Fantastic Metropolis

 

This story is dedicated with love to Reshmi Mukherjee.

 

I. Flintlock Jaw

When Robin Darktree takes to the road, he carries two flintlock pistols, a blunderbuss, a rapier and a bag of ginger biscuits. It is best to present a formidable appearance on the road. He also carries a spare tricorne hat. It takes but a single seagull to ruin a formidable appearance.

His mount is an elderly roan with the bumbreezes. Her name is Hannah. He is too fond of her to consider a replacement. Thus he is given to wearing a black silk handkerchief even when not travelling incognito. His cloak is sailor’s garb, filched from a Portsmouth market. His fine high boots were made by Alberto’s of Siena, Tuscany Province.

Darktree loves the mountains, the clear streams and wild flowers. When he goes into hiding it is usually to the mountains that he flees. He distrusts the forests—dank, horrid affairs—and positively loathes the marshes. He feels neutral about the sea, all but his wistful eye.

When the government sends a pack of hired hands on his trail, Darktree tries to enjoy the chase. On moonless nights he alone can thunder down the roads, hooves pounding, wild laugh caught at the back of his throat.

At such times, full of gin and confidence, he often doubles back and trots past his pursuers with a polite nod. The true art of disguise, he maintains, is more a matter of poise than looks. He has never been caught. But in his more fanciful moments, he feels he is being followed from ahead. As if it is possible!

Darktree at sunset: waiting behind a clump of bushes for the Holyhead mail. A solitary figure slightly bowed, but not devoid of dignity. Darktree during a mad gallop over the heath: foolishly romantic, arrogant, profoundly sad and almost comic. Darktree asleep: muffled.

Times are hard, he decides, as he puffs on his churchwarden pipe. The coaches are becoming fewer with each passing day. He feels like a fisher who has overexploited the resources of any given bay.

Once he considered his smiling eyes to be hook and line enough for the ladies. Now even nets of flint, steel and smoke do not suffice. I am growing old, he thinks, and imagines the following: Darktree as an ancient man, snug in the hearth of a weary coaching house. Muffins and ale. White hair beneath crow-black hat. Nose aglow, gnarled as a bole. But no, who will really look after him in his dotage? His mother?

When Darktree’s friend, Nick Cooke, was captured near Highgate, Darktree dressed himself as a woman in order to witness the execution. Although poise is the thing, there is also pleasure. Nick made a few jokes, sang a bawdy song, was fondly cheered by the crowd. Darktree shed a single tear.

And real women? Darktree can scarcely lay claim to a single meaningful relationship with a member of the opposite sex. He has tried, God knows, but it has all been so difficult. They never want to settle down with a highwayman—why should they? Always working nights, away for weeks on end, no guaranteed income. And all that opportunity for philandering, never washing their socks or underwear. No.

There is a girl called Lucy who lives in Epsom. Whenever Darktree passes through the town he turns crimson. Lucy remains blissfully unaware of either his identity or his infatuation. Darktree will often conduct long detours to avoid Epsom, or race through at high speed, eyes lowered.

Once, in a coaching house near Salisbury, Darktree dropped a tankard of porter. In the dark puddle that spread out on the stone floor, he caught his own reflection. At first he thought the scar that crested his right eyebrow had jumped sides. Astonishment!

Another amusing incident: in Abergavenny, Darktree helped a lame beggar to a tavern and bought him a meal and a drink. Later, away from the town, passing beneath the purple scrub and blasted peak of Ysgyryd Fawr, he realised who the lame beggar was. Tom Jackstraw, his archenemy.

Yes, Darktree loves the mountains. Sitting atop Sugar Loaf at dawn, counting the clouds, dreaming about travelling to even more distant regions. He has heard they are asking for settlers in the antipodes. Will he go? There are forms to be filled in, proof of identity, passage to be paid. And where will he find muffins among the men who walk upside down? On the snowy slopes of the Southern Alps?

Occasionally, on the road, Darktree meets kindred spirits, bundled up tight like parcels, some of them with newfangled guns that require no flint. They will exchange news, opinions, snippets of philosophy and general laments concerning the weather and lack of traffic. Sometimes there is a mutual hold-up, a great joke.

