by Robin Blake
‘Come, buy!’ he was calling in a hoarse voice. ‘All the latest! Tuppence apiece. Direct from London town, the latest ballads, and all the old favourites I have too! You know the tunes, now get the words. Best London ballads, tuppence apiece.’
I looked around to see there was no one of my acquaintance close by, then approached the man.
‘Do you happen to have the one called “Lord Dancy and Count Blackheart” or some such?’
‘Yes indeed, sir.’
Seemingly able to locate any required sheet without recourse to light, he whisked a ballad out of his pouch and handed it to me.
‘A great favourite is that one,’ he said. ‘I congratulate you on your taste, sir. A great favourite, is that.’
I took the sheet, folded it and gave him his tuppence.
‘May I interest you in another, kind sir?’ he rattled on. ‘I have “Lady Godiva’s Ride”. That might suit. And let’s see. Oh, yes! “The Sad Ravaging of Lady Castlehaven” – that’s a very good one.’
I cut short his pattering by turning on my heel and walking briskly away. I was ashamed to be taken for some sensation-seeking ballad-fancier in search of wanton songs to drool over. Yet I had to know how the story of Lady Dancy’s rape turned out.
1 The story of Titus Cragg’s visit to Manchester is told in Rough Music.
TWENTY-FOUR
At home, poor Matty had been harassed continually as Highlanders came and went, demanding food and wine, smoking their pipes in the parlour, consulting maps on the dining-room table and arguing loudly in military language she could not understand. As an ally, she had cajoled Furzey into coming in from the office to the kitchen to sit with her, in case of trouble. Ignoring the voices I heard from the dining room and parlour, I went straight there, finding them huddled over cups of tea.
‘Oh, Mr Cragg! Wherever have you been?’ cried Matty as I walked in. She fell into my arms and I let her hug me for a few moments, then detached myself.
‘I have been the guest of the Chevalier himself,’ I said.
Matty’s mouth fell open.
‘Have you met the Prince?’
‘Yes. And incredibly, Furzey, it was he that we …’
I checked myself. Furzey too had known ‘Mr Burnet’ in Manchester in the previous year, but I now felt for some reason reticent to tell him of the supposed silk merchant’s true identity.
‘But what was he like?’ cried Matty. ‘Is he as handsome as they say?’
‘Yes, Matty, he is handsome. And he treated me handsomely. You will both be glad to know that he has lifted the sentence of death against me. I shall not after all be subject to military execution.’
Furzey’s face twisted into that enigmatic smile of his.
‘Then the Pretender is good for something,’ he said. ‘It would have been a sorry waste of good bullets.’
I asked after my wife and son, but there had been no word from Broughton.
‘But I wish they would come home!’ said Matty. ‘Will you not go and fetch them, sir?’
‘They will return in their own good time,’ I said. ‘What about Doctor Fidelis? I need to see him. I shall go to the Turk’s Head, and if he is not there, I must send for him.’
As Furzey was ready to return home, I asked him to go by way of the Simpson place and send Pip to me. When the boy arrived, I took him with me to the coffee house where, not finding Fidelis, I wrote a note asking him to join me and sent the boy to deliver it at Scrafton’s Roost. Then I took a table and ordered pipes and port wine.
The humour of the coffee house this evening was one of wariness and noise. The wariness was on the part of the Prestonians in the room, and the noise came from a small group of drunken Scotchmen – young officers, I guessed – who had collected in a corner and were carousing and shouting defiant slogans against the Duke of Cumberland and the Elector of Hanover.
I was just lighting a pipe when a shadow fell across the table and I looked up.
‘MacLintock!’ I cried. ‘This is wonderful! Sit down, have a pipe and tell me how you escaped.’
‘It was you that escaped, Cragg, or so I’ve heard. They merely let me go.’
