A RAVEN EMBOSSED IN GOLD
3. Fallen Amongst Thieves
The moors were the same as I had left them, bleak and cold and empty. The rabbits were as reluctant to enter my snares as they had been, the rain was as wet as I remembered and the nights just as cold. But I was glad to be there; there was something strangely comforting about the silence and the isolation, about the vast sky and the empty world where there was nothing to do but walk. And so I followed my raven. I caught sight of it occasionally winging across the open sky, forever westward and I below, the fool, forever wandering. I crossed the moors and passed through North Allerton before climbing the harsh ridge of the Pennines and going down into Lancashire. There, whether by accident of design, I fell amongst thieves.
There were two of them; dark harsh men who carried loaded pistols in their pockets and knives in their boots. They tried to rob me but I had nothing to take so they laughed and called me a 'vagabond boy'. My cards they found but they neither knew nor understood what they held in their hands and so they allowed me to keep them and there, beneath the stars, I told their fortunes in exchange for food. I told them of money and riches, of horses that rode through the night and of pistol shots in the dark. I also saw that one, betrayed by the other, would hang; his body rotting on a gibbet as a warning to others. The second would escape and take ship across the ocean to die in a foreign country. But I did not tell them that, it was far in the future and the betrayer, the Judas, who would take the spoils at the expense of his friend, had as yet no intention of doing so, any more than the other knew that the shadow of the noose hung in his eyes. I wanted to live, and these were highway robbers, these were killers and the blood on their hands ran like a red ribbon through the tale my cards told me. On that dark night in the fire light discretion was by far the better part of valour.
They gave me food and they gave me gin, and they laughed as I fell asleep not knowing whether I would wake alive the next morning. Of course I did, I woke in the grey dawn, sick and dizzy but living still. I looked for my raven, sitting upon a tree branch or wheeling high in the air above me. But the bare trees and the cold sky remained resolutely empty so I stayed with the highwaymen and learned their trade. I learned to ride and learned to shoot; I already knew how to steal and how to hide. I stood on roads beneath the moon, a pistol in my hand and cried out those infamous words, "Stand and Deliver!". I rode through the night, my pockets heavy with gold and jewels that would be spent within a week, drinking and carousing in the taverns, sleeping in soft feather beds instead of upon the cold, hard ground. Hundreds of pounds must have flowed through their hands and they could hold none of it, for all that they talked incessantly of what they would do when they were rich they spent their gains as fast as they could steal them. I had nothing of course, I rode with them, drank with them and stole for them but the money was never mine and I did not wish it. I took the food and I drank the gin, I slept between linen sheets in canopied beds but their dreams of riches were never mine. I was waiting for something else. I was waiting for a sign, a sign that never came and I began to think that my raven had abandoned me and that I would remain a highwayman until the law caught me and danced me on the scaffold as a warning to those as foolish as I.
I never killed. I fired my pistols into the night sky, I held them to the temples of our reluctant victims, but I never killed. "Your money or your life" was the rule and I held to it. I took the money and their lives were theirs to keep. Nor did I see my compatriots kill, although I know that they did. There were nights when they whispered together, their shadowed eyes hard upon some rich gent at an inn before following him out and returning evasive and proud wearing dead men's clothes and dead men's boots. Their pockets weighed down with blood, their pistols warm and stinking of death; the millpond, the river or the woodland richer for the body they had bequeathed it. For all that I was never included in these enterprises and neither did I benefit from them, still these sad, abandoned deaths would hang me too. There would have been no excuse, no circumstance that would mitigate the truth. They were thieves and murderers and I was complicit in all their crimes.
It was not the sort of life that could last and nor would I have wanted it to. My first clue that things would change came on an autumn evening at a tavern called The Weaver's Arms at Sabden Bridge, deep within the shadow of Pendle Hill1 . We had been successful two days before and, still flush with gold and victory, they fell at once to drinking whilst I was left to settle the horses in the stable and arrange rooms with the dour landlord who leaned upon his bar and, with narrowed eyes, contemplated the richly dressed ruffians who took their leisure at his fire. And there it was that the raven caught my eye, embossed in gold upon the cracked and ancient spine of a book upon a dusty shelf, high above the bar.
I asked him about it but he just shrugged his shoulders, he couldn't read, no one who frequented that tavern could read, that book and the two beside it had sat there for longer than he could recall. He was not interested, he did not care about the books but I was spellbound by their presence, my hands wished to hold them, my eyes yearned to read them. I had not a penny in my pocket but I asked him to sell them to me. I would have begged if I thought it would have helped my cause.
