The Devil's Surrogate (25 page)

'And what if
he has more than the one man with him?' James asked.

Hannah was
carefully tipping powder down the gaping black muzzle, and didn't
respond.

'It looked
like he had several others working for him from what I could see
back at the green. Two pistols won't be much good then, even if
that thing might take a couple of men out in one shot.'

'He'll only
have the one,' Hannah replied, a note of total certainty in her
voice. She looked up from her task to smile grimly. 'Those other
buggers are only in this for a handful of whatever he's promised
them, mark my words, and Crawley won't want any witnesses this
night, not if he's planning what I think he's planning.'

'But if we
know he's planning to double-cross us, and he'll be using Matilda
as some sort of shield, why are we even thinking of being there to
meet him?'

'Because we ain't got a lot of choice from where I'm sitting,'
Hannah snapped. 'If we don't turn up by the three elms at the
appointed hour, he'll just take her back and hang her straight off.
And anyway, the fact that we're expecting the bastard to play dirty
gives us that little edge
he
won't be expecting. Now quit your mithering and
get down under this bed. There should be a couple of coils of rope
under there somewhere. If we hurry, there should be just enough
time for us to arrange a little diversion for Master Crawley and
his friend.'

Matilda
Pennywise groaned through her gag as she was finally lifted down
from the wagon. She could barely stand, and but for the support of
the man called Sean she would have collapsed to her knees. Nearly
two hours bound in one position, even though they had cut the cords
about her legs and ankles, had left her feeling stiff and sore, and
now she had to be half carried into the barn.

The events of
the day were blurred in her mind, but she remembered everything
clearly enough. First she was dressed in one of the ridiculous bird
costumes and herded together with a group of other similarly
dressed girls, and then they had been sent off into the woods to
run around as sport for those sinister looking black-garbed
hunters. Tired and covered in tiny scratches from all the brambles,
she had managed to avoid capture for what seemed like an eternity,
only to be scooped up at the last and trussed like a chicken bound
for the oven. She was then dumped into the little wagon where she
bounced about as the driver apparently went in search of further
quarry. After that there had been a sudden flurry of action in
which something happened to the original driver, and then a second
girl had been deposited in the wagon with her, a girl with the
largest breasts Matilda had ever seen. Then there was more trouble
outside, some sort of fight followed by a pistol shot. She heard
raised voices and some talk about a woman being hurt before the two
men lifted yet another female into the now crowded wagon, a woman
dressed like the male hunters except she wasn't wearing a mask, and
her face was all too familiar to Matilda. The innkeeper's daughter
had sat jammed into a corner of the wagon, her hands bound behind
her, her mouth stuffed with a gag, glaring across at her with
undisguised hatred. Matilda, who wondered why these men had chosen
to remove Kitty's gag and not her own, glared back at her in turn
until fatigue finally fell heavy upon her eyelids, and she drifted
off into a doze until the wagon finally stopped at the barn.

She still had
no idea what was happening, or who these newcomers were, but the
man Sean, at least, seemed to be taking care to handle her gently
as he helped her into one of the inner chambers.

'Bugger
me!'

Matilda's head
jerked up at the sound of the youthful voice, and she found herself
staring at Toby Blaine. For a moment she thought his outburst was
due to the fact that he had recognised her, but then she realised
her features were still hidden beneath the feathered hood and that
he had merely been surprised by her garish and bizarre
appearance.

'Stop staring,
lad,' Sean said quietly. 'Ain't the lady's fault, whoever she is.
Just make a bit of room there and help her down. She looks like she
could use a drink, too. See if you can get that thing off her head
and get her a drop of water, there's a good lad. I'm going to fetch
the other two in and I'll wager they've a healthy thirst on them by
now as well.'

Oona pushed
her way through a thicket of brambles and threw herself onto the
grass, alternately whimpering and growling and trying to turn her
head far enough to get a look at the wound on her shoulder. She
could smell the blood and feel the burning pain where the ball had
torn through her furry jerkin, ripping the flesh beneath it, but
she could not tell the extent of the damage. At least she could
still move her arm.

