Gallows Thief. Bernard Cornwell
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So within an hour they came and arrested me at Sir George’s studio.’
‘Who sent for the constables?’
Corday shrugged to suggest he did not know. ‘Meg? Another of the servants?’
‘And the constables found you at Sir George’s studio. Which is where?’
‘Sackville Street. Above Gray’s, the jewellers.’ Corday stared red-eyed at Sandman. ‘Do you have a knife?’
‘No.’
‘Because if you do, then I beg you give it me. Give it me! I would rather cut my wrists than stay here! I did nothing, nothing! Yet I am beaten and abused all day, and in a week I hang. Why wait a week? I am already in hell. I am in hell!’
Sandman cleared his throat. ‘Why not stay up here, in the cells? You’d be alone here.’
‘Alone? I’d be alone for two minutes! It’s safer downstairs where at least there are witnesses.’ Corday wiped his eyes with his sleeve. ‘What do you do now?’
‘Now?’ Sandman was nonplussed. He had expected to listen to a confession and then go back to the Wheatsheaf and write a respectful report. Instead he was confused.
‘You said the Home Secretary wanted you to make enquiries. So will you?’ Corday’s gaze was challenging, then he crumpled. ‘You don’t care. No one cares!’
‘I shall make enquiries,’ Sandman said gruffly, and suddenly he could not take the stench and the tears and the misery any more and so he turned and ran down the stairs. He came into the fresher air of the Press Yard, then had a moment’s panic that the turnkeys would not unbolt the gate that would let him into the tunnel, but of course they did.
The porter unlocked his cupboard and took out Sandman’s watch, a gold-cased Breguet that had been a gift from Eleanor. Sandman had tried to return the watch with her letters, but she had refused to accept them. ‘Find your man, sir?’ the porter asked.
‘I found him.’
‘And he spun you a yarn, I’ve no doubt,’ the porter chuckled. ‘Spun you a yarn, eh? They can gammon you, sir, like a right patterer. But there’s an easy way to know when a felon’s telling lies, sir, an easy way.’
‘I should be obliged to hear it,’ Sandman said.
‘They’re speaking, sir, that’s how you can tell they’re telling lies, they’re speaking.’ The porter thought this a fine joke and wheezed with laughter as Sandman went down the steps into Old Bailey.
He stood on the pavement, oblivious of the crowd surging up and down. He felt soiled by the prison. He clicked open the Breguet’s case and saw it was just after half past two in the afternoon; he wondered where his day had gone. To Rider, Eleanor’s inscription inside the watch case read, in aeternam, and that palpably false promise did not improve his mood. He clicked the lid shut just as a workman shouted at him to mind himself. The trapdoor, pavilion and stairs of the scaffold had all been dismantled and now the tongue-and-groove cladding that had screened the platform was being thrown down and the planks were falling perilously near Sandman. A carter hauling a vast wagon of bricks whipped blood from the flanks of his horses, even though the beasts could make no headway against the tangle of vehicles that blocked the street.
Sandman finally thrust the watch into his fob pocket and walked northwards. He was torn. Corday had been found guilty and yet, though Sandman could not find a scrap of liking for the young man, his story was believable. Doubtless the porter was right and every man in Newgate was convinced of his own innocence, yet Sandman was not entirely naïve. He had led a company of soldiers with consummate skill and he reckoned he could distinguish when a man was telling the truth. And if Corday was innocent then the fifteen guineas that weighed down Sandman’s pockets would be neither swiftly nor easily earnt.
He decided he needed advice.
So he went to watch some cricket.
Sandman reached Bunhill Row just before the city clocks struck three, the jangling of the bells momentarily drowning the crack of bat on ball, the deep shouts and applause of the spectators. It sounded like a large crowd and, judging by the shouts, a good match. The gatekeeper waved him through. ‘I ain’t taking your sixpence, Captain.’
‘You should, Joe.’
‘Aye, and you should be playing, Captain.’ Joe Mallock, gatekeeper at the Artillery Ground, had once bowled for the finest clubs in London before painful joints had laid him low, and he well remembered one of his last games when a young army officer, scarce out of school, had thrashed him all over the New Road outfield in Marylebone. ‘Been too long since we seen you bat, Captain.’
‘I’m past my prime, Joe.’
‘Past your prime, boy? Past your prime! You aren’t even thirty yet. Now go on in. Last I heard England was fifty-six runs up with only four in hand. They need you!’
A raucous jeer rewarded a passage of play as Sandman walked towards the boundary. The Marquess of Canfield’s eleven were playing an England eleven and one of the Marquess’s fielders had dropped an easy catch and now endured the crowd’s scorn. ‘Butter-fingers!’ they roared. ‘Fetch him a bucket!’
Sandman glanced at the blackboard and saw that England, in their second innings, were only sixty runs ahead and still had four wickets in hand. Most of the crowd were cheering the England eleven and a roar greeted a smart hit that sent the ball scorching towards the field’s far side. The Marquess’s bowler, a bearded giant, spat on the grass then stared up at the blue sky as if he was deaf to the crowd’s noise. Sandman watched the batsman, Budd it was, walk down the wicket and pat down an already smooth piece of turf.
Sandman strolled past the carriages parked by the boundary. The Marquess of Canfield, white-haired, white-bearded and ensconced with a telescope in a landau, offered Sandman a curt nod, then pointedly looked away. A year ago, before the disgrace of Sandman’s father, the Marquess would have called out a greeting, insisted on sharing a few moments of gossip and begged Sandman to play for his team, but now the Sandman name was dirt and the Marquess had pointedly cut him. But then, from further about the boundary and as if in recompense, a hand waved vigorously from another open carriage and an eager voice shouted a greeting. ‘Rider! Here! Rider!’
The hand and voice belonged to a tall, ragged young man who was painfully thin, very bony and lanky, dressed in shabby black and smoking a clay pipe that trickled a drift of ash down his waistcoat and jacket. His red hair was in need of a pair of scissors for it collapsed across his long-nosed face and flared above his wide and old-fashioned collar. ‘Drop the carriage steps,’ he instructed Sandman, ‘come on in. You’re monstrous late. Heydell scored thirty-four in the first innings and very well scored they were too. How are you, my dear fellow? Fowkes is bowling creditably well, but is a bit errant on the off side. Budd is carrying his bat, and the creature who has just come in is called Fellowes and I know nothing about him. You should be playing. You also look pale. Are you eating properly?’
‘I eat,’ Sandman said, ‘and you?’
‘God preserves me, in His effable wisdom He preserves me.’ The Reverend Lord Alexander Pleydell settled back on his seat. ‘I see my father ignored you?’
‘He nodded to me.’
‘He nodded? Ah! What graciousness. Is it true you played for Sir John Hart?’
‘Played and lost,’ Sandman said bitterly. ‘They were bribed.’
‘Dear Rider! I warned you of Sir John! Man’s nothing but greed. He only wanted you to play so that everyone would assume his team was incorruptible and it worked, didn’t it? I just hope he paid you well for he must have made a great deal of money from your gullibility. Would you like some tea? Of course you would. I shall have Hughes