'We'll have an ale afterwards,' Botting said, 'and a chop for dinner.'
He left ten minutes later, the ropes and cords safe in his bag. He just had to fetch the two cotton bags from a seamstress, then he would be ready. He was England's hangman, and in the next day's dawn he would do his work.
===OO=OOO=OO===
Sandman was in a vile mood that Sunday morning. He had hardly slept, his temper was frayed and taut, and Meg's whining only made his bad temper worse. Berrigan and Sally were hardly more cheerful, but had the sense to keep silent, while Meg complained about being forced to London, then started screeching in protest when Sandman savaged her with accusations of selfishness and stupidity.
Billy, the stable hand, was left behind in the village. He could hardly get back to London ahead of the coach and so he could not warn the Seraphim Club of what was happening and thus it was safe to abandon him. 'But how do I get home?' he enquired plaintively.
'You do what the rest of us did from Lisbon to Toulouse,' Sandman snapped. 'You walk.'
The horses were ragged and tired. They had cropped the grass on the village green, shying away from the intrusive geese that resented their presence, but the animals were used to oats and corn, not thin grass, and they were sluggish in the harness though they responded briskly enough to Mackeson's whip and by the time the sun had climbed above the eastern trees they were going northwards at a fair clip. Church bells jangled a summer sky where high white clouds sailed westwards. 'You a churchgoer, Captain?' Berrigan asked, judging that their progress would have improved Sandman's mood.
'Of course.' Sandman was sharing the box with Berrigan and Mackeson, leaving the carriage's interior for Sally and Meg. It had been Sally's idea to share the coach with Meg. 'She don't frighten me,' Sally had said, 'and besides, maybe she'll talk to another girl?'
'I ain't a church sort of man,' Berrigan said. 'Ain't got time for it, but I do like to hear the bells.' All about them, concealed by the leafy Kent woods, the church towers and spires rang the changes. A dog cart clipped past them, loaded with children in their Sunday best and all carrying their prayer books to morning service. The children waved.
The bells went silent as the services began. The carriage came to a village, its main street deserted. They clopped past the church and Sandman heard a cellist accompanying the old hymn, 'Awake my soul and with the sun thy daily stage of duty run.' They had sung it, he remembered, on the morning of the battle at Salamanca, the men's voices hard and low beneath a sun climbing into a sky that became pitiless with heat on a day of burning death. Mackeson stopped the team in a ford on the other side of the village and, as the horses drank, Sandman folded down the steps to let Sally and Meg stretch their legs. He looked quizzically at Sally, who shook her head. 'Stubborn,' she murmured to Sandman.
Meg came down and glared at Sandman, then bent to scoop water into her mouth. Afterwards she sat on the bank and just watched the dragonflies. 'I'll kill you,' she said to Sandman, 'if the foxes have eaten my chooks.'
'You care more about your hens than the life of an innocent man?'
'Let him bloody hang,' Meg said. She had lost her bonnet and her hair was lank and tousled.
'You're going to have to talk to other men in London,' Sandman said, 'and they won't be gentle.'
The girl said nothing.
Sandman sighed. 'I know what happened,' he said. 'You were in the room where Corday was painting the Countess and someone came up the back stairs. So you took Corday down the front stairs, didn't you? You left his painting and his brushes in the Countess's bedroom and you hurried him out to the street because one of the Countess's lovers had arrived, and I know who it was. It was the Marquess of Skavadale.' Meg frowned, looked as if she was about to say something, then just stared away into the distance. 'And the Marquess of Skavadale,' Sandman went on, 'is engaged to marry a very rich heiress, and he needs that marriage because his family is short of money, desperately short. But the girl won't marry him if she knows he was having a liaison with the Countess, and the Countess was blackmailing him. She made money that way, didn't she?'
'Did she?' Meg asked tonelessly.
'You were her procuress, weren't you?'
Meg turned her small, bitter eyes on Sandman. 'I was her protector, culley, and she needed one. Too good for her own good, she was.'