She rolled
over onto her back and sat up, staring down at the gleaming claws
tipping her fingers. They made it impossible for her to probe the
wound without inflicting further injury, and the rigidity of the
glove, as well as the intricacy of the fastenings holding them over
her hands, made it equally impossible for her to remove them
unaided. She snorted in anger and frustration, and shook her head
like a mad dog in an effort to clear it of the whirling red and
grey mists that always seemed to rise before her eyes whenever she
attempted to think straight.

She was
accustomed to pain. The handlers here were never sparing in their
use of the whip, and she could vaguely remember back to earlier
days when women had used canes on her, beating her savagely day and
night until she thought she would prefer to die than face another
dawn. It had all been so unfair, for it was not her fault. She had
not asked to grow into the grotesque creature that had emerged from
her original girlish body as she entered into adulthood. Oona could
hardly remember those innocent childish times now, yet she knew she
had been happy, and that she had lived in a large house and worn
soft clothes and slept in a soft bed. But she had been different,
and her difference had appalled and frightened people she thought
loved her and would protect her. They had beaten her. They had cast
her out. They had sold her to traders just to get her out of their
sight. And the traders had beaten her and made her into a wild and
savage animal, tormenting and then playing with her until the
object of so much horror and curiosity arose from its slumber and
displayed itself in all its blatant lust.

Her eyes
narrowed as these memories whirled through her head. She would
never forget the way they brought her here, dressed her as she was
now, and called her 'dog-girl' and 'bitch-hound'. They had forced
their various tonics into her, and there had been times when she
believed herself mad and that she truly was a wild dog. She barked
and yelped and bounded after whatever they told her to chase. She
fell upon women whose scent drove her to the verge of insane lust,
a lust only abated when she could mount them like bitches and
plunge her hated and demanding shaft deep inside them, pounding
until she sprayed her barren seed into their squirming bodies.

Slowly, Oona
rose to her feet. Her head was beginning to throb, as it always did
just before they gave her her morning and evening meals. She peered
down at herself. Sure enough, the throbbing member was fully awake
and demanding its needs be answered. She reached down and gently
touched its length with one talon, shivering as she did so, and
then raised her head and sniffed the night air speculatively.

The log was a
section of a large branch three to four feet in length and split in
two where a smaller branch had been growing off to one end. There
were four additional projections much smaller in diameter that had
all been broken off short, either by the original fall or in the
time since then.

'I had young
Toby Blaine, and a couple of his friends, drag this over for me
back in the spring,' Hannah said. 'I found it lying in the woods a
week or two before. You can see where someone's chopped a bit away
at one end, but it was a tad rotten, so they left it. It would have
done for firewood though, if I could have bribed one of the boys to
chop it for us.'

'I'd have done
it for you, if you'd had Matilda ask,' James asserted.

In the near
darkness, Hannah grinned. 'I know, and that was my next move. But
the thing is, young Jamie, do you reckon you can carry it?'

James walked
around the piece of timber, studying it.

'It probably
weighs about forty to fifty pounds,' she added. 'My pa used to
bring home lumps like this on his shoulder all the time.'

'How far do
you want me to carry it?' James asked. He stooped and knelt,
reaching beneath the twisted limb to test its weight.

'As far as the
three elms, where else do you think?' Hannah snapped irritably.
'You think I've got time to worry about lighting fires in the
cottage right now?'

'Well,
Mistress Pennywise,' James replied quietly, 'perhaps if you told me
exactly what it was you were planning, I'd have a better idea of
what was expected of me. Whether you've got magical powers as
people say, or not, I most certainly haven't, so I can't read
minds.'

'You wouldn't
want to read mine, young man,' Hannah retorted, yet her expression
softened and she smiled gently at him. 'But you're right,' she
said, and speaking quietly and rapidly, she outlined the plan she
had come up with.

