Gallows Thief

Barnwell tried bowling underarm and was forced to watch his ball follow Hughes's last delivery up the slope. One of the boys who were fielding for the nets tried a fast ball at Sandman's legs and was rewarded with a blow that almost took his head off. 'You're in a savage mood,' Lord Alexander observed.

'Not really. Damp day, ball's slow,' Sandman lied. In truth he was in a savage mood, wondering how he was to keep his promise to Eleanor and why he had even made the promise to elope if her father refused his blessing. No, he understood the answer to the second question. He had made the promise because, as ever, he had been overwhelmed by Eleanor, by the look of her, by the nearness of her and by his own desire for her, but could the promise be kept? He slashed a ball into the net behind with such force that the ball drove the tarred mesh into the back fence, rattling the palings and startling a dozen sparrows into the air. How could he elope, Sandman asked himself. How could he marry a woman when he had no means to support her? And where was the honour in some hole-in-the-wall Scottish wedding that needed neither licence nor banns? The anger surged in him so he skipped down the pitch and drove a ball hard towards the stables where the club members kept their horses during games.

'An exceedingly savage mood,' Lord Alexander said thoughtfully, then took a pencil from the tangled hair behind his ear and a much creased piece of paper from a pocket. 'I thought Hammond could keep wicket, do you agree?'

'This is your team to play Hampshire?'

'No, Rider, it's my proposal for a new Dean and canons of St Paul's Cathedral. What do you think it is?'

'Hammond would be an excellent choice,' Sandman said, going onto his back leg and blocking a sharply rising ball. 'Good one,' he called to Hughes.

'Edward Budd said he'll play for us,' Lord Alexander said.

'Wonderful!' Sandman spoke with genuine warmth, for Edward Budd was the one batsman he acknowledged as his superior and was also thoroughly good company.

'And Simmons is available.'

'Then I won't be,' Sandman said. He collected the last ball with the tip of his bat and knocked it back to Hughes.

'Simmons is an excellent batsman,' Lord Alexander insisted.

'So he is,' Sandman said, 'but he took cash to throw a game in Sussex two years ago.'

'It won't happen again.'

'Not while I'm on the same team, it won't. Make your choice, Alexander, him or me.'

Lord Alexander sighed. 'He really is very good!'

'Then pick him,' Sandman said, taking his stance.

'I shall think about it,' Lord Alexander said in his most lordly manner.

The next delivery came hurtling at Sandman's ankles and he rewarded it with a blow that sent the ball all the way to the tavern by the lower boundary fence where a dozen men watched the nets from the beer garden. Were any of those men Lord Robin Holloway's footpads? Sandman glanced at his coat folded onto the damp grass and was reassured by the sight of the pistol's hilt just protruding from a pocket.

'Maybe you can talk to Simmons?' Lord Alexander suggested. 'Including him will give our side an immense batting force, Rider, a positively immense force. You, Budd and him? We shall set new records!'

'I'll talk to him,' Sandman said, 'I just won't play with him.'

'For God's sake, man!'

Sandman stepped away from the wicket. 'Alexander. I love the game of cricket, but if it's to be bent out of shape by bribery then there will be no sport left. The only way to treat bribery is to punish it absolutely.' He spoke angrily. 'Is it any wonder that the game's dying? This club here used to have a decent field, now they play on a hillside. The game's in decline, Alexander, because it's being corrupted by money.'

'It's all very well for you to say that,' Lord Alexander said huffily, 'but Simmons has a wife and two children. Don't you understand temptation?'

'I think I do, yes,' Sandman said, 'I was offered twenty thousand guineas yesterday.' He stepped back to the crease and nodded at the next bowler.

'Twenty thousand?' Lord Alexander sounded faint. 'To lose a game of cricket?'

'To let an innocent man hang,' Sandman said, playing a demure defensive stroke. 'It's too easy,' he complained.

'What is?'

'This intellectual bowling.' The side arm delivery, when the ball was bowled from a straight arm held at shoulder height, was curiously known as the intellectual style. 'It has no accuracy,' Sandman complained.

'But it has force,' Lord Alexander declared energetically, 'far more so than balls bowled under arm.'

'We should bowl over arm.'

'Never! Never! Ruin the game! An utterly ridiculous suggestion, offensive in the extreme!' Lord Alexander paused to suck on his pipe. 'The club isn't certain it will even allow side arm, let alone over arm. No, if we wish to redress the balance between batsman and bowler, then the answer is obvious. Four stumps. Are you serious?'

'I just think that over arm bowling will combine force with accuracy,' Sandman suggested, 'and might even present a challenge to the batsman.'

'Serious, I mean, about being offered twenty thousand pounds?'

'Guineas, Alexander, guineas. The men who made the offer consider themselves to be gentlemen.' Sandman stepped back and cracked the ball hard into the netting, close to where Lord Alexander was standing.

'Why would they offer you so much?'

'It's cheaper than death on the gallows, isn't it? The only trouble is I don't know for certain which member of the Seraphim Club is the murderer, but I hope to discover that this evening. You wouldn't like to lend me your carriage, would you?'

Lord Alexander looked puzzled. 'My carriage?'

'The thing with four wheels, Alexander, and the horses up front.' Sandman sent another ball scorching up the hill. 'It's in a good cause. Rescuing the innocent.'

'Well, of course,' Lord Alexander said with admirable enthusiasm. 'I shall be honoured to help you. Shall I wait at your lodgings?'

'Keeping Miss Hood company?' Sandman asked. 'Why not?' He laughed at Alexander's blushes, then backed away from the stumps as a young man walked towards the practice wickets from the tavern. There was something purposeful in the man's approach and Sandman was about to fetch his pistol when he recognised Lord Christopher Carne, the heir to the Earl of Avebury. 'Your friend's coming,' he told Lord Alexander.

'My friend? Oh, Kit!'

Lord Christopher waved in response to Lord Alexander's enthusiastic greeting, then noticed Sandman. He blanched, stopped and looked annoyed. For a heartbeat Sandman thought Lord Christopher was about to turn on his heel and walk away, but instead the bespectacled young man strode purposefully towards Sandman. 'You never told me,' he said accusingly, 'that you were visiting my father.'

'Did I need to tell you?' A ball kicked up and Sandman swayed aside to let it thump into the net behind.

'It would have been c-courteous,' Lord Christopher complained.

'If I need lessons in courtesy,' Sandman said sharply, 'then I shall go to those who treat me politely.'

Lord Christopher bridled, but lacked the courage to demand an apology for Sandman's truculence. 'I spoke to you in c-confidence,' he protested, 'and had no idea you would p-pass anything on to my father.'

'I passed on nothing to your father,' Sandman said mildly. 'I did not repeat one word you said. Indeed, I did not even tell him I had seen you.'

'He wrote to me,' Lord Christopher said, 'saying you'd visited and that I wasn't to speak with you again. So it's plain you're lying! You d-did tell him you spoke with me.'

The letter, Sandman thought, must have travelled on the same mail coach that brought him back to London. 'Your father deduced it,' Sandman explained, 'and you should have a care whom you accuse of telling lies, unless you're quite confident you are both a better shot and a better swordsman than the man you accuse.' He did not look to see the effect of his words, but instead danced two quick-steps down the pitch and drove at a delivery with all his strength. He knew the stroke was good even before the bat struck the ball, and then it shot away and the three men scything the playing wicket stared in awe as the ball streaked between them to take its first bounce just short of the uphill boundary and it still seemed to be travelling at the same speed with which it had left the bat when it vanished in the bushes at the top of the hill. It had gone like a six-pounder shot, Sandman thought, and then he heard it crack against the fence and heard a cow mooing in protest from the neighbouring meadow.

'Good God,' Lord Alexander said faintly, staring up the hill, 'good God alive.'

'I spoke hastily,' Lord Christopher said in scant apology, 'but I still don't understand why you should even need to go near Carne Manor.'

'Did you see how hard he struck that?' Lord Alexander asked.

'Why?' Lord Christopher insisted angrily.

'I told you why,' Sandman said. 'To discover whether any of your stepmother's servants had gone there.'

'Of course they wouldn't,' Lord Christopher said.

'Last time you thought it possible.'

'That's because I hadn't thought about it p-properly. Those servants must have known precisely what vile things my stepmother was doing in London and my father would hardly want them spreading such t-tales in Wiltshire.'

'True,' Sandman conceded. 'So I wasted a journey.'

'But the good news, Rider,' Lord Alexander intervened, 'is that Mister William Brown has agreed that you and I should attend on Monday!' He beamed at Sandman. 'Isn't that splendid?'

'Mister Brown?' Sandman asked.

'The Keeper of Newgate. I would have expected a man in your position to have known that.' Lord Alexander turned to a bemused Lord Christopher. 'It occurred to me, Kit, that so long as Rider was the Home Secretary's official Investigator, then he should certainly investigate the gallows. He should know exactly what awful brutality awaits people like Corday. So I wrote to the Keeper and he has very decently invited Rider and myself to breakfast. Devilled kidneys, he promises! I've always rather liked a properly devilled kidney.'

Sandman stepped away from the stumps. 'I have no wish to witness a hanging,' he said.

'It doesn't matter what you wish,' Lord Alexander said airily, 'it is a matter of duty.'

'I have no duty to witness a hanging,' Sandman insisted.

'Of course you do,' Lord Alexander said. 'I confess I am apprehensive. I do not approve of the gallows, but at the same time I discover a curiosity within me. If nothing else, Rider, it will be an educational experience.'

'Educational rubbish!' Sandman stepped back to the wicket and played a straight bat to a well-bowled ball. 'I'm not going, Alexander, and that's that. No! The answer is no!'

'I'd like to go,' Lord Christopher said in a small voice.

'Rider!' Lord Alexander expostulated.

'No!' Sandman said. 'I shall happily send the real killer to the gallows, but I'm not witnessing a Newgate circus.' He waved Hughes away. 'I've batted long enough,' he explained, then ran a hand down the face of his bat. 'You have any linseed oil, Alexander?'

'The real killer?' Lord Christopher asked. 'Do you know who that is?'

'I hope to know by this evening,' Sandman said. 'If I send for your carriage, Alexander, then you'll know I've discovered my witness. If I don't? Alas.'

'Witness?' Lord Christopher asked.

'If Rider's going to be obdurate,' Lord Alexander said to Lord Christopher, 'then perhaps you should join me for the Keeper's devilled kidneys on Monday?' He fumbled with his tinder box as he tried to light a new pipe. 'I was thinking that you really ought to join the club here, Rider. We need members.'

'I can imagine you do. Who'd join a club that plays on an imitation of an alpine meadow?'

'A perfectly good pitch,' Lord Alexander said querulously.

'Witness?' Lord Christopher broke in to ask again.

'I trust you'll send for the carriage!' Lord Alexander boomed. 'I want to see that bloody man Sidmouth confounded. Make him grant a pardon, Rider. I shall await your summons at the Wheatsheaf.'

'I'll wait with you,' Lord Christopher said, and was rewarded by a flicker of annoyance on Lord Alexander's face. Sandman, who saw the same flicker, knew that Lord Alexander did not want a rival for Sally's attention, but Lord Christopher must have taken it as an insult for his face fell.

Lord Alexander gazed at the three groundsmen, who were still leaning on their scythes and discussing Sandman's ball that had blasted through them like a roundshot. 'I have always thought,' Lord Alexander said, 'that there is a fortune to be made by a man who can invent a device for the cutting of grass.'

'It's called a sheep,' Sandman said, 'vulgarly known as a woolly bird.'

'A device that does not leave dung,' Lord Alexander said acidly, then smiled at Lord Christopher Carne. 'Of course you must spend the evening with me, my dear fellow. Perhaps you can explain this man Kant to me? Someone sent me his last book, have you seen it? I thought you would have. He seems very sound, but he was a Prussian, wasn't he? I suppose that wasn't his fault. Come and have some tea first. Rider? You'll have some tea? Of course you will. And I want you to meet Lord Frederick. You know he's our club secretary now? You really should join us. And you wanted some linseed oil for the bat? They do a very acceptable tea here.'

So Sandman went for a lordly tea.

===OO=OOO=OO===

It was a cloudy evening and the sky over London was made even darker because there was no wind and the coal smoke hung thick and still above the roofs and spires. The streets near St James's Square were quiet, for there were no businesses in these quiet houses and many of their owners were in the country. Sandman saw a watchman noting him and so he crossed to the man and said good evening and asked what regiment he had served in and the two passed the time exchanging memories of Salamanca, which Sandman thought was perhaps the most beautiful town he had ever seen. A lamplighter came round with his ladder and the new gas lights popped on one after the other, burning blue for a time and then turning whiter. 'Some of the houses here are getting gas,' the watchman said, 'indoors.'

'Indoors?'

'No good'll come of it, sir. It ain't natural, is it?' The watchman looked up at the nearest hissing lamp. 'There'll be fire and pillars of smoke, sir, like it says in the good book sir, fire and pillars of smoke. Burning like a fiery furnace, sir.'

Sandman was saved more apocalyptic prophecies when a hackney turned into the street, the sound of its horse's hooves echoing sharply from the shadowed white house fronts. It stopped close to Sandman, the door opened and Sergeant Berrigan stepped down. He tossed a coin up to the driver, then held the door open for Sally.

'You can't…' Sandman began.

'I told you he'd say that,' Berrigan boasted to Sally, 'didn't I tell you he'd say you shouldn't come?'

'Sergeant!' Sandman insisted. 'We cannot…'

'You're going for Meg, right?' Sally intervened. 'And she ain't going to take kindly to two old swoddies doing her up, is she? She needs a woman's touch.'

'I'm sure two old soldiers can gain her confidence,' Sandman said.

'Sal won't take no for an answer,' the Sergeant warned him.

'Besides,' Sandman continued, 'Meg isn't in the Seraphim Club. We're only going there to find the coachman so he can tell us where he took her.'

'Maybe he'll tell me what he won't tell you,' Sally said to Sandman with a dazzling smile, then she turned on the watchman. 'You got nothing better to do than listen to other folks chatting?'

The man looked startled, but followed the lamplighter down the street while Sergeant Berrigan fished in his coat pocket to bring out a key which he showed to Sandman. 'Back way in, Captain,' he said, then looked at Sally. 'Listen, my love, I know…'

'Stow it, Sam! I'm coming with you!'

Berrigan led the way, shaking his head. 'I don't know what it is,' he grumbled, 'the ladies tell you that life ain't fair because men get all the privileges, but the mollishers don't half get their own way. You notice that, Captain? It's bitch about this and bitch about that, but who gets to wear the silk, gold and pearls, eh?'

'You talking about me, Sam Berrigan?' Sally asked.

'True love,' Sandman murmured, then Berrigan put a finger to his lips as they approached a wide carriage gate set in a white wall at the end of a short street.

'What it is,' Berrigan said softly, 'is that it's a quiet time of day in the club. We should be able to sneak in.' He approached a small door set to one side of the gates, tried it, found it locked and so used his key. He pushed the door open, looked into the yard and evidently saw nothing to alarm him, for he stepped over the threshold and beckoned Sandman and Sally to follow.

The yard was empty except for a coach, its blue paint trimmed with gold, that had evidently just been washed for it stood gleaming in the dusk with water dripping from its flanks and buckets standing by the wheels. The badge of the golden angel was painted on the door. 'Over here, quick,' Berrigan said, and Sandman and Sally followed the Sergeant to the shadow of the stables. 'One of the lads will be washing it,' Berrigan said, 'but the coachmen will be in the back kitchen there.' He nodded to a lit window in the carriage house, then turned in alarm as a door in the main house was thrown open. 'In here!' Berrigan hissed, and the three of them filed into an alley that led beside the stables. Footsteps sounded in the yard.

'Here?' a voice asked. Sandman did not recognise it.

'A hole twelve feet deep,' another voice answered, 'stone-lined and with a masonry dome over the top.'

'Not much damn room. How wide's the hole?'

'Ten feet?'

'Christ, man, it's where we turn the carriages!'

'Do it in the street.'

Berrigan swayed close to Sandman. 'They're talking about building an ice house,' he breathed in Sandman's ear, 'been discussing it for a year now.'

'What about behind the stables?' the first man asked.

'No room,' the other man answered.

'I mean between the stables and the back wall,' the first man said, and Sandman heard his footsteps getting closer and knew it was only a matter of seconds before they were discovered. But then Berrigan peered out of the alley's far end, saw no one and dashed across a smaller yard to a door that opened into the rear of the house. 'This way!' he hissed.

Sandman and Sally ran after him and found themselves on a servant's stairway that evidently ran from the kitchens in the basement to the upper floors. 'We'll hide upstairs,' Berrigan whispered, 'till the coast's clear.'

'Why not hide here?' Sandman asked.

''Cos the bastards could come back in through this bleeding door,' Berrigan said, then led them up the unlit stairway. Halfway up he edged open a door that led into a corridor that was deeply carpeted and had walls covered in a deep scarlet paper, though it was too dark to see the pattern of the paper or the details of the pictures that hung between the polished doors. Berrigan chose a door at random, opened it and found an empty room. 'We'll be all right in here,' he said.

It was a bedroom; large, lavish and comfortable. The bed itself was high and huge, plump-mattressed and covered with a thick scarlet covering on which the Seraphim's naked angel took flight. A fireplace was there to warm the room in winter. Berrigan crossed to the window and pulled back the curtain so he could gaze down into the yard. Sandman's eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light, then he heard Sally laugh and he turned to see her gazing at a picture above the bedhead. 'Good God,' Sandman said.

'There's a lot of those,' Berrigan commented drily.

The picture showed a happy group of men and women in a circular arcade of white marble pillars. In the foreground a child played a flute and another plucked a harp, both ignoring their naked elders who coupled under the moon that lit the pillared arcade with an unearthly glow. 'Bloody hell,' Sally said respectfully, 'you wouldn't think a girl could do that with her legs.'

Sandman decided no answer was necessary. He moved to the window and stared down, but the yard seemed empty again. 'I think they've gone back inside,' Berrigan said.

'Another one,' Sally said, standing on tiptoe to examine the painting above the empty fireplace.

'D'you think they'll come in here?' Sandman asked.

Berrigan shook his head. 'They only use these back slums in the winter.'

Sally giggled at the picture, then turned on Berrigan. 'You worked in an academy, Sam Berrigan.'

'It's a club!'

'Bleeding academy is what it is,' Sally said scornfully.

'I left it, didn't I?' Berrigan protested. 'Besides, it weren't an academy for us servants. Only for the members.'

'What members?' Sally asked, and laughed at her own jest.

Berrigan hushed her, not because she was being coarse, but because there were footsteps in the corridor outside. They came close to the door, passed on, faded.

'It doesn't really help us being up here,' Sandman said.

'We'll wait for things to quiet down,' Berrigan said, 'and then we'll slip back down to the yard.'

The door handle rattled. Berrigan quickly stepped behind a folding screen that hid a chamberpot and Sandman froze. The footsteps had seemed to pass on down the passage, but the person now trying the handle must have heard the voices and crept back, and suddenly the door was pushed open and a girl walked in. She was tall, slender and her black hair was prettily piled on her head and held in place with long pins with mother of pearl heads. Her shoes had mother of pearl heels, she sported pearl earrings and had a string of pearls strung twice about her elegant, swan-like neck, but otherwise she was quite naked. She took no notice of Sandman, who had half drawn his pistol, but smiled at Sally. 'I didn't know you worked here, Sal!'

'I'm not really working, Flossie,' Sally said.

Sandman recognised the girl then. It was the opera dancer who had called herself Sacharissa Lasorda and who now turned and stared at Sandman and somehow, though she was stark naked and he was fully dressed, she made him feel out of place. She looked him up and down, then smiled at Sally. 'You got the good-looking one, didn't you? But he's taking his time, ain't he?' Then her eyes widened as Berrigan stepped from behind the screen. 'You having a threesome?' she asked, then recognised the sergeant.

'I ain't here, Flossie,' Berrigan growled, 'so close the door when you leave and you ain't seen me. I thought you'd left for higher things?'