“Good morning, sir! Whither bound?”

“To Halifax, for the fair. Pockets to be picked, stalls to be rifled.”

“Watch the gibbet, sir. Halifax is no place for the unwary.”

“I am Robin Darktree, no mere amateur!”

One day, Darktree reads about a new invention in a newspaper abandoned on the highway. The invention is a type of steam carriage that can carry passengers on rails. Darktree frowns. He cannot grasp this notion. The paper is several years out of date. What does this mean? That the roads are being forsaken? Impossible!

This story colours his idle thoughts for weeks to come. He tries to picture such a diabolical machine, surely all clashing cymbals and roaring furnaces. And who will blow the post horn at eighteen miles per hour? Absurd. He will not have it. He wrests the image from his mind. He regards the smoking bowl of his pipe with a deep suspicion. The roads are the arteries of the country; the nation will bleed dry, a sallow, anaemic kingdom.

Another encounter, this time in the deeps of the recently enclosed New Forest. A strange man without a periwig: Darktree more cautious than usual. A trifle sombre perhaps, impatient, a mixture of inappropriate emotions.

“Good day to you, sir! A fine day for travelling.”

“Indeed so. And I to Exeter before its end.”

“I see. And will you be taking the train, sir?”

Darktree scowls. “Train? What is this train? I have no inkling of what you are talking about.”

But finally he can deny the truth no longer. On the outskirts of Bath he comes across a pair of iron bars seemingly stretching into infinity in both directions. Stubborn as flint himself, he waits by their side. When the train eventually passes, what do the passengers see? An archaic figure mounted on a decrepit horse, a living ghost of sorts, an echo. And Darktree? A steam humbug.

When Darktree waits in the bushes for the Holyhead mail, he reaches into his pocket for his bag of ginger biscuits. But his fingers chance instead upon a locket. Lovingly, with a dirty fingernail, he flips open the lid of this locket. A lock of auburn hair, the hair of Lucy Reeves from Epsom, curled tight like the spring of a wheel-lock musket.

He wants to settle down, but how do you arrest the motion of a boulder rolling down a hillside? No, this is a pitiful metaphor. Darktree is less a boulder than a sack of gestures, hurled through the air by some gargantuan catapult. No woman will ever be able to catch him before he lands, or piece him together afterwards, not even Lucy. He will continue as he is, boiling soup on a fire struck from tinder, using saltpetre as seasoning, washing his feet in icy springs, collecting blackberries in his spare tricorne hat.

The laws of the land are changing. Men are no longer hung for poaching rabbits. Darktree is lost. He wanders the empty, rutted roads, leading his roan by the bridle, mud on his fine boots. Perhaps it is time for him to visit his mother again, up in Lancashire. Perhaps he will keep going. Do they have trains in Scotland? He doubts this. He prays.

Yes, times are hard. And when they hung Nick, he muses, they also hung me. After all this time perhaps they have realised this. Perhaps that is why they no longer send hired hands after me. A chilling speculation.

When Darktree is loading his pistols, cleaning his blunderbuss, sharpening his rapier, he whistles a favourite melody. But the notes sound more and more unconvincing, as if his lungs and throat have lost all confidence. His flatulent roan salutes the rising moon. Should he hang up his black silk handkerchief on a nearby branch? Bury the adjuncts of his life in the soft loam? What memorials would they make to the spirit of a whole age? Is not the road itself his epitaph?

At a tollbooth in Rutland, Darktree tips his hat at the long-faced collector, paying his fare as would any honest fellow.

“See you again, when I return this way.”

“Not I, sir. The tollbooth is closing. Few use the roads these days. Locomotives are all the rage now.”

“Closing? But who will pay for the upkeep of the highways?”

There is no answer to this, and the long-faced collector merely shrugs. When Darktree returns that way, a fortnight later, the tollbooth has been dismantled. He considers desperate measures. Could he actually hold up an iron monstrosity? What would he say? There are no words that he knows.