Gallows Thief

  Sandman eased her onto the bench, then sat beside her. ‘Allow me to name Sergeant Berrigan,’ he told her, ‘once of His Majesty’s First Foot Guards. This is Miss Sally Hood.’

  ‘Sam Berrigan,’ the Sergeant said, plainly amused by Sally’s fury, ‘and I’m honoured, miss.’

  ‘I’m bleeding not honoured.’ She glared at him.

  ‘A pound?’ Sandman asked Berrigan.

  ‘I said those two dozy bastards wouldn’t take you, sir. Not Captain Sandman of the 52nd.’

  Sandman half smiled. ‘Lord Skavadale seemed to know me as a cricketer, not as a soldier.’

  ‘I was the one what knew the regiment you served in,’ Berrigan said, then snapped his fingers and one of the serving girls came running. Sandman was not particularly impressed that Berrigan knew his old regiment, but he was very impressed by a stranger who could command such instant service in the Wheatsheaf. There was something very competent about Sam Berrigan. ‘I’ll have an ale, miss,’ the Sergeant told the girl, then he looked at Sally. ‘Your pleasure, Miss Hood?’

  Sally debated with herself for a second, deciding whether her pleasure was to reject Sam Berrigan’s offer, then she decided life was too short to turn down a drink. ‘I’ll have a gin punch, Molly,’ she said sulkily.

  ‘Ale,’ Sandman said.

  Berrigan put a coin in Molly’s palm, folded her fingers over it and then held on to her hand. ‘A jug of ale, Molly,’ he said, ‘and make sure the gin punch is as fine as any we’d get at Limmer’s.’

  Molly, entranced by the Sergeant, dropped a curtsey to him. ‘Mister Jenks, sir,’ she whispered, ‘he don’t like sticks on his tables.’

  Berrigan smiled, let go of her hand and put the pistol in a deep pocket of his jacket. He looked at Sandman. ‘Lord Robin Holloway sent those two,’ he said dismissively, ‘and the Marquess sent me.’

  ‘Marquess?’

  ‘Skavadale, Captain. He didn’t want you to come to any harm.’

  ‘His lordship is very generous suddenly.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Berrigan said. ‘The Marquess doesn’t want to stir up trouble, but Lord Robin? He don’t care. He’s a halfwit is what he is. He sent those two to persuade you back to the club where he planned to challenge you.’

  ‘To a duel?’ Sandman was amused.

  ‘Pistols, I imagine,’ Berrigan was equally amused. ‘I can’t see him wanting to take you on with a blade again. But I told the Marquess those two would never force you. You were too good a soldier.’

  Sandman smiled. ‘How do you know what kind of a soldier I was, Sergeant?’

  ‘I know exactly what sort of swoddy you was,’ Berrigan said. He had a good face, Sandman thought, broad, tough and with confident eyes.

  Sandman shrugged. ‘I don’t believe I had any particular reputation.’

  Berrigan looked at Sally. ‘It was the end of the day at Waterloo, miss, and we was beaten. I knew it. I’ve been in enough fights to know when you’re beaten, and we was just standing there and dying. We hadn’t given in, don’t get me wrong, miss, but the bloody Crapauds had us beat. There was simply too many of the bastards. We’d been killing them all day and still they kept coming and it was day’s end and the last of them was coming up the hill and there were four times as many of them as there were of us. I watched him,’ he jerked his head at Sandman, ‘and he was walking up and down in front of the line like he didn’t have a care in the world. You’d lost your hat, hadn’t you, sir?’

  Sandman laughed at that memory. ‘I had, you’re right.’ His bicorne hat had been blasted off by a French musket ball and it had vanished. He had immediately searched the fire-blackened ground where he was standing, but the hat had gone. He never did find it.

  ‘It was his fair hair,’ Berrigan explained to Sally. ‘Stood out in a dark day. Up and down he walked and the Crapauds had a swarm of skirmishers not fifty paces off and they was all shooting at him and he didn’t blink an eyelid. Just walked.’

  Sandman was embarrassed. ‘I was only doing my duty, Sergeant, like you were, and I was terrified, I can tell you.’

  ‘But you’re the one we noticed doing the duty,’ Berrigan said, then looked back to Sally who was listening open-mouthed. ‘He’s walking up and down and the Emperor’s own guard are coming up the hill at us, and I thought to myself, that’s it! That’s it, Sam. A short life and a shallow grave, ’cos there were precious few of us left, but the Captain here, he was still strolling like it was Sunday in Hyde Park and then he stopped walking and he watched the Frenchies as cool as you like, and then he laughed.’

  ‘I don’t remember that,’ Sandman said.

  ‘You did,’ Berrigan insisted. ‘There’s death in bluecoats coming up the hill and you were laughing!’

  ‘I had a Colour Sergeant who made very bad jokes at inappropriate moments,’ Sandman said, ‘so I imagine he said something rather indecent.’

  ‘Then I watched him take his men round the flank of the bastards,’ Berrigan continued telling Sally his story, ‘and he beat them into hell.’

  ‘That wasn’t me,’ Sandman said reprovingly. ‘It was Johnny Colborne who marched us round the flank. It was his regiment.’

  ‘But you led them,’ Berrigan insisted. ‘You led.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Sandman countered. ‘I was just closest to you, Sergeant, and we certainly didn’t beat the French guards alone. As I recall your regiment was in the thick of it?’

  ‘We was good that day,’ Berrigan allowed, ‘we was very good and we bloody well had to be ’cos the Crapauds were fierce as buggery.’ He poured two pots of ale, then raised his own tankard. ‘Your very good health, Captain.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Sandman said, ‘though I doubt your employers would share the sentiment?’

  ‘Lord Robin don’t like you,’ Berrigan said, ‘on account that you made him look a bloody idiot, but that ain’t difficult seeing as he is a bloody idiot.’

  ‘Maybe they don’t like me,’ Sandman observed, ‘because they don’t want the Countess’s murder investigated?’

  ‘Don’t suppose they care one way or another,’ Berrigan said.

  ‘I hear they commissioned the portrait, and the Marquess admitted knowing the dead woman.’ Sandman tallied the points that counted against Berrigan’s employers. ‘And they refuse to answer questions. I suspect them.’

  Berrigan drank from his tankard, then refilled it from the jug. He stared at Sandman for a few seconds, then shrugged. ‘They’re the Seraphim Club, Captain, so yes, they’ve done murder, and they’ve thieved, they’ve bribed, they’ve even tried highway robbery. They call them pranks. But killing the Countess? I’ve heard nothing.’

  ‘Would you have heard?’ Sandman asked.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Berrigan allowed. ‘But we servants know most of what they do because we clean up after them.’

  ‘Because they’re being flash?’ Sally sounded indignant. It was one thing for her friends at the Wheatsheaf to be criminals, but they had been born poor. ‘Why the hell do they want to be flash?’ she asked. ‘They’re rich already, ain’t they?’

  Berrigan looked at her, evidently liking what he saw. ‘That’s exactly why they do it, miss, because they are rich,’ he said. ‘Rich, titled and privileged, and on account of that they reckon they’re better than the rest of us. And they’re bored. What they want, they take and what gets in their way, they destroy.’

  ‘Or get you to destroy it?’ Sandman guessed.

  Berrigan gave Sandman a very level look. ‘There are thirty-eight Seraphims,’ he said, ‘and twenty servants, and that don’t count the kitchens or the girls. And it takes all twenty of us to clean up their messes. They’re rich enough so they don’t have to care,’ his tone suggested he was warning Sandman, ‘and they’re bastards, Captain, real bastards.’

  ‘Yet you work for them,’ Sandman spoke very gently.

  ‘I’m no saint, Captain,’ Berrigan said, ‘and they pay me well.’

  ‘Because they need your s
ilence?’ Sandman guessed and, when there was no reply, he pushed a little harder. ‘What do they need your silence about?’

  Berrigan glanced at Sally, then looked back to Sandman. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he growled.

  Sandman understood the implications of that quick glance at Sally. ‘Rape?’ he asked.

  Berrigan nodded, but said nothing.

  ‘Is that the purpose of the club?’ Sandman asked.

  ‘The purpose,’ Berrigan said, ‘is for them to do whatever they want. They’re all lords or baronets or rich as hell and the rest of the world are peasants, and they reckon they have the right to do whatever they fancy. There’s not a man there who shouldn’t be hanged.’

  ‘You included?’ Sandman asked and, when the Sergeant did not answer, he asked another question. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’

  ‘Lord Robin Holloway,’ Berrigan said, ‘wants you dead because you humiliated him, but I won’t stand for it, Captain, not after Waterloo. That was a—’ he paused, frowning as he tried and failed to find the right word – ‘I didn’t think I’d live through it,’ he confessed instead, ‘and nothing’s been the same since. We went to the gates of hell, miss,’ he looked at Sally, ‘and we got deep scorched, but we marched out again.’ The Sergeant’s voice had been hoarse with emotion and Sandman understood that. He had met many soldiers who could begin crying just thinking about their years of service, about the battles they had endured and the friends they had lost. Sam Berrigan looked as hard as a cobblestone, and undoubtedly he was, but he was also a very sentimental man. ‘There’s been hardly a day that I haven’t seen you in my mind,’ Berrigan went on, ‘out on that ridge in that bloody smoke. It’s what I remember about the battle, just that, and I don’t know why. So I don’t want you harmed by some spavined halfwit like Lord Robin Holloway.’

  Sandman smiled. ‘I think you’re here, Sergeant, because you want to leave the Seraphim Club.’

  Berrigan leant back and contemplated Sandman and then, more appreciatively, Sally. She blushed under his scrutiny, and he took a cigar from his inside pocket and struck a light with a tinder box. ‘I don’t intend to be any man’s servant for long,’ he said when the cigar was drawing, ‘but when I leave, Captain, I’ll set up in business.’

  ‘Doing what?’ Sandman asked.

  ‘These,’ Berrigan tapped the cigar. ‘A lot of gentlemen acquired a taste for these in the Spanish war, but they’re curious hard to come by. I find them for the club members and I make almost as much tin that way as I do from wages. You understand me, Captain?’

  ‘I’m not sure I do.’

  ‘I don’t need your advice, I don’t need your preaching and I don’t need your help. Sam Berrigan can look after himself. I just came to warn you, nothing else. Get out of town, Captain.’

  ‘Joy shall be in heaven,’ Sandman said, ‘over one sinner that repenteth.’

  ‘Oh no. No, no, no,’ Berrigan shook his head. ‘I just done you a favour, Captain, and that’s it!’ He stood up, ‘And that’s all I came to do.’

  Sandman smiled. ‘I could do with some help, Sergeant, so when you decide to leave the club, come and find me. I’m leaving London tomorrow, but I’ll be back here on Thursday afternoon.’

  ‘You’d better bloody be,’ Sally put in.

  Sandman, amused, raised an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s that private performance,’ Sally explained. ‘You’re coming to Covent Garden to cheer me, aren’t you? It’s Aladdin.’

  ‘Aladdin, eh?’

  ‘A half bloody rehearsed Aladdin. Got to be in there tomorrow morning to learn the steps. You are coming, aren’t you, Captain?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ Sandman said, and looked back to Berrigan. ‘So I’ll be back here on Thursday and thank you for the ale, and when you decide to help me, then you know where to find me.’

  Berrigan stared at him for a heartbeat, said nothing, then nodded at Sally and walked away after putting a handful of coins on the table. Sandman watched him leave. ‘A very troubled young man, Sally,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t look troubled to me. Good-looking though, ain’t he?’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Course he is!’ Sally said forcefully.

  ‘But he’s still troubled,’ Sandman said. ‘He wants to be good and finds it easy to be bad.’

  ‘Welcome to life,’ Sally said.

  ‘So we’re going to have to help make him good, aren’t we?’

  ‘We?’ She sounded alarmed.

  ‘I’ve decided I can’t put the world to rights all on my own,’ Sandman said. ‘I need allies, my dear, and you’re elected. So far there’s you, someone I saw this afternoon, maybe Sergeant Berrigan and …’ Sandman turned as a newcomer to the taproom knocked down a chair, apologised profusely, fumbled his walking stick and then struck his head on a beam. The Reverend Lord Alexander Pleydell had arrived. ‘… and your admirer makes four,’ Sandman finished.

  And maybe five, for Lord Alexander had a young man with him, a young man with an open face and a troubled expression. ‘You’re Captain Sandman?’ The young man did not wait for an introduction, but just hurried across the room and held out his hand.

  ‘At your service,’ Sandman said cautiously.

  ‘Thank God I’ve found you!’ the young man said. ‘My name is Carne, Christopher Carne.’

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ Sandman said politely, though the name meant nothing to him and the young man’s face was quite unfamiliar.

  ‘The Countess of Avebury was my stepmother,’ Carne explained. ‘I am my father’s only son, only child indeed, and thus heir to the earldom.’

