Gallows Thief

by Bernard Cornwell

  The Earl released his grip on the two girls, then gobbled his chicken and slurped his champagne. ‘I was told,’ he dismissed the two girls back to their painting by slapping their rumps, ‘that the French cavalry charged at least twenty times. Was that so?’

  ‘I didn’t count,’ Sandman said, still looking out of the window.

  ‘Perhaps you were not there after all?’ the Earl suggested.

  Sandman did not rise to the bait. He was still looking through the window, but instead of seeing the long scythes hiss through the grass, he was staring down a smoky slope in Belgium. He was seeing his recurring dream, watching the French cavalry surge up the slope, their horses labouring in the damp earth. The air on the British-held ridge had seemed heated, as though the door of hell’s great oven had been left ajar, and in that heat and smoke the French horsemen had never stopped coming. Sandman had not counted their charges for there were too many, a succession of cavalrymen thumping about the British squares, their horses bleeding and limping, the smoke of the muskets and cannon drifting over the British standards, the ground underfoot a matted tangle of trampled rye stalks, thick as a woven rush mat, but damp and rotten from the rain. The Frenchmen had been grimacing, their eyes red from the smoke and their mouths open as they shouted for their doomed emperor. ‘All I remember clearly, my lord,’ Sandman said, turning from the window, ‘was feeling grateful to the French.’

  ‘Grateful, why?’

  ‘Because so long as their horsemen milled so thick about our squares then their artillery could not fire on us.’

  ‘But how many charges did they make? Someone must know!’ The Earl was petulant.

  ‘Ten?’ Sandman suggested. ‘Twenty? They just kept coming. And they were hard to count because of the smoke. And I remember being very thirsty. And we didn’t just stand and watch them coming, we were looking backwards, too.’

  ‘Backwards? Why?’

  ‘Because once a charge had gone through the squares, my lord, they had to come back again.’

  ‘So they were attacking from both sides?’

  ‘From every side,’ Sandman said, remembering the swirl of horsemen, the mud and straw kicking up from the hooves and the screams of the dying horses.

  ‘How many cavalry?’ the Earl wanted to know.

  ‘I didn’t count, my lord. How many servants did your wife have in Mount Street?’

  The Earl grinned, then turned from Sandman. ‘Bring me a horseman, Betty,’ he ordered and the girl dutifully brought him a model French dragoon in his greencoat. ‘Very pretty, my dear,’ the Earl said, then put the dragoon on the table and hauled Betty onto his lap. ‘I am an old man, Captain,’ he said, ‘and if you want something of me then you must oblige me. Betty knows that, don’t you, child?’

  The girl nodded. She flinched as the Earl dug a skeletal hand into her dress to cradle one of her breasts. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, a country girl, curly-haired, freckled and with a round healthy face.

  ‘How must I oblige you, my lord?’ Sandman asked.

  ‘Not as Betty does! No, no!’ The Earl leered at Sandman. ‘You will tell me all I want to know, Captain, and perhaps, when you are done, I shall tell you a little of what you want to know. Rank has its privileges!’

  Outside, in the hall, a clock struck six and the sound seemed melancholy in the great empty house. Sandman felt the despair of wasted time. He needed to discover if Meg was here and he needed to return to London, and he sensed that the Earl would play with him all evening and at the end send him away with his questions unanswered. The Earl, sensing and enjoying Sandman’s disapproval, pulled the girl’s breasts out of her dress. ‘Let us begin at the beginning, Captain,’ he said, lowering his face to nuzzle the warm flesh, ‘let us begin at dawn, eh? It had been raining, yes?’

  Sandman walked round the table until he was behind the Earl, where he stooped so his face was close to the stiff hairs of the wig. ‘Why not talk about the battle’s end, my lord?’ Sandman asked in a low voice. ‘Why not talk about the attack of the Imperial Guard? Because I was there when we wheeled out of line and took the bastards in the flank.’ He crouched even lower. He could smell his lordship’s reek and see a louse crawling along the wig’s edge. He lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. ‘They’d won the battle, my lord, it was all over except the pursuit, but we changed history in an eyeblink. We marched out of line and we gave them volley fire, my lord, and then we fixed bayonets and I can tell you exactly how it happened. I can tell you how we won, my lord.’ Sandman’s temper was rising now and there was a bitterness in his voice. ‘We won! But you’ll never hear that story, my lord, never, because I’ll make damn sure that not one officer of the 52nd will ever talk to you! You understand that? Not one officer will ever talk to you. Good day, my lord. Perhaps your servant will be kind enough to show me out?’ He walked towards the door. He would ask the servant if Meg had come here and if not, which he suspected would prove the case, then this whole journey would have been a waste of time and money.

