Page 27 of The Last Crimes of Peregrine Hind
Nine
Peregrine
“I’m plenty warm,” Alexander fussed as Peregrine tried to layer his coat over the one Alexander was already wearing. “You’ve built a fire big enough for a Viking hall.”
That demonstrably wasn’t true, but Peregrine didn’t argue, only settled back against the wall. There were chairs here, but he’d chosen the floor because then he could sit with Alexander between his legs and have him recline on his chest while they waited out the storm. It had begun raining outside, a thick, drenching deluge, and the coming of dawn did little to lighten the world. Peregrine was grateful to his past self for having the patience and foresight to keep this place well stocked with things for a fire.
“This isn’t a Viking hall,” Alexander said after a moment, squirming to get comfortable against Peregrine’s chest. “But it’s no shepherd’s hut either. Clearly, it was a farmhouse.”
“There was a whole hamlet here once. You’ll see the empty houses in the daylight when we leave.”
“An entire hamlet? Empty? Why do you think they left?”
Peregrine had refused to talk about his past for so long that he was surprised to hear the words fall from his lips. “Most of them couldn’t make a living here anymore and had to move. But the people in this particular house died.”
“Died?” Alexander said, clearly horrified. “Recently?”
“Six years ago now.”
“How?”
Peregrine looked over at the fireplace, crackling with a fire just as it had in his earliest memories. “The short answer is a fever.”
“And the long answer?”
Peregrine watched the flames dance behind the old firedogs, thinking of the day he’d gone to enlist, of his mother setting his coat and boots by the fire so they’d be warm when he left. It was strange how such a vast tree of catastrophes could come from a single seed. “The eldest son left them. Their father had been dead a while, and so he was the head of the family for a time. But he knew he would never marry, never sire children, and so he thought it best to leave the farm to his younger brother. He would go off and earn good wages to send home instead. But it’s nearly impossible to send letters to infantry when they’re at war, and so he didn’t know that the Duke of Jarrell had decided to enclose the common land shared by everyone in the hamlet. The land they used for farming, for grazing, for their living, was gone. They’ll hang a lowborn man for stealing more than twelve pence, but if a lord steals the income and sustenance from an entire village, he is given an Act of Parliament to do so and then he’s heralded as a reformer and a modern man.”
Peregrine took a long breath, the injustice of it burning him all over again. He had to make himself go back to the story, back to the house and the family who’d lived in it, otherwise he’d jump to his feet in a seething rage and go find the duke right then and there. “Half-starving, the sister found a way to approach the duke and plead their case. He offered her some small assistance in exchange for time spent in his bed. She agreed, because what other choice did she have?”
Alexander had gone still against his chest. “And then?” he asked quietly.
“And then the fever came,” Peregrine told him. “It took the mother and the brother quickly. The sister hung on, but by this point she was swollen with the duke’s child, and she never truly recovered. The duke, of course, wasn’t interested in a mistress who was pregnant or sickly, and so refused to help or even see her. It was beyond foolish to go to Far Hope the night she died, but she must have felt it was the only place she could go. Perhaps she thought if the duke could see her, he would take pity on her for the unborn child’s sake? Perhaps she thought a servant would help? No one can say. But whatever she thought, it didn’t happen. Even though the night was bitterly cold and she was very ill, no one admitted her into the house. The next morning, they found her with frost on her eyelashes and no breath left in her at all.”
Alexander’s voice was both sad and careful when he asked, “And the eldest son? The one who went to war?”
Peregrine took his eyes from the fire and occupied himself with Alexander’s hair instead, curling the silken ends around his fingers as he spoke. “He came home a year after the sister had died and learned the story from a neighboring vicar. He found his childhood home empty, his childhood village empty, and his family in their new graves. He learned that it was the duke who had enclosed the land, starved his family, coerced his sister into his bed and then left her to die. Everything the son had become a soldier for was gone, and all the blood and death and disease he’d endured because it earned money for his family was for nothing in the end. Nothing at all.”
Alexander moved so Peregrine could more easily stroke his hair. “But how did you decide to become a highwayman then?” he asked, pushing past the pretense that the story had been about anyone else. “The revenge—I see that well enough now. But why become the Peregrine Hind to achieve it?”
“It was an accident the first time,” Peregrine said, remembering a long-ago summer evening. He’d been staying in his vacant family home after learning what had happened, lost to his grief. “There was a riding party, out quite late. Your brother wanted to show his guests the enclosed fields, boast about how much his new flock had already earned for him, and so they were riding down my lane outside.”
Peregrine had stood inside his doorway like a ghost, watching as the duke had proudly told this fine, mounted party how much he’d improved the land, how he’d turned the commons from inefficient wastes into wool and then into money. And as Peregrine listened, the fathomless pain which had gnawed at him for days—which had stolen his thoughts, his sensations, even his ability to sleep and to feed himself—had forged itself into a blade, and that blade cut through his grief. That blade gave him purpose.
And that was when Peregrine had known he was going to kill the duke.
“Fine people are so careless,” Peregrine continued. “I watched as they milled around the shell of my dead hamlet, paying as much mind to me as they would one of the duke’s new sheep. They had servants behind them with a cart in case they’d like to stop and have a drink or something to eat, and the cart was loaded with silver and dishes. The silver alone would have fed the village for a year or more.” He paused, thinking of how it had felt to see the Duke of Jarrell call for an alfresco celebration of his successful wool venture, to see the servants open the lid of the chest on the cart and reveal gleaming silver and glass. To watch these people toast the destruction and the hunger and the death that had made the rich duke so much richer still.
It had felt like standing in front of his family’s graves all over again.
“I thought, here is my chance to kill the duke,” Peregrine said. “He was right there, standing like a lazy pheasant in front of my family’s house, ignoring my presence and swilling wine. I’d newly come from the war, and I still had my pistols. I wouldn’t even have had to leave the house . . . ”
“But you didn’t succeed,” Alexander surmised.
“I missed. Not by much, but enough to warn him. The entire party fled down the lane in terror, thinking they were all being hunted, and the servants ran on foot after them.”
“Leaving the silver,” Alexander concluded.
“Leaving the silver,” Peregrine said in confirmation. After staring at the booty for several minutes, Peregrine had decided he had no need of it. He’d found the other families who’d fled the hamlet and gave the silver to them in its entirety. “At first, I thought I’d stalk the road to find the duke again, get on with my revenge, and then I would—well, I wasn’t sure what I would do after. But it didn’t matter at first, because I couldn’t find him. Only other dawdling lords and ladies, slowly rolling through the hills with jewels and coins and anything else you could think of. All on their way to Far Hope, for one party or another. It was too easy, and out on the moors, it’s even easier not to get caught after, not if you grew up here and know where to hide. Not if you made friends in every town and village by giving away so much of what you’ve stolen.”
