'Still, I suppose the Home Office knows its business.' He turned and gazed moodily into the hearth. 'It isn't a quick death, Rider, not quick at all, yet the Keeper was inordinately proud of the whole process. Wanted our approbation and insisted on showing us the rest of the prison.' Sir Henry fell silent, frowning. 'You know,' he went on after a while, 'there's a corridor from the prison to the Sessions House? So the prisoners don't need to walk in the street when they go to trial. Birdcage Walk, they call it, and it's where they bury the hanged men. And women, I suppose, though the girl I saw hanged was taken to the surgeons for dissection.' He had been looking into the empty fireplace as he spoke, but now looked up at Sandman. 'The flagstones of Birdcage Walk were wobbling, Rider, wobbling. That's because the graves are always settling underneath them. They had casks of lime there to hasten the decomposition. It was vile. Indescribably vile.'
'I'm sorry you had to experience it,' Sandman said.
'I thought it my duty,' Sir Henry replied with a shudder. 'I was with a friend and he took an indecent delight in it all. The gallows is a necessary thing, of course it is, but not to be enjoyed, surely? Or am I being too scrupulous?'
'You're being very helpful, Sir Henry, and I'm grateful.'
Sir Henry nodded. 'It'll be a day or two before you get your answer, I'm sure, but let's hope it helps. Are you going? You must come again. Rider, you must come again.' He took Sandman through to the hall and helped him with his coat.
And Sandman walked away, not even noticing whether it was raining or not.
He was thinking of Lord Eagleton. Eleanor had not behaved as though she were in love with his lordship, indeed she had made a face expressing distaste when his lordship's name was mentioned, and that gave Sandman hope. But then, he asked himself, what did love have to do with marriage? Marriage was about money and land and respectability. About staying above financial ruin. About reputation.
And love? God damn it, Sandman thought, but he was in love.
===OO=OOO=OO===
It was not raining now, indeed it was a beautiful late afternoon with a rare clear sky above London. Everything looked clean-cut, newly washed, pristine. The rain clouds had flown westwards and fashionable London was spilling onto the streets. Open carriages, pulled by matching teams with polished coats and ribboned manes, clipped smartly towards Hyde Park for the daily parade. Street bands vied with each other, trumpets shrilling, drums banging and collectors shaking their money boxes. Sandman was oblivious.
He was thinking of Eleanor and when he could no longer wring any clue as to her intentions from every remembered glance and nuance, he wondered what he had achieved in the day. He had learnt, he thought, that Corday had mostly told him the truth and he had confirmed to himself that bored young aristocrats were among the least courteous of all men, and he had usefully started Eleanor's maid on her search for gossip, but in truth, he had not learnt much. He could not report anything to Viscount Sidmouth. So what to do?
He thought about that when he returned to the Wheatsheaf and took his laundry down to the woman who charged a penny for each shirt, and he had to stand talking for twenty minutes or else she took offence. Then he stitched up his boots, using a sailmaker's needle and palm leather which he borrowed from the landlord and when his boots were crudely mended he brushed his coat, trying to get a stain out of the tail. He reflected that of all the inconveniences of poverty, the lack of a servant to keep clothes clean was the most time-consuming. Time. It was what he needed most, and he tried to decide what he should do next. Go to Wiltshire, he told himself. He did not want to go because it was far, it would be expensive and he had no assurance that he would find the girl Meg if he went, but if he waited to hear from Eleanor then it might already be too late. There was a chance, even a good chance, that the servants from the London house had all been taken down to the Earl's country estate. So go there, he told himself. Catch the mail coach in the morning and he would be there by early afternoon and he could catch the mail coach back in the next day's dawn, but he cringed at the expense. He thought of using a stage coach and guessed that would cost no more than a pound each way, but the stage coach would not get him to Wiltshire before the evening, it would probably take him at least two or three hours to find the Earl of Avebury's house, and so he was unlikely to reach it before dark, and that meant he would have to wait until next morning to approach the household, while if he used the mail coach he would be at the Earl's estate by mid-afternoon at the latest. It would cost him at least twice as much, but Corday only had five days left and Sandman counted his change and wished he had not been so generous as to buy Sally Hood her dinner, then chided himself for that ungallant thought and walked down to the mail office on Charing Cross where he paid two pounds and seven shillings for the last of the four seats on the next morning's mail to Marlborough.
He went back to the Wheatsheaf where, in the inn's back room among the beer barrels and the broken furniture waiting for repair, he blacked and polished his newly mended boots. It was a dark and malodorous space, haunted by rats and by Dodds, the inn's errand boy and Sandman, seated on a barrel in a dark corner, heard Dodds's tuneless whistle and was about to call out a greeting when he heard a stranger's voice. 'Sandman ain't upstairs.'
'I saw him come in,' Dodds said in his usual truculent manner.
Sandman, very quietly, pulled on his boots. The stranger's voice had been harsh, not one inviting Sandman to call out and identify himself, but rather to persuade him to look for a weapon — the only thing to hand was a barrel stave. It was not much, but he held it like a sword as he edged towards the door.
'You find anything?' the stranger asked.
'This tail and a cricket bat,' another man answered and Sandman, still in the shadows, swayed forward and saw a young man holding his bat and his army sword. The two men must have gone upstairs and found Sandman absent, so the one had come down to look for him while the other had stayed to search his room and found the only two things of any value. Sandman could ill afford to lose either and his task now was to retrieve the bat and sword, and to discover who the two men were.
'I'll look in the taproom,' the first man said.
'Bring him back here,' the second said, and so delivered himself into Sandman's mercy.
Because all Sandman needed to do was wait. The first man followed Dodds through the service door and left the second man in the passage, where he half drew Sandman's sword and peered at the inscription on the blade. He was still peering when Sandman stepped from the back room and rammed the stave like a truncheon into the man's kidneys. The wood splintered with the impact and the man lurched forward, gasping, and Sandman let go of the stave, seized the man's hair and pulled him backwards. The man flailed for balance, but Sandman tripped him so that he crashed back onto the floor, where Sandman stamped hard on his groin. The man shrieked and curled around his agony.
Sandman retrieved the bat and sword that had fallen in the passageway. The fight had not taken more than a few seconds and the man was moaning and twitching, incapacitated by sheer pain, but that did not mean he would not recover quickly. Sandman feared he might be carrying a pistol, so he used the sword scabbard to tweak the man's coat aside.
And saw yellow and black livery. 'You're from the Seraphim Club?' Sandman asked, and the man gasped through his pain, but the answer was not informative and Sandman was not minded to obey the injunction. He stooped by the man, felt in his coat pockets and found a pistol which he tugged out, though in his haste he ripped the pocket's lining with the pistol's doghead. 'Is it loaded?' he asked.
The man repeated his injunction, so Sandman put the barrel by his head and cocked the gun. 'I'll ask again,' he said, 'is it loaded?'
'Yes!'
'So why are you here?'
'They wanted you fetched back to the club.'
'Why?'
'I don't know! They just sent us.'
It made sense that the man knew little more than that, so Sandman stepped back. 'Just get out,' he said. 'Collect your friend in the taproom and tell him that if he wants to make trouble for a soldier then he should bring an army.'
The man twisted on the floor and looked up incredulously. 'I can go?'
'Get out,' Sandman said, and he watched the man climb to his feet and limp out of the passage. So why, he wondered, would the Seraphim Club want him? And why send two bullies to fetch him? Why not just send an invitation?