He accepted a pipe and told me his story. The cart containing the group of prisoners from Preston had reached Manchester, where the rebels stayed two nights. MacLintock was interrogated in much the way I had been at Wigan, and was shown a letter he had written from Preston to his brother during the rebels’ advance into England, which the rebels had intercepted on its way north and thought might be evidence that MacLintock was a government spy. Unable to make up their minds about him, they kept him with them all the way to Derby, MacLintock continuing to argue that this letter was not of military interest and that it gave no secrets away.
‘The irony of it is, Cragg, that my little letter to my brother Douglas would actually have been useful to the rebels. Yes, I moaned about their coming and I wrote one or two uncomplimentary things about the Pretender. But from their point of view, what was more important was that I described the mood and disposition of us in Preston as we waited for the rebels to come. It was not my intention, of course, as I never thought of the mail being seized. But it gave them fresh intelligence of the town. I told them this, but they are suspicious of any Glaswegian and they held on to me unreasonably long before they finally saw sense and let me go.’
‘Have you just got back? You took your time about it.’
‘I had not a penny of money and so I walked and begged bread until I could get to Knutsford where there is a man I deal with, who took me in and lent me the means to go the rest of my journey. I was forced on to byways, for the road had their army on it, retreating by the same way that they came.’
‘And now they are here again. Do you have any news of Cumberland?’
‘I met a group of his scouts on the bank of the river at Warrington. They are frustrated because the bridge was broken down by the Liverpool militia; if it was usable, they would gain half a day on the Prince and likely catch him up. But Duke Fatty moves only sluggishly. They laughed about his mistress who lives in the baggage train unless he calls her to his tent, which he does each evening.
‘Fanny,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘Fanny Mallender. Niece of our Sergeant here in Preston.’
‘Is she indeed? The actress? Well, she is doing the Scotch a service by slowing Fatty down. With her in his army, some say he’s too distracted ever to catch up with the Pretender.’
MacLintock’s friends were calling to him, so he left me just as a Highlander came in from the street carrying a fiddle. The newcomer joined the young officers and began to play, though not the joyful jigs and reels we had heard so often during Charles Edward’s earlier incursion into Preston. Tonight his tune was solemn, full of melancholy and with many notes of yearning. The shouts and challenges we’d heard earlier faded away under the spell of this music. The officers sat silent, lost in thought. They were young men a long way from home, a long way from their sweethearts and their mothers, whom they may never see again after the winnowing of the battle that was bound to come soon.
I thought of the soldiers who, as Mrs Bigelow had told it, bullied Horace Limmington to death and took his money. They might even have been some of the same men. I knew little enough about soldiering, but I suspected this double capacity for cruelty and fondness, which we all have, reaches the extreme in the members of an army.
I felt the wet muzzle of a dog pushing my hand and saw that it was Bawty. I looked around. At last, Luke Fidelis had arrived.
‘How did your Highlanders enjoy their soup?’ I asked.
‘They couldn’t have enough of it, Titus. They had it for supper and they had it for breakfast. Better than any broth from their own field kitchen. Not better than their mammies’, of course, but that’s to be expected. What have you been doing, Titus?’
I poured him some wine and gave a full account of my meeting with the Duke of Perth and the Pretender, and how the latter was the sa
me as Mr Burnet the lace merchant. Fidelis, who had chased Burnet across three fields the last time we’d seen him, laughed.
‘That is astonishing. But he took an extraordinary gamble, coming into the kingdom like that.’
‘He is an extraordinary gambler, Luke. This whole exploit is a gamble, and so far a lucky one. But it seems the cards are beginning to run against him. He no longer trusts his generals, it seems, as it was they who made him turn around at Derby.’
‘I fear I cannot match that for news,’ Fidelis said. ‘But nevertheless we – that is, Bawty and I – have seen something interesting today.’
‘In regard to what, Luke?’
‘In regard to our friend Mrs Bigelow. We have visited my patient in Penwortham this morning.’
‘The dropsical one?’
‘The same. And on the way back, as you know, one passes the former house of Mr Limmington. In doing so, I noticed two men watching the place. They were on the opposite side of the street.’
