Long Ears Larkin

Every fare increase out of Bridgeport's Iron Gate arrives with the same warning, freshly repainted each spring on the coach-house boards: beware the highwayman whose ears outreach his manners. Long Ears Larkin has never robbed a single traveller in the eleven years since Binaco Stables invented him, which has not stopped three coaching companies, a magistrate's clerk, and one increasingly cornered rabbitfolk from treating him as an established fact of the road.

Detailed Description

Larkin exists only on paper and in the retelling, but he is thoroughly documented for a man who doesn't exist. Broadsheets like the Bridgeport Beacon and the Gnome Workshop owned Brass Bolt Chronicles agree on the essentials: a long grey coat, a plain cloth mask, and a pair of unmistakable rabbitfolk ears. He carries a flintlock pistol that features prominently in every description. Mysteriously no one has been shot at, though. Sightings are always secondhand, always at dusk and always from a coach that "only just got away."

Binaco Stables sells a solution to this menace: an "armed escort" surcharge has been added to any fare leaving through Iron Gate or Barn Gate after noon. Rival lines, unwilling to look less safety-conscious, now offer the same surcharge and have begun reporting their own Larkin sightings to justify the fee. A traveller can now cross Bridgeport County paying escort fees against a non-existent bandit.

History / Origin

The tale began with Lilla, Binaco Stables owner, a woman in her fifties with a braid of red hair. A cheaper rival stable had opened in Flintlock, undercutting her rates by a margin she could not match honestly. Her solution was not to lower her prices but to instead justify a raise: a coachman, paid an extra crown for his trouble, returned from a routine run with a breathless description of a masked rabbitfolk bandit who had chased his coach nearly to the gate.

Long Ears Larkin by Tillerz using MJ

The story reached the writers at the nearby Gnome Workshop, and by the following day Long Ears Larkin had a name, a woodcut likeness, and a reputation, on display as a matter of fact in the latest issue of the Brass Bolt Chronicles, followed by the town crier Clara Bellows yelling it into everyone's ear. The Black Guard at Iron Gate, who noticed a curious and welcome drop in actual robberies as travellers grew warier and stuck to escorted convoys, saw no pressing reason to correct the record. The one lasting cost fell on Bridgeport's rabbitfolk, who found themselves searched at gates and refused rooms on the strength of a description that fit half their ancestry. Complaints to the Council went nowhere; a fictional bandit cannot be produced for questioning, and neither, it turned out, could the coachman who first reported him.

No one feels Long Ears Larkin's shadow more keenly than the couriers of the Hare-Mail Delivery Company, whose fleet of rabbitfolk runners criss-cross Bridgeport County pulling their carts along the very roads the broadsheets warn against. Their bells were always meant as a cheerful herald of the post's arrival, and now do double duty as proof of innocence: gate guards aswell as wary travellers have learned that an honest courier announces himself well before he's close enough to be mistaken for anything else. A courier caught without a working bell, whether from a snapped cord or a rushed morning, has been stopped, searched, and once held overnight at the Iron Gate on suspicion alone. Hare-Mail's owners have lodged three formal complaints with the Council of Ten this year, each filed, read, and set aside, and now inspect every cart's bells each morning with a care usually reserved for the mail itself.

Role in the World

After years, Larkin is still "active." Any unresolved theft, missing cargo, or late coach along Bridgeport County roads is attributed to him by default, which suits everyone except the people actually responsible. Binaco Stables' ledgers, if anyone ever saw them properly, would show the escort surcharge as the stable's single largest source of income, well ahead of ordinary hire fees.

The arrangement held for eleven years until a rabitfolk, tired of being stopped at the Iron Gate for a face he shares with a legend, concluded that if he was going to be searched for it anyway, he might as well earn the accusation. Lilla has begun noticing coin missing from the company strongbox, never much, a few Crowns here and there. She has said nothing yet, uncertain whether to call it theft or simple carelessness on her own part.

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