So he went to watch some cricket.
CHAPTER TWO
Sandman reached Bunhill Row just before the city clocks struck three, the jangling of the bells momentarily drowning the crack of bat on ball, the deep shouts and applause of the spectators. It sounded like a large crowd and, judging by the shouts, a good match. The gatekeeper waved him through. 'I ain't taking your sixpence, Captain.'
'You should, Joe.'
'Aye, and you should be playing, Captain.' Joe Mallock, gatekeeper at the Artillery Ground, had once bowled for the finest clubs in London before painful joints had laid him low, and he well remembered one of his last games when a young army officer, scarce out of school, had thrashed him all over the New Road outfield in Marylebone. 'Been too long since we seen you bat, Captain.'
'I'm past my prime, Joe.'
'Past your prime, boy? Past your prime! You aren't even thirty yet. Now go on in. Last I heard England was fifty-six runs up with only four in hand. They need you!'
A raucous jeer rewarded a passage of play as Sandman walked towards the boundary. The Marquess of Canfield's eleven were playing an England eleven and one of the Marquess's fielders had dropped an easy catch and now endured the crowd's scorn. 'Butterfingers!' they roared. 'Fetch him a bucket!'
Sandman glanced at the blackboard and saw that England, in their second innings, were only sixty runs ahead and still had four wickets in hand. Most of the crowd were cheering the England eleven and a roar greeted a smart hit that sent the ball scorching towards the field's far side. The Marquess's bowler, a bearded giant, spat on the grass then stared up at the blue sky as if he was deaf to the crowd's noise. Sandman watched the batsman, Budd it was, walk down the wicket and pat down an already smooth piece of turf.
Sandman strolled past the carriages parked by the boundary. The Marquess of Canfield, white-haired, white- bearded and ensconced with a telescope in a landau, offered Sandman a curt nod, then pointedly looked away. A year ago, before the disgrace of Sandman's father, the Marquess would have called out a greeting, insisted on sharing a few moments of gossip and begged Sandman to play for his team, but now the Sandman name was dirt and the Marquess had pointedly cut him. But then, from further about the boundary and as if in recompense, a hand waved vigorously from another open carriage and an eager voice shouted a greeting. 'Rider! Here! Rider!'
The hand and voice belonged to a tall, ragged young man who was painfully thin, very bony and lanky, dressed in shabby black and smoking a clay pipe that trickled a drift of ash down his waistcoat and jacket. His red hair was in need of a pair of scissors for it collapsed across his long-nosed face and flared above his wide and old- fashioned collar. 'Drop the carriage steps,' he instructed Sandman, 'come on in. You're monstrous late. Heydell scored thirty-four in the first innings and very well scored they were too. How are you, my dear fellow? Fowkes is bowling creditably well, but is a bit errant on the off side. Budd is carrying his bat, and the creature who has just come in is called Fellowes and I know nothing about him. You should be playing. You also look pale. Are you eating properly?'
'I eat,' Sandman said, 'and you?'
'God preserves me, in His effable wisdom He preserves me.' The Reverend Lord Alexander Pleydell settled back on his seat. 'I see my father ignored you?'
'He nodded to me.'
'He nodded? Ah! What graciousness. Is it true you played for Sir John Hart?'
'Played and lost,' Sandman said bitterly. 'They were bribed.'
'Dear Rider! I warned you of Sir John! Man's nothing but greed. He only wanted you to play so that everyone would assume his team was incorruptible and it worked, didn't it? I just hope he paid you well for he must have made a great deal of money from your gullibility. Would you like some tea? Of course you would. I shall have Hughes bring us tea and cake from Mrs Hillman's stall, I think, don't you? Budd looks good as ever, don't he? What a hitter he is! Have you ever lifted his bat? It's a club, a cudgel! Oh, well done, sir! Well struck! Go hard, sir, go hard!' He was cheering on England and doing it in a very loud voice so that his father, whose team was playing against England, would hear him. 'Capital, sir, well done! Hughes, my dear fellow, where are you?'
Hughes, Lord Alexander's manservant, approached the side of the carriage. 'My lord?'