  ‘Captain!’ The Earl had tipped the girl off his lap. ‘Wait!’ His rouged face twitched. There was malevolence in it; an old, bitter, hard-hearted malevolence, but he so badly wanted to know exactly how Bonaparte’s vaunted Guard had been beaten off, so he snarled at the two girls and the servants to leave the room. ‘I’ll be alone with the Captain,’ he said.

  It still took time to draw the tale from him. Time and a bottle of smuggled French brandy, but eventually the Earl spewed the bitter tale of his marriage, confirming what Lord Christopher had already told Sandman. Celia, second wife to the sixteenth earl of Avebury, had been on stage when the Earl first saw her. ‘Legs,’ the Earl said dreamily, ‘such legs, Captain, such legs. That was the first thing about her I saw.’

  ‘At the Sans Pareil?’ Sandman asked.

  The Earl shot Sandman a very shrewd glance. ‘Who’ve you been talking to?’ he demanded. ‘Who?’

  ‘People talk in town,’ Sandman said.

  ‘My son?’ the Earl guessed, then laughed. ‘That little fool? That pasty little weakling? Good God, Captain, I should have culled that one when he was an infant. His mother was a holy damned fool and swiving her was like rogering a prayerful mouse, and the bloody fool thinks he’s taken after her, but he hasn’t. There’s me in him. He might be forever on his knees, Captain, but he’s always thinking of tits and bum, legs and tits again. He might fool himself, but he don’t fool me. Says he wants to be a priest! But he won’t. What he wants, Captain, is for me to be dead and then the estate is his, all of it! It’s entailed onto him, did he tell you that? And he’ll spend it all on tits, legs and bums, just as I would have done, only the difference between that stammering little fool and me is that I was never ashamed. I enjoyed it, Captain, I still do, and he suffers from guilt. Guilt!’ The Earl spat the word, whirling a length of spittle across the room. ‘So what did the pallid little halfwit tell you? That I killed Celia? Perhaps I did, Captain, or perhaps Maddox went up to town and did it for me, but how will you prove it, eh?’ The Earl waited for an answer, but Sandman did not speak. ‘Did you know, Captain,’ the Earl asked, ‘that they hang an aristocrat with a silken rope?’

  ‘I did not, my lord.’

  ‘So they say,’ the Earl declared, ‘so they do say. The common folk get turned off with a yard or two of common hemp, but we lords get a rope of silk and I’d gladly wear a silk rope in exchange for that bitch’s death. Lord, but she robbed me blind. Never knew a woman to spend money like it! Then when I came to my senses I tried to cut off her allowance. I denied her debts and told the estate’s trustees to turn her out of the house, but the bastards left her there. Maybe she was swiving one of them? That’s how she made her money, Captain, by diligent swiving.’

  ‘You’re saying she was a whore, my lord?’

  ‘Not a common whore,’ the Earl said, ‘she was no mere buttock, I’ll say that for her. She called herself a cantatrice, an actress, a dancer, but in truth she was a clever bitch and I was a fool
to exchange a marriage for a season of her swiving, however good she was.’ He grinned at himself, then turned his rheumy eyes on Sandman. ‘Celia used blackmail, Captain. She’d take a young man about town as a lover, commit the poor fool to write a letter or two begging her favours, and then when he engaged to marry an heiress she threatened to reveal the letters. Made a pretty penny, she did! She told me as much! Told me to my face. Told me she didn’t need my cash, had her own.’

  ‘Do you know what men she treated thus, my lord?’

  The Earl shook his head. He stared at the model battle, unwilling to meet Sandman’s eyes. ‘I didn’t want to know names,’ he said softly and, for the first time, Sandman felt some pity for the old man.

  ‘And the servants, my lord? The servants from your London house. What happened to them?’

  ‘How the devil would I know? They ain’t here.’ He scowled at Sandman. ‘And why would I want that bitch’s servants here? I told Faulkner to get rid of them, just to get rid of them.’

  ‘Faulkner?’

