The Whispering Swarm (12 page)

By the time Moll arrived I was talking casually to Galloping Dick Langley, one of the younger actors who had joined me on the bench and remained in character the whole time. He talked of the great steel toby and robbing double-decker coaches. I had begun to enjoy the game.

When Moll turned up I was surprised by her costume. Perhaps she'd had no time to change. She wore the clothes I saw her in when she rode past me that first day—a tricorne on her red-gold ringlets, a linen stock at her throat, over which frothed a luxury of white lace, matching what she wore on her wrists. A ruby velvet military-style coat covered a calf-length brocaded waistcoat whose buttons were as bright as her violet eyes. She wore doeskin breeches and, unsurprisingly, good riding boots, their cuffs turned at the knee, their spurs blunted. On her arm she carried a cloak and in that same hand a sword and some gloves. She grinned when she saw me and signalled for me to stand.

Still amused, stamping in her boots like a soldier, Moll guided me out of the bar and up a short flight of stairs to a landing and what appeared to be a closet. She opened the door and I saw it held bottles. A quick glance around and she opened the door supporting the shelves to reveal another door. Sliding a catch on this, she swung it open, showing me into a small room full of costumes: shirts, waistcoats, overcoats, boots, stocks and hats. She made me strip and get into clothes she found for me there, including a pair of riding boots into which I tucked my ordinary trousers. I now wore a long waistcoat and overcoat much like hers, a hat and a wig which she fitted firmly on my head. I also carried a cloak, sword and gloves. So much for my mid-twentieth-century dandyism, I felt a bit of an idiot.

‘They'll do you, Master Michael!' She hurried me out of the room, closing the two doors carefully behind her. ‘Do ye ride?'

Wasn't this taking authenticity too far? As it happened I had grown up bareback riding the totter's ponies in our mews and knew a little about keeping my seat and guiding my mount. But I would never call myself a horseman!

‘I'm no expert,' I said.

She laughed. ‘We'll make you one soon enough.' She saw my sardonic glance at her feet. ‘Barefoot Maggy's riding as Moll Midnight tonight, sir.' She smiled. ‘Maybe you should choose a nom de guerre for yourself? “Cock o' the Highway,” perhaps?' She laughed at my look of disgust.

My initial surprise and hesitancy subsiding, I now thoroughly enjoyed the masquerade. Within minutes we were trotting from the stable yard on our way through streets I hardly recognised though they pretty much followed familiar routes. Fog became mist as we galloped out of the city. I felt trapped astride a cement mixer, rattling and bouncing on Jessie, my amiable, forgiving mare, while I desperately tried to find my seat.

In heavy tooled-leather holsters already attached to my saddle I found two monstrous flintlock pistols, almost the size of rifles. It was as well I didn't really know how to use them. They looked fearsomely lethal, even if they were stage props. Not that they seemed fakes. The flints were real enough. I could see that powder already primed the pans. I could smell it, too. The metal parts were good quality. The steel barrel was bound to the dark oak stock by glowing brass bands and the steel ramrod was fixed firmly in place in its own slot beneath the barrel. I knew weapons like these from local museums, films like
The Highwayman,
Noyes's poem, and in Olivier's hands onstage in
The Beggar's Opera,
so I knew how they worked, more or less. You hauled back the hammer as far as it would go, pointed, and pulled the trigger hoping the spark would catch the primer to ignite the gunpowder and discharge your massive lead ball in the general direction of the target. These brutes looked as if the recoil would knock me backwards off Jessie. The good-natured chestnut was a clattering, jolly hunter in her prime. She enjoyed a long-striding gallop if given her head. Concentrating on keeping my seat and posting as I'd once been taught, I gave her that head as little as possible! For a while, as we went by taverns and a few shops, we slowed to a trot, according to the law. Riding close beside me Moll took these moments to fill me in on what was still a rather murky plan. I have to say I barely understood her. Sometimes I thought I felt reality tearing like rotten stage canvas behind me. I remained determined to enter as fully as possible into the spirit of the scenes. Charade it might be but I had little to lose and I was fascinated to see how the game unfolded.

*   *   *

In darkness we rode on for hours. At one point the moon was bright enough for me to see a church-steeple clock, its hands set at midnight. This was by no means the romantic evening I'd planned in the warmth of Romano's, I thought ruefully. My bones had begun to ache. I was unclear how we had passed through London and I had only the vaguest idea where we were. Hertfordshire, perhaps? Essex? In my whole life I had not travelled so far north, certainly not on horseback!

