did he expect to find it easily. Elizabeth's searchers had been good, ruthless and well-rewarded for finding priests, yet some hiding places had eluded them despite days of looking.
'Weighs a bloody ton,' Berrigan complained as he staggered into the bedroom and dropped an enormous cauldron onto the floor. Sally was a few steps behind with a bundle of firewood.
'Where's the steward?' Sandman asked.
'Sitting in the kitchen looking if he's sucking gunpowder,' Berrigan said.
'His wife?'
'Gone.'
'Didn't he want to know what you were doing with that?'
'I told him I'd put a hole in his face if he dared ask,' Berrigan said happily.
'Tact,' Sandman said. 'It always works.'
'So what are you doing?' Sally asked.
'We're going to burn the damn house down,' Sandman said loudly. He shifted the cauldron onto the hearth's apron. 'No one's using the house,' he still spoke loudly enough for someone two rooms away to hear him, 'and the roof needs mending. Cheaper to burn it down than clean it up, don't you think?' He put the kindling in the bottom of the cauldron, struck a spark in the tinder box and blew on the charred linen till he had a flame that he transferred to the kindling. He nursed the flame for a few seconds, then it was crackling and spreading and he put some smaller pieces of firewood on top.
It took a few minutes before the larger pieces caught the flames, but by then the cauldron was belching a thick blue-white smoke and, because the cauldron was on the hearth's apron rather than in the fireplace, almost none of the smoke was being sucked into the chimney. Sandman planned to smoke Meg out, and in case the priest's hole opened to the passage, he had put Berrigan to stand guard outside the bedroom while he and Sally stayed inside with the door shut. The smoke was choking them, so that Sally was crouching by the bed, but she was reluctant to leave in case the ruse worked. Sandman's eyes were streaming and his throat was raw, but he fed another piece of wood onto the flames and he saw the belly of the cauldron begin to glow a dull red. He opened the door a fraction to let some smoke out and fresh air in. 'You want to leave?' he hissed at Sally, and she shook her head.
Sandman stooped down to where the smoke was thinner and he thought of Meg in the priest's hole, a space so dark and black and tight and frightening. He hoped the smell of burning was already adding to her fears and that the smoke was infiltrating the cunning traps and hatches and secret doors that concealed her ancient hiding place. A log crackled, split and a puff of smoke shot out of the cauldron on a lance of flame. Sally had the dust sheet over her mouth and Sandman knew they could not last much longer, but just then there was a creaking sound, a scream and a crash like the impact of a cannon ball, and he saw a whole section of the panelling open like a door — only it was not by the fireplace but along the outer wall, between the windows, where he had thought the wall too thin for a priest's hole. Sandman pulled his sleeves over his hands and, so protected, shoved the cauldron under the chimney as Sally snatched the wrist of the screaming, terrified woman who had thought herself trapped in a burning house and now tried to extricate herself from the narrow, laddered shaft that led down from the dislodged panels.
'It's all right! It's all right!' Sally was saying as she led Meg over to the door.
And Sandman, his coat scorched and blackened, followed the two women onto the wide landing where he gasped cool clean air and stared into Meg's red-rimmed eyes. He thought how good an artist Charles Corday was, for the young woman was truly monstrously ugly, even malevolent looking, and then he laughed because he had found her and with her he would discover the truth, and she mistook his laughter as mockery and, stepping forward, slapped his face hard.
And just then a gun fired from the hallway.
Sally screamed as Sandman pushed her down and out of the way. Meg, sensing escape, ran towards the stairs, but Berrigan tripped her. Sandman stepped over her as he limped to the balustrade, where he saw that it was the sour-looking housekeeper, much braver than her husband, who had fired the fowling piece up the staircase. But, like many raw recruits, she had shut her eyes when she pulled the trigger and she had fired too high, so that the duck shot had whipped over Sandman's hair. A half-dozen men were behind her, one with a musket, and Sandman slapped down Berrigan's pistol. 'No shooting!' he shouted. 'No killing!'
