21 Highwaymen And Elopements
T he letter from James Neate was terse and to the point. Michael read it aloud to Luce and Pettigrew.
‘To Captain M Edgerton, Corland Castle, West Yorkshire. Michael, Entry has been gained to the house, but Mrs Mayberry and her four nieces are gone, fled in the night, according to the neighbours, taking the servants with them, destination unknown. We do not yet know precisely what else they may have taken with them, but the safe is still there, the contents untouched. Do you think Miss Nicholson and her maid, who have seen the interior of the house, would be willing to come to Pickering to see what might be missing? If not, the bailiffs are compiling a detailed inventory which they might look at. Yours, J Neate.’
“This is what happens when one gives due notice to people,” Michael said disgustedly. “They disappear. Poof! Vanished in the night.”
“At least they did not manage to break into the safe,” Pettigrew said.
“Shall you try to find them?” Luce said. “If they have not stolen anything—”
“But they know so much!” Michael cried. “And Mrs Mayberry, if that is even her right name, lied to us! She told us that Nicholson never went to the house, but that is clearly not the case, for all his account books are in that room above the coach house. We must find out where she has gone and question her closely until she tells us the truth.”
“And yet,” Pettigrew said placidly, “I seem to recall his lordship expressing the wish that the lady should not be inconvenienced.”
“She is no lady!” Michael said hotly. “She is a brothel keeper and a thief.”
“The first I will grant you, but the second is yet to be established. If indeed items are missing, then you will have every justification for pursuing Mrs Mayberry, but otherwise, she is hardly pertinent to the murder.”
“Everyone is pertinent to the murder,” Michael muttered, but without heat now. “Very well, Pettigrew. Have it your own way. Unless there has been thievery, Mrs Mayberry may be left in peace. Miss Nicholson told us of a cash box containing four hundred and twenty pounds. If that is still there and the exact amount remains within, we may assume that nothing has been stolen. However, if I should happen to be in Pickering and should happen to talk to a postilion, it would do no harm to enquire as to whether he transported a group of ladies away in the middle of the night, now, would it?”
Pettigrew laughed, and shook his head but said no more.
It was Luce who added quietly, “If you should happen to be in Pickering, Michael, I hope you will not forget poor Peachy, who has been missing for more than a month now.”
“I do not forget Miss Peach, but unless we have some unexpected luck, I fear it may be impossible to pick up her trail now. But she is a resourceful lady. I do not believe she has come to any harm. She is merely busy on secret business of her own, that is all.”
“I hope so, Michael. I do very much hope so.”
***
T ess could not remember a time when she had not had a Plan. As a child, she had fully intended to be a sailor and fight to keep the seas free from the marauding hordes of other nations. Captain Nicholson would save the day for Britain, and she had kept a particularly straight stick in her bedroom for practising her swordplay. But her first visit to Scarborough and the sight of real ships being tossed about on tempestuous waves had scotched that notion.
Her next idea was to be a highwayman, living wild and free like the Romanies, and only occasionally, when living on berries and herbs palled, would she hold up a carriage and take a few coins with which to buy meat. Rich people could afford to share their wealth, after all. But no amount of persuasion succeeded in convincing her father, uncle or cousins to teach her about guns, and since she did not see how it could be done without weapons, she was forced to rethink.
Eventually she decided that she would be a spy, and sneak into France to find out what Bonaparte was up to. The government would be extremely grateful to her, she was sure of that, and she might even be knighted for her efforts. Sir Teresa Nicholson. Naturally she would have to speak French like a native to be able to pass unnoticed, and the governess of the day was startled to find her such an enthusiastic student all of a sudden, after showing little interest in any other subject.
But the seep of reality from her mother and aunt, the various governesses and her female cousins brought home to her that the only acceptable career for a woman was to marry and breed children. As first Izzy and then Josie married, and even Olivia, her confidante in all things, turned her thoughts in that direction, Tess had realised she was alone, and trapped. The only escape was marriage, but that was just another trap, to keep a woman subservient to a man.
That was when she had met Tom Shapman, and her Plan had taken a different turn. Why should she not marry, but to a man of her own choosing, who would not keep her in subjection as men of her own class would? And when her father had died, she had, for a brief moment, believed that all she wanted would at last come to her — money, and the man with the strong arms and clever hands, and most of all, freedom. Freedom from this stultifying castle and all the people within it.
Now that was gone, and even her emergency plan to marry Ulric Frith had flown out of the window. She would be penniless and would be a prisoner all her life.
She could not summon the energy to go anywhere, to do anything. She could not go to Birchall for fear of meeting Tom or, even worse, the poultry maid. There was no point in going to stay with Lady Tarvin at Harfield, or with Josie at Throxfield, or even Aunt and Uncle Lochmaben, because the walls would press her just as close anywhere else.
Nor could she sit tamely with the other females in the parlour, so she often took her cloak and found a secluded corner of the gardens where she could sit and be miserable by herself. There was a small sunken garden with arbours built into the surrounding wall where she could shelter from whatever wind or rain the skies saw fit to inflict on her. Somehow, the days were all filled now with wind and rain, with not a ray of sunlight to be seen. Even the fountain in the centre of the little garden was still and silent, as if in sympathy with her mood. There she huddled day after day, pondering her future and finding no answers.
Here it was that Edward found her one morning.
“I have caught up with you at last,” he said cheerfully, sitting down beside her. “What an elusive girl you are, Tess Nicholson! I began to think you had grown wings and flown away.”
“If only I could,” she muttered.
“Why is the fountain not working? I am sure I have seen it splashing away cheerfully.”
“It is broken. Kent will mend it. He has done so before.” Her legs were stretched out on the bench, but now she drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Go away, Edward. Why are you still here, anyway? You have ruined my life — is that not enough for you?”
“I want to make your life better, Tess,” he said gently.
“Nothing you could possibly do could make my life better!”
“Then make your own life better. What do you want, more than anything?”
She laughed. “Are you serious? I want Tom Shapman!”
“Then take him. Go down to Birchall village and seduce him away from his wife. You have the power to do that, if you truly want to.”
For a moment, for a very brief moment, she actually considered the idea. To have Tom with her for always! And who cared if he was married to someone else?
She cared, she discovered. Marrying a woodworker was one thing, but running away with him when he had a wife was just wrong. She could not do it. Even telling herself she hated the poultry maid, she could not do it. Ruby, that was her name, and no doubt she loved Tom just as Tess did, and she had won him fair and square. And what would it say about Tom if he were willing to leave his wife? She would not want a man who could so easily desert her.
“No,” she said slowly. “Even I have some moral standards.”
That made Edward laugh. “You astonish me. Well, then, what else do you want? Because whatever it is, if it takes money, I can make it happen.”
She swung her legs to the ground in sudden excitement. “I want to be a highwayman.”
That made him laugh even more. “A highway woman , you mean. Great heavens, Tess, I did not expect that! What would we need? Masks and cloaks, of course. A pair of—”
“We?”
“Of course. You do not imagine for one moment that I would miss out on an adventure like that, do you? If I am going to be hanged, and clearly in your company that is inevitable, it might as well be for something exciting. Pistols, then, and a good, fast horse each. We will probably need a base somewhere, because I suspect sleeping under hedges would become tiresome in the winter. A remote cottage, perhaps, where our nocturnal activities would be unobserved, but quite close to the turnpike. Oh, do you have a particular road in mind? It might be as well to give a wide berth to your home area to avoid the embarrassment of holding up your own mother.”
“Or yours,” she said, grinning.
“No, that would be an essential part of the enterprise, holding up my mother at regular intervals. I should enjoy that excessively.”
He looked suddenly fierce, and she had a curious feeling of affinity with him. She was not the only one who disliked her own mother!
“Do you think we would be hanged?” she said. “They would have to catch us first.”
“To be honest, being hanged would be the least of our worries, Tess. I cannot be the only man who travels with a loaded pistol at the ready. A far more likely end is a bullet through the heart. I am quite prepared to risk it, if it would amuse you, but I should hate to see you die young, my love. I should not particularly like to meet my own end that way, but if it were you…”
“Then we will not do it,” she said at once. “I am not quite ready to die yet, although I should like to learn to shoot. Will you teach me?”
“I would love to, but I would need your mother’s permission.”
Tess groaned in frustration. “It always comes down to that! I cannot do this or that because Mama would not approve. How can I ever be free of her?”
He slid closer to her on the bench, taking her hand in his and gently stroking the back of it. “You know the answer to that, my darling. If we were married, we could do as we pleased, go where we want, be whatever we want to be.” She pulled a face, and he went on, “It could be a secret marriage, if you wish.”
She turned a little to face him, laughing. “A secret marriage? How would that work?”
“Well, we would have to get a special licence and be married somewhere we are not known, but we need tell no one about it. No announcement in the Gazette. Then when we meet in public, we can pretend not to know each other. ‘Miss Nicholson, do you know Lord Tarvin? He is most anxious to dance with you.’ And you would say loftily, ‘I believe we have met before — a slight acquaintance.’ Then we would dance and talk about the weather and the state of the roads and what a crush there is. We would have to leave separately, of course, but we would return to wherever we were staying and retire to bed together, laughing at those credulous people who knew nothing.”
“Bed? What about the marriage of convenience?”
“I told you — I could not hold to that when you kiss me with such fire. You need not worry about that side of marriage, my darling. When you kiss like that, I know you will enjoy the rest of it.”
“With Tom, I would have.”
He dropped her hand abruptly, a look of such pain on his face that she was shocked. He jumped to his feet and paced across the sunken garden and back again.
“Well! You do have a way of puncturing a man’s vanity, Tess,” he said, his voice shaky. “And I thought we were getting on so well, too.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said, contrite. “I did not mean… it was a stupid thing to say.”
“Perhaps I should take up woodwork,” he said, sitting down with a whump on the bench again. “Would that help? I could roll up my sleeves and replace the cravat with a red spotted neckerchief and make chairs. Perhaps then I would be less stuffy. I cannot imagine why I ever thought I could win you over, Tess. I must have been mad. You have a heart of stone, clearly. Have you any idea how many caps have been thrown my way in town? Daughters of earls and viscounts… wealthy heiresses… all of them accomplished and educated and suitable for a man in my position. I could have had my pick, but no, they were all boring. Stuffy, even. I foolishly imagined that a chaplain’s daughter who wants to be a highwayman would be a more interesting wife. What an idiot I have been!”
For answer, she slid along the bench towards him and put an arm around his slumped shoulders. “Hush. I am the foolish one. If you had an ounce of common sense, you would run back to London as fast as you can, and marry one of your heiresses. You are supposed to disapprove of me, you know.”
He raised his head, and she saw the humour shining in his eyes. “But that would be no fun at all.”
She laughed and, because she could not at that moment resist the twinkle in his eyes, she leaned forward and pressed her lips against his. He responded with such fierceness that all the breath left her lungs and her legs turned to jelly. It was as well she was already sitting down for otherwise she would have fallen down. She clung to him in fear that she would simply collapse at his feet, but he held her tight in his arms and after a while, when she realised that she was in no danger of falling, she surrendered utterly to the glory of his embrace. Such a man! Such a kiss! Such joy bubbling up in her heart… but she could not… it was impossible… what on earth was this that she was feeling? It was like nothing she had ever experienced before, and it was terrifying.
Pushing him away, she slid away from him, breathing heavily. And then she felt bereft.
“Oh, Tess, Tess!” he groaned. “Marry me, my love, please!”
She took a deep breath, then another. Deep inside, her heart was screaming, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’
But her head was still just about in charge. “I cannot possibly marry you, Edward.”
“Why not? Why not? Give me a single reason why we should not be married at once.”
“Because my mother would approve of you.”
He stared at her in astonishment, and then, very slowly, he began to laugh. “We will just have to elope, then. She would certainly not approve of me then.”
Tess laughed, too. Such an infuriating man, in so many ways, but he had the power to surprise her, too. And if he was truly willing to elope with her… that was not stuffy at all, was it?
***
E dward’s mother wrote almost every day, in increasingly strident terms.
‘My dearest son, Where are you? I do not expect you to dance attendance on me, for I am well accustomed to the loneliness of widowhood and the sorrow of having no daughter to console my declining years, and I know you have business that occupies you from time to time, but please assure an anxious mother that you are well. You know how I worry about you. I write to Corland as you directed, but having no response for some time, I now wonder if my letters are reaching you at all. Are you back in town? The Williamsons are there at present for Lady Serena to consult her physician. Or if you should happen to be in York, Lady Anne is visiting her cousins there. This would be a good time to fix your interest with her, too good an opportunity to miss by dallying at Corland. What business keeps you there? I do trust you are keeping well away from Tess Nicholson, who is nothing but trouble. Do write soon, Edward, if only for the reassurance your reply would furnish to your affectionate mother, Alvira Harfield.’
