Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (30 page)

More than this, she was ready to transform her whole nature, discarding like outworn garments her craving for excitement and callous egotism. She would teach herself to be warm-hearted, clinging, sensitive, because this was how Kit Locksby imagined her to be. When she was his wife – she found it impossible to contemplate her future under any other guise – how assiduously she would devote herself to him and to the children that she would surely give him, bringing to bear all her remarkable zest for living on to the pattern of her everyday life. She had been quite sincere when she had told him in one of her letters, ‘All pleasure I find is nothing without you.'

But one thing remained to be done before she could attain to this state of domestic felicity – one final risk must be taken. Sir Ralph stood in the way of her complete happiness and must be removed.

She who had so delighted in secrecy was impatient now to put an end to subterfuge where her love was concerned. For she knew that Kit would never be satisfied or at ease in the entanglements of a secret amour. Already he had suggested, with a hint of desperation in his tone, that they
should abandon their families, friends and country, and flee together to the Continent. Barbara had a better plan than this, a plan, however, that she must carry out alone. Another visit to the Sign of the Golden Glove in Buckingham, a few months of patience, and she would be free to enter again into those bonds of marriage which she found so galling at present, but which, with Kit as her partner, would be the fulfilment of her heart's desire.

But all this lay in the future. At present, Barbara, all aflame with love, lived for the brief reunions with Kit Locksby. Whenever he was able to leave home – for his father was something of an invalid and upon Kit as eldest son devolved much of the management of the estate – he sent her a note arranging a meeting at the house beside the trout stream. She had been six days without seeing or hearing from him, six dragging, fretful days. Then at last he had written explaining that his father's serious illness had kept him at home, and arranging to meet her this very night. She had been keyed up to a pitch of ecstatic expectation, when a second letter had arrived with the news that his father's condition had taken a worse turn and that he could not leave after all. The disappointment had been too much for her excited nerves. She felt the imperative need to relieve her pent-up feelings in some form of violent action. Almost against her will, certainly against her better judgment, she had crept once more up the winding stairs to her garret chamber. Robbery on the highway, this was the only drug that could deaden the tumultuous longing within her.

And now, dressed in her highwayman's clothes and sitting before the mirror in a little pool of candlelight, she
picked up her lover's letter, and read it again to charm and reassure herself by its loving phrases and its promises of a speedy meeting. He wrote:

‘To my most passionately beloved mistress, Barbara Skelton.

‘Dear heart,

I thank you for your tender letter and the lock of your delicate hair which I begged of you and which I will always carry with me. What an unhappy wretch I am to have nothing to send you in return but the news that I cannot come to you the day after tomorrow, for my father's heart is plaguing him sorely, and till I know how things go with him I dare not leave him or my mother. He is in great peril of his life I fear, and we all in sharp apprehension and distress, and so I know that I need make no further excuses to my kind sweetheart, nor tell her how much I long for her delightful company, and to kiss her sweet mouth, for if she knows anything she knows my true love and passion for her. I write in haste that this may reach you in time. Adieu my dearest dear. I shall be with you, God willing, at the earliest opportunity.

Your ladyship's passionate lover and faithful servant,

Kit Locksby.'

He had scribbled a postscript. ‘I have found something to send you. This rose. It is not as sweet as you.'

Barbara laid down the letter and picked up a white rose which lay on the table beside her. Smiling gently she held it to her nose, breathed in its delicious perfume, then brushed it lightly with her lips. She began to fasten it to her coat,
then, with a movement of revulsion, laid it down again. No! her lover's gift had no place in that dark, midnight life of which she was going to take final leave tonight. It must wait for her here, token of all the enchanted, candid tomorrows which she would share with him.

She opened the Dutch chest, which had once contained her wedding clothes, and put the rose in there, laying it down as softly as a mother would lay a child to sleep.

She bent towards the mirror to blow out the candles and her heart gave a jerk as she saw three candle flames reflected in its surface. What had possessed her to light three candles – dire portent – tonight of all nights?
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A feeling of heavy foreboding weighed down on her. The sloping, shadowy walls of the attic chamber seemed to lean down menacingly towards her. The little narrow room was congested with the baleful memories of the men she had slain – Ned Cotterell, Hogarth, Jerry Jackson, and those unknown victims of the highway to whom she had never, till tonight, given a passing thought. And suddenly she was horribly afraid. Not of them but of herself. It was as though she were already dead, and watching her own lost spirit through some other person's terror-stricken eyes.

The spasm passed. She told herself, ‘Love is making you a coward,' blew out the candles, and made her way furtively down the stairs and out into the moonlit night.

The superb, fantastically large moon was rising behind the trees; gradually as it soared clear of the tree-tops it would
diminish in size but increase in brightness, till it sailed high, serene and brilliant in the autumn sky.

Except for a few fitful moonbeams its light had not yet penetrated to the yew glades as Barbara Skelton cantered down them. The stone urn that marked their juncture was barely visible as she passed it, a dull pallor against the darkness. It was here, as she remembered with a pang of triumphant pleasure, that she had made her bold, sudden, and successful assault on Kit Locksby's heart. In years to come other lovers might make their vows or exchange embraces by it. But it would remain sacred to her, an unknown altar to her love, because no other woman would or could love so fiercely or so wholeheartedly as she.

