‘It is certain,’ said Mr. Hilyard, ‘that the lords and the chiefs will be taken to London, there to be tried for high treason. I heard that it was already decided from two King’s officers, who came to the shop for a plaister on Monday afternoon.’
This made me think that, if one were to help Tom, it must be in London, and I presently resolved that somehow I would get me thither. To be sure, it was a great journey for a woman to undertake, and that in winter. But it must be done. Mr. Hilyard was going to Stene. I would go with him so far; after that by myself, if necessary, or under such charge as Lady Crewe would assign to me, and to such a house as she would recommend to me. On this I quickly resolved, and was determined. As for Lord Crewe’s help, on that I built little, because it needed not a politician to perceive that one of his lordship’s history and known opinions would have small interest in a Whig Court. Yet when a man is so highly placed he must have friends, cousins, and old acquaintances on both sides. ‘Add to this,’ said Mr. Hilyard, ‘that to-day my turn; to-morrow yours! The great Whig Lords are not too certain of their seats.’
When, however, I told Mr. Hilyard that I was resolved to go, I had the greatest trouble with him. For, first, he maintained stiffly that it would be impossible to take me with him on account of the weather, it being already the middle of November, the days growing short, and the roads so heavy that no one could expect the coach or any waggons would run. Moreover, there had already fallen so great a depth of snow as I have never seen since, insomuch that Hexham Moor was four or five feet deep in it, and in the drifts much deeper. No one, he said, ought to travel in such weather but those who are young, strong, and fear not the cold. I replied that I was both strong and young, and fearless of cold. Next, as to other dangers, he was himself well known in these parts as having been in the service of Mr. Forster, both the elder and the younger, for fifteen years; during that time having met with many people and made many acquaintances. It also was very well known that he went out with his patron. This being so, what if he were arrested and imprisoned, and I left alone on the road? I replied that such a thing would be most dreadful, and must therefore be guarded against by some disguise, the nature of which I would leave to his invention. ‘Why,’ he said, smiling, ‘as to that, I doubt not that I could dress up so as to defy them all; but there is also yourself. Will it be wise, think you, men’s minds being in a tumult, to proclaim aloud that Miss Dorothy Forster, sister of General Forster, is going to London in order to get off her brother, if she can in any way prevail? There must be disguise for you, as well as for me, if you will go.’
‘Indeed I shall go,’ I replied; ‘nothing else will content me. And I trust to you to bring me safe to town; disguise me as you will. Why, Mr. Hilyard, who is there to work for Tom but myself?’
‘There is Lady Crewe,’ he said. ‘And, truly, I know not what you could do in London.’
‘Yes, Mr. Hilyard; by your leave I could be doing something. I could see Tom, and do what is told me. Surely he has friends in London.’
‘Surely he has; but I fear that they are all on the wrong side, like Lady Crewe herself. Have you no cousins among the Whigs?’
Cousins I had, plenty as blackberries, but all were honest Tories. Stay, there was one; but I had never seen her. She was Mary Clavering, who made a great match, and married Lord Cowper.
‘Lord Cowper? Lord Cowper?’ cried Mr. Hilyard. ‘Why, he is Lord Chancellor. If Lady Cowper is your cousin, the business is as good as done. But yet, I know not. She cannot ask for many; and there is Mr. Clavering of Callalee a prisoner. Still, there is one friend at Court for us. If he only had the money (but perhaps his honour’s friends in London will find that) to grease a few palms, I should not despair. Miss Dorothy, if you are brave, and feel strong enough, come to London with me, in the name of God.’
