Now Sandman and Berrigan rode, the seal on the reprieve still warm, and Sandman thought what guilt Lord Christopher must have endured, and how killing his stepmother would have brought him no relief for the Marquess of Skavadale had discovered him almost in the act of the murder and the Marquess, whose family was near penury, had seen his life's problems solved at a stroke. Meg was the witness who could identify Lord Christopher as the murderer, and so long as Meg lived, and so long as she was under the Marquess's protection, so long would Lord Christopher pay to keep her silent. And when Lord Christopher became Earl, and so gained the fortune of his grandfather, he would have been forced to pay all he had inherited. It would all have gone to Skavadale, while Meg, the lever by which that wealth would have been prised from the Avebury estate, would have been bribed with chickens.
Sidmouth had sent messengers to the channel ports, and to Harwich and to Bristol, warning officials there to keep a watch for Lord Christopher Carne. 'And what of Skavadale?' Sandman had asked.
'We do not know if he has yet taken any monies by threat,' Sidmouth said primly, 'and if the girl speaks the truth then they did not plan to begin their depredations until after Lord Christopher had inherited the earldom. We might disapprove of their intentions, Captain, but we cannot punish them for a crime that is yet to be committed.'
'Skavadale concealed the truth!' Sandman said indignantly. 'He sent for the constables and told them he didn't recognise the murderer. He would have let an innocent man go to his death!'
'And how do you prove that?' Sidmouth asked curtly. 'Just be content that you have identified the real killer.'
'And earned the forty pound reward,' Berrigan put in happily, earning a very dirty look from his lordship.
As they rode, their horses' shoes echoing from the walls of Saint Clement's Church, Sandman saw a dozen reflections of himself distorted in the roundel panes of Clifton's Chop House and he thought how good a pork chop and kidney would taste now. The Temple Bar was immediately ahead and the space under the arch was crowded with carts and pedestrians. The constables shouted for the carts to move, bullied their horses into the press and yelled at the drivers to use their whips. A wagon loaded with cut flowers was filling most of the archway and one of the constables started beating at it with his truncheon, scattering petals and leaves onto the cobbles. 'Leave it!' Sandman bellowed. 'Leave it!' He had seen a gap on the pavement and he drove his horse for it, knocking down a thin man in a tall hat. Berrigan followed him, then they were past the arch, Sandman was standing in the stirrups and his horse was plunging towards the Fleet Ditch, sparks flying where its shoes struck the cobbles.
The first church bells began to strike eight and it seemed to Sandman that the whole city was filled with a cacophony of bells, hoofbeats, alarm and doom.
He settled back in the saddle, slapped the horse's rump, and rode like the wind.
===OO=OOO=OO===
Lord Alexander, as he passed through the towering arch of the high Debtor's Door, saw in front of him the dark hollow interior of the scaffold and he thought how much it resembled the underside of a theatre's stage. From outside, where the audience gathered in the street, the gallows looked heavy, permanent and sombre with its black baize drapery, but from here Lord Alexander could see it was an illusion sustained by raw wooden beams. It was a stage set for a tragedy ending in death. Wooden stairs climbed to his right, going up into the shadows before turning sharply left to emerge in a roofed pavilion that formed the rear of the scaffold. The roofed pavilion was like the privileged stage boxes, offering the important guests the best view of the drama.
Lord Alexander was first up the steps and a huge cheer greeted his appearance. No one cared who he was, but his arrival presaged the coming of the two doomed men and the crowd was bored with waiting. Lord Alexander, blinking in the sudden sunlight, took off his hat and bowed to the mob who, appreciative of the gesture, laughed and applauded. The crowd was not large, but it filled the street for a hundred yards southwards and quite blocked the junction with Newgate Street immediately to the north. Every window in the Magpie and Stump was taken and there was even a scatter of spectators on the tavern's roof.
'We were asked to take chairs at the back,' Lord Christopher pointed out when Lord Alexander sat himself in the very front row.
'We were requested to leave two front row places for the Sheriff,' Lord Alexander corrected him, 'and there they are. Sit down, Kit, do. What a delightful day! Do you think the weather will last? Budd on Saturday, eh?'
'Budd on Saturday?' Lord Christopher was jostled as the other guests pushed past to the rearmost chairs.
'Cricket, dear boy! I've actually persuaded Budd to play a single wicket match against Jack Lambert, and Lambert, good fellow that he is, has agreed to stand down if Rider Sandman will take his place! He told me so yesterday, after church. Now that's a match to dream of, eh? Budd against Sandman. You will come, won't you?'
A cheer drowned conversation on the scaffold as the sheriffs appeared in their breeches, silk stockings, silver-buckled shoes and fur-trimmed robes. Lord Christopher seemed oblivious of their arrival, gazing instead at the beam from which the prisoners would hang. He seemed disappointed that it was not bloodstained, then he looked down and flinched at the sight of the two unplaned coffins waiting for their burdens. 'She was an evil woman,' he said softly.
'Of course you'll come,' Lord Alexander said, then frowned. 'What did you say, my dear fellow?'
'My stepmother. She was evil.' Lord Christopher seemed to shiver, though it was not cold. 'She and that maid of hers, they were like witches!'
'Are you justifying her murder?'
'She was evil,' Lord Christopher said more emphatically, apparently not hearing his friend's question. 'She said she would make a claim on the estate, on the trustees, because I wrote her some letters. She lied, Alexander, she lied!' He winced, remembering the long letters in which he had poured out his devotion to his stepmother. He had known no women until he had been taken to her bed and he had become besotted by her. He had begged her to run away to Paris with him and she had encouraged his madness until, one day, mocking him, she had snapped the trap closed. Give her money, she had insisted, or else she would make him the laughing stock of Paris, London and every other European capital. She threatened to have the letters copied and the copies distributed so everyone would see his shame, and so he had paid her money and she demanded more and he knew the blackmail would never end. And so he killed her.
He had not believed himself capable of murder, but in her bedroom, begging her a final time to return him the letters, she had mocked him, called him puny, said he was a fumbling and stupid boy. He had pulled the knife from his belt. It was hardly a weapon, it was little more than an old blade he used to slit the pages of uncut books, but in his mad anger it sufficed. He had stabbed her, then hacked and slashed at her loathsome and beautiful skin, and afterwards he had rushed onto the landing and seen the Countess's maid and a man staring up at him from the downstairs hall and he had recoiled back to the bedroom where he had whimpered in panic. He expected to hear feet on the stairs, but no one came, and he forced himself to be calm and to think. He had been on the landing for only a split second, hardly time to be recognised! He snatched a knife from the painter's table and tossed it onto the red-laced body, then searched the dead woman's bureau to find his letters that he had carried away down the back stairs and burnt at home. He had crouched in his lodgings, fearing arrest, then next day heard that the painter had been taken by the constables.