'Didn't work out, Sam,' she said, closing the door but staying inside the room.

'What happened to Spofforth?' Sally asked.

'Faked off this morning, didn't he?' She sniffed. 'The bastard! And I need the bleeding rhino, don't I? And this place is always worth a few quid.' She sat on the bed. 'So what the hell are you doing here?' she asked Berrigan.

'What the hell are you doing?' he demanded in return.

'We sneak in here for a rest,' Flossie said, 'on account that no one looks in here in summer.'

'Well just you remember that we ain't here,' Berrigan said fiercely. 'We ain't here, you ain't seen us and don't ask us no questions.'

'Bloody hell!' Flossie gave Berrigan a very level look. 'Pardon me for bloody breathing.'

'And who are you supposed to be with?' Berrigan asked.

'Tollemere. Only he's drunk and snoring.' She sniffed again and looked at Sally. 'You working here?'

'No.'

'Rhino's good,' Flossie said. She eased off a shoe and massaged her foot. 'So what happens if I go downstairs and tell them you're here?' she asked Berrigan.

'Next time I see you,' Berrigan said, 'you get a thorough bloody kicking.'

'Sergeant!' Sandman remonstrated, though he noticed that Flossie seemed remarkably unmoved by the threat.

'She bloody well will get a kicking!' Berrigan said.

'It's all bulge and no bang with you, Sam,' Flossie said, grinning.

'We ain't going to hurt no one,' Sally said earnestly, 'and we're only trying to help someone.

'I won't tell anyone you're here,' Flossie promised. 'Why should I?'

'So who's here tonight?' Berrigan asked.

She rattled off a list of names, none of which was of interest to Sandman, for neither the Marquess of Skavadale nor Lord Robin Holloway were included. Flossie was certain neither man was in the club. 'I don't mind the Marquess,' she said, ''cos he's a proper gentlemen, but Lord bleeding Robin, he's a bastard.' She pulled her shoe back on, yawned and stood up. 'I'd better go and make sure his lordship ain't missing me. He'll want his supper soon.' She frowned. 'I don't mind working here,' she went on, 'the rhino's good, it's comfortable, but I bloody hate sitting down to supper naked. Makes you feel queer, it does, all the men dressed bang up and us skinned to nothing.' She opened the door and shook her head. 'And I always spill the bloody soup.'

'You will keep mum, Flossie?' Berrigan asked anxiously.

She blew him a kiss. 'For you, Sam, anything,' she said, and was gone.

'For you, Sam, anything?' Sally asked.

'She don't mean nothing,' Berrigan said hastily.

'Mister Spofforth was right,' Sandman interrupted them.

'Right about what?' Sally wanted to know.

'She does have good legs.'

'Captain!' Sally was shocked.

'I've seen better,' Sergeant Berrigan said gallantly, and Sandman was pleased to see Sally blush.

'Out of interest,' Sandman asked as he went to the door, 'what does it cost to be a member here?' He opened the door a crack and peered out, but the corridor was empty.

'Two thousand to join, that's if you're invited, and a hundred a year,' Berrigan said.

The privileges of wealth, Sandman thought, and if the Countess of Avebury had been blackmailing one of the members, or even two or three of the members, then would they not kill her to preserve their place in this hedonistic mansion? He glanced back at the window. It was dark outside now, but it was the luminous dark of a summer night in a gas-lit town. 'Shall we find our coachman?' he asked Berrigan.

They went back down the servants' stairs and crossed the yard. The coach still glistened wetly on the cobbles, though the buckets were gone. Horses stamped in the stables as Berrigan went to the side door of the carriage house. He listened there for a few seconds, then raised two fingers to indicate that he thought there were two men on the door's far side. Sandman pulled the pistol from his coat pocket. He decided not to cock it for he did not want the gun to fire accidentally, but he checked it was primed then he edged Berrigan aside, opened the door and walked inside.

The room was a kitchen, tack room and store. A pot of water bubbled over a fire and a pair of candles burnt on the mantel and more stood on the table where two men, one young and one middle-aged, sat with tankards of ale and plates of bread, cheese and cold beef. They turned and stared when Sandman came in, and the older man, opening his mouth in astonishment, let his clay pipe drop so that its stem broke on the table's edge. Sally followed Sandman into the room, then Berrigan came in and closed the door.

'Introduce me,' Sandman said. He was not pointing the pistol at either man, but it was very obvious and the two could not take their eyes from it.

'The youngster's a stable hand,' Berrigan said, 'and he's called Billy, while the one with the jaw in his lap is Mister Michael Mackeson. He's one of the club's two coachmen. Where's Percy, Mack?'

'Sam?' Mackeson said faintly. He was a burly man, red-faced, with a fine waxed moustache and a shock of black hair that was turning grey at the temples. He was dressed well and could doubtless afford to be, for good drivers were paid extravagantly. Sandman had heard of a driver earning over two hundred pounds a year, and all of them were considered the possessors of an enviable skill, so enviable that every young gentleman wanted to be like them. Lordlings wore the same caped coats as the professionals and learnt to carry the whip in one hand and the bunched reins in the other, and there were so many aristocrats aspiring to be coachmen that no one could be sure whether any particular carriage was driven by a duke or a paid driver. Now, despite his elevated status, Mackeson just gaped at Berrigan who, like Sandman, had a pistol.

'Where's Percy?' Berrigan asked again.

'He's taken Lord Lucy to Weybridge,' Mackeson said.

'Let's hope you're the one we want,' Berrigan said. 'And you're not going anywhere, Billy,' he snapped at the stable hand, who was dressed in a shabby set of the Seraphim Club's yellow and black livery, 'not unless you want a broken skull.' The stable hand, who had been rising from the bench, subsided again.

Sandman was not aware of it, but he was angry suddenly. It was possible that the moustached coachman might have the answer Sandman had been searching for, and the notion that he might get this close and still not discover the truth had sparked his rage. It was a controlled rage, but it was in his voice, harsh and clipped, and Mackeson jumped with alarm when Sandman spoke. 'Some weeks ago,' Sandman said, 'a coachman from this club collected a maid from the Countess of Avebury's house in Mount Street. Was that you?'

Mackeson swallowed, but seemed unable to speak.

'Was that you?' Sandman asked again, louder.

Mackeson nodded very slowly, then glanced at Berrigan as if he did not believe what was happening to him.

'Where did you take her?' Sandman asked. Mackeson swallowed again, then jumped as Sandman rapped the pistol on the table. 'Where did you take her?' Sandman demanded again.

Mackeson turned from Sandman and frowned at Berrigan. 'They'll kill you, Sam Berrigan,' he said, 'kill you stone dead if they find you here.'

'Then they'd better not find me, Mack,' Berrigan said.

The coachman gave another start of alarm when he heard the ratcheting sound of Sandman's pistol being cocked. His eyes widened as he stared into the muzzle and uttered a pathetic moan. 'I'm only going to ask you politely once more,' Sandman said, 'and after that, Mister Mackeson, I shall…'

'Nether Cross,' Mackeson said hurriedly.

'Where's Nether Cross?'

'Fair old ways,' the coachman said guardedly. 'Seven hours? Eight hours?'

'Where?' Sandman asked harshly.

'Down near the coast, sir, down Kent way.'

'So who lives there,' Sandman asked, 'in Nether Cross?'

'Lord John de Sully Pearce-Tarrant,' Berrigan answered for the coachman, 'the Viscount Hurstwood, Earl of Keymer, Baron Highbrook, lord of this and lord of God knows what else, heir to the Dukedom of Ripon and also known, Captain, as the Marquess of Skavadale.'

And Sandman felt a great surge of relief. Because he had his answer at last.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The carriage rattled through the streets south of the Thames. Its two lamps were lit, but cast a feeble glow that did nothing to light the way so that, once they reached the summit of Shooters Hill where there were few lights and the road across Blackheath stretched impenetrably black before them, they stopped. The horses were unharnessed and picketed on the green and the two prisoners were locked inside the carriage by the simple expedient of fastening the coach doors by looping their handles with the reins that were then strapped tight around the whole vehicle. The windows were jammed shut with slivers of wood, and either Sandman or Berrigan would stand guard all night.

The prisoners were the driver, Mackeson, and Billy, the stable hand. It had been Berrigan's idea to take the Seraphim Club's newly washed carriage. Sandman had refused at first, saying he had already arranged to borrow Lord Alexander's coach and team and he doubted he had the legal right to commandeer one of the Seraphim Club's carriages, but Berrigan had scoffed at the thought of such scruples. 'You reckon Lord Alexander's coachman knows the way to Nether Cross?' he asked. 'Which means you've got to take Mackeson anyway, so you might as well take a vehicle he knows how to handle. And considering what evils the bastards have done I don't suppose God or man will worry about you borrowing their coach.'

And if the coach and driver were taken then Billy, the stable hand, had to be kept from betraying that Sandman had been asking about Meg, so he too must be taken prisoner. He put up no resistance, but instead helped Mackeson harness the team and then, with his hands and feet tied, he was put into the carriage while Mackeson, accompanied by Berrigan, sat up on the box. The few members of the club, ensconced in their dining room, had no idea that their coach was being commandeered.

Now, stranded on Blackheath, Sandman and his companions had to wait through the dark hours. Berrigan took Sally to a tavern and paid for a room and he stayed with her while Sandman guarded the coach. It was not till after the clocks had struck two that Berrigan loomed out of the dark. 'Quiet night, Captain?'

'Quiet enough,' Sandman said, then smiled. 'Long time since I did picquet duty.'

'Those two behaving themselves?' Berrigan asked, glancing at the carriage.

'Quiet as lambs,' Sandman said.

'You can go to sleep,' Berrigan suggested, 'and I'll stand sentry.'

'In a while,' Sandman said. He was sitting on the grass, his back against a wheel and he tilted his head to look at the stars that were drifting out from behind ragged clouds. 'Remember the Spanish night marches?' he asked. 'The stars were so bright it was as though you could reach up and snuff them out.'

'I remember the camp fires,' Berrigan said, 'hills and valleys of fire.' He twisted and looked west. 'A bit like that.'

Sandman turned his head to see London spread beneath them like a quilt of fire that was blurred by the red-touched smoke. The air up on the heath was clean and chill, yet he could just smell the coal smoke from the great city that spread its hazed lights to the western horizon. 'I do miss Spain,' he admitted.

'It were strange at first,' Berrigan said, 'but I liked it. Did you speak the language?'

'Yes.'

Berrigan laughed. 'And I'll bet you were good at it.'

'I was fluent enough, yes.'

The Sergeant handed Sandman a stone bottle. 'Brandy,' he explained. 'And I was thinking,' he went on, 'that if I go and buy those cigars I'll need someone who speaks the language. You and me? We could go there together, work together.'

'I'd like that,' Sandman said.

'There's got to be money in it,' Berrigan said. 'We paid pennies for those cigars in Spain and here they cost a fortune if you can get them at all.'

'I think you're right,' Sandman said, and smiled at the thought that maybe he did have a job after all. Berrigan and Sandman, Purveyors of Fine Cigars? Eleanor's father liked a good cigar and paid well for them, so well that there might even be enough money in the idea to persuade Sir Henry that his daughter was not marrying a pauper. Lady Forrest might never be convinced that Sandman was a proper husband for Eleanor, but Sandman suspected that Eleanor and her father would prevail. He and Berrigan would need money, and who better than Sir Henry to lend it? They would have to travel around Spain, hire shipping space and rent premises in a fashionable part of London, but it could work. He was sure of it. 'It's a brilliant idea, Sergeant,' he said.

'So shall we do it when this is over?'

'Why not? Yes.' He put out his hand and Berrigan shook it.

'We old soldiers should stick together,' Berrigan said, 'because we were good. We were damned good, Captain. We chased the bloody Crapauds halfway across bloody Europe, and then we came home and none of the bastards here cared, did they?' He paused, thinking. 'They had a rule in the Seraphim Club. No one was ever to talk about the wars. No one.'

'None of the members served?' Sandman guessed.

'Not one. They wouldn't even let you in if you'd been a swoddy or a sailor.'

'They were jealous?'

'Probably.'

Sandman drank from the bottle. 'Yet they employed you?'

They liked having a guardsman in the hall. I made the bastards feel safe. And they could order me around, which they also liked. Do this, Berrigan, do that.' The Sergeant grunted thanks when Sandman passed him the bottle. 'Most of the time it weren't nothing bad. Run errands for the bastards, but then once in a while they'd want something else.' He fell silent and Sandman also kept quiet. The night was extraordinarily quiet. After a time, as Sandman hoped, Berrigan began talking again. 'Once, there was a fellow who was taking one of the Seraphim to court, so we gave him a lesson. They sent a wagonload of flowers to his grave, they did. And the girls, of course — we paid them off. Not the ones like Flossie, they can look after themselves, but the others? We gave 'em ten pounds, perhaps twelve.'

'What sort of girls?'

'Common girls, Captain, girls that had caught their eye on the street.'

'They were kidnapped?'

'They were kidnapped,' Berrigan said. 'Kidnapped, raped and paid off.'

'And all the members did that?'

'Some were worse than others. There's always a handful that are ready for any mischief, just like in a company of soldiers. And then there are the followers. And one or two of them are more sensible. That's why I was surprised it was Skavadale that scragged the Countess. He ain't a bad one. He's got a ramrod up his arse and he thinks he smells of violets, but he ain't an unkind man.'

'I rather hoped it would be Lord Robin,' Sandman admitted.

'He's just a mad bastard,' Berrigan said. 'Bloody rich, mad bastard,' he added.

'But Skavadale has more to lose,' Sandman explained.

'Lost most of it already,' Berrigan said. 'He's probably the poorest man there. His father's lost a fortune.'

'But the son,' Sandman explained, 'is betrothed to a very rich girl. Perhaps the wealthiest bride in Britain? I suspect he was ploughing the Countess of Avebury and she had a nasty habit of blackmail.' Sandman thought for a moment. 'Skavadale might be relatively poor, but I'll bet he could still scratch together a thousand pounds if he had to. That's probably the sort of money the Countess asked for if she was not to write a letter to the wealthy and religious bride to be.'

'So he killed her?' Berrigan asked.

'So he killed her,' Sandman said.

Berrigan thought for a moment. 'So why did they commission her portrait?'

'In one way,' Sandman said, 'that had nothing to do with the murder. It's simply that several of the Seraphim had rogered the Countess and they wanted her picture as a trophy. So poor Corday was painting away when Skavadale comes to visit. We know he came up the back stairs, the private way, and Corday was hurried off when the Countess realised one of her lovers had arrived.' Sandman was sure that was how it had happened. He imagined the silent awkwardness in the bedroom as Corday painted and the Countess lounged on the bed and made idle conversation with the maid. The charcoal would have scratched on the paper, then there would have been the sound of footsteps on the back service stairs and Corday's ordeal had begun.

Berrigan drank again, then passed the bottle to Sandman. 'So the girl Meg takes the pixie downstairs,' he said, 'and throws him out, then she goes back upstairs and finds what? The Countess dead?'

'Probably. Or dying, and she finds the Marquess of Skavadale there.' Would the Countess have been pleased to see the Marquess, Sandman wondered. Or was their adulterous tangle already at an end? Perhaps Skavadale had come to plead with her to withdraw her demands and the Countess, desperate for money, had probably laughed at him. Perhaps she hinted that he would have to pay even more, but somehow she drove him into a black rage in which he drew a knife. What knife? A man like Skavadale did not wear a knife, but perhaps there had been a knife in the room? Meg would know. Perhaps the Countess had been eating fruit and had had a paring knife which Skavadale seized and plunged into her, and afterwards, when she lay pale and dying on a bed of blood, he had the whimsy to put Corday's palette knife into one of her wounds. And then, or just about then, Meg had returned. Or perhaps Meg had overheard the fight and was waiting outside the room when Skavadale emerged.

'So why didn't he kill Meg as well?' the Sergeant asked.

'Because Meg isn't a threat to him,' Sandman guessed. 'The Countess threatened his betrothal to a girl who could probably pay off the mortgages on all his family's estates — all of them! And the Countess would have ended that engagement and there's no greater tragedy to an aristocrat than to lose his money, for with his money goes his status. They reckon they're born better than the rest of us, but they're not, they're just a lot richer, and they have to stay rich if they're to keep their illusions of superiority. The Countess could have put Skavadale in the gutter, so he hates her and he kills her, but he didn't kill the maid because she wasn't a threat.'

Berrigan thought about that for a moment. 'So he takes the maid off to one of the mortgaged estates instead?'

'That seems to be the size of it,' Sandman said.

'So why is Lord Robin Holloway trying to kill you?'

'Because I'm a danger to his friend, of course,' Sandman replied forcefully. 'The last thing they want is for the truth to be told, so they tried to bribe me and now they'll try to kill me.'

'A big bribe, it was,' Berrigan said.

'Nothing compared to the wealth that Skavadale's bride will bring him,' Sandman said, 'and the Countess put that at risk. So she had to die, and now Corday must die because then everyone will forget the crime.'

'Aye,' Berrigan allowed. 'But I still don't understand why they didn't just scrag this maid Meg. If they thought she was a danger they wouldn't let her live.'

'Perhaps they have killed her,' Sandman said.

'Then this is a right waste of time,' Berrigan said gloomily.

'But I don't think they'd have taken Meg all the way to Nether Cross just to kill her,' Sandman said.

'So what are they doing with her?'

'Maybe they've given her somewhere to live,' Sandman suggested, 'somewhere comfortable so she doesn't reveal what she knows.'

'So now she's the blackmailer?'

'I don't know,' Sandman said, yet as he thought about it, the Sergeant's notion that Meg was now blackmailing Skavadale made sense. 'Perhaps she is,' he said, 'and if she's sensible she's not asking too much, which is why they're content to let her live.'

'But if she is blackmailing him,' Berrigan suggested, 'then she'll hardly tell us the truth, will she? She's got Skavadale strapped down tight, don't she? She's got the whip on him. Why should she give all that up to save some bloody pixie's life?'

'Because we shall appeal,' Sandman said, 'to her better nature.'

Berrigan laughed sourly. 'Ah well, then,' he said, 'it's all solved!'

'It worked with you, Sergeant,' Sandman pointed out gently.

'That were Sally, that were.' Berrigan paused, then sounded embarrassed. 'At first, you know, in the Wheatsheaf that night? I thought it was you and her.'

'Alas no,' Sandman said, 'I am well spoken for and Sally is all yours, Sergeant, and I think you are a most fortunate man. As am I. But I am also a tired one.' He crawled under the carriage, bumping his head painfully on the forward axle. 'After Waterloo,' he said, 'I thought I'd never again sleep in the open.'

The grass was dry under the carriage. The springs creaked as one of the prisoners shifted inside, the picketed horses stamped and the wind sighed in a nearby stand of trees. Sandman thought of the hundreds of other nights he had slept under the stars and then, just as he decided that sleep would never come in this night, it did. And he slept.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Early next morning Sally brought them a basket with bacon, hard boiled eggs, bread and a stone jar of cold tea, a breakfast they shared with the two prisoners. Mackeson, the coachman, was phlegmatic about his fate. 'You didn't have much choice, did you?' he said to Berrigan. 'You had to keep us quiet, but it won't do you no good, Sam.'

'Why not?'

'You ever seen a lord hang?'

'Earl Ferrers was hanged,' Sandman intervened, 'for murdering his servant.'

'No!' Sally said in disbelief. 'They hanged an earl? Really?'

'He went to the scaffold in his own carriage,' Sandman told her, 'wearing his wedding suit.'

'Bleeding hell!' She was obviously pleased by this news. 'A lord, eh?'

'But that were a long time ago,' Mackeson said dismissively, 'a very long time ago.' His moustache, which had been waxed so jauntily when Sandman had first seen him, was now fallen and straggling. 'So what happens to us?' he asked gloomily.

'We go to Nether Cross,' Sandman said, 'we fetch the girl and you take us back to London where I shall write a letter to your employers saying your absence from duties was forced.'

'Much bleeding good that will do,' Mackeson grumbled.

