The Price of Murder

me.

“He was asleep,” was my reply.

“Asleep, was he? Well, I’ve half a notion to leave him where he’s now standin’.”

“You do that,” said I, “and you’ll have Sir John Fielding to answer to back in London.”

“What’s he to do with you two?”

“You’d find out soon enough.”

I would go no further with my threat. Truth to tell, I thought perhaps I’d gone too far already. We were headed into territory in which Sir John’s name had not quite the weight that it carried round Covent Garden. From this point on, I promised myself that I would use his name much more sparingly. But now was Constable Patley returned, and there was no need to wrangle further with the driver. He hopped inside and closed the door after him.

“Ah, I’m a new man,” said he.

“I hope not,” said I, “for I liked the old one pretty well.”

“Let me tell you something, Jeremy, old lad. There’s few in this world who I owe anything to-but you’re one of them.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“I can write as well as any of the constables now, which ain’t to say I can write perfect. And I can even read a bit now. It’s a great time-passer, it is.”

I, who had no difficulty passing the time, had never thought of reading in quite that way before. What he had said struck me as funny-and so I did what may have struck him as rude: I laughed. Yet he took no offense.

“No, it’s true,” said he. “You take a fellow like me, he gets out of the army, and all he knows to do when he ain’t workin’ is go out and drink as he used to do in the army. And y’see that ain’t right, for it’s too easy to fall in with the same element you’re keepin’ an eye on whilst you’re on the job-the whores and the robbers and such-if you get my meaning, and that ain’t right.”

“Oh, I understand,” said I-and indeed I did. ’Twas the first time I had considered the matters he spoke of.

“Now I know for fact that readin’ ain’t just to pass the time. You got all your learning, which is considerable, out of books, didn’t you?”

“Well, not quite all. A lot that isn’t facts and some that is I got from Sir John.”

“And him,” he laughed. “He was just born with it, I reckon.”

“Indeed,” said I, “he must have been.”

“But whenever I come to a word I don’t know, I just take a look into that Johnson dictionary you gave me- and there it is. I know what it means, and I know how to spell it proper. I want you to know, Jeremy, that giving me that dictionary is about the most considerate thing anybody ever did for me. And I’ve read that Robinson Crusoe book twice through, I have!”

“Well, it’s about time then that you got another, don’t you think so?”

“You just tell me what to get, and I’ll get it.”

“Well,” said I, “let me give some thought to that.”

“You do that.”

Then did Constable Patley sit back, blushing with excitement at having said his piece. He nodded a good, firm, manly nod.

“I just wanted you to know.”

“Thank you, Mr. Patley.”

We finished the rest of the trip to Newmarket in complete silence-or near it.

Yet, as we entered the town of Newmarket, Mr. Patley pointed off to the left and called my attention to the heath just beyond us.

“It’s there they run the race,” said he. “It’s the longest and the fastest, and the only one that’s run on a permanent course.”

Of the events that followed-our arrival and search for the Good Queen Bess, and our disappointment at learning Mr. Deuteronomy and his party had not yet arrived-I shall have nothing to say. Such mundane details have little place in such a report as this, for they seem only to clutter the narrative. Let me begin this section, rather, with our first survey of the race site. We were, I suppose, searching for Alice Plummer, yet neither Mr. Patley nor I expected to find her quite so immediate. And, truth be known, I do believe that both of us would have been disappointed if we had found her quite so soon, for we must then have turned round and taken her back to London without ever having viewed the great race for the King’s Plate. I had told Patley of Mr. Deuteronomy’s bold boast that he would win, riding Pegasus, and we were both greatly impressed by that. We would see him win-sister or no.

In my case, after we had rested ourselves a bit in the room provided us, we went out to get a proper view of the race course and a sense of the town. Newmarket itself was not much-nor is it today, if what I have heard of it still pertains. The surrounding countryside is pretty enough, but the buildings in the town have to them a rather decrepit air, as if a good, strong wind might blow them all down. The main street in town is the same road we took from Cambridge. It is withal, as its name implies, a market town- and probably has been such for near a thousand years. There is a central square, and in it, foodstuffs-fruit and vegetable-are sold. Though not so grand as Covent Garden, I do believe a greater variety of growing things are sold there. Yet what the town of Newmarket may or may not be matters little, for it is known not so much as a town (there must be half a hundred or more like it) as it is a location for the greatest horse-racing to be found in all of England. Without its race course, it would be simply another market town.

The King’s Plate race was still a few days into the future, yet there seemed to be more people in the area surrounding the course than in the town proper. Was it always so? Their number would doubtless increase on race day. Where had they all come from? Where did they sleep? These visitors must have surely doubled the population of the town already.

As we merged with the crowd, Mr. Patley and I noticed a number of familiar faces from Bedford Street and Seven Dials in London: whores and pickpockets they were, and in such number as I had not seen before. The whores flirted one with another. The pickpockets dipped their hands each in the other’s coats and waistcoats. It was a carnival for thieves. We came at last to a rail fence that marked one of the limits of the course. Coaches and carriages were parked there, hard by, and the dukes and earls stood atop them, observing the activity out on the track through telescopes and spy-glasses. Each seemed to boast a surrounding retinue of a sizable number. There was a good deal of teasing comment that passed back and forth between them. It was for the nobles, as I saw, that this pageant was played out. But what was it they watched so intently out there on the course? I put the question to Mr. Patley.

“I don’t rightly know,” said he. “I reckon, though, that they’re studying their horses out there-not so much for speed as for gait and behavior on the course and whatnot. There’s a lot to learning a course like this one.”

“Why this one, especially?”

“Well, because of its length and the many rough places out there on the heath.”

“Not an easy course then, eh?”

“Oh, no. Ain’t a bit of it easy.”

We had a good view of the horses on the track-though not so good as the nobles and aristocrats atop their vehicles. We had found a spot between two coaches, somewhat protected from the crowd. From it, I watched and took in all that Mr. Patley had to say about the racing of horses in general, and the racing of them at Newmarket in particular. In the course of my days in Newmarket, he passed on to me a wealth of information. It all began, as I recall, with a question I asked about the number of horses out on the track. There was a great swarm of them following those on which the owners had their spy-glasses trained. They were moving along at a ragged pace and with no style whatever. It was almost as if this second line of riders were hoping that some reflected glory might be cast back upon them from the first.

“They can’t all be running in the King’s Plate race, can they?” I asked Mr. Patley.

“No, not at all. But it’s one of the faults of this race that there’s far too many in it.”