Then he began to plan disguises; and first he thought he would become a clergyman, and I his daughter —— then he walked about, puffing his cheeks and smacking his protruded lips, like one of those reverend gentlemen who think too much of the fleshpots and the flask. (While thus acting, he looked for all the world as if he wore a cassock.) But that plan pleased him not, on consideration, because he remembered that it is a long way to London, that accidents might happen on the road, and he be called upon to read the service appointed for the sick, to console and fortify the dying, even to administer the Holy Sacrament, which would be a most dreadful and unpardonable sin; and yet, if he refused, he must needs confess the cheat, and so be haled to prison, or whipped out of the town as a rogue, and very likely I with him. No; that would not do. Then he thought that he would be a physician, and his face became long, and he carried his nose in the air, and one seemed to perceive the smell of drugs, as is generally the case with these gentry.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘truly, I am already somewhat skilled in medicine, having once, when young, read for curiosity the works of Celsus, Galen, and Avicenna, and could easily pass for a physician until I fell in with a brother of the mystery, when, for lack of the current coin of speech and the jargon of the trade, every craft having its own manner of speech, I should certainly be discovered.’
Then he laughed, for a new idea occurred to him, and he begged me to excuse him for a few minutes. So he left the room. Presently a step outside and a knock at the door. Wonderful is the power of a mime! It is needless to say that I knew Mr. Hilyard under his disguise, but I also knew, which is much more to the point, for whom he wished to be taken. There is in the village of Bamborough an honest blacksmith named John Purdy, of as old a family as our own, because if we have been Forsters of Etherston from time immemorial, the Purdys have been village blacksmiths for as long (one of them joined the insurgents at Kendal for no other reason than because Mr. Tom was the General, and afterwards for his trouble got sent to Virginia, where he presently was set free, and is now doing well). John Purdy was a man of forty, short and square built, who went lame by reason of an accident in his ‘prentice days. He wore a handkerchief tied round his head, and over that a great flapping hat, and in his hand always a stout ashen staff. Such as he was, so was Mr. Hilyard —— a simple tradesman, honest to look at, and not ashamed of himself, knowing his duty to his betters. Why, Mr. Hilyard looked almost too much of a village blacksmith. He had no occasion to carry a hammer; there was across his face a grimy stain of oil or grease; his hands were rusty with iron stains; his flapping hat was over the red handkerchief; his neck was wrapped in wool.
‘Will this do, Miss Dorothy?’ he asked with pride; and as he spoke his face became square like the face of John Purdy, his mouth set firm, and his nose long and straight. ‘Will this do? I am now a North-country blacksmith; I am going to Durham to seek for work with my sister, who is a handy girl, knows her place, and is respectful to her betters. At Durham we shall be going to Newcastle, at Newcastle to York, and at York to London. It is a truly admirable disguise. I am safe, unless they ask me to make a horseshoe.’
His spirits, which had been desponding, rallied again at the prospect of riding to London and play-acting all the way.
I asked him when the prisoners might be expected to arrive in London.
‘Justice,’ he said, ‘is not only blind, but lame. That is why she goeth so slowly. But I see no reason why the prisoners should be kept at Preston. They will ride by easy stages, perhaps ten or twelve miles a day; and it is three hundred miles or so. If I were his honour or Lord Derwentwater, I would try whether a clean pair of heels would not be more to the purpose than Court influence.’
‘But suppose they are too well guarded.’
He laughed.
‘You cannot,’ he said, ‘guard a man who resolves to escape, and hath the wit. Oh Lord! everything is possible to him who hath the wit.’
‘Then, Mr. Hilyard, why have not you become a rich man?’
He might have replied that it was partly out of his fidelity to me and to mine; otherwise, had so ingenious a gentleman gone to London, he must, surely, have acquired great fame and riches.
We set off on our journey the next morning, in a terrible gale of wind and snow, through which nothing could have kept me up but a terror worse than that of a driving wind across a bleak moor. I had with me in my pocket all the money that I could find, amounting in all to no more than twenty-four guineas. I also tied up, in as small a parcel as I could make it, some of my fine things which I might want in London. These Mr. Hilyard made into a pack. He was dressed in a long brown coat of frieze, with long sleeves, which covered his hands as well as gloves might have done, and was, besides, muffled up about the neck and chin, so that certainly no one, with his flapping hat and his limp, would have recognised him. As for me, I was dressed like any plain village girl, with a hood and thick flannel petticoats. We were to ride the same horse (but that a good stout nag, easily able to carry both), I on pillion behind Mr. Hilyard; but the way was so bad, and the snow so deep, that I do not think the poor man rode fifty miles out of all the way between Blanchland and London. Often we both walked, one each side the poor creature, who picked his way slowly in the deep snow, and sank sometimes up to the girth.
