Bernard Cornwell - Gallows Thief

Sandman smiled. 'How do you know what kind of a soldier I was, Sergeant?'

'I know exactly what sort of swoddy you was,' Berrigan said. He had a good face, Sandman thought, broad, tough and with confident eyes.

Sandman shrugged. 'I don't believe I had any particular reputation.'

Berrigan looked at Sally. 'It was the end of the day at Waterloo, miss, and we was beaten. I knew it. I've been in enough fights to know when you're beaten, and we was just standing there and dying. We hadn't given in, don't get me wrong, miss, but the bloody Crapauds had us beat. There was simply too many of the bastards. We'd been killing them all day and still they kept coming and it was day's end and the last of them was coming up the hill and there were four times as many of them as there were of us. I watched him,' he jerked his head at Sandman, 'and he was walking up and down in front of the line like he didn't have a care in the world. You'd lost your hat, hadn't you, sir?'

Sandman laughed at that memory. 'I had, you're right.' His bicorne hat had been blasted off by a French musket ball and it had vanished. He had immediately searched the fire-blackened ground where he was standing, but the hat had gone. He never did find it.

'It was his fair hair,' Berrigan explained to Sally. 'Stood out in a dark day. Up and down he walked and the Crapauds had a swarm of skirmishers not fifty paces off and they was all shooting at him and he didn't blink an eyelid. Just walked.'

Sandman was embarrassed. 'I was only doing my duty, Sergeant, like you were, and I was terrified, I can tell you.'

'But you're the one we noticed doing the duty,' Berrigan said, then looked back to Sally who was listening open mouthed. 'He's walking up and down and the Emperor's own guard are coming up the hill at us, and I thought to myself, that's it! That's it, Sam. A short life and a shallow grave, 'cos there were precious few of us left, but the Captain here, he was still strolling like it was Sunday in Hyde Park and then he stopped walking and he watched the Frenchies as cool as you like, and then he laughed.'

'I don't remember that,' Sandman said.

'You did,' Berrigan insisted. 'There's death in bluecoats coming up the hill and you were laughing!'

'I had a Colour Sergeant who made very bad jokes at inappropriate moments,' Sandman said, 'so I imagine he said something rather indecent.'

'Then I watched him take his men round the flank of the bastards,' Berrigan continued telling Sally his story, 'and he beat them into hell.'

'That wasn't me,' Sandman said reprovingly. 'It was Johnny Colborne who marched us round the flank. It was his regiment.'

'But you led them,' Berrigan insisted. 'You led.'

'No, no, no,' Sandman countered. 'I was just closest to you, Sergeant, and we certainly didn't beat the French guards alone. As I recall your regiment was in the thick of it?'

'We was good that day,' Berrigan allowed, 'we was very good and we bloody well had to be 'cos the Crapauds were fierce as buggery.' He poured two pots of ale, then raised his own tankard. 'Your very good health, Captain.'

'I'll drink to that,' Sandman said, 'though I doubt your employers would share the sentiment?'

'Lord Robin don't like you,' Berrigan said, 'on account that you made him look a bloody idiot, but that ain't difficult seeing as he is a bloody idiot.'

'Maybe they don't like me,' Sandman observed, 'because they don't want the Countess's murder investigated?'

'Don't suppose they care one way or another,' Berrigan said.

'I hear they commissioned the portrait, and the Marquess admitted knowing the dead woman.' Sandman tallied the points that counted against Berrigan's employers. 'And they refuse to answer questions. I suspect them.'

Berrigan drank from his tankard, then refilled it from the jug. He stared at Sandman for a few seconds, then shrugged. 'They're the Seraphim Club, Captain, so yes, they've done murder, and they've thieved, they've bribed, they've even tried highway robbery. They call them pranks. But killing the Countess? I've heard nothing.'

'Would you have heard?' Sandman asked.

'Maybe not,' Berrigan allowed. 'But we servants know most of what they do because we clean up after them.'

'Because they're being flash?' Sally sounded indignant. It was one thing for her friends at the Wheatsheaf to be criminals, but they had been born poor. 'Why the hell do they want to be flash?' she asked. 'They're rich already, ain't they?'

Berrigan looked at her, evidently liking what he saw. 'That's exactly why they do it, miss, because they are rich,' he said. 'Rich, titled and privileged, and on account of that they reckon they're better than the rest of us. And they're bored. What they want, they take and what gets in their way, they destroy.'

'Or get you to destroy it?' Sandman guessed.

Berrigan gave Sandman a very level look. 'There are thirty-eight Seraphims,' he said, 'and twenty servants, and that don't count the kitchens or the girls. And it takes all twenty of us to clean up their messes. They're rich enough so they don't have to care,' his tone suggested he was warning Sandman, 'and they're bastards, Captain, real bastards.'

'Yet you work for them,' Sandman spoke very gently.

'I'm no saint, Captain,' Berrigan said, 'and they pay me well.'

'Because they need your silence?' Sandman guessed and, when there was no reply, he pushed a little harder. 'What do they need your silence about?'

Berrigan glanced at Sally, then looked back to Sandman. 'You don't want to know,' he growled.

Sandman understood the implications of that quick glance at Sally. 'Rape?' he asked.

Berrigan nodded, but said nothing.

'Is that the purpose of the club?' Sandman asked.

'The purpose,' Berrigan said, 'is for them to do whatever they want. They're all lords or baronets or rich as hell and the rest of the world are peasants, and they reckon they have the right to do whatever they fancy. There's not a man there who shouldn't be hanged.'

'You included?' Sandman asked and, when the Sergeant did not answer, he asked another question. 'Why are you telling me all this?'

'Lord Robin Holloway,' Berrigan said, 'wants you dead because you humiliated him, but I won't stand for it, Captain, not after Waterloo. That was a—' he paused, frowning as he tried and failed to find the right word— 'I didn't think I'd live through it,' he confessed instead, 'and nothing been's the same since. We went to the gates of hell, miss,' he looked at Sally, 'and we got deep scorched, but we marched out again.' The Sergeant's voice had been hoarse with emotion and Sandman understood that. He had met many soldiers who could begin crying just thinking about their years of service, about the battles they had endured and the friends they had lost. Sam Berrigan looked as hard as a cobblestone, and undoubtedly he was, but he was also a very sentimental man. 'There's been hardly a day that I haven't seen you in my mind,' Berrigan went on, 'out on that ridge in that bloody smoke. It's what I remember about the battle, just that, and I don't know why. So I don't want you harmed by some spavined halfwit like Lord Robin Holloway.'

Sandman smiled. 'I think you're here, Sergeant, because you want to leave the Seraphim Club.'

Berrigan leant back and contemplated Sandman and then, more appreciatively, Sally. She blushed under his scrutiny, and he took a cigar from his inside pocket and struck a light with a tinder box. 'I don't intend to be any man's servant for long,' he said when the cigar was drawing, 'but when I leave, Captain, I'll set up in business.'

'Doing what?' Sandman asked.

'These,' Berrigan tapped the cigar. 'A lot of gentlemen acquired a taste for these in the Spanish war, but they're curious hard to come by. I find them for the club members and I make almost as much tin that way as I do from wages. You understand me, Captain?'