Gallows Thief

'I live here,' Sandman said.

'I didn't know.' Her grey eyes seemed huge. What had Sir George Phillips said of her? That her nose was too long, her chin too sharp, her eyes too far apart, her hair too red and her mouth too lavish, and it was all true, yet just by looking at her Sandman felt almost light-headed, as though he had drunk a whole bottle of brandy and not just two sips. He stared at her and she stared back and neither spoke.

'Here in London?' Sir Henry broke the silence.

'Sir?' Sandman forced himself to look at Sir Henry.

'You live here, Rider? In London?'

'In Drury Lane, sir.'

Sir Henry frowned. 'That's a trifle—' he paused, 'dangerous?'

'It's a tavern,' Sandman explained, 'that was recommended to me by a Rifle officer in Winchester and I was settled in before I discovered it was, perhaps, a less than desirable address. But it suits me.'

'Have you been here long?' Eleanor asked.

'Three weeks,' he admitted, 'a little over.'

She looked, Sandman thought, as though he had struck her in the face. 'And you didn't call?' she protested.

Sandman felt himself reddening. 'I was not sure,' he said, 'to what end I should call. I thought you would appreciate it if I did not.'

'If you thought at all,' Eleanor said tartly. Her eyes were grey, almost smoky, with flecks of green in them.

Sir Henry gestured feebly towards the doors. 'You're missing the duet, my dear,' he said, 'and Rider came here to see Hammond, of all people. Isn't that right, Rider? It's not really a social call at all.'

'Hammond, yes,' Sandman confirmed.

'What on earth do you want with Hammond?' Eleanor asked, her eyes suddenly bright with inquisitiveness.

'I'm sure that's for the two of them to discuss,' Sir Henry said stiffly, 'and me, of course,' he added hastily.

Eleanor ignored her father. 'What?' she demanded of Sandman.

'Rather a long story, I fear,' Sandman said apologetically.

'Better that than listening to the Pearman sisters murder their music teacher's setting of Mozart,' Eleanor said, then took a chair and put on an expectant face.

'My dear,' her father began, and was immediately interrupted.

'Papa,' Eleanor said sternly, 'I am sure that nothing Rider wants with Hammond is unsuitable for a young woman's ears, and that is more than I can say for the effusions of the Pearman girls. Rider?'

Sandman suppressed a smile and told his tale, and that gave rise to astonishment, for neither Eleanor nor her father had connected Charles Corday with Sir George Phillips. It was bad enough that the Countess of Avebury had been murdered in the next street, now it seemed that the convicted murderer had spent time in Eleanor's company. 'I'm sure it's the same young man,' Eleanor said, 'though I only ever heard him referred to as Charlie. But he seemed to do a great deal of the work.'

'That probably was him,' Sandman said.

'Best not to tell your mother,' Sir Henry observed gently.

'She'll think I came within an inch of being murdered,' Eleanor said.

'I doubt he is a murderer,' Sandman put in.

'And besides, you were chaperoned, surely?' her father enquired of Eleanor.

'Of course I was chaperoned, Papa. This is,' she looked at Sandman and raised an eyebrow, 'a respectable family.'

'The Countess was also chaperoned,' Sandman said, and he explained about the missing girl, Meg, and how he needed servants to retail the local gossip about the fate of the staff from Avebury's house. He apologised profusely for even thinking of involving Hammond. 'Servants' tittle-tattle isn't something I'd encourage, sir,' he said, and was interrupted by Eleanor.

'Don't be so stuffy, Rider,' she said, 'it doesn't require encouraging or discouraging, it just happens.'

'But the truth is,' Sandman went on, 'that the servants all talk to each other and if Hammond can ask the maids what they've heard…'

'Then you'll learn nothing,' Eleanor interrupted again.

'My dear,' her father protested.

'Nothing!' Eleanor reiterated firmly. 'Hammond is a very good butler and an admirable Christian, indeed I've often thought he would make a quite outstanding bishop, but the maidservants are all quite terrified of him. No, the person to ask is my maid Lizzie.'

'You can't involve Lizzie!' Sir Henry objected.

'Why ever not?'

'Because you can't,' her father said, unable to find a cogent reason. 'It simply isn't right.'

'It isn't right that Corday should hang! Not if he's innocent. And you, Papa, should know that! I've never seen you so shocked!'

Sandman looked enquiringly at Sir Henry, who shrugged. 'Duty took me to Newgate,' he admitted. 'We City aldermen, I discovered, are the legal employers of the hangman and the wretch has petitioned us for an assistant. One never likes to disburse funds unnecessarily, so two of us undertook to discover the demands of his work.'

'And have you made a decision yet?' Eleanor asked.

'We're taking the Sheriff's advice,' Sir Henry said. 'My own inclination was to refuse the request, but I confess that might have been mere prejudice against the hangman. He struck me as a vile wretch, vile!'

'Not an employment that would attract persons of quality,' Eleanor remarked drily.

'Botting, he's called, James Botting.' Sir Henry shuddered. 'Hanging's not a pretty thing, Rider, have you ever seen one?'

'I've seen men after they've been hanged,' Sandman said, thinking of Badajoz with its ditch streaming with blood and its streets filled with screams. The British army, breaking into the Spanish city despite a grim French defence, had inflicted a terrible revenge on the inhabitants and Wellington had ordered the hangmen to cool the redcoats' anger. 'We used to hang plunderers,' he explained to Sir Henry.

'I suppose you had to,' Sir Henry said. 'It's a terrible death, terrible. But necessary, of course, no one disputes that…'

'They do,' his daughter put in.

'No one of sound mind disputes it,' her father amended his statement firmly, 'but I trust I shall never have to witness another.'

'I should like to see one,' Eleanor said.

'Don't be ridiculous,' her father snapped.

'I should!' Eleanor insisted. 'We are constantly told that the purpose of execution is twofold; to punish the guilty and to deter others from crime, to which intent it is presented as a public spectacle, so my immortal soul would undoubtedly be safer if I was to witness a hanging and thus be prejudiced against whatever crime I might one day be tempted to commit.' She looked from her bemused father to Sandman, then back to her father again. 'You're thinking I'm an unlikely felon, Papa? That's kind of you, but I'm sure the girl who was hanged last Monday was an unlikely felon.'

Sandman looked at Sir Henry, who nodded unwilling confirmation. 'They hanged a girl, I'm afraid,' he said, then stared at the rug, 'and only a young thing, Rider. Only a young thing.'

'Perhaps,' Eleanor persisted, 'if her father had taken her to witness a hanging then she would have been deterred from her crime. You could even say, Papa, that you are failing in your Christian and paternal duty if you do not take me to Newgate.'

Sir Henry stared at her, not certain that she was talking in jest, then he looked at Sandman and shrugged as if to suggest that his daughter was not to be taken seriously. 'So you think, Rider, that my servants might have heard of this girl Meg's fate?'

'I was hoping so, sir. Or that they could ask questions of the servants who live in Mount Street. The Avebury house isn't a stone's throw away and I'm sure all the servants in the area know each other.'

'I'm sure Lizzie knows everyone,' Eleanor said pointedly.

'My dear,' her father spoke sternly, 'these are delicate matters, not a game.'

Eleanor gave her father an exasperated look. 'It is servants' gossip, Papa, and Hammond is above such things. Lizzie, on the other hand, thrives on it.'

Sir Henry shifted uncomfortably. 'There's no danger, is there?' he asked Sandman.

'I can't think so, sir. As Eleanor says, we only want to know where the girl Meg went, and that's merely gossip.'

'Lizzie can explain her interest by saying one of our coachmen was sweet on her,' Eleanor said enthusiastically. Her father was unhappy at the thought of involving Eleanor, but he was almost incapable of refusing his daughter. She was his only child and such was his affection for her that he might even have permitted her to marry Sandman despite Sandman's poverty and despite the disgrace attendant on his family, but Lady Forrest had other ideas. Eleanor's mother had always seen Rider Sandman as second best. It was true that when the original engagement took place Sandman had the prospect of considerable wealth, enough to have persuaded Lady Forrest that he would just about make an acceptable son-in-law, but he did not have the one thing Lady Forrest wanted above all else for her daughter. He had no title and Lady Forrest dreamt that Eleanor would one day be a duchess, a marchioness, a countess or, at the very least, a lady. Sandman's impoverishment had given Lady Forrest the excuse to pounce and her husband, for all his indulgence of Eleanor, could not prevail against his wife's determination that her child should be the titled mistress of marble stairways, vast acres and ballrooms large enough to manoeuvre whole brigades.

So though Eleanor might not marry where she wanted, she would be allowed to ask her maidservant to delve the gossip from Mount Street. 'I shall write to you,' Eleanor said to Sandman, 'if you tell me where?'

'Care of the Wheatsheaf,' Sandman told her, 'in Drury Lane.'

Eleanor stood and, rising onto tiptoe, kissed her father's cheek. 'Thank you, Papa,' she said.

'Whatever for?'

'For letting me do something useful, even if it is only encouraging Lizzie's propensity for gossip, and thank you, Rider.' She took his hand. 'I'm proud of you.'

'I hope you always were.'

'Of course I was, but this is a good thing you're doing.' She held onto his hand as the door opened.

Lady Forrest came in. She had the same red hair and the same beauty and the same force of character as her daughter, though Eleanor's grey eyes and intelligence had come from her father. Lady Forrest's eyes widened when she saw her daughter holding Sandman by the hand, but she forced a smile. 'Captain Sandman,' she greeted him in a voice that could have cut glass, 'this is a surprise.'

'Lady Forrest,' Sandman managed a bow, despite his trapped hand.

'Just what are you doing, Eleanor?' Lady Forrest's voice was now only a few degrees above freezing.

'Reading Rider's palm, Mama.'

'Ah!' Lady Forrest was immediately intrigued. She feared her daughter's unsuitable attachment to a pauper, but was thoroughly attracted to the idea of supernatural forces. 'She will never read mine, Captain,' Lady Forrest said, 'she refuses. So what do you see there?'

Eleanor pretended to scrutinise Sandman's palm. 'I scry,' she said portentously, 'a journey.'

'Somewhere pleasant, I hope?' Lady Forrest said.

To Scotland,' Eleanor said.

'It can be very pleasant at this time of year,' Lady Forrest remarked.

Sir Henry, wiser than his wife, saw a reference to Gretna Green looming. 'Enough, Eleanor,' he said quietly.

'Yes, Papa,' Eleanor let go of Sandman's hand and dropped her father a curtsey.

'So what brings you here, Rid—' Lady Forrest almost forgot herself, but managed a timely correction. 'Captain?'

'Rider very kindly brought me news of a rumour that the Portuguese might be defaulting on their short-term loans,' Sir Henry answered for Sandman, 'which doesn't surprise me, I must say. We advised against the conversion, as you'll remember, my dear.'

'You did, dear, I'm sure.' Lady Forrest was not sure at all, but she was nevertheless satisfied with the explanation. 'Now, come, Eleanor,' she said, 'tea is being served and you are ignoring our guests. We have Lord Eagleton here,' she told Sandman proudly.

Lord Eagleton was the man whom Eleanor was supposed to be marrying and Sandman flinched. 'I'm not acquainted with his lordship,' he said stiffly.

'Hardly surprising,' Lady Forrest said, 'for he only moves in the best of circles. Henry, must you smoke in here?'

'Yes,' Sir Henry said, 'I must.'

'I do hope you enjoy your visit to Scotland, Captain,' Lady Forrest said, then led her daughter away and closed the door on the cigar smoke.

'Scotland,' Sir Henry said gloomily, then shook his head. 'They don't hang nearly as many in Scotland as we do in England and Wales. Yet, I believe, the murder rate is no higher.' He stared at Sandman. 'Strange that, wouldn't you say?'

'Very strange, sir.'

'Still, I suppose the Home Office knows its business.' He turned and gazed moodily into the hearth. 'It isn't a quick death, Rider, not quick at all, yet the Keeper was inordinately proud of the whole process. Wanted our approbation and insisted on showing us the rest of the prison.' Sir Henry fell silent, frowning. 'You know,' he went on after a while, 'there's a corridor from the prison to the Sessions House? So the prisoners don't need to walk in the street when they go to trial. Birdcage Walk, they call it, and it's where they bury the hanged men. And women, I suppose, though the girl I saw hanged was taken to the surgeons for dissection.' He had been looking into the empty fireplace as he spoke, but now looked up at Sandman. 'The flagstones of Birdcage Walk were wobbling, Rider, wobbling. That's because the graves are always settling underneath them. They had casks of lime there to hasten the decomposition. It was vile. Indescribably vile.'

'I'm sorry you had to experience it,' Sandman said.

'I thought it my duty,' Sir Henry replied with a shudder. 'I was with a friend and he took an indecent delight in it all. The gallows is a necessary thing, of course it is, but not to be enjoyed, surely? Or am I being too scrupulous?'

'You're being very helpful, Sir Henry, and I'm grateful.'

Sir Henry nodded. 'It'll be a day or two before you get your answer, I'm sure, but let's hope it helps. Are you going? You must come again. Rider, you must come again.' He took Sandman through to the hall and helped him with his coat.

And Sandman walked away, not even noticing whether it was raining or not.

He was thinking of Lord Eagleton. Eleanor had not behaved as though she were in love with his lordship, indeed she had made a face expressing distaste when his lordship's name was mentioned, and that gave Sandman hope. But then, he asked himself, what did love have to do with marriage? Marriage was about money and land and respectability. About staying above financial ruin. About reputation.

And love? God damn it, Sandman thought, but he was in love.

===OO=OOO=OO===

It was not raining now, indeed it was a beautiful late afternoon with a rare clear sky above London. Everything looked clean-cut, newly washed, pristine. The rain clouds had flown westwards and fashionable London was spilling onto the streets. Open carriages, pulled by matching teams with polished coats and ribboned manes, clipped smartly towards Hyde Park for the daily parade. Street bands vied with each other, trumpets shrilling, drums banging and collectors shaking their money boxes. Sandman was oblivious.

He was thinking of Eleanor and when he could no longer wring any clue as to her intentions from every remembered glance and nuance, he wondered what he had achieved in the day. He had learnt, he thought, that Corday had mostly told him the truth and he had confirmed to himself that bored young aristocrats were among the least courteous of all men, and he had usefully started Eleanor's maid on her search for gossip, but in truth, he had not learnt much. He could not report anything to Viscount Sidmouth. So what to do?

He thought about that when he returned to the Wheatsheaf and took his laundry down to the woman who charged a penny for each shirt, and he had to stand talking for twenty minutes or else she took offence. Then he stitched up his boots, using a sailmaker's needle and palm leather which he borrowed from the landlord and when his boots were crudely mended he brushed his coat, trying to get a stain out of the tail. He reflected that of all the inconveniences of poverty, the lack of a servant to keep clothes clean was the most time-consuming. Time. It was what he needed most, and he tried to decide what he should do next. Go to Wiltshire, he told himself. He did not want to go because it was far, it would be expensive and he had no assurance that he would find the girl Meg if he went, but if he waited to hear from Eleanor then it might already be too late. There was a chance, even a good chance, that the servants from the London house had all been taken down to the Earl's country estate. So go there, he told himself. Catch the mail coach in the morning and he would be there by early afternoon and he could catch the mail coach back in the next day's dawn, but he cringed at the expense. He thought of using a stage coach and guessed that would cost no more than a pound each way, but the stage coach would not get him to Wiltshire before the evening, it would probably take him at least two or three hours to find the Earl of Avebury's house, and so he was unlikely to reach it before dark, and that meant he would have to wait until next morning to approach the household, while if he used the mail coach he would be at the Earl's estate by mid-afternoon at the latest. It would cost him at least twice as much, but Corday only had five days left and Sandman counted his change and wished he had not been so generous as to buy Sally Hood her dinner, then chided himself for that ungallant thought and walked down to the mail office on Charing Cross where he paid two pounds and seven shillings for the last of the four seats on the next morning's mail to Marlborough.

He went back to the Wheatsheaf where, in the inn's back room among the beer barrels and the broken furniture waiting for repair, he blacked and polished his newly mended boots. It was a dark and malodorous space, haunted by rats and by Dodds, the inn's errand boy and Sandman, seated on a barrel in a dark corner, heard Dodds's tuneless whistle and was about to call out a greeting when he heard a stranger's voice. 'Sandman ain't upstairs.'

'I saw him come in,' Dodds said in his usual truculent manner.

Sandman, very quietly, pulled on his boots. The stranger's voice had been harsh, not one inviting Sandman to call out and identify himself, but rather to persuade him to look for a weapon — the only thing to hand was a barrel stave. It was not much, but he held it like a sword as he edged towards the door.

'You find anything?' the stranger asked.

'This tail and a cricket bat,' another man answered and Sandman, still in the shadows, swayed forward and saw a young man holding his bat and his army sword. The two men must have gone upstairs and found Sandman absent, so the one had come down to look for him while the other had stayed to search his room and found the only two things of any value. Sandman could ill afford to lose either and his task now was to retrieve the bat and sword, and to discover who the two men were.

'I'll look in the taproom,' the first man said.

'Bring him back here,' the second said, and so delivered himself into Sandman's mercy.

Because all Sandman needed to do was wait. The first man followed Dodds through the service door and left the second man in the passage, where he half drew Sandman's sword and peered at the inscription on the blade. He was still peering when Sandman stepped from the back room and rammed the stave like a truncheon into the man's kidneys. The wood splintered with the impact and the man lurched forward, gasping, and Sandman let go of the stave, seized the man's hair and pulled him backwards. The man flailed for balance, but Sandman tripped him so that he crashed back onto the floor, where Sandman stamped hard on his groin. The man shrieked and curled around his agony.

Sandman retrieved the bat and sword that had fallen in the passageway. The fight had not taken more than a few seconds and the man was moaning and twitching, incapacitated by sheer pain, but that did not mean he would not recover quickly. Sandman feared he might be carrying a pistol, so he used the sword scabbard to tweak the man's coat aside.

And saw yellow and black livery. 'You're from the Seraphim Club?' Sandman asked, and the man gasped through his pain, but the answer was not informative and Sandman was not minded to obey the injunction. He stooped by the man, felt in his coat pockets and found a pistol which he tugged out, though in his haste he ripped the pocket's lining with the pistol's doghead. 'Is it loaded?' he asked.

The man repeated his injunction, so Sandman put the barrel by his head and cocked the gun. 'I'll ask again,' he said, 'is it loaded?'

'Yes!'

'So why are you here?'

'They wanted you fetched back to the club.'

'Why?'

'I don't know! They just sent us.'

It made sense that the man knew little more than that, so Sandman stepped back. 'Just get out,' he said. 'Collect your friend in the taproom and tell him that if he wants to make trouble for a soldier then he should bring an army.'

The man twisted on the floor and looked up incredulously. 'I can go?'

'Get out,' Sandman said, and he watched the man climb to his feet and limp out of the passage. So why, he wondered, would the Seraphim Club want him? And why send two bullies to fetch him? Why not just send an invitation?

He followed the limping man into the taproom where a score of customers were seated at the tables. A blind fiddler was tuning his instrument in the chimney corner and he looked up sharply, white eyes blank, as Sally Hood uttered a squeak of alarm. She was staring at the gun in Sandman's hand. He raised it, pointing the blackened muzzle at the ceiling, and the two men took the hint and fled. Sandman carefully lowered the flint and pushed the weapon into his belt as Sally ran across the room. 'What's happening?' she asked, and in her anxiety she clutched Sandman's arm.

'It's all right, Sally,' Sandman said.

'Oh bleeding hell, it's not,' she said, and now she was looking past him, her eyes huge, and Sandman heard the sound of a gun being cocked.

He eased his arm from Sally's grip and turned to see a long-barrelled pistol pointing between his eyes. The Seraphim Club had not sent two men to fetch him, but three, and the third, Sandman suspected, was the most dangerous of all, for it was Sergeant Berrigan, once of His Majesty's First Foot Guards. He was sitting in a booth, grinning, and Sally took hold of Sandman's arm again and uttered a small moan of fear.

'It's like French dragoons, Captain,' Sergeant Berrigan said. 'If you don't see the bastards off properly the first time, then sure as eggs they'll be back to trap you.'

And Sandman was trapped.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sergeant Berrigan kept the pistol pointed at Sandman for a heartbeat, then he lowered the flint, put the weapon on the table and nodded at the bench opposite. 'You just won me a pound, Captain.'

'You bastard!' Sally spat at Berrigan.

'Sally! Sally!' Sandman calmed her.

'He's got no bleeding right to point a stick at you,' she protested, then turned on Berrigan. 'Who do you bleeding think you are?'

Sandman eased her onto the bench, then sat beside her. 'Allow me to name Sergeant Berrigan,' he told her, 'once of His Majesty's First Foot Guards. This is Miss Sally Hood.'

'Sam Berrigan,' the Sergeant said, plainly amused by Sally's fury, 'and I'm honoured, miss.'

'I'm bleeding not honoured.' She glared at him.

'A pound?' Sandman asked Berrigan.

'I said those two dozy bastards wouldn't take you, sir. Not Captain Sandman of the 52nd.'

Sandman half smiled. 'Lord Skavadale seemed to know me as a cricketer, not as a soldier.'

'I was the one what knew the regiment you served in,' Berrigan said, then snapped his fingers and one of the serving girls came running. Sandman was not particularly impressed that Berrigan knew his old regiment, but he was very impressed by a stranger who could command such instant service in the Wheatsheaf. There was something very competent about Sam Berrigan. 'I'll have an ale, miss,' the Sergeant told the girl, then he looked at Sally. 'Your pleasure, Miss Hood?'

Sally debated with herself for a second, deciding whether her pleasure was to reject Sam Berrigan's offer, then she decided life was too short to turn down a drink. 'I'll have a gin punch, Molly,' she said sulkily.

'Ale,' Sandman said.

Berrigan put a coin in Molly's palm, folded her fingers over it and then held on to her hand. 'A jug of ale, Molly,' he said, 'and make sure the gin punch is as fine as any we'd get at Limmer's.'

Molly, entranced by the Sergeant, dropped a curtsey to him. 'Mister Jenks, sir,' she whispered, 'he don't like sticks on his tables.'

Berrigan smiled, let go of her hand and put the pistol in a deep pocket of his jacket. He looked at Sandman. 'Lord Robin Holloway sent those two,' he said dismissively, 'and the Marquess sent me.'

'Marquess?'

'Skavadale, Captain. He didn't want you to come to any harm.'

'His lordship is very generous suddenly.'

'No, sir,' Berrigan said. 'The Marquess doesn't want to stir up trouble, but Lord Robin? He don't care. He's a halfwit is what he is. He sent those two to persuade you back to the club where he planned to challenge you.'

'To a duel?' Sandman was amused.

'Pistols, I imagine,' Berrigan was equally amused. 'I can't see him wanting to take you on with a blade again. But I told the Marquess those two would never force you. You were too good a soldier.'

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?'

'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.'

'A wish?' Sandman asked.

'It is not a step to b-be taken lightly,' Lord Christopher said sternly.

'Indeed not,' Sandman said.

'And my father knows that when he dies and the family fortune passes to me that it will be used in God's service. That annoys him.'

The conversation, Sandman thought, had passed a long way from Lord Christopher's assertion that his father had committed the murder. 'It is, I understand,' he said carefully, 'a considerable fortune?'

'Very considerable,' Lord Christopher said evenly.

Sandman leant back. Gales of laughter gusted about the taproom which was crowded now, though folk instinctively avoided the booth where Sandman and Lord Christopher talked so earnestly. Lord Alexander was staring with doglike devotion at Sally, oblivious of the other men trying to catch her attention. Sandman looked back to the diminutive Lord Christopher. 'Your stepmother,' he said, 'had a considerable household in Mount Street. What happened to those servants?'

Lord Christopher blinked rapidly as if the question surprised him. 'I have no conception.'

'Would they have gone to your father's estate?'

'They might.' Lord Christopher sounded dubious. 'Why do you ask?'

Sandman shrugged, as if the questions he was asking were of no great importance, though the truth was that he disliked Lord Christopher and he also knew that dislike was as irrational and unfair as his distaste for Charles Corday. Lord Christopher, like Corday, lacked what, for want of a better word, Sandman thought of as manliness. He doubted that Lord Christopher was a pixie, as Sally would put it, indeed the glances he kept throwing towards Sally suggested the opposite, but there was a petulant weakness in him. Sandman could imagine this small, learned man as a clergyman obsessed with his congregation's pettiest sins, and his distaste for Lord Christopher meant he had no wish to prolong this conversation so instead of admitting to Meg's existence he just said that he would like to discover from the servants what had happened on the day of the Countess's murder.

'If they're loyal to my father,' Lord Christopher said, 'they will tell you nothing.'

'Why should that loyalty make them dumb?'

'Because he killed her!' Lord Christopher cried too loudly, and immediately blushed when he saw he had attracted the attention of folk at other tables. 'Or at least he c-caused her to be killed. He has gout, he no longer walks far, but he has men who are loyal to him, men who do his bidding, evil men.' He shuddered. 'You must tell the Home Secretary that Corday is innocent.'

'I doubt it will make any difference if I do,' Sandman said.

'No? Why? In God's name, why?'

'Lord Sidmouth takes the view that Corday has already been found guilty,' Sandman explained, 'so to change that verdict I need either to produce the true murderer, with a confession, or else adduce proof of Corday's innocence that is incontrovertible. Opinion, alas, does not suffice.'

Lord Christopher gazed at Sandman in silence for a few heartbeats. 'You must?'

'Of course I must.'

'Dear God!' Lord Christopher seemed astonished and leant back, looking faint. 'So you have five days to find the real killer?'

'Indeed.'

'So the boy is doomed, is he not?'

Sandman feared Corday was doomed, but he would not admit it. Not yet. For there were still five days left to find the truth and thus to steal a soul from Newgate's scaffold.

===OO=OOO=OO===

At half past four in the morning a pair of lamps glimmered feebly from the windows of the yard of the George Inn. Dawn was touching the roofs with a wan gleam. A caped coachman yawned hugely, then flicked his whip at a snarling terrier that slunk out of the way of the massive coachhouse doors that were dragged open to reveal a gleaming dark-blue mail coach. The vehicle, bright with new varnish and with its doors, windows, harness pole and splinter bar picked out in scarlet, was manhandled onto the yard's cobbles where a boy lit its two oil lanterns and a half-dozen men heaved the mail bags into its boot. The eight horses, high-stepping and frisky, their breath misting the night air, were led from the stables. The two coachmen, both in the Royal Mail's blue and red livery and both armed with blunderbusses and pistols, locked the boot and then watched as the team was harnessed. 'One minute!' a voice shouted, and Sandman drank the scalding coffee that the inn had provided for the mail's passengers. The lead coachman yawned again, then clambered up to the box. 'All aboard!'

There were four passengers. Sandman and a middle-aged clergyman took the front seat with their backs to the horses, while an elderly couple sat opposite them and so close that their knees could not help touching Sandman's. Mail coaches were light and cramped, but twice as fast as the larger stage coaches. There was a squeal of hinges as the inn yard's gates were dragged open, then the carriage swayed as the coachmen whipped the team out into Tothill Street. The sound of the thirty-two hooves echoed sharp from houses and the wheels cracked and rumbled as the coach gathered speed, but Sandman was fast asleep again by the time it reached Knightsbridge.

He woke at about six o'clock to find the coach was rattling along at a fine pace, swaying and lurching through a landscape of small fields and scattered coverts. The clergyman had a notebook on his lap, half-moon spectacles on his nose and a watch in his hand. He was peering through the windows on either side, searching for milestones, and saw that Sandman had woken.

'A fraction over nine miles an hour!' he exclaimed.

'Really?'

'Indeed!' Another milestone passed and the clergyman began working out sums on the page of his notebook. 'Ten and carry three, that's half again, minus sixteen, carry two. Well, I never! Certainly nine and a quarter! I once travelled at an average velocity of eleven miles an hour, but that was in eighteen-o-four and it was a very dry summer. Very dry, and the roads were smooth—' the coach hit a rut and lurched violently, throwing the clergyman against Sandman's shoulder— 'very smooth indeed,' he said, then peered through the window again. The elderly man clutched a valise to his chest and looked terrified, as though Sandman or the clergyman might prove to be a thief, though in truth highwaymen like Sally's brother were a much greater danger. Not this morning, though, for Sandman saw that two robin redbreasts were riding escort. The redbreasts were the Horse Patrol, all retired cavalrymen who, uniformed in blue coats over red waistcoats and armed with pistols and sabres, guarded the roads close to London. The two patrolmen kept the coach company until it clattered through a village and there the pair peeled away towards a tavern where, despite the early hour, a couple of men in long smocks were already sitting in the porch and drinking ale.

Sandman gazed fixedly out of the window, revelling in being out of London. The air seemed so remarkably clean. There was no pervading stench of coal smoke and horse dung, just the morning sunlight on summer leaves and the sparkle of a stream twisting beneath willows and alders beside a field of grazing cattle who looked up as the coachman sounded the horn. They were still close to London and the landscape was flat, but well drained. Good hunting country, Sandman thought, and imagined pursuing a fox beside this road. He felt his dream horse gather itself and leap a hedge, heard the huntsman's horn and the hounds giving tongue.

'Going far?' The clergyman interrupted his reverie.

'Marlborough.'

'Fine town, fine town.' The clergyman, an archdeacon, had abandoned his computations about the coach's speed and now rambled on about visiting his sister in Hungerford. Sandman made polite responses, but still kept looking out of the window. The fields were near harvest and the heads of rye, barley and wheat were heavy. The land was becoming hillier now, but the rattling, swaying and jolting coach kept up its fine pace and spewed a tail of dust that whitened the hedgerows. The horn warned folk of its approach and children waved as the eight horses thundered past. A blacksmith, leather apron blackened by fire, stood in his doorway. A woman shook her fist when her flock of geese scattered from the coach's noise, a child whirled a rattle in a vain attempt to drive predatory jays from rows of pea plants, then the sound of the trace chains and hooves and clattering wheels was echoing back from the seemingly endless wall of a great estate.

The Earl of Avebury, Sandman decided, would probably live in just such a walled estate, a great swathe of aristocratic country cut off by bricks, gamekeepers and watchmen. Suppose the Earl refused to see him? His lordship was said to be a recluse and the further west Sandman went the more he feared he would be summarily ejected from the estate, but that was a risk he would have to take. He forgot his fears as the coach lurched into a street of modern brick houses, the horn sounded urgently and Sandman realised they had come to the village of Reading where the coach swung into an inn yard to find the new horses waiting.

'Less than two minutes, gentlemen!' The two coachmen swung down from their box and, because the day was getting warmer, took off their triple-caped coats. 'Less than two minutes and we don't wait for laggards, milords.'

Sandman and the archdeacon had a companionable piss in the corner of the inn yard, then they each gulped down a cup of lukewarm tea as the new horses were harnessed and the old team, white with sweat, were led to the water trough. A sack of mail had been pulled from the boot and another took its place before the two coachmen scrambled up to their leather-cushioned perch. 'Time, gentlemen! Time!'

'One minute and forty-five seconds!' a man called from the inn door. 'Well done, Josh! Well done, Tim!'

The horn sounded, the fresh horses pricked back their ears and Sandman slammed the coach door and was thrown into the rear seat as the vehicle lurched forward. The elderly couple had left the coach, their place taken by a middle-aged woman who, within a mile, was vomiting from the offside window. 'You must forgive me,' she gasped.

'It is a motion mighty like a ship, ma'am,' the archdeacon observed, and took a silver flask from his pocket. 'Brandy might help?'

'Oh, Lord above!' the woman wailed in horrified refusal, then craned and retched through the window again.

'The springs are soft,' the archdeacon pointed out.

'And the road's very bumpy,' Sandman added.

'Especially at eight and a half miles an hour.' The archdeacon was busy with watch and pencil again, struggling gainfully to make legible figures despite the jolting. 'It always takes time to settle a new team and speed, which we lack, smooths a road.'

Sandman's spirits rose as each mile passed. He was happy, he suddenly realised, but quite why, he was not sure. Perhaps, he thought, it was because his life had purpose again, a serious purpose, or perhaps it was because he had seen Eleanor and nothing about her demeanour, he had decided, betrayed an imminent marriage to Lord Eagleton.

Lord Alexander Pleydell had hinted as much the previous evening, most of which he had spent worshipping at Sally Hood's shrine, though Sally herself had seemed distracted by her memories of Sergeant Berrigan. Not that Lord Alexander had noticed. He, like Lord Christopher Carne, was struck dumb by Sally, so dumb that for most of the evening the two aristocrats had merely gaped at her, sometimes stammering a commonplace until at last Sandman had taken Lord Alexander into the back parlour. 'I want to talk to you,' he had said.

'I want to continue my conversation with Miss Hood,' Lord Alexander had complained pettishly, worried that his friend Kit was being given untrammelled access to Sally.

'And so you shall,' Sandman assured him, 'but talk to me first. What do you know about the Marquess of Skavadale?'

'Heir to the Dukedom of Ripon,' Lord Alexander had said immediately, 'from one of the old Catholic families of England. Not a clever man, and it's rumoured the family has monetary troubles. They were once very rich, exceedingly so, with estates in Cumberland, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Hertfordshire, Kent and Sussex, but father and son are both gamblers so the rumours may well be true. He was a reasonable bat at Eton, but can't bowl. Why do you ask?'

'Lord Robin Holloway?'

'Youngest son of the Marquess of Bleasby and a thoroughly nasty boy who takes after his father. Has plenty of money, no brains and he killed a man in a duel last year. No cricketer, I fear.'

'Did he fight the duel with swords or pistols?'

'Swords, as it happened. It was fought in France. Are you going to make enquiries about the whole of the aristocracy?'

'Lord Eagleton?'

'A fop, but a useful left hand batsman who sometimes plays for Viscount Barchester's team, but is otherwise utterly undistinguished. A bore indeed, despite being a passable cricketer.'

'The sort of man who might appeal to Eleanor?'

Alexander stared at Sandman in astonishment. 'Don't be absurd, Rider,' he said, lighting another pipe. 'She wouldn't stand him for two minutes!' He frowned as if trying to remember something, but whatever it was did not come to mind.

'Your friend Lord Christopher,' Sandman had said, 'is convinced his father committed the murder.'

'Or had someone else commit it,' Alexander said. 'It seems likely. Kit sought me out when he heard you were investigating the matter and I applaud him for doing so. He, like me, is avid that no injustice should occur next Monday. Now, do you think I might go back to my conversation with Miss Hood?'

'Tell me what you know about the Seraphim Club first.'

'I have never heard of it, but it sounds like an association of high-minded clergymen.'

'It isn't, believe me. Is there any significance in the word seraphim?'

Lord Alexander had sighed. 'The seraphim, Rider, are reckoned to be the highest order of angels. The credulous believe there to be nine such orders; seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels and, at the very bottom, mere common angels. This is not, I hasten to assure you, the creed of the Church of England. The word seraphim is thought to derive from a Hebrew word meaning serpent, the association is obscure yet suggestive. In the singular it is a seraph, a glorious creature that has a bite like fire. It is also believed that the seraphim are the patrons of love. Why they should be such I have no idea, but so it is said, just as it is claimed that the cherubim are patrons of knowledge. I momentarily forget what the other orders do. Have I satisfied your curiosity or do you wish this lecture to continue?'

'The seraphim are angels of love and poison?'

'A crude, but apt summary,' Lord Alexander had said grandly, then insisted they go back to the taproom where he had again been struck dumb by Sally's presence. He stayed till past midnight, became drunk and verbose, then left with Lord Christopher, who had drunk little and had to support his friend, who staggered from the Wheatsheaf declaring his undying love for Sally in a voice slurred by brandy.

Sally had frowned as Lord Alexander's coach had left. 'Why did he call me stupid?'

'He didn't,' Sandman had said, 'he just said you were the stupor mundi, the wonder of the world.'

'Bloody hell, what's the matter with him?'

'He's frightened of your beauty,' Sandman had said, and she had liked that and Sandman had gone to bed wondering how he would ever wake in time to catch the mail coach, yet here he was, rattling through as glorious a summer's day as any a man could dream of.

The road ran alongside a canal and Sandman admired the narrow painted barges that were hauled by great horses with ribboned manes and brass-hung harnesses. A child bowled a hoop along the towpath, ducks paddled, God was in His heaven and it took a keen eye to see that all was not quite as well as it looked. The thatch of many roofs was threadbare and in every village there were two or three cottages that had collapsed and were now overgrown with bindweed. There were too many tramps on the roads, too many beggars by the churchyards, and Sandman knew a good number of them had been redcoats, riflemen or sailors. There was hardship here, hardship among plenty, the hardship of rising prices and too few jobs, and hidden behind the cottages and the ancient churches and the heavy elm trees were parish workhouses that were filled with refugees from the bread riots that had flared in England's bigger cities, yet still it was all so heart breakingly beautiful. The foxgloves made thickets of scarlet beneath the pink roses in the hedgerows. Sandman could not take his eyes from the view. He had not been in London a full month, yet already it seemed too long.

At noon the coach swung across a stone bridge and clattered up a brief hill into the great wide main street of Marlborough, with its twin churches and capacious inns. A small crowd was waiting for the mail and Sandman pushed through the folk and out under the tavern's arch. A carrier's cart was plodding eastwards and Sandman asked the man where he might find the Earl of Avebury's estate. Carne Manor was not far, the carrier said, just over the river and up the hill and on the edge of Savernake. A half-hour's walk, he thought, and Sandman, hunger gnawing at his belly, walked south towards the deep trees of Savernake Forest.

He was hot. He had been carrying his coat, a garment that was not needed on this warm day though he had been grateful for it when he left the Wheatsheaf at dawn. He asked for more directions in a hamlet and was sent down a long lane that twisted between beech woods until he came to Carne Manor's great brick wall, which he followed until he reached a lodge and a pair of cast iron gates hung from stone pillars surmounted with carved griffins. A gravel drive, thick with weeds, led from the locked gates. A bell hung by the lodge, but though Sandman tolled it a dozen times no one answered. Nor could he see anyone inside the estate. Either side of the drive was parkland, a sward of grass dotted by fine elms, beeches and oaks, but no cattle or deer grazed the grass that grew lank and was thick with cornflowers and poppies. Sandman gave the bell a last forlorn tug and, when its sound had faded into the warm afternoon, he stepped back and looked at the spikes on top of the gates. They looked formidable, so he went back up the lane until he came to a place where an elm, growing too close to the wall, had buckled the bricks. The tree's proximity to the wall made it easy to climb. He paused a second on the mortared coping, then dropped down into the park. The grass was long enough to conceal a spring trap set against poachers and so he moved carefully until he reached the gravel drive and then turned towards the house that was hidden beyond some woods growing along the crest of a low hill.

He walked slowly, half expecting a gamekeeper or some other servant to intercept him, but he saw no one as he followed the drive though a fine stand of beeches in the centre of which was an overgrown glade surrounding a mossy statue of a naked woman hoisting a biblical water jar onto her shoulder. Sandman walked on and, from the far side of the beeches, he could at last see Carne Manor a half-mile away. It was a fine stone building with a façade of three high gables on which ivy grew about mullioned windows. Stables, coach houses and a brick-walled kitchen garden lay to the west, while behind the house were terraced lawns dropping to a placid stream. He walked on down the long drive. It suddenly seemed a futile expedition, futile and expensive, for the Earl's reputation as a recluse suggested that Sandman would most likely be greeted with a horsewhip.

The sound of his steps seemed extraordinarily loud as he crossed the great sweep of gravel where carriages could turn in front of the house, though the weeds, grass and moss growing so thick among the stones suggested that few coaches ever did. Sandman climbed the entrance steps. Two glazed lanterns were mounted either side of the porch, though one had a glass pane missing and a bird's nest was smothering its candle holder. He hauled on the bell chain and, when he heard no sound, pulled again and waited. The wooden door had gone grey with age and was stained with rust that had leaked from its decorative metal studs. Bees drifted into the shallow porch. A young cuckoo, looking uncannily like a hawk, flew across the drive. The afternoon was warm and Sandman wished he could abandon this search for a reclusive earl and just go down by the stream and sleep in the shade of some great tree.

Then a harsh banging to his right made Sandman step back to see that a man was trying to open a leaded window in the room closest to the porch. The window was evidently jammed, for the man struck it so hard that Sandman was certain the leaded lights would smash, but then it jarred open and the man leant out. He was in late middle age, had a very pale face and unkempt hair, which suggested he had just woken from a deep sleep. 'The house,' he said testily, 'is not open to visitors.'

'I hadn't supposed it was,' Sandman said, though it had occurred to him to ask the housekeeper, if such a person had answered the door, for a view of the public rooms. Most great houses allowed such visits, but plainly the Earl of Avebury did not extend the courtesy. 'Are you his lordship?' he asked.

'Do I look like him?' the man answered in an irritated tone.

'I have business with his lordship,' Sandman explained.

'Business? Business?' The man spoke as though he had never heard of such a thing, and then a look of alarm crossed his pale features. 'Are you a lawyer?'

'It is delicate business,' Sandman said emphatically, suggesting it was none of the servant's, 'and my name,' he added, 'is Captain Sandman.' It was a mere courtesy to provide his name and a reproof because he had not been asked for it.

The man gazed at him for a heartbeat, then retreated inside. Sandman waited. The bees buzzed by the ivy and house martins swerved above the weed-strewn gravel, but the servant did not return and Sandman, piqued, hauled on the bell-pull again.

A window on the other side of the porch was forced open and the same servant appeared there. 'A captain of what?' he demanded peremptorily.

'The 52nd Foot,' Sandman answered, and the servant vanished for a second time.

'His lordship wishes to know,' the servant reappeared at the first window, 'whether you were with the 52nd at Waterloo.'

'I was,' Sandman said.

The servant went back inside, there was another pause and then Sandman heard bolts being shot on the far side of the door, which eventually creaked open, and the servant offered a sketchy bow. 'We don't get visitors,' he said. 'Your coat and hat, sir? Sandman, you said?'

'Captain Sandman.'

'Of the 52nd Foot indeed, sir, this way, sir.'

The front door opened onto a hall panelled in a dark wood where a fine white-painted stairway twisted upwards beneath portraits of heavily jowled men in ruffs. The servant led Sandman down a passageway into a long gallery lined by tall velvet-curtained windows on one side and great paintings on the other. Sandman had expected the house to be as dirty as the grounds were unkempt, but it was all swept and the rooms smelt of wax polish. The paintings, so far as he could see in the curtained gloom, were exceptionally fine. Italian, he thought, and showing gods and goddesses disporting in vineyards and on dizzying mountainsides. Satyrs pursued naked nymphs and it took Sandman a moment or two to realise that all the paintings showed nudes: a gallery of feminine, abundant and generous flesh. He had a sudden memory of some of his soldiers gaping at just such a painting that had been captured from the French at the battle of Vitoria. The canvas, cut from its frame, had been purloined by a Spanish muleteer to use as a waterproof tarpaulin and the redcoats had bought it from him for tuppence, hoping to use it as a groundsheet. Sandman had purchased it from its new owners for a pound and sent it to headquarters, where it was identified as one of the many masterpieces looted from the Escorial, the King of Spain's palace.

'This way, sir,' the servant interrupted his reverie. The man opened a door and announced Sandman who was suddenly dazzled, for the room into which he had been ushered was vast and its windows that faced south and west were uncurtained and the sun was streaming in to illuminate a huge table. For a few seconds Sandman could not understand the table for it was green and lumpy and smothered in scraps that he thought at first were flowers or petals, then his eyes adjusted to the sunlight and he saw that the coloured scraps were model soldiers. They were thousands of toy soldiers on a table covered in green baize that had been draped across some kind of blocks so that it resembled the valley in which the battle of Waterloo had been fought. He gaped at it, astonished by the size of the model which was at least thirty feet long and twenty deep. Two girls sat at a side table with brushes and paint, which they applied to lead soldiers. Then a squeaking noise made him look into the dazzle by a south window, where he saw the Earl.

His lordship was in a wheeled chair like those Sandman's mother had liked to use in Bath when she was feeling particularly poorly, and the squeak had been the sound of the ungreased axles turning as a servant pushed the Earl towards his visitor.

The Earl was dressed in the old fashion that had prevailed before men had adopted sober black or dark blue. His coat was of flowered silk, red and blue, with enormously wide cuffs and a lavish collar over which fell a cascade of lace. He wore a full-bottomed wig that framed an ancient, lined face that was incongruously powdered, rouged and decorated with a velvet beauty spot on one sunken cheek. He had not been properly shaved, and patches of white stubble showed in the folds of his skin. 'You are wondering,' he addressed Sandman in a shrill voice, 'how the models are inserted onto the centre of the table, are you not?'

The question had not even occurred to Sandman, but now he did find it puzzling, for the table was far too big for its centre to be reached from the sides, and if a person were to walk across the model then they would inevitably crush the little trees that were made from sponge or else they would disarrange the serried ranks of painted soldiers. 'How is it done, my lord?' Sandman asked. He did not mind calling the Earl 'my lord' for he was an old man and it was a mere courtesy that youth owed to age.

'Betty, dearest, show him,' the earl commanded, and one of the two girls dropped her paintbrush and disappeared beneath the table. There was a scuffling sound, then a whole section of the valley rose into the air to become a wide hat for the grinning Betty. 'It is a model of Waterloo,' the Earl said proudly.

'So I see, my lord.'

'Maddox tells me you were in the 52nd. Show me where they were positioned.'

Sandman walked about the table's edge and pointed to one of the red-coated battalions on the ridge above the Chateau of Hougoumont. 'We were there, my lord,' he said. The model really was extraordinary. It showed the two armies at the beginning of the fight, before the ranks had been bloodied and thinned and before Hougoumont had burnt to a black shell. Sandman could even make out his own company on the 52nd's flank, and assumed that the little mounted figure just ahead of the painted ranks was meant to be himself. That was an odd thought.

'Why are you smiling?' the Earl demanded.

'No reason, my lord,' Sandman looked at the model again, 'except that I wasn't on horseback that day.'

'Which company?'

'Grenadier.'

The Earl nodded. 'I shall replace you with a foot soldier,' he said. His chair squealed as he pursued Sandman about the table. His lordship had blue-gartered silk stockings, though one of his feet was heavily bandaged. 'So tell me,' the Earl demanded, 'did Bonaparte lose the battle by delaying the start?'

'No,' Sandman said curtly.

The Earl signalled the servant to stop pushing the chair. He was close to Sandman now and could stare up at him with red-rimmed eyes that were dark and bitter. The Earl was much older than Sandman had expected. Sandman knew the Countess had still been young when she died, and she had been beautiful enough to be painted naked, yet her husband looked ancient despite the wig, the cosmetics and the lace frills. He stank, too; a reek of stale powder, unwashed clothes and sweat. 'Who the devil are you?' the Earl growled.

'I have come from Viscount Sidmouth, my lord, and…'

'Sidmouth?' the Earl interrupted. 'I don't know a Viscount Sidmouth. Who the devil is the Viscount Sidmouth?'

'The Home Secretary, my lord.' That information prompted no reaction at all, so Sandman explained further. 'He was Henry Addington, my lord, and was once the Prime Minister? Now he is Home Secretary.'

'Not a real lord then, eh?' the Earl declared. 'Not an aristocrat! Have you noticed how the damned politicians make themselves into peers? Like turning a toilet into a fountain, ha! Viscount Sidmouth? He's no gentleman. A bloody politician is all he is! A trumped up liar! A cheat! I assume he is first viscount?'

'I am sure he is, my lord,' Sandman said.

'Ha! A back-alley aristo, eh? A piece of Goddamn slime! A well-dressed thief! I'm the sixteenth earl.'

'Your family amazes us all, my lord,' Sandman said, with an irony that was utterly wasted on the Earl, 'but however new his ennoblement, I still come with the viscount's authority.' He produced the Home Secretary's letter, which was waved away. 'I have heard, my lord,' Sandman went on, 'that the servants from your town house in Mount Row are now here?' He had heard nothing of the sort, but perhaps the bald statement would elicit agreement from the Earl. 'If that's so, my lord, then I would like to talk with one of them.'

The Earl shifted in the chair. 'Are you suggesting,' he asked in a dangerous voice, 'that Blucher might have come sooner had Bonaparte attacked earlier?'

'No, my lord.'

'Then if he'd attacked earlier he'd have won!' the Earl insisted.

Sandman looked at the model. It was impressive, comprehensive and all wrong. It was too clean for a start. Even in the morning, before the French attacked, everyone was filthy because, on the previous day, most of the army had slogged back from Quatre Bras through quagmires of mud and then they had spent the night in the open under successive cloudbursts. Sandman remembered the thunder and the lightning whiplashing the far ridge and the terror when some cavalry horses broke free in the night and galloped among the sodden troops.

'So why did Bonaparte lose?' the Earl demanded querulously.

'Because he allowed his cavalry to fight unsupported by foot or artillery,' Sandman said shortly. 'And might I ask your lordship what happened to the servants from the house in Mount Street?'

'So why did he commit his cavalry when he did, eh? Tell me that?'

'It was a mistake, my lord, even the best generals make them. Did the servants come back here?'

The Earl petulantly slapped the wicker arms of his chair. 'Bonaparte didn't make futile mistakes! The man might be scum, but he's clever scum. So why?'

Sandman sighed. 'Our line had been thinned, we were on the reverse slope of the hill and it must have seemed, from their side of the valley, that we were beaten.'

'Beaten?' The Earl leapt on that word.

'I doubt we were even visible,' Sandman said. 'The Duke had ordered the men to lie down so, from the French viewpoint, it must have looked as if we just vanished. The French saw an empty ridge, they doubtless saw our wounded retreating into the forest behind, and they must have thought we were all retreating, so they charged. My lord, tell me what happened to your wife's servants.'

'Wife? I don't have a wife. Maddox!'

'My lord?' The servant who had let Sandman into the house stepped forward.

'The cold chicken, I think, and some champagne,' the Earl demanded, then scowled at Sandman. 'Were you wounded?'

'No, my lord.'

'So you were there when the Imperial Guard attacked?'

'I was there, my lord, from the guns that signalled the first French assault to the very last shot of the day.'

The Earl seemed to shudder. 'I hate the French,' he said suddenly. 'I detest them. A race of dancing-masters, and we brought glory on ourselves at Waterloo, Captain, glory!'

Sandman wondered what glory came from defeating dancing-masters, but said nothing. He had met other men like the Earl, men who were obsessed by Waterloo and who wanted to know every remembered minute of the battle, men who could not hear enough tales from that awful day, and all of those men, Sandman knew, had one thing in common: none had been there. Yet they revered that day, thinking it the supreme moment of their lives and of Britain's history. Indeed, for some it seemed as though history itself had come to its end on June 18th, 1815, and that the world would never again see a rivalry to match that of Britain and France. That rivalry had given meaning to a whole generation, it had burnt the globe, matching fleets and armies in Asia, America and Europe, and now it was all gone and there was only dullness in its place and, for the Earl of Avebury, as for so many others, that dullness could only be driven away by reliving the rivalry. 'So tell me,' the Earl said, 'how many times the French cavalry charged.'

'Did you bring the servants from Mount Street to this house?' Sandman asked.

'Servants? Mount Street? You're drivelling. Were you at the battle?'

'All day, my lord. And all I wish to know from you, my lord, is whether a maid called Meg came here from London.'

'How the devil would I know what happened to that bitch's servants, eh? And why would you ask?'

'A man is in prison, my lord, awaiting execution for the murder of your wife, and there is good reason to believe him innocent. That is why I am here.'

The Earl gazed up at Sandman, then began to laugh. The laugh came from deep in his narrow chest and it racked him, dredged up phlegm that half choked him, brought tears to his eyes and left him gasping. He fumbled a handkerchief from his lace-frilled sleeve and wiped his eyes, then spat into it. 'She wronged a man at the very end, did she?' he asked in a hoarse voice. 'Oh, she was good, my Celia, she was so very good at being bad.' He hawked another gobbet of spittle into the handkerchief, then glowered at Sandman. 'So, how many battalions of Napoleon's Guard climbed the hill?'

'Not enough, my lord. What happened to your wife's servants?'

The Earl ignored Sandman because the cold chicken and champagne had been placed on the edge of the model table. He summoned Betty to cut up the chicken and, as she did so, he put an arm round her waist. She seemed to shudder slightly as he first touched her, but then tolerated the caresses.

The Earl, a length of spittle hanging from his wattled jaw, turned his red, rheumy eyes on Sandman. 'I have always liked women young,' he said, 'young and tender. You!' This was to the other girl. 'Pour the champagne, child.' The girl stood on his other side and the Earl put a hand under her skirt while she poured the champagne. He still stared defiantly at Sandman. 'Young flesh,' he growled, 'young and soft.' His servants gazed at the panelled walls and Sandman turned away to look out of the window at two men scything the lawn while a third raked up the clippings. Two herons flew above the distant stream.

The Earl released his grip on the two girls, then gobbled his chicken and slurped his champagne. 'I was told,' he dismissed the two girls back to their painting by slapping their rumps, 'that the French cavalry charged at least twenty times. Was that so?'

'I didn't count,' Sandman said, still looking out of the window.

'Perhaps you were not there after all?' the Earl suggested.

Sandman did not rise to the bait. He was still looking through the window, but instead of seeing the long scythes hiss through the grass, he was staring down a smoky slope in Belgium. He was seeing his recurring dream, watching the French cavalry surge up the slope, their horses labouring in the damp earth. The air on the British-held ridge had seemed heated, as though the door of hell's great oven had been left ajar, and in that heat and smoke the French horsemen had never stopped coming. Sandman had not counted their charges for there were too many, a succession of cavalrymen thumping about the British squares, their horses bleeding and limping, the smoke of the muskets and cannon drifting over the British standards, the ground underfoot a matted tangle of trampled rye stalks, thick as a woven rush mat, but damp and rotten from the rain. The Frenchmen had been grimacing, their eyes red from the smoke and their mouths open as they shouted for their doomed emperor. 'All I remember clearly, my lord,' Sandman said, turning from the window, 'was feeling grateful to the French.'

'Grateful, why?'

'Because so long as their horsemen milled so thick about our squares then their artillery could not fire on us.'

'But how many charges did they make? Someone must know!' The Earl was petulant.

'Ten?' Sandman suggested. 'Twenty? They just kept coming. And they were hard to count because of the smoke. And I remember being very thirsty. And we didn't just stand and watch them coming, we were looking backwards, too.'

'Backwards? Why?'

'Because once a charge had gone through the squares, my lord, they had to come back again.'

'So they were attacking from both sides?'

'From every side,' Sandman said, remembering the swirl of horsemen, the mud and straw kicking up from the hooves and the screams of the dying horses.

'How many cavalry?' the Earl wanted to know.

'I didn't count, my lord. How many servants did your wife have in Mount Street?'

The Earl grinned, then turned from Sandman. 'Bring me a horseman, Betty,' he ordered and the girl dutifully brought him a model French dragoon in his greencoat. 'Very pretty, my dear,' the Earl said, then put the dragoon on the table and hauled Betty onto his lap. 'I am an old man, Captain,' he said, 'and if you want something of me then you must oblige me. Betty knows that, don't you, child?'

The girl nodded. She flinched as the Earl dug a skeletal hand into her dress to cradle one of her breasts. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, a country girl, curly haired, freckled and with a round healthy face.

'How must I oblige you, my lord?' Sandman asked.

'Not as Betty does! No, no!' The Earl leered at Sandman. 'You will tell me all I want to know, Captain, and perhaps, when you are done, I shall tell you a little of what you want to know. Rank has its privileges!'

Outside, in the hall, a clock struck six and the sound seemed melancholy in the great empty house. Sandman felt the despair of wasted time. He needed to discover if Meg was here and he needed to return to London, and he sensed that the Earl would play with him all evening and at the end send him away with his questions unanswered. The Earl, sensing and enjoying Sandman's disapproval, pulled the girl's breasts out of her dress. 'Let us begin at the beginning, Captain,' he said, lowering his face to nuzzle the warm flesh, 'let us begin at dawn, eh? It had been raining, yes?'

Sandman walked round the table until he was behind the Earl, where he stooped so his face was close to the stiff hairs of the wig. 'Why not talk about the battle's end, my lord?' Sandman asked in a low voice. 'Why not talk about the attack of the Imperial Guard? Because I was there when we wheeled out of line and took the bastards in the flank.' He crouched even lower. He could smell his lordship's reek and see a louse crawling along the wig's edge. He lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. They'd won the battle, my lord, it was all over except the pursuit, but we changed history in an eyeblink. We marched out of line and we gave them volley fire, my lord, and then we fixed bayonets and I can tell you exactly how it happened. I can tell you how we won, my lord.' Sandman's temper was rising now and there was a bitterness in his voice. 'We won! But you'll never hear that story, my lord, never, because I'll make damn sure that not one officer of the 52nd will ever talk to you! You understand that? Not one officer will ever talk to you. Good day, my lord. Perhaps your servant will be kind enough to show me out?' He walked towards the door. He would ask the servant if Meg had come here and if not, which he suspected would prove the case, then this whole journey would have been a waste of time and money.

'Captain!' The Earl had tipped the girl off his lap. 'Wait!' His rouged face twitched. There was malevolence in it; an old, bitter, hard-hearted malevolence, but he so badly wanted to know exactly how Bonaparte's vaunted Guard had been beaten off, so he snarled at the two girls and the servants to leave the room. 'I'll be alone with the Captain,' he said.

It still took time to draw the tale from him. Time and a bottle of smuggled French brandy, but eventually the Earl spewed the bitter tale of his marriage, confirming what Lord Christopher had already told Sandman. Celia, second wife to the sixteenth earl of Avebury, had been on stage when the Earl first saw her. 'Legs,' the Earl said dreamily, 'such legs, Captain, such legs. That was the first thing about her I saw.'

'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.'

'In St George's Fields?' Sandman asked, puzzled by the apparently irrelevant statement.

'A lot of the high toby live and dine there,' Hood said, 'on account that it's convenient for the western roads.' He meant that a number of highwaymen patronised the tavern. 'And I heard a whisper there, Captain. Your life, fifty quid.' He raised an eyebrow. 'You've upset someone, Captain. I've spread word in the 'sheaf that no one's to touch you because you've been kind to my Sal and I look after those that look after her, but I can't control every flash bowzing house in London.'

Sandman felt a lurch of his heart. Fifty guineas for his life? Was that a compliment or an insult? 'You would not know, I suppose,' he asked, 'who has staked the money?'

'I asked, but no one knew. But it's firm cash, Captain, so watch yourself. I'm obliged to you.' These last four words were because Sandman had hauled open the yard gate.

Sandman looked up at the horseman. 'You're not going to see Sally on stage tonight?'

Hood shook his head. 'Seen her often enough,' he said curtly, 'and I've business of my own that she won't be watching.' He touched his spurs to his horse's flanks and, without a word of farewell, rode northwards behind a wagon loaded with newly baked bricks.

Sandman closed the gate. Viscount Sidmouth, when he had given Sandman this job, had hinted it would be easy, a month's pay for a day's work, but it was suddenly a life for a month's pay. Sandman turned and gazed at the dirty windows of the back parlour, but he could not see beyond the gloss of the evening light on the small panes. Whoever waited there could see him, but he could not see them and so he did not go directly to the parlour, but instead cut through the barrel room to the passage where there was a serving hatch. He nudged the hatch open, careful not to make a noise, then stooped to peer through the crack.

He heard the footsteps behind him, but before he could turn a pistol barrel was cold by his ear. 'A good soldier always makes a reconnaissance, eh Captain?' Sergeant Berrigan said. 'I thought you'd come here first.'

Sandman straightened and turned to see that the Sergeant was grinning, pleased because he had outmanoeuvred Sandman. 'So what are you going to do, Sergeant?' he asked. 'Shoot me?'

'Just making sure you ain't got any sticks on you, Captain,' Berrigan said, then used his pistol barrel to push open the flaps of Sandman's jacket and, satisfied that the Captain was not armed, he jerked his head towards the parlour door. 'After you, Captain.'

'Sergeant,' Sandman began, planning to appeal to Berrigan's better nature, but that nature was nowhere to be seen, for the Sergeant just cocked the pistol and aimed it at Sandman's chest. Sandman thought about knocking the barrel aside and bringing his knee up into Berrigan's groin, but the Sergeant gave him a half-smile and an almost imperceptible shake of his head as though inviting Sandman to try. 'Through the door, eh?' Sandman asked and, when Berrigan nodded, he turned the knob and went into the back parlour.

The Marquess of Skavadale and Lord Robin Holloway were on the settle at the far side of the long table. Both were exquisitely dressed in superbly cut black coats, blossoming cravats and skin-tight breeches. Holloway scowled to see Sandman, but Skavadale courteously stood and offered a smile. 'My dear Captain Sandman, how very kind of you to join us.'

'Been waiting long?' Sandman asked truculently.

'A half-hour,' Skavadale replied pleasantly. 'We did expect to find you here already, but the wait has not been unduly tedious. Please, sit.'

Sandman sat reluctantly, first glancing at Berrigan who came into the parlour, closed the door and lowered the pistol's flint, though he did not put the weapon away. Instead the Sergeant stood beside the door and watched Sandman. The Marquess of Skavadale took the cork from some wine and poured out a glassful. 'A rather raw claret, Captain, but probably welcome after your journey? But how could we have expected the finest wine here, eh? This is the Wheatsheaf, flash, but not flush, eh? That's rather good, don't you think, Robin? Flash, but not flush?'

Lord Robin Holloway neither smiled nor spoke, but just stared at Sandman. There were still two raw scars across his cheeks and nose where Sandman had whipped him with the fencing foil. Skavadale pushed the glass of wine across the table, then looked pained when Sandman shook his head in refusal. 'Oh come, Captain,' Skavadale said with a frown, 'we're here to be friendly.'

'And I'm here because I was threatened with a pistol.'

'Put it away, Sergeant,' Skavadale ordered, then he toasted Sandman. 'I've learnt a little about you in the last couple of days, Captain. I already knew you were a formidable cricketer, of course, but you have another reputation besides.'

'For what?' Sandman asked bleakly.

'You were a good soldier,' Skavadale said.

'So?'

'But unfortunate in your father,' Skavadale said gently. 'Now, as I understand things, Captain, you are supporting your mother and sister. Am I right?' He waited for a reply, but Sandman neither spoke nor moved. 'It's sad,' Skavadale went on, 'when folk of refinement are condemned to poverty. If it were not for you, Captain, your mother would long have been reduced to accepting charity and your sister would be what? A governess? A paid companion? Yet with a small dowry she could still marry perfectly well, could she not?'

Sandman still kept silent, yet Lord Skavadale had spoken nothing but the truth. Belle, Sandman's sister, was nineteen years old and had only one hope of escaping poverty which was to marry well, yet without a dowry she could not hope to find a respectable husband. She would be lucky to find a tradesman willing to marry her, and even if she did then Sandman knew his sister would not accept such a husband for, like her mother, she had an exaggerated sense of her own high standing in society. A year ago, before her father's death, Belle might have expected a dowry of several thousand pounds, enough to attract an aristocrat and provide a healthy income, and she still yearned for those prospects and, in some obscure way, she blamed Sandman for their loss. That was why Sandman was in London, because he could no longer bear the reproaches of his mother and sister, who expected him to replace his father as a provider of endless luxuries.

'Now,' Skavadale said, 'your father's gambling has reduced the family to penury. Is that not right, Captain? Yet you are trying to pay off some of his debts. You've chosen a difficult path and it's very honourable of you, very honourable. Ain't that honourable, Robin?'

Lord Robin Holloway said nothing. He just shrugged, keeping his cold eyes on Sandman.

'So what will you do, Captain?' Skavadale asked.

'Do?'

'A mother and a sister to keep, debts to pay, and no employment other than an occasional game of cricket?' Skavadale asked, raising his eyebrows in mock surprise. 'And, as I understand it, the Home Secretary's demands upon you are very temporary and are hardly likely to lead to a permanent fortune. So what will you do?'

'What will you do?' Sandman asked.

'I beg your pardon?'

'As I understand it,' Sandman said, remembering Lord Alexander's description of the Marquess of Skavadale, 'you are not unlike me. Your family once possessed a great fortune, but it also possessed gamblers.'

The Marquess looked irritated for a second, but let the insult pass. 'I shall marry well,' he said lightly, 'meaning I shall marry wealth. And you?'

'Maybe I shall marry well, too,' Sandman retorted.

'Really?' Skavadale raised a sceptical eyebrow. 'I shall succeed to a dukedom, Sandman, and that's a great lure to a girl. What's your attraction? Skill at cricket? Fascinating memories of Waterloo?' His lordship's voice was still polite, but the scorn was obvious. 'Girls who possess money,' Skavadale went on, 'either marry more money or else they seek rank, because money and rank, Captain, are the only two things that matter in this world.'

'Truth?' Sandman suggested. 'Honour?'

'Money,' Skavadale repeated flatly, 'and rank. My family may be close to bankruptcy, but we have rank. By God, we have rank, and that will restore our fortune.'

'Money and rank,' Sandman said reflectively. 'So how do you console a man like Sergeant Berrigan whose rank is lowly and whose fortune, I surmise, is paltry?'

Skavadale gave the Sergeant a lazy glance. 'I advise him, Captain, to attach himself to a man of rank and fortune. That is the way of the world. He serves, I reward, and together we prosper.'

'And where do I fit into this divinely ordained scheme?' Sandman enquired.

Skavadale gave a ghost of a smile. 'You are a gentleman, Captain, so you possess rank, but you have been denied your share of wealth. If you will allow us,' he gestured to include the sallow Lord Robin Holloway, 'and by us I mean the whole membership of the Seraphim Club, we should like to remedy that lack.' He took a piece of paper from his pocket, placed it on the table and slid it towards Sandman.

'Remedy?' Sandman asked bleakly, but Skavadale said nothing, just pointed at the paper that Sandman picked up, opened and saw, first, Lord Robin Holloway's extravagantly scrawled signature and then he saw the figure. He stared at it, then looked up at Lord Skavadale, who smiled. Sandman looked at the paper again. It was a money draft, payable to Rider Sandman, drawn on the account of Lord Robin Holloway at Courts Bank, to the value of twenty thousand guineas.

Twenty thousand. His hands shook slightly and he forced himself to take a deep breath.

It solved everything. Everything.

Twenty thousand guineas could pay off his father's small debts, buy his mother and sister a fine house and there would still be enough left over to yield an income of six or seven hundred pounds a year, which was small compared to the money Sandman's mother had once been used to, but six hundred pounds a year could keep a woman and her daughter in country gentility. It was respectable. They might not be able to afford a carriage and horses, but they could keep a maid and a cook, they could put a gold coin in the collection plate each Sunday and they could receive their neighbours in sufficient style. They could stop complaining to Rider Sandman of their poverty.

There was a great clatter of hooves and chains as a dray arrived in the yard, but Sandman was oblivious of the noise. He was being tempted by the thought that he was not responsible for his father's debts, and if he ignored the tradesmen who had been taken close to ruin by Ludovic Sandman's suicide then he could get his mother an income of perhaps eight hundred a year. Best of all, though, and most tempting of all, was the knowledge that twenty thousand guineas would be a fortune sufficient to overcome Lady Forrest's objections to his marrying Eleanor. He stared at the money draft. It made all things possible. Eleanor, he thought, Eleanor, and he thought of the money Eleanor would bring him and he knew he would be wealthy again and he would have horses in his stables and he could play cricket all summer and hunt all winter. He would be a proper gentleman again. He would no longer need to scratch for pennies or spend time worrying about the laundry.

He looked up into Lord Robin Holloway's eyes. The young man was a fool who had wanted to challenge Sandman to a duel, now he was giving him a fortune? Lord Robin ignored Sandman's gaze, staring off at a cobweb high on the parlour's panelling. Lord Skavadale smiled at Sandman. It was the smile of a man enjoying another's good fortune, yet it filled Sandman with shame. Shame because he had been tempted, truly tempted. 'You think we are trying to bribe you?' Lord Skavadale had seen Sandman's change of expression and asked the question anxiously.

'I did not expect such kindness from Lord Robin,' Sandman said drily.

'Every member of the Seraphim contributed,' the Marquess said, 'and my friend Robin collated the funds. It is, of course, a gift, not a bribe.'

'A gift?' Sandman repeated the words bitterly. 'Not a bribe?'

'Of course it's not a bribe,' Skavadale said sternly, 'indeed not.' He stood and went to the window where he watched the beer-barrels being rolled down planks from the dray's bed, then he turned and smiled. 'I am offended, Captain Sandman, when I see a gentleman reduced to penury. Such a thing goes against the natural order, wouldn't you say? And when that gentleman is an officer who has fought gallantly for his country, then the offense is all the greater. I told you that the Seraphim Club is composed of men who attempt to excel, who celebrate the higher achievements. What else are angels but beings that do good? So we should like to see you and your family restored to your proper place in society. That is all.' He shrugged as though the gesture was really very small.

Sandman wanted to believe him. Lord Skavadale had sounded so reasonable and calm, as though this transaction was something very ordinary. Yet Sandman knew better. 'You're offering me charity,' he said.