For just a moment the landlord's eyes, curious and wary, met mine and then snapped back to the fireplace where my compatriots, their pistols ostentatious upon the table, were demanding something more than gin from the young woman who had served them. Her eyes were filled with fear and I was put in mind of a lamb menaced by wolves. The lamb was the landlord's daughter and her fear was my opportunity. Her father offered me the books if I would remove the danger from his inn and from his daughter immediately and without delay or trouble.
It was an offer I could not refuse and I accomplished my task by appealing to their greed. I told them that we had not been the only strangers in that tavern that night, that a rich man in a carriage had rested there not two hours before and had declared his intention of travelling on to Skipton. We could, I told them, catch him on the road, our horses could out pace a carriage and it was an opportunity we should not ignore. Already warm with gin they could not see the foolishness of a rich man leaving the carriage roads to stop at a piss poor place like Sabden Bridge, the lure of gold was too great and we left without delay, three unread books hidden in my saddle bags.
Of course there was no carriage upon the Skipton road, but that hardly mattered, the rain came heavy and hard out of the north and we only made it as far as the Black Bull in Padiham before we stopped again and there we spent the night. I did not show my books to the others, I did not think that I could adequately explain them, but as they sank further and further into their cups I found a quiet corner and looked at my prizes. One was a Bible, old and scuffed, I have it still; the second was a copy of Culpepper2 ; but the third, the one with the Raven in Flight embossed upon the spine was a book I had never heard of. It was entitled 'The Words of The Black King' and had been written by a man named Richard Whitebuck over a hundred years before. It claimed to be a record of the life, words and deeds of John Uskglass, collected from a variety of lost manuscripts. I searched it avidly, scanning the pages for the stories I remembered from my childhood. I couldn't find them, they weren't in there, it was all of politics and treaties with kings, courtiers and fairies. When magic appeared at all it was couched in Latin phrases that I could not understand. The book was beyond my skills, beyond my interest. I was disappointed; I put them back in my saddlebag and drank until I slept.
The next morning we continued on to Skipton with no great purpose in mind, and from Skipton we rode further east, to Harrogate and to Knaresborough where Ursula Southeil had made her famous prophesies3 . I was back in Yorkshire and it felt good to me. We began to haunt the Great North Road4 , there were richer pickings there than on the back roads of Lancashire but greater dangers too. We were not the only criminals preying on that great highway; our victims were better prepared and the tolls and the watch were always waiting. Life on the Great North Road was rich but short for men like us. My compatriots were fools but I was the greater fool for remaining with them. My cards had told me disaster was imminent but I chose to ignore the warning. A part of me was tired, tired of wandering, tired of living the life I had and I believe that down deep, somewhere in the unacknowledged depths of my soul, I desired that promised disaster and wished to embrace it.
The watch were waiting for us on the road north of Whetherby, at an often-used place where a bend in the road forced carriages to slow. As I rode out before it, my pistol firing thunder into the air, the carriage slewed to a halt, the horses rearing as the coachman pulled on the reins. I kept my second gun upon him as my compatriots ran to the carriage, one on each side, wrenching the doors open, eager to see the prize they had won but finding only loaded pistols aimed at their faces. I had barely time to realise what was happening when the coachman pulled back his cloak and aimed a musket at me and the trees lining the road suddenly bristled with guns as the watch advanced upon us.
I wheeled my horse and rode for my life hearing the blast of the coachman’s musket behind me. I galloped down two men who stood in my way and careered off the road hearing the hue and cry raised behind me. I rode till my horse was a river of sweat, his eyes rolling in his head and when he stumbled on a tree root at the edge of a thicket I knew he could carry me no further. Listening to the shouts of my pursuers behind me I stripped him of his saddle, bridle and bit and let him go, as naked and as free as the day he was born.
1. Pendle Hill in Lancashire; famous as the home of the Pendle Witches in the early 17th century.
2. Nicolas Culpepper 1616-1654; writer of The English Physician (1652) and The Complete Herbal (1653), seminal texts on herbal medicine.
3. Ursula Southeil; also known as Mother Shipton, a famous prophetess who lived in a cave besides a petrifying well at Knaresborough.
4 . The Great North Road; an ancient and busy highway that connected London, the capital of England to Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland.
