The Talisman Ring (5 page)

Lucy, at first scandalized by the idea of a young lady setting out into the world alone, was not a difficult person to inspire. The portrait drawn for her edification of a shrinking damsel condemned to espouse a tyrant of callous instincts and brutal manners profoundly affected her mind, and by the time Eustacie had graphically described her almost inevitable demise in child-bed, she was ready to lend her support to any plan her mistress might see fit to adopt. Her own brain, though appreciative, was not fertile, but upon being adjured to think of some means whereby a lady could evade a distasteful marriage and arrange her own life, she had the happy notion of suggesting a perusal of the advertisements in the
Morning Post
.

Together mistress and maid pored over the columns of this useful periodical. It was not, at first glance, very helpful, for most of its advertisements appeared to be of Well-matched Carriage Horses, or Superb Residences to be Hired for a Short Term. Further study, however, enlarged the horizon. A lady domiciled in Brook Street required a Governess with a knowledge of Astronomy, Botany, Water-Colour Painting, and the French Tongue to instruct her daughters. Dismissing the first three requirements as irrelevancies, Eustacie triumphantly pointed to the last, and said that here was the very thing.

That a governess’s career was unlikely to prove adventurous was a consideration that did not weigh with her for more than two minutes, for it did not take her longer than this to realize that her young charges would possess a handsome brother, who would naturally fall in love with his sisters’ governess. Persecution from his Mama was to be expected, but after various vicissitudes it would be discovered that the humble governess was an aristocrat and an heiress, and all would end happily. Lucy, in spite of never having read any of the romances which formed her mistress’s chief study, saw nothing improbable in this picture, but doubted whether Sir Tristram would permit his betrothed to leave the Court.

‘He will know nothing about it,’ said Eustacie, ‘because I shall escape very late at night when he thinks I am in bed, and ride to Hand Cross to catch the mail-coach to London.’

‘Oh, miss, you couldn’t do that, not all by yourself!’ said Lucy. ‘It wouldn’t be seemly!’

Paying no heed to this poor-spirited criticism, Eustacie clasped her hands round her knees, and began to ponder the details of her flight. The scheme itself might be fantastical, but there was a streak of French rationality in her nature which could be trusted to cope with the intricacies of the wildest escapade. She said: ‘We shall need the stable keys.’

‘
We
, miss?’ faltered Lucy.

Eustacie nodded. ‘But yes, because I have never saddled a horse, and though I think it would be a better adventure if I did everything quite by myself, one must be practical, after all. Can you saddle a horse?’

‘Oh yes, miss!’ replied Lucy, a farmer’s daughter, ‘but –’

‘Very well, then, that is arranged. And it is you, moreover, who must steal the stable keys. That will not be a great matter. And you will pack for me two bandboxes, but not any more, because I cannot carry much on horseback. And when I reach Hand Cross I shall let Rufus go, and it is certain that he will find his way home, and that will put my cousin Tristram in a terrible fright when he sees my horse quite riderless. I dare say he will think I am dead.’

‘Miss, you don’t really mean it?’ said Lucy, who had been listening open-mouthed.

‘But of course I mean it,’ replied Eustacie calmly. ‘When does the night mail reach Hand Cross?’

‘Just before midnight, miss, but they do say we shall be having snow, and that would make the mail late as like as not. But, miss, it’s all of five miles to Hand Cross, and the road that lonely, and running through the Forest – oh, I’d be afeard!’

‘I am not afraid of anything,’ said Eustacie loftily.

Lucy sank her voice impressively. ‘Perhaps you haven’t ever heard tell of the Headless Horseman, miss?’

‘No!’ Eustacie’s eyes sparkled. ‘Tell me at once all about him!’

‘They say he rides the Forest, miss, but never on a horse of his own,’ said Lucy throbbingly. ‘You’ll find him up behind you on the crupper with his arms round your waist.’

Even in the comfortable daylight this story was hideous enough to daunt the most fearless. Eustacie shuddered, but said stoutly: ‘I do not believe it. It is just a tale!’

‘Ask anyone, miss, if it’s not true!’ said Lucy.

Eustacie, thinking this advice good, asked Sir Tristram at the first opportunity.

‘The Headless Horseman?’ he said. ‘Yes, I believe there is some such legend.’

‘But is it true?’ asked Eustacie breathlessly.

‘Why, no, of course not!’

