'How must I oblige you, my lord?' Sandman asked.
'Not as Betty does! No, no!' The Earl leered at Sandman. 'You will tell me all I want to know, Captain, and perhaps, when you are done, I shall tell you a little of what you want to know. Rank has its privileges!'
Outside, in the hall, a clock struck six and the sound seemed melancholy in the great empty house. Sandman felt the despair of wasted time. He needed to discover if Meg was here and he needed to return to London, and he sensed that the Earl would play with him all evening and at the end send him away with his questions unanswered. The Earl, sensing and enjoying Sandman's disapproval, pulled the girl's breasts out of her dress. 'Let us begin at the beginning, Captain,' he said, lowering his face to nuzzle the warm flesh, 'let us begin at dawn, eh? It had been raining, yes?'
Sandman walked round the table until he was behind the Earl, where he stooped so his face was close to the stiff hairs of the wig. 'Why not talk about the battle's end, my lord?' Sandman asked in a low voice. 'Why not talk about the attack of the Imperial Guard? Because I was there when we wheeled out of line and took the bastards in the flank.' He crouched even lower. He could smell his lordship's reek and see a louse crawling along the wig's edge. He lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. They'd won the battle, my lord, it was all over except the pursuit, but we changed history in an eyeblink. We marched out of line and we gave them volley fire, my lord, and then we fixed bayonets and I can tell you exactly how it happened. I can tell you how we won, my lord.' Sandman's temper was rising now and there was a bitterness in his voice. 'We won! But you'll never hear that story, my lord, never, because I'll make damn sure that not one officer of the 52nd will ever talk to you! You understand that? Not one officer will ever talk to you. Good day, my lord. Perhaps your servant will be kind enough to show me out?' He walked towards the door. He would ask the servant if Meg had come here and if not, which he suspected would prove the case, then this whole journey would have been a waste of time and money.
'Captain!' The Earl had tipped the girl off his lap. 'Wait!' His rouged face twitched. There was malevolence in it; an old, bitter, hard-hearted malevolence, but he so badly wanted to know exactly how Bonaparte's vaunted Guard had been beaten off, so he snarled at the two girls and the servants to leave the room. 'I'll be alone with the Captain,' he said.
It still took time to draw the tale from him. Time and a bottle of smuggled French brandy, but eventually the Earl spewed the bitter tale of his marriage, confirming what Lord Christopher had already told Sandman. Celia, second wife to the sixteenth earl of Avebury, had been on stage when the Earl first saw her. 'Legs,' the Earl said dreamily, 'such legs, Captain, such legs. That was the first thing about her I saw.'
'At the Sans Pareil?' Sandman asked.
The Earl shot Sandman a very shrewd glance. 'Who've you been talking to?' he demanded. 'Who?'
'People talk in town,' Sandman said.
'My son?' the Earl guessed, then laughed. 'That little fool? That pasty little weakling? Good God, Captain, I should have culled that one when he was an infant. His mother was a holy damned fool and swiving her was like rogering a prayerful mouse, and the bloody fool thinks he's taken after her, but he hasn't. There's me in him. He might be forever on his knees, Captain, but he's always thinking of tits and bum, legs and tits again. He might fool himself, but he don't fool me. Says he wants to be a priest! But he won't. What he wants, Captain, is for me to be dead and then the estate is his, all of it! It's entailed onto him, did he tell you that? And he'll spend it all on tits, legs and bums, just as I would have done, only the difference between that stammering little fool and me is that I was never ashamed. I enjoyed it, Captain, I still do, and he suffers from guilt. Guilt!' The Earl spat the word, whirling a length of spittle across the room. 'So what did the pallid little halfwit tell you? That I killed Celia? Perhaps I did, Captain, or perhaps Maddox went up to town and did it for me, but how will you prove it, eh?' The Earl waited for an answer, but Sandman did not speak. 'Did you know, Captain,' the Earl asked, 'that they hang an aristocrat with a silken rope?'
'I did not, my lord.'
