Highway Robbery (6 page)

What was I to do, sir? You can see my predicament. What would you have done? I was so excited, sir, to have met the great Dick Turpin and to be holding his famous horse, but now I was to be bait in a plan to trap him! Worms on a hook, sir, that’s what they wanted us to be. Me and poor Black Bess. I looked into her eyes and I knew that she would have hated it as much as me, if only she could understand what was happening.

I thought a lot of thoughts in a very short time, and I’m not proud of all of them. The worst one was about whether
Dick Turpin would have time to hand me my golden guinea before the soldiers closed in on him, and the best one had me dropping Black Bess’s reins and walking away from the whole filthy business. But there was another one, which lay somewhere in between, and that was the one I chose to act upon, and it was this: as long as I was there holding Black Bess there was still a chance that Dick Turpin could get away. If I saw him at a distance, I might shout out to him and warn him of the trap, and he might be able to run away and hide. And if he just appeared, creeping up out of the alley the way the two thieves had, I might get him to spring up on Black Bess’s back and gallop away before the soldiers had time to move in. These chances were slim, I knew, but they were the best I could come up with.

So there was just one small matter that needed to be dealt with.

‘What’s in it for me, Captain?’ I said. ‘Dick Turpin promised me a guinea for holding the horse, so I’ll be out of pocket, won’t I?’

The captain laughed and almost ruffled my hair again, but pulled out at the last minute.

‘If we catch Dick Turpin,’ he said, ‘you will be well rewarded. Have no fear of it.’

He patted the breast of his uniform jacket and I heard the soft music of coinage. And so, although I couldn’t do it entirely without shame, I nodded to the captain, and with that nod I agreed to do that piece of work for the King and to play my part in entrapping the man who was my hero and, I liked to think, my friend.

THE CAPTAIN AND
his aide mounted up and went away, leaving the dingy old street empty again. I don’t know where they hid their horses, and for that matter, I don’t know where they hid themselves. I examined every door and window, every rooftop, every shadow in every alley. But I didn’t get one glimpse of a scarlet coat or a dubbined boot.

It had been, to say the least, a very strange day, as I’m sure you understand. I
had never in my life been offered so much money by so many people, and yet I still hadn’t seen a penny of it. I couldn’t decide whether I had made the right decisions, and all the events of the day kept racing round and round in my mind.

Bess wasn’t happy, either. She was restless, looking this way and that and tugging on the reins as if she wanted to drag me off along the street. I held on tight and kept her there. I stroked her on the nose to try and calm her, but she shook her head and shoved me so hard in the chest that I nearly fell over.

‘There, there, Bess,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’ But she wouldn’t look at me now, and I came to believe that she knew exactly what
was going on and wanted no part in the unsavoury plan. I kept wishing that I had no part in it, either, sir, but I could not see a way out of it now. I was surrounded by soldiers, and if I tried to run away, I might myself be arrested as a criminal. Several more times Bess pushed me hard with her nose against my chest, and after a while I realized what the problem was. I had lost track of the time we had been standing there together, but it must have been several hours by then, and the poor mare must have been ravenous.

You know something, sir? If I had been with another lad or girl that day, nothing could have induced me to share what I had with them. I had grown up too hard, I suppose, and when you get as low down as me, then it’s every man for himself, so to speak. I would have sneaked away somewhere quiet where I could be on my own and eat the penny loaf I’d saved in my pocket, and no one else would have got so much as a sniff of it.

So why on earth should a horse be any different? I can’t answer that, sir, but I shared my last bit of bread with that mare and that is God’s honest truth. It didn’t make any sense, either. That loaf was a
meal for me, and it was barely a mouthful for her, but all the same she had her share, and more than her share, and despite the bit in her mouth, she was able to chew it up and swallow it down, and do you know, I got nearly as much pleasure from watching her eat as I did from eating myself.

I’m told the King takes two hours over his dinner every day, but I can’t imagine that. I never even saw so much food in one place as would take the King and his company two hours to eat. I think of that as heaven. Two hours with nothing else to do but eat. The mare and I scoffed the bread in two minutes, sir, or less. And after that, we were back to the plain old waiting again.

I notice you have a fine pair of boots, sir, and I doubt you ever knew what it’s like to lose all the feeling in your feet, but it’s a thing I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. On the coldest days it happens, and it’s very peculiar. You’d know you were standing up, but you wouldn’t have any idea what you were standing on. It might be cobbles and it might be mud and you might be standing in water up to your ankles, but unless you took the trouble to look, you’d have no idea.

And it was beginning to happen to me now, standing there waiting. Usually when it happens, I walk around until my feet warm up or I forget about them, but on this occasion, of course, there was nowhere for me to go. I had no choice but to put up with it.

Dusk began to fall, the grim, early dusk of mid-winter, and the street became busy with people returning from their day’s work and setting about their household business. Men and women passed up and down with buckets, on their way to and from the pump. Children were sent out into the street to play while their suppers were cooked, and some of them gathered round to look at Bess. One stupid boy
thought it funny to throw stones at her. I didn’t dare tell him who she belonged to, but I stopped him by returning one of his missiles, and hard enough for it to sting.

As dusk gave way to darkness, the children were sent to round up the pigs and the chickens, and then everyone disappeared inside and closed the doors and the shutters. I don’t suppose it was so warm inside those houses, but from where I was standing it looked it. The smells of cooking drove me to distraction. Candlelight leaked through the door and window frames, and wood-smoke spilled from chimneys. It seemed so unfair, sir, that I had no family to go to and no hearth to thaw my frozen toes.

I thought about Dick Turpin and wondered where he was. Somewhere warm, no doubt. Spending his money and eating his fill, his high boots steaming before some hearty fire.

The brief pat and a promise that he had given me began to feel like less of a privilege in the light of that understanding. Perhaps he wasn’t such a kind man if he was prepared to leave me in my bare feet in the coming darkness, with the ice on the mud puddles beginning to freeze over again.

Or perhaps it was true, what they said about him. Perhaps he had tried to come and get Black Bess and give me my guinea, but he’d got a whiff of the dubbin on the soldiers’ boots and had turned away, smelling the trap we had laid for him.