  ‘Ah,’ Sandman said.

  ‘We must talk,’ Carne said. ‘Please, we must talk.’

  Lord Alexander was bowing to Sally and, at the same time, blushing deep scarlet. Sandman knew his friend would be content for a while, so he led Carne to the back of the taproom where a booth offered some privacy.

  ‘We must talk,’ Carne said again. ‘Dear God, Sandman, you can prevent a great injustice and God knows you must.’

  So they talked.

  He was, of course, the Lord Christopher Carne. ‘Call me Kit,’ he said, ‘please.’

  Sandman was no radical. He had never shared Lord Alexander’s passion to pull down a society based on wealth and privilege, but nor did he like calling men ‘my lord’ unless he truly found them or their office worthy of respect. He had no doubt that the Marquess of Skavadale had noted that reluctance, just as Sandman had noted that the Marquess was gentleman enough not to remark on it. But though Sandman was unwilling to address Lord Christopher Carne as my lord, he was equally unwilling to call him Kit, so it was better to call him nothing.

  Sandman just listened. Lord Christopher Carne was a nervous, hesitant young man with thick-lensed spectacles. He was very short, had thin hair and the faintest suggestion of a stammer. In all he was not a prepossessing man, though he did possess an intensity of manner that compensated for his apparent weakness. ‘My father,’ he told Sandman, ‘is a dreadful man, just d-dreadful.’

  ‘Dreadful?’

  ‘It is as though the ten commandments, Sandman, were quite d-deliberately compiled as a challenge to him. Especially the seventh!’

  ‘Adultery?’

  ‘Of course. He ignores it, Sandman, ignores it!’ Behind the magnifying lenses of his glasses Lord Christopher’s eyes widened as though the very thought of adultery was horrid, then his lordship blushed as if to mention it was shameful. He was dressed, Sandman noted, respectably enough in a well-cut coat and a fine shirt, but the cuffs of both were stained with ink, betraying a bookish disposition. ‘My p-point,’ Lord Christopher seemed uncomfortable under Sandman’s scrutiny, ‘is that like many habitual sinners, my father takes umbrage when he is sinned against.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Lord Christopher blinked several times. ‘He has sinned with many men’s wives, Captain Sandman,’ he said uncomfortably, ‘but he was furious when his own
wife was unfaithful.’

  ‘Your stepmother?’

  ‘Just so. He threatened to kill her! I heard him.’

  ‘To threaten to kill someone,’ Sandman observed, ‘is not the same as killing them.’

  ‘I am apprised of the difference,’ Lord Christopher answered with a surprising asperity, ‘but I have talked with Alexander and he tells me you have a duty to the painter, Cordell?’

  ‘Corday.’

  ‘Just so, and I cannot believe, cannot believe he did it! What cause did he have? But my father, Sandman, my father had cause.’ Lord Christopher spoke with a savage vehemence, even leaning forward and gripping Sandman’s wrist as he made the accusation. Then, realising what he had done, he blushed and let go. ‘You will perhaps understand,’ he went on more mildly, ‘if I tell you a little of my father’s story.’

  The tale was briefly told. The Earl’s first wife, Lord Christopher’s mother, had been the daughter of a noble family and, Lord Christopher averred, a living saint. ‘He treated her wretchedly, Sandman,’ he said, ‘shaming her, abusing her and insulting her, but she endured it with a Christian forbearance until she died. That was in ‘nine. God rest her dear soul.’

  ‘Amen,’ Sandman said piously.

  ‘He hardly mourned her,’ Lord Christopher said indignantly, ‘but just went on taking women to his bed and among them was Celia Collett. She was scarce a child, Sandman, a mere third his age! But he was besotted.’

  ‘Celia Collett?’

  ‘My stepmother, and she was clever, Sandman, she was clever.’ The savagery was back in his voice. ‘She was an opera dancer at the Sans Pareil. Do you know it?’

  ‘I know of it,’ Sandman said mildly. The Sans Pareil on the Strand was one of the new unlicensed theatres that put on entertainments that were lavish with dance and song and if Celia, Countess of Avebury, had graced its stage then she must have been beautiful.

  ‘She refused his advances,’ Lord Christopher took up his tale again. ‘She turned him down flat! Kept him from her b-bed till he married her, and then she led him a dance, Sandman, a dance! I won’t say he didn’t deserve it, for he did, but she took what money she could and used it to buy horns for his head.’