Jack Bolt and the Highwaymen's Hideout Read online

  “Well, I—”

  “You are a disgrace to your family.”

  “Well, I—”

  “You! Who were once a bright and golden hope!”

  “Yes, I—”

  “And now you are a criminal! Henry Vane! The people may laugh at your robberies and your witty little rhymes and your gallant manners—but you are no Robin Hood! You steal for yourself. You are a worthless, common thief!” She spat the word out in disgust. “To think that once I loved you!”

  “You—?”

  One of the highwaymen snickered and another made an “ooooo” noise. Jack watched as the woman leaned forward and spoke something to Lord Henry. He recoiled as if stung by the words.

  “Enough!” shouted Tom Drum, swaggering forward in his fine boots. If His Lordship was stuck for words, he would take charge! “Hand over your valuables!” he ordered abruptly and shook his sack at her.

  Lady Marchwell glared at him. “Here!” she cried, her eyes filling with tears. She began fumbling with her rings. Her hands trembled so much that she could barely pull them off.

  “Emily, please.” Lord Henry’s voice shook with emotion.

  “Emily?” whispered Polly.

  “Emily—” Henry Vane’s voice broke. This was discourteous … ungentlemanly. What a disaster for his reputation! This was his past—he had betrayed his past. How could he explain? “I … I never harmed anybody,” he said lamely. “And I do give to the poor.” He began to dismount.

  “Take this!” Lady Marchwell shrieked, barely controlling her anger. “Here. My engagement ring. And know—I care NOT that you have the ring, for on Saturday I shall have a new ring, given at the Church of Saint Stephen by the Honorable Horace Hogg.”

  “NO!” yelped Lord Henry, for the news that she was to be married took him by surprise. Such surprise, in fact, that he caught his foot in the stirrup and tumbled into the dust with one leg still stuck in the air. “Oh, foul day! Oh, most vile news! Oh, Hogg. Oh, my leg!”

  “Are you all right, my lord?” asked Tom Drum, looking on uselessly.

  “Not. All right,” growled Lord Henry. His dignity was destroyed, forced as he was to speak upside down between the horse’s legs. He spat out the grit and dirt and tried to replace his wig and hat. “Let the lady go,” he shouted. “Let them all go. I am ruined. Ruined. And stop standing there like a pumpkin. Help me up!”

  Chapter Nine

  The Retreat

  The highwaymen didn’t just let the passengers go. They robbed them first. Jack watched from the tree as beside him Polly muttered under her breath, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, dear me.” Lord Henry disentangled himself, cursing all the while, and Dirty Dick, Bad-Breath Bernard, and Pete the Pudding took the jewels and the money and the silver shoe buckles from the passengers and rifled through the two trunks strapped to the back of the carriage.

  “Go on!” shouted Lord Henry to the driver when at last he had remounted Red Ruby. “Go on!” He brought his hand down hard on the coach horses’ flanks. The driver cracked his whip, and the carriage took off.

  The back of Lord Henry’s hat was dented, his wig was lopsided, and he had a smear of dirt down one side of his face. He turned to the gang.

  “What are you looking at?” he demanded.

  “Nothing,” snorted Pete the Pudding.

  But Jack caught a grin cross the face of Pete the Pudding as he turned away, and there was a stifled snort from Dirty Dick. Henry ignored them. He walked Red Ruby toward Jack and Polly. Jack climbed down onto Henry’s horse and sat behind the highwayman. He didn’t dare say anything. Henry’s face was stony and unreachable.

  “Follow us to Wittlesham,” he ordered flatly. “Tom, you take Polly. We’ll meet at Nanny Manners’s house and rest up. You can be sure that they will raise the alarm and the soldiers will be abroad soon.”

  He nudged his horse and they set off down a bank into the dark forest. Jack clung close as the branches brushed past. Occasionally Henry would say “Down” as they came to an overhanging branch, and they ducked down, but otherwise he was silent.

  His pride was wounded. The gang had seen him encounter an old friend. For them it had shed light into his dark past—but for Henry it had shed light on his darker present.