‘You would not then be afraid to ride through the Forest at night?’

‘Not in the least. I’ve often done so, and never encountered a headless horseman, I assure you!’

‘Thank you,’ said Eustacie. ‘Thank you very much!’

He looked a little surprised, but as she said nothing more very soon forgot the episode.

‘My cousin Tristram,’ Eustacie told Lucy, ‘says that it is nothing but a legend. I shall not regard it.’

Had Sir Tristram been less preoccupied he might have found something to wonder at in his cousin’s sudden docility. As it was, he was much too busy unravelling the intricacies of Sylvester’s affairs with Mr Pickering to pay any heed to Eustacie’s change of front. If he thought about it at all he supposed merely that she had recovered from a fit of tantrums, and was heartily glad of it. He had half expected her to raise objections to his plan to convey her to Bath on the day after her grandfather’s burial, but when he broached the matter to her she listened to him with folded hands and downcast eyes, and answered never a word. A man more learned in female wiles might have found this circumstance suspicious; Sir Tristram was only grateful. He himself would be returning to Lavenham Court, but he told Eustacie that he did not expect to be obliged to remain for more than a week or two, after which time he would join the household in Bath, and set forward the marriage arrangements. Eustacie curtseyed politely.

She did not attend Sylvester’s funeral, which took place on the third day after his death, but busied herself instead with choosing from her wardrobe the garments she considered most suited to her new calling, and directing Lucy how to bestow them in the two bandboxes. Lucy, too devoted to her glamorous young mistress to think of betraying her, but very much alarmed at the idea of all the dangers she might encounter on her solitary journey, sniffed dolefully as she folded caracos and fichus and said that she would almost prefer to accompany Miss, braving the terror of the Headless Horseman, than be left behind to face Sir Tristram’s wrath. Eustacie, feeling that to take her maid with her would be to destroy at a blow all the romance of the adventure, told her to pretend the most complete ignorance of the affair, and promised that she would send for her to London at the first opportunity.

The forlorn sight of snowflakes drifting down from a leaden sky affected Lucy with a sense of even deeper foreboding, but only inspired her mistress to say she would wear her fur-lined cloak after all, and the beaver hat with the crimson plume.

Her actual escape from the Court was accomplished without the least difficulty, the servants having gone to bed, and Sir Tristram being shut up in the library with Beau Lavenham, who had come over from the Dower House to dine with his cousins. Eustacie had excused herself from their company soon after dinner, and gone up to her bedchamber. At eleven o’clock, looking quite enchanting in her riding-dress and crimson cloak and wide-brimmed beaver, with its red feather curling over to mingle with her dark, silky curls, she tiptoed down the back stairs, holding up her skirts in one hand and in the other grasping her whip and gloves. Behind her tottered the shrinking Lucy, carrying the two bandboxes and a lantern.

Half-way down the stairs Eustacie stopped. ‘I ought to have a pistol!’

‘Good gracious sakes alive, miss!’ whispered Lucy. ‘Whatever would you do with one of them nasty, dangerous things?’

‘But, of course, I must have a pistol!’ said Eustacie. ‘And I know where there is a pistol, too!’ She turned, ignoring her abigail’s tearful protests, and ran lightly up the stairs again, and disappeared in the direction of the Long Gallery.

When she returned she was flushed and rather out of breath and carried in her right hand a peculiarly deadly-looking duelling pistol with a ten-inch barrel and silver sights. Lucy nearly dropped the bandboxes when she saw it, and implored her mistress in an agitated whisper to put it down.

‘It is my cousin Ludovic’s,’ said Eustacie triumphantly. ‘There were two of them in a case in the bedchamber that was his. How fortunate that I should have remembered! I saw them – oh, a long time ago! – when they put the new curtains in that room. Do you think it is loaded?’

‘Oh, mercy, miss, I hope not!’

‘I must be careful,’ decided Eustacie, handling the weapon somewhat gingerly. ‘I think it has a hair-trigger, but I do not properly understand guns. Hurry, now!’

