Death of a Dancer

by Caro Peacock

  ‘I’ll take these two and see them bedded down, then I’ll be back here after it’s dark,’ Amos said.

  ‘Very well. Have supper with us.’

  Amos went over to the horses and did complicated things with the buckles of their double harness. When he’d finished he vaulted on to the bare back of the one that had reared, holding the other by the driving reins.

  ‘You’re not going across the park like that, are you?’ I said.

  ‘Why not? A good gallop will get the devilment out of them.’

  I reached up and slid Morris’s four pounds into his pocket. He turned to wave as the horses clattered across the cobbles and out of the gateway, more sedately than they’d arrived.

  He returned at six o’clock, on foot for once, wearing a new brown corduroy jacket and mustard-coloured stock. When he took off his cap, his hair looked damp from the washing I guessed it had gone through under the stableyard pump. Mrs Martley had seen him in the livery yard but seemed wonderstruck to have a man of his height and good looks in our parlour, beaming his blue-eyed smile at her. He took up so much room that we had to dodge round him to put food on the table. Mrs Martley had flown into a panic when I told her we’d have a guest for supper and sent me running to Mr Colley for a jug of cream from the Guernseys and as many eggs as he could spare, then downstairs to the forge with one of her special treacle tarts and strict instructions to stand by and see it didn’t burn, then out again with a quart jug to the nearest beerhouse. All this had been annoying because I had my own preparations to make for the evening, but I’d managed so that, by the time Amos arrived, everything was in place.

  ‘I do like to see a man enjoying his food,’ Mrs Martley said as Amos started on his second plateful of ham and eggs.

  I waited until she’d gone to the sink downstairs with a bowl of washing up, then told Amos my plan.

  ‘If he comes tonight, I don’t think it will be until late,’ I said. ‘If we’re in the workshop from ten o’clock, that should be enough.’

  ‘The other times he tried, it was well after midnight,’ Amos said.

  ‘There’s a big old-fashioned travelling chariot in the workshop, waiting to have new springs fitted. I’ve taken some cushions and blankets down there. We’ll be quite comfortable while we’re waiting. I’ve put in a candle lantern, and a flint lighter. If we hear him unbolting the door of the workshop, we must wait before lighting it to give him time to do whatever he’s going to do in the phaeton. He’ll have to bring a lamp to work by, but he’ll have no reason to look inside the travelling chariot. While he’s in the phaeton, I’ll get down quietly from the chariot, creep round and bolt the workshop door on the inside …’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Amos said.

  ‘It makes more sense for me to do it. I’m lighter and can move more quietly. I oiled the inside bolt this afternoon, so it should move without making a noise. I practised getting out of the chariot and over to the door, and it takes twenty seconds by daylight. Double that, because it will be dark apart from his lamp in the phaeton, and give it a count of forty before you light your lamp and get out, making as much noise as you like. Then we close in on him, catching him red-handed.’

  ‘What happens if he hears or sees you going for the door?’ Amos said.

  ‘In that case, he’ll shout out and you make your move at once, without waiting to light the lantern.’

  I knew that was the weakest part of my plan. It would take luck to slide the bolt before the person in the phaeton realised what was happening. I’d wear a dark dress and my lightest shoes, meant for dancing quadrilles, and hope for the best.

  ‘He’ll have a knife, perhaps a pistol,’ Amos said, sounding unworried.

  ‘Hardcastle’s no fighter.’

  ‘Anything will fight when it’s cornered,’ Amos said. ‘But don’t you worry, I’ll settle him if he does.’

  ‘Settle who?’ Mrs Martley said, coming back into the room.

  She must have heard Amos from the stairs. Expecting opposition, I broke the news to her that Mr Legge and myself would be spending the night in the carriage-repair shop, waiting for an intruder.

  ‘But there’s nothing to worry about,’ I said. ‘We’ll be quite safe.’

  ‘Your reputation’s not worth worrying about? Sitting in the dark with a gentleman all night’s nothing to worry about?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Martley, but this is nothing to be ashamed of and I’m going to do it whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Then I’m sitting up along with you,’ she said.

  Amos and I looked at each other in silence.

  ‘Well, a three-horse team it is then,’ Amos said.