  After a while they reached a clear path in the forest and Red Ruby began to trot. Jack bounced up and down uncomfortably. It was lucky that he had ridden a few times on vacations. The other members of the gang followed. No one spoke. Jack felt himself relax. The farther they were from the robbery, the safer they must be, he thought. Staring at the gloomy trees passing, Jack wondered who Lady Marchwell was and how Henry Vane knew her. And then he wondered why Henry Vane was a highwayman. If he had once been a gentleman, why was he now robbing other gentlemen? To give to the poor? Henry pretended highway robbery was a big joke, grand and glamorous, but Jack knew it wasn’t. It was a desperate, deadly game.

  As they crossed a stream in the woods, Red Ruby’s hooves made a clattering noise on the stones, and there was a shout ahead. Jack hardly had time to take it in, but Henry Vane wheeled Red Ruby around in an instant and clattered back through the stream. Jack clung on tightly. Tom Drum was just coming toward them.

  Lord Henry leaned over and hissed, “Back! Go back. The soldiers are camped here!”

  The highwaymen immediately turned their horses and spurred them back down the path, as behind them more shouts filled the air. At the edge of the forest, the highwaymen found open ground and raced across, their horses’ hooves thudding on the earth. They were well ahead now, but this was no time to relax. Behind them they heard the soldiers calling. If they had guessed that it was the highwayman Henry Vane, they’d soon be searching the surrounding villages.

  “Let’s go around by Gedgrave,” suggested Dirty Dick, “and up by the church.”

  “They’ll be crawling all over the place!” objected Bad-Breath Bernard.

  “Not yet,” said Lord Henry. “There’s time to get to Wittlesham.”

  “And don’t you worry yourselves,” Tom Drum said with glee. “We’ve got a hideout in Wittlesham. It’s so good you’ll never believe it. Trust me—they’ll never find us! Not in a hundred years.”

  They abandoned their horses on the outskirts of the village. Henry left Red Ruby in a farmyard, and the others disappeared down a lane. Jack was relieved to be off the horse. Then Jack, Polly, and the highwaymen raced past the little thatched cottages into the old village square. The daylight was fading, dusk falling around them.

  “Mrs. Manners is in the Cap and Stockings with Old Ma Cracklepot,” Polly whispered to Henry.

  “Good.”

  “But the house is no place to hide,” she told them. “The soldiers came the other night. They searched all the houses. They crawled over us.”

  “Ah, but we’ve got a secret,” Henry Vane replied, arching his eyebrow. “Haven’t we, Jack?”

  “You bet,” Jack replied. For a second he worried that the hideout might no longer be there, then he dismissed the thought from his mind.

  “Lead on, Jack Bolt,” said Lord Henry. A playfulness seemed to be returning and Jack glimpsed the flash of white teeth.

  He led them up the rickety stairs into the bedroom. And then to the fireplace. Beside the grate he found the iron plate that was the secret door into his bedroom. At the top he found the clasp and he twisted it. The iron plate fell open toward him and he saw his bedroom on the other side. He smiled. “Come on.”

  The men crawled through, one after the other. They emerged into Jack’s bedroom, a secret room in another time. At once the atmosphere changed. This was a lighter, friendlier world—at least as far as Jack was concerned. He noticed how the streetlight in the square gave a yellowish tinge to the light in the room. He heard a car. He heard the beep of an electronic lock. How strangely reassuring they were. He looked around at the big shapes of the men filling the room.

  They were speaking to each other softly:

  “’Tis not natural.”

  �
��I is right and proper spooked.”

  “… like entering a new world.”

  “’Tis the spell of a witch …”

  “’Tis a holy deliverance!”

  “Are we all here? Good.” Lord Henry closed the hole in the wall.

  Everyone breathed easily again. Then they gathered around the window and peered in disbelief at the transformation that had taken place in the humble village.

  “Jack! Jack! Is that you?” It was Granny calling from downstairs.

  “Yes, Granny!”

  “At last! Please will you come down? It’s supper-time. I’ve been calling for ages.”

  “I’m coming!”

  Jack hastily explained to the highwaymen that this was his granny’s house. They had to be quiet and not move around and not make a sound. Then, changing out of the rough clothes, he pulled on his sweater and jeans and went downstairs.

