The Highwayman's Footsteps (review)

William de Lacey, age fourteen, can no longer tolerate his family's accusations of cowardice, and he runs away. Desperate for money, he steals a purse full of coins, only to find himself, in turn, at the wrong end of a highwayman's pistol. This is no ordinary robber, though, but the love child of Alfred Noyes' tragic couple of ballad fame, named Bess, of course, after her mother. Bess understandably has some issues with King George's soldiers, having been raised on tales of how they were responsible for her mother's death, and as she and Will join forces, they become caught up in the flight of military deserter, Henry Parish (based on a real person) and in holding up William's own father, a corrupt high sheriff who has been fleecing the people in his charge. Narrator Will is annoyingly prone to breathless musing: "How had she come to choose a robber's life? What evil must lurk in her heart? . . . What corruption of mind had brought her to this?" Moreover, Morgan's efforts to fit young Bess and Will's story into the overarching plot of "The Highwayman" can be embarrassingly forced: "Not till dawn did my father hear what had happened, and they say his face grew gray when he heard how Bess, his beautiful Bess, Bess the landlord's black-eyed daughter, had watched for her love in the moonlight and died in the darkness there." Happily, however, there's enough action and romantic drama to sustain the substantial page count, and an afterword graciously includes the Noyes poem to augment the readers' enjoyment of this literary exercise.