Gallows Thief

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.

2

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 bring us tea and cake from Mrs Hillman’s stall, I think, don’t you? Budd looks good as ever, don’t he? What a hitter he is! Have you ever lifted his bat? It’s a club, a cudgel! Oh, well done, sir! Well struck! Go hard, sir, go hard!’ He was cheering on England and doing it in a very loud voice so that his father, whose team was playing against England, would hear him. ‘Capital, sir, well done! Hughes, my dear fellow, where are you?’

Hughes, Lord Alexander’s manservant, approached the side of the carriage. ‘My lord?’

‘Say hello to Captain Sandman, Hughes, and I think we might venture a pot of Mrs Hillman’s tea, don’t you? And perhaps some of her apricot cake?’ His lordship put money into his servant’s hand. ‘What are the bookies saying now, Hughes?’

‘They strongly favour your father’s eleven, my lord.’

Lord Alexander pressed two more coins on his servant. ‘Captain Sandman and I will wager a guinea apiece on an England win.’

‘I can’t afford such a thing,’ Sandman protested, ‘and besides I detest gambling on cricket.’

‘Don’t be pompous,’ Lord Alexander said, ‘we’re not bribing the players, merely risking cash on our appreciation of their skill. You truly do look pale, Rider, are you sickening? Cholera, perhaps? The plague? Consumption, maybe?’

‘Prison fever.’

‘My dear fellow!’ Lord Alexander looked horrified. ‘Prison fever? And for God’s sake sit down.’ The carriage swayed as Sandman sat opposite his friend. They had attended the same school where they had become inseparable friends and where Sandman, who had always excelled at games and was thus one of the school’s heroes, had protected Lord Alexander from the bullies who believed his lordship’s clubbed foot made him an object of ridicule. Sandman, on leaving school, had purchased a commission in the infantry while Lord Alexander, who was the Marquess of Canfield’s second son, had gone to Oxford where, in the first year that such things were awarded, he had taken a double first. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been imprisoned,’ Lord Alexander now chided Sandman.

Sandman smiled and showed his friend the letter from the Home Office and then described his afternoon, though the telling of his tale was constantly interrupted by Lord Alexander’s exclamations of praise or scorn for the cricket, many of them uttered through a mouthful of Mrs Hillman’s apricot cake which his lordship reduced to a spattering of crumbs that joined the ashes on his waistcoat. Beside his chair he kept a bag filled with clay pipes and as soon as one became plugged he would take out another and strike flint on steel. The sparks chipped from the flint smouldered on his coat and on the carriage’s leather seat where they were either beaten out or faded on their own as his lordship puffed more smoke. ‘I must say,’ he said when he had considered Sandman’s story, ‘that I should deem it most unlikely that young Corday is guilty.’

‘But he’s been tried.’

‘My dear Rider! My dear, dear Rider! Rider, Rider, Rider. Rider! Have you ever been to the Old Bailey sessions? Of course you haven’t, you’ve been far too busy smiting the French, you wretch. But I dare say that inside of a week those four judges get through a hundred cases. Five a day apiece? They often do more. These folk don’t get trials, Rider, they get dragged through the tunnel from Newgate, come blinking into the Session House, are knocked down like bullocks and hustled off in manacles! It ain’t justice!’

‘They are defended, surely?’

Lord Alexander turned a shocked face on his friend. ‘The sessions ain’t your Courts Martial, Rider. This is England! What barrister will defend some penniless youth accused of sheep stealing?’

‘Corday isn’t penniless.’

‘But I’ll wager he isn’t rich. Good Lord, Rider, the woman was found naked, smothered in blood, with his palette knife in her throat.’

Sandman, watching the batsmen steal a quick single after an inelegant poke had trickled the ball down to square leg, was amused that his friend knew the details of Corday’s crime, suggesting that Lord Alexander, when he was not deep in volumes of philosophy, theology and literature, was dipping into the vulgar broadsheets that described England’s more violent crimes. ‘So you’re suggesting Corday is guilty,’ Sandman said.