'You're a jervis, Mack,' Berrigan said, 'you'll get a job. The rest of the world could be starving, but there's always work for a jervis.'

'Time to get ready,' Sandman said, glancing up at the lightening sky. A small mist drifted over the heath as the four horses were watered at a stone trough, then led back to the carriage where it took a long time to put on the four sets of bridles, belly bands, back bands, martingales, hames, traces, cruppers, driving pads and fillet straps. After Mackeson and Billy had finished harnessing the horses, Sandman made the younger man strip off his shoes and belt. The stable hand had pleaded to be left without bonds on his ankles and wrists and Sandman had agreed, but without shoes and with his breeches falling round his knees the boy would find it hard to escape. Sandman and Sally sat inside with the embarrassed Billy, Mackeson and Berrigan climbed onto the box and then, with a jangle and clanging and a lurching roll, they bounced over the grass and onto the road. They were travelling again.

They went south and east past hop fields, orchards and great estates. By midday Sandman had unwittingly fallen asleep, then woke with a start when the carriage lurched in a rut. He blinked, then saw that Sally had taken the pistol from him and was gazing at a thoroughly cowed Billy. 'You can sleep on, Captain,' she said.

'I'm sorry, Sally.'

'He didn't dare try nothing,' Sally said derisively, 'not once I told him who my brother is.'

Sandman peered through the window to see they were climbing through a beech wood. 'I thought we might meet him last night.'

'He don't like crossing the river,' Sally said, 'so he only works the north and west roads.' She saw he was properly awake and gave him back his pistol. 'Do you think a man can be on the cross and then go straight?' she asked.

Sandman suspected the question was not about her brother, but about Berrigan. Not that the Sergeant was exactly in the cross life, not as the Wheatsheaf understood it, but as a servant of the Seraphim Club he had certainly known his share of crime. 'Of course he can,' Sandman said confidently.

'Not many do,' Sally averred, but not in argument. Rather she wanted reassurance.

'We all have to make a living, Sally,' Sandman said, 'and if we're honest we none of us want to work too hard. That's the appeal of the cross life, isn't it? Your brother can work one night in three and make a living.'

'That's Jack though, isn't it?' She sounded bleak and, rather than meet Sandman's eye, she gazed through the dusty window at an orchard.

'And maybe your brother will settle down when he meets the right woman,' Sandman suggested. 'A lot of men do that. They start off by being rogues, but then find honest work and as often as not it's after they've met a woman. I can't tell you how many of my soldiers were utter nuisances, complete damn fools, more use to the enemy than to us, and then they'd meet some Spanish girl half their weight and within a week they'd be model soldiers.' She turned to look at him and he smiled at her. 'I don't think you've anything to worry about, Sally.'

She returned his smile. 'Are you a good judge of men, Captain?'

'Yes, Sally, I am.'

She laughed, then looked at Billy. 'Close your bleeding trap before you catch flies,' she said, 'and stop listening to private conversation!'

He blushed and stared at a hedge that crawled past the window. They could not change horses and so Mackeson was pacing the team, which meant they travelled slowly, and the journey was made even slower because the road was in bad condition and they had to pull over whenever a horn announced that a stage or mail coach was behind them. The mail coaches were the most dramatic, their approach heralded by an urgent blast of a horn, then the lightly built and high-sprung vehicles would fly past in a flurry of hooves, rocking like a galloper gun. Sandman envied their speed, and worried about time, then told himself it was only Saturday and, so long as Meg really was hiding at Nether Cross, then they should be back in London by Sunday evening and that left plenty of time to find Lord Sidmouth and secure Corday's reprieve. The Home Secretary had said he did not want to be disturbed by official business on the Lord's Day, but Sandman did not give a damn about his lordship's prayers. Sandman would keep the whole government from its devotions if that meant justice.

In mid-morning Sandman changed places with Berrigan. Sandman now guarded Mackeson and he lifted his coat to let the driver see the pistol, but Mackeson was cowed and docile. He was taking the carriage down ever narrower roads, beneath trees heavy with summer leaves so that both he and Sandman were constantly ducking beneath boughs. They stopped at a ford to let the horses drink and Sandman watched the blue-green dragonflies flitting between the tall rushes, then Mackeson clicked his tongue and the horses hauled on and the coach splashed through the water and climbed between warm fields where men and women cut the harvest with sickles. Near midday they stopped close to a tavern and Sandman bought ale, bread and cheese which they ate and drank as the carriage creaked the last few miles. They passed a church that had a lych gate wreathed with bridal flowers and then clopped through a village where men played cricket on the green. Sandman watched the game as the coach rattled along the green's edge. This was rural cricket, a long way from the sophistication of the London game. These players still used only two stumps and a wide bail, and they bowled strictly under arm, yet the batsman had a good stance and a better eye and Sandman heard the shouts of approbation as the man punished a bad ball by striking it into a duck pond. A small boy splashed in to retrieve the ball, and then Mackeson, with a careless skill, wheeled the horses between two brick walls and clicked them on past a pair of oast houses and down into a narrow lane that ran steep between thick woods of oak. 'Not far now,' Mackeson said.

'You've done well to remember the way,' Sandman said. His compliment was genuine because the route had been tortuous and he had wondered whether Mackeson was misleading them by trying to get lost in the tangle of small lanes, but at the last turn, beside the oast houses, Sandman had seen a fingerpost pointing to Nether Cross.

'I done this journey a half-dozen times with his lordship,' Mackeson said, then hesitated before glancing at Sandman. 'So what happens if you don't find the woman?'

'We will find her,' Sandman said 'You brought her here, didn't you?' he added.

'Long time back, master,' Mackeson said, 'long time back.'

'How long?'

'Seven weeks near enough,' the coachman said, and Sandman realised that Meg must have been brought down to the country just after the murder and a full month before Corday's trial. 'All of seven weeks ago,' Mackeson went on, 'and anything can happen in seven weeks, can't it?' He gave Sandman a sly look. 'And maybe his lordship's here? That'll cool your porridge, won't it?'

Sandman had fretted that Skavadale might indeed be at his estate in Nether Cross, but there had been little point in worrying over much. He was either there or not, and he would have to be dealt with or not, and Sandman was far more worried that Meg might have vanished. Perhaps she was dead? Or perhaps, if she was blackmailing Skavadale, then she was living in country luxury and would not want to abandon her new life. 'What sort of house is it?' he asked the coachman.

'It ain't like their big ones up north,' Mackeson said. 'They got this one through a marriage in the old days, that's what I heard.'

'Comfortable?'

'Better than anything you or I will ever live in,' Mackeson said, then he clicked his tongue and the horses' ears twitched back as he flicked the leaders' reins and they turned smartly towards a tall pair of gates hung between high flint pillars.

Sandman opened the gates that were latched but not locked, then closed them after the carriage had passed. He climbed back onto the box and Mackeson walked the horses down the long drive that twisted through a deer park and between fine copper beeches until it crossed a small bridge and there, amidst the overgrown box hedges of an untended garden, lay a small and exquisitely beautiful Elizabethan house with black timbers, white plasterwork and red brick chimneys. 'Cross Hall, it's called,' Mackeson said.

'Some marriage portion,' Sandman said jealously, for the house looked so perfect under the afternoon sun.

'All mortgaged now,' Mackeson said, 'or that's what they say. Needs a fortune, this place, and I need to look after these horses. They want water, proper feed, a rubdown and a good rest.'

'All in good time,' Sandman said. He was watching the windows, but could see no movement in any of them. None was open either, and that was a bad sign for it was a warm summer's day, but then he saw there was a smear of smoke coming from one of the tall chimneys at the rear of the house and that restored his optimism. The carriage stopped and he dropped down from the box, wincing as his weight went onto his damaged ankle. Berrigan opened the carriage door and kicked down the steps, but Sandman told him to wait and make sure that Mackeson did not simply whip the horses back down the drive.

Sandman limped to the front door and hammered on its old dark panels. He had no right to be here, he thought. He was probably trespassing, and he felt in his tail pocket for the letter of authorisation from the Home Office. He had not used it once yet, but perhaps it would help him now. He knocked on the door again and stepped back to see if anyone was peering from a window. Ivy grew round the porch and under the leaves above the door he could just see a shield carved into the plasterwork. Five scallop shells were set into the shield. No one showed at any of the windows, so he stepped back into the porch and raised his fist to knock again and just then the door was pulled open and a gaunt old man stared at him, then looked at the carriage with its badge of the Seraphim Club. 'We weren't expecting any visitors today,' the man said in evident puzzlement.

'We have come to fetch Meg,' Sandman replied on an impulse. The man, a servant judging by his clothes, had plainly recognised the carriage and did not think its presence strange. Untimely, perhaps, but not strange, and Sandman hoped the servant would assume it had been sent by the Marquess.

'No one said she was to go anywhere.' The man was suspicious.

'London,' Sandman said.

'So who be you?' The man was tall and had a deeply lined face surrounded by unkempt white hair.

'I told you. We came to fetch Meg. Sergeant Berrigan and I.'

'Sergeant?' The man did not recognise the name, but sounded alarmed. 'You brought a lawyer?'

'He's from the club,' Sandman said, feeling the conversation slide into mutual incomprehensibility.

'His lordship said nothing about her going,' the man said cautiously.

'He wants her in London,' Sandman repeated.

'Then I'll fetch the lass,' the man said and then, before Sandman could react, he slammed the door and shot the bolts and did it so quickly that Sandman was left gaping. He was still staring at the door when he heard a bell ring inside the house and he knew that urgent sound had to be a signal to Meg. He swore.

'That's a good bloody start,' Berrigan said sarcastically.

'But the woman is here,' Sandman answered as he walked back to the carriage, 'and he says he's fetching her.'

'Is he?'

Sandman shook his head. 'Hiding her, more like. Which means we've got to look for her, but what do we do with these two?' He gestured at Mackeson.

'Shoot the buggers, then bury them,' Berrigan growled, and was rewarded by two of Mackeson's fingers. In the end they took the carriage round to the stables, where they found the stalls and feed racks empty except for a score of broody hens, but they also discovered a brick-built tack room that had a solid door and no windows and Mackeson and the stable boy were imprisoned inside while the horses were left in the yard harnessed to the carriage. 'We'll deal with them later,' Sandman declared.

'Collect some eggs later, too,' Berrigan said with a smile, for the stable yard had been given over to chickens, seemingly hundreds of them, some looking down from the roof ridge, others on the window ledges and most hunting for grain that had been scattered among the weed-strewn, dropping-white cobbles. A cockerel stared sideways at them from the mounting block, then twitched his comb and crowed lustily as Sandman led Berrigan and Sally to the back door of Cross Hall. The door was locked. Every door was locked, but the house was no fortress and Sandman found a window that was inadequately latched and shook it hard until it came open and he could climb into a small parlour with panelled walls, an empty stone fireplace and furniture shrouded in dust sheets. Berrigan followed. 'Stay outside,' Sandman said to Sally and she nodded agreement, but a moment later clambered through the window. 'There could be a fight,' Sandman warned her.

'I'm coming in,' she insisted. 'I hate bloody chickens.'

'The girl could have left the house by now,' Berrigan said.

'She could,' Sandman agreed, yet his first instinct had been that she would hide somewhere inside and he still thought the same, 'but we'll search for her anyway,' he said, and opened the door that led into a long panelled passage. The house was silent. No pictures hung on the walls and no rugs lay on the darkened floorboards that creaked underfoot. Sandman threw open doors to see dust sheets draped over what little furniture remained. A fine staircase with an elaborately carved newel post stood in the hall and Sandman glanced into the upstairs gloom as he passed, then went on towards the back of the house.

'No one lives here,' Sally said as they discovered yet more empty rooms, 'except the chickens!'

Sandman opened a door to see a long dining table draped with sheets. 'Lord Alexander tells me that his father once completely forgot about a house he owned,' he told Sally. 'It was a big house, too. It just mouldered away until they remembered they owned it.'

'A dozy lot,' Sally said scornfully.

'Are you talking about your admirer?' Berrigan asked, amused.

'You watch it, Sam Berrigan,' Sally said. 'I've only got to lift my little finger and I'll be Lady Whatsername and you'll be bowing and scraping to me.'

'I'll scrape you, girl,' Berrigan said, 'be a pleasure.'

'Children, children,' Sandman chided his companions, then turned sharply as a door opened suddenly at the end of the passage.

The tall, gaunt man with the wild white hair stood in the doorway, a cudgel in his right hand. 'The girl you're looking for,' he said, 'is not here.' He raised the cudgel half-heartedly as Sandman approached him, then let it drop and shuffled aside. Sandman pushed past him into a kitchen that had a big black range, a dresser and a long table. A woman, perhaps the gaunt man's wife, sat mixing pastry in a large china bowl at the table's head. 'Who are you?' Sandman asked the man.

'The steward here,' the man said, then nodded at the woman, 'and my wife is the housekeeper.'

'When did the girl leave?' Sandman asked.

'None of your business!' the woman snapped. 'And you've no business here, either. You're trespassing! So make yourselves scarce before they arrest you.'

Sandman noticed a fowling piece above the mantel. 'Who'll arrest me?' he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'She's run off,' Sally suggested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Where's the steward?' Sandman asked.

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

'His wife?'

'Gone.'

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

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

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

'So what are you doing?' Sally asked.

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

It took a few minutes before the larger pieces caught the flames, but by then the cauldron was belching a thick blue-white smoke and, because the cauldron was on the hearth's apron rather than in the fireplace, almost none of the smoke was being sucked into the chimney. Sandman planned to smoke Meg out, and in case the priest's hole opened to the passage, he had put Berrigan to stand guard outside the bedroom while he and Sally stayed inside with the door shut. The smoke was choking them, so that Sally was crouching by the bed, but she was reluctant to leave in case the ruse worked. Sandman's eyes were streaming and his throat was raw, but he fed another piece of wood onto the flames and he saw the belly of the cauldron begin to glow a dull red. He opened the door a fraction to let some smoke out and fresh air in. 'You want to leave?' he hissed at Sally, and she shook her head.

Sandman stooped down to where the smoke was thinner and he thought of Meg in the priest's hole, a space so dark and black and tight and frightening. He hoped the smell of burning was already adding to her fears and that the smoke was infiltrating the cunning traps and hatches and secret doors that concealed her ancient hiding place. A log crackled, split and a puff of smoke shot out of the cauldron on a lance of flame. Sally had the dust sheet over her mouth and Sandman knew they could not last much longer, but just then there was a creaking sound, a scream and a crash like the impact of a cannon ball, and he saw a whole section of the panelling open like a door — only it was not by the fireplace but along the outer wall, between the windows, where he had thought the wall too thin for a priest's hole. Sandman pulled his sleeves over his hands and, so protected, shoved the cauldron under the chimney as Sally snatched the wrist of the screaming, terrified woman who had thought herself trapped in a burning house and now tried to extricate herself from the narrow, laddered shaft that led down from the dislodged panels.

'It's all right! It's all right!' Sally was saying as she led Meg over to the door.

And Sandman, his coat scorched and blackened, followed the two women onto the wide landing where he gasped cool clean air and stared into Meg's red-rimmed eyes. He thought how good an artist Charles Corday was, for the young woman was truly monstrously ugly, even malevolent looking, and then he laughed because he had found her and with her he would discover the truth, and she mistook his laughter as mockery and, stepping forward, slapped his face hard.

And just then a gun fired from the hallway.

Sally screamed as Sandman pushed her down and out of the way. Meg, sensing escape, ran towards the stairs, but Berrigan tripped her. Sandman stepped over her as he limped to the balustrade, where he saw that it was the sour-looking housekeeper, much braver than her husband, who had fired the fowling piece up the staircase. But, like many raw recruits, she had shut her eyes when she pulled the trigger and she had fired too high, so that the duck shot had whipped over Sandman's hair. A half-dozen men were behind her, one with a musket, and Sandman slapped down Berrigan's pistol. 'No shooting!' he shouted. 'No killing!'

'You've no business here!' the housekeeper screamed up at him. She had gone pale, for she had not meant to fire the gun, but when she had snatched it from her husband and aimed it up the stairway as a threat, she had inadvertently jerked the trigger. The men behind her were led by a tall, fair-haired giant armed with a musket. The rest had cudgels and sickles. To Sandman they looked like the peasants come to burn down the big house, whereas in truth they were probably tenants who had come to protect the Duke of Ripon's property.

'We have every right to be here,' Sandman lied. He kept his voice calm as he drew out the Home Secretary's letter which, in truth, granted him no rights whatsoever. 'We have been asked by the government to investigate a murder,' he spoke gently as he went slowly down the stairs, always keeping his eyes on the man with the gun. He was a hugely tall man, well muscled and perhaps in his early thirties, wearing a grubby white shirt and cream-coloured trousers held up by a strip of green cloth that served as a belt. He looked oddly familiar and Sandman wondered if he had been a soldier. His musket was certainly an old army musket, abandoned after Napoleon's last defeat, but it was clean, it was cocked and the tall man held it confidently. 'I have here the Home Secretary's authorisation,' Sandman said, brandishing the letter with its impressive seal, 'and we have not come to harm anyone, to steal anything or to cause damage. We have only come to ask questions.'

'You've no rights here!' the housekeeper screeched.

'Quiet, woman,' Sandman snapped in his best officer's voice. What she said was correct, absolutely correct, but she had lost her temper and Sandman suspected that these men would rather listen to a reasonable voice than to an hysterical rant. 'Does anyone want to read his lordship's letter?' he asked, holding out the paper and knowing that a mention of 'his lordship' would give them pause. 'And by the way,' he glanced back up the stairs where the smoke was thinning on the landing, 'the house is not on fire and is in no danger. Now, who wants to read his lordship's letter?'

But the man holding the musket ignored the paper. He frowned at Sandman instead and lowered the weapon's muzzle. 'Are you Captain Sandman?'

Sandman nodded. 'I am,' he said.

'By God, but I saw you knock seventy-six runs off us at Tunbridge Wells!' the man said. 'And we had Pearson and Willes bowling to you! Pearson and Willes, no less, and you knocked 'em ten ways crazy and halfway upside down.' He had now uncocked the musket and was beaming at Sandman. 'Last year, it were, and I was playing for Kent. You had us well beat, except the rain came and saved us!'

And, by the grace of God, the big man's name slithered into Sandman's mind. 'It's Mister Wainwright, isn't it?'

'Ben Wainwright it is, sir.' Wainwright, who from his clothes must have been playing cricket when he had been summoned to the house, pulled his forelock.

'You hit a ball over the haystack, I recall,' Sandman said. 'You nearly beat us on your own!'

'Nothing like you, sir, nothing like you.'

'Benjamin Wainwright!' the housekeeper snapped. 'You ain't here to…'

'You be quiet, Doris,' Wainwright said, lowering the flint of the musket. 'Ain't no harm in Captain Sandman!' The men with him growled their assent. It did not matter that Sandman was in the house illegally or that he had filled its upper landing with smoke, he was a cricketer and a famous one and they were all grinning at him now, wanting his approbation. 'I heard you'd given the game up, sir?' Wainwright sounded worried. 'Is that true?'

'Oh no,' Sandman said, 'it's just I only like playing in clean games.'

'Precious few of them,' Wainwright said. 'But I should have had you on our team today, sir. Taking a fair licking, we are, from a side from Hastings. I already had my innings,' he added, explaining his absence from the game.

'There'll be other days,' Sandman consoled him, 'but for now I want to take this young lady into the garden and have a conversation with her. Or maybe there's a tavern where we can talk over an ale?' He added that because he realised it would be sensible to take Meg off the Duke of Ripon's property before someone with a rudimentary legal knowledge accused them of trespass and explained to Meg that she did not have to talk with them.

