'Dear God!' Lord Christopher seemed astonished and leant back, looking faint. 'So you have five days to find the real killer?'
'Indeed.'
'So the boy is doomed, is he not?'
Sandman feared Corday was doomed, but he would not admit it. Not yet. For there were still five days left to find the truth and thus to steal a soul from Newgate's scaffold.
===OO=OOO=OO===
At half past four in the morning a pair of lamps glimmered feebly from the windows of the yard of the George Inn. Dawn was touching the roofs with a wan gleam. A caped coachman yawned hugely, then flicked his whip at a snarling terrier that slunk out of the way of the massive coachhouse doors that were dragged open to reveal a gleaming dark-blue mail coach. The vehicle, bright with new varnish and with its doors, windows, harness pole and splinter bar picked out in scarlet, was manhandled onto the yard's cobbles where a boy lit its two oil lanterns and a half-dozen men heaved the mail bags into its boot. The eight horses, high-stepping and frisky, their breath misting the night air, were led from the stables. The two coachmen, both in the Royal Mail's blue and red livery and both armed with blunderbusses and pistols, locked the boot and then watched as the team was harnessed. 'One minute!' a voice shouted, and Sandman drank the scalding coffee that the inn had provided for the mail's passengers. The lead coachman yawned again, then clambered up to the box. 'All aboard!'
There were four passengers. Sandman and a middle-aged clergyman took the front seat with their backs to the horses, while an elderly couple sat opposite them and so close that their knees could not help touching Sandman's. Mail coaches were light and cramped, but twice as fast as the larger stage coaches. There was a squeal of hinges as the inn yard's gates were dragged open, then the carriage swayed as the coachmen whipped the team out into Tothill Street. The sound of the thirty-two hooves echoed sharp from houses and the wheels cracked and rumbled as the coach gathered speed, but Sandman was fast asleep again by the time it reached Knightsbridge.
He woke at about six o'clock to find the coach was rattling along at a fine pace, swaying and lurching through a landscape of small fields and scattered coverts. The clergyman had a notebook on his lap, half-moon spectacles on his nose and a watch in his hand. He was peering through the windows on either side, searching for milestones, and saw that Sandman had woken.
'A fraction over nine miles an hour!' he exclaimed.
'Really?'
'Indeed!' Another milestone passed and the clergyman began working out sums on the page of his notebook. 'Ten and carry three, that's half again, minus sixteen, carry two. Well, I never! Certainly nine and a quarter! I once travelled at an average velocity of eleven miles an hour, but that was in eighteen-o-four and it was a very dry summer. Very dry, and the roads were smooth—' the coach hit a rut and lurched violently, throwing the clergyman against Sandman's shoulder— 'very smooth indeed,' he said, then peered through the window again. The elderly man clutched a valise to his chest and looked terrified, as though Sandman or the clergyman might prove to be a thief, though in truth highwaymen like Sally's brother were a much greater danger. Not this morning, though, for Sandman saw that two robin redbreasts were riding escort. The redbreasts were the Horse Patrol, all retired cavalrymen who, uniformed in blue coats over red waistcoats and armed with pistols and sabres, guarded the roads close to London. The two patrolmen kept the coach company until it clattered through a village and there the pair peeled away towards a tavern where, despite the early hour, a couple of men in long smocks were already sitting in the porch and drinking ale.
Sandman gazed fixedly out of the window, revelling in being out of London. The air seemed so remarkably clean. There was no pervading stench of coal smoke and horse dung, just the morning sunlight on summer leaves and the sparkle of a stream twisting beneath willows and alders beside a field of grazing cattle who looked up as the coachman sounded the horn. They were still close to London and the landscape was flat, but well drained. Good hunting country, Sandman thought, and imagined pursuing a fox beside this road. He felt his dream horse gather itself and leap a hedge, heard the huntsman's horn and the hounds giving tongue.
'Going far?' The clergyman interrupted his reverie.