‘No, Rider, I am suggesting that he looks guilty. There is a difference. And in any respectable system of justice we would devise ways of distinguishing between the appearance and the reality of guilt. But not in Sir John Silvester’s courtroom. The man’s a brute, a conscienceless brute. Oh, well struck, Budd, well struck! Run, man, run! Don’t dawdle!’ His lordship took up a new pipe and began setting fire to himself. ‘The whole system,’ he said between puffs, ‘is pernicious. Pernicious! They’ll sentence a hundred folk to hang, then only kill ten of them because the rest have commuted sentences. And how do you obtain a commutation? Why, by having the squire or the parson or his lordship sign the petition. But what if you don’t know such elevated folk? Then you’ll hang. Hang. You fool! You fool! Did you see that? Fellowes is bowled, by God! Middle stump! Closed his eyes and swung! He should be hanged. You see, Rider, what is happening? Society, that’s the respectable folk, you and me, well you at least, have devised a way to keep the lower orders under our control. We make them depend upon our mercy and our loving kindness. We condemn them to the gallows, then spare them and they are supposed to be grateful. Grateful! It is pernicious.’ Lord Alexander was thoroughly worked up now. His long hands were wringing together and his hair, already hopelessly tousled, was being shaken into a worse disorder. ‘Those damned Tories;’ he glared at Sandman, including him in this condemnation, ‘utterly pernicious!’ He frowned for a second, then a happy idea struck him. ‘You and I, Rider, we shall go to a hanging!’

‘No!’

‘It’s your duty, my dear fellow. Now that you are a functionary of this oppressive state you should understand just what brutality awaits these innocent souls. I shall write to the Keeper of Newgate and demand that you and I are given privileged access to the next execution. Oh, a change of bowler. This fellow’s said to twist it very cannily. You will have supper with me tonight?’

‘In Hampstead?’

‘Of course in Hampstead,’ Lord Alexander said, ‘it is where I live and dine, Rider.’

‘Then I won’t.’

Lord Alexander sighed. He had tried hard to persuade Sandman to move into his house and Sandman had been tempted, for Lord Alexander’s father, despite disagreeing with all his son’s radical beliefs, lavished an allowance on him that permitted the radical to enjoy a carriage, stables, servants and a rare library, but Sandman had learnt that to spend more than a few hours in his friend’s company was to end up arguing bitterly. It was better, far better, to be independent.

‘I saw Eleanor last Saturday,’ Lord Alexander said with his usual tactlessness.

‘I trust she was well?’

‘I’m sure she was, but I rather think I forgot to ask. But then, why should one ask? It seems so redundant. She was obviously not dying, she looked well, so why should I ask? You recall Paley’s Principles?’

‘Is that a book?’ Sandman asked, and was rewarded with an incredulous look. ‘I’ve not read it,’ he added hastily.

‘What have you been doing with your life?’ Lord Alexander asked testily. ‘I shall lend it to you, but only so that you can understand the vile arguments that are advanced on the scaffold’s behalf. Do you know,’ Lord Alexander emphasised his next point by stabbing Sandman with the mouthpiece of his pipe, ‘that Paley actually condoned hanging the innocent on the specious grounds that capital punishment is a necessity, that errors cannot be avoided in an imperfect world and that the guiltless suffer, therefore, so that general society might be safer. The innocent who are executed thus form an inevitable, if regrettable, sacrifice. Can you credit such an argument? They should have hanged Paley for it!’

‘He was a clergyman, I believe?’ Sandman said, applauding a subtle snick that sent a fielder running towards the Chiswell Street boundary.

‘Of course he was a clergyman, but what does that have to do with the matter? I am a clergyman, does that give my arguments divine force? You are absurd at times.’ Lord Alexander had broken the stem of his pipe while prodding his friend and now needed to light another. ‘I confess that Thomas Jefferson makes the exact same point, of course, but I find his reasoning more elegant than Paley’s.’

‘Meaning,’ Sandman said, ‘that Jefferson is a hero of yours and can do no wrong.’

‘I hope I am more discerning than that,’ Lord Alexander replied huffily, ‘and even you must allow that Jefferson has political reasons for his beliefs.’

‘Which makes them all the more reprehensible,’ Sandman said, ‘and you’re on fire.’

‘So I am,’ Lord Alexander beat at his coat. ‘Eleanor asked after you, as I recall.’

‘She did?’

‘Did I not just say so? And I said I had no doubt you were in fine fettle. Oh, well struck, sir, well struck. Budd hits almost as hard as you! She and I met at the Egyptian Hall. There was a lecture about,’ he paused, frowning as he stared at the batsmen, ‘bless me, I’ve quite forgotten why I went, but Eleanor was there with Doctor Vaux and his wife. My God, that man is a fool.’

