Bruce Alexander - The Price of Murder

“Oh, I understand,” said I-and indeed I did. ’Twas the first time I had considered the matters he spoke of.

“Now I know for fact that readin’ ain’t just to pass the time. You got all your learning, which is considerable, out of books, didn’t you?”

“Well, not quite all. A lot that isn’t facts and some that is I got from Sir John.”

“And him ,” he laughed. “He was just born with it, I reckon.”

“Indeed,” said I, “he must have been.”

“But whenever I come to a word I don’t know, I just take a look into that Johnson dictionary you gave me-and there it is. I know what it means, and I know how to spell it proper. I want you to know, Jeremy, that giving me that dictionary is about the most considerate thing anybody ever did for me. And I’ve read that Robinson Crusoe book twice through, I have!”

“Well, it’s about time then that you got another, don’t you think so?”

“You just tell me what to get, and I’ll get it.”

“Well,” said I, “let me give some thought to that.”

“You do that.”

Then did Constable Patley sit back, blushing with excitement at having said his piece. He nodded a good, firm, manly nod.

“I just wanted you to know.”

“Thank you, Mr. Patley.”

We finished the rest of the trip to Newmarket in complete silence-or near it.

Yet, as we entered the town of Newmarket, Mr. Patley pointed off to the left and called my attention to the heath just beyond us.

“It’s there they run the race,” said he. “It’s the longest and the fastest, and the only one that’s run on a permanent course.”

Of the events that followed-our arrival and search for the Good Queen Bess, and our disappointment at learning Mr. Deuteronomy and his party had not yet arrived-I shall have nothing to say. Such mundane details have little place in such a report as this, for they seem only to clutter the narrative. Let me begin this section, rather, with our first survey of the race site. We were, I suppose, searching for Alice Plummer, yet neither Mr. Patley nor I expected to find her quite so immediate. And, truth be known, I do believe that both of us would have been disappointed if we had found her quite so soon, for we must then have turned round and taken her back to London without ever having viewed the great race for the King’s Plate. I had told Patley of Mr. Deuteronomy’s bold boast that he would win, riding Pegasus, and we were both greatly impressed by that. We would see him win-sister or no.

In my case, after we had rested ourselves a bit in the room provided us, we went out to get a proper view of the race course and a sense of the town. Newmarket itself was not much-nor is it today, if what I have heard of it still pertains. The surrounding countryside is pretty enough, but the buildings in the town have to them a rather decrepit air, as if a good, strong wind might blow them all down. The main street in town is the same road we took from Cambridge. It is withal, as its name implies, a market town- and probably has been such for near a thousand years. There is a central square, and in it, foodstuffs-fruit and vegetable-are sold. Though not so grand as Covent Garden, I do believe a greater variety of growing things are sold there. Yet what the town of Newmarket may or may not be matters little, for it is known not so much as a town (there must be half a hundred or more like it) as it is a location for the greatest horse-racing to be found in all of England. Without its race course, it would be simply another market town.

The King’s Plate race was still a few days into the future, yet there seemed to be more people in the area surrounding the course than in the town proper. Was it always so? Their number would doubtless increase on race day. Where had they all come from? Where did they sleep? These visitors must have surely doubled the population of the town already.

As we merged with the crowd, Mr. Patley and I noticed a number of familiar faces from Bedford Street and Seven Dials in London: whores and pickpockets they were, and in such number as I had not seen before. The whores flirted one with another. The pickpockets dipped their hands each in the other’s coats and waistcoats. It was a carnival for thieves. We came at last to a rail fence that marked one of the limits of the course. Coaches and carriages were parked there, hard by, and the dukes and earls stood atop them, observing the activity out on the track through telescopes and spy-glasses. Each seemed to boast a surrounding retinue of a sizable number. There was a good deal of teasing comment that passed back and forth between them. It was for the nobles, as I saw, that this pageant was played out. But what was it they watched so intently out there on the course? I put the question to Mr. Patley.

“I don’t rightly know,” said he. “I reckon, though, that they’re studying their horses out there-not so much for speed as for gait and behavior on the course and whatnot. There’s a lot to learning a course like this one.”

“Why this one, especially?”

“Well, because of its length and the many rough places out there on the heath.”

“Not an easy course then, eh?”

“Oh, no. Ain’t a bit of it easy.”

We had a good view of the horses on the track-though not so good as the nobles and aristocrats atop their vehicles. We had found a spot between two coaches, somewhat protected from the crowd. From it, I watched and took in all that Mr. Patley had to say about the racing of horses in general, and the racing of them at Newmarket in particular. In the course of my days in Newmarket, he passed on to me a wealth of information. It all began, as I recall, with a question I asked about the number of horses out on the track. There was a great swarm of them following those on which the owners had their spy-glasses trained. They were moving along at a ragged pace and with no style whatever. It was almost as if this second line of riders were hoping that some reflected glory might be cast back upon them from the first.

“They can’t all be running in the King’s Plate race, can they?” I asked Mr. Patley.

“No, not at all. But it’s one of the faults of this race that there’s far too many in it.”

“They put no limit on the number?”

“Well, in a practical way I s’pose they do. They put the entry fee up so high, there’s not so many can afford it. But those who can are free to get out on the course and ride round it as often as they like.” He smiled and shook his head. “It makes for a pretty crowded field, don’t it?”

“It does indeed.”

We watched on as the leaders and the pursuing line of stragglers reached the farthest point from us. Then did Patley lose interest (or so it seemed to me) and began looking up and down the rail fence, as if for something he knew had to be there. Having found it, he pointed down to our right.

“There, Jeremy, just take a look.” There was a line of horses, with overweight riders perched on top awaiting the arrival of the mob of horsemen so that they might join them.

“What about them?”

“Well, just look. They’re waiting to take their trip round the course, and there’s none checking to see if they got any right to be here at all, much less to tour the track.”

“So right now anybody could get on the course?”

“As long as he’s got a horse to ride.”

I looked them over, those waiting impatiently for the mounted mob to make the circle complete. I had one more question, the last for a while.

“Who are those people waiting their turn on the track?”

“Local gentry.” He spat it out as if it were an oath or an obscenity.

As near as I could tell, the entire event was staged simply for the entertainment of the local gentry. The nobility-that is, those who owned the horses running the race-seemed to take it all quite earnestly.