The snow had stopped falling some time before, but a light covering of it lay upon the ground, and there was a sharp, frosty nip in the air. The two females, one of them in high fettle and the other shivering with mingled cold and fright, trod softly down the drive that led from the house to the stables. No light showed in the coachman’s cottage, nor in the grooms’ quarters, and no one appeared to offer the least hindrance to Eustacie’s escape. She unlocked the door of the harness-room, pulled Lucy in after her, and setting the lantern down on the table, selected a bridle from the wall, and pointed out her saddle to the abigail. The next thing was to unlock the stable door, and to saddle and bridle Rufus, who seemed sleepy but not displeased to see his mistress. Lucy, dreading the consequences of this exploit, had begun to weep softly, but was told in a fierce whisper to saddle Rufus and to stop being a fool. She was an obedient girl, so she gulped down her tears, and heaved the saddle up on to Rufus’s back. The girths having been pulled tight, the head-stall removed and the bridle put on, it only remained to attach the two bandboxes to the saddle. This called for a further search in the harness-room for a pair of suitable straps, and by the time these had been found and the bandboxes suspended from them, Eustacie had decided that the only possible way to carry a pistol was in a holster. A lady’s saddle not being equipped with his necessary adjunct, one had to be removed from a saddle of Sylvester’s and buckled rather precariously on to the strap that held one of the bandboxes. It seemed to be far too large a holster for the slender pistol that was pushed into it, but that could not be helped. Eustacie remarked that it was fortunate there was snow upon the ground, since it would muffle the sound of Rufus’s hooves on the cobble-stones, and led him out to the mounting-block. Once safely in the saddle, she reminded Lucy to lock all the doors again and to replace the keys, gave her her hand to kiss, and set off, not by way of the avenue leading to the closed lodge gates, but across the park to a farm-track with an unguarded gate at the end of it which could be opened without dismounting.

This feat presently accomplished, Eustacie urged Rufus to a trot, and set off down the lane towards the rough road that ran north through Warninglid to join the turnpike road from London to Brighton at Hand Cross.

She knew the way well, but to one wholly unaccustomed to being abroad after nightfall, the countryside looked oddly unfamiliar in the moonlight. Everything was very silent, and the trees, grown suddenly to preposterous heights, cast black distorted shadows that might, to those of nervous disposition, seem almost to hold a menace. Eustacie was glad to think that she was a de Vauban, and therefore afraid of nothing, and wondered why a stillness unbroken by so much as the crackle of a twig should, instead of convincing her that she was alone, have the quite opposite effect of making her imagine hidden dangers behind every bush or thicket. She was enjoying herself hugely, of course – that went without saying – but perhaps she would not be entirely sorry to reach Hand Cross and the protection of the mail-coach. Moreover, the bandboxes bobbed up and down in a tiresome way, and one of them showed signs of working loose from its strap. She tried to rectify this, but only succeeded in making things worse.

The lane presently met the road to Hand Cross, and here the country began to be more thickly wooded, and consequently darker, for there were a good many pines and hollies which had not shed their foliage and so obscured the moonlight. It was very cold, and the carpet of snow made it sometimes difficult to keep to the road. Once Rufus stumbled almost into the ditch, and once some creature (only a fox, Eustacie assured herself) slipped across the road ahead of her. It began to seem a very long way to Hand Cross. A thorn-bush beside the road cast a shadow that was unpleasantly like that of a misshapen man. Eustacie’s heart gave a sickening bump, and all at once she remembered the Headless Horseman, and for one dreadful moment felt positive that he was close behind her. Every horrid story she had heard of St Leonard’s Forest now came unbidden to her mind, and she discovered that she could even recall with painful accuracy the details of
A Discourse relating a strange and monstrous Serpent (or Dragon) lately discovered and yet living
, which she had found in a musty old volume in Sylvester’s library.

Past Warninglid the country grew more open, but although it was a relief to get away from the trees Eustacie knew, because Sylvester had told her, that the Forest had once covered all this tract of ground, and she was therefore unable to place any reliance on the Headless Horseman keeping to the existing bounds. She began to imagine moving forms in the hedges, and when, about a mile beyond the Slaugham turning, her horse suddenly put forward his ears at a flutter of white seen fleetingly in the gloom of a thicket and shied violently across the road, she gave a sob of pure fright, and was nearly unseated. She pulled Rufus up, but his plunge had done all that was necessary to set the troublesome bandbox free. It slipped from the strap and went rolling away over the snow, and came to rest finally quite close to the thicket at the side of the road.