James listened
in silence, nodding now and then, and then he too smiled. 'Yes,' he
said at last. 'Yes, that would most certainly come as something of
a surprise to Master Crawley. But the question is, can we make it
work?'

'No,' Hannah
replied sombrely. 'The question is, can we afford not to? And the
answer, my lad, ain't going to come to us standing here. Nothing
ventured, nothing gained, as they say.'

Jane stared
defiantly at Toby Blaine and at the two troopers, but her outward
defiance masked an inner turmoil that had begun the moment Paddy
and Sean removed her mask. It now reached a boiling point as she
was confronted with young Toby, who identified her without any
trouble, confirming Paddy's earlier suspicion as to her identity. A
few moments later, however, things became infinitely worse from her
point of view when the bird-girls were unmasked and it was revealed
that one of them was, despite her lack of hair, most unmistakably
Matilda.

'You're sure,
lad?' Paddy asked when Toby had stopped gawping long enough to tell
the men who she was.

Matilda, her
jaw aching from being gagged for hours, glared fiercely at the
Irishman. 'Of course he's sure, you idiot! He's known me and my
grandmother for as long as I've lived in the village, and that's
more than two years now.'

'But...?'
Paddy looked from Matilda, to Toby, to Jane and back to Matilda
again. 'You'll have to pardon my ignorance, miss, but I was under
the impression you was the girl that witchfinder fellow had in the
church, at least that was the talk while I was in the village.'

'She was,'
Toby interrupted. 'I was watching when that Crawley and his men
took her. Wickstanner was with them, and he read out something from
a piece of paper.'

'Yes,' Matilda confirmed, her face grim with tension at the
memory, 'that was me sure enough, and it was me he was intending to
hang, but then
she
took me from the crypt. There's a passageway leading out from
it into the graveyard, and she brought me here. I thought they'd
come to save me, but...' she shrugged, looked pointedly down at
herself and then across at Kitty, who was listening to the exchange
with a vaguely uninterested look on her face. 'Well, as you can
see, I was hardly rescued. The one good thing was that at least
here nobody was threatening to hang me.'

'You want to
try explaining any of this?' Paddy demanded, rounding on Jane. 'No,
I thought not,' he snapped when she just stared at him. 'Well, I
think you'll have some explaining to do to your daddy soon enough,
but meantime, if you're not you, Mistress Pennywise... I mean, if
the girl at the church isn't you, then who in heaven's name is
she?'

Matilda looked
confused. 'I don't understand,' she said, 'what girl at the church?
I'm here, aren't I?'

'Yes indeed,
you're
here,' Paddy confirmed, 'but they have a girl at
the church they
think
is you, or at least I suppose they think she's you, though I
can't for the life of me see why.'

'Because I was
kept masked, with a terrible spike-thing in my mouth so I couldn't
talk,' Matilda explained. 'This bitch took the mask off me in the
crypt. I didn't realise they were leaving someone else in my place
because it was so dark and it was all very confusing, but that's
what she must have done.'

'But who?'
Sean Kelly demanded. 'One of the poor girls from here, I
suppose.'

'Whoever it
was,' Matilda said, her eyes suddenly filling with tears, 'they'll
have done for her by now. Crawley was intending to hang me at dusk,
unless he's changed his mind.'

'I doubt he'll
have done that,' Jane spat, breaking her silence at last. 'Like
most men, he's only interested in two things, and enough gold
usually means that money takes precedence over the other
thing.'

'Then maybe
you've got more explaining to do than I thought,' Paddy said
grimly. 'If you left an innocent girl to be hanged, whether she's a
slave, a servant, or whatever, that's against all the laws I ever
heard of. You'll be answering to a judge for murder, missy, and
I'll wager it'll be yourself that's dangling on a rope before much
longer!'

'There was a
time when I could shin up a tree twice as fast as that,' Hannah
smiled. She peered up into the darkness of the foliage above her
head, barely able to make out the pale outline of James's breeches.
'You make sure you tie that knot exactly the way I showed you now,'
she warned, 'and not too tightly either, otherwise it won't slip
through properly.'