Gallows Thief. Bernard Cornwell

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      ‘Who does?’

      ‘His friends. He usually knows one of the poor bastards being twisted, see?’

      ‘Twisted?’

      ‘Hanged, Captain. Hanged, twisted, crapped, nubbed, scragged or Jack Ketched. Doing the Newgate Morris, dancing on Jemmy Botting’s stage, rope gargling. You’ll have to learn the flash language if you live here, Captain.’

      ‘I can see I will,’ Sandman said, and had just begun to thread the handkerchief through the dress’s gaping back when Dodds, the inn’s errand boy, pushed through the half-open door and grinned to discover Sally Hood in Captain Sandman’s room and Captain Sandman doing up her frock and him with tousled hair and dressed in nothing but a frayed old dressing gown.

      ‘You’ll catch flies if you don’t close your bloody gob,’ Sally told Dodds, ‘and he ain’t my boman, you spoony little bastard. He’s just hooking me up ’cos my brother and Mother Gunn have gone to the crap. Which is where you’ll end up if there’s any bleeding justice.’

      Dodds ignored this tirade and held a sealed paper towards Sandman. ‘Letter for you, Captain.’

      ‘You’re very kind,’ Sandman said, and stooped to his folded clothes to find a penny. ‘Wait a moment,’ he told the boy who, in truth, had shown no inclination to leave until he was tipped.

      ‘Don’t you bug him nothing!’ Sally protested. She pushed Sandman’s hand away and snatched the letter from Dodds. ‘The little toe-rag forgot it, didn’t he? No bleeding letter arrived this morning! How long’s it been?’

      Dodds looked at her sullenly. ‘Came on Friday,’ he finally admitted.

      ‘If a bleeding letter comes on Friday then you bleeding deliver it on Friday! Now, on your trotters and fake away off!’ She slammed the door on the boy. ‘Lazy little bleeder. They should take him down bleeding Newgate and make him do the scaffold hornpipe. That would stretch his lazy bloody neck.’

      Sandman finished threading the silk handkerchief through the gaps in the dress’s fastenings, then stepped back and nodded. ‘You look very fetching, Miss Hood.’

      ‘You think so?’

      ‘I do indeed,’ Sandman said. The dress was pale green, printed with cornflowers, and the colours suited Sally’s honey-coloured skin and curly hair that was as gold as Sandman’s own. She was a pretty girl with clear blue eyes, a skin unscarred by pox and a contagious smile. ‘The dress really does become you,’ he said.

      ‘It’s the only half good one I’ve got,’ she said, ‘so it had better suit. Thank you.’ She held out his letter. ‘Close your eyes, turn round three times, then say your loved one’s name aloud before you open it.’

      Sandman smiled. ‘And what will that achieve?’

      ‘It will mean good news, Captain,’ she said earnestly, ‘good news.’ She smiled and was gone.

      Sandman listened to her footsteps on the stairs, then looked at the letter. Perhaps it was an answer to one of his enquiries about a job? It was certainly a very high class of paper and the handwriting was educated and stylish. He put a finger under the flap, ready to break the seal, then paused. He felt like a fool, but he closed his eyes, turned three times then spoke his loved one’s name aloud: ‘Eleanor Forrest,’ he said, then opened his eyes, tore off the letter’s red wax seal and unfolded the paper. He read the letter, read it again and tried to work out whether or not it really was good news.

      The Right Honourable the Viscount Sidmouth presented his compliments to Captain Rider Sandman and requested the honour of a call at Captain Sandman’s earliest convenience, preferably in the forenoon at Lord Sidmouth’s office. A prompt reply to Lord Sidmouth’s private secretary, Mister Sebastian Witherspoon, would be appreciated.

      Sandman’s first instinct was that the letter must be bad news, that his father had dunned the Viscount Sidmouth as he had dunned so many others and that his lordship was writing to make a claim on the pathetic shreds of the Sandman estate. Yet that was nonsense. His father, so far as Rider Sandman knew, had never encountered Lord Sidmouth and he would surely have boasted if he had for Sandman’s father had liked the company of important men. And there were few men more important than the Right Honourable Henry Addington, first Viscount Sidmouth, erstwhile Prime Minister of Great Britain and now His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State in the Home Department.

      So why did the Home Secretary want to see Rider Sandman?

      There was only one way to find out.

      So Sandman put on his cleanest shirt, buffed his fraying boots with his dirtiest shirt, brushed his coat and, thus belying his poverty by dressing as the gentleman he was, went to see Lord Sidmouth.

      The Viscount Sidmouth was a thin man. He was thin-lipped and thin-haired, had a thin nose and a thin jaw that narrowed to a weasel-thin chin and his eyes had all the warmth of thinly knapped flint and his thin voice was precise, dry and unfriendly. His nickname was ‘the Doctor’, a nickname without warmth or affection, but apt, for he was clinical, disapproving and cold. He had made Sandman wait for two and a quarter hours, though as Sandman had come to the office without an appointment he could scarce blame the Home Secretary for that. Now, as a bluebottle buzzed against one of the high windows, Lord Sidmouth frowned across the desk at his visitor. ‘You were recommended by Sir John Colborne.’

      Sandman bowed his head in acknowledgement, but said nothing. There was nothing to say. A grandfather clock ticked loud in a corner of the office.

      ‘You were in Sir John’s battalion at Waterloo,’ Sidmouth said, ‘is that not so?’

      ‘I was, my lord, yes.’

      Sidmouth grunted as though he did not entirely approve of men who had been at Waterloo and that, Sandman reflected, might well have been the case for Britain now seemed divided between those who had fought against the French and those who had stayed at home. The latter, Sandman suspected, were jealous and liked to suggest, oh so delicately, that they had sacrificed an opportunity to gallivant abroad because of the need to keep Britain prosperous. The wars against Napoleon were two years in the past now, yet still the divide remained, though Sir John Colborne must possess some influence with the government if his recommendation had brought Sandman to this office. ‘Sir John tells me you seek employment?’ the Home Secretary asked.

      ‘I must, my lord.’

      ‘Must?’ Sidmouth pounced on the word. ‘Must? But you are on half pay, surely? And half pay is not an ungenerous emolument, I would have thought?’ The question was asked very sourly, as though his lordship utterly disapproved of paying pensions to men who were capable of earning their own livings.

      ‘I’m not eligible for half pay, my lord,’ Sandman said. He had sold his commission and, because it was peacetime, he had received less than he had hoped, though it had been enough to secure a lease on a house for his mother.

      ‘You have no income?’ Sebastian Witherspoon, the Home Secretary’s private secretary, asked from his chair beside his master’s desk.

      ‘Some,’ Sandman said, and decided it was probably best not to say that the small income came from playing cricket. The Viscount Sidmouth did not look like a man who would approve of such a thing. ‘Not enough,’ Sandman amended his answer, ‘and much of what I do earn goes СКАЧАТЬ