Before long, and much sooner than I expected, we had reached wilder country than I'd ever thought to find so near the city. The landscape felt unreal, lacking a single living soul, save for the owls and nightjars calling from the thickets. The only light in this open country came from the slowly sinking moon and the stars. From horizon to horizon the sky was a sprawl of sparkling points, wide and deep, as if the galaxy were a jug of mercury splashed against black slate. I loved the smell of gorse, heather and still water as we made our way along unpaved roads and out onto a wide expanse of yielding grass full of flying insects and the chirr of crickets. The cold air tasted sweeter than any air before. Where was this primitive, prehistoric wetland? Moll knew the low-lying marsh well, guiding us along narrow paths of relatively firm ground. Were these the legendary Hackney Marshes I'd heard about in old cockney songs? What an adventure! I felt as if I had galloped beyond the edge of the known globe and was in another wilder, simpler, easier world where such things as the atom bomb and the Cold War were unknown and all you needed to emerge victorious from a passage of arms was a sense of honour and a bit of courageous resolve! What a simple, invigorating world! Every sensation was new to me! No surprise, really, for I was a true Londoner. All I had ever experienced of the countryside was Hyde Park and what I could see through a train window on my way to Southend. The experience really was making me drunk.

Moll reined in beside me, handing me a wad of dark silk pulled from her pocket; the hood went over my head and settled on my shoulders. I adjusted it until I found eye and mouth holes then sat hat and wig back on my head. ‘What now?' I asked.

‘Now,' said Moll, with a wild grin, ‘we rob the Hackney mail. Check your barkers, Master Michael! Be sure the powder's level in the pan.' When I showed hesitation, she reached over and showed me how to cock and prepare my pistols, flipping up the covers of the priming pans. Then we were off again, with a light rain flickering through the sky. We followed what I thought at first was the bed of a narrow-gauge railway until I realised it more closely resembled a tram line. In 1952 the last trams had rolled through the London suburbs but I still remembered them with nostalgia. You knew exactly where a tram line went. The trams were built to outlast the pyramids. But they had been sacrificed anyway.

Now Moll brought our horses to a halt in the shadow of a grove of oak trees. The moon came out intermittently and showed nothing but gorse and clumps of trees: Hackney Heath as it had not existed for centuries. I began to realise I had a serious problem. Might I really be experiencing some sort of waking dream or delusion? Madness, in other words.…

I had read Twain's
Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court
and L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's Harold Shea stories, but purely as satirical fiction. I didn't believe in so-called ‘parallel worlds'. Twain's at least had been familiar. This half-known England was far more complicated and troubling. I had ridden on trams as a kid. I had read dozens of books and comics featuring Turpin, Duval and the other legendary highwaymen. I had been as fascinated by them as I had been with the James brothers and Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, Pecos Bill and Kit Carson. And Buck Jones, of course, who, according to legend, died heroically in the 1940s, saving people from a terrible fire.

In this waking delusion I felt I had entered an existence obeying entirely different notions of time and identity, exactly like a vivid nightmare. If there were rules, no one told me what they were. Kafka, indeed! The eighteenth and twentieth centuries somehow overlapped. Absurd! Surreal! I had speculated, very crudely, on such things in the odd science fiction story, but never expected to experience them. I was alarmed. This went quite literally beyond my wildest dreams.

At Moll's prompting I looked across the marshy flatland. In the distance was a fuzz of yellow light I took for a farmhouse until it came creeping towards us. I heard a faint clanging like a distant, off-key bell. The air around me buzzed and the ground underfoot shook so I suspected an earthquake. Moll handed me her spyglass. Putting it to my eye I was amazed to distinguish a big Feltham double-decker tram of a kind I thought vanished from the urban landscape. London Transport livery, all flashing brass, bright sparks and crimson enamel with a bold black-and-white destination board indicating exactly what her route was: Hackney Downs to the Theobald's Road depot, less than half a mile from my own Brookgate home! There was her number picked out in gold above her single, brilliant headlight in the centre of her bow, below the driver's cab.

‘A long-hauler going via London Fields carrying the registered mail with a full complement of recently paid company officials. And Universal still pays in cash!' Moll sounded excited as she heaved back the hammer of her right-hand pistol and sighted along its barrel. ‘We'll leave the mail for them as waits for it, but the rest are our particular prey. Ready?'

