Gallows Thief

‘It is indeed,’ Sir George said enthusiastically, stepping away from Nelson’s half-finished apotheosis to admire the young woman whose red hair was brushed away from a forehead that was high and broad, whose nose was straight and long and whose mouth was generