Bernard Cornwell - Gallows Thief

'I'm not sure I do.'

'I don't need your advice, I don't need your preaching and I don't need your help. Sam Berrigan can look after himself. I just came to warn you, nothing else. Get out of town, Captain.'

'Joy shall be in heaven,' Sandman said, 'over one sinner that repenteth.'

'Oh no. No, no, no,' Berrigan shook his head. 'I just done you a favour, Captain, and that's it!' He stood up, 'And that's all I came to do.'

Sandman smiled. 'I could do with some help, Sergeant, so when you decide to leave the club, come and find me. I'm leaving London tomorrow, but I'll be back here on Thursday afternoon.'

'You'd better bloody be,' Sally put in.

Sandman, amused, raised an eyebrow.

'It's that private performance,' Sally explained. 'You're coming to Covent Garden to cheer me, aren't you? It's Aladdin.'

'Aladdin, eh?'

'A half bloody rehearsed Aladdin. Got to be in there tomorrow morning to learn the steps. You are coming, aren't you, Captain?'

'Of course I am,' Sandman said, and looked back to Berrigan. 'So I'll be back here on Thursday and thank you for the ale, and when you decide to help me, then you know where to find me.'

Berrigan stared at him for a heartbeat, said nothing, then nodded at Sally and walked away after putting a handful of coins on the table. Sandman watched him leave. 'A very troubled young man, Sally,' he said.

'Don't look troubled to me. Good-looking though, ain't he?'

'Is he?'

'Course he is!' Sally said forcefully.

'But he's still troubled,' Sandman said. 'He wants to be good and finds it easy to be bad.'

'Welcome to life,' Sally said.

'So we're going to have to help make him good, aren't we?'

'We?' She sounded alarmed.

'I've decided I can't put the world to rights all on my own,' Sandman said. 'I need allies, my dear, and you're elected. So far there's you, someone I saw this afternoon, maybe Sergeant Berrigan and . . .' Sandman turned as a newcomer to the taproom knocked down a chair, apologised profusely, fumbled his walking stick and then struck his head on a beam. The Reverend Lord Alexander Pleydell had arrived. '… and your admirer makes four,' Sandman finished.

And maybe five, for Lord Alexander had a young man with him, a young man with an open face and a troubled expression. 'You're Captain Sandman?' The young man did not wait for an introduction, but just hurried across the room and held out his hand.

'At your service,' Sandman said cautiously.

'Thank God I've found you!' the young man said. 'My name is Carne, Christopher Carne.'

'I'm pleased to meet you,' Sandman said politely, though the name meant nothing to him and the young man's face was quite unfamiliar.

'The Countess of Avebury was my stepmother,' Carne explained. 'I am my father's only son, only child indeed, and thus heir to the earldom.'

'Ah,' Sandman said.

'We must talk,' Carne said. 'Please, we must talk.'

Lord Alexander was bowing to Sally and, at the same time, blushing deep scarlet. Sandman knew his friend would be content for a while, so he led Carne to the back of the taproom where a booth offered some privacy.

'We must talk,' Carne said again. 'Dear God, Sandman, you can prevent a great injustice and God knows you must.'

So they talked.

===OO=OOO=OO===

He was, of course, the Lord Christopher Carne. 'Call me Kit,' he said, 'please.'

Sandman was no radical. He had never shared Lord Alexander's passion to pull down a society based on wealth and privilege, but nor did he like calling men 'my lord' unless he truly found them or their office worthy of respect. He had no doubt that the Marquess of Skavadale had noted that reluctance, just as Sandman had noted that the Marquess was gentleman enough not to remark on it. But though Sandman was unwilling to address Lord Christopher Carne as my lord, he was equally unwilling to call him Kit, so it was better to call him nothing.

Sandman just listened. Lord Christopher Carne was a nervous, hesitant young man with thick-lensed spectacles. He was very short, had thin hair and the faintest suggestion of a stammer. In all he was not a prepossessing man, though he did possess an intensity of manner that compensated for his apparent weakness. 'My father,' he told Sandman, 'is a dreadful man, just d-dreadful.'