Lord Skavadale shook his head. 'Merely a correction of blind fate, Captain.'

'And if I allow my fate to be corrected,' Sandman asked, 'what would you want in return?'

Lord Skavadale looked offended, as though it had not even occurred to him that Sandman might perform some small service in return for being given a small fortune. 'I should only expect, Captain,' he spoke stiffly, 'that you would behave like a gentleman.'

Sandman glanced at Lord Robin Holloway, who had not spoken. 'I trust,' Sandman said frostily, 'that I always behave thus.'

'Then you will know, Captain,' Skavadale said pointedly, 'that gentlemen do not perform paid employment.'

Sandman said nothing.

Lord Skavadale bridled slightly at Sandman's silence. 'So naturally, Captain, in return for accepting that draft, you will resign any paid offices that you might enjoy.'

Sandman looked down at the small fortune. 'So I write to the Home Secretary and resign as his Investigator?'

'It would surely be the gentlemanly thing to do,' Skavadale observed.

'How gentlemanly is it,' Sandman asked, 'to let an innocent man hang?'

'Is he innocent?' Lord Skavadale enquired. 'You told the Sergeant you would bring proof from the countryside, and did you?' He waited, but it was plain from Sandman's face that there was no proof. Lord Skavadale shrugged as if to suggest that Sandman might just as well abandon a hopeless hunt and accept the money.

And Sandman was tempted, he was so very tempted, but he was also ashamed of that temptation and so he nerved himself and then tore the draft into shreds. He saw Lord Skavadale blink with surprise when he made the first rip, and then his lordship looked furious and Sandman felt a pulse of fear. It was not fear of Lord Skavadale's anger, but for his own future and for the enormity of the fortune he was rejecting.

He scattered the scraps on the table. The Marquess of Skavadale and Lord Robin Holloway stood. Neither spoke. They looked at Sergeant Berrigan and it seemed that some kind of unspoken message was delivered before, without even glancing at Sandman, they went. Their footsteps receded down the passage as cold metal touched the back of Sandman's neck and he knew it was the pistol. Sandman tensed, planning to throw himself backwards in hope of unbalancing Berrigan, but the Sergeant ground the cold barrel hard into Sandman's neck. 'You had your chance, Captain.'

'You still have one, Sergeant,' Sandman said.

'But I ain't a fool,' Berrigan went on, 'and I ain't killing you here. Not here and now. Too many folk in the inn. I kill you here, Captain, and I'm dancing in Newgate.' The pistol's pressure vanished, then the Sergeant leant close to Sandman's ear. 'Watch yourself, Captain, watch yourself.' It was the exact same advice that Jack Hood had given.

Sandman heard the door open and shut, and the Sergeant's footsteps fade.

Twenty thousand guineas, he thought. Gone.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The Reverend Lord Alexander Pleydell had secured one of the Covent Garden Theatre's stage boxes for the performance. 'I cannot say I am expecting great artistry,' he declared as he followed Sandman through the crowds, 'except from Miss Hood. I am sure she will be more than dazzling.' His lordship, like Sandman, was clutching his pockets for theatre crowds were famous hunting grounds for cly-fakers, knucklers, divers, dummy hunters and buzz-coves, all of them, to Lord Alexander's delight, different names for pickpockets. 'Do you realise,' he said in his shrill voice, 'that there is a whole hierarchy of cly-fakers?'

'I was listening to the conversation, Alexander,' Sandman said. Lord Alexander, before they left the Wheatsheaf, had insisted on another tutorial in the flash language, this one from the landlord, Jenks, who rather liked having a reverend lord as a customer. The Reverend Lord had taken notes, delighted to discover that the lowest rank of cly-faker was the clouter, a child who snitched handkerchiefs, while the lords of the buzzing trade were the thimble-coves who stole watches. It was not just the practitioners of the trade who had names, the pockets themselves were all differentiated. 'Garret,' Lord Alexander chanted, 'hoxter, kickseys, pit, rough-fammy, salt box cly and slip. Did I miss one?'

'I wasn't paying attention.' Sandman edged closer to the brightly lit awning of the theatre.

'Garret, hoxter, kickseys, pit, rough-fammy, salt box cly and slip,' Lord Alexander announced again to the bemusement of the crowd. The garret was the fob pocket of a waistcoat while the lower pockets were rough-fammies, the kickseys were pockets in breeches, the hoxter was a coat's inside pocket, an unflapped chest pocket was a pit, an outside coat pocket protected by a flap was a salt box cly while a tail pocket, the easiest of all to pick, was a slip. 'Do you think,' Lord Alexander shouted over the noise of the crowd, 'that Miss Hood will join us for supper after the performance?'

'I'm sure she'll be more than happy to bask in the admiration of one of her admirers.'

'One of?' Lord Alexander asked anxiously. 'You're not thinking of Kit Carne, are you?'

Sandman was not thinking of Lord Christopher Carne, but he shrugged as though the Earl of Avebury's heir was indeed a rival for Sally's hand. Lord Alexander looked very disapproving. 'Kit is not a serious man, Rider.'

'I thought he was very serious.'

'I have decided he is weak,' Lord Alexander said loftily.

'Weak?'

'The other night,' Lord Alexander said, 'he just stared at Miss Hood with a vacant look on his face! Ridiculous behaviour. I was talking to her and he was just gaping! Lord knows what she thought of him.'

'I can't imagine,' Sandman said.

'He was gaping like a fish!' Lord Alexander said, then turned in alarm as a child squealed. The child's pain was met by a roar of laughter. 'What happened?' Lord Alexander asked anxiously.

'Someone lined their pockets with fish-hooks,' Sandman guessed, 'and a clouter just got torn fingers?' It was a common precaution against pickpockets.

'A lesson the child will not forget,' Lord Alexander said piously. 'But I mustn't be hard on Kit. He has little experience of women and I fear he has no defences against their charms.'

'That,' Sandman said, 'from a man who is eager to watch Sally Hood dance, is rich.'

Lord Alexander grinned. 'Even I am not perfect. Kit wanted to come tonight, but I told him to buy his own ticket. Good Lord, he might even have wanted to come to supper with Miss Hood afterwards! Do you think she might like to visit Newgate with us?'

'Visit Newgate?'

'For a hanging! I told you I was requesting a privileged seat from the prison authorities, so I wrote to them. No answer yet, but I'm sure they'll consent.'

'And I'm sure I don't want to go,' Sandman shouted over the crowd's noise, and just then the throng gave an inexplicable lurch and Sandman was able to make a lunge for the doorway. If it was a paid crowd causing the crush, he thought, then it was costing Mister Spofforth a rare fortune. Mister Spofforth was the man who had taken the theatre for the evening on behalf of his protégé, a Miss Sacharissa Lasorda, who was billed as the new Vestris. The old Vestris was only twenty years old and a dazzling Italian actress who was reputed to add three hundred pounds a night to a theatre's takings merely by baring her legs, and Mister Spofforth was now trying to launch Miss Lasorda on a career of similar profitability.

'Do you know Spofforth?' Sandman asked his friend. They were inside the theatre now and an old woman was leading them up musty stairs to their box.

'Of course I know William Spofforth,' Lord Alexander's club foot banged against the risers as he struggled manfully up the dark stairs, 'he was at Marlborough. He's a rather foolish young man whose father made a fortune in sugar. Young Spofforth, our host tonight, kept wicket, but had no idea how to place fielders.'

'I always think the captain or bowler should do that,' Sandman observed mildly.

'An absurd statement,' Lord Alexander snapped. 'Cricket will cease to be cricket when the Keeper abandons his duties of field setting. He sees as the batsman does, so who else is better placed to set a field? Truly, Rider, I am second to none in my admiration of your batting, but when it comes to a theoretical understanding of the game then you really are a child.' It was an old argument, and one that happily engaged them as they took their places above the stage's apron. Lord Alexander had his bag of pipes and lit his first of the evening, the smoke wreathing past a large sign that prohibited smoking. The house was full, over three thousand spectators, and it was rowdy because a good number of the audience were already drunk, suggesting that Mister Spofforth's servants must have dredged the taverns to find his supporters. A group of newspaper writers was being plied with champagne, brandy and oysters in a box opposite Lord Alexander's plush eyrie. Mister Spofforth, an aloof beau with a collar rising past his ears, was in the neighbouring box from where he kept an anxious eye on the journalists who were costing him so much and whose verdict could make or break his lover, but one critic was already asleep, another was fondling a woman while the remaining two were loudly haranguing the box's attendant for more champagne. A dozen musicians filed into the pit and began tuning their instruments.

'I'm putting together a gentlemen's eleven to play against Hampshire at the end of the month,' Lord Alexander said, 'and I rather hoped you'd want to play.'

'I'd like that, yes. Would the game be in Hampshire?' Sandman asked the question anxiously, for he did not particularly want to go near Winchester and his mother's querulous demands.

'Here, in London,' Lord Alexander said, 'at Thomas Lord's ground.'

Sandman grimaced. 'That wretched hillside?'

'It's a perfectly good ground,' Lord Alexander said huffily, 'a slight slope, maybe? And I've already wagered fifty guineas on the game, which is why I'd like you to play. I shall go higher if you're in my team.'

Sandman groaned. 'Money's ruining the game, Alexander.'

'Which is why those of us who oppose corruption must be energetic in our patronage of the game,' Lord Alexander insisted. 'So will you play?'

'I'm very out of practice,' Sandman warned his friend.

'Then get into practice,' Lord Alexander said testily, lighting another pipe. He frowned at Sandman. 'You look depressingly glum. Don't you enjoy the theatre?'

'Very much.'

'Then look as if you do!' Lord Alexander polished the lens of his opera glasses on the tails of his coat. 'Do you think Miss Hood would enjoy cricket?'

'I can't imagine her playing it, somehow.'

'Don't be so grotesquely absurd, Rider, I mean as a spectator.'

'You must ask her, Alexander,' Sandman said. He leant over the edge of the box to look down into the stalls, where a claque from the Wheatsheaf were readying themselves to cheer Sally. A pair of whores were working their way around the edge of the pit and one of them, seeing him peer down, mimed that she would come up to the box. Sandman hastily shook his head and pulled back out of sight. 'Suppose she's dead,' he asked suddenly.

'Miss Hood? Dead? Why should she be?' Lord Alexander looked very worried. 'Was she ill? You should have told me!'

'I'm talking about the maidservant. Meg.'

'Oh, her,' Lord Alexander said absently, then frowned at his pipe. 'Do you recall those Spanish cigars that were all the rage when you were fighting against the forces of enlightenment in Spain?'

'Of course I do.'

'You can't get them anywhere, and I did like them.'

'Try Pettigrews in Old Bond Street,' Sandman said, sounding annoyed that his friend had ignored his concerns about Meg.

'I've tried. They have none. And I did like them.'

'I know someone who's thinking of importing them,' Sandman said, remembering Sergeant Berrigan.

'Let me know if they do,' Lord Alexander blew smoke towards the gilded cherubs on the ceiling. 'Are your friends in the Seraphim Club aware that you are pursuing Meg?'

'No.'

'So they have no cause to find and kill her. And if they had wished to kill her at the time of the Countess's murder, supposing that they did, indeed, perform that wicked deed, then they would have left her body with her mistress's corpse so that Corday could be convicted of both murders. Which suggests, does it not, that the girl is alive? It occurs to me, Rider, that your duties as an Investigator demand a great deal of logical deduction, which is why you are such a poor choice for the post. Still, you may always consult me.'

'You're very kind, Alexander.'

'I try to be, dear boy.' Lord Alexander, pleased with himself, beamed. 'I do try to be.'

A cheer sounded as boys went round the theatre extinguishing the lamps. The musicians gave a last tentative squeak, then waited for the conductor's baton to fall. Some of the audience in the pit began to whistle as a demand for the curtains to part. Most of the scene-shifting was done by sailors, men accustomed to ropes and heights, and, just as at sea, some of the signals were given by whistles and the audience's whistling betrayed their impatience, but the curtain stayed obstinately shut. More lamps were extinguished, then the big reflective lanterns at the edges of the stage were unmasked, the drummer gave a portentous roll and a player in a swathing cloak leapt from between the curtains to recite the prologue on the stage's wide apron:

'In Africa, so far from home,

A little lad was wont to roam.

Aladdin was our hero's name…'

He got no further before the audience drowned him in a cacophony of shouting, hissing and whistling. 'Show us the girl's pins!' a man yelled from the box next to Sandman. 'Show us her gams!'

'I think Vestris's supporters are here!' Lord Alexander shouted in Sandman's ear.

Mister Spofforth was looking ever more anxious. The newspaper writers were beginning to pay attention now that the crowd was in full cry, but the musicians, who had heard it all before, began to play and that slightly calmed the audience, who gave a cheer as the prologue was abandoned and the heavy scarlet curtains parted to reveal a glade in Africa. Oak trees and yellow roses framed an idol that guarded the entrance to a cave where a dozen white-skinned natives were sleeping. Sally was one of the natives, who were inexplicably dressed in white stockings, black velvet jackets and very short tartan skirts. Lord Alexander bellowed a cheer as the twelve girls got to their feet and began dancing. The Wheatsheaf's customers in the pit also cheered loudly and Vestris's supporters, assuming that the cheers came from Spofforth's paid claque, began to jeer. 'Bring on the girl!' the man in the next box demanded. A plum arced onto the stage to splatter against the idol, which looked suspiciously like a Red Indian's totem pole. Mister Spofforth was making helpless gestures to calm an audience that was determined to make mayhem, or at least the half who had been rented by Vestris's supporters were, while the other half, paid by Mister Spofforth, were too cowed to fight back. Some of the crowd had rattles that filled the high gilded hall with a crackling and echoing din. 'It's going to be very nasty!' Lord Alexander said with relish. 'Oh, this is splendid!'

The theatre's management must have believed that the sight of Miss Sacharissa Lasorda would calm the tumult, for the girl was pushed prematurely onto the stage. Mister Spofforth stood and began to applaud as she staggered out of the wings and his claque took their cue and cheered so lustily that they actually drowned the catcalls for a while. Miss Lasorda, who played the Sultan of Africa's daughter, was dark-haired and certainly pretty, but whether her legs deserved to be as famous as Vestris's was still a mystery, for she was wearing a long skirt embroidered with crescent moons, camels and scimitars. She seemed momentarily alarmed to find herself on stage, but then bowed to her supporters before beginning to dance.

'Show us your gams!' the man in the next box shouted.

'Skirt off! Skirt off! Skirt off!' the crowd in the stalls began to chant, and a shower of plums and apples hurtled onto the stage. 'Skirt off! Skirt off! Skirt off!' Mister Spofforth was still making calming gestures with his hands, but that only made him a target and he ducked as a well-aimed volley of fruit spattered his box.

Lord Alexander had tears of joy running down his cheeks. 'I do so like the theatre,' he said, 'dear sweet God, I do so love it. This must have cost that young fool two thousand pounds at the very least!'

Sandman did not hear what his friend had said and so leant towards him. 'What?' he asked.

He heard something smack into the wall at the back of the box and saw, in the shadows there, a puff of dust. It was only then that he realised a shot had been fired in the theatre and astonished, he gaped up to see a patch of smoke in the dim heights of an upper gallery box. A rifle, he thought. It had a different sound from a musket. He remembered the greenjackets at Waterloo, remembered the distinctive sound of their weapons, and then he realised someone had just shot at him and he was so shocked that he did not move for a few seconds. Instead he stared up at the spreading smoke and realised that the audience was going silent. Some had heard the shot over the raucous din of rattles, whistles and shouts, while others could smell the reeking powder smoke, then someone screamed in the upper gallery. Miss Lasorda stared upwards, mouth open.

Sandman snatched open the door to the box and saw two men running up the stairs with pistols in their hands. He slammed the door. 'Meet me in the Wheatsheaf,' he told Lord Alexander, and he swung his legs over the box's balustrade, paused a second, then jumped. He landed heavily, turning his left ankle and almost falling. The audience cheered, thinking Sandman's leap was part of the entertainment, but then some in the stalls began to scream for they could see the two men in Lord Alexander's box and they could see the pistols.

'Captain!' Sally shouted, and pointed to the wings.

Sandman stumbled. There was a pain in his ankle, a terrible pain that made him stagger towards the idol guarding the cave mouth. He turned to see the two men in the box, both pointing their pistols but neither dared fire onto the stage which was crowded with dancers. Then one of the men threw a leg over the box's gilded lip and Sandman limped into the wings where a man dressed as a harlequin and another with a blackened face, a tall crown and a magic lamp waited. Sandman pushed between them, staggered through a tangle of ropes, then down some stairs and, at the bottom, turned into a passage. He did not think his left ankle was broken, but he must have twisted it and every step was an agony. He stopped in the passage, his heart beating, and flattened himself against the wall. He heard the screams from the dancers on stage, then the pounding of feet down wooden stairs, and a second later a man came round the corner and Sandman tripped him, then stamped hard on the back of his neck. The man grunted and Sandman took the pistol out of his suddenly feeble hand. He turned the man over. 'Who are you?' he asked, but the man merely spat up at Sandman, who struck him with the pistol barrel, then fished in the man's pockets to find a handful of cartridges. He stood, wincing from the pain in his left leg, then limped down the passage to the stage door. More footsteps sounded behind him and he turned, pistol raised, but it was Sally running towards him with her street clothes bundled in a cloak.

'You all right?' she asked him.

'Twisted my ankle.'

'Bleeding ruckus back there,' Sally said, 'there's more fruit on the bloody deck than there is in the market.'

'Deck?' he asked.

'Stage,' she explained shortly, then pulled open the door.

'You should go back,' Sandman said.

'I should do a lot of bleeding things, but I don't,' Sally said, 'so come on.' She tugged him out into the street. A man whistled at the sight of her long legs in the white stockings and she snarled at him to fake away off, then draped the cloak about her shoulders. 'Lean on me,' she told Sandman, who was limping and grunting from pain. 'You're in a bad bleeding way, ain't you?'

'Sprained ankle,' Sandman said. 'I don't think it's broken.'

'How do you know?'

'Because it isn't grating with every step.'

'Bloody hell,' Sally said. 'What happened?'

'Someone shot at me. A rifle.'

'Who?'

'I don't know,' Sandman said. The Seraphim Club? That seemed most likely, especially after Sandman had turned down their vast bribe, but that did not explain Jack Hood's assertion that there was a price on Sandman's head. Why would the Seraphim Club pay criminals to do what they or their servants were more than capable of doing? 'I really don't know,' he said, puzzled and frightened.

They had come from the rear of the theatre and now walked or, in Sandman's case, hobbled under the piazza of the Covent Garden market. The summer evening meant it was still light, though the shadows were long across the cobbles that were littered with the remnants of vegetables and squashed fruit. A rat slithered across Sandman's path. He constantly glanced behind, but he could see no obvious enemies. No sign of Sergeant Berrigan or anyone in a black and yellow livery. No sign of Lord Robin Holloway or the Marquess of Skavadale. 'They'll be expecting me to go back to the Wheatsheaf,' he told Sally.

'They won't know which bleeding door you're going in, though, will they?' Sally said, 'and once you're inside you're bleeding safe, Captain, because there ain't a man there who won't protect you.' She turned in sudden alarm as hurried footsteps sounded behind, but it was only a child running from an irate man accusing the boy of being a pickpocket. Flower sellers were arranging their baskets on the pavement, ready for the crowds to come from the two nearby theatres. Whistles and rattles sounded. 'Bleeding Charlies on their way to the spell,' Sally said, meaning that the constables from Bow Street were converging on the Covent Garden Theatre. She frowned at the pistol in Sandman's hand. 'Hide that stick. Don't want a charlie scurfing you.'

Sandman pushed the gun into a pocket. 'Are you sure you shouldn't be at the theatre?'

'They ain't ever going to get that bleeding circus started again, not that it ever did get started, did it? Dead before it was born. No, Miss Sacharissa's little night of fame got the jump, didn't it? Mind you, her name ain't Sacharissa Lasorda.'

'I never thought it was.'

'Flossie, she's called, and she used to be the pal of a fire-eater at Astleys. Must be thirty if she's a day, and last I heard she was earning her bunce in an academy.'

'She was a schoolteacher?' Sandman asked, sounding surprised, for few women chose that profession and Miss Lasorda, or whatever she was called, did not look like a teacher.

Sally laughed so much she had to support herself by leaning on Sandman. 'Lord, I love you, Captain,' she said, still laughing. 'An academy ain't for learning. At least not letters. It's a brothel!'

'Oh,' Sandman said.

'Not far now,' Sally said as they approached the Drury Lane Theatre, from which a burst of applause sounded. 'How's your ankle?'

'I think I can walk,' Sandman said.

'Try,' Sally encouraged him, then watched as Sandman hobbled a few steps. 'You don't want to take that boot off tonight,' she said. 'Your ankle's going to swell something horrible if you do.' She walked on ahead and opened the Wheatsheaf's front door. Sandman half expected to see a man waiting there with a pistol, but the doorway was empty.

'We don't want to be looking over our shoulders all night,' Sandman said, 'so I'm going to see if the back parlour's free.' He led Sally across the crowded taproom where the landlord was holding court at a table. 'Is the back parlour free?' Sandman asked him.

Jenks nodded. 'The gentleman said you'd be back, Captain, and he kept it for you. And there's a letter for you as well, brought by a slavey.'

'A footman,' Sally translated for Sandman 'and what gentleman reserved the back slum?'

'It must be Lord Alexander,' Sandman explained, 'because he wanted you and me to have dinner with him.' He took the letter from Mister Jenks and smiled at Sally. 'You don't mind Alexander's company?'

'Mind Lord Alexander? He'll just gawp at me like a Billingsgate cod, won't he?'

'How fickle your affection is, Miss Hood,' Sandman said, and received a blow on the shoulder as a reward.

'Well he does!' Sally said, and gave a cruelly accurate imitation of Lord Alexander's goggling devotion. 'Poor old cripple,' she said sympathetically, then glanced down at her short tartan skirt under the cloak. 'I'd better change into something decent or else his eyes will pop right out.'

Sandman pretended to be heart-broken. 'I rather like that Scottish skirt.'

'And I thought you was a gentleman, Captain,' Sally said, then laughed and ran up the stairs as Sandman shouldered open the back parlour door and, with great relief, sank into a chair. It was dark in the room because the shutters were closed and the candles extinguished, so he leant forward and pulled the nearest shutter open and saw that it was not Lord Alexander who had reserved the back parlour, but another gentleman altogether, though perhaps Sergeant Berrigan was not truly a gentleman.

The Sergeant was lounging on the settle, but now raised his pistol and aimed it at Sandman's forehead. 'They want you dead, Captain,' he said, 'they want you dead. So they sent me because when you want a dirty job done neatly, you send a soldier. Ain't that the truth? You send a soldier.'

So they had sent Sam Berrigan.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Sandman knew he should do something fast. Throw himself forward? But his ankle was throbbing and he knew he could never move quicker than Berrigan who was fit, tough and experienced. He thought of pulling out the pistol he had taken from his attacker in the theatre, but by the time he dragged it from his pocket Berrigan would already have fired, so instead Sandman decided he would just keep the Sergeant talking until Sally arrived and could raise the alarm. He lifted his left foot and rested it on a chair. 'I sprained it,' he told Berrigan, 'jumping onto the stage.'

'Stage?'

'At Miss Hood's performance. Someone tried to kill me.'

'Not us, Captain,' Berrigan said.

'Someone with a rifle.'

'Lot of those left from the wars,' Berrigan said. 'You can pick up a used Baker for seven or eight shillings. So someone other than the Seraphim Club wants you dead, eh?'

Sandman stared at the Sergeant. 'Are you sure it wasn't the Seraphim Club?'

'They sent me, Captain, only me,' Berrigan said, 'and I wasn't at the theatre.'

Sandman stared at him, wondering who in God's name had put a price on his head. 'It must be a great relief being dishonest,' he said.

Berrigan grinned. 'Relief?'

'No one trying to kill you, no scruples about accepting thousands of guineas? I'd say it was a relief. My problem, Sergeant, is that I so feared being like my father that I set out to behave in an utterly dissimilar manner. I set out to be consciously virtuous. It was exceedingly tedious of me and it annoyed him hugely. I suppose that's why I did it.'

If Berrigan was surprised or discomfited by this strange admission, he did not show it. Instead he seemed interested. 'Your father was dishonest?'

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.

'He can't drink,' Sandman had said, 'and that's his problem.' Lord Alexander, he thought, was bored and boredom drove him to drink, while Sandman was anything but bored. He had lain awake half the night trying to work out who beyond the Seraphim Club might want him dead, and it had only been when the bell of St Paul's church rang two o'clock that the answer had come to him with a clarity and force that made him ashamed for not having thought of so obvious a solution before. He shared it with Berrigan as they walked down Holborn beneath clouds so low they seemed to touch the belching chimneys.

'I know who's paying to have me killed.'

'It ain't the Seraphim Club,' Berrigan insisted. 'They'd have told me just to make sure I didn't get in the way of some other cove.'

'It isn't the club,' Sandman agreed, 'because they decided to buy me off, but the only member with sufficient funds immediately available was Lord Robin Holloway, and he detests me.'

'He does,' Berrigan agreed, 'but they all contributed.'

'No they didn't,' Sandman said. 'Most of the members are in the country and there won't have been time to solicit them. Skavadale doesn't have the funds. Maybe one or two members in London donated, but I'll wager the largest part of the twenty thousand came from Lord Robin Holloway, and he only did it because Skavadale begged him or ordered him or persuaded him, and I think he probably agreed to pay me, but privately arranged to have me killed before I could accept or, God forbid, cash his note.'

Berrigan thought about it, then reluctantly nodded. 'He's capable of that. Nasty piece of work, he is.'

'But maybe he'll call off his dogs,' Sandman said, 'now that he knows I'm not taking his money?'

'Except if he killed the Countess,' Berrigan suggested, 'he might still want you nubbed. What the hell's happening here?' His question was caused because the only thing moving on Newgate Hill was a trickle of dirty water in the gutter. The carts and carriages in the roadway were motionless, all held up by a wagon that had shed its load of pear saplings at the corner of Old Bailey and Newgate Street. Men shouted, whips cracked, horses buried their faces in nosebags and nothing moved. Berrigan shook his head. 'Who'd want half a ton of bloody pear trees?'

'Someone who likes pears?'

'Someone who needs their bloody brains reamed out,' the Sergeant grumbled, then stopped to gaze at the granite facade of Newgate Prison. It squatted grim and gaunt, sparsely supplied with windows, solid and forbidding. The rain was falling harder, but the Sergeant still stared in apparent fascination. 'Is this where they hang them?'

'Right outside the Debtor's Door, whichever one that is.'

'I've never been to a hanging here,' Berrigan admitted,

'Nor have I.'

'Been to one at Horsemonger Lane prison, but they hang them up on the roof of the gateway there and you don't see a lot from the street. Bit of jerking, that's all. My mum used to like going to Tyburn.'

'Your mother did?'

'It was a day out for her,' Berrigan had heard the surprise in Sandman's voice and sounded defensive. 'She likes a day out, my mum does, but she says the Old Bailey's too far—one day I'll hire a coach and bring her up.' He grinned as he climbed the prison steps. 'I always reckoned I'd end up in here.'

A turnkey accompanied them through the tunnel to the Press Yard and pointed out the large cell where those to be hanged spent their last night. 'If you want to see a hanging,' he confided to Sandman, 'then you come on Monday, 'cos we'll be ridding England of two of the bastards, but there won't be a crowd. Not a big one, anyway, on account that neither of 'em is what you'd call notorious. You want a big crowd? Hang someone notorious, sir, someone notorious, or else string up a woman. The Magpie and Stump got through a fortnight's supply of ale last Monday, and that was only 'cos we scragged a woman. Folks do like to see a woman strangling. Did you hear how that one ended?'

'Ended?' Sandman asked, puzzled by the question. 'I assume she died.'

'Died and went to the anatomists, sir, what do like a young 'un to slice apart, but she was hanged for the theft of a pearl necklace and I do hear how the owner found the necklace last week.' The man chuckled. 'Fallen down the back of a sofa! Might be rumour, of course, might just be rumour.' He shook his head in wonderment at fate's arbitrary ways. 'But it's a strange business, life, isn't it?'

'Death is,' Sandman said bitterly.

The turnkey fumbled with the Press Yard's padlocked gate, unaware that his callousness had provoked Sandman's anger. Berrigan saw it and tried to divert the Captain. 'So why are we seeing this Corday?' he asked.

Sandman hesitated. He had not yet told the Sergeant about the missing maid, Meg, and it had crossed his mind that perhaps Berrigan had not really changed sides at all. Had the Seraphim Club sent him as a spy? Yet that seemed unlikely, and the Sergeant's change of heart appeared to be sincere, even if it was prompted more by an attraction to Sally than any sincere repentance. 'There was a witness,' he told Berrigan, 'and I need to know more about her. And if I find her…' He left that thought unfinished.

'And if you find her?'

'Then someone will hang,' Sandman said, 'but not Corday.' He nodded a curt acknowledgement to the turnkey who had unlocked the gate, then led Berrigan across the stinking yard and into the Association Room. It was crowded because the rain had driven the prisoners and their visitors indoors and they stared resentfully at Sandman and his companion as the two threaded their way through the tables to the shadowed back of the room where Sandman expected to find Corday. The artist was evidently a changed man for, instead of cowering from his persecutors, he was now holding court at the table closest to the fire where, with a thick pile of paper and a stick of charcoal, he was drawing a portrait of a prisoner's woman. A small crowd surrounded him, admiring his skill, and they parted reluctantly to let Sandman through. Corday gave a small start of recognition when he saw his visitors, then quickly looked away. 'I need a word with you,' Sandman said.

'He'll talk to you when he's finished,' a huge man, black-haired, long-bearded and with a massive chest, growled from the bench beside Corday, 'and he won't be finished for a while, so wait, my culleys, wait.'

'And who are you?' Berrigan asked.

'I'm the cove telling you to wait,' the man said. He had a West Country accent, greasy clothes and a thick matted beard. He probed a finger into a capacious nostril as he stared belligerently at Berrigan, then withdrew it and gave the pickings a close inspection. He cleaned his nail by running it through his beard, then looked defiantly at Sandman. 'Charlie's time is valuable,' he explained, 'and there's not much left of it.'

'It's your life, Corday,' Sandman said.

'Don't listen to him, Charlie!' the big man said. 'You've got no friends in this wicked world except me and I know what's—' He stopped abruptly and uttered a gasping, mewing noise as his eyes widened in shock. Sergeant Berrigan had gone to stand behind him and now gave a jerk with his right hand that made the big man grunt in renewed pain.

'Sergeant!' Sandman remonstrated with mock concern.

'Just teaching the culley manners,' Berrigan said, and thumped the man in the kidneys a second time. 'When the Captain wants a word, you nose-picking piece of garbage, you jump to attention, you do, eyes front, mouth shut, heels together and back straight! You don't tell him to wait, that ain't polite.'

Corday looked anxiously at the bearded man. 'Are you all right?'

'He'll be fine,' Berrigan answered for his victim. 'You just talk to the Captain, boy, because he's trying to save your miserable bleeding life. You want to play games, culley?' The bearded man had stood and attempted to ram his elbow back into Berrigan's belly, but the Sergeant now thumped him across the ear, tripped him and, while he was still off balance, ran him hard and fast until he slammed into a table. Berrigan thumped the man's face down hard. 'You bleeding stay there, culley, till we're done.' He tapped the back of the man's head as an encouragement, then stalked back to Corday's table. 'Everyone on parade, Captain,' he reported, 'ready and willing.'

Sandman edged a woman aside so he could sit opposite Corday. 'I need to talk to you about the maid,' he said softly, 'about Meg. I don't suppose you knew her surname? No? So what did Meg look like?'

'Your friend shouldn't have hit him!' Corday, still distracted by his companion's pain, complained to Sandman.

'What did she bloody look like, son?' Berrigan shouted in his best sergeant's manner, and Corday twitched with sudden terror, then set aside the half-finished portrait and, without a word, began to sketch on a clean sheet of paper. He worked fast, the charcoal making a small scratching noise in the silence of the big room.

'She's young,' Corday said, 'maybe twenty-four or-five? She has a pockmarked skin and mouse-coloured hair. Her eyes have a greenish tint and she has a mole here.' He flicked a mark on the girl's forehead. 'Her teeth aren't good. I've only drawn her face, but you should know she had broad hips and a narrow chest.'

'Small tits, you mean?' Berrigan growled.

Corday blushed. 'She was small above the waist,' he said, 'but big beneath it.' He finished the drawing, frowned at it for a moment, then nodded in satisfaction and handed the sheet to Sandman.

Sandman stared at the picture. The girl was ugly, and then he thought she was more than ugly. It was not just the pox-scarred skin, the narrow jaw, the scrawny hair and small eyes, but a suggestion of knowing hardness that sat strangely on such a young face. If the portrait was accurate then Meg was not just repulsive, but evil. 'Why would the Countess employ such a creature?' he asked.

'They worked together in the theatre,' Corday said.

'Worked together? Meg was an actress?' Sandman sounded astonished.

'No, she was a dresser.' Corday looked down at the portrait and seemed embarrassed. 'She was more than a dresser, I think.'

'More than?'

'A procuress,' Corday said, looking up at Sandman.

'How do you know?'

The painter shrugged. 'It's strange how people will talk when you're making their portrait. They forget you're even there. You just become part of the furniture. So the Countess and Meg talked, I listened.'

'Did you know,' Sandman asked, 'that the Earl didn't commission the portrait?'

'He didn't?' That was plainly news to Corday. 'Sir George said he did.'

Sandman shook his head. 'It was commissioned by the Seraphim Club. Have you heard of it?'

'I've heard of it,' Corday said, 'but I've never been there.'

'So you wouldn't know why they commissioned the portrait?'

'How would I know that?' Corday asked.

Berrigan had come to stand at Sandman's shoulder. He grimaced at the sight of Meg's portrait and Sandman turned the drawing so Berrigan could get an even better look. 'Did you ever see her?' he asked, wondering if the girl had ever been taken to the Seraphim Club, but Berrigan shook his head.

Sandman looked back to Corday. 'There is a chance,' he said, 'that we shall find her.'

'How great a chance?' Corday's eyes were glistening.

'I don't know,' Sandman said. He saw the hope fade in Corday's eyes. 'Do you have ink here?' he asked. 'A pen?'