‘Vaux?’

‘No, the new batsman! No point in waving the bat idly! Strike, man, strike, it’s what the bat is for! Eleanor had a message for you.’

‘She did?’ Sandman’s heart quickened. His engagement to Eleanor might be broken off, but he was still in love with her. ‘What?’

‘What, indeed?’ Lord Alexander frowned. ‘Slipped my mind, Rider, slipped it altogether. Dear me, but it can’t have been important. Wasn’t important at all. And as for the Countess of Avebury!’ He shuddered, evidently unable to express any kind of opinion on the murdered woman.

‘What of her ladyship?’ Sandman asked, knowing it would be pointless to pursue Eleanor’s forgotten message.

‘Ladyship! Ha!’ Lord Alexander’s exclamation was loud enough to draw the gaze of a hundred spectators. ‘That baggage,’ he said, then remembered his calling. ‘Poor woman, but translated to a warmer place, no doubt. If anyone wanted her dead I should think it would be her husband. The wretched man must be weighted down with horns!’

‘You think the Earl killed her?’ Sandman asked.

‘They’re estranged, Rider, is that not an indication?’

‘Estranged?’

‘You sound surprised. May one ask why? Half England’s husbands seem to be estranged from their wives. It is hardly an uncommon situation.’

Sandman was surprised because he could have sworn Corday had said the Earl had commissioned his wife’s portrait, but why would he do that if they were estranged? ‘Are you certain they’re estranged?’ he asked.

‘I have it on the highest authority,’ Lord Alexander said defensively. ‘I am a friend of the Earl’s son. Christopher, his name is, and he’s a most cordial man. He was at Brasenose when I was at Trinity.’

‘Cordial?’ Sandman asked. It seemed an odd word.

‘Oh, very!’ Alexander said energetically. ‘He took an extremely respectable degree, I remember, then went off to study with Lasalle at the Sorbonne. His field is etymology.’

‘Bugs?’

‘Words, Rider, words.’ Lord Alexander rolled his eyes at Sandman’s ignorance. ‘The study of the origins of words. Not a serious field, I always think, but Christopher seemed to think there was work to be done there. The dead woman, of course, was his stepmother.’

‘He talked to you of her?’

‘We talked of serious things,’ Alexander said reprovingly, ‘but naturally, in the course of any acquaintanceship, one learns trivia. There was little love lost in that family, I can tell you. Father despising the son, father hating the wife, wife detesting the husband and the son bitterly disposed towards both. I must say the Earl and Countess of Avebury form an object lesson in the perils of family life. Oh, well struck! Well struck! Good man! Capital work! Scamper, scamper!’

Sandman applauded the batsman, then sipped the last of his tea. ‘I’m surprised to learn that Earl and Countess were estranged,’ he said, ‘because Corday claimed that the Earl commissioned the portrait. Why would he do that if they’re estranged?’

‘You must ask him,’ Lord Alexander said, ‘though my guess, for what it is worth, is that Avebury, though jealous, was still enamoured of her. She was a noted beauty and he is a noted fool. Mind you, Rider, I make no accusations. I merely assert that if anyone wanted the lady dead then it could well have been her husband, though I doubt he would have struck the fatal blow himself. Even Avebury is sensible enough to hire someone else to do his dirty work. Besides which he is a martyr to gout. Oh, well hit! Well hit! Go hard, go hard!’

‘Is the son still in Paris?’

‘He came back. I see him from time to time, though we’re not as close as when we were at Oxford. Look at that! Fiddling with the bat. It’s no good poking at balls!’

‘Could you introduce me?’

‘To Avebury’s son? I suppose so.’

The game ended at shortly past eight when the Marquess’s side, needing only ninety-three runs to win, collapsed. Their defeat pleased Lord Alexander, but made Sandman suspect that bribery had once again ruined a game. He could not prove it, and Lord Alexander scoffed at the suspicion and would not hear of it when Sandman tried to refuse his gambling winnings. ‘Of course you must take it,’ Lord Alexander insisted. ‘Are you still lodging in the Wheatsheaf? You do know it’s a flash tavern?’

‘I know now,’ Sandman admitted.

‘Why don’t we have supper there? I can learn some demotic flash, but I suppose all flash is demotic. Hughes? Summon the carriage horses, and tell Williams we’re going to Drury Lane.’