Wainwright assured them that the Castle and Bell was a fine tavern and the housekeeper, disgusted with his treason, walked away. Sandman let out a breath of relief. 'Meg?' He turned to the girl. 'If there's anything you want to take to London, fetch it now. Sergeant?' Sandman could see the girl wanted to protest, maybe even hit him again, but he gave her no time to argue. 'Sergeant? Make sure the horses are watered. Perhaps the carriage should be brought to the tavern? Sally, my dear, make sure Meg has everything she needs. And Mister Wainwright,' Sandman turned and smiled at the Kent batsman, 'I'd take it as an honour if you'd show me the tavern? Don't I recall that you make bats? I would like to talk to you about that.'

The confrontation was over. Meg, even though she was bitter, was not trying to run away and Sandman dared to hope that all would be well. One conversation now, a dash to London, and justice, that rarest of all the virtues, would be done.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Meg was bitter, sullen and angry. She resented Sandman's incursion into her life, indeed she seemed to resent life itself and for a time, sitting in the back garden of the Castle and Bell, she refused even to talk with him. She stared into the distance, drank a glass of gin, demanded another in a whining voice and then, after Benjamin Wainwright had left to see how his team was faring, she insisted that Sandman take her back to Cross Hall. 'My chooks need looking after,' she snapped.

'Your chickens?' That surprised Sandman.

'I always liked hens,' she said defiantly.

Sandman, his cheek still stinging from her slap, shook his head in astonishment. 'I'm not taking you back to the house,' he growled, 'and you'll be damned lucky if you're not transported for life. Is that what you want? A voyage to Australia and life in a penal settlement?'

'Piss on you,' she retorted. She was dressed in a white bonnet and a plain brown serge dress that was spotted with chicken feathers. They were ugly clothes, yet they suited her for she was truly ill-favoured, yet also remarkably defiant. Sandman almost found himself admiring her belligerence, but he knew that strength was going to make her difficult to deal with. She was watching him with knowing eyes, and seemed to read his hesitation for she gave a short mocking laugh and turned away to look at the Seraphim Club's carriage, all dusty after its journey, which had just appeared on the village green. Berrigan was watering the horses at a duck pond while Sally, with some of the Sergeant's coins, was buying a jug of ale and another of gin. Pigeons were making a fuss in a newly harvested wheatfield just beyond the Castle and Bell's hedge while scores of swifts were lining the tavern's thatched ridge.

'You liked the Countess, didn't you?' Sandman said to Meg.

She spat at him just as Sally stalked out of the tavern. 'Bastards,' Sally said, 'bloody country bastards! They don't want to serve a woman!'

'I'll go,' Sandman offered.

'There's a potman bringing the jugs,' she said. 'They didn't want to serve me, but they changed their minds when I had words with them.' She flapped a hand at an irritating wasp, driving it towards Meg who gave a small scream and, when the insect would not leave her, began to cry with alarm. 'What are you napping your bib for?' Sally demanded, and Meg, uncomprehending, just stared at her. 'Why are you bleeding crying?' Sally translated. 'You've got no bleeding reason to cry. You've been swanning down here while that poor little pixie's waiting to be scragged.'

The potman, plainly terrified of Sally, brought a tray of tankards, glasses and jugs. Sandman poured ale into a pint tankard that he gave to Sally. 'Why don't you take that to the Sergeant?' he said. 'I'll talk with Meg.'

'Meaning you want me to fake away off,' Sally said.

'Give me a few minutes,' Sandman suggested. Sally took the ale and Sandman offered Meg a glass of gin, which she snatched from him. 'You were fond of the Countess, weren't you?' he asked her again.

'I've got nothing to say to you,' Meg said, 'nothing.' She drained the gin and reached for the

jug-

Sandman snatched the jug away from her. 'What's your name?'

'None of your business, and give me some bloody max!' She lunged at the jug, but Sandman held it away from her.

'What's your name?' Sandman asked again, and was rewarded with a kick on his shin. He poured some of the gin onto the grass and Meg immediately went very still and looked wary. 'I'm taking you to London,' Sandman told her, 'and you have two ways of going there. You can behave yourself, in which case it will be comfortable, or you can go on being rude, in which case I'm taking you to prison.'

'You can't do that!' she sneered.

'I can do what I damn well like!' Sandman snapped, astonishing her with his sudden anger. 'I have the Home Secretary's commission, miss, and you are concealing evidence in a murder case! Prison? You'll be damned lucky if it's only prison and not the gallows themselves.'

She glowered at him for a moment, then shrugged. 'My name's Hargood,' she said in a surly voice, 'Margaret Hargood.'

Sandman poured her another glass of gin. 'Where are you from, Miss Hargood?'

'Nowhere you bloody know.'

'What I do know,' Sandman said, 'is that the Home Secretary instructed me to investigate the murder of the Countess of Avebury. He did that, Miss Hargood, because he fears that a great injustice is about to be done.' The day that Viscount Sidmouth worried about an injustice to a member of the lower classes, Sandman reflected, was probably the day the sun rose in the west, but he could not admit that to the lumpen girl who had just sucked down her second gin as though she were dying of thirst. 'The Home Secretary believes, as I do,' Sandman went on, 'that Charles Corday never murdered your mistress. And we think you can confirm that.'

Meg held out her glass, but said nothing.

'You were there, weren't you,' Sandman asked, 'on the day the Countess was murdered?'

She jerked the glass, demanding more gin, but still said nothing.

'And you know,' Sandman went on, 'that Charles Corday did not commit that murder.'

She looked down at a bruised apple, a windfall, that lay on the grass. A wasp crawled on its wrinkled skin and she screamed, dropped the glass and clasped her hands to her face. Sandman stamped on the wasp, crushing the fruit. 'Meg,' he appealed to her.

'I ain't got nothing to say,' she watched the ground fearfully, evidently frightened that the wasp might resurrect itself.

Sandman picked up her glass, filled it and handed it to her. 'If you cooperate, Miss Hargood,' he said formally, 'then I shall ensure that nothing harmful happens to you.'

'I don't know nothing about it,' she said, 'nothing about any murder.' She looked defiantly at Sandman, her eyes as hard as flint.

Sandman signed. 'Do you want an innocent man to die?' The girl made no answer, but just twisted away from him to stare across the hedge and Sandman felt a rush of indignation. He wanted to hit her and was ashamed of the intensity of that desire, so intense that he stood and began to pace up and down. 'Why are you in the Marquess of Skavadale's house?' he demanded and got no reply. 'Do you think,' he went on, 'that the Marquess will protect you? He wants you there so that the wrong man can hang, and once Corday is dead then what use will you be to him? He'll kill you to stop you testifying against him. I'm just astonished he hasn't murdered you already.' That, at least, got some reaction from the girl, even if it was only to make her turn and stare at him. 'Think, girl!' Sandman said forcefully. 'Why is the Marquess keeping you alive? Why?'

'You don't know a bloody thing, do you?' Meg said scornfully.

'I'll tell you what I know,' Sandman said, his anger very close to violence. 'I know that you can save an innocent man from the gallows, and I know you don't want to, and that makes you an accomplice to murder, miss, and they can hang you for that.' Sandman waited, but she said nothing and he knew he had failed. The loss of his temper was a sign of that failure and he was ashamed of himself, but if the girl would not talk then Corday could not be saved. Meg, just with silence, could defeat him, and now more troubles, niggling and stupid troubles, piled upon him. He wanted to get Meg back to London swiftly, but Mackeson insisted that the horses were too tired to travel another mile and Sandman knew the coachman was right. That meant they would have to stay the night in the village and guard their three prisoners. Guard them, feed them, and keep an eye on the horses. Meg was put into the coach and its doors were tied and windows jammed with wedges and she must have slept, though twice she woke Sandman as she screamed and beat on the windows. She finally broke a window and began to clamber out, then Sandman heard a grunt, a stifled cry and heard her slump back. 'What happened?' he asked.

'Nothing that need trouble you,' Berrigan said. Berrigan, Sandman and Sally slept on the grass, guarding Mackeson and Billy, though there was no fight left in either man for they were confused, frightened and obedient. They reminded Sandman of a French colonel his men had taken captive in the Galician mountains, a bombastic man who had whined and complained about the conditions of his captivity until, in exasperation, Sandman's own colonel had simply freed the man. 'Bugger off,' he had told him in French, 'you're free.' And the Frenchman, so terrified of the Spanish peasants, had begged to be taken captive again. Mackeson and Billy could have walked away from their tired captors, but both were too scared of the strange village and the sheer darkness of the night and the daunting prospect of finding their own way back to London.

'So what happens now?' Berrigan asked Sandman in the short summer night.

'We take her to the Home Secretary,' Sandman said bleakly, 'and let him pick over her bones.'

It would do no good, he thought, but what choice did he have? Somewhere a dog barked in the darkness and then, as Berrigan kept watch, Sandman slept.

CHAPTER NINE

It was just after dawn when the main door of Newgate Prison was eased open and the first pieces of the scaffold were carried out into Old Bailey. The fence that surrounded the finished scaffold was fetched out first and part of it was placed halfway across the street to divert what small traffic went between Ludgate Hill and Newgate Street this early on a Sunday. William Brown, the Keeper of Newgate, came to the main door where he yawned, scratched his bald head, lit a pipe, then stepped aside as the heavy beams that formed the framework of the scaffold's platform were carried out. 'It's going to be a lovely day, Mister Pickering,' he remarked to the foreman.

'Be a hot one, sir.'

'Plenty of ale over the street.'

'God be thanked for that, sir,' Pickering said, then turned and stared up at the prison's façade. There was a window just above the Debtor's Door and he nodded at it. 'I was thinking, sir, we could save ourselves a deal of trouble by putting a platform under that window. Build it there for all time, see? And put a hinged trap there and a beam over the top and we wouldn't needs to make a scaffold every time.'

The Keeper turned and stared upwards. 'You're talking yourself out of a job, Mister Pickering.'

'I'd rather have my Sundays at home, sir, with Mrs Pickering. And if you had a platform up there, sir, it wouldn't obstruct the traffic and it would give the crowd a better view.'

'Too good a view, maybe?' the Keeper suggested. 'I'm not sure the crowd ought to see the death struggles.' The present scaffold, with its screened flanks, meant that only the folk who rented the upper rooms immediately opposite the prison could see down into the pit where the hanged men and women choked to death.

'They see them struggle at Horsemonger Lane,' Pickering pointed out, 'and folk appreciate seeing them die proper. That's why they liked Tyburn! You got a proper view at Tyburn.' In the old century the condemned were taken by cart from Newgate to the wide spaces at Tyburn, where a permanent scaffold of three long beams had stood with embanked seating all around it. It had been a two-hour journey, punctuated by stops where the tavern crowds obstructed the roads, and the authorities had detested the carnival atmosphere that always accompanied a Tyburn hanging and for that reason, and in the belief that executions outside Newgate would be more dignified, they had demolished the old triangular scaffold and with it eliminated the rowdy journey. 'I saw the last hanging at Tyburn,' Pickering said. 'I was just seven, I was, and I've never forgotten it!'

'It's supposed to be memorable,' the Keeper said, 'else it won't deter, will it? So why hide the death throes? I do believe you're right, Mister Pickering, and I shall pass on your suggestion to the Court of Aldermen.'

'Kind of you, sir, kind of you.' Pickering knuckled his forehead. 'So it's a busy day tomorrow, is it, sir?'

'Just the two,' the Keeper said, 'but one of them is the painter, Corday. Remember him? He was the fellow who stabbed the Countess of Avebury.' He sighed. 'Bound to attract a fair crowd.'

'And the weather will encourage them, sir.'

'That it will,' the Keeper agreed, 'that it will, if it stays fine.' He stepped aside as one of his wife's kitchen servants hurried down the steps with a tall china jug to meet a milk-girl carrying two lidded pails on a shoulder yoke. 'Smell it, Betty,' he called after her, 'smell it! We had some sour last week.'

The platform's frame was slotted and pegged into place while the cladding for the sides and the black baize that swathed the whole scaffold were piled on the pavement. The Keeper tapped out his pipe against the door's black knocker, then went inside to change for morning service. Old Bailey had little traffic, though a few idlers vacantly watched the growing scaffold and a half-dozen choirboys, hurrying towards Saint Sepulchre's, stopped to gape as the heavy hanging beam with its dark metal hooks was carried from the prison. A waiter from the Magpie and Stump brought a tray of ale pots to the workmen, a gift from the tavern's landlord who would keep the dozen men well supplied all day. It was traditional to provide the scaffold makers with free ale, and profitable, for the presence of the gallows would mean a glut of customers next morning.

In Wapping, to the east, a chandler unlocked his back door to a single customer. His shop was closed, for it was Sunday, but this customer was special. 'It looks like being a fine day tomorrow, Jemmy,' the chandler said.

'It'll bring out the crowd,' Mister Botting agreed, edging into the shop past hanging swathes of ropes and dead-eyes, 'and I do like a crowd.'

'A skilled man should have an appreciative audience,' the chandler said, leading his guest to a table where two twelve-foot lengths of hemp rope had been laid ready for Botting's inspection. 'One inch rope, Jemmy, oiled and boiled,' the chandler said.

'Very nice, Leonard, very nice.' Botting lowered his face and sniffed the ropes.

'Like to guess where they're from?' the chandler asked. He was proud of the two ropes that he had boiled clean, then massaged with linseed oil so that they were pliable. Afterwards he had lovingly fashioned two nooses and spliced an eye in each bitter end.

'Looks like Bridport hemp,' Botting said, though he knew it was not. He just said it to please the chandler.

And the chandler chuckled with delight. 'Bain't be a man alive that can tell that ain't Bridport hemp, Jemmy, but it ain't. It's sisal, it is, hawser laid sisal.'

'No!' Botting, his face grimacing from its nervous tic, stooped for a closer look at the rope. He was instructed to buy only the best new Bridport hemp and his bill to the Court of Aldermen would indeed demand repayment for two such expensive ropes, but it had always offended him to waste good rope on gallows scum.

'It came out of the halliard barrel of a Newcastle collier,' the chandler said. 'West African shoddy, at a guess, but boil it, oil it and give it a light coat of boot blacking and no man could tell, eh? A hog apiece to you, Jemmy.'

'A fair price,' Botting agreed. He would pay two shillings and indent nine shillings and ninepence for the two ropes, then slice them after they had served their purpose and sell off the pieces for whatever the market would bear. Neither of the men to be hanged was truly notorious, but curiosity about the Countess of Avebury's murderer might drive the price of Corday's rope up to sixpence an inch. There would be a fat profit, anyway. He tested that the noose of one rope would tighten, then nodded in satisfaction. 'And I'll be wanting some strapping cord,' he went on, 'four lengths.'

'I've a butt of Swedish lanyard all ready for you, Jemmy,' the chandler said. 'So you're still lashing their hands and elbows yourself, are you?'

'Not for long,' Botting said. 'Thank you!' This last was because the chandler had poured two tin mugs of brandy. 'They had a pair of aldermen at the last swinging,' Botting went on, 'pretending they was just there for the entertainment, but I knows better. And Mister Logan was one of them, and he's a good enough fellow. He knows what's necessary. Mind you, the other one wished he'd stayed away. Emptied his belly, he did! Couldn't stand the sight!' He chuckled. 'But Mister Logan tipped me the wink afterwards and said they'll give me an assistant.'

'A man needs an assistant.'

'He does, he does.' Jemmy Botting drained the brandy, then collected his ropes and followed the chandler to a barrel where the lanyard cording was kept. 'Nice easy job in the morning,' he said, 'just two to top. Maybe I'll see you there?'

'Like as not, Jemmy.'

'We'll have an ale afterwards,' Botting said, 'and a chop for dinner.'

He left ten minutes later, the ropes and cords safe in his bag. He just had to fetch the two cotton bags from a seamstress, then he would be ready. He was England's hangman, and in the next day's dawn he would do his work.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Sandman was in a vile mood that Sunday morning. He had hardly slept, his temper was frayed and taut, and Meg's whining only made his bad temper worse. Berrigan and Sally were hardly more cheerful, but had the sense to keep silent, while Meg complained about being forced to London, then started screeching in protest when Sandman savaged her with accusations of selfishness and stupidity.

Billy, the stable hand, was left behind in the village. He could hardly get back to London ahead of the coach and so he could not warn the Seraphim Club of what was happening and thus it was safe to abandon him. 'But how do I get home?' he enquired plaintively.

'You do what the rest of us did from Lisbon to Toulouse,' Sandman snapped. 'You walk.'

The horses were ragged and tired. They had cropped the grass on the village green, shying away from the intrusive geese that resented their presence, but the animals were used to oats and corn, not thin grass, and they were sluggish in the harness though they responded briskly enough to Mackeson's whip and by the time the sun had climbed above the eastern trees they were going northwards at a fair clip. Church bells jangled a summer sky where high white clouds sailed westwards. 'You a churchgoer, Captain?' Berrigan asked, judging that their progress would have improved Sandman's mood.

'Of course.' Sandman was sharing the box with Berrigan and Mackeson, leaving the carriage's interior for Sally and Meg. It had been Sally's idea to share the coach with Meg. 'She don't frighten me,' Sally had said, 'and besides, maybe she'll talk to another girl?'

'I ain't a church sort of man,' Berrigan said. 'Ain't got time for it, but I do like to hear the bells.' All about them, concealed by the leafy Kent woods, the church towers and spires rang the changes. A dog cart clipped past them, loaded with children in their Sunday best and all carrying their prayer books to morning service. The children waved.

The bells went silent as the services began. The carriage came to a village, its main street deserted. They clopped past the church and Sandman heard a cellist accompanying the old hymn, 'Awake my soul and with the sun thy daily stage of duty run.' They had sung it, he remembered, on the morning of the battle at Salamanca, the men's voices hard and low beneath a sun climbing into a sky that became pitiless with heat on a day of burning death. Mackeson stopped the team in a ford on the other side of the village and, as the horses drank, Sandman folded down the steps to let Sally and Meg stretch their legs. He looked quizzically at Sally, who shook her head. 'Stubborn,' she murmured to Sandman.

Meg came down and glared at Sandman, then bent to scoop water into her mouth. Afterwards she sat on the bank and just watched the dragonflies. 'I'll kill you,' she said to Sandman, 'if the foxes have eaten my chooks.'

'You care more about your hens than the life of an innocent man?'

'Let him bloody hang,' Meg said. She had lost her bonnet and her hair was lank and tousled.

'You're going to have to talk to other men in London,' Sandman said, 'and they won't be gentle.'

The girl said nothing.

Sandman sighed. 'I know what happened,' he said. 'You were in the room where Corday was painting the Countess and someone came up the back stairs. So you took Corday down the front stairs, didn't you? You left his painting and his brushes in the Countess's bedroom and you hurried him out to the street because one of the Countess's lovers had arrived, and I know who it was. It was the Marquess of Skavadale.' Meg frowned, looked as if she was about to say something, then just stared away into the distance. 'And the Marquess of Skavadale,' Sandman went on, 'is engaged to marry a very rich heiress, and he needs that marriage because his family is short of money, desperately short. But the girl won't marry him if she knows he was having a liaison with the Countess, and the Countess was blackmailing him. She made money that way, didn't she?'

'Did she?' Meg asked tonelessly.

'You were her procuress, weren't you?'

Meg turned her small, bitter eyes on Sandman. 'I was her protector, culley, and she needed one. Too good for her own good, she was.'

'But you didn't protect her, did you?' Sandman said harshly. 'And the Marquess killed her, and you discovered that. Did you find him there? Maybe you heard the murder? Perhaps you saw it! So he hid you away and he promised you money. But one day, Meg, he'll be tired of paying you. And he's only keeping you alive until Corday is hanged, for after that no one will believe anyone else was guilty.'

Meg half smiled. 'Why didn't he kill me there and then, eh?' She stared defiantly at Sandman. 'If he killed the Countess, why wouldn't he kill the maid? Tell me that, go on!'

Sandman could not. It was, indeed, the one thing he could not explain, though everything else made sense and he believed that, in time, even that mystery would unravel. 'Perhaps he likes you?' he suggested.

Meg stared at him incredulously for a few seconds, then gave a short bark of raucous laughter. 'The likes of him?' she asked. 'Liking me? No.' She brushed an insect off her skirt. 'He let me look after the chooks, that's all. I like chooks. I've always liked chooks.'