I could barely lift my flintlock to the saddle and hold it so that I could rest it over my left arm, sideways on. I laughed.

Then, lamp and lights glaring, the rattling monster pounded towards us, blazing and roaring like a military brass band. Moll took a bead at an unseen point in the sky. Her pistol flashed and boomed. I heard a hiss and something whistled past my face, just grazing my silk-covered cheek, followed by a crash as the tram's overhead power line hit the roof of the vehicle, sending the conductor rod on the roof swinging crazily, back and forth, swishing like a gigantic windscreen wiper, scarcely visible against the sky. Her emergency brakes automatically squealed on. I saw the driver in his cab trying to fight the tram's momentum and hold his position. The monstrous vehicle shrieked and swayed like a stricken dinosaur, shaking and gasping, until at last she settled back on her tracks and shuddered to a stop.

Out of the cooling night I glimpsed only Moll's breath rising like ectoplasm into the darkness and then her voice came calm and authoritative, absolutely chilling as she called with sardonic good manners in Kensington English: ‘Throw down your lever, if you please, Mr Driver!' Within seconds there came a thump nearby and I saw something bright in the grass. Moll made no attempt to pick it up. From his cab the uniformed driver stared furiously unseeing into the blackness.

Moll's voice was still a drawling, lazy half shout. ‘Now one of my men will come among you for donations while another will keep an eye on the platform. We want you gents to put your hands deep in your pockets and this bein' the last Friday in the month you'll find those fat wage packets. Packets, gents, you tell your workers you can't afford to share, times being so hard. The company must be more generous than you credit 'em. They're divvying a bonus or two, I hear.' Then, with military impatience, ‘Stump up, gentlemen, for our barkers have sensitive triggers, liable to go off at the slightest disappointment. My lads here are hungry for some target practise.' At Moll's signal her ‘men' swung from my horse, as we had rehearsed on the way. Carrying my saddlebags over my shoulder I leapt onto the tram's platform, my pistol in my belt. Full of the thrill of adventure I took the outer stairs to the top deck first, bowing to the cursing executives and waving my heavy barker, which I stuffed back in my belt as I collected the big white fivers, twenty pounds or more a head, from the well-fed, grumbling Universal Transport Company executives. As Moll had predicted, not once did I have to do anything more than show them my pistol.

Dream or not, I was enjoying the game. I tipped my hat and bowed to them as if I'd been a tobyman all my life, then stepped down the steel stairs to the lower deck and demanded the same from the red-faced bureaucrats in dark suits and loud ties blustering their threats as they parted with more than half their pay, counted out from their monthly packets. You could smell their outrage. From the size of our ‘take' it was clear these men were doing well behind their desks. My uncle Willie, who had been a Japanese POW, had worked for the tram company until 1952. He told me how the weekly wages of drivers or conductors were half or less what these office workers received. Where I could, I took the empty packets, too. It was Moll's idea. Here was proof how much more these elevated clerks received compared to the drivers who faced the responsibilities and dangers of the ‘steel toby'.

A loud shot. Part of our agreed signal. I lifted my hat to the growling executives and headed for my horse.

Then, as musket balls yelped past our heads, splintering wood and thumping into the turf, with our saddlebags stuffed with rustling fivers, fresh oncers and ten-bob notes, our cloaks flying behind us, we were off at full gallop the way we had come. The rushing adrenaline insured I kept my seat. A louder bang. Something hissed by my left shoulder and hit a willow with a great thunk, showing how serious our game was! Another shot and Moll, a black shadow, swerved, still at full gallop, to lead me along a series of narrow paths through the marsh. ‘They've unshipped the top deck cannon!' Her big stallion took a hedge easily with my mare following. I, however, threatened to remain behind, almost flying clear of saddle and stirrups. I lost my seat more than once and pulled too heavily on the reins, but patient Jessie looked after me. By jumping more gates and streams we reached open fields and avoided the larger, better-lit towns. I saw a wooden signpost for Shoreditch, Stepney and Stoke Newington. The first time we slowed to a walk Moll reached over to pat my arm. ‘Good work, Master Michael! This cash will go to the Road Transport Workers Union to help their members pay for a planned strike. Meanwhile the bosses will have learned a lesson from us. They've just received a taste of what we can do if we decide to act. There'll be a thousand pound in our bags tonight. We'll take a levy of five per cent and the rest goes to the union. Workers—and bandits—of the world unite against the bosses. This is how it should be, eh?' Her eyes were alive with excitement.