Flash was the slang name for London’s criminal life and the label attached to its language. No one stole a purse, they filed a bit or boned the cole or clicked the ready bag. Prison was a sheep walk or the quod, Newgate was the King’s Head Inn and its turnkeys were gaggers. A good man was flash scamp and his victim a mum scull. Lord Alexander was reckoned a mum scull, but a genial one. He learnt the flash vocabulary and paid for the words by buying ale and gin, and he did not leave till well past midnight and it was then that Sally Hood came home on her brother’s arm, both of them worse for drink, and they passed Lord Alexander who was standing by his carriage, which he had been delighted to learn was really a rattler, while its lamps were a pair of glims. He was holding himself upright by gripping a wheel when Sally hurried past. He stared after her open-mouthed. ‘I am in love, Rider,’ he declared too loudly.

Sally glanced back over her shoulder and gave Sandman a dazzling smile. ‘You are not in love, Alexander,’ Sandman said firmly.

Lord Alexander kept staring after Sally until she had vanished through the Wheatsheaf’s front door. ‘I am in love,’ Lord Alexander insisted. ‘I have been smitten by Cupid’s arrow. I am enamoured. I am fatally in love.’

‘You’re a very drunken clergyman, Alexander.’

‘I am a very drunken clergyman in love. Do you know the lady? You can arrange an introduction?’ He lurched after Sally, but his club foot slipped on the cobbles and he fell full length. ‘I insist, Rider!’ he said from the ground. ‘I insist upon paying the lady my respects. I wish to marry her.’ In truth he was so drunk he could not stand, but Sandman, Hughes and the coachman managed to get his lordship into his carriage and then, glims glimmering, it rattled north.

It was raining next morning and all London seemed in a bad mood. Sandman had a headache, a sore belly and the memory of Lord Alexander singing the gallows song that he had been taught in the taproom.

And now I’m going to hell, going to hell,

And wouldn’t we do well, we do well,

If you go there to dwell, there to dwell,

Damn your eyes.

The tune was lodged in Sandman’s mind and he could not rid himself of it as he shaved, then made tea over the back room fire where the tenants were allowed to boil their water. Sally hurried in, her hair in disarray, but with her dress already hooked up. She ladled herself a cup of water and lifted it in a mock toast. ‘Breakfast,’ she told Sandman, then grinned. ‘I hear you was jolly last night?’

‘Good morning, Miss Hood,’ Sandman groaned.

She laughed. ‘Who was that cripple cove you was with?’

‘He is my particular friend,’ Sandman said, ‘the Reverend Lord Alexander Pleydell, MA, is second son of the Marquess and Marchioness of Canfield.’

Sally stared at Sandman. ‘You’re gammoning me.’

‘I promise I am not.’

‘He said he was in love with me.’

Sandman had hoped she had not heard. ‘And doubtless this morning, Miss Hood,’ he said, ‘when he is sober, he will still be in love with you.’

Sally laughed at Sandman’s tact. ‘Is he really a reverend? He don’t dress like one.’

‘He took orders when he left Oxford,’ Sandman explained, ‘but I rather think he did it to annoy his father. Or perhaps, at the time, he wanted to become a fellow of his college? But he’s never looked for a living. He doesn’t need a parish or any other kind of job because he’s rather rich. He claims he’s writing a book, but I’ve seen no evidence of it.’

Sally drank her water, then grimaced at the taste. ‘A reverend rich cripple?’ She thought for a moment, then smiled mischievously. ‘Is he married?’

‘No,’ Sandman said, and did not add that Alexander regularly fell in love with every pretty shopgirl he saw.

‘Well, I could do a hell of a lot worse than a crocked parson, couldn’t I?’ Sally said, then gasped as a clock struck nine. ‘Lord above, I’m late. This bugger I’m working for likes to start early.’ She ran.

Sandman pulled on his greatcoat and set off for Mount Street. Investigate, Alexander had urged him, so he would. He had six days to discover the truth, and he decided he would begin with the missing maid, Meg. If she existed, and on this wet morning Sandman was dubious of Corday’s story, then she could end Sandman’s confusion by confirming or denying the painter’s tale. He hurried up New Bond Street, then realised with a start that he would have to walk past Eleanor’s house in Davies Street and, because he did not want anyone there to think he was being importunate, he avoided it by taking the long way round and so was soaked to the skin by the time he reached the house in Mount Street where the murder had taken place.