‘Did you approach them?’
‘Certainly I did. I suggested they were loitering with intent, and they did not deny it. Said they were bailiffs collecting a debt. I told them they’d get no satisfaction as the householder was six feet underground, and they laughed and said, “It’s not with the corpse we got business. It’s with the old baggage.”’
‘Mrs Bigelow? Could this be to do with the money she has got to buy the house from Widow Limmington? Has she borrowed from moneylenders?’
‘If she has, they want it back before she’s had a chance to spend it.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I left them to it. They were not doing anything wrong and their story was not too far-fetched. But later I put my mind to the conversation, and in particular to this supposed loan that Mrs Bigelow has acquired to buy her house. Why should it be a loan? Why should it not, as we supposed, be the golden guineas that her master found beside the Liverpool Road?’
‘In which case, who were those two men?’
‘Who indeed?’
I did not have time to reply, for now I was aware that a boy was standing beside me. It was Pip, with a sealed letter in his hand.
‘Here is a letter for you, Mr Cragg. This man brought it to your house, but Matty said you were at the coffee house, so he asked what boy ran messages and I was sent for to bring it to you.’
Pip showed me with his finger two words on the cover, written in capital letters beside my name.
‘Matty says it says here “Most Urgent”.’
‘Why did he not bring this urgent letter himself, if he’d learned where I was?’
The boy shrugged his bony shoulders.
‘The man didn’t say. But he told me a house here in Preston that I’m not to repeat out loud.’
‘Well, this is all very secretive. Is it to that house you will take my reply?’
‘I don’t know.’
I turned the letter over and examined it. The wax was impressed with a plain seal and there was no indication who my correspondent was. I broke the seal and read the letter.
‘What do you make of this?’ I said handing it to Fidelis.
Fidelis read out loud:
If you are curious to know how Horace Limmington died, come to me at the house the boy brings you to. He is sworn only to show you my whereabouts, and not to repeat the address, and he knows I will break his bones if he discloses or shows the place to any except yourself and the doctor. I will, of course, serve you both in like manner if you blab about my whereabouts. J. Sigginho.
He looked up, noticeably excited.
‘Underhand dealings, Titus! Secret addresses! The highwayman’s lair! This has the makings of a first-rate adventure. We must go without delay.’
I stood up.
‘Yes, but we shall return to my house and collect a pair of pistols first.’
The boy led us to Back Weind Court, which was not far behind Friar Gate, yet a part of town into which the burghers of Preston and their men – Sergeant Oswald Mallender and his like – did not venture. The houses were ancient and in a state of advanced decay. Their timbers sagged askew, their thatch moulted and hardly any of their windows had glass. About halfway along, Pip pointed.
‘In there,’ he said. ‘The door with the knocker.’
In response to my triple knock, a villainous black-bearded and very fat fellow opened. He had a sharp, broad-bladed knife stuck through his belt
‘You’re Cragg?’ he grunted.
I said I was, and without another word he stood aside to let us in. We squeezed past him into a passage and, ignoring the doorway to an uninhabited ruinous room, went up to another closed door which led into the back of the house. Going ahead of me, Fidelis opened it and we stepped into a warm, candlelit room where a fire burned and the air was aromatically fogged with pipe smoke. In a high-backed chair at the head of a dining table lounged Jack Fingers, drinking wine. With him sat two other men with tankards before them, one wiry and hollow-cheeked and the other much muscled, with the thickest neck I’d seen since I’d last attended a match between wrestlers. On the floor lay another creature with a neck almost as thick – a bulldog, who sprang up and growled at us. We had left Bawty outside in the care of Pip, but I rather wished we had brought him in to balance the canine equation.
Jack Fingers did not get up but acknowledged us with a waft of his hand.
‘Will you look here! The legal and the medical profession have arrived. You are welcome, learned gentlemen, to our commodious apartments. Paddy, you lazy dog, fetch glasses and wine for our guests.’