'Say hello to Captain Sandman, Hughes, and I think we might venture a pot of Mrs Hillman's tea, don't you? And perhaps some of her apricot cake?' His Lordship put money into his servant's hand. 'What are the bookies saying now, Hughes?'
'They strongly favour your father's eleven, my lord.'
Lord Alexander pressed two more coins on his servant. 'Captain Sandman and I will wager a guinea apiece on an England win.'
'I can't afford such a thing,' Sandman protested, 'and besides I detest gambling on cricket.'
'Don't be pompous,' Lord Alexander said, 'we're not bribing the players, merely risking cash on our appreciation of their skill. You truly do look pale, Rider, are you sickening? Cholera, perhaps? The plague? Consumption, maybe?'
'Prison fever.'
'My dear fellow!' Lord Alexander looked horrified. 'Prison fever? And for God's sake sit down.' The carriage swayed as Sandman sat opposite his friend. They had attended the same school where they had become inseparable friends and where Sandman, who had always excelled at games and was thus one of the school's heroes, had protected Lord Alexander from the bullies who believed his lordship's clubbed foot made him an object of ridicule. Sandman, on leaving school, had purchased a commission in the infantry while Lord Alexander, who was the Marquis of Canfield's second son, had gone to Oxford where, in the first year that such things were awarded, he had taken a double first. 'Don't tell me you've been imprisoned,' Lord Alexander now chided Sandman.
Sandman smiled and showed his friend the letter from the Home Office and then described his afternoon, though the telling of his tale was constantly interrupted by Lord Alexander's exclamations of praise or scorn for the cricket, many of them uttered through a mouthful of Mrs Hillman's apricot cake which his lordship reduced to a spattering of crumbs that joined the ashes on his waistcoat. Beside his chair he kept a bag filled with clay pipes and as soon as one became plugged he would take out another and strike flint on steel. The sparks chipped from the flint smouldered on his coat and on the carriage's leather seat where they were either beaten out or faded on their own as his lordship puffed more smoke. 'I must say,' he said when he had considered Sandman's story, 'that I should deem it most unlikely that young Corday is guilty.'
'But he's been tried.'
'My dear Rider! My dear, dear Rider! Rider, Rider, Rider. Rider! Have you ever been to the Old Bailey sessions? Of course you haven't, you've been far too busy smiting the French, you wretch. But I dare say that inside of a week those four judges get through a hundred cases. Five a day apiece? They often do more. These folk don't get trials, Rider, they get dragged through the tunnel from Newgate, come blinking into the Session House, are knocked down like bullocks and hustled off in manacles! It ain't justice!'
'They are defended, surely?'
Lord Alexander turned a shocked face on his friend. 'The sessions ain't your Courts Martial, Rider. This is England! What barrister will defend some penniless youth accused of sheep stealing?'
'Corday isn't penniless.'
'But I'll wager he isn't rich. Good Lord, Rider, the woman was found naked, smothered in blood, with his palette knife in her throat.'
Sandman, watching the batsmen steal a quick single after an inelegant poke had trickled the ball down to square leg, was amused that his friend knew the details of Corday's crime, suggesting that Lord Alexander, when he was not deep in volumes of philosophy, theology and literature, was dipping into the vulgar broadsheets that described England's more violent crimes. 'So you're suggesting Corday is guilty,' Sandman said.
'No, Rider, I am suggesting that he looks guilty. There is a difference. And in any respectable system of justice we would devise ways of distinguishing between the appearance and the reality of guilt. But not in Sir John Silvester's courtroom. The man's a brute, a conscienceless brute. Oh, well struck, Budd, well struck! Run, man, run! Don't dawdle!' His lordship took up a new pipe and began setting fire to himself. The whole system,' he said between puffs, 'is pernicious. Pernicious! They'll sentence a hundred folk to hang, then only kill ten of them because the rest have commuted sentences. And how do you obtain a commutation? Why, by having the squire or the parson or his lordship sign the petition. But what if you don't know such elevated folk? Then you'll hang. Hang. You