  The three hours in the coach shop were some of the oddest I’d ever spent. We sat there in the dark, on the cracked leather seats of the travelling chariot that smelled of old hay and musty wine, like three people being drawn by invisible horses along a flat and endless road. We’d arranged ourselves exactly as we might for a real journey, Mrs Martley and I on one seat with our faces towards the non-existent horses, Amos opposite, all of us tucked up in our blankets because the night was cold and we had the door on my side partly open so that we could hear everything.

  At first there was a dim glow from the last of the fire in the forge showing the phaeton in silhouette, but that soon died down so the blackness was complete. The chariot rocked and creaked on its old springs when one of us moved, making far more noise in the stillness than I’d noticed by day. That was worrying, but there was nothing to be done about it. The scuttlings of mice or rats and something larger that might have been a cat hunting broke the silence now and then. After a while Mrs Martley wadded up her pillow and fell asleep with her head against the window, snoring gently. Amos had the countryman’s ability to sit entirely still. I did my best to imitate him but was so strung up that the slightest sound had me looking in the direction of the outer door, as if I could see through the darkness.

  Eleven o’clock, then twelve sounded from the workhouse clock and a tawny owl screamed, flying over the graveyard. Beside me, Mrs Martley stirred.

  ‘Is something happening?’

  ‘Not yet, no.’

  He might not come tonight. We might have to go through all this another night. In his place, though, I shouldn’t wait. He had no way of knowing how long the phaeton would be here. Mrs Martley went back to sleep. I rubbed my hands together, to keep them supple for working the bolt. The small rasping sound the palms made sounded like footsteps in dry leaves. Then suddenly there were footsteps, real footsteps, outside, coming cautiously across the cobbles of the yard. The movement I made when I heard them set the chariot creaking, drowning them out.

  ‘Him,’ I whispered.

  We all froze. The creaking died away. A grinding of metal on metal came from the direction of the door. When I’d oiled the inside bolt I’d deliberately left the outer one as it was, so that the noise would be our alarm. The person there was working it backwards and forwards, trying to move it. It slid at last with a screech, then the latch clicked up and the wooden door grated on the cobbles. Whoever was there opened it just enough to let himself in, but the dim starlight coming from the yard seemed so bright in comparison with the dark inside the coach house that I was afraid he’d see us sitting there in the chariot. Foolish, of course. Coming into total darkness, he’d be blind as a mole. For a moment I saw a silhouette against the starlight. Then the door ground shut, the latch clicked again and he was inside with us.

  All we could see of him at first was a line of yellow light as thin as a piece of straw, moving uncertainly away from the door. Then it stopped moving and became a pool of light, but still unsteady, dodging from floor to walls and back again. He was carrying one of those candle lanterns with a shutter that can be turned to hide the light – a burglar’s lantern. He was nervous. We could hear his harsh, quick breaths. The dodging light found the phaeton and came to rest. He followed it across the floor. When he turned towards us the light fell on his face for a mom
ent. No doubt about that round, pale face like a pantomime moon against the darkness. Hardcastle. We had our man.

  Moving less cautiously now, he hauled himself into the phaeton and put the lamp down on the seat beside him. It was on the side furthest from us so his body blocked most of the light. I craned forward, but all I could see was his silhouette, hunched over. Then he slid down and seemed to be kneeling on the narrow space of the phaeton’s floor, facing the seat. Almost time to move. My nerves were twitching to go at once, go now and make sure of him, but I forced myself to sit tight. All we had so far was evidence that Hardcastle wanted his phaeton. There had to be more than that.

  It seemed an age until anything else happened, then a sawing sound came from the phaeton, like a knife hacking through tough meat, and a few muffled curses to show he was finding it heavy going. Time to move.

