Bernard Cornwell - Gallows Thief

'We've sent for aid,' the woman answered defiantly. She had white hair pulled hard back into a bun and a harsh face with a hooked nose curving towards a sharp chin. A nutcracker face, Sandman thought, and one utterly bereft of any signs of human kindness.

'You've sent for help,' Sandman said, 'but I come from the Home Secretary. From the government. I have authority,' he spoke forcefully, 'and if you want to stay out of trouble I suggest you tell me where the girl is.'

The man looked worriedly at his wife, but she was unmoved by Sandman's words. 'You ain't got no right to be in here, mister,' she said, 'so I suggests you leave before I has you locked up for the night!'

Sandman ignored her. He opened a scullery door and looked in a larder, but Meg was not hidden here. Yet still he was sure she was in the house. 'You finish searching down here, Sergeant,' he told Berrigan, 'and I'll look upstairs.'

'You really think she's here?' Berrigan sounded dubious.

Sandman nodded. 'She's here,' he said with a confidence he could not justify, yet he sensed that the steward and his wife were being untruthful. The steward, at least, was fearful. His wife was not, but the tall man was much too nervous. He should have shared his wife's defiance, insisting that Sandman was trespassing, but instead he behaved like a man with something to hide and Sandman hurried up the stairs to find it.

The rooms on the upper floor seemed as deserted and empty as those below, but then, right at the end of the corridor, next to a narrow stairway that climbed to the attics, Sandman found himself in a large bedroom that was clearly inhabited. There were faded oriental rugs on the dark floorboards while the bed, a fine four poster with threadbare tapestry hangings, had a sheet and rumpled blankets. A woman's clothes were draped over a chair and more were carelessly heaped on the two seats below the open windows that looked across a lawn to a brick wall beyond which, surprisingly close, was a church. A ginger cat slept on one of the window seats, its bed a pile of petticoats. Meg's room, Sandman thought, and he sensed she had only just left. He went back to the door and looked down the passage, but he saw nothing except dust motes drifting in the shafts of late afternoon sunlight where he had left doors ajar.

Then, where the sun struck the uneven floorboards, he saw his own footprints in the dust and he walked slowly back down the passage, looking into each room again, and in the biggest bedroom, the one that lay at the head of the fine staircase and had a wide stone fireplace carved with an escutcheon showing six martlets, he saw more scuff marks in the dust. Someone had been in the room recently and their foot prints led to the stone hearth, then to the window nearest the fireplace, but did not return to the door and the room was empty and the two windows were shut. Sandman frowned at the marks, wondering if he was seeing nothing more than the errant effects of light and shadows but he could have sworn they really were footprints that ended at the window, yet when he went over he could not open it because the iron frame had rusted itself shut. So Meg had not escaped through the window, even though her footsteps, now obliterated by Sandman's own, ended there. Damn it, he thought, but she was here! He lifted the dust sheet from the bed and opened a cupboard but no one was hiding in the room.

He sat on the end of the bed, another four poster, and stared into the fireplace where a pair of blackened dogs stood on the stone hearth. On a whim he crossed to the fireplace, stooped and stared up the chimney, but the blackened shaft narrowed swiftly and hid no one. Yet Meg had been in here, he was certain of it.

The sounds of footsteps on the stairs made him stand and put a hand on the pistol's hilt, but it was Berrigan and Sally who appeared in the doorway. 'She ain't here,' Berrigan said in disgust.

'Must be a hundred places to hide in the house,' Sandman said.

'She's run off,' Sally suggested.

Sandman sat on the bed again and stared at the fireplace. Six martlets on a shield, three in the top row, two in the second and one underneath, and why would the house display that badge inside and five scallop shells on a shield outside? Five shells. He stared at the martlets and then a tune came to him, a tune and some half-remembered words that he had last heard sung by a camp fire in Spain. 'I'll give you one O,' he said.

'You'll what?' Berrigan asked, while Sally stared at Sandman as though he had gone quite mad.

'Seven for the seven stars in the sky,' Sandman said, 'six for the six proud walkers.'

'Five for the symbols at your door,' Berrigan supplied the next line.

'And there are five scallop shells carved over the front door here,' Sandman said softly, suddenly aware he could be overheard. The song's words were mostly a mystery. Four for the gospel makers was obvious enough, but what the significance of the seven stars was, Sandman did not know, any more than he knew who the six proud walkers were, but he did know what five symbols at the door meant. He had learnt that years before, when he and Lord Alexander had been at school together, and Lord Alexander had excitedly discovered that when five sea-shells were set above a door or were displayed on the gable of a house it was a sign that Catholics lived within. The shells had been placed during the persecutions in Elizabeth's reign, when to be a Catholic priest in England meant risking imprisonment, torture and death, yet some folk could not live without the consolations of their faith and they had marked their houses so that their co-religionists might know a refuge was to be found within. Yet Elizabeth's men knew the meaning of the five shells as well as any Catholic did, so if a priest was in the house there had to be a place where he could be hidden, and so the householder would make a priest's hole, a hiding place so cunningly disguised that it could cheat the Protestant searchers for days.

'You look as if you're thinking,' Berrigan said.

'I want kindling,' Sandman said softly. 'Kindling, firewood, a tinder box and see if there's a big cauldron in the kitchen.'

Berrigan hesitated, wanting to ask what Sandman planned, then decided he would find out soon enough so he and Sally went back downstairs. Sandman crossed the room and ran his fingers along the joints of the linenfold panelling that covered the walls on either side of the fireplace, but so far as he could determine there was no seam in the carvings. He knocked on the panels, but nothing sounded hollow. Yet that was the point of priest's holes; they were almost impossible to detect. The window wall and the wall by the passage looked too thin, so it had to be the fireplace wall or its opposite where the deep cupboard was — yet Sandman could discover nothing. Yet nor did he expect to find it easily. Elizabeth's searchers had been good, ruthless and well-rewarded for finding priests, yet some hiding places had eluded them despite days of looking.

'Weighs a bloody ton,' Berrigan complained as he staggered into the bedroom and dropped an enormous cauldron onto the floor. Sally was a few steps behind with a bundle of firewood.

'Where's the steward?' Sandman asked.

'Sitting in the kitchen looking if he's sucking gunpowder,' Berrigan said.

'His wife?'

'Gone.'

'Didn't he want to know what you were doing with that?'

'I told him I'd put a hole in his face if he dared ask,' Berrigan said happily.

'Tact,' Sandman said. 'It always works.'

'So what are you doing?' Sally asked.

'We're going to burn the damn house down,' Sandman said loudly. He shifted the cauldron onto the hearth's apron. 'No one's using the house,' he still spoke loudly enough for someone two rooms away to hear him, 'and the roof needs mending. Cheaper to burn it down than clean it up, don't you think?' He put the kindling in the bottom of the cauldron, struck a spark in the tinder box and blew on the charred linen till he had a flame that he transferred to the kindling. He nursed the flame for a few seconds, then it was crackling and spreading and he put some smaller pieces of firewood on top.