  Chapter Ten

  Burglars

  The morning dawned crisp and clear. There was a red sky in the east and the autumn leaves hung in the trees like golden coins.

  Jack opened his eyes. The previous night’s events hit him like a bolt from the blue. He sat up in bed.

  BOING!

  Oh, Granny. His bones ached. He stared around the room. There were footprints across the carpet. There were black marks on the wall. The chair was broken; the curtain hung like a flag at half-mast. The chest had been moved and there were blankets and clothes and black cloaks slung around the place. There was a cheesy, rancid smell of feet and wood smoke. But there were no highwaymen. The highwaymen had gone.

  At first Jack felt a curious mixture of relief and sadness. The five highwaymen and the girl from another time had bedded down here for the night. It was like a sleepover, except instead of his friends he had a gang of highwaymen. After they had asked Jack a million questions about the modern world, and he told them about cars and TVs and telephones and computers and streetlights and history and clothes and toothbrushes and even things like dinosaurs and planets that they had never heard of, they relaxed and became accustomed to the idea that they had traveled forward into another time. Then they told stories and cracked funny jokes and laughed in a low, gruff way.

  Soon after they had settled, Polly pointed out that they should block the hole in the wall, in case the soldiers found it. So they moved the chest until it was covering the hole. Later, the soldiers did come—and they found the secret cupboard door, but when they looked in all they saw was the inside of a chest. Little did they know that on the other side, five highwaymen were sitting in nervous silence.

  Jack smiled. That was a cool moment. Outwitting the soldiers had been fun. Outwitting Granny had been more difficult. She hadn’t looked as if she believed him for an instant when he told her he had been out for a walk for most of yesterday. Then he told her he had been listening to music on his headphones upstairs and hadn’t heard her call. She had given him that beady bird stare, the one that went right through him.

  But Jack’s relief changed to concern when he wondered where the highwaymen and Polly had gone. He assumed they had gone back to the eighteenth century, maybe to do another robbery, or to have breakfast. Jack decided he would go and look for them after his own breakfast. He was hungry.

  As he went downstairs, he was startled by a cry. He found Granny by the front door, hands on hips, staring at the wall.

  “Would you believe it!” she exclaimed. “It’s gone! The clock. Someone’s stolen the clock!” She glanced around. “And my big magnifying glass!” She turned to Jack. “I came down and the door was open. And these things have gone. Look! The pens! All the pens and pencils in the pencil pot have gone! You haven’t seen them, have you?”

  Jack shook his head. He tried not to blush, not to look guilty. He kept his mouth shut tight, but the words came unbidden into his head. “I know who stole them. Some highwaymen from the eighteenth century. They came for a sleepover …” But he said nothing.

  “Humph.” Granny began blinking. It was a habit of hers and made her look even more birdlike. “Something fishy is going on here,” she mumbled.

  “Yeah,” agreed Jack.

  Twenty minutes later, in the middle of breakfast, the answer came. Jack was sitting at the table eating toast when Granny let out a squeal of surprise.

  “Good grief! What on earth are those?”

  Jack looked up to see five dark figures crossing the square. They wore cloaks and hats and had a little peasant girl with them. They looked so out of place. Why, oh why couldn’t they have stayed in his room?

  “I—”

  “They’re looking at our house!” said Granny suspiciously. The men were pointing up at the windows and talking energetically. “Are they some sort of pop cult?”

  “I—”

  “Look, they’re waving! Do you know them?” Granny turned to Jack. Tom Drum was pointing and waving at Jack. He had a stupid expression on his face.

  Jack waved back.

  “I’ve never seen them before.” Then he added quietly, “In the square.” Behind his granny’s back, he changed his wave to say “go away.” And he made a face at Lord Henry. Luckily Polly began pulling the other highwaymen away.

  Then before Jack could stop her, Granny opened the back door and called out to the men. “Do we know you?” and without waiting for an answer she went on, “I know it is Halloween, but I’ve never seen anyone dressed up so early in the day.”