Out on Watling Street she roamed aimlessly to and fro, a forlorn and sinister figure. Her tingling nerves craved for action, but her mind was, as usual, occupied with thoughts of her lover. She talked in a low voice to Fleury as he paced along the roadside. ‘Fleury, Fleury. This is the last time we shall ride abroad on the highway lay
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– you and I. Never fret, we shall learn better delights when we ride beside our master. Ah, how my soul dotes on him.' She patted Fleury's arched neck, sighing to herself and longing.

The moon reigned high now in the sky, diffusing a bluish light around it. A few opalescent clouds, like the torn wings of birds, drifted idly across it.

And as Barbara Skelton sat there on horseback, her uplifted face bathed in the moonlight, she heard the urgent sounds of galloping hoofs coming along the high road.

Instantly on the alert, she took refuge behind a cluster of trees. Here was her appointed prey. Unlucky traveller,
she thought with malicious amusement, to be riding along Watling Street so late, but just not late enough to be Barbara Skelton's final victim.

All unaware the solitary horseman approached her hiding place.

She took a deep breath, touched Fleury's flanks with her heels…

‘Stand and deliver,' cried Barbara, flourishing her pistol. The startled horse reared. As its rider controlled it, Barbara pointed her pistol at his head. ‘Down with your gold or expect no quarter.'

The man said, ‘Ruffian! I have no gold, and I ask for no quarter,' whipped out his sword and lunged at her.

She sat swaying on her saddle, not from the wound but because his voice was the voice of Kit Locksby.

She turned her horse and fled.

Kit Locksby, staring after her in some surprise, thought, ‘The rogue did not show much fight. Well, maybe that prick from my sword will make him shy of attacking lone travellers in future.'

He wiped his stained blade with a wry face. He thought himself a fool for it but he disliked shedding even a highwayman's blood. How his sweet Barbara would scold him for being out so late on such an ugly robbing road. But when he told her of his father's sudden, unexpected recovery, and how he had decided to travel by night so that he might spend all the next day with her, she would certainly forgive him…

Barbara rode wildly for home. That she was wounded hardly troubled her – she was only dimly aware of the pain in her chest, and the feeling that something untoward and alarming was happening to her body – only the thought, ‘He must not know'. She must get home, safe, undiscovered, creep into her bed. She would find some excuse for being indisposed. Ah cruel! that she should lose, by her own folly, even a few days of his dear company. But he must never know. That was all that mattered.

She passed familiar landmarks, trees, bushes, a pond, a barn, cottages, all dream-like in the moonlight. She was riding so hard, no wonder that she was getting breathless, giddy. She heard herself give deep sighing sounds. A damp, dark trickle was creeping down her coat. He had gashed her coat, torn too the white skin that he loved – her cruel, sweet lover.

She slackened pace when she reached the yew glades, not that the urgency of her panic had abated, but because she was finding it difficult to breathe; she had grown so faint, it was an effort to sit her horse. The moon looked down indifferently. The yew glades were dappled with moonlight. She was afraid of falling off, sinking unconscious into that checkered moonshine and darkness. He might come to the house and find her lying here…

Desperately she urged Fleury forward, clinging to his neck to keep herself in the saddle. He trotted in bewildered obedience to the little back door, stood still, cropping the grass.

Barbara half slipped, half fell off his back. She must reach her room before the pain and deadly faintness engulfed her.
How dark it was in the passage, and airless as a tomb. She staggered along, leaning against the walls, appalled at the sound of her own deep, gasping sighs.

Something wet and warm trickled from her lips, her mouth was full of the acrid taste of blood. At the foot of the secret staircase she collapsed. In a last despairing effort she tried to drag herself up, clutching at the lower steps. But the blood was gushing from her mouth. She was choking, groaning. Life was ebbing from her in profound moaning sighs.

She knew that she was dying, killed by her beloved's hand. In her last conscious moments she thought in agony and also in triumph:

‘He will never see me grow old.'

“Lie still, lie still but a little wee while.'
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T
HEY FOUND HER
lying there, in the early morning – she who had been known as the beautiful Lady Skelton, who had been so fine, delicate and elegant – lying in the pitiful disarray of violent death, a mysterious and appalling figure in mask and man's clothes.

She was carried up to her bedchamber, divested of her masculine attire, mask, pistols, cloak hidden furtively away, her terrible green eyes closed, the blood washed from her face and tangled bronzen curls. It was given out that Lady Skelton, sleep-walking, had fallen down the disused staircase and broken her neck. No one believed it. Rumours of blood, firearms, mask, outlandish gear, a strange and sinister mystery, sped from mouth to mouth. Few, at that time or for months to come, knew the true facts, but all suspected that their mistress had died a violent and shameful death. The whisperings, the pale, scared, yet eager looks, could not be hushed nor hidden, but all the funeral pomp that rank and money could command was thrown like a pall over the hideous scandal, concealing, it was hoped, the sudden, fearful extinction of that one personality under the solemn impersonality of death.