  ‘A lawyer, one of the trustees, and like all lawyers he’s a belly-crawling piece of shit.’ The Earl looked up at Sandman. ‘I don’t know what happened to Celia’s damned servants,’ he said, ‘and I don’t care. Now, go to the door and find Maddox and tell him you and I will sup on beef, and then, damn you, tell me what happened when the Emperor’s Guard attacked.’

  So Sandman did.

  He had come to Wiltshire, he had not found Meg, but he had learnt something.

  Though whether it was enough, he did not know.

  And in the morning he went back to London.

  5

  Sandman got back to London late on Thursday afternoon. He had taken the mail coach from Marlborough, justifying the expense by the time he was saving, but just outside Thatcham one of the horses had thrown a shoe and then, near the village of Hammersmith, a haywain with a broken axle was blocking a bridge and Sandman reckoned it would have been far quicker to have walked the last few miles rather than wait while the road was cleared, but he was tired after sleeping fitfully on a pile of straw in the yard of the King’s Head in Marlborough and so he stayed with the coach. He was also irritated, for he reckoned his journey to Wiltshire had been largely wasted. He doubted the Earl of Avebury had either killed or arranged the killing of his wife, but he had never thought the man guilty in the first place. The only advantage Sandman had gained was to learn that the dead Countess had kept herself by blackmailing her lovers, but that did not help him to discover who those lovers had been.

  He used the side door of the Wheatsheaf that opened into the tavern’s stableyard where he pumped water into the tin cup chained to the handle. He drank it down, pumped again, then turned as the click of hooves sounded in the stable entrance where he saw Jack Hood heaving a saddle onto a tall and handsome black horse. The highwayman nodded a curt acknowledgement of Sandman’s presence, then stooped to buckle the girth. Like his horse, Jack Hood was tall and dark. He wore black boots, black breeches and a narrow-waisted black coat, and he wore his black hair long and tied with a ribbon of black silk at the nape of his neck. He straightened and gave Sandman a crooked grin. ‘You look tired, Captain.’

  ‘Tired, poor, hungry and thirsty,’ Sandman said, and pumped a third cup of water.

  ‘That’s what the square life does for you,’ Hood said cheerfully. He slid two long-barrelled pistols into their saddle holsters. ‘You should be on the cross like me.’

  Sandman drank down the water and let the cup drop. ‘And what will you do, Mister Hood,’ he asked, ‘when they catch you?’

  Hood led the horse into the waning evening sunlight. The beast was fine bred and nervous, high-stepping and skittish; a horse, Sandman suspected, that could fly like the night wind when escape was needed. ‘When I’m caught?’ Hood asked. ‘I’ll come to you for help, Captain. Sally says you’re a crap prig.’

  ‘A gallows thief.’ Sandman had learnt enough flash to be able to translate the phrase. ‘But I haven’t stolen one man from the scaffold yet.’

  ‘And I doubt you ever will,’ Hood said grimly, ‘because that ain’t the way the world works. They don’t care how many they hang, Captain, so long as the rest of us take note that they do hang.’

  ‘They care,’ Sandman insisted, ‘why else did they appoint me?’

  Hood offered Sandman a sceptical look, then put his left foot into the stirrup and hauled himself into the saddle. ‘And are you telling me, Captain,’ he asked as he fiddled his right foot into its stirrup, ‘that they appointed you out of the goodness of their hearts? Did the Home Secretary discover a sudden doubt about the quality of justice in Black Jack’s court?’

  ‘No,’ Sandman allowed.

  ‘They appointed you, Captain, because someone with influence wanted Corday’s case examined. Someone with influence, am I right?’

  Sandman nodded. ‘Exactly right.’

  ‘A cove can be as innocent as a fresh-born babe,’ Hood said sourly, ‘but if he don’t have a friend with influence then he’ll hang high. Ain’t that so?’ Jack Hood flicked his coat tails out over his horse’s rump, then gathered the reins. ‘And as like as not I’ll finish my days on Jem Botting’s dancing floor and I don’t lose sleep nor tears over it. The gallows is there, Captain, and we live with it till we die on it, and we won’t change it because the bastards don’t want it changed. It’s their world, not ours, and they fight to keep it the way they want. They kill us, they send us to Australia or else they break us on the treadmill, and you know why? Because they fear us. They fear we’ll become like the French mob. They fear a guillotine in Whitehall and to keep it from happening they build a scaffold in Newgate. They might let you save one man, Captain, but don’t think you’ll change anything.’ He pulled on thin black leather gloves. ‘There are some coves to see you in the back slum, Captain,’ he said, meaning that there were some men waiting for Sandman in the back parlour. ‘But before you talk with them,’ Hood went on, ‘you should know I took my dinner at the Dog and Duck.’