Corday had both and Sandman tore one of the big pieces of drawing paper in half, dipped the steel nib in the ink, let it drain and began to write. 'Dear Witherspoon,' he began, 'the bearer of this letter, Sergeant Samuel Berrigan, is a companion of mine. He served in the First Foot Guards and I trust him absolutely.' Sandman was not certain those last four words were entirely true, but he had little choice now but to assume Berrigan was trustworthy. He dipped the nib into the ink again, conscious that Corday was reading the words from across the table. 'The regrettable possibility occurs that I might need to communicate with his lordship on Sunday next and, in the presumption that his lordship will not be at the Home Office on that day, I beg you to tell me where he might be found. I apologise for prevailing upon your time, and assure you I do it only because I may have matters of the gravest urgency to report.' Sandman read the letter over, subscribed it, and blew on the ink to dry it. 'He won't like that,' he said to no one in particular, then folded the letter and stood.

'Captain!' Corday, his eyes full of tears, appealed to Sandman.

Sandman knew what the boy wanted to hear, but he could not offer him any kind of assurance. 'I am doing my best,' he said lamely, 'but I can promise you nothing.'

'You're going to be all right, Charlie,' the bearded West Countryman consoled Corday and Sandman, who could add nothing more helpful, thrust the portrait inside his coat and led Berrigan back to the prison entrance.

The Sergeant shook his head in apparent wonder when they reached the Lodge. 'You didn't tell me he was a bloody pixie!'

'Does it matter?'

'It would be nice to think we was making an effort for a proper man,' Berrigan growled.

'He's a very good painter.'

'So's my brother.'

'He is?'

'He's a house-painter, Captain. Gutters, doors and windows. And he ain't a pixie like that little worm.'

Sandman opened the prison's outer door and shuddered at the sight of the pelting rain. 'I don't much like Corday either,' he confessed, 'but he's an innocent man, Sergeant, and he doesn't deserve the rope.'

'Most of those who hang don't.'

'Maybe. But Corday's ours, pixie or not.' He gave Berrigan the folded letter. 'Home Office. You ask to see a man called Sebastian Witherspoon, give him that, then meet me at Gunter's in Berkeley Square.'

'And all for a bloody pixie, eh?' Berrigan asked, then he thrust the letter into a pocket and, with a grimace at the rain, dashed out into the traffic. Sandman, limping painfully, followed more slowly.

He feared that the rain might have persuaded Eleanor and her mother to abandon their expedition, but he walked to Berkeley Square anyway and was soaked by the time he arrived at the door of Gunter's. A footman stood under the shelter of the shop's awning and looked askance at Sandman's shabby coat, then opened the door reluctantly as if to give Sandman time to reflect on whether he really wanted to go inside.

The front of the shop was made of two wide windows behind which were gilded counters, spindly chairs, tall mirrors and spreading chandeliers that had been lit because the day was so gloomy. A dozen women were shopping for Gunter's famous confections; chocolates, meringue sculptures and delicacies of spun-sugar, marzipan and crystallised fruit. The conversation stopped as Sandman entered and the women stared at him as he dripped on the tiled floor, then they began talking again as he made his way to the large room at the back where a score of tables were set beneath the wide skylights of stained glass. Eleanor was not at any of the half-dozen occupied tables, so Sandman hung his coat and hat on a bentwood stand and took a chair at the back of the room where he was half hidden by a pillar. He ordered coffee and a copy of the Morning Chronicle.

He idly read the newspaper. There had been more rick-burnings in Sussex, a bread riot in Newcastle, and three mills burnt and their machines broken in Derbyshire. The militia had been summoned to keep the peace in Manchester, where flour had been selling at four shillings and ninepence a stone. The magistrates in Lancashire were calling on the Home Secretary to suspend habeas corpus as a means of restoring order. Sandman looked at his watch and saw that Eleanor was already ten minutes late. He sipped the coffee and felt uncomfortable because the chair and table were too small, making him feel as though he were perched in a school room. He looked back to the newspaper. A river had flooded in Prussia and it was feared there were at least a hundred drowned. The whale ship Lydia out of Whitehaven was reported lost with all hands off the Grand Banks. The East Indiaman Calliope had arrived in the Pool of London with a cargo of porcelain, ginger, indigo and nutmegs. A riot at the Covent Garden Theatre had left heads and bones broken, but no serious casualties. Reports that a shot had been fired in the theatre were being denied by the managers. There was the click of footsteps, a wafting of perfume and a sudden shadow fell across his newspaper. 'You look gloomy, Rider,' Eleanor's voice said.

'There is no good news,' he said, standing. He looked at her and felt his heart miss a beat, so that he could scarcely speak. 'There is really no good news anywhere in all the world,' he managed to say.

'Then we must make some,' Eleanor said, 'you and I.' She handed an umbrella and her damp coat to one of the waitresses, then stepped close to Sandman and planted a kiss on his cheek. 'I think I am yet angry with you,' she said softly, still standing close.

'With me?'

'For coming to London and not telling me.'

'Our engagement is broken, remember?'

'Oh, I had quite forgotten,' she said acidly, then glanced at the other tables. 'I'm causing scandal, Rider, by being seen alone with a damp man.' She kissed him again, then stood back so he could pull out a chair for her. 'So let them have their scandal, and I shall have one of Gunter's vanilla ices with the powdered chocolate and crushed almonds. So will you.'

'I'm content with coffee.'

'Nonsense, you will have what is put in front of you. You look too thin.' She sat and peeled off her gloves. Her red hair was drawn up into a small black hat decorated with tiny jet beads and a modest plume. Her dress was a muted dark brown with a barely distinguishable flower pattern worked in black threads and was high collared, modest, almost plain, and decorated with only one small jet brooch, yet somehow she looked more alluring than the scantily clad dancing girls who had scattered when Sandman leapt down onto the stage the night before. 'Mother is being measured for a new corset,' Eleanor said, pretending to be oblivious of his inspection, 'so she will be at least two hours. She believes I am at Massingberds, choosing a hat. My maid Lizzie is chaperoning me, but I've bribed her with two shillings and she's gone to see the pig-headed woman at the Lyceum.'

'Pig-headed? As in obstinate?'

'Don't be silly, Rider, I trust all women are obstinate. This one is pig-headed as in ugly. She snuffles her food from a trough, we're told, and has stiff pink whiskers. It sounds a very unlikely beast, but Lizzie was enchanted at the prospect and I was quite tempted to go myself, but I'm here instead. Did I see you limping?'

'I sprained an ankle yesterday,' he said, then had to tell the whole story which, of course, enchanted Eleanor.

'I'm jealous,' she said when he had finished. 'My life is so dull! I don't jump onto stages pursued by footpads! I am exceedingly jealous.'

'But you have news?' Sandman asked.

'I think so. Yes, definitely.' Eleanor turned to the waitress and ordered tea, the vanilla confection with the chocolate and almonds and, as an afterthought, brandy snaps. 'They have an ice house out the back,' she told Sandman when the girl had gone, 'and I asked to see it a few weeks ago. It's like a cellar with a dome and every winter they bring the ice down from Scotland packed in sawdust and it stays solid all summer. There was a frozen rat between two of the blocks and they were very embarrassed about it.'

'I should think they would be.' Sandman was suddenly acutely aware of his own shabbiness, of the frayed cuffs of his coat and the broken stitching at the top of his boots. They had been good boots, too, from Kennets of Silver Street, but even the best boots needed care. Merely staying respectably dressed needed at least an hour a day, and Sandman did not have that hour.

'I tried to persuade father to build an ice house,' Eleanor said, 'but he just went grumpy and complained about the expense. He's having one of his economy drives at the moment, so I told him I'd save him the cost of a society wedding.'

Sandman gazed into her grey-green eyes, wondering what message was being sent by her apparent glibness. 'Was he pleased?'

'He just muttered to me how prudence was one of the virtues. He was embarrassed by the offer, I think.'

'How would you save him the expense? By remaining a spinster?'

'By eloping,' Eleanor said, her gaze very steady.

'With Lord Eagleton?'

Eleanor's laugh filled the big space of Gunter's back room, causing a momentary hush at the other tables. 'Eagleton's such a bore!' Eleanor said much too loudly. 'Mama was very keen I should marry him, because then, in due course, I would be her ladyship and Mama would be unbearable. Don't tell me you thought I was betrothed to him?'

'I heard that you were. I was told your portrait was a gift for him.'

'Mother said we should give it to him, but father wants it for himself. Mother just wants me to marry a title, she doesn't mind what or who it is, and Lord Eagleton wants to marry me, which is tedious because I can't abide him. He sniffs before he talks.' She gave a small sniff. 'Dear Eleanor, sniff, how charming you look, sniff. I can see the moon reflected in your eyes, sniff.'

Sandman kept a straight face. 'I never told you I saw the moon reflected in your eyes. I fear that was remiss of me.'

They looked at each other and burst out laughing. They had always been able to laugh since the very first day they had met, when Sandman was newly home after being wounded at Salamanca and Eleanor was just twenty and determined not to be impressed by a soldier, but the soldier had made her laugh and still could, just as she could amuse him.

'I think,' Eleanor said, 'that Eagleton spent a week rehearsing the words about the moon, but he spoilt it by sniffing. Really, Rider, talking to Eagleton is like conversing with an asthmatic lap dog. Mama and he seem to believe that if they wish it long enough then I will surrender to his sniffs, and I gathered a rumour of our betrothal had been bruited about so I deliberately told Alexander to inform you I was not going to marry the noble sniffer. Now I find Alexander never told you?'

'I fear not.'

'But I told him distinctly!' Eleanor said indignantly. 'I met him at the Egyptian Hall.'

'He told me that much,' Sandman said, 'but he quite forgot any message you might have sent. He'd even forgotten why he had gone to the Egyptian Hall.'

'For a lecture by a man called Professor Popkin on the newly discovered location of the Garden of Eden. He wants us to believe that paradise is to be found at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers. He informed us that he once ate a very fine apple there.'

'That sounds like proof positive,' Sandman said gravely, 'and did he become wise after eating the fruit?'

'He became erudite, learned, sagacious and clever,' Eleanor said, and Sandman saw there were tears in her eyes. 'And,' she went on, 'he encouraged us to uproot ourselves and follow him to this new world of milk, honey and apples. Would you like to go there, Rider?'

'With you?'

'We could live naked by the rivers,' Eleanor said, as a tear escaped to trickle down her cheek, 'innocent as babes and avoiding serpents.' She could not go on and lowered her face so he could not see her tears. 'I'm so very sorry, Rider,' she said quietly.

'About what?'

'I should never have let Mama persuade me to break off the engagement. She said your family's disgrace was too absolute, but that's nonsense.'

'The disgrace is dire,' Sandman admitted.

'That was your father. Not you!'

'I sometimes think I am very like my father,' Sandman said.

'Then he was a better man than I realised,' Eleanor said fiercely, then dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. The waitress brought their ices and brandy snaps and, thinking that Eleanor had been upset by something Sandman had said, gave him a reproachful look. Eleanor waited for the girl to move away. 'I hate crying,' she said.

'You do it rarely,' Sandman said.

'I have been weeping like a fountain these six months,' Eleanor said, then looked up at him. 'Last night I told Mama I consider myself betrothed to you.'

'I'm honoured.'

'You're supposed to say it is mutual.'

Sandman half smiled. 'I would like it to be, truly.'

'Father won't mind,' Eleanor said, 'at least I don't think he will mind.'

'But your mother will?'

'She does! When I told her my feelings last night she insisted I ought to visit Doctor Harriman. Have you heard of him? Of course you haven't. He is an expert, Mama tells me, in feminine hysteria and it is considered a great honour to be examined by him. But I don't need him! I'm not hysterical, I am merely, inconveniently, in love with you, and if your damned father had not killed himself then you and I would be married by now. I do envy men.'

'Why?'

'They can swear and no one lifts an eyebrow.'

'Swear, my dear,' Sandman said.

Eleanor did, then laughed. 'That felt very good. Oh dear, one day we shall be married and I shall swear too much and you will get bored with me.' She sniffed, then sighed as she tasted the ice. 'That is real paradise,' she said, prodding the ice with the long silver spoon, 'and I swear nothing at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers can rival it. Poor Rider. You shouldn't even think of marrying me. You should tip your hat at Caroline Standish.'

'Caroline Standish? I've not heard of her.' He tasted the ice and it was, as Eleanor had said, pure paradise.

'Caroline Standish is perhaps the richest heiress in England, Rider, and a very pretty girl she is too, but you should be warned that she is a Methodist. Golden hair, damn her, a truly lovely face and probably thirty thousand a year? But the drawback is that you cannot drink ardent spirits in her presence, neither smoke, nor blaspheme, nor take snuff, nor really enjoy yourself in any way. Her father made his money in the potteries, but they now live in London and worship at that vulgar little chapel in Spring Gardens. I'm sure you could attract her eye.'

'I'm sure I could,' Sandman said with a smile.

'And I'm confident she will approve of cricket,' Eleanor said, 'so long as you don't play it on the Sabbath. Do you still indulge in cricket, Rider?'

'Not as often as Alexander would like.'

'They say that Lord Frederick Beauclerk earns six hundred a year gambling on cricket. Could you do that?'

'I'm a better batsman than him,' Sandman said truthfully enough. Lord Frederick, a friend of Lord Alexander's and, like him, an aristocrat in holy orders, was the secretary of the Marylebone Cricket Club that played at Thomas Lord's ground. 'But I'm a worse gambler,' Sandman went on. 'Besides, Beauclerk wagers money he can afford to lose, and I don't have such funds.'

'Then marry the pious Miss Standish,' Eleanor said. 'Mind you, there is the small inconvenience that she is already betrothed, but there are rumours that she's not altogether persuaded that the future Duke of Ripon is nearly as godly as he pretends. He goes to the Spring Gardens chapel, but only, one suspects, so that he can pluck her golden feathers once he has married her.'

'The future Duke of Ripon?' Sandman asked.

'He has his own title, of course, but I can't remember it. Mother would know it.'

Sandman went very still. 'Ripon?'

'A cathedral city in Yorkshire, Rider.'

'The Marquess of Skavadale,' Sandman said, 'is the title carried by the heir to the Dukedom of Ripon.'

'That's him! Well done!' Eleanor frowned at him. 'Have I said something wrong?'

'Skavadale isn't godly at all,' Sandman said, and he remembered the Earl of Avebury describing how his wife had blackmailed young men about town. Had Skavadale been blackmailed by the Countess? Skavadale was famously short of money and his father's estates were evidently mortgaged to the hilt, yet Skavadale had managed to become betrothed to the wealthiest heiress in England and if he had been ploughing the Countess of Avebury's furrow she would surely have found him a ripe target for blackmail. His family might have lost most of its fortune, but there would be some funds left and there would be porcelain, silver and paintings that could be sold; more than enough to keep the Countess content.

'You're mystifying me,' Eleanor complained.

'I think the Marquess of Skavadale is my murderer,' Sandman said, 'either him or one of his friends.' If Sandman had been forced to put money on the murderer's identity he would have chosen Lord Robin Holloway rather than the Marquess, but he was quite certain it was one of them.

'So you don't need to know what Lizzie discovered?' Eleanor asked, disappointed.

'Your maid? Of course I want to know. I need to know.'

'Meg wasn't very popular with the other servants. They thought she was a witch.'

'She looks like one,' Sandman said.

'You've already found her?' Eleanor asked, excited.

'No, I saw a portrait.'

'Everyone seems to sit these days,' Eleanor said.

'This portrait.' Sandman pulled the drawing from inside his coat and showed it to Eleanor.

'Rider, you don't think she's the pig-faced woman, do you?' Eleanor asked. 'No, she can't be, she has no whiskers.' She sighed. 'Poor girl, to be so ugly.' She stared at the drawing for a long while, then rolled it up and pushed it back to Sandman. 'What was I saying? Oh yes, Lizzie discovered that Meg was carried away from the Countess's town house by a carriage, a very smart carriage that was either black or dark blue, and with a strange coat-of-arms painted on its door. It wasn't a complete coat-of-arms, just a shield showing a red field decorated with a golden angel.' Eleanor crumbled a brandy snap. 'I asked Hammond if he knew of that shield and he became very refined. "A field gules, Miss Forrest," he insisted to me, "with an angel or", but astonishingly he didn't know who it belonged to and consequently he was most upset.'

Sandman smiled at the thought of Sir Henry Forrest's butler being unable to identify a coat-of-arms. 'He shouldn't feel upset,' Sandman said, 'because I doubt the College of Arms issued that device. It's the badge of the Seraphim Club.'

Eleanor grimaced, remembering what Sandman had told her and her father earlier in the week, though in truth Sandman had not revealed all he knew about the Seraphim. 'And the Marquess of Skavadale,' she said quietly, 'is a member of the Seraphim Club?'

'He is,' Sandman confirmed.

She frowned. 'So he's your murderer? It's that easy?'

'The members of the Seraphim Club,' Sandman said, 'consider themselves beyond the law. They believe their rank, their money and their privilege will keep them safe. And quite possibly they're right, unless I can find Meg.'

'If Meg lives,' Eleanor said quietly.

'If Meg lives,' Sandman agreed.

Eleanor stared at Sandman and her eyes seemed bright and big. 'I feel rather selfish now,' she said.

'Why?'

'Worrying about my small problems when you have a murderer to find.'

'Your problems are small?' Sandman asked with a smile.

Eleanor did not return the smile. 'I am not willing, Rider,' she said, 'to give you up. I tried.'

He knew how much effort it had taken for her to say those words and so he reached for her hand and kissed her fingers. 'I have never given you up,' he said, 'and next week I shall talk to your father again.'

'And if he says no?' She clutched his fingers.