'So they say,' the Earl declared, 'so they do say. The common folk get turned off with a yard or two of common hemp, but we lords get a rope of silk and I'd gladly wear a silk rope in exchange for that bitch's death. Lord, but she robbed me blind. Never knew a woman to spend money like it! Then when I came to my senses I tried to cut off her allowance. I denied her debts and told the estate's trustees to turn her out of the house, but the bastards left her there. Maybe she was swiving one of them? That's how she made her money, Captain, by diligent swiving.'
'You're saying she was a whore, my lord?'
'Not a common whore,' the Earl said, 'she was no mere buttock, I'll say that for her. She called herself a cantatrice, an actress, a dancer, but in truth she was a clever bitch and I was a fool to exchange a marriage for a season of her swiving, however good she was.' He grinned at himself, then turned his rheumy eyes on Sandman. 'Celia used blackmail, Captain. She'd take a young man about town as a lover, commit the poor fool to write a letter or two begging her favours, and then when he engaged to marry an heiress she threatened to reveal the letters. Made a pretty penny, she did! She told me as much! Told me to my face. Told me she didn't need my cash, had her own.'
'Do you know what men she treated thus, my lord?'
The Earl shook his head. He stared at the model battle, unwilling to meet Sandman's eyes. 'I didn't want to know names,' he said softly and, for the first time, Sandman felt some pity for the old man.
'And the servants, my lord? The servants from your London house. What happened to them?'
'How the devil would I know? They ain't here.' He scowled at Sandman. 'And why would I want that bitch's servants here? I told Faulkner to get rid of them, just to get rid of them.'
'Faulkner?'
'A lawyer, one of the trustees, and like all lawyers he's a belly-crawling piece of shit.' The Earl looked up at Sandman. 'I don't know what happened to Celia's damned servants,' he said, 'and I don't care. Now, go to the door and find Maddox and tell him you and I will sup on beef, and then, damn you, tell me what happened when the Emperor's Guard attacked.'
So Sandman did.
He had come to Wiltshire, he had not found Meg, but he had learnt something.
Though whether it was enough, he did not know.
And in the morning he went back to London.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sandman got back to London late on Thursday afternoon. He had taken the mail coach from Marlborough, justifying the expense by the time he was saving, but just outside Thatcham one of the horses had thrown a shoe and then, near the village of Hammersmith, a haywain with a broken axle was blocking a bridge and Sandman reckoned it would have been far quicker to have walked the last few miles rather than wait while the road was cleared, but he was tired after sleeping fitfully on a pile of straw in the yard of the King's Head in Marlborough and so he stayed with the coach. He was also irritated, for he reckoned his journey to Wiltshire had been largely wasted. He doubted the Earl of Avebury had either killed or arranged the killing of his wife, but he had never thought the man guilty in the first place. The only advantage Sandman had gained was to learn that the dead Countess had kept herself by blackmailing her lovers, but that did not help him to discover who those lovers had been.
He used the side door of the Wheatsheaf that opened into the tavern's stableyard where he pumped water into the tin cup chained to the handle. He drank it down, pumped again, then turned as the click of hooves sounded in the stable entrance where he saw Jack Hood heaving a saddle onto a tall and handsome black horse. The highwayman nodded a curt acknowledgement of Sandman's presence, then stooped to buckle the girth. Like his horse, Jack Hood was tall and dark. He wore black boots, black breeches and a narrow waisted black coat, and he wore his black hair long and tied with a ribbon of black silk at the nape of his neck. He straightened and gave Sandman a crooked grin. 'You look tired, Captain.'
Tired, poor, hungry and thirsty,' Sandman said, and pumped a third cup of water.
'That's what the square life does for you,' Hood said cheerfully. He slid two long-barrelled pistols into their saddle holsters. 'You should be on the cross like me.'
Sandman drank down the water and let the cup drop. 'And what will you do, Mister Hood,' he asked, 'when they catch you?'
Hood led the horse into the waning evening sunlight. The beast was fine bred and nervous, high-stepping and skittish; a horse, Sandman suspected, that could fly like the night wind when escape was needed. 'When I'm