  ‘In St George’s Fields?’ Sandman asked, puzzled by the apparently irrelevant statement.

  ‘A lot of the high toby live and dine there,’ Hood said, ‘on account that it’s convenient for the western roads.’ He meant that a number of highwaymen patronised the tavern. ‘And I heard a whisper there, Captain. Your life, fifty quid.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ve upset someone, Captain. I’ve spread word in the ’sheaf that no one’s to touch you because you’ve been kind to my Sal and I look after those that look after her, but I can’t control every flash bowzing house in London.’

  Sandman felt a lurch of his heart. Fifty guineas for his life? Was that a compliment or an insult? ‘You would not know, I suppose,’ he asked, ‘who has staked the money?’

  ‘I asked, but no one knew. But it’s firm cash, Captain, so watch yourself. I’m obliged to you.’ These last four words were because Sandman had hauled open the yard gate.

  Sandman looked up at the horseman. ‘You’re not going to see Sally on stage tonight?’

  Hood shook his head. ‘Seen her often enough,’ he said curtly, ‘and I’ve business of my own that she won’t be watching.’ He touched his spurs to his horse’s flanks and, without a word of farewell, rode northwards behind a wagon loaded with newly baked bricks.

  Sandman closed the gate. Viscount Sidmouth, when he had given Sandman this job, had hinted it would be easy, a month’s pay for a day’s work, but it was suddenly a life for a month’s pay. Sandman turned and gazed at the dirty windows of the back parlour, but he could not see beyond the gloss of the evening light on the small panes. Whoever waited there could see him, but he could not see them and so he did not go directly to the parlour, but instead cut through the barrel room to the passage where there was a serving hatch. He nudged the hatch open, careful not to make a noise, then stooped to peer through the crack.

  He heard the footsteps behind him, but before he could turn a pistol barrel was cold by his ear. ‘A good soldie
r always makes a reconnaissance, eh Captain?’ Sergeant Berrigan said. ‘I thought you’d come here first.’

  Sandman straightened and turned to see that the Sergeant was grinning, pleased because he had outmanoeuvred Sandman. ‘So what are you going to do, Sergeant?’ he asked. ‘Shoot me?’

  ‘Just making sure you ain’t got any sticks on you, Captain,’ Berrigan said, then used his pistol barrel to push open the flaps of Sandman’s jacket and, satisfied that the Captain was not armed, he jerked his head towards the parlour door. ‘After you, Captain.’

  ‘Sergeant,’ Sandman began, planning to appeal to Berrigan’s better nature, but that nature was nowhere to be seen, for the Sergeant just cocked the pistol and aimed it at Sandman’s chest. Sandman thought about knocking the barrel aside and bringing his knee up into Berrigan’s groin, but the Sergeant gave him a half-smile and an almost imperceptible shake of his head as though inviting Sandman to try. ‘Through the door, eh?’ Sandman asked and, when Berrigan nodded, he turned the knob and went into the back parlour.

  The Marquess of Skavadale and Lord Robin Holloway were on the settle at the far side of the long table. Both were exquisitely dressed in superbly cut black coats, blossoming cravats and skin-tight breeches. Holloway scowled to see Sandman, but Skavadale courteously stood and offered a smile. ‘My dear Captain Sandman, how very kind of you to join us.’

  ‘Been waiting long?’ Sandman asked truculently.

  ‘A half-hour,’ Skavadale replied pleasantly. ‘We did expect to find you here already, but the wait has not been unduly tedious. Please, sit.’

  Sandman sat reluctantly, first glancing at Berrigan who came into the parlour, closed the door and lowered the pistol’s flint, though he did not put the weapon away. Instead the Sergeant stood beside the door and watched Sandman. The Marquess of Skavadale took the cork from some wine and poured out a glassful. ‘A rather raw claret, Captain, but probably welcome after your journey? But how could we have expected the finest wine here, eh? This is the Wheatsheaf, flash, but not flush, eh? That’s rather good, don’t you think, Robin? Flash, but not flush?’