'You've no business here!' the housekeeper screamed up at him. She had gone pale, for she had not meant to fire the gun, but when she had snatched it from her husband and aimed it up the stairway as a threat, she had inadvertently jerked the trigger. The men behind her were led by a tall, fair-haired giant armed with a musket. The rest had cudgels and sickles. To Sandman they looked like the peasants come to burn down the big house, whereas in truth they were probably tenants who had come to protect the Duke of Ripon's property.
'We have every right to be here,' Sandman lied. He kept his voice calm as he drew out the Home Secretary's letter which, in truth, granted him no rights whatsoever. 'We have been asked by the government to investigate a murder,' he spoke gently as he went slowly down the stairs, always keeping his eyes on the man with the gun. He was a hugely tall man, well muscled and perhaps in his early thirties, wearing a grubby white shirt and cream- coloured trousers held up by a strip of green cloth that served as a belt. He looked oddly familiar and Sandman wondered if he had been a soldier. His musket was certainly an old army musket, abandoned after Napoleon's last defeat, but it was clean, it was cocked and the tall man held it confidently. 'I have here the Home Secretary's authorisation,' Sandman said, brandishing the letter with its impressive seal, 'and we have not come to harm anyone, to steal anything or to cause damage. We have only come to ask questions.'
'You've no rights here!' the housekeeper screeched.
'Quiet, woman,' Sandman snapped in his best officer's voice. What she said was correct, absolutely correct, but she had lost her temper and Sandman suspected that these men would rather listen to a reasonable voice than to an hysterical rant. 'Does anyone want to read his lordship's letter?' he asked, holding out the paper and knowing that a mention of 'his lordship' would give them pause. 'And by the way,' he glanced back up the stairs where the smoke was thinning on the landing, 'the house is not on fire and is in no danger. Now, who wants to read his lordship's letter?'
But the man holding the musket ignored the paper. He frowned at Sandman instead and lowered the weapon's muzzle. 'Are you Captain Sandman?'
Sandman nodded. 'I am,' he said.
'By God, but I saw you knock seventy-six runs off us at Tunbridge Wells!' the man said. 'And we had Pearson and Willes bowling to you! Pearson and Willes, no less, and you knocked 'em ten ways crazy and halfway upside down.' He had now uncocked the musket and was beaming at Sandman. 'Last year, it were, and I was playing for Kent. You had us well beat, except the rain came and saved us!'
And, by the grace of God, the big man's name slithered into Sandman's mind. 'It's Mister Wainwright, isn't it?'
'Ben Wainwright it is, sir.' Wainwright, who from his clothes must have been playing cricket when he had been summoned to the house, pulled his forelock.
'You hit a ball over the haystack, I recall,' Sandman said. 'You nearly beat us on your own!'
'Nothing like you, sir, nothing like you.'
'Benjamin Wainwright!' the housekeeper snapped. 'You ain't here to…'
'You be quiet, Doris,' Wainwright said, lowering the flint of the musket. 'Ain't no harm in Captain Sandman!' The men with him growled their assent. It did not matter that Sandman was in the house illegally or that he had filled its upper landing with smoke, he was a cricketer and a famous one and they were all grinning at him now, wanting his approbation. 'I heard you'd given the game up, sir?' Wainwright sounded worried. 'Is that true?'
'Oh no,' Sandman said, 'it's just I only like playing in clean games.'
'Precious few of them,' Wainwright said. 'But I should have had you on our team today, sir. Taking a fair licking, we are, from a side from Hastings. I already had my innings,' he added, explaining his absence from the game.
'There'll be other days,' Sandman consoled him, 'but for now I want to take this young lady into the garden and have a conversation with her. Or maybe there's a tavern where we can talk over an ale?' He added that because he realised it would be sensible to take Meg off the Duke of Ripon's property before someone with a rudimentary legal knowledge accused them of trespass and explained to Meg that she did not have to talk with them.