  I pushed the chariot door wide open and swung my legs round, moving carefully to try to stop the springs creaking. For all my care, they squeaked as I slid out, but I hoped he wouldn’t hear it over the noise he was making. I stood for a moment, hand on the side of the chariot, getting my bearings. The light from his lantern came nowhere near the chariot, so I was still in darkness, but it was throwing some light on the workshop door on the far side of the phaeton. I’d have to cross this half-lit area to get to the bolt, something I hadn’t allowed for in my plan. Still, no time to work out another one now. I took a few steps, trying to remember the sequence I’d worked out by day. Four steps towards the far wall, then turn left towards the doors and be careful not to bump into the forge. Although the fire had died, heat was still radiating from the bricks, telling me I was on the right path. I went past it, aware of the swishing of my footsteps and my heartbeat feeling loud enough to fill the coach house. The hacking and cursing from the phaeton went on. I was on the edge of the pool of lamplight now. It looked terribly bright but the bolt was only two or three steps away. No time for caution now. I dived for it.

  ‘Hey, what’s that? What’s going on?’

  Hardcastle’s alarmed voice from the phaeton. Simultaneously, the chariot doors banged back, Mrs Martley shouted something, and Amos’s feet came thundering across the floor. I reached the bolt, shot it across and braced myself with my back to the door. Hardcastle stood upright in the chariot, mouth open, a knife in his right hand. For a moment he stared at me, then vaulted clumsily over the side of the phaeton and ran towards me. His vault must have toppled the lantern over because it went out and we were suddenly in complete darkness.

  ‘Get away from her,’ Amos yelled.

  ‘Don’t touch her,’ Mrs Martley shouted.

  From the sound of it, she was on her feet too. A hand pawed at my waist.

  ‘Please, please …’

  Hardcastle’s gasping voice. It was coming from below, as if he was kneeling on the floor. Ridiculously, it sounded as if he were pleading with me to let him stab me because through the fabric of my skirt I felt something sharp pressing against my knee. I tried to kick out, but he was clinging to me like a sloth to a branch, pulling himself upright on my legs. Blasts of wine-soaked breath hit my nostrils.

  ‘Please, oh please …’ He was almost sobbing.

  ‘Let go of her.’

  Amos’s voice, from a few steps away. Then, from the same direction, the muffled crash of two bodies colliding and a shriek from Mrs Martley. My two rescuers had run into each other, giving Hardcastle his chance. He got himself almost upright and managed somehow to hit me under the chin with the top of his head. It was probably more by luck than any skill of his, but my head snapped back and I staggered sideways. I could hear him rattling the door, groping for the bolt. Then he found it, opened the door and starlight came in.

  ‘Miss Lane, are you all right?’

  Amos’s arms were round me.

  ‘Yes, for goodness sake, go after him.’

  Something rushed past us, flapping like a wind-blown umbrella into the yard. There was a clanking sound, a whoosh of water, a man’s yell and a bad smell. Then Mrs Martley’s voice, harsh and loud as we’d never heard it before.

  ‘And don’t you dare come back.’

  Amos and I rushed out of the coach shop just as the latch clicked on the door from the yard into the mews. It swung open and Hardcastle went running through it. I ran, shouting to Amos to follow, trying to keep my balance as my shoes skidded on slimy stuff on the cobbles. I ran out into Adam’s Mews just in time to see him turning into the passageway to Mount Street. Amos overtook me and I ran after him along Mount Street. As I rounded the corner into South Audley Street, Hardcastle was still in sight.

  ‘Only a couple of furlongs in it,’ Amos said over his shoulder, not even sounding puffed. ‘He’s not a stayer.’

  ‘He doesn’t need to be,’ I panted. ‘He’s near the finishing post already.’

  I’d realised where we were, just a few houses away from the Silverdale family’s London residence. Even as I said it, Hardcastle disappeared.

  ‘Gone to ground,’ Amos said. ‘He’ll be hiding in one of the basements. We’ll dig him out, don’t you worry.’

  ‘Quite the reverse of basement, I’m afraid.’

  We were outside the Silverdales’ house now. I came to a halt, hand on the stitch in my side. Most of the house was in darkness, but a window on the top floor glowed with soft candlelight. I imagined Lady Silverdale and her daughter at this moment having their studies interrupted by the family heir, stinking from the contents of the waste bucket.

  ‘Where’s he gone then?’ Amos said.

  ‘Just where any boy in trouble goes: home to mother.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Back at Abel Yard, Amos and I lit the lantern and had a look at the phaeton. The red leather of the driving seat had been gashed and pulled away from the nails that had been holding it, stuffing gaping out.