'Then we shall go to Scotland,' Sandman said. 'We shall go to Scotland.'

Eleanor held tight to his hand. She smiled. 'Rider? My prudent, well-behaved, honourable Rider? You would elope?'

He returned the smile. 'Of late, my dear,' he said, 'I have been thinking about that afternoon and evening I spent on the ridge at Waterloo and I remember making a decision there, and it's a decision I am constantly in danger of forgetting. If I survived that day, I promised myself, then I would not die with regrets. I would not die with wishes, dreams and desires unfulfilled. So yes, if your father refuses to let us marry, then I shall take you to Scotland and let the devil take the hindmost.'

'Because I am your wish, dream and desire?' Eleanor asked with tears in her eyes and a smile on her face.

'Because you are all of those things,' Sandman said, 'and I love you besides.'

And Sergeant Berrigan, dripping with rainwater and grinning with delight at discovering Sandman at so delicate a moment, was suddenly standing beside them.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The Sergeant began to whistle 'Spanish Ladies' as they climbed Hay Hill towards Old Bond Street. It was a cheerful whistle, one that proclaimed that he was not at all interested in what he had just seen, and a well-judged whistle that, in the army, would have been recognised as entirely insubordinate, but quite unpunishable. Sandman, still limping, laughed. 'I was once engaged to Miss Forrest, Sergeant.'

'German coach there, Captain, see it? Heavy bloody thing.' Berrigan still pretended to be uninterested, pointing instead at a massive carriage that was sliding dangerously on the hill's rain-slicked cobbles. The coachman was hauling on the brake, the horses were skittering nervously, but then the wheels struck the kerb and steadied the vehicle. 'Shouldn't be allowed,' Berrigan said, 'foreign bloody coaches cracking up our roads. They should tax the buggers blind or else send them back across the bloody Channel where they belong.'

'And Miss Forrest broke off the engagement because her parents did not want her to marry a pauper,' Sandman said, 'so now, Sergeant, you know all.'

'Didn't look much like a broken bloody engagement to me, sir. Staring into your eyes like the sun, moon and sparkles were trapped there.'

'Yes, well. Life is complicated.'

'I hadn't noticed,' Berrigan said sarcastically. He grimaced at the weather, though the rain was now spitting rather than cascading. 'And talking of complications,' he went on, 'Mister Sebastian Witherspoon was not a happy man. Not a happy man at all. In fact, if I was to be accurate, he was bloody annoyed.'

'Ah! He has adduced that I am not behaving as he expected?'

'He wanted to know what you were bloody up to, Captain, so I said I didn't know.'

'He surely refused to accept that assurance?'

'He could do what he bloody liked, Captain, but I told him yes sir, no sir, I don't know a blessed thing sir, up your back alley, sir, and go to hell, sir, but all of it in a deeply respectful manner.'

'You behaved, in other words, like a sergeant?' Sandman asked, and laughed again. He remembered that subservient insolence from his own sergeants; an apparent cooperation masking a deep intransigence. 'But did he tell you where the Home Secretary will be on Sunday?'

'His lordship won't be at his home, Captain, on account that the builders are putting in a new staircase in his house which they promised to have finished last May and which they ain't even painted yet, so his lordship is borrowing a house in Great George Street. Mister Witherspoon said he hopes he don't see you any day soon and, anyway, his lordship won't thank you for disturbing him on Sunday on account that his lordship is of the Godly persuasion, and anyway Mister Witherspoon, like his holy lordship, trusts that the bloody pixie is hanged by his bloody neck till he's bloody well dead like what he bloody deserves to be.'

'I'm sure he didn't say the last.'

'Not quite,' Berrigan admitted cheerfully, 'but I did, and Mister Witherspoon began to think well of me. Another few minutes and he'd have given you the butt end and made me the Investigator instead.'

'God help Corday then, eh?'

'The little bugger would go to the gallows so bleeding fast that his twinkle toes wouldn't touch the ground,' Berrigan said happily. 'So where are we going now?'

'We're going to see Sir George Phillips, because I want to know if he can tell me exactly who commissioned the Countess's portrait. Know that man's name, Sergeant, and we have our murderer.'

'You hope,' Berrigan said dubiously.

'Miss Hood is also at Sir George's studio. She models for him.'

'Ah!' Berrigan cheered up.

'And even if Sir George won't tell us, then I've also learnt that my one witness was carried away in the Seraphim Club's carriage.'

'One of their carriages,' Berrigan corrected him, 'they have two.'

'So I assume one of the club's coachmen can tell us where they took her.'

'I imagine they might,' Berrigan said, 'though they might need some persuading.'

'A pleasing prospect,' Sandman said, arriving at the door beside the jeweller's shop. He knocked and, as before, the door was answered by Sammy, the black page, who immediately tried to shut it. Sandman bulled his way through. 'Tell Sir George,' he said imperiously, 'that Captain Rider Sandman and Sergeant Samuel Berrigan have come to talk to him.'

'He don't want to talk to you,' Sammy said.

'Go and tell him, child!' Sandman insisted.

Instead Sammy made an ill-judged attempt to dodge past Sandman into the street, only to be caught by Sergeant Berrigan, who lifted the lad and slammed him against the door post. 'Where were you going, boy?' Berrigan demanded.

'Why don't you fake off?' Sammy said defiantly, then yelped. 'I wasn't going anywhere!' Berrigan drew back his fist again. 'He told me if you was to come again,' Sammy said hastily, 'I was to go and fetch help.'

'From the Seraphim Club?' Sandman guessed, and the boy nodded. 'Hold onto him, Sergeant,' Sandman said, then began climbing the stairs. 'Fee, fi, fo, fum!' he chanted at the top of his voice, 'I smell the blood of an Englishman!' He was making the noise to warn Sally so that Sergeant Berrigan would not see her naked. Sandman had no doubt that Berrigan would be getting that treat very soon, but Sandman also had no doubt that Sally would want to decide when that would be. 'Sir George!' he bellowed. 'Are you there?'

'Who the devil is it?' Sir George shouted. 'Sammy?'

'Sammy's a prisoner,' Sandman shouted.

'God's bollocks! It's you?' Sir George, for a fat man, moved with remarkable speed, going to a cupboard from which he took a long-barrelled pistol. He ran with it to the head of the stairs and pointed it down at Sandman. 'No further, Captain, on pain of your life!' he growled.

Sandman glanced at the pistol and kept on climbing. 'Don't be such a bloody fool,' he said tiredly. 'Shoot me, Sir George, and you'll have to shoot Sergeant Berrigan, then you'll have to keep Sally quiet and that means shooting her, so then you'll have three corpses on your hands.' He climbed the last few steps and, without any fuss, took the pistol from the painter's hand. 'It's always best to cock weapons if you want to look really threatening,' he added, then turned and nodded at Berrigan. 'Allow me to introduce Sergeant Berrigan, late of the First Foot Guards, then of the Seraphim Club, but now a volunteer in my army of righteousness.' Sandman saw, with relief, that Sally had received enough warning to pull on a coat. He took off his hat and bowed to her. 'Miss Hood, my respects.'

'You're still limping, then?' Sally asked, then blushed as Sergeant Berrigan arrived.

'He's bleeding hurting me!' Sammy complained.

'I'll bleeding kill you if you don't shut up,' Berrigan growled, then he nodded to Sally. 'Miss Hood,' he said, then he saw the canvas and his eyes widened in admiration and Sally blushed even deeper.

'You can put Sammy down,' Sandman said to Berrigan, 'because he won't go for help.'

'He'll do what I tell him!' Sir George said belligerently.

Sandman crossed to the painting and stared at the central figure of Nelson, and thought that since the admiral's death the painters and engravers had been making the hero ever more frail so that he was now almost a spectral figure. 'If you tell Sammy to go for help, Sir George,' he said, 'then I shall spread it abroad that your studio deceives women, that you paint them clothed and, when they are gone, you turn them into nudes.' He turned and smiled at the painter. 'What will that do to your prices?'

'Double them!' Sir George said defiantly, then he saw that Sandman's threat was real and he seemed to deflate like a pricked bladder. He flapped a paint-stained hand at Sammy. 'You're not going anywhere, Sammy.'

Berrigan put the boy down. 'You can make some tea instead,' Sandman said.

'I'll help you, Sammy,' Sally said, and followed the boy down the stairs. Sandman suspected she was going to get dressed.

Sandman turned to Sir George. 'You're an old man, Sir George, you're fat and you're a drunkard. Your hand shakes. You can still paint, but for how long? You're living off your reputation now, but I can ruin that. I can make quite certain that men like Sir Henry Forrest never hire you again to paint their wives or daughters for fear of you doing to them what you would have done to the Countess of Avebury.'

'I would never do that to…' Sir George began.

'Be quiet,' Sandman said. 'And I can put in my report to the Home Secretary that you have deliberately hidden the truth.' That, in reality, was a much lesser threat, but Sir George did not know it. He only feared prosecution, the dock and jail. Or maybe he saw transportation to Australia, for he began to shudder in unfeigned terror. 'I know you lied,' Sandman said, 'so now you will tell me the truth.'

'And if I do?'

'Then Sergeant Berrigan and I will tell no one. Why should we care what happens to you? I know you didn't murder the Countess and that's the only person I'm interested in. So tell us the truth, Sir George, and we shall leave you in peace.'

Sir George sank onto a stool. The apprentices and the two men portraying Nelson and Neptune gazed at him until he snarled at them to go downstairs. Only when they were gone did he look at Sandman. 'The Seraphim Club commissioned the painting.'

'I know that.' Sandman walked to the back of the studio, past the table heaped with rags, brushes and jars. He was looking for Eleanor's portrait, but he could not see it. He turned back. 'What I want to know, Sir George, is who in the club commissioned it.'

'I don't know. Really! I don't know!' He was pleading, his fear almost tangible. 'There were ten or eleven of them, I can't remember.'

'Ten or eleven of them?'

'Sitting at a table,' Sir George said, 'like the Last Supper, only without Christ. They said they were having the painting done for their gallery and they promised me there'd be others.'

'Other paintings?'

'Of titled women, Captain, naked.' Sir George snarled the last word. 'She was their trophy. They explained it to me. If more than three members of the club had swived a woman then she could be hung in their gallery.'

Sandman glanced at Berrigan, who shrugged. 'Sounds likely,' the Sergeant said.

'They have a gallery?'

'Corridor upstairs,' Berrigan said, 'but they've only just started hanging paintings up there.'

'The Marquess of Skavadale was one of the eleven?' Sandman asked Sir George.

'Ten or eleven,' Sir George sounded irritated that he had to correct Sandman, 'and yes, Skavadale was one. Lord Pellmore was another. I remember Sir John Lassiter, but I didn't know most of them.'

'They didn't introduce themselves?'

'No.' Sir George made the denial defiantly because it confirmed that he had been treated by the Seraphim Club as a tradesman, not as a gentleman.

'I think it likely,' Sandman said quietly, 'that one of those ten or eleven men is the murderer of the Countess.' He looked at Sir George quizzically, as though expecting that statement to be confirmed.

'I wouldn't know,' Sir George said.

'But you must have suspected that Charles Corday did not commit the murder?'

'Little Charlie?' For a moment Sir George looked amused, then he saw the anger on Sandman's face and shrugged. 'It seemed unlikely,' he admitted.

'Yet you did not appeal for him? You did not sign his mother's petition? You did nothing to help.'

'He was tried, wasn't he?' Sir George said. 'He received justice.'

'I doubt that,' Sandman said bitterly, 'I doubt that very much.'

Sandman lifted the frizzen of the pistol he had taken from Sir George and saw that it was not primed. 'You have powder and bullets?' he asked, and then, when he saw the fear on the painter's face, he scowled. 'I'm not going to shoot you, you fool! The powder and bullets are for other people, not you.'

'In that cupboard.' Sir George nodded across the room.

Sandman opened the door and discovered a small arsenal, most of it, he supposed, for use in paintings. There were naval and army swords, pistols, muskets and a cartridge box. He tossed a cavalry pistol to Berrigan, then took a handful of the cartridges and pushed them into a pocket before stooping to pick up a knife. 'You've wasted my time,' he told Sir George. 'You've lied to me, you've inconvenienced me.' He carried the knife back across the room and saw the terror on Sir George's face. 'Sally!' Sandman shouted.

'I'm here!' she called up the stairs.

'How much does Sir George owe you?'

'Two pounds and five shillings!'

'Pay her,' Sandman said.

'You can't expect me to carry cash on—'

'Pay her!' Sandman shouted, and Sir George almost fell off the stool.

'I only have three guineas on me,' he whined.

'I think Miss Hood is worth that,' Sandman said. 'Give the three guineas to the Sergeant.'

Sir George handed over the money as Sandman turned to the painting. Britannia was virtually finished, sitting bare-breasted and proud-eyed on her rock in a sunlit sea. The goddess was unmistakeably Sally, though Sir George had changed her usually cheerful expression into one of calm superiority. 'You really have inconvenienced me,' Sandman said to Sir George, 'and worse, you were ready to let an innocent boy die.'

'I've told you everything I can!'

'Now you have, yes, but you lied and I think you need to be inconvenienced too. You need to learn, Sir George, that for every sin there is a payment extracted. In short you must be punished.'

'You insolent…' Sir George began, then lurched to his feet and called out a protest. 'No!'

Berrigan held Sir George down while Sandman took the knife to the Apotheosis of Lord Nelson. Sammy had just brought his tray of tea to the stairhead and the boy watched appalled as Sandman cut down the canvas, then across. 'A friend of mine,' Sandman explained as he mutilated the painting, 'is probably going to get married soon. He doesn't know it, and nor does his intended bride, but they plainly like each other and I'll want to give them a present when it happens.' He slashed again, slicing across the top of the painting. The canvas split with a sharp sizzling sound, leaving small threads. He slid the knife downwards again and so excised from the big picture a life-size and half-length portrait of Sally. He tossed the knife onto the floor, rolled up the picture of Britannia and smiled at Sir George. 'This will make a splendid gift, so I shall have it varnished and framed. Thank you so very much for your help. Sergeant? I believe we're finished here.'

'I'm coming with you!' Sally said from the stairs. 'Only someone has to hook me frock up.'

'Duty summons you,' Sandman said to Berrigan. 'Your servant, Sir George.'

Sir George glared at him, but seemed incapable of speaking. Sandman began to smile as he ran down the stairs and he was laughing by the time he reached the street, where he waited for Berrigan and Sally.

They joined him when Sally's dress was fastened. 'Who do you know getting married soon?' Berrigan demanded.

'Just two friends,' Sandman said airily, 'and if they don't? Well. I might keep the picture for myself.'

'Captain!' Sally chided him.

'Married?' Berrigan sounded shocked.

'I am very old-fashioned,' Sandman said, 'and a staunch believer in Christian morality.'

'Speaking of which,' the Sergeant said, 'why have we got pistols?'

'Because our next call, Sergeant, must be the Seraphim Club and I do not like to go there unarmed. I'd also prefer it if they did not know we were on the premises, so when is the best time to make our visit?'

'Why are we going there?' Berrigan wanted to know.

'To talk to the coachmen, of course.'

The Sergeant thought for a second, then nodded. 'Then go after dark,' he said, 'because it'll be easier for us to sneak in, and at least one jervis will be there.'

'Let us hope it's the right coachman,' Sandman said, and snapped open his watch. 'Not till dark? Which means I have an afternoon to while away.' He thought for a moment. 'I shall go and talk to a friend. Shall we meet at nine o'clock, say? Behind the club?'

'Meet me at the carriage house entrance,' the Sergeant suggested, 'which is in an alley off Charles II Street.'

'Unless you want to stay with me?' Sandman suggested. 'I'm only going to pass the time with a friend.'

'No,' Berrigan reddened. 'I feel like a rest.'

'Then be kind enough to place that in my room,' Sandman said, giving the Sergeant the rolled portrait of Sally. 'And you, Miss Hood? I can't think how you might want to pass the afternoon. Would you want to accompany me to see a friend?'

Sally put her arm into the Sergeant's elbow, smiled sweetly at Sandman, so very sweetly, and spoke gently. 'Fake away off, Captain.'

Sandman laughed and did what he was told. He faked away off.

CHAPTER SEVEN

'Bunny' Barnwell was reckoned to be the best bowler in the Marylebone Cricket Club, despite having a strange loping run that ended with a double hop before he launched the ball sidearm. The double hop had provided his nickname and he now bowled at Rider Sandman on one of the netted practice wickets at the downhill side of Thomas Lord's new cricket ground in St John's Wood, a pretty suburb to the north of London.

Lord Alexander Pleydell stood beside the net, peering anxiously at every ball. 'Is Bunny moving it off the grass?' he asked.

'Not at all.'

'He's supposed to twist the ball so it moves into your legs. Sharply in. Crossley said the motion was extremely confusing.'

'Crossley's easily confused,' Sandman said, and thumped the ball hard into the net, driving Lord Alexander back in fright.

Barnwell was taking turns with Hughes, Lord Alexander's servant, to bowl to Sandman. Hughes reckoned himself a useful underarm bowler, but he was becoming frustrated at being unable to get anything past Sandman's bat and so he tried too hard and launched a ball that did not bounce at all and Sandman cracked it fast out of the net and over the damp grass so that the ball flicked up a fine silver spray as it shot up the hill where three men were scything the turf. Making a cricket field on such a pronounced slope made no sense to Sandman, but Alexander had a curious attachment to Thomas Lord's new field even though, from one boundary to another, there must have been a fall of at least six or seven feet.