Bernard Cornwell - Gallows Thief

'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.

CHAPTER FIVE

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 right foot into the stirrup and hauled himself into the saddle. 'And are you telling me, Captain,' he asked as he fiddled his left 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.'