'But you didn't protect her, did you?' Sandman said harshly. 'And the Marquess killed her, and you discovered that. Did you find him there? Maybe you heard the murder? Perhaps you saw it! So he hid you away and he promised you money. But one day, Meg, he'll be tired of paying you. And he's only keeping you alive until Corday is hanged, for after that no one will believe anyone else was guilty.'
Meg half smiled. 'Why didn't he kill me there and then, eh?' She stared defiantly at Sandman. 'If he killed the Countess, why wouldn't he kill the maid? Tell me that, go on!'
Sandman could not. It was, indeed, the one thing he could not explain, though everything else made sense and he believed that, in time, even that mystery would unravel. 'Perhaps he likes you?' he suggested.
Meg stared at him incredulously for a few seconds, then gave a short bark of raucous laughter. 'The likes of him?' she asked. 'Liking me? No.' She brushed an insect off her skirt. 'He let me look after the chooks, that's all. I like chooks. I've always liked chooks.'
'Captain!' Berrigan, sitting up on the coach's box, was staring north. 'Captain!' he called again. Sandman stood and walked to the carriage and stared northwards across some fields and up a low, thickly wooded hill and there, on the crest where the London road crossed the skyline and made a gash in the trees, was a group of horsemen. 'They've been looking down here,' Berrigan said, 'like they was dragoons and they was trying to work out how many redcoats they could see.'
Sandman had no telescope and the horsemen were too far away to see clearly. There were six or seven of them and Sandman had the impression, no more, that they were gazing towards the coach and that at least one of them had a telescope. 'Could be anyone,' he said.
'Could be,' Berrigan agreed, 'only Lord Robin Holloway likes to wear a white riding coat and he's got a great black horse.'
The man at the centre of the group had a white coat and was mounted on a big black horse. 'Damn,' Sandman said mildly. Had Flossie talked in the Seraphim Club? Had she revealed that Sandman had trespassed there? In which case they would surely have connected him with the missing carriage and then started to worry about Meg in Kent, and then they would send a rescue party to make sure that Sandman did not bring the girl to London, and even as he thought that so he saw the group of horsemen spur forward and disappear into the trees. 'Whip 'em on,' he told Mackeson. 'Sergeant! Get Meg into the carriage! Hurry!'
How long before the horsemen arrived? Ten minutes? Probably less. Sandman thought of turning the coach and going back to the village where there had been a crossroads, but there was no room to turn the vehicle and so, when Meg was safely bundled aboard, Mackeson urged the horses on and Sandman told him to take the first turning off the road. Any lane or farm track would do, but perversely there was none, and as the coach lurched on Sandman expected to see the horsemen appear at any second. He stared ahead, watching for the dust to show above the trees. At least the countryside was heavily wooded here, which meant that the coach would be hidden almost until they encountered the riders, and then, just as Sandman was despairing of ever finding an escape route, a narrow lane fell off to the right and he ordered Mackeson to take it.
'Rough old road, that,' Mackeson warned him.
'Just take it!'
The vehicle swung into the lane, narrowly missing the gnarled bole of an oak tree as it negotiated the sharp bend. 'I hope this goes somewhere,' Mackeson sounded amused, 'or else we're stuck to buggery.'
The coach lurched and swayed alarmingly, for the lane was nothing but deep old cart ruts that had solidified in the dry mud, but it ran between thick hedges and wide orchards and every yard took them farther from the London road. Sandman made Mackeson stop after a couple of hundred yards and then stood on the carriage roof and stared back, but he could see no horsemen on the road. Had he let his fears make him too cautious? Then Meg screamed, screamed again, and Sandman, scrambling down off the roof, heard a slap. The scream stopped and he jumped down to the road. Berrigan dropped the unbroken window. 'Only a bleeding wasp,' he said, flicking the dead insect into the hedge. 'You'd think it was a bleeding crocodile the fuss she bleeding makes!'
'I thought she was murdering you,' Sandman said, then he started to climb back up onto the coach, only to be checked by Berrigan's raised hand. He stopped, listened and heard the sound of hoofbeats.