  “Indeed, ma’am,” said one of the men. “Good day to you!” He doffed his hat and ushered the men away to the far end of the square by the churchyard.

  “Most peculiar,” sighed Granny. “What do you say nowadays? Weirdos. I’ve half a mind to call the police. Without the slightest proof, I’d say they looked like burglars!”

  “Burglars?” Jack ate his toast very fast. “Hmm. I suppose they do look kind of like that.”

  Chapter Eleven

  All Hallows’ Eve

  “What’s going on? What are you doing?” Jack caught up with the highwaymen in the churchyard. They were hanging around the gravestones, stooped over like big black birds, reading the inscriptions.

  “We are concealing ourselves from the soldiers. In the twenty-first century.” Henry Vane turned on his irresistible smile. “We must wait till darkness before we return to our time, for then the soldiers will be away. And while we are waiting, we thought we would have a little look around. Like you, we desire to see what life is like here.”

  “And who stole the clock and the magnifying glass and pencils?” Jack demanded.

  Henry Vane frowned. He looked quizzically at the other men.

  “Er, I found the clock,” admitted Bernard, sheepishly producing the hall clock from his cloak.

  “And I saw these—they is so pretty,” said Pete the Pudding. He pulled out a handful of pens and pencils. “And Dick took a liking to the magic glass, which makes things seem wondrous big.”

  “Well—give them back!” Jack told them firmly. “I’ll get into trouble. They belong to Granny.”

  Henry Vane shook his head. “We abuse our friend’s hospitality here—indeed we do! No swiping or filching or taking a liking to things from now on. Is that clear?”

  The men nodded.

  “Nor no robbin’?” asked Tom Drum. “Not even a little highway robbin’?”

  “Certainly not. How can we rob without horses?” Henry frowned. His attention was suddenly riveted to a man in a yellow and black striped running suit jogging past the graveyard.

  “The man is like a vast bumblebee,” he observed. Jack could tell the highwaymen were in for some surprises here in the twenty-first century.

  “The problem is,” said Dirty Dick, “the people here are all dressed funny. All colorful, like a carnival. We stick out, you know. Like sober people at some revelry.”

  “Has it occurred to you,” asked Polly, “that it’s not them who is dressed funny—it’s you!”

  Dirty Dick scowled.

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter,
” Jack told them, “because tonight is Halloween. Everyone dresses up as ghosts and vampires and scary things. So if you meet people you could say ‘Happy Halloween—we’ve dressed up as scary highwaymen.’ And they won’t care that you’re dressed strangely.”

  “Ghosts and vampires?” repeated Dirty Dick. “What a strange thing to do.”

  “Oh! Halloween is like our All Hallows’ Eve, then?” said Pete the Pudding.

  “Of course,” said Polly, “it must be.”

  “So, in the twenty-first century, everyone knows about highwaymen?” asked Lord Henry. His interest was aroused, his eyebrow arched.

  “Sure. Everyone knows Dick Turpin,” Jack told him.

  “Dick Turpin?” Lord Henry was outraged. His eyes bulged and his lip curled. “Dick Turpin! Why do they remember Dick Turpin?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s a rascal. A common criminal. No style, no breeding, not an ounce of gallantry in him! Why him?” he spluttered and sat down on a gravestone like a sulky boy.

  Jack was surprised. “He’s just famous, I guess.”

  “And I’m not? No one remembers Lord Henry Vane? And the Vane Gang—of course?”

  “Well. No. I guess not.”

  “Oh!” Henry Vane couldn’t conceal his disappointment. He turned his back. His dreams of fame had evaporated in a cruel instant.

  Polly nudged Jack and rolled her eyes as if to say, “This isn’t the behavior of a heroic highwayman.” Jack smiled. Polly couldn’t care less about fame.

  “I’m starving,” she said. “I haven’t eaten for hours.”

  “Me too,” said Pete the Pudding. “Where can we get a handsome breakfast around here? I could eat a couple of sheep.”

  “Well, I can’t get you any sheep, but”—Jack remembered that his mom had given him some emergency money—“I’ll get something from the supermarket.”

  “A super breakfast from the super market,” sang Tom Drum cheerfully.