'Dreadful?'

'It is as though the ten commandments, Sandman, were quite d-deliberately compiled as a challenge to him. Especially the seventh!'

'Adultery?'

'Of course. He ignores it, Sandman, ignores it!' Behind the magnifying lenses of his glasses Lord Christopher's eyes widened as though the very thought of adultery was horrid, then his lordship blushed as if to mention it was shameful. He was dressed, Sandman noted, respectably enough in a well-cut coat and a fine shirt, but the cuffs of both were stained with ink, betraying a bookish disposition. 'My p-point,' Lord Christopher seemed uncomfortable under Sandman's scrutiny, 'is that like many habitual sinners, my father takes umbrage when he is sinned against.'

'I don't understand.'

Lord Christopher blinked several times. 'He has sinned with many men's wives, Captain Sandman,' he said uncomfortably, 'but he was furious when his own wife was unfaithful.'

'Your stepmother?'

'Just so. He threatened to kill her! I heard him.'

'To threaten to kill someone,' Sandman observed, 'is not the same as killing them.'

'I am apprised of the difference,' Lord Christopher answered with a surprising asperity, 'but I have talked with Alexander and he tells me you have a duty to the painter, Cordell?'

'Corday.'

'Just so, and I cannot believe, cannot believe he did it! What cause did he have? But my father, Sandman, my father had cause.' Lord Christopher spoke with a savage vehemence, even leaning forward and gripping Sandman's wrist as he made the accusation. Then, realising what he had done, he blushed and let go. 'You will perhaps understand,' he went on more mildly, 'if I tell you a little of my father's story.'

The tale was briefly told. The Earl's first wife, Lord Christopher's mother, had been the daughter of a noble family and, Lord Christopher averred, a living saint. 'He treated her wretchedly, Sandman,' he said, 'shaming her, abusing her and insulting her, but she endured it with a Christian forbearance until she died. That was in 'nine. God rest her dear soul.'

'Amen,' Sandman said piously.

'He hardly mourned her,' Lord Christopher said indignantly, 'but just went on taking women to his bed and among them was Celia Collett. She was scarce a child, Sandman, a mere third his age! But he was besotted.'

'Celia Collett?'

'My stepmother, and she was clever, Sandman, she was clever.' The savagery was back in his voice. 'She was an opera dancer at the Sans Pareil. Do you know it?'

'I know of it,' Sandman said mildly. The Sans Pareil on the Strand was one of the new unlicensed theatres that put on entertainments that were lavish with dance and song and if Celia, Countess of Avebury, had graced its stage then she must have been beautiful.

'She refused his advances,' Lord Christopher took up his tale again. 'She turned him down flat! Kept him from her b-bed till he married her, and then she led him a dance, Sandman, a dance! I won't say he didn't deserve it, for he did, but she took what money she could and used it to buy horns for his head.'

'You obviously didn't like her?' Sandman observed.

Lord Christopher blushed again. 'I hardly knew her,' he said uncomfortably, 'but what was there to like? The woman had no religion, few manners and scarce any education.'

'Did your father — does your father,' Sandman amended himself, 'care for such things as religion, manners or education?'

Lord Christopher frowned as though he did not understand the question, then nodded. 'You have understood him precisely,' he said. 'My father cares nothing for God, for letters or for courtesy. He hates me, Sandman, and do you know why? Because the estate is entailed onto me. His own father did that, his very own father!' Lord Christopher tapped the table to emphasise his point. Sandman said nothing, but he understood that an entailed estate implied a great insult to the present Earl of Avebury for it meant that his father, Lord Christopher's grandfather, had so mistrusted his own son that he had made certain he could not inherit the family fortune. Instead it was placed in the hands of trustees and, though the present earl could live off the estate's income, the capital and the land and investments would all be held in trust until he died, when they would pass to Lord Christopher. 'He hates me,' Lord Christopher went on, 'not only because of the entail, but because I have expressed a wish to take holy orders.'