  ‘Like her dressing room,’ I said, thinking of the knife slits in her couch and muff. I held the lamp while Amos kneeled down on the floor of the phaeton and looked at the gash.

  ‘The nails had been taken out from this bit of the seat, then put back quite clumsy like,’ he said. ‘He hid something here, right enough.’

  ‘And this time he was in too much of a hurry to bother with taking the nails out again,’ I said. ‘Is there anything there?’

  Amos put his hand into the gash and rummaged around.

  ‘Nothing there. Whatever it was, he got away with it.’

  ‘I didn’t notice him carrying anything, did you?’

  ‘If it was jewellery, he could have slipped it in his pocket.’

  Lamplight glinted on something lying on the floor near my foot. I hoped it might be a piece of jewellery, but it turned out to be a knife that Hardcastle must have dropped when he ran away.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ Amos said. ‘What’s this?’

  He’d been kneeling on it, on the floor of the phaeton. A plain brown leather portfolio, tied with black tapes. I moved the lamp as he untied it, showing a thick pile of papers inside.

  ‘We’ll take it upstairs and look at it in better light,’ I said.

  We found Mrs Martley with tea already brewed.

  ‘Did he get away, then?’

  She’d become as eager as a huntress. From the smell of soap clinging to her, she’d been scrubbing her hands to take away the smell of the waste bucket. I spread out the contents of the portfolio near the oil lamp on the table and we all crowded round.

  ‘Lawyers’, things, by the look of them,’ Amos said.

  The papers on top of the bundle were written on parchment-like paper in legal language. It took me a while to realise that they were property deeds, nine of them altogether, registering the sale of various London properties to Columbine under her real name of Priddy.

  The dates covered the past ten years and the properties themselves ranged from a shop in Bond Street through various houses in Kensington and Knightsbridge to a villa in Maida Vale. The earlier the date, the less expensive the property, suggesting
that she’d ploughed the profits from rents into new investments. Next came an orderly pile of share certificates. As far as I could make out, she owned a quarter share in a hotel of dubious reputation near the Haymarket: twenty per cent of an omnibus company, of all things; and thirty per cent of the Augustus Theatre.

  ‘No wonder they had to tolerate her whims, and no wonder she was nagging poor Blake about ticket sales,’ I said. ‘There must be tens of thousands of pounds here altogether. She was a wealthy woman.’

  And a clever one. Any diamonds she’d collected in her career had been turned into property in fast-growing London. While she lived in houses paid for by her lovers, the value of her investments grew year by year.

  Amos, no great hand at reading or writing, seized on a document he could recognise.

  ‘I said there’d be her marriage lines.’

  He was holding the certificate of the marriage of Margaret Priddy and Rodney Hardcastle. Another paper was attached to it by a small pearl-headed pin: a family tree of the Silverdale family for many generations back, neatly copied in a round, school-girlish hand that I recognised from Columbine’s signature in the church register. So when she’d decided to make what turned out to be her final investment and buy a title for herself by marrying Hardcastle, she’d done her research methodically, like the good businesswoman she was. I felt the stirrings of admiration for her. True, she’d exploited her looks for all they were worth, but there must have been a bedrock of commonsense that told her looks didn’t last and the day would come when gentlemen weren’t clamouring to pay her rent and buy carriages for her. She faced that day indebted to no one, a woman of property who’d added a husband in society and the prospect of ‘your ladyship’ to the luxuries she’d arranged for herself. I raised my teacup in a silent toast to her.

  The other papers in the portfolio looked less impressive; there were several dozen of them in various shapes, sizes and handwritings. They ranged from fine-quality writing paper with the addresses of gentlemen’s clubs at the top, through hastily written scraps that might have been torn out of notebooks, to the back of a tavern bill. I was bundling them back into the portfolio, sure we’d already seen the documents that mattered, when I noticed the sums of money recorded on them. They were sprinkled with pound signs and figures with a formidable number of noughts behind them. The smallest were for several hundred pounds, the larger ones for sums that made my head reel. I glimpsed ‘compound sum of £15,000’ in black slashing writing on lined paper; ‘to a total of £20,000’ on torn yellow paper in ink so rusty that it might as well have been blood.