He would have been surprised indeed to know that the lady had an ability to observe and deduce that equalled his own.
But for a quite different reason.
She had summed him up accurately as a man without vanity, a man who needed none of the accoutrements of fine clothes and superficial elegance to add false lustre to what nature had given him. And that, she knew from bitter experience, made him all the more dangerous.
Bypassing that strongly male but admittedly attractive and appealing countenance, the straight, slightly hooked nose and the wide-set eyes that, shuddering, she thought resembled those of a bird of prey, she had immediately decided on his identity.
He was a policeman.
A breed of man she hated and feared. One she had learned to recognise, distrust and at all costs avoid.
Chapter 4
The hiring cab returned to the station, collected Faro and the horses set off again at a brisk pace on their uphill climb.
When at last a church spire and a huddle of houses indicated a surprisingly modern town, the coachman pointed with his whip: 'Wooler, sir.'
Faro had heard of Wooler as one of the baronies into which Northumberland was divided after the Norman Conquest. In the twelfth century a rich and prosperous centre of the woollen industry, three centuries later it had borne the full brunt of the Border Wars, with only a hilly mound, a rickle of stones, to mark those turbulent times.
The houses in the main street were newly built and as Wooler disappeared from view the coachman said: 'Almost destroyed by a fire about ten years back, 1862 it was, sir. Second time in less than two hundred years. Eve the church over there, see, rebuilt in 1863.’
A short distance from Wooler and the countryside changed dramatically. It was no longer soft and undulating as in front of them rose hills of grimmer aspect. Wild moorland, great crags and huge boulders were the legacy of some ice age when the world was still young.
Now only a few spindly hawthorns, taking what shelter they could find, suggested that it had seen little in the way of human footsteps or endeavour.
He was acutely aware that he was in an alien land.
Used to the protection of city streets, Faro regarded the scene around him. This was an ancient battlefield which stretched from the Solway Firth to the North Sea, the Debatable Land of history, and he was right in the middle of it.
As if all those ancient bloodthirsty ballads still lived, their battle cries still throbbing to the long and terrible violence that had soaked these hills and moors in blood. For this was the ring in which the champions of England and Scotland clashed arms, some armoured in splendour, proud and valiant, their clansmen running alongside, fighting loyally beside their Border barons.
Here the victors robbed, slaughtered and made an end without quarter on either side.
The ballads told it wrong. Many a battle had been lost not by defeat, but by raggle-taggle soldiers who seized the chance of pillage while their skins were still intact. While hungry mouths and empty stomachs awaited their homecoming with the spoils of war, there was no room for sentimental loyalty to lost causes.
To add to Faro's sombre thoughts, the radiant day disappeared to be replaced by clouds hiding the sun. Now he was aware of boulders that moved. A tide of woolly sheep, followed by a shepherd and his dog, signalled a not far distant civilisation.
There was something else too: mile upon mile of fences bordered the narrow road.
'We're in the domain of the wild cattle, sir,' the coachman replied to his question. They don't like us and we don't like them.'
'Dangerous, are they?'
The coachman laughed uproariously at this naive question.
'Kill you as soon as look at you, sir. I dare say they feel they have the right to it - the right of way, as you may say. Seeing they were here long before the Romans came. They've seen the killing times come and go - and many a fight that's gone badly for both sides.'
'Could the cattle not have been moved?' he asked.
The coachman thought this was even more humorous than his last question.
'I wouldn't like to try any of that sir. Wouldn't want their horns in my backside - begging your pardon, sir. Besides, His Lordship says it's best not to interfere with nature...' He stopped suddenly, remembering that His Lordship had also lost out in the end.
As the road descended once more, Faro felt that the legends and the ballads had never said half enough. They only skimmed the surface of a brutal reality.
The men this land had once supported had lived by the law of the jungle, the same law that saw the survival of the wild cattle hadn't worked for them.
While his beloved Shakespeare was penning the most exquisite prose the world had ever known, or perhaps ever would know, paving the way to an enlightened culture that would last for centuries still unborn, while Elizabethan seamen kept the might of Spain at bay, the monarchs of Scotland and England had emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages to live in a fair approximation of luxury and culture.
But both were helpless to rule their borders or the men who lived on them. A race apart, their laws were made and their swords wielded by tribal leaders who would have seemed outmoded in the Roman Empire. They were intent on only one thing: blood feuds, the perennial excuse to annihilate one another.
Not all were peasants, or smallholders, or cattle rustlers. Some were educated gentlemen; a few were peers of the realm. All had in common that they were fighting men of great resource to whom the crafty
