The Brown Mask

At a shabby Clerkenwell tavern, Gentleman Jack cheerfully declares he would rather be hanged at Tyburn than grow old in slippers. Then a name hushes the room: the Galloping Hermit, the highwayman no one can unmask.

In seventeenth-century England, the Punch-Bowl hides at the end of a dead-end alley, its cosy parlour a refuge for roadmen, rogues and fine gentlemen with dangerous secrets. Jack makes a merry boast of the risks he runs, but even this swaggering company is dazzled by the masked rider who haunts the highways and always escapes. The brown mask conceals more than a face—and the road’s romance comes with a price that can be paid in blood. Who is the Galloping Hermit, and what lies behind the legend?

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