'Marlborough.'
'Fine town, fine town.' The clergyman, an archdeacon, had abandoned his computations about the coach's speed and now rambled on about visiting his sister in Hungerford. Sandman made polite responses, but still kept looking out of the window. The fields were near harvest and the heads of rye, barley and wheat were heavy. The land was becoming hillier now, but the rattling, swaying and jolting coach kept up its fine pace and spewed a tail of dust that whitened the hedgerows. The horn warned folk of its approach and children waved as the eight horses thundered past. A blacksmith, leather apron blackened by fire, stood in his doorway. A woman shook her fist when her flock of geese scattered from the coach's noise, a child whirled a rattle in a vain attempt to drive predatory jays from rows of pea plants, then the sound of the trace chains and hooves and clattering wheels was echoing back from the seemingly endless wall of a great estate.
The Earl of Avebury, Sandman decided, would probably live in just such a walled estate, a great swathe of aristocratic country cut off by bricks, gamekeepers and watchmen. Suppose the Earl refused to see him? His lordship was said to be a recluse and the further west Sandman went the more he feared he would be summarily ejected from the estate, but that was a risk he would have to take. He forgot his fears as the coach lurched into a street of modern brick houses, the horn sounded urgently and Sandman realised they had come to the village of Reading where the coach swung into an inn yard to find the new horses waiting.
'Less than two minutes, gentlemen!' The two coachmen swung down from their box and, because the day was getting warmer, took off their triple-caped coats. 'Less than two minutes and we don't wait for laggards, milords.'
Sandman and the archdeacon had a companionable piss in the corner of the inn yard, then they each gulped down a cup of lukewarm tea as the new horses were harnessed and the old team, white with sweat, were led to the water trough. A sack of mail had been pulled from the boot and another took its place before the two coachmen scrambled up to their leather-cushioned perch. 'Time, gentlemen! Time!'
'One minute and forty-five seconds!' a man called from the inn door. 'Well done, Josh! Well done, Tim!'
The horn sounded, the fresh horses pricked back their ears and Sandman slammed the coach door and was thrown into the rear seat as the vehicle lurched forward. The elderly couple had left the coach, their place taken by a middle-aged woman who, within a mile, was vomiting from the offside window. 'You must forgive me,' she gasped.
'It is a motion mighty like a ship, ma'am,' the archdeacon observed, and took a silver flask from his pocket. 'Brandy might help?'
'Oh, Lord above!' the woman wailed in horrified refusal, then craned and retched through the window again.
'The springs are soft,' the archdeacon pointed out.
'And the road's very bumpy,' Sandman added.
'Especially at eight and a half miles an hour.' The archdeacon was busy with watch and pencil again, struggling gainfully to make legible figures despite the jolting. 'It always takes time to settle a new team and speed, which we lack, smooths a road.'
Sandman's spirits rose as each mile passed. He was happy, he suddenly realised, but quite why, he was not sure. Perhaps, he thought, it was because his life had purpose again, a serious purpose, or perhaps it was because he had seen Eleanor and nothing about her demeanour, he had decided, betrayed an imminent marriage to Lord Eagleton.
Lord Alexander Pleydell had hinted as much the previous evening, most of which he had spent worshipping at Sally Hood's shrine, though Sally herself had seemed distracted by her memories of Sergeant Berrigan. Not that Lord Alexander had noticed. He, like Lord Christopher Carne, was struck dumb by Sally, so dumb that for most of the evening the two aristocrats had merely gaped at her, sometimes stammering a commonplace until at last Sandman had taken Lord Alexander into the back parlour. 'I want to talk to you,' he had said.
'I want to continue my conversation with Miss Hood,' Lord Alexander had complained pettishly, worried that his friend Kit was being given untrammelled access to Sally.
'And so you shall,' Sandman assured him, 'but talk to me first. What do you know about the Marquess of Skavadale?'
