Bernard Cornwell - Gallows Thief

Sandman nodded. 'If there was any justice in this world, Sergeant, then he would have been hanged at Newgate. He wasn't a felon like the folk who live here. He didn't rob stage coaches or pick pockets or burgle houses, instead he tied people's money into crooked schemes and he'd still be doing it if he hadn't met an even cleverer man who did it back to him. And there was me, claiming to be virtuous, but I still took his money all my life, didn't I?'

Sergeant Berrigan lowered the pistol's cock, then put the weapon on the table. 'My father was honest.'

'He was? Not is?'

Berrigan used a tinder box to light two candles, then lifted a jug of ale that he had kept hidden on the floor. 'My father died a couple of years ago. He was a blacksmith in Putney, and he wanted me to learn the trade, but of course I wouldn't. I knew better, didn't I?' He sounded rueful. 'I wanted life to be easier than forever shoeing horses and banging up trace-chains.'

'So you joined the army to escape the smithy?'

Berrigan laughed. 'I joined the army to escape a hanging.' He poured the ale and pushed a tankard towards Sandman. 'I was peter hunting. Do you know what that is?'

'I live here, remember,' Sandman said. Peter hunting was the trade of cutting luggage off the backs of coaches and, if it was well done, the coachmen and passengers had no idea that their trunks had been slashed off the rack. To prevent it many coaches used steel chains to secure the baggage, but a good peter hunter carried a jemmy to prise the chain's anchoring staples from the coach's chassis.

'I got caught,' Berrigan said, 'and the beak said I could stand trial or join the army. And nine years later I was a sergeant.'

'A good one, eh?'

'I could keep order,' Berrigan said bleakly.

'So could I, oddly enough,' Sandman said, and it was not such a strange claim as it sounded. Many officers relied on their sergeants to keep order, but Sandman had possessed a natural and easy authority. He had been a good officer and he knew it and, if he was honest with himself, he missed it. He missed the war, missed the certainties of the army, missed the excitements of campaigning and missed the companionship of his company. 'Spain was the best,' he said. 'We had such happy times in Spain. Some bloody awful times too, of course, but I don't remember those. You were in Spain?'

''twelve to 'fourteen,' Berrigan said.

'Those were mostly good times,' Sandman said, 'but I hated Waterloo.'

The Sergeant nodded. 'It was bad.'

'I've never been so damned frightened in my life,' Sandman said. He had been shaking when the Imperial Guard came up the hill. He remembered his right arm quivering and he had been ashamed to show such fear; it had not occurred to him until much later that most of the men on the ridge, and most of the men coming to attack them, were just as frightened and just as ashamed of their fears. 'The air was warm,' he said, 'like an oven door had been opened. Remember?'

'Warm,' Berrigan agreed, then frowned. 'A lot of folk want you dead, Captain.'

'It puzzles me,' Sandman admitted. 'When Skavadale offered me that money I was convinced that either he or Lord Robin had murdered the Countess, but now? Now there's someone else out there. Maybe they're the real murderer and the strange thing is I haven't a clue who it might be. Unless this has the answer?' He lifted the letter that the landlord had given him. 'Can you push a candle towards me?'

The letter was written on pale-green paper and was in a handwriting he knew only too well. It was from Eleanor, and he remembered how his heart would leap whenever her letters arrived in Spain or France. Now he slit her green wax seal and unfolded the thin paper. He had hoped the letter would reveal Meg's whereabouts, but instead Eleanor was asking Sandman to meet her next morning at Gunter's confectionery store in Berkeley Square. There was a postscript. I think I might have news, she had written, but nothing else.

'No,' he said, 'I don't have the truth yet, but I think I'll have it soon.' He lay the letter down. 'Aren't you supposed to shoot me?'

'In a tavern?' Berrigan shook his head. 'Cut your throat, more like. It's quieter. But I'm trying to decide whether Miss Hood will ever talk to me again if I do.'

'I doubt she ever will,' Sandman said with a smile.

'And the last time I was on your side,' Berrigan said, 'things looked rough, but we did win.'

'Against the Emperor's own guard, too,' Sandman agreed.

'So I reckon I'm on your side again, Captain,' the Sergeant said.

Sandman smiled and raised his tankard in a mock toast. 'But if you don't kill me, Sergeant, can you return to the Seraphim Club? Or will they regard your disobedience as cause for dismissal?'

'I can't go back,' Berrigan said, and gestured at a heavy bag, a haversack and his old army knapsack that lay together on the floor.

Sandman showed neither pleasure nor surprise. He was pleased, but he was not surprised because from the very first he had sensed that Berrigan was looking for an escape from the Seraphim. 'Do you expect wages?' he asked the Sergeant.

'We'll split the reward, Captain.'

'There's a reward?'

'Forty pounds,' Berrigan said, 'is what the magistrates pay to anyone who brings in a proper felon. Forty.' He saw that the reward money was news to Sandman and shook his head in disbelief. 'How the hell else do you think the watchmen make a living?'

Sandman felt very foolish. 'I didn't know.'

Berrigan filled up both ale tankards. 'Twenty for you, Captain, and twenty for me.' He grinned. 'So what are we doing tomorrow?'

'Tomorrow,' Sandman said, 'we begin by going to Newgate. Then I am meeting a lady and you will, well, I don't know what you'll do, but we shall see, won't we?' He twisted in the chair as the door opened behind him.

'Bleeding hell,' Sally frowned when she saw the pistol on the table, then glared at Berrigan. 'What the hell are you doing here?'

'Come to have supper with you, of course,' Berrigan said.

Sally blushed, and Sandman looked out the window so as not to embarrass her and reflected that his allies now consisted of a club-footed reverend aristocrat of radical views, a sharp-tongued actress, a felonious sergeant and, he dared to hope, Eleanor.

And together they had just three days to catch a killer.

CHAPTER SIX

It was raining next morning when Sandman and Berrigan walked to Newgate Prison. Sandman was still limping badly, grimacing every time he put weight on his left foot. He had wrapped a bandage tight about the boot, but the ankle still felt like jellied fire. 'You shouldn't be walking,' Berrigan told him.

'I shouldn't have walked when I sprained the other ankle at Burgos,' Sandman said, 'but it was either that or get captured by the Frogs. So I walked back to Portugal.'

'You, an officer?' Berrigan was amused. 'No gee-gee?'

'I loaned my gee-gee,' Sandman said, 'to someone who was really injured.'

Berrigan walked in silence for a few paces. 'We had a lot of good officers, really,' he said after a while.

'And there I was,' Sandman said, 'thinking I was unique.'

'Because the bad officers didn't last too long,' Berrigan went on, 'especially when there was a fight. Wonderful what a bullet in the back will do.' The Sergeant had slept in the Wheatsheaf's back parlour after it became clear he was not to be invited to share Sally's bed, though Sandman, watching the two during the evening, had thought it a damn close-run thing. Lord Alexander, oblivious that he was losing Sally to a low-born rival, had stared at her in dumb admiration until he nerved himself to tell her a joke, but as the jest depended for its humour on an understanding of the Latin gerund, it failed miserably. When Lord Alexander finally fell asleep the Sergeant carried him out to his carriage which took him home. 'He can drink, that cove,' Berrigan had said in admiration.