Eustacie, patting Rufus’s neck with a hand which, though meant to convey reassurance, was actually trembling more than he was, looked after her property with dismay. She did not feel that she could abandon it (which she would have liked to have done), for in spite of being afraid of nothing, she was extremely loth to dismount and pick it up. She sat still for a few minutes, intently staring at the thicket. Rufus stared, too, with his head up and his ears forward. Nothing seemed to be stirring, however, and Eustacie, telling herself that the Headless Horseman was only a legend, and that the monstrous Serpent (or Dragon) had flourished nearly two hundred years ago and must surely be dead by now, gritted her teeth, and dismounted. She was disgusted to find that her knees were shaking, so to give herself more courage she pulled the duelling pistol out of the holster and grasped it firmly in her right hand.

Rufus, though suspicious of the thicket, allowed her to lead him up to the bandbox. She had just stooped to pick it up when the shrill neigh of a pony not five yards distant startled her almost out of her wits. She gave a scream of terror, saw something move in the shadow, and the next minute was struggling dementedly in the hold of a man who had seemed to pounce upon her from nowhere. She could not scream again because a hand was clamped over her mouth, and when she pulled the trigger of her pistol nothing happened. A sinewy arm was round her; she was half lifted, half dragged into the cover of the thicket; and heard a rough voice behind her growl: ‘Hit her over the head, blast the wench!’

Her terrified eyes, piercing the gloom, saw the dim outline of a face above her. Her captor said: ‘I’ll be damned if I do!’ in the unmistakable accents of a gentleman, and bent over her, and added softly: ‘I’m sorry, but you mustn’t screech. If I take my hand away, will you be quiet – quite quiet?’

She nodded. At the first sound of his voice, which was oddly attractive, a large measure of her fright had left her. Now, as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she saw that he was quite a young man, and, judging from the outline of his profile against the moonlit sky, a very personable young man.

The voice of the man behind her spoke again. ‘Adone do! She’ll be the ruin o’ we! Let me shut her mouth for her!’

Eustacie made a strangled sound in her throat and tried to bring her hands up to clutch at the young man’s arm. The barrel of her pistol, which she was till clutching, gleamed in the moonlight, and caught the attention of her captor, who said under his breath: ‘If you let that pistol off I’ll murder you! Ned, take the gun away from her!’

A heavy hand wrenched it out of her grasp; the rough voice said: ‘It ain’t loaded. If you won’t do more, tie her up with a gag in her mouth!’

‘No, no, she’s much too pretty,’ said the young man, taking the pistol and slipping it into the pocket of his frieze coat. ‘You won’t squeak, will you, darling?’

As well as she could Eustacie shook her head. The hand left her mouth and patted her cheek. ‘Good girl! Don’t be frightened: I swear I won’t hurt you!’

Eustacie, who had been almost suffocated, gasped thankfully: ‘I thought you were the Headless Horseman!’

‘You thought I was what?’

‘The Headless Horseman.’

He laughed. ‘Well, I’m not.’

‘No, I can see you are not. But why did you seize me like that? What are you doing here?’

‘If it comes to that, what are
you
doing here?’

‘I am going to London,’ replied Eustacie.

‘Oh!’ said the young man, rather doubtfully. ‘It’s no concern of mine, of course, but it’s a plaguey queer time to be going to London, isn’t it?’

‘No, because I am going to catch the night mail at Hand Cross. You must instantly let me go, or I shall be too late.’

The other man, who had been listening in scowling silence, muttered: ‘She’ll have the pack of them down on us!’

‘Be damned to you, don’t croak so!’ said the young man. ‘Tether that nag of hers!’

‘If you let her go –’

‘I’m not going to let her go. You keep a look-out for Abel, and stop spoiling sport!’

‘But certainly you are going to let me go!’ interposed Eustacie in an urgent undertone. ‘I must go!’

The young man said apologetically: ‘The devil’s in it that I can’t let you go. I would if I could, but to tell you the truth –’

‘There’s no call to do that!’ growled his companion. ‘Dang me, master, if I don’t think you’re unaccountable crazed!’

Eustacie, who had had time by now to take stock of her surroundings, discovered that the darker shadows a little way off were not shadows at all, but ponies. There seemed to be about a dozen of them, and as she peered at them she was gradually able to descry what they were carrying. She had been living in Sussex for two years, and she was perfectly familiar with the appearance of a keg of brandy. She exclaimed: ‘You are smugglers, then!’

‘Free-traders, my dear, free-traders!’ replied the young man cheerfully. ‘At least, I am. Ned here is only what we call a land smuggler. You need not heed him.’