The giant shambled through an inner door where another voice was heard, followed by his growling reply.
‘Sit down,’ said Jack, indicating the two unoccupied chairs. ‘I have the pleasure of introducing you to my associates, Stumpy and Joe.’ He did not indicate which was which.
Fidelis and I took our places opposite these two.
‘In your letter,’ I said, ‘you still try to hide under the alias of Sigginho. But I should warn you, we know quite well who you are.’
‘You solved the little anagram, did you? My congratulations.’
‘That letter spoke of Horace Limmington,’ I said. ‘You claim to know how he died?’
‘I do know how he died. And I know who did it. The culprit is here, in this house, under close arrest, ain’t he, boys?’
Joe and Stumpy nodded as one.
‘Oh, aye, we got ’im,’ said Joe, or Stumpy.
‘We got ’im,’ echoed Stumpy, or Joe.
‘Who got him, you pair of addled sots?’ O’Higgins jeered.
‘No. I mean ter say, you got ’im, chief,’ said one of them, hurriedly.
‘Yer. You did. You got ’im,’ chimed in the other.
‘Of course I did, and never forget it.’
He tapped a finger against his temple.
‘These idiots would be lost without me,’ he told us. ‘They’re good enough as brawn, but I have the genius. If a question arises, I give consideration to it and I find the answer. The question here was how and why Limmington’s life was snuffed out.’
‘And you say you have found the answer?’ I said.
His mountainous disciple now emerged from the back room with two glasses and a bottle, which he put on the table. O’Higgins filled both our glasses and pushed them towards us.
‘You will remember I told you I did not trust that old woman. That distrust burned in me. Yes, it burned. So I watched her house and saw a certain young blade – one that I didn’t know – coming and going. I didn’t follow him into the house but instead followed him when he was leaving it, and he led us straight to this salubrious apartment, the hidey-hole where he had laid his nest. Within a few minutes of our entering, we had persuaded him to give up the thing he had hidden here.’
Without leaving his seat, he reached up and behind him and drew down a pair of saddle bags that hung over the back of the chair. In a moment he had unlatched one of the buckles and drawn out a bulging
leather pouch, which he planted on the table before him. I recognized the bag. I had last seen it in the house of Horace Limmington, and then it had been full of golden guineas.
It still was. Jack Fingers unlaced the pouch and thrust his hand inside, coming out with a fistful of glittering coins, which he trickled back into the bag, his face suffused with pleasure at the act.
‘So, you see, I have my money back. Do you want to discover who returned it to me?’
He snapped his fingers.
‘Fetch him out, Paddy. Keep a good hold on him, mind. He’s a slippery one, like all snakes.’
Paddy made his laborious way out of the room and again there was a voice raised in complaint.
Fidelis nudged me with his elbow.
‘I believe I know who we are about to meet, Titus,’ he murmured.
The door swung open and Paddy was there, with his huge hand around the upper arm of a tall, slim fellow, smartly dressed but otherwise drooping woefully in the giant’s clutch.
I did not recognize him at first. Released from Paddy’s grasp, he was looking from one face to the next while desperately trying to regain composure. He somewhat straightened his back, but he could not make his face straight. It was badly disfigured, not unlike the face of James Barrowclough as I had seen it at the rebel headquarters only that afternoon. One of the eyes was bruised, puffed and almost closed. The nostrils were caked with blood and the lips were swollen. The man had taken a heavy beating, and recently.
Then, with a jolting shock, I saw through the disfigurement and grasped who the man was. I was looking at Abel Grant, James Barrowclough’s servant.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Come and join us, young man,’ said Jack Fingers, as if inviting him into a party.
Grant was dragged shuffling through the door, evidently suffering many bodily injuries beside his facial ones, and brought to stand next to Fingers’s chair. I looked at Fidelis. I didn’t see how he could have known beforehand, but the satisfied smile on his face told me my friend wasn’t in the least surprised. In response to my glance he gave an acknowledging nod of the head towards the captive.