after night with this graceless scamp, on robbery bent. Side by side they prowled through the sleeping, unsuspecting countryside – through the milky refulgence of the moonlight, under the glitter of the stars, through the sighing wind and sharp, malicious lashes of rain. They could see each other's dimly-outlined masked faces and cloaked figures, hear each other's quick breathings
and whispers, the jingle of bits, creak of saddle or stirrup and thud of hoofs as their horses paced together neck by neck and flank by flank. They were bound together in a partnership closer even than that of their bodily embraces, the partnership of a common business and danger.

Sometimes as they rode to their hiding place they talked, or rather Jerry Jackson talked for the most part, for while he was eager to chat and boast about himself, Barbara maintained a resolute silence, which he had endeavoured in vain to penetrate, about her identity and her day-time life. Sometimes they were silent in instinctive enjoyment of their proximity and the hushed yet watchful mystery of the night, or revelling like birds of prey in expectation of the approaching swoop. Or less happily, when their path took them past a roadside gibbet where a gruesome object, horribly blackened and tattered by weather and decay, hung in chains. Then Barbara would see by the way that Captain Jackson threw back his head and squared his shoulders and looked to the other side that, however light he might make of ‘half an hour's pastime', as he called hanging, he was haunted by the dreadful thought that one day his handsome body might also rot in chains by the wayside.

Barbara was aware that there was a part of Jackson's life that she could not share. She was, unhappily, precluded from joining in his daytime robberies. She was a night bird, her coups must be swiftly executed and at no great distance from her home. Daylight must find her sleeping quietly behind
the rose-coloured curtains of her great bed at Maryiot Cells. (Her lie-abed habits were a matter of some concern to her mother-in-law. As Barbara's figure remained disconcertingly slim, old Lady Skelton concluded that her daughter-in-law was in a decline and fussed over her with asses' milk and sugar of roses.)

Then, after a particularly good haul, Jackson would go to London to spend his share of the proceeds at the gambling table, on wine, fine clothes and (Barbara knew by his sleek air and the assiduousness of his attentions to her when they were reunited) on women. It riled Barbara that while he was gallivanting in town she must relapse into the unrelieved role of a country lady, full of domesticity and good works.

Nor, from Jackson's accounts, was his revelry confined to low taverns, to the unlicensed theatre at Sadlers Wells, or to the bawdy houses of Mother Temple and Madam Bennet's in Drury Lane or Moorfields. No, Captain Jackson boldly displayed his new finery and that of his frail and rapacious lady friends at the fashionable French eating-house in Covent Garden, at the Opera House, the old Spring Gardens and other modish resorts. It puzzled Barbara how he was able to show himself in public like this without being apprehended, till he explained to her that the longer his career of highway robbery continued unchecked, the higher would be the reward offered for him, and the more valuable he would become from an informer's point of view. Therefore it paid those persons who were, without doubt, watching his movements with the calculating interest of a sportsman watching the form of a certain horse, to allow
him to remain at liberty as long as possible. A murder committed by him on the highway would, of course, double his value, and this was one reason, he explained to Barbara, why he continued to kill horses instead of men.

One night, after several weeks of bad weather, when travellers had been scarce and takings poor, Jackson said to Lady Skelton:

‘Barbara, you seem to me a person who would not baulk at an adventure because dangerous. I have had a blow set me that there is a farmer near here by the name of Cotterell, who has two hundred guineas laid by in his money chest. I intend to relieve him of them on Friday night. This is something different from the highway lay, but the goldfinches will be none the less good for that and, as it is so convenient for you, I would not care to leave you out of the affair if you have a mind to join me.'