‘If we may believe in the intervention of Heaven,’ said Mr. Hilyard, ‘we might own that the wrath of the Lord is poured out upon us, for our Rebellion against the Protestant Succession, in snow and sleet, storm and rain.’
‘And yet,’ I replied, ‘there be many thousands in England who have not joined in the Rebellion: and for them, too, are the storm and snow.’
‘Yes; and David alone counted the people, yet the people perished.’
Every day, and all day long, Sundays included, we continued our journey in such a winter as I hope never to see again. On the road we were in little danger: footpads would not attack a pair of poor country people: no one was likely to recognise either of us: the danger and the inconvenience were in the evening, when we had to find the rudest lodgings, avoiding the inns, unless we were compelled to go to them; and then Mr. Hilyard would be in terror lest some one should offer a rudeness to me, whereby he would have to fight and create a disturbance, and be taken before a justice; and I in terror lest he should be carried away by his vanity, and begin to sing and to show his gifts and parts. But neither of these things happened. For myself, as soon as I had a bed, or a part of a bed, given to me (which was always among the maids and servants, as suited my pretended condition), I would go there and sit down, and to bed early, while the rest, men and women together, sat round the fire, my blacksmith being thought a surly fellow, who spoke little, though he was willing to drink with any who offered.
Once the night fell before we found a resting-house, and we lost our way. Then, indeed, my brave companion and trusty friend, who had kept me in heart by his own courage, seemed to lose his courage suddenly.
‘Alas!’ he said, when I reproved him gently, ‘I know of dangers whereof you know nothing. We are now warm and not yet hungry, but we shall presently become chilled with the terrible wind, and we shall grow hungry, and we shall yawn and feel a desire to fall asleep. But, mark you, if we fall asleep we shall die. Wherefore, if you see me growing sleepy or heavy, prick me sharply with a pin; and if you so much as yawn, think it not strange if I shake you by the shoulders. It is related in Olaus Magnus how a company of sailors, going a-fishing about the North Cape (where live the little Lapps, and there are terrible sorcerers and magicians), were overtaken by a storm of wind and snow, and so lost their way, and presently fell a-yawning and so all to sleep save one, who kept himself awake with deep stabs and cuts of a knife, causing sore pains; so that if his eyelids fell, for mere smart he was sure to open them again —— and so was at last picked up and recovered. But his companions sleep still, where they lie covered with snow and ice, and so will lie till the Day of Judgment. Miss Dorothy, ’tis an awful tale! Prick me sharply, I pray you, if I so much as offer to yawn.’
The wind blew too cold in our faces for me, at least, to feel sleepy, or to think of yawning. But it was late, and the road grew worse, and I knew not whither we might be going.
The poor tired nag was stumbling now, and both of us at his head. There seemed no vestige of a road. The landscape on either hand, for it was a champaign country, lay stretched out white, covered with snow. The clouds had cleared away, and the moon was out; but not a barn, or a farmhouse, or a cottage in which we could seek for so much as a shelter in the straw. We plodded on, the horse lifting his feet with difficulty, and Mr. Hilyard, now in a kind of despair, begging me from time to time not to yawn, and to have a long pin ready.
Suddenly we saw before us a light, or lights.
‘Is it a Will-o’-the-wisp?’ I said. ‘Or it may be a fairy light. Sure nothing human could be out on such a night, except ourselves.’
‘I know not what it is,’ he said; ‘but I have two loaded pistols in the holsters, and, by your leave, I will have them in readiness: and there is also my cudgel, but I hope I shall not ............