He wrote back as he thought appropriate.
‘My dear mother, I am quite well. I am fixed at Corland for the present, and do not yet know my plans beyond that. I am fully aware of Miss Nicholson’s nature. My regards to Aunt Myrtle and to you from your dutiful son, Edward.’
He smiled as he imagined his mother’s reaction when she read it. Lord, how she badgered a man! But he was not a child any longer, obliged to account for every lesson with his tutors and every boy he befriended. And while it had amused him to pretend to be considering this or that eligible female during the season, he was not about to tell her that he had been climbing trees and chasing about Yorkshire in pursuit of Tess Nicholson. His mother would have an apoplexy if she knew the half of it!
It was true that Tess appeared superficially to be a demure maiden. She had returned to the dinner table each evening instead of skulking in her room, and they always sat together, ignoring Lady Alice’s invitations for Edward to sit next to her. Afterwards, they played chess, and he had to concentrate hard to have any chance of defeating her. Quite often he was able to persuade her to ride with him, with a groom for propriety, and it amused him to think that even his mother could find nothing amiss in Tess’s person or behaviour.
Yet their conversation, had she overheard it, would have given her palpitations. They planned in great detail how they would live as highwaymen. When that had been agreed, they discussed being pirates or running a gaming hell or simply disappearing to America, not telling a soul where they were going. And sometimes Edward raised the issue of elopement, and how they would plan that.
“We would need four horses to our post chaise,” Tess had said. “Just in case Mama sends Captain Edgerton after us.”
“Why a post chaise? I have a perfectly good carriage,” Edward protested.
“Oh, the one with your crest on the door, I suppose? So that every toll gate keeper between here and the border will say, ‘Oh yes, Lord Tarvin passed this way three hours and ten minutes ago.’ Do have some sense, Edward. It must be a post chaise, and we must run away in the middle of the night, so that our flight will not be discovered for some hours.”
“And how are we to get a post chaise out here in the middle of the night with no one noticing?”
“It will wait for us on the road, of course. I am afraid we will not be able to take much luggage with us, only what we can carry.”
“It is a pity I cannot take Deakin with me, for he is a strong fellow and could carry quite a bit, but one does not quite like to take one’s valet on an elopement. It does not have the proper romantic sensibility to it, somehow. And you would have to leave Betty and Harold behind, too.”
“With pleasure. How long will it take us to reach Scotland?” she said.
“Two or three days. Do you really think Lady Alice would send Captain Edgerton after us?”
“I do, and he is very likely to catch us up, too. He may not be very good at catching murderers but I think chasing an eloping couple would be something he would do very well.”
“We shall just have to elope when he is not here — as now. Shall I order the post chaise for tomorrow night?”
She only laughed and said, “Silly boy.”
But the next day, the captain returned from Pickering with James Neate and two other men, and were shut away with the earl and Mr Willerton-Forbes for some time. Edward, alerted by Deakin of the event, loitered in the library watching the door to the earl’s study to see the newcomers as soon as they emerged. But when the door opened, it was only the earl to speak to the footman stationed outside. The footman nodded and then pointed across the room to Edward. The earl waved him across.
“Come inside, Tarvin, for I have news that affects you. It affects Tess most of all, but Edgerton has told me— Never mind, just come inside.”
The two newcomers were a goldsmith from London, brought in to value the gold in the safe, and a bailiff who specialised in valuing houses and their contents to defray debts. The gold, it now appeared, was worth a great deal more than they had originally supposed.
“The goldsmith who valued the one bar we had removed assumed we wanted to sell, so he offered us a low price for it,” Edgerton said. “When the whole collection was properly valued, by weighing every bar individually, it was worth a great deal more. And the house… the house is stuffed with precious objects. A whole room in the basement full of silver. Expensive rugs on the floor, fine furnishings, porcelain ornaments, exquisite glassware, some excellent paintings on the walls… In all, that house and its contents, plus the money in the bank, are worth some hundred thousand pounds.”
“And… how much of that will go to Tess? After allowing for the late Mr Nicholson’s thievery?”
“I cannot account for more than fifty thousand pounds stolen, if that,” Willerton-Forbes said. “Miss Nicholson will inherit a fortune of at least fifty thousand pounds. She is a very wealthy lady.”
Edward slumped into a chair. His dreams were over. Tess would marry Ulric after all, and be free.