‘Victor Nash,’ said Armstrong heavily. ‘I had hoped never to see you again after I threw you off my farm so long ago. Like the bad penny you are, you came back, and I wasn’t sorry to think you’d drowned off Brandy Island.’
Victor bowed. ‘Drowned? It was not my time. I live to claim what’s mine. I owe you thanks, Armstrong, for raising my son and educating him. Don’t he speak fine, after all his teaching? Listen to what comes out of his mouth – why sometimes I can hardly understand him, when he gets going with his Latin and his Greek and his long words nobody knows. And he can write so nice. See him with a pen and watch how quick he takes the notions from your tongue and sets them down in ink, and never a blot! All curls and twiddles and it looks a picture, it does. And his manners! Nobody can say a word against his manners – he is like the finest lord of the land. I am proud of my son, truly I am. For in him the best of me – all my cunning and all my guile – is mixed with the best of your missus – ain’t he fair, with his soft hair and his white skin? And you have played your part, Armstrong. You have polished him over with the best of you too.’
Robin shuddered.
‘It’s not true!’ he told Victor and, turning to Armstrong, ‘It’s not true, is it? Tell him! Tell him who my father is!’
Victor sniggered.
‘It is true,’ Armstrong told Robin. ‘This man is your father.’
Robin stared. ‘But Lord Embury!’
‘Lord Embury!’ echoed the man, with a snigger. ‘Lord Embury! He be somebody’s father all right, eh, Armstrong? Why don’t you tell him?’
‘Lord Embury is my father, Robin. He fell in love with my mother when he was a very young man and she a servant girl. That is what the letter in the bureau referred to. It is the agreement he made to assure my financial future before he died. I am the Robert Armstrong mentioned in the letter.’
Robin looked, stricken, into Armstrong’s face.
‘Then my mother …’
‘Her innocence was taken advantage of in the vilest manner by this scoundrel, and I did my utmost to make things right for her. And to make things right for you.’
‘Yes, well, enough of that. I have come to claim him. It is time to give him up to me. You have had him for twenty-three years and now he must come to his true father. Mustn’t you, Rob?’
‘Come to you? You think I will come to you?’ Robin laughed. ‘You’re mad.’
‘Ah, but you must, boy. Family is family. We are kin, you and me. With my base plotting and your fine looks, with my low knowledge and your high manners, think what we can do! We have only just begun! We must continue what we have started! Together, my boy, we can work wonders! After all the waiting, our time has come!’
‘I’ll have nothing to do with you!’ Robin snarled. ‘I tell you now, leave me alone! I’ll not have it said that I’m your son. If you tell a soul of this, I’ll … I’ll …’
‘What will you, Robin, my boy? What, eh?’
Robin panted.
‘What is it I know, Robin? Tell me that. What is it I know about you that nobody else knows?’
Robin froze. ‘Whatever you say brings you down with me!’
Victor nodded slowly. ‘So be it.’
‘You would not incriminate yourself.’
Victor looked at the water. ‘Who’s to say what a man would or wouldn’t do when his own son denies him? It’s about family, my boy. I lost my mother in the days before I can remember. My father taught me everything I know, but he was hanged before I was grown to manhood. I had a sister once – at least, I called her sister – but even she betrayed me. You are all I have, my Robin with the soft hair and the silky words and the lordly ways … You are all the world to me, and if I cannot have you, then what is the purpose of my life? No, our future is one, Robin, and it is up to you which way you will have it. We can go into business together, as we have before, or you can deny me and I’ll denounce you, and we will be chained together in the cells and will go to the gallows, father and son together, as is the natural way of things.’
Robin wept.
‘What is the hold this man has over you?’ Armstrong asked. ‘What conspiracy is it that binds you to him?’
‘Shall I tell him?’ Victor asked.
‘No!’
‘I think I will. This is one refuge I will close and when it is gone the only succour left will be at my side.’ He turned to Armstrong. ‘I knew this fine young man liked to drink in a place on the edge of Oxford and I got to know him there, slow and gradual. I sowed a plot in his mind and let him think it was his own invention. He thought I was following behind his every step, when in fact the route was all mine. We stole your pig together, Armstrong – that was the first thing! How I laughed in my sleeve that night, thinking that you had told me twenty-three years before to stay away and not come within twelve miles of you and your Bess, and there I was, being let into your yard to steal your favourite pig, and it was my own son unlatching the gate and tempting her with raspberries to help me do it! He ran off with me and we had a good little business for a while. I knew how to set it up, the trickery of a fortune-telling pig. The fairs brought us in some good money – we was well off, for low-down types, only your son wasn’t satisfied. He wanted more. So we used what we had – the pig and the fair – and we leapt to greater things. Didn’t we, Rob, my son?’
Robin shuddered.
‘The Vaughan child …’ Armstrong murmured, aghast. ‘The kidnap …’
‘Well done! Rob used all his inveigling words to draw that foolish girl Ruby into parting with a shilling. Your ginger pig looked with soft eyes into that girl’s silly round ones, and from behind a curtain Robin here in his sweetest piggy voice told her where to go to see the face of her one true love in the night river. Didn’t you, my son?’
Robin put his face in his hands and turned to Armstrong, but Armstrong took him by the wrists and forced him to look him in the eye.
‘Is this true?’
Robin cringed and his face crumpled.
‘And there is more, isn’t there, Rob, my lad?’
‘Don’t listen to him!’ Robin wailed.
‘Yes, for that was only the beginning. Whose idea was it, Rob, at the start? Whose idea to take the little girl from the Vaughans, and how to do it?’
‘That was your idea!’
‘Aye, it was too, but whose idea did you think it was, at the outset?’
Robin turned his face away.
‘Who was it who crowed at his own cleverness? Who was it who gave orders to the men in the boat, who wrote out the ransom note, who set each man his hiding place? Who was it who strutted about on the night itself, checking each man had his instructions clear? I was proud of you then! When I saw you, only a stripling, yet sure of yourself and your villainy. He’s my boy, I thought. He’s got my blood in his veins and my wickedness in his heart, and there’s nothing Armstrong can do to clean it out. He’s mine, body and soul.’
‘Give him the money,’ Robin whispered into Armstrong’s ear, but not quietly enough, for the words carried over the rising water and the man laughed. ‘The money? Yes, we’ll take the money all right, won’t we, son? Share and share alike. I’ll share it with you, Rob, my boy, fifty–fifty!’
The water had risen to reach the knees of the three, and the rain soaked into their hats and ran down their necks and into their shirts, and before long their top halves were as wet as their bottom halves and it made no difference whether they were in or out of the water.
‘And the rest, Rob,’ Victor went on. ‘The rest!’