The Whispering Swarm
I had remembered Mr Ackermann’s advice that it was always best to run from danger if there was a good chance of getting away. ‘One big punch and then run like buggery, my boy.’ Wondering why they showed such fear of the third man, I ran like an Olympic athlete, looking for the nearest crowded place, preferably a pub or a restaurant, but discovered myself somehow at the same gate. Opening it for the second time, I expected to be back in the Sanctuary where I could at least find allies. Instead I was again standing at the far end of that Inn of Court through which I’d come. Maybe Clitch and Love had been unable to follow me any further. Local statutes? A genuine fear of God’s wrath if they drew blood outside their established precinct? And was the third man still around?
Clearly, visiting the Alsacia was more perilous than I had first realised. I was very happy that the Alsacians seemed confined, for whatever reason, to their own particular manor. Custom or superstition or both? I knew in my bones I was afraid of that pair for good reason. I recognised them as men of terrible, gleeful sadism, like some serious East End gangsters I’d been around all my life. Unlike the Teds, the Kray brothers had real ambition to do murder. I had no intention of getting beaten up or killed by their like on that foggy night. They recognised my saviour and feared him, but who was he? Tomorrow I would make sure I reached Alsacia when it was still light. I would tell my mum I was going to a late-night movie with a friend in Earls Court and would probably stay over. That way I could leave at daylight on Saturday morning.
I got home breathless. Now I was completely uncertain about the nature of what I’d witnessed. The costume party at the pub? The old monk and his Cosmolabe? The cloak-and-dagger stuff in the square? Part of me was a sceptic—even a cynic—but part of me was also romantic and gullible. I felt distinctly dizzy. Was I in some waking dream? Maybe someone wasn’t telling me all they should. Had I gone mad? Could the supernatural really exist? If the last were true, I was in a serious moral dilemma. I was still young enough to try telepathic experiments with my friends; gullible enough to wonder if, just possibly, the tarot could tell the future. But I believed there were scientific, not magical, explanations. I was determined to know the truth, fully prepared for some perfectly ordinary explanation.
Of course it never once occurred to me that I might simply forget the whole thing, as one does a dream, and not keep the next day’s appointment with Moll Midnight, whose reality or lack of it had me so thoroughly mesmerised. She was not even, I told my teenage self, my type. I should have recognised the symptoms. This wasn’t the first time. I had fallen in love again.
6
MOLL
That following night, I swapped my jumper for my knitted black tie and a stiff stud-at-the-back white collar, with cuff links showing at my wrist, and a black duffel coat. Pretty damned dapper! Definitely stylish. I skipped my Woody Guthrie railroad hat. To my own eyes I looked as much like Max Stone as possible. Even more presentable. I was, however, still awkwardly self-conscious as I went to meet Moll Midnight on that darkening Friday afternoon. I planned to go to Greek Street, Soho. Romano Santi was one of London’s best restaurants. They would take several pounds out of my earnings, but it would be worth it. I believed in treating a girl the way my mother always expected to be treated.
Even then, as now, I thought in terms of what a piece of work would buy. A short story brought me a minimum of a guinea a thousand words, often two, sometimes three. That was the rent. The slick magazines were at that time beyond my aspirations but later I would earmark so much for new furniture, so much for utilities and so on. Once I had earned what I needed, I would take it easy for a while. Anticipating a stiffish bill at Romano’s, I knew I could always do more freelance work to improve my fortunes. A posh meal for two was the equivalent of six pages of text in Tarzan Adventures. I had more than enough cash to cover tonight.
Running down a virtually deserted New Fetter Lane, I got to the inn gate in a hurry. It was growing dark by five and I wanted to be early so that I should not be caught by Messrs Clitch and Love at night. I would ask Moll how much I should fear them. Maybe I should find a new way out of Alsacia?
The square was lighting up as the lawyers’ offices completed their week’s work. Solicitors’ clerks scampered from one door to another carrying briefcases of every size. Messengers ran to and fro with large manila envelopes under their arms. Wigs on heads or in hands, QCs walked briskly from the law courts or the Old Bailey to their chambers. The lamplighter rode around the square on his solid black bike, igniting the gas in the globes of the big-bracketed wall lamps and the diamond-shaped pole lamps. The Inns of Court worked a little later on Fridays but rarely opened, these days, at the weekend. Even then the City was beginning to stop working on Saturday mornings. The neighbourhood would be almost deserted by Friday evening.
I rarely noticed it back then, but I always had a very faint humming in my ears. Too faint to be a nuisance, it was almost below my consciousness. I don’t think I even realised that it had stopped. In some momentary conflict, I pushed open the big gate into Alsacia.
There was no sign of last night’s aggressive duo. I was relieved and instantly relaxed. A few more steps and I was outside The Swan With Two Necks. Two more and I was in the snug camaraderie of the private bar, looking for Moll. I knew I was earlier than we had arranged but my need to avoid that pair of self-elected ‘Parliamentary’ policeman had its boot on the neck of my thoughts. Who the hell were they? But now I was through the gate and in the pub I worried about Moll standing me up. Several of her companions of the previous evening were there, including a tall, rather gloomy man with a silver streak through his black hair, dressed up as Pecos Bill, the legendary hero of Texas.
Bill seemed a little grey and haggard, rather like my uncle Larry when he was treated for cancer. Here he wore a simple suit of dark tweed. In his comic book he sported an exaggerated cowboy outfit, with wide chaps and a heavy, tooled-leather vest, as well as a white shirt, a red bandanna and a gun belt with a single holster for his .45, and he carried his lariat. Bill kept his own counsel at the bar and I was far too shy to introduce myself. I sat on a bench against a wall in the shadows and watched as Bill was joined by Colonel Carson, in a well-cut, if Victorian, three-piece suit. Kit’s hair was shorter and less fair than in the comics, as had been Bill Cody’s. He was trying to cheer up Pecos Bill, recruiting the older Turpin to help. He kept holding his hand to the light and pointing. I realised then how old he was. I could almost see through his skin. His friends shook their heads and smiled supportively. But the Texan hero refused consolation and eventually the others shrugged and parted from him.
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 ridi
ng 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.