'Captain!' Berrigan, sitting up on the coach's box, was staring north. 'Captain!' he called again. Sandman stood and walked to the carriage and stared northwards across some fields and up a low, thickly wooded hill and there, on the crest where the London road crossed the skyline and made a gash in the trees, was a group of horsemen. 'They've been looking down here,' Berrigan said, 'like they was dragoons and they was trying to work out how many redcoats they could see.'

Sandman had no telescope and the horsemen were too far away to see clearly. There were six or seven of them and Sandman had the impression, no more, that they were gazing towards the coach and that at least one of them had a telescope. 'Could be anyone,' he said.

'Could be,' Berrigan agreed, 'only Lord Robin Holloway likes to wear a white riding coat and he's got a great black horse.'

The man at the centre of the group had a white coat and was mounted on a big black horse. 'Damn,' Sandman said mildly. Had Flossie talked in the Seraphim Club? Had she revealed that Sandman had trespassed there? In which case they would surely have connected him with the missing carriage and then started to worry about Meg in Kent, and then they would send a rescue party to make sure that Sandman did not bring the girl to London, and even as he thought that so he saw the group of horsemen spur forward and disappear into the trees. 'Whip 'em on,' he told Mackeson. 'Sergeant! Get Meg into the carriage! Hurry!'

How long before the horsemen arrived? Ten minutes? Probably less. Sandman thought of turning the coach and going back to the village where there had been a crossroads, but there was no room to turn the vehicle and so, when Meg was safely bundled aboard, Mackeson urged the horses on and Sandman told him to take the first turning off the road. Any lane or farm track would do, but perversely there was none, and as the coach lurched on Sandman expected to see the horsemen appear at any second. He stared ahead, watching for the dust to show above the trees. At least the countryside was heavily wooded here, which meant that the coach would be hidden almost until they encountered the riders, and then, just as Sandman was despairing of ever finding an escape route, a narrow lane fell off to the right and he ordered Mackeson to take it.

'Rough old road, that,' Mackeson warned him.

'Just take it!'

The vehicle swung into the lane, narrowly missing the gnarled bole of an oak tree as it negotiated the sharp bend. 'I hope this goes somewhere,' Mackeson sounded amused, 'or else we're stuck to buggery.'

The coach lurched and swayed alarmingly, for the lane was nothing but deep old cart ruts that had solidified in the dry mud, but it ran between thick hedges and wide orchards and every yard took them farther from the London road. Sandman made Mackeson stop after a couple of hundred yards and then stood on the carriage roof and stared back, but he could see no horsemen on the road. Had he let his fears make him too cautious? Then Meg screamed, screamed again, and Sandman, scrambling down off the roof, heard a slap. The scream stopped and he jumped down to the road. Berrigan dropped the unbroken window. 'Only a bleeding wasp,' he said, flicking the dead insect into the hedge. 'You'd think it was a bleeding crocodile the fuss she bleeding makes!'

'I thought she was murdering you,' Sandman said, then he started to climb back up onto the coach, only to be checked by Berrigan's raised hand. He stopped, listened and heard the sound of hoofbeats.

The sound passed. The group of horsemen was on the main road, but they were not coming down this narrow lane. Sandman touched the hilt of the pistol stuck into his belt and he remembered a day up in the Pyrenees when, with a small forage party, he had been hunted by a score of dragoons. He had lost three men that day, all cut down by the straight French swords and he had only escaped because a Greenjacket officer had chanced by with a dozen men who had used their rifles to drive the horsemen away. There was no chance of a friendly rifle officer today. Would the horsemen search the lane? The hoofbeats had faded, but Sandman was reluctant to order the coach on for the vehicle was noisy, but he reflected that Meg's scream had been noisier still and that had brought no pursuers, so he hauled himself up to the box and nodded to Mackeson. 'Gently now,' he said, 'just ease her on.'

'Can't do nothing else,' Mackeson said, nodding ahead to where the lane bent sharply to the left. 'I'll have to take her on the verge, Captain, and it's a tight turn.'

'Just go slowly.' Sandman stood and looked back, but no horsemen were in sight.

'So what are we going to do?' Mackeson asked.

'There'll be a farm down here somewhere,' Sandman said, 'and if the worst comes to the worst we'll unhitch the horses, manhandle the coach round, and harness up again.'

'She ain't a vehicle built for rough roads,' Mackeson said reprovingly, but he clicked his tongue and gave an almost imperceptible tremor to the reins. The lane was narrow and the turn was excruciatingly tight, but the horses took it slowly. The carriage lurched as the wheels mounted the verge and the horses, sensing the resistance, slackened their pull so that Mackeson cracked the whip above their heads and twitched the reins again and just then the leading left wheel slid down a bank obscured by grass and dock leaves and the whole carriage tilted and Mackeson flailed for balance as Sandman gripped the handrail on the roof. The horses neighed in protest, Meg screamed in alarm, then the spokes of the wheel, taking the weight of the whole carriage in the hidden ditch, snapped one after the other and, inevitably, the wheel rim shattered and the coach lurched hard down. Mackeson had somehow managed to stay on his seat. 'I told you she ain't built for the country,' he said resentfully, 'it's a town vehicle.'

'It ain't any kind of bloody vehicle now,' Berrigan said. He had scrambled out of the canted passenger compartment and helped the two women down to the road.

'Now what will you do?' Mackeson demanded of Sandman.

Sandman teetered on the top of the coach. He was watching the road behind and listening. The wheel had broken loudly and the body of the carriage had thumped noisily onto the ditch's bank, and he thought he could hear hoofbeats again.

He drew the pistol. 'Everyone!' he snapped. 'Be quiet!'

Now he was sure he could hear the hooves, and he was certain the sound was getting closer. He cocked the pistol, jumped down to the road and waited.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The Reverend Horace Cotton, Ordinary of Newgate, seemed to crouch in his pulpit, eyes closed, as though he gathered all his forces, physical and mental, for some supreme effort. He took a breath, clenched his fists, then gave an anguished cry that echoed from the high beams of the Newgate chapel. 'Fire!' he wailed. 'Fire and pain and flames and agony! All the bestial torments of the devil await you. Fire everlasting and pain unimaginable and unassuaged weeping and the gnashing of teeth and when the pain will seem to you to be unbearable, when it will seem that no soul, not even one as rotten as yours, can endure such inflictions for a moment longer, then you will learn that it is but the beginning!' He let that last word ring about the chapel for a few seconds, then lowered his voice to a tone of sweet reason that was scarce above a whisper. 'It is but the beginning of your anguish. It is but the commencement of your punishment which will torment you through eternity. Even as the stars die and new firmaments are born, so you will scream in the fire which will rend your flesh like the tearing of a hook and like the searing of a brand.' He leant from the pulpit, his eyes wide, and stared down into the Black Pew where the two condemned men sat beside the black-painted coffin. 'You will be the playthings of demons,' he promised them, 'racked and burnt and beaten and torn. It will be pain without end. Agony without surcease. Torment without mercy.'

The silence in the chapel was broken by the sound of mallets erecting the scaffold beyond the high windows and by Charles Corday's weeping. The Reverend Cotton straightened, pleased that he had broken one of the wretches. He looked at the pews where the other prisoners sat, some waiting for their own turn in the Black Pew and others biding their time before they were taken to the ships that would carry them to Australia and oblivion. He looked higher up at the public gallery, crowded as it ever was on the day before a hanging. The worshippers in that gallery paid for the privilege of watching condemned felons listen to their burial service. It was a warm day and earlier in the service some of the women in the gallery had tried to cool themselves with fans, but no painted cardboard fluttered now. Everyone was still, everyone was silent, everyone was caught up in the terrible words that the Ordinary span like a web of doom above the heads of the two condemned men.

'It is not I who promises you this fate,' the Reverend Cotton said in warning, 'it is not I who foresees your soul's torment, but God! God has promised you this fate! Through all eternity, when the saints are gathered beside the crystal river to sing God's praises, you will scream in pain.' Charles Corday sobbed, his thin shoulders heaving and his head lowered. His leg irons, joined to an iron band about his waist, chinked slightly as he shuddered with each sob. The Keeper, in his own family pew just behind the Black Pew, frowned. He was not sure these famous sermons were of much help in keeping order within the prison, for they reduced men and women to quivering terror or else prompted an impious defiance. The Keeper would have much preferred a quiet and dignified service, mumbled and sedate, but London expected the Ordinary to put on a display and Cotton knew how to live up to those expectations.

'Tomorrow,' Cotton thundered, 'you will be taken out to the street and you will look up and see God's bright sky for the very last time, and then the hood will be placed over your eyes and the noose will be looped about your necks and you will hear the great beating of the devil's wings as he hovers in waiting for your soul. Save me, Lord, you will cry, save me!' He fluttered his hands towards the ceiling beams as if signalling to God. 'But it will be too late, too late! Your sins, your wilful sins, your own wickednesses, will have brought you to that dread scaffold where you will fall to the rope's end and there you will choke and you will twitch and you will struggle for breath, and the struggle will avail you nothing and the pain will fill you! And then the darkness will come and your souls will rise from this earthly pain to the great seat of judgement where God awaits you. God!' Cotton raised his plump hands again, this time in supplication as he repeated the word. 'God! God will be waiting for you in all His mercy and majesty, and He will examine you! He will judge you! And He will find you wanting! Tomorrow! Yes, tomorrow!' He pointed at Corday, who still had his head lowered. 'You will see God. The two of you, as clearly as I see you now, will see the dread God, the Father of us all, and He will shake His head in disappointment and he will command that you be taken from his presence, for you have sinned. You have offended Him who has never offended us. You have betrayed your maker who sent His only begotten son to be our salvation, and you will be taken from before His great throne of mercy and you will be cast down into the uttermost depths of hell. Into the flames. Into the fire. Into the everlasting pain!' He drew the sounds out into a quavering moan, and then, when he heard a gasp from a frightened woman in the public gallery, he repeated the phrase. 'Into the everlasting pain!' He shrieked the last word, paused so that the whole chapel could hear the woman sobbing in the gallery, then leant towards the Black Pew and dropped his voice into a hoarse whisper. 'And you will suffer, oh, how you will suffer, and your suffering, your torment, will commence tomorrow.' His eyes widened as his voice rose. 'Think of it! Tomorrow! When we who are left on this earth are having our breakfast you will be in agony. When the rest of us are closing our eyes and clasping our prayerful hands to say a grace of thanks to a benevolent God for providing us with our porridge, with our bacon and eggs, with toast and chops, with braised liver or even,' and here the Reverend Cotton smiled, for he liked to introduce homely touches into his sermons, 'perhaps even a dish of devilled kidneys, at that very moment you will be screaming with the first dreadful pains of eternity! And, through all eternity, those torments will become ever more dreadful, ever more agonising and ever more terrible! There will be no end to your pains, and their beginning is tomorrow.' He was leaning out from the canopied pulpit now, leaning so that his voice fell like a spear into the Black Pew. 'Tomorrow you will meet the devil. You will meet him face to face and I shall weep for you. I shall tremble for you. Yet above all I shall thank my Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, that I shall be spared your pain, and that instead I shall be given a crown of righteousness for I have been saved.' He straightened and clutched his hands to his chest. 'I have been saved! Redeemed! I have been washed in the blood of the Lamb and I have been blessed by the grace of Him who alone can take away our pain.'

The Reverend Horace Cotton paused. He was forty-five minutes into the sermon and had as long again to go. He took a sip of water as he stared down at the two prisoners. One was weeping and the other was resisting, so he would try harder.

He took a breath, summoned his powers, and preached on.

===OO=OOO=OO===

No horsemen came down the lane. The sound of their hooves sounded loud on the London road for a while, then they faded and at last vanished in the heat of the day. Somewhere, very far off, church bells began ringing the changes after matins.

'So what are you going to do?' Mackeson asked again, this time with an undisguised note of triumph. He sensed that the wreck of the coach had ruined Sandman's chances and his pleasure in that gave him a kind of revenge for the humiliations that had been heaped on him over the last day and two nights.

'What I'm going to do,' Sandman retorted, 'is none of your damn business, but what you're going to do is stay here with the carriage. Sergeant? Cut the horses out of the traces.'

'I can't stay here!' Mackeson protested.

'Then start bloody walking,' Sandman snarled, then turned on Meg and Sally. 'You two are riding bareback,' he said.

'I can't ride,' Meg protested.

'Then you'll bloody well walk to London!' Sandman said, his temper slipping dangerously. 'And I'll make damn sure you do!' He snatched the whip from Mackeson.

'She'll ride, Captain,' Sally said laconically, and sure enough, when the team was cut from the traces, Meg obediently scrambled up the unfolded carriage steps to sit on a horse's broad back with her legs dangling down one flank and with her hands gripping the fillet strap that ran along the mare's spine. She looked terrified while Sally, even without a saddle, appeared graceful.

'What now?' Berrigan asked.

'Main road,' Sandman said, and he and the Sergeant led all four horses back along the lane. It was a risk using the London road, but the horsemen, if they were indeed looking for the missing carriage, had taken their search southwards. Sandman walked cautiously, but they met no one until they came to a village where a dog chased after the horses and Meg screamed for fear when her mare skittered sideways. A woman came out of a cottage and slapped at the dog with a broom.

A milestone just beyond the village said that London was forty-two miles away. 'A long day ahead,' Berrigan said.

'Day and night,' Sandman said gloomily.

'I ain't staying up here all day and night,' Meg complained.

'You'll do as you're told,' Sandman said, but at the next village Meg began to scream that she had been snatched from her home and a small indignant crowd followed the plodding horses until the village rector, a napkin tucked into his neck because he had been plucked from his dinner table, came to investigate the noise.

'She's mad,' Sandman told the priest.

'Mad?' The rector looked up at Meg and shuddered at the malevolence in her face.

'I've been kidnapped!' she screamed.

'We're taking her to London,' Sandman explained, 'to see the doctors.'

'They're stealing me!' Meg shouted.

'She's got bats in her belfry,' Sally said helpfully.

'I've done nothing!' Meg shouted, then she dropped to the ground and tried to run away, but Sandman ran after her, tripped her, and then knelt beside her. 'I'll break your bloody neck, girl,' he hissed at her.

The rector, a plump man with a shock of white hair, tried to pull Sandman away. 'I'd like to talk with the girl,' he said. 'I insist on talking to her.'

'Read this first,' Sandman said, remembering the Home Secretary's letter and handing it to the rector. Meg, sensing trouble in the letter, tried to snatch it away and the rector, impressed by the Home Office seal, stepped away from her to read the crumpled paper. 'But if she's mad,' he said to Sandman when he had finished reading, 'why is Viscount Sidmouth involved?'

'I'm not mad!' Meg protested.

'In truth,' Sandman spoke to the rector in a low voice, 'she's wanted for a murder, but I don't want to frighten your parishioners. Better for them to think that she's ill, yes?'

'Quite right, quite right.' The priest looked alarmed and thrust the letter back at Sandman as though it were contagious. 'But maybe you should tie her hands?'

'You hear that?' Sandman turned on Meg. 'He says I should tie your hands, and I will if you make more noise.'

She recognised defeat and began to swear viciously, which only made the rector believe Sandman's claim. He began using his napkin like a fly-swatter to drive his parishioners away from the cursing girl who, seeing that her bid for freedom had failed, and fearing that Sandman would pinion her if she did not cooperate, used a stone watering trough as a mounting block to get back onto her horse. She was still swearing as they left the village.

They trudged on. They were all tired, all irritable, and the heat and the long road sapped Sandman's strength. His clothes felt sticky and filthy, and he could feel a blister growing on his right heel. He was still limping because of the damage he had done to his ankle jumping onto the stage of the Covent Garden theatre, but like all infantryman he believed the best way to cure a sprain was to walk it out. Even so it had been a long time since he had walked this far. Sally encouraged him to ride, but he wanted to keep a spare horse fresh and so he shook his head and then fell into the mindless trudge of the soldier's march, scarce noticing the landscape as his thoughts skittered back to the long dusty roads of Spain and the scuff of his company's boots and the wheat growing on the verges where the seeds had fallen from the commissary carts. Even then he had rarely ridden his horse, preferring to keep the animal fresh.

'What happens when we get to London?' Berrigan broke the silence after they had passed through yet another village.

Sandman blinked as though he had just woken up. The sun was sinking, he saw, and the church bells were calling for evensong. 'Meg is going to tell the truth,' he answered after a while. She snorted in derision and Sandman held his temper in check. 'Meg,' he said gently, 'you want to go back to the Marquess's house, is that it? You want to go back to your chickens?'

'You know I do,' she said.

'Then you can,' he said, 'but first you're going to tell part of the truth.'

'Part of?' Sally asked, intrigued.

'Part of the truth,' Sandman insisted. He had, without realising it, been thinking about his dilemma and suddenly the answer seemed clear. He had not been hired to discover the Countess's murderer, but rather to determine whether or not Corday was guilty. So that was all he would tell the Home Secretary. 'It doesn't matter,' he told Meg, 'who killed the Countess. All that matters is that you know Corday did not. You took him out of her bedroom while she was still alive, and that's all I want you to tell the Home Secretary.'

She just stared at him.

That is the truth, isn't it?' Sandman asked. She still said nothing, and he sighed. 'Meg, you can go back to the Marquess's house. You can do whatever you want with the rest of your life, but first you have to tell that one small part of the truth. You know Corday is innocent, don't you?'

And, at last, at long last, she nodded. 'I saw him out the street door,' she said softly.

'And the Countess was still alive?'

'Of course she was,' Meg said. 'She told him to come back the next afternoon, but by then he was arrested.'

'And you'll tell that to the Home Secretary?'

She hesitated, then nodded. 'I'll tell him that,' she said, 'and that's all I'll tell him.'

'Thank you,' Sandman said.

A milestone told him that Charing Cross lay eighteen miles ahead. The city's smoke filled the sky like a brown fog while to his right, glimpsed through the folds of darkening hills, the shining Thames lay flat as a blade. Sandman's tiredness vanished. Part of the truth, he thought, would be enough and his job, thank God, would be done.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Jemmy Botting, hangman of England, came to Old Bailey in the early evening to inspect the finished scaffold. One or two passers by, recognising him, called out ironic greetings, but Botting ignored them.

He had little to inspect. He took it on trust that the beams were properly bolted together, the planks nailed down and the baize properly secured. The platform did sway a little, but it always had and the motion was no worse than being on the deck of a ship in a very slight swell. He pulled the peg that held the trapdoor's support beam in place, then went down below into the gloom beneath the platform where he seized the rope that tugged the beam free. It gave way with a judder, then the trapdoor swung down to let in a wash of evening sunlight.

Botting did not like that judder. No one had been standing on the trapdoor, yet still the beam had been reluctant to move, so he opened his bag and took out a small jar of tallow that had been a gift from the chandler. He climbed the wooden framework and greased the beam until its surface felt slippery, then he raised the trapdoor and clumsily pushed the beam back into place. Two rats watched him and he growled at them. He clambered down to the Old Bailey's cobbles and pulled the rope again and this time the beam slid easily and the trapdoor thumped down to bang against two of the upright supports. 'Bloody works, eh?' Botting said to the rats that were quite unafraid of his presence.

He replaced the trapdoor and beam, put the tallow back in his bag and climbed to the top of the scaffold where he first replaced the locking peg, then gingerly tested the firmness of the trapdoor by putting one foot on its planks and slowly easing his weight onto that leg. He knew it was secure, knew it would not give way beneath him, yet still he tested it. He did not want to become London's laughing stock by pushing a prisoner onto a trap that gave way before the rope was round the man's neck. He grinned at the thought, then, confident that all was ready, he went to the Debtor's Door and knocked loudly. He would be given dinner in the prison, then provided with a small bedroom above the Lodge. 'Got any rat poison?' he asked the turnkey who opened the door. 'Only there's rats the size of bleeding foxes under the scaffold. That platform can't have been up more than two hours yet there's already rats there.'

'Rats everywhere,' the turnkey said, then locked the door.

Beneath them, even though it was a warm evening, the cellars of Newgate Prison held a chill and so, before Charles Corday and the other condemned man were put into the death cell, a coal fire was lit in the small hearth. The chimney did not draw well at first and the cell filled with smoke, but then the flue heated and the air cleared, though the stench of coal smoke stayed. A metal chamber pot was put in a corner of the cell, though no screen was provided for privacy. Two iron cots with straw palliasses and thin blankets were put by the wall and a table and chairs were provided for the turnkeys who would watch the prisoners through the night. Lamps were hung from iron hooks. At dusk the two men who would die in the morning were brought to the cell and given a meal of pease pottage, pork chops and boiled cabbage. The Keeper came to see them during their supper and he thought, as he waited for them to finish their meal, that the two men were so utterly dissimilar. Charles Corday was slight, pale and nervous while Reginald Venables was a hulking brute with a lavish dark beard and a grimly hard face, yet it was Corday who had committed murder while Venables was being hanged for the theft of a watch.

Corday merely picked at his food then, his leg irons clanking, went to his cot where he lay down and gazed wide-eyed at the damp stones of the vaulted ceiling. 'Tomorrow…' the Keeper began as Venables finished his meal.

'I hope that damn preacher won't be there,' Venables interrupted.

'Silence while the Keeper's talking,' the senior turnkey growled.

'The preacher will be there,' the Keeper said, 'to offer what spiritual comfort he can.' He waited as the turnkey removed the spoons from the table. 'Tomorrow,' he started again, 'you will be taken from here to the Association Room where your irons will be struck and your arms pinioned. You will already have been given breakfast, but there will be brandy for you in the Association Room and I advise you to drink it. After that we walk to the street.' He paused. Venables watched him with a resentful eye while Corday seemed oblivious. 'It is customary,' the Keeper went on, 'to slip the hangman a coin because he can make your passage to the next world less painful. Such an emolument is not something of which I can approve, but he is an officer of the city, not of the jail, and so I can do nothing to end the practice. But even without such an emolument you will find that your punishment is not painful and is soon done.'

'Bloody liar,' Venables snarled.

'Silence!'

'It's all right, Mister Carlisle,' the Keeper said to the offended turnkey. 'Some men,' he continued, 'go unwilling to the scaffold and attempt to hinder the necessary work. They do not succeed. If you resist, if you struggle, if you try to inconvenience us, then you will still be hanged, but you will be hanged painfully. It is best to cooperate. It is easier for you and easier for your loved ones who might be watching.'

'Easier for you, you mean,' Venables observed.

'No duties are easy,' the Keeper said sanctimoniously, 'not if they are done with proper assiduity.' He moved to the door. 'The turnkeys will stay here all night. If you require spiritual comfort then they can summon the Ordinary. I wish you a good night.'

Corday spoke for the first time. 'I'm innocent,' he said, his voice close to breaking.

'Yes,' the Keeper said, embarrassed, 'yes indeed.' He found he had nothing more to say on the subject so he just nodded to the turnkeys. 'Good night, gentlemen.'

'Good night, sir,' Mister Carlisle, the senior turnkey, responded, then stood to attention until the Keeper's footsteps had faded down the passage. Then he relaxed and turned to look at the two prisoners. 'You want spiritual bloody comfort,' he growled, 'then you don't disturb me and you don't disturb the Reverend Cotton, but you get down on your bloody knees and disturb Him up there by asking Him for bloody forgiveness. Right, George,' he turned to his companion, 'spades are trumps, is that right?'

In the Birdcage Walk, which was the underground passage that led from the prison to the courtrooms of the Session House, two felons were working with pickaxes and spades. Lanterns had been hung from the passage ceiling and the flagstones, great slabs of granite, had been pried up and stacked to one side. A stench now filled the passageway; a noxious stink of gas, lime and rotted flesh.

'Christ!' one of the felons said, recoiling from the smell.

'You won't find Him down there,' a turnkey said, backing away from the space that had been cleared of its flagstones. When the Birdcage Walk had been built the paving slabs had been laid direct on the London clay, but this clay had a mottled, dark look in the uncertain light of the guttering lanterns.

'When was this bit of the passage last used?' one of the prisoners asked.

'Got to be two years ago,' the turnkey said, but sounded dubious, 'at least two years.'

'Two years?' the prisoner said scornfully. 'They're still bloody breathing down there.'

'Just get it over with, Tom,' the turnkey encouraged him, 'then you get this.' He held up a bottle of brandy.

'God bloody help us,' Tom said gloomily, then took a deep breath and struck down with his spade.

He and his companion were digging the graves for the two men who would be executed in the morning. Some of the bodies were taken for dissection, but hungry as the anatomists were for bodies they could not take them all and so most were brought here and put into unmarked graves. Although the passage was short and the prison buried the corpses in quicklime to hasten their decomposition, and though they dug up the floor in a strict rotation so that no part of it was excavated too soon after a burial, still the picks and spades struck down into bones and rotting, deliquescent clay. The whole floor was buckled, looking as though it had been deformed by an earthquake, but in truth it was merely the flagstones settling as the bodies decomposed beneath. Yet, though the passage stank and the clay was choked with unrotted flesh, still more corpses were brought and thrust down into the filth.

Tom, ankle-deep in the hole, brought out a yellow skull that he rolled down the passageway. 'He looks in the pink, don't he?' he said, and the two turnkeys and the second prisoner began to laugh and somehow could not stop.

Mister Botting ate lamb chops, boiled potatoes, and turnips. The Keeper's kitchen provided a syrup pudding to follow, then a tin mug of strong tea and a beaker of brandy. Afterwards Mister Botting slept.

Two watchmen stood guard on the scaffold. Just after midnight the skies clouded over and a brief shower blew chill from Ludgate Hill. A handful of folk, eager for the best positions by the railings that fenced off the gallows, were sleeping on the cobbles and were woken by the rain. They grumbled, shrugged deeper into their blankets and tried to sleep again.

Dawn came early. The clouds shredded, leaving a pearl-white sky laced with the frayed brown streaks of coal smoke. London stirred.

And in Newgate there would be devilled kidneys for breakfast.

CHAPTER TEN

Sally's horse, a gelding, had fallen lame just after Sunday's nightfall, then Berrigan's right boot had lost its sole, so they tied the gelding to a tree, Berrigan scrambled onto the back of the third horse and Sandman, whose boots were just holding together, led the two girls' horses. 'If we don't return all the horses to the Seraphim Club,' Sandman remarked, worrying about the beast they had simply abandoned, 'they could accuse us of horse thieving.'

'They could hang us for that,' Berrigan retorted, then grinned, 'but I wouldn't worry about it, Captain. With what I know about the Seraphim Club they ain't going to accuse us of anything.'

The remaining three horses were so bone tired that Sandman reckoned they would probably have made faster progress by leaving them behind, but Meg had resigned herself to telling the partial truth and he did not want to disturb her by suggesting she walk, especially after she began complaining again, saying her chickens would be eaten by the foxes, but then Sally had begun singing and that stopped the whining. Sally's first song was a soldier's favourite, 'The Drum Major', that told of a girl so in love with her redcoat that she followed him into the regiment where she became the drum major and escaped detection till she took a bath in a stream and was almost raped by another soldier. She escaped him, the officers discovered her identity and insisted she marry her lover. 'I like stories that end happily,' Berrigan had remarked, then laughed when Sally began her second song, which was also a soldier's favourite, but this one was about a girl who did not escape and Sandman was somewhat shocked, but not too surprised, that Sally knew all the words, and Berrigan sang along and Meg actually laughed when the Colonel took his turn and failed to perform, and Sally had still been singing when the robin redbreast pounced on them from behind a hollow tree beside the road.

The patrolling horseman suspected that the four bedraggled travellers had stolen the three carriage horses, in which he was not far wrong, and he faced them with one of his pistols drawn. The gun's muzzle and the steel buttons on his uniform blue coat and red waistcoat shone in the moonlight. 'In the name of the King,' he said, not wanting to be mistaken for a highwayman, 'stand! Who are you? And where are you travelling?'

'Your name?' Sandman had snapped the question back. 'Your name, rank? What regiment did you serve in?' The redbreasts were all men who had served in the cavalry. None was young, for it was reckoned that a young man would be too amenable to temptation, and so steadier, older and well-recommended cavalrymen were hired to try to keep the thieves off the King's highways.

'I ask the questions here,' the redbreast had retorted, but tentatively because there was an undeniable authority in Sandman's voice. Sandman might be in dusty, crumpled clothes, but he had plainly been an officer.

'Put the gun up! Quickly, man!' Sandman said, deliberately talking to the redbreast as though he was still in the army. 'I'm on official business, authorised by Viscount Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, and this paper bears his seal and signature, and if you cannot read then you had better take us right now to your magistrate.'

The redbreast carefully lowered the flint of the pistol, then slid the weapon into its saddle holster. 'Lost your coach, sir?'

'Broke a wheel thirty miles back,' Sandman said. 'Now, are you going to read this letter or would you rather take us to your magistrate?'

'I'm sure everything's in order, sir.' The patrolling redbreast did not want to admit that he could not read and certainly did not want to disturb his supervising magistrate who would, by now, have sat down to a lavish supper, and so he just moved his horse aside to let Sandman and his three companions pass. Sandman supposed he could have insisted on being taken to the magistrate and used his letter from the Home Office to arrange another carriage or, at the very least, four fresh saddle horses, but that would all have taken time, a lot of time, and it would have disturbed Meg's fragile equanimity, and so they walked on until, well after midnight, they trailed across London Bridge and so to the Wheatsheaf where Sally took Meg to her own room and Sandman let Berrigan use his room while he collapsed in the back parlour, not in one of the big chairs, but on the wooden floor so that he would wake frequently, and it was when the bells of Saint Giles were ringing six in the morning that he dragged himself upstairs, woke Berrigan and told him to stir the girls from their beds. Then he shaved, found his cleanest shirt, brushed his coat and washed the dirt from his disintegrating boots before, at half past six, with Berrigan, Sally and a very reluctant Meg in tow, he set out for Great George Street and the end, he hoped, of his investigation.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Lord Alexander Pleydell and his friend, Lord Christopher Carne, almost gagged when they entered the Press Yard for the smell was terrible, worse than the reek of the sewer outflows where the Fleet Ditch joined the Thames. The turnkey who was escorting them chuckled. 'I don't notice the smell no more, my lords,' he said, 'but I do suppose it's mortal bad in its way, mortal bad. Mind the steps here, my lords, do mind 'em.'

Lord Alexander gingerly took the handkerchief away from his nose. 'Why is it called the Press Yard?'

'In days gone by, my lord, this is where the prisoners was pressed. They was squashed, my lord. Weighted down by stones, my lord, to persuade them to tell the truth. We don't do it any longer, more's the pity, and as a consequence they lies like India rugs.'

'You squeezed them to death?' Lord Alexander asked, shocked.

'Oh no, my lord, not to death. Not to death, not unless they made a mistake and piled too many rocks on!' He chuckled, finding the notion amusing. 'No, my lord, they just got squashed till they told the truth. It's a fair persuader to a man or woman to tell the truth, my lord, if they're carrying half a ton of rocks on their chests!' The turnkey chuckled again. He was a fat man with leather breeches, a stained coat, and a stout billy club. 'Hard to breathe,' he said, still amused, 'very hard to breathe.'

Lord Christopher Carne shuddered at the terrible stench. 'Are there no drains?' he enquired testily.

'The prison is very up to date, my lord,' the turnkey hastened to assure him, 'very up to date, it is, with the proper drains and proper close stools. Truth is, my lord, we spoils them, we does, we spoils them, but they is filthy animals. They fouls their own nest what we give them clean and tidy.' He put down his billy club as he closed and bolted the barred gate by which they had entered the yard that was long, high and narrow. The stones of the yard seemed damp, even on this dry day, as though the misery and fear of centuries had soaked into the granite and could not be wrung out.

'If you no longer press the prisoners,' Lord Alexander enquired, 'what is the yard used for instead?'

'The condemned have the freedom of the Press Yard, sir, during the daylight hours,' the turnkey said, 'which is an example, my lords, of how kindly disposed towards 'em we are. We spoils them, we do. There was a time when a prison was a prison, not a glorified tavern.'

'Liquor is sold here?' Lord Alexander enquired acidly.

'Not any longer, my lord. Mister Brown, that's the Keeper, my lord, closed down the grog shop on account that the scum was getting lushed and disorderly, my lord, but not that it makes any difference 'cos now they just have their liquor sent in from the Lamb or the Magpie and Stump.' He cocked an ear to the sound of a church bell tolling the quarter hour. 'Bless me! Saint Sepulchre's telling us it's a quarter to seven already! If you turn to your left, my lords, you can join Mister Brown and the other gentlemen in the Association Room.'

'The Association Room?' Lord Alexander enquired.

'Where the condemned associate, my lord, during the daylight hours,' the turnkey explained, 'except on high days and holidays like today, and those windows to your left, my lord, those are the salt boxes.'

Lord Alexander, despite his opposition to the hanging of criminals, found himself curiously fascinated by everything he saw and now gazed at the fifteen barred windows. 'That name,' he said, 'salt boxes. You know its derivation?'

'Nor its inclination, my lord,' the turnkey laughed, 'only I suspects that they're called salt boxes on account of being stacked up like boxes.'

'The salt b-boxes are what?' Lord Christopher, who was very pallid this morning, asked.

'Really, Kit,' Lord Alexander said with uncalled-for asperity, 'everyone knows they're where the condemned spend their last days.'

'The devil's waiting rooms, my lord,' the turnkey said, then pulled open the Association Room door and ostentatiously held out his hand, palm upward.

Lord Alexander, who took pride in his notions of equality, was about to force himself to shake the turnkey's hand, then realised the significance of the palm. 'Ah,' he said, taken aback, but hurriedly fished in his pocket and brought out the first coin he found. 'Thank you, my good man,' he said.

'Thank you, your lordship, thank you,' the turnkey said and then, to his astonishment, saw he had been tipped a whole sovereign and hastily pulled off his hat and tugged his forelock. 'God bless you, my lord, God bless.'

William Brown, the Keeper, hurried to meet his two new guests. He had met neither man before, but recognised Lord Alexander by his clubbed foot and so took off his hat and bowed respectfully. 'Your lordship is most welcome.'

'Brown, is it?' Lord Alexander asked.

'William Brown, my lord, yes. Keeper of Newgate, my lord.'

'Lord Christopher Carne,' Lord Alexander introduced his friend with a rather vague wave of the hand. 'His stepmother's murderer is being hanged today.'

The Keeper bowed again, this time to Lord Christopher. 'I do trust your lordship finds the experience both a revenge and a comfort, and will you now permit me to name the Ordinary of Newgate?' He led them to where a stout man in an old-fashioned wig, a cassock, surplice and Geneva Bands was waiting with a smile on his plump face. 'The Reverend Doctor Horace Cotton,' the Keeper said.

'Your lordship is most welcome,' Cotton bowed to Lord Alexander. 'I believe your lordship is, like me, in holy orders?'

'I am,' Lord Alexander said, 'and this is my particular friend, Lord Christopher Carne, who also hopes to take orders one day.'

'Ah!' Cotton clasped his hands prayerfully and momentarily raised his eyes to the rafters. 'I deem it a blessing,' he said, 'when our nobility, the true leaders of our society, are seen to be Christians. It is a shining example for the common ruck, don't you agree? And you, my lord,' he turned to Lord Christopher, 'I understand that this morning you will see justice done for the grave insult committed against your family?'

'I hope to,' Lord Christopher said.

'Oh, really, Kit!' Lord Alexander expostulated. 'The revenge your family seeks will be provided in eternity by the fires of hell

'Praise Him!' the Ordinary interjected.

'And it is neither seemly nor civilised of us to hurry men to that condign fate,' Lord Alexander finished.

The Keeper looked astonished. 'You would surely not abolish the punishment of hanging, my lord?'

'Hang a man,' Lord Alexander said, 'and you deny him the chance of repentance. You deny him the chance of being pricked, day and night, by his conscience. It should be sufficient, I would have thought, to simply transport all felons to Australia. I am reliably informed it is a living hell.'

'They will suffer from their consciences in the real hell,' Cotton put in.

'So they will, sir,' Lord Alexander said, 'so they will, but I would rather a man came to repentance in this world, for he surely has no chance of salvation in the next. By execution we deny men their chance of God's grace.'

'It's a novel argument,' Cotton allowed, though dubiously.

Lord Christopher had been listening to this conversation with a harried look and now blurted out an intervention. 'Are you,' he stared at the Ordinary, 'related to Henry Cotton?'

The conversation died momentarily, killed by Lord Christopher's sudden change of tack. 'To whom, my lord?' the Ordinary enquired.

'Henry Cotton,' Lord Christopher said. He seemed to be in the grip of some very powerful emotion, as if he found being inside Newgate Prison almost unbearable. He was pale, there was sweat on his brow, and his hands were trembling. 'He was G-Greek reader at Christ Church,' he explained, 'and is now the sub librarian at the Bodleian.'

The Ordinary took a step away from Lord Christopher, who looked as if he was about to be ill. 'I had thought, my lord,' the Ordinary said, 'to be connected instead with the Viscount Combermere. Distantly.'

'Henry Cotton is a g-good fellow,' Lord Christopher said, 'a very good fellow. A sound scholar.'

'He's a pedant,' Lord Alexander growled. 'Related to Combermere, are you, Sir Stapleton Cotton as was? He almost lost his right arm at the battle of Salamanca and what a tragic loss that would have been.'

'Oh indeed,' the Ordinary agreed piously.

'You are not usually tender about soldiers,' Lord Christopher observed to his friend.

'Combermere can be a very astute batsman,' Lord Alexander said, 'especially against twisting balls. Do you play cricket, Cotton?'

'No, my lord.'

'It's good for the wind,' Lord Alexander declared mysteriously, then turned to offer a lordly inspection of the Association Room, staring up at the ceiling beams, rapping one of the tables, then peering at the cooking pots and cauldrons stacked by the embers of the fire. 'I see our felons live in some comfort,' he remarked, then frowned at his friend. 'Are you quite well, Kit?'

'Oh yes, indeed, yes,' Lord Christopher said hastily, but he looked anything but well. There were beads of sweat on his brow and his skin was paler than usual. He took off his spectacles and polished them with a handkerchief. 'It is just that the apprehension of seeing a man launched into eternity is conducive to reflection,' he explained, 'very conducive. It is not an experience to be taken lightly.'

'I should think not indeed,' Lord Alexander said, then turned an imperious eye on the other breakfast guests who seemed to be looking forward to the morning's events with an unholy glee. Three of them, standing close to the door, laughed at a jest and Lord Alexander scowled at them. 'Poor Corday,' he said.

'Why do you pity the man, my lord?' the Reverend Cotton asked.

'It seems likely he is innocent,' Lord Alexander said, 'but it seems proof of that innocence has not been found.'

'If he was innocent, my lord,' the Ordinary observed with a patronising smile, 'then I am confident that the Lord God would have revealed that to us.'

'You're saying you have never hanged an innocent man or woman?' Lord Alexander demanded.

'God would not allow it,' the Reverend Cotton averred.

'Then God had better get his boots on this morning,' Lord Alexander said, then turned as a barred door at the other end of the room opened with a sudden and harsh squeal. For a heartbeat no one appeared in the doorway and it seemed as though all the guests held their breath, but then, to an audible gasp, a short and burly man carrying a stout leather bag stumped into sight. The man was red-faced and dressed in brown gaiters, black breeches and a black coat that was buttoned too tightly over his protuberant belly. He respectfully pulled off a shabby brown hat when he saw the waiting gentry, but he offered no greeting and no one in the Association Room acknowledged his arrival.

'That's the man Botting,' the Ordinary whispered.

'Ponderous sort of name for a hangman,' Lord Alexander observed in a tactlessly loud voice. 'Ketch, now, that's a proper hangman's name. But Botting? Sounds like a disease of cattle.'

Botting shot a hostile glance at the tall, red-haired Lord Alexander who was quite unmoved by the animosity, though Lord Christopher recoiled a step, perhaps in horror at the hangman's beef-like face that was disfigured by warts, wens and scars and subject to involuntary grimaces every few seconds. Botting gave the other guests a sardonic look, then heaved a bench aside so he could drop his leather bag onto a table. He unbuckled the bag and, conscious of being watched, brought out four coils of thin white cord. He placed the coils on the table and then took from the bag two heavy ropes, each with a noose at one end and a spliced eye at the other. He placed the two ropes on the table, added two white cotton bags, then stepped smartly back a pace. 'Good morning, sir,' he said to the Keeper.

'Oh, Botting!' The Keeper's surprised tone suggested he had only just noticed the hangman's presence. 'And a very good morning to you, too.'

'And a nice one it is, sir,' Botting said. 'Hardly a cloud up aloft, hardly one. Still just the two clients today, sir?'

'Just the two, Botting.'

'There's a fair crowd for them,' Botting said, 'not over large, but fair enough.'

'Good, good,' the Keeper said vaguely.

'Botting!' Lord Alexander intervened, pacing forward with his crippled foot clumping heavily on the scarred floorboards. 'Tell me, Botting, is it true that you hang members of the aristocracy with a silken rope?' Botting looked astonished at being addressed by one of the Keeper's guests, and even more by such an extraordinary figure as the Reverend Lord Alexander Pleydell with his shock of red hair, hawklike nose and gangly figure. 'Well?' Lord Alexander demanded peremptorily. 'Is it so? I have heard it is, but on matters concerning hanging then you, surely, are the fons et origo of reliable information. Would you not concur?'

'A silken rope, sir?' Botting asked weakly.

'My lord,' the Ordinary corrected him.

'My lord! Ha!' Botting said, recovering his equanimity and amused at the thought that perhaps Lord Alexander was contemplating being executed. 'I hates to disappoint you, my lord,' he said, 'but I wouldn't know where to lay hands on a silken rope. Not a silken one. Now this,' Botting caressed one of the nooses on the table, 'is the best Bridport hemp, my lord, fine as you could discover anywhere, and I can always lay hands on quality Bridport hemp. But silk? That's a horse of a different colour, my lord, and I wouldn't even know where to look. No, my lord. If ever I has the high privilege of hanging a nobleman I'll be doing it with Bridport hemp, same as I would for anyone else.'

'And quite right too, my good man.' Lord Alexander beamed approval at the hangman's levelling instincts. 'Well done! Thank you.'

'You will forgive me, my lord?' The Keeper gestured that Lord Alexander should step away from the wide central aisle between the tables.

'I'm in the way?' Lord Alexander sounded surprised.

'Only momentarily, my lord,' the Keeper said, and just then Lord Alexander heard the clank of irons and the shuffle of feet. The other guests drew themselves up and made their faces solemn. Lord Christopher Carne took a step back, his face even paler than before, then turned to face the door that led from the Press Yard.

A turnkey came in first. He knuckled his forehead to the Keeper, then stood beside a low slab of timber that squatted on the floor. The turnkey held a stout hammer and a metal punch and Lord Alexander wondered what their purpose was, but he did not like to ask, and then the guests closest to the door hauled off their hats because the Sheriff and Under-Sheriff were ushering the two prisoners into the Association Room.

'Brandy, sir?' One of the Keeper's servants appeared beside Lord Christopher Carne.

'Thank you.' Lord Christopher could not take his eyes from the slender, pale young man who had come first through the door with legs weighed down by the heavy irons. 'That,' he said to the servant, 'that is Corday?'

'It is, my lord, yes.'

Lord Christopher gulped down the brandy and reached for another.

And the two bells, the prison tocsin and the bell of Saint Sepulchre's, began to toll for those about to die.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Sandman expected the door of the Great George Street house to be opened by a servant, but instead it was Sebastian Witherspoon, Viscount Sidmouth's private secretary, who raised his eyebrows in astonishment. 'An unseemly hour, Captain?' Witherspoon observed, then frowned at Sandman's dishevelled state and the ragged looks of his three companions. 'I do trust you have not all come expecting breakfast?' he said in a voice dripping with contempt.

'This woman,' Sandman did not bother with the niceties of a greeting, 'can testify that Charles Corday is not the murderer of the Countess of Avebury.'

Witherspoon dabbed at his lips with a napkin stained with egg yolk. He glanced at Meg, then shrugged as if to suggest that her testimony was worthless. 'How very inconvenient,' he murmured.

'Viscount Sidmouth is here?' Sandman demanded.

'We are at work, Sandman,' Witherspoon said severely. 'His lordship, as you doubtless know, is a widower and since his sad loss he has sought consolation in hard work. He begins early and works late and does not brook disturbance.'

'This is work,' Sandman said.

Witherspoon looked again at Meg and this time he seemed to notice her looks. 'Must I remind you,' he said, 'that the boy has been found guilty and the law is due to take its course in one hour? I really cannot see what can be done at this late juncture.'

Sandman stepped back from the door. 'My compliments to Lord Sidmouth,' he said, 'and tell him we are going to seek an audience with the Queen.' He had no idea whether the Queen would receive him, but he was quite sure Witherspoon and the Home Secretary did not want the animosity of the royal family, not when there were honours and pensions to be had from the crown. 'Her Majesty, I believe' Sandman went on, 'has taken an interest in this case and will doubtless be intrigued to hear of your cavalier attitude. Good day, Witherspoon.'

'Captain!' Witherspoon pulled the door wide open. 'Captain! You had better come in.'

They were shown into an empty parlour. The house, though it was in an expensive street close to the Houses of Parliament, had a makeshift air. It was not permanently lived in, but was plainly let on short leases to politicians like Lord Sidmouth who needed a temporary refuge. The only furniture in the parlour was a pair of stuffed armchairs, both with faded covers, and a heavy desk with a thronelike chair behind. A beautifully bound prayer book lay on the desk next to an untidy pile of regional newspapers which all had articles ringed in ink. Sandman, when they were left alone in the drab parlour, saw that the marked articles were accounts of riots. Folk up and down Britain were taking to the streets to protest against the price of corn or the introduction of machinery to the mills. 'I sometimes think,' Sandman said, 'that the modern world is a very sad place.'

'Has its consolations, Captain,' Berrigan said carelessly, glancing at Sally.

'Riots, rick burning,' Sandman said. 'It never used to be like this! The damned French let anarchy into the world.'

Berrigan smiled. 'Things used to be better in the old days, eh? Nothing but cricket and cream?'

'When we weren't fighting the Frogs? Yes, it did seem like that.'

'No, Captain,' the Sergeant shook his head, 'you just had money then. Everything's easier when you've got cash.'

'Amen to that,' Sally said fervently, then turned as the door opened and Witherspoon ushered in the Home Secretary.

Viscount Sidmouth was wearing a patterned silk dressing gown over his shirt and trousers. He was newly shaven and his white skin had a sheen as though it had been stretched and polished. His eyes, as ever, were cold and disapproving. 'It seems, Captain Sandman,' he said acidly, 'that you choose to inconvenience us?'

'I choose nothing of the sort, my lord,' Sandman said belligerently.

Sidmouth frowned at the tone, then looked at Berrigan and the two women. The sound of crockery being cleared came from deeper in the house and made Sandman realise how hungry he was. 'So,' the Home Secretary said with distaste in his voice, 'who do you bring me?'

'My associates, Sergeant Berrigan and Miss Hood…'

'Associates?' Sidmouth was amused.

'I must acknowledge their assistance, my lord, as no doubt Her Majesty will when she learns the outcome of our enquiries.'

That not so subtle hint made the Home Secretary grimace. He looked at Meg and almost recoiled from the force of her small eyes and the sight of her mangled teeth and pocked skin. 'And you, madam?' he asked coldly.

'Miss Margaret Hargood,' Sandman introduced her, 'who was a maid to the Countess of Avebury and was present in the Countess's bedroom on the day of her murder. She personally escorted Charles Corday from the bedroom before the murder, she saw him out of the house and can testify he did not return. In short, my lord, she can witness that Corday is innocent.' Sandman spoke with a deal of pride and satisfaction. He was tired, he was hungry, his ankle hurt and his boots and clothes showed the effects of walking from Kent to London, but by God he had discovered the truth.

Sidmouth's lips, already thin, compressed into a bloodless line as he looked at Meg. 'Is it true, woman?'

Meg drew herself up. She was not in the least awed by his lordship, but instead looked him up and down, then sniffed. 'I don't know nothing,' she said.

'I beg your pardon?' The Home Secretary blanched at the insolence in her voice.

'He comes and kidnaps me!' Meg shrieked, pointing at Sandman. 'Which he got no bleeding right to do! Takes me away from my chooks. He can fake away off where he came from, and what do I care who killed her? Or who dies for her?'

'Meg,' Sandman tried to plead with her.

'Get your bleeding paws off me!'

'Dear God,' Viscount Sidmouth said in a pained voice, and backed towards the door. 'Witherspoon,' he said, 'we are wasting our time.'

'Got ever such big wasps in Australia,' Sally said, 'begging your lordship's pardon.'

Even Viscount Sidmouth with his thin, barren lawyer's mind was not oblivious of Sally's charms. In the dark room she was like a ray of sunlight and he actually smiled at her, even though he did not understand her meaning. 'I beg your pardon?' he said to her.

'Ever such big wasps in Australia,' Sally said, 'and that's where this mollisher's going on account that she didn't give her testimony at Charlie's trial. She should have done, but she didn't. Protecting her man, see? And you're going to transport her, aren't you, my lord?' Sally reinforced this rhetorical question with a graceful curtsey.

The Home Secretary frowned. 'Transportation? It is for the courts, my dear, not me to decide on who should be…' His voice suddenly tailed away for he was staring with astonishment at Meg, who was shivering with fear.

'Very large wasps in Australia,' Sandman said, 'famously so.'

'Aculeata Gigantus,' Witherspoon contributed rather impressively.

'No!' Meg cried.

'Big ones,' Sally said with extraordinary relish, 'with stingers like hatpins.'

'He didn't do it!' Meg said, 'and I don't want to go to Australia!'

Sidmouth was looking at her much as the audience must have gazed on the pig faced lady at the Lyceum. 'Are you saying,' he asked in a very cold voice, 'that Charles Corday did not commit the murder?'

'The Marquess didn't! He didn't!'

'The Marquess didn't?' Sidmouth asked, utterly mystified now.

'The Marquess of Skavadale, my lord,' Sandman explained, 'in whose house she was given shelter.'

'He came after the murder,' Meg, terrified of the mythical wasps, was desperate to explain now. 'The Marquess came after she was dead. He often called on the house. And he was still there!'

'Who was still there?' Sidmouth enquired.

'He was there!'

'Corday was?'

'No!' Meg said, frowning. 'Him!' She paused, looked at Sandman then back to the Home Secretary whose face still showed puzzlement. 'Her stepson,' she said, 'him what had been ploughing his father's field for half a year.'

Sidmouth grimaced with distaste. 'Her stepson?'

'Lord Christopher Carne, my lord,' Sandman explained, 'stepson to the Countess and heir to the Earldom.'

'I saw him with the knife,' Meg snarled, 'and so did the Marquess. He was crying, he was. Lord Christopher! He hated her, see, but he couldn't keep his scrawny paws off her neither. Oh, he killed her! It wasn't that feeble painter!'

There was a second's pause in which a score of questions came to Sandman's mind, but then Lord Sidmouth snapped at Witherspoon. 'My compliments to the police office in Queen Square,' that office was only a short walk away, 'and I shall be obliged if they will provide four officers and six saddle horses instantly. But give me a pen first, Witherspoon, a pen and paper and wax and seal.' He turned and looked at a clock on the mantel. 'And let us hurry, man.' His voice was sour as though he resented this extra work, but Sandman could not fault him. He was doing the right thing and doing it quickly. 'Let us hurry,' the Home Secretary said again. And hurry they did.

===OO=OOO=OO===

'Foot on the block, boy! Don't dally!' the turnkey snapped at Charles Corday who gave a gulp, then put his right foot on the wooden block. The turnkey put the punch over the first rivet then hammered it out. Corday gasped with each blow, then whimpered when the manacle dropped away. Lord Alexander saw that the boy's ankle was a welt of sores.

'Other foot, boy,' the turnkey ordered.

The two bells tolled on and neither would stop now until both bodies were cut down. The Keeper's guests were silent, just watching the prisoners' faces as though some clue to the secrets of eternity might lie in those eyes that so soon would be seeing the other side.

'Right, lad, go and see the hangman!' the turnkey said, and Charles Corday gave a small cry of surprise as he took his first steps without leg irons. He stumbled, but managed to catch himself on a table.

'I do not know,' Lord Christopher Carne said, then stopped abruptly.

'What, Kit?' Lord Alexander asked considerately.

Lord Christopher gave a start, unaware that he had even spoken, but then collected himself. 'You say there are doubts about his guilt?' he asked.

'Oh indeed, yes, indeed.' Lord Alexander paused to light a pipe. 'Sandman was quite sure of the boy's innocence, but I suppose it can't be proven. Alas, alas.'

'But if the real k-killer were to be found,' Lord Christopher asked, his eyes fixed on Corday who was quivering as he stood before the hangman, 'could that man then be convicted of the crime if Corday has already been found g-guilty of it and been hanged?'

'A very nice question!' Lord Alexander said enthusiastically. 'And one to which I confess I do not know the answer. But I should imagine, would you not agree, that if the real killer is apprehended then a posthumous pardon must be granted to Corday and one can only hope that such a pardon will be recognised in heaven and the poor boy will be fetched up from the nether regions.'

'Stand still, boy,' Jemmy Botting growled at Corday. 'Drink that if you want to. It helps.' He pointed to a mug of brandy, but Corday shook his head. 'Your choice, lad, your choice,' Botting said, then he took one of the four cords and used it to lash Corday's elbows, pulling them hard behind his back so that Corday was forced to throw out his chest.

'Not too tight, Botting,' the Keeper remonstrated.

'In the old days,' Botting grumbled, 'the hangman had an assistant to do this. There was the Yeoman of the Halter and pinioning was his job. It ain't mine.' He had not been tipped anything by Corday, hence had made the first pinion so painful, but now he relaxed the cord's tension a little before lashing Corday's wrists in front of his body.

'That's for both of us,' Reginald Venables, the second prisoner, big and bearded, slapped a coin on the table. 'So slacken my friend's lashings.'

Botting looked at the coin, was impressed by the generosity, and so loosened Corday's two cords before placing one of the noosed ropes round his neck. Corday flinched from the sisal's touch and the Reverend Cotton stepped forward and placed a hand on his shoulder. 'God is our refuge and strength, young man,' the Ordinary said, 'and a very present help in times of trouble. Call on the Lord and He will hear you. Do you repent of your foul sins, boy?'

'I did nothing!' Corday wailed.

'Quiet, my son, quiet,' Cotton urged him, 'and reflect on your sins in decent silence.'

'I did nothing!' Corday screamed.

'Charlie! Don't give 'em the pleasure,' Venables said. 'Remember what I told you, go like a man!' Venables sank a mug of brandy, then turned his back so that Botting could lash his elbows.

'But surely,' Lord Christopher said to Lord Alexander, 'the very fact that a man already stands c-convicted and has been p-punished, would make the authorities most reluctant to reopen the case?'

'Justice must be served,' Lord Alexander said vaguely, 'but I suppose you make a valid point. No one likes to admit that they were mistaken, least of all a politician, so doubtless the real murderer can feel a good deal safer once Corday is dead. Poor boy, poor boy. He is a sacrifice to our judicial incompetence, eh?'

Botting placed the second rope about Venables's shoulders, then the Reverend Cotton took a step back from the prisoners and let his prayer book fall open at the burial service. '"I am the resurrection and the life,"' he intoned, '"he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."'

'I did nothing!' Corday shouted, and turned left and right as though he could see some way of escape.

'Quiet, Charlie,' Venables said softly, 'quiet.'

The Sheriff and Under-Sheriff, both in robes and both wearing chains of office and both carrying silver-tipped staves, and both evidently satisfied that the prisoners were properly prepared, went to the Keeper, who formally bowed to them before presenting the Sheriff with a sheet of paper. The Sheriff glanced at the paper, nodded in satisfaction and thrust it into a pocket of his fur-trimmed robe. Until now the two prisoners had been in the care of the Keeper of Newgate, but now they belonged to the Sheriff and he, in turn, would deliver them into the keeping of the devil. The Sheriff pulled aside his robe to find the watch in his fob pocket. He snapped open the lid and peered at the face. 'It lacks a quarter of eight,' he said, then turned to Botting. 'Are you ready?'

'Quite ready, your honour, and at your service,' Botting said. He pulled on his hat, scooped up the two white cotton bags and thrust them into a pocket.

The Sheriff closed his watch, let his robe fall and headed for the Press Yard. 'We have an appointment at eight, gentlemen,' he announced, 'so let us go.'

'Devilled kidneys!' Lord Alexander said. 'Dear God, I can smell them. Come, Kit!'

They joined the procession.

And the bells tolled on.

===OO=OOO=OO===

It was not far. A quarter-mile up Whitehall, right into the Strand and three quarters of a mile to Temple Bar, and after that it was scarcely a third of a mile down Fleet Street, across the ditch and up Ludgate Hill before the left turn into Old Bailey. No distance at all, really, and certainly not after the police office in Queen Square had brought some patrol officers' horses. Sandman and Berrigan were both mounted, the Sergeant on a mare that a constable swore was placid and Sandman on a walleyed gelding that had more spirit. Witherspoon brought the reprieve out of the house and handed it up to Sandman. The wax of the seal was still warm. 'God speed you, Captain,' Witherspoon said. 'See you in the 'sheaf, Sal!' Berrigan shouted, then lurched back as his mare followed Sandman's gelding towards Whitehall. Three patrolmen rode ahead, one blowing a whistle and the other two with drawn truncheons to clear a path through the carts, wagons and carriages. A crossing sweeper leapt out of the way with a shrill curse. Sandman thrust the precious document into his pocket and turned to see Berrigan making heavy weather of his mare. 'Heels down, Sergeant! Heels down! Don't snatch on the reins, just let her run! She'll look after you!'

They passed the royal stables, then took to the pavement in the Strand. They rode past Kidman's the Apothecary, driving two pedestrians into its deep doorway, then past Carrington's, a cutlery store where Sandman had purchased his first sword. It had broken, he remembered, in the assault on Badajoz. It had been nothing heroic, merely frustration at the army's apparent failure to get into the French fortress and in his anger he had slashed the sword at a marooned ammunition cart and snapped the blade off at the hilt. Then they galloped past Sans Pareil, the theatre where Celia Collet, actress, had entranced the Earl of Avebury. An old fool marrying a sharp young greed and, when their undying love proved to be no more than unmatched lust, and after they had fallen out, she moved back to London where, to keep herself in the luxury she felt her due, she took back her old theatre servant, Margaret Hargood, to be her procuress. Thus had the Countess snared her men, she had blackmailed them and she had thrived, but then the fattest fly of all came to her web. Lord Christopher Carne, innocent and naive, fell for his stepmother and she had seduced him and amazed him, she had made him moan and shudder, and then she had threatened to tell the trustees of the entailed estate, his father and the whole world if he did not pay her still more money from his generous allowance, and Lord Christopher, knowing that when he inherited the estate his stepmother would demand more and more until there would be nothing left but a husk, had killed her.

All this Sandman had learnt as the Viscount Sidmouth scribbled the reprieve in his own handwriting. 'The proper thing,' the Home Secretary had said, 'is for the Privy Council to issue this document.'

'Hardly time, my lord,' Sandman had pointed out.

'I am aware of that, Captain,' Sidmouth said acidly. The steel nib scratched and spattered tiny droplets of ink as he scrawled his signature. 'You will present this,' he said, sprinkling sand on the wet ink, 'with my compliments, to the Sheriff of London or to one of his Under-Sheriffs, one of whom will certainly be upon the scaffold. They may enquire why such an order was not signed in council and then forwarded to them by the Recorder of London and you will explain that there was no time for the proper procedures to be followed. You will also be so kind as to pass me that candle and the stick of sealing wax?'

Now Sandman and Berrigan rode, the seal on the reprieve still warm, and Sandman thought what guilt Lord Christopher must have endured, and how killing his stepmother would have brought him no relief for the Marquess of Skavadale had discovered him almost in the act of the murder and the Marquess, whose family was near penury, had seen his life's problems solved at a stroke. Meg was the witness who could identify Lord Christopher as the murderer, and so long as Meg lived, and so long as she was under the Marquess's protection, so long would Lord Christopher pay to keep her silent. And when Lord Christopher became Earl, and so gained the fortune of his grandfather, he would have been forced to pay all he had inherited. It would all have gone to Skavadale, while Meg, the lever by which that wealth would have been prised from the Avebury estate, would have been bribed with chickens.

Sidmouth had sent messengers to the channel ports, and to Harwich and to Bristol, warning officials there to keep a watch for Lord Christopher Carne. 'And what of Skavadale?' Sandman had asked.

'We do not know if he has yet taken any monies by threat,' Sidmouth said primly, 'and if the girl speaks the truth then they did not plan to begin their depredations until after Lord Christopher had inherited the earldom. We might disapprove of their intentions, Captain, but we cannot punish them for a crime that is yet to be committed.'

'Skavadale concealed the truth!' Sandman said indignantly. 'He sent for the constables and told them he didn't recognise the murderer. He would have let an innocent man go to his death!'

'And how do you prove that?' Sidmouth asked curtly. 'Just be content that you have identified the real killer.'

'And earned the forty pound reward,' Berrigan put in happily, earning a very dirty look from his lordship.

As they rode, their horses' shoes echoing from the walls of Saint Clement's Church, Sandman saw a dozen reflections of himself distorted in the roundel panes of Clifton's Chop House and he thought how good a pork chop and kidney would taste now. The Temple Bar was immediately ahead and the space under the arch was crowded with carts and pedestrians. The constables shouted for the carts to move, bullied their horses into the press and yelled at the drivers to use their whips. A wagon loaded with cut flowers was filling most of the archway and one of the constables started beating at it with his truncheon, scattering petals and leaves onto the cobbles. 'Leave it!' Sandman bellowed. 'Leave it!' He had seen a gap on the pavement and he drove his horse for it, knocking down a thin man in a tall hat. Berrigan followed him, then they were past the arch, Sandman was standing in the stirrups and his horse was plunging towards the Fleet Ditch, sparks flying where its shoes struck the cobbles.

The first church bells began to strike eight and it seemed to Sandman that the whole city was filled with a cacophony of bells, hoofbeats, alarm and doom.

He settled back in the saddle, slapped the horse's rump, and rode like the wind.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Lord Alexander, as he passed through the towering arch of the high Debtor's Door, saw in front of him the dark hollow interior of the scaffold and he thought how much it resembled the underside of a theatre's stage. From outside, where the audience gathered in the street, the gallows looked heavy, permanent and sombre with its black baize drapery, but from here Lord Alexander could see it was an illusion sustained by raw wooden beams. It was a stage set for a tragedy ending in death. Wooden stairs climbed to his right, going up into the shadows before turning sharply left to emerge in a roofed pavilion that formed the rear of the scaffold. The roofed pavilion was like the privileged stage boxes, offering the important guests the best view of the drama.

Lord Alexander was first up the steps and a huge cheer greeted his appearance. No one cared who he was, but his arrival presaged the coming of the two doomed men and the crowd was bored with waiting. Lord Alexander, blinking in the sudden sunlight, took off his hat and bowed to the mob who, appreciative of the gesture, laughed and applauded. The crowd was not large, but it filled the street for a hundred yards southwards and quite blocked the junction with Newgate Street immediately to the north. Every window in the Magpie and Stump was taken and there was even a scatter of spectators on the tavern's roof.

'We were asked to take chairs at the back,' Lord Christopher pointed out when Lord Alexander sat himself in the very front row.

'We were requested to leave two front row places for the Sheriff,' Lord Alexander corrected him, 'and there they are. Sit down, Kit, do. What a delightful day! Do you think the weather will last? Budd on Saturday, eh?'

'Budd on Saturday?' Lord Christopher was jostled as the other guests pushed past to the rearmost chairs.

'Cricket, dear boy! I've actually persuaded Budd to play a single wicket match against Jack Lambert, and Lambert, good fellow that he is, has agreed to stand down if Rider Sandman will take his place! He told me so yesterday, after church. Now that's a match to dream of, eh? Budd against Sandman. You will come, won't you?'

A cheer drowned conversation on the scaffold as the sheriffs appeared in their breeches, silk stockings, silver-buckled shoes and fur-trimmed robes. Lord Christopher seemed oblivious of their arrival, gazing instead at the beam from which the prisoners would hang. He seemed disappointed that it was not bloodstained, then he looked down and flinched at the sight of the two unplaned coffins waiting for their burdens. 'She was an evil woman,' he said softly.

'Of course you'll come,' Lord Alexander said, then frowned. 'What did you say, my dear fellow?'

'My stepmother. She was evil.' Lord Christopher seemed to shiver, though it was not cold. 'She and that maid of hers, they were like witches!'

'Are you justifying her murder?'

'She was evil,' Lord Christopher said more emphatically, apparently not hearing his friend's question. 'She said she would make a claim on the estate, on the trustees, because I wrote her some letters. She lied, Alexander, she lied!' He winced, remembering the long letters in which he had poured out his devotion to his stepmother. He had known no women until he had been taken to her bed and he had become besotted by her. He had begged her to run away to Paris with him and she had encouraged his madness until, one day, mocking him, she had snapped the trap closed. Give her money, she had insisted, or else she would make him the laughing stock of Paris, London and every other European capital. She threatened to have the letters copied and the copies distributed so everyone would see his shame, and so he had paid her money and she demanded more and he knew the blackmail would never end. And so he killed her.

He had not believed himself capable of murder, but in her bedroom, begging her a final time to return him the letters, she had mocked him, called him puny, said he was a fumbling and stupid boy. He had pulled the knife from his belt. It was hardly a weapon, it was little more than an old blade he used to slit the pages of uncut books, but in his mad anger it sufficed. He had stabbed her, then hacked and slashed at her loathsome and beautiful skin, and afterwards he had rushed onto the landing and seen the Countess's maid and a man staring up at him from the downstairs hall and he had recoiled back to the bedroom where he had whimpered in panic. He expected to hear feet on the stairs, but no one came, and he forced himself to be calm and to think. He had been on the landing for only a split second, hardly time to be recognised! He snatched a knife from the painter's table and tossed it onto the red-laced body, then searched the dead woman's bureau to find his letters that he had carried away down the back stairs and burnt at home. He had crouched in his lodgings, fearing arrest, then next day heard that the painter had been taken by the constables.

Lord Christopher had prayed for Corday. It was not right, of course, that the painter should die, but nor could Lord Christopher be persuaded that he himself deserved death for his stepmother's murder. He would do good with his inheritance! He would be charitable. He would pay for the murder and for Corday's innocence a thousand times over. Sandman had threatened that exercise of repentance and so Lord Christopher had consulted his manservant and, claiming that Rider Sandman had a grudge against him and planned to sue the trustees and thus tie up the Avebury fortune in the Court of Chancery, he had promised a thousand guineas to the man who could rid the estate of that threat. The manservant had hired other men and Lord Christopher had rewarded them richly for even making the attempt on Sandman's life. Now, it seemed, further payment would be unnecessary for Sandman had evidently failed. Corday would die and no one would then want to admit that an innocent man had been sent to dance on Botting's stage.

'But your stepmother, surely, had no claim on the estate,' Lord Alexander had been thinking about his friend's words, 'unless the entail specifically provides for your father's widow. Does it?'

Lord Christopher looked confused, but then made a great effort to concentrate on what his friend had just said. 'No,' he said, 'the whole estate is entailed on the heir. Onto m-me alone.'

'Then you will be a prodigiously rich man, Kit,' Lord Alexander said, 'and I shall wish you well of your great fortune.' He turned from his friend as a huge cheer, the loudest of the morning, greeted the hangman's arrival on the scaffold.

'"I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle," the Reverend Cotton's voice grew louder as he climbed the stairs behind the first prisoner, '"while the ungodly is in my sight."'

A turnkey appeared first, then Corday, who was still walking awkwardly because his legs were not used to being without irons. He tripped on the top step and stumbled into Lord Alexander who gripped his elbow. 'Steady, there's a good fellow,' Lord Alexander said.

'Hats off!' the crowd bellowed at those who stood in the front ranks. 'Hats off!' The roar of the crowd was massive as they surged forward to crush against the low wooden rail that surrounded the scaffold. The City Marshal's men, arrayed just behind the rail, raised their staves and spears.

Lord Alexander felt assaulted by the noise that echoed back from the prison's granite facade. This was England at play, he thought, the mob given its taste of blood in the hope that, given this much, they would not demand more. A child, sitting on his father's shoulders, was screaming obscenities at Corday, who was weeping openly. The crowd liked a man or woman to go to their deaths bravely and Corday's tears were earning him nothing but scorn. Lord Alexander had a sudden urge to go to the young man and comfort him, to pray with him, but he stayed seated because the Reverend Cotton was already close beside Corday. '"O teach us to number our days,"' the Ordinary read in a singsong voice, '"that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."'

Then the crowd roared in mocking laughter because Corday had collapsed. Botting had half climbed the ladder and was just lifting the rope from the prisoner's shoulders ready to attach it to one of the hooks of the beam, when Corday's legs turned to jelly. The Reverend Cotton leapt back, the turnkey ran forward, but Corday could not stand. He was shaking and sobbing.

'Shoot the bugger, Jemmy!' a man shouted from the crowd.

'I need an assistant,' Botting growled at the Sheriff, 'and a chair.'

One of the guests volunteered to stand and his chair was brought into the sunlight and placed on the trapdoor. The crowd, realising this was going to be an unusual execution, applauded the sight. Botting and a turnkey hoisted Corday onto the seat and the hangman deftly undid the line holding Corday's elbows and retied it so that it bound the prisoner to the chair. Now he could be hanged, and Botting clambered up the ladder, attached the rope, then came down and rammed the noose hard over Corday's head. 'Snivelling little bastard,' he whispered as he jerked the rope tight, 'die like a man.' He took one of the white cotton bags from his pocket and pulled it over Corday's head. Lord Alexander, silent now, saw the cotton pulsing in and out with Corday's breathing. The boy's head had dropped onto his chest so that, if it had not been for the flicker of cotton at his mouth, he might already have been dead.

'Show Thy servants Thy work,' the Reverend Cotton read,' "and their children Thy glory."'

Venables came up the steps and received only a perfunctory cheer from a crowd that had exhausted itself at Corday's expense. The big man nevertheless bowed to his audience, then walked calmly to the trapdoor and waited for rope and blindfold. The scaffold creaked beneath his weight. 'Do it quick, Jemmy,' he said loudly, 'and do it well.'

'I'll look after you,' the hangman promised, 'I'll look after you.' He took the white hood from his pocket and pulled it over Venables's head.

'"The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away,"' the Reverend Cotton said.

Lord Alexander, who had found himself appalled by the last few moments, became dimly aware of some disturbance at the southern, narrow end of Old Bailey.

'"Blessed be the name of the Lord."' intoned the Ordinary.

===OO=OOO=OO===

'God damn it!' Sandman found himself blocked by the press of traffic at the junction of Farringdon Street and Ludgate Hill. Off to his right the Fleet Ditch stank in the early morning sun. A coal wagon was turning into Fleet Street and it had jammed on the corner and a dozen men were offering advice while a lawyer in a hackney was telling his driver to whip the coal heaver's horses even though there was no room for it to move because an even larger wagon, loaded with a score of oak beams, was scraping past. The mounted constables, whistles blowing and truncheons drawn, clattered into the junction behind Sandman, who kicked a pedestrian out of his way, wrenched his horse to the left, swore at the lawyer whose coach blocked him, then had his bridle seized by a well-meaning citizen who thought Sandman was fleeing the constables.

'Get your bloody hands off me!' Sandman shouted, then Berrigan rode alongside and thumped the man on the head, crushing his hat, and Sandman's horse was suddenly free and he kicked it alongside the wagon with the huge oak beams.

'No point in hurrying!' the driver called. 'Not if you're going to the hanging. The culleys will be dangling by now!' All the bells of the city had rung the hour, the ones that always chimed early and even the laggards had struck eight, but the funeral bell of Saint Sepulchre still tolled and Sandman dared to hope that Corday was still alive as he burst out of the tangled traffic and kicked the horse up towards Saint Paul's Cathedral, which filled the crest of Ludgate Hill with its steps, pillars and dome.

Halfway up the hill he turned into Old Bailey and for the first few yards, as he passed the law courts in the Session House, the road was blessedly empty, but then it widened as he passed the big yard of Newgate Prison and suddenly the seething crowd stretched across the whole street, blocking him, and he could see the beam of the gallows reaching across the sky and the black scaffold platform beneath, and then he just drove the horse at the crowd. He was standing in the stirrups, shouting, just as the Royals, the Scots Greys and the Inniskillings had stood and shouted as they drove their big horses into the French corps they had destroyed at Waterloo.

'Make way!' Sandman bellowed. 'Make way!' He saw the men on the scaffold and noticed that one seemed to be sitting, which was strange, and he saw a priest there, and a knot of spectators or officials at the scaffold's rear, and the crowd protested at his savagery, resisted him, and he wished he had a weapon to thrash at them, but then the constables drove alongside him and thrust at the press of people with their long truncheons.

Then a sigh seemed to pass through the crowd, and Sandman could see no one but the priest on the scaffold's black stage that stretched halfway across the widest part of the street.

Which meant the trapdoor had opened.

And Saint Sepulchre's bell tolled on for the dying.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Venables swore at the Ordinary and cursed the Keeper, but gave no insults to Jemmy Botting for he knew well enough that the hangman could hasten his end. 'Stop weeping,' he told Corday.

'I did nothing!' Corday protested.

'You think you're the first innocent person to die up here?' Venables asked. 'Or the hundredth? It's a scaffold, Charlie, and it knows no difference between the guilty and the innocent. Are you there, Jemmy?' Venables had the white hood over his eyes, so he could not see that the hangman had snuffled to the corner of the platform to pull the safety peg. 'Are you there, Jemmy?'

'Not long now, boys,' Botting said, 'have patience.' He vanished down the back stairs.

'It's Rider!' Lord Alexander was standing now, to the annoyance of the guests seated behind him. 'It's Rider!'

The crowd had at last sensed that something untoward was happening. Their first inkling was when Lord Alexander, tall and striking, stood by the pavilion and pointed towards Ludgate Hill, then they turned and saw the horsemen who were trying to force their way through the crowd.

'Let them through!' some of the people shouted.

'What's happening?' Venables roared from the trapdoor. 'What's happening?'

'Sit down, my lord,' the Sheriff said to Lord Alexander, who ignored him.

'Rider!' he shouted across the crowd, his voice drowned by their commotion.

Jemmy Botting cursed because he had pulled the rope and the tallow-greased beam had juddered, but not moved. 'God damn you to bloody hell!' he cursed the beam, then took hold of the rope a second time and gave it a monstrous tug and this time the beam moved so swiftly that Botting was thrown backwards as the sky opened above him. The trap fell with a thump and the two bodies fell into the scaffold's pit. Venables was dancing and throttling, while Corday's legs were thrashing against the chair.

'Sheriff! Sheriff!' Sandman was nearing the scaffold. 'Sheriff!'

'Is it a reprieve?' Lord Alexander roared. 'Is it a reprieve?'

'Yes!'

'Kit! Help me!' Lord Alexander limped on his club foot to where Corday hung, twitched and gagged. 'Help me haul him up!'

'Let go of him!' the Sheriff bellowed, as Lord Alexander reached for the rope.

'Let go, my lord!' the Reverend Cotton demanded. 'This is not seemly!'

'Get off me, you damned bloody fool!' Lord Alexander snarled as he pushed Cotton away. He then seized the rope and tried to haul Corday back up to the platform, but he did not possess nearly enough strength. The white cotton bag over Corday's mouth shivered.

Sandman thrust aside the last few folk and rammed his horse against the barrier. He fumbled in his pockets for the reprieve, thought for a dreadful instant that it was lost, then found the paper and held it up towards the scaffold, but the Sheriff would not come to receive it. 'It's a reprieve!' Sandman shouted.

'Kit, help me!' Lord Alexander tugged feebly at Corday's rope and could not raise the dying man by even an inch, and so he turned to Lord Christopher. 'Kit! Help me!' Lord Christopher, eyes huge behind his thick spectacles, held both hands to his mouth. He did not move.

'What the bloody hell are you doing?' Jemmy Botting shouted at Lord Alexander from beneath the scaffold and then, to make sure he was not cheated of a death, he scrambled over the supporting beams to haul downwards on Corday's legs. 'You'll not have him!' he screamed up at Lord Alexander. 'You'll not have him! He's mine! He's mine!'

'Take it!' Sandman shouted at the Sheriff, who still refused to lean down and accept the reprieve, but just then a black-dressed man pushed his way to Sandman's side.

'Give it to me,' the newcomer said. He did not wait for Sandman to obey, but instead snatched the paper, hoisted himself onto the railing that protected the scaffold and then, with one prodigious leap, jumped to catch hold of the scaffold's edge. For an instant his black boots scrabbled on the baize for a lodgment, then he managed to grip the exposed edge left by the fallen trapdoor and heaved himself onto the platform. It was Sally's brother, dressed all in black and with a black ribbon tying his black hair, and the regulars in the crowd cheered for they recognised and admired him. He was Jack Hood, Robin Hood — the man that every magistrate and constable in London wanted to see caper on Jem Botting's stage, and Jack Hood mocked their ambition by flaunting himself at every Newgate hanging. Now, on the scaffold at last, he thrust Corday's reprieve towards the Sheriff. 'Take it, God damn you!' Hood snarled, and the Sheriff, astonished by the young man's confidence, at last took the paper.

Hood strode to Lord Alexander's side and took hold of the rope, but Jemmy Botting, fearing that his victim would be snatched at the last minute, had scrambled onto Corday's lap so that his weight was added to the choking noose. 'He's mine!' he shouted up at Lord Alexander and Hood. 'He's mine!' Corday's wheezing breath was drowned in the morning's din. Hood heaved, but could not raise the combined weight of Corday and Botting. 'He's mine! Mine!' Botting screamed.

'You!' Sandman snapped at one of the City Marshal's javelin men. 'Give me your hanger! Now!'

The man, bemused, but cowed by Sandman's snap of command, nervously drew the short curved sword that was more decorative than useful. Sandman snatched the blade from him, then was assaulted by another of the scaffold guards who thought Sandman planned an assault on the Sheriff. 'Bugger off!' Sandman snarled at the man, then Berrigan thumped his fist on the crown of the man's head.

'Wait!' the Sheriff shouted. 'There must be order. There must be order!' The crowd was shrieking, its noise filling the street like a great roar. 'Marshal!' the Sheriff called. 'Marshal!'

'Give up the sword!' the Marshal bellowed at Sandman.

'Hood!' Sandman shouted as he stood in the stirrups. 'Hood!' Hands reached up to haul him out of the saddle, but Sandman had the highwayman's attention now and he tossed him the hanger. 'Cut him down, Hood! Cut him down!'

Hood deftly caught the blade. The constables who had escorted Sandman and Berrigan from Whitehall now pushed away the Marshal's men. Lord Christopher Carne, eyes still wide and mouth agape, was staring in horror at Rider Sandman, who at last noticed his lordship. 'Constable,' Sandman spoke to the horseman nearest him, 'that's the man you arrest. That man there.' Sandman pointed and Lord Christopher turned as if to escape, but the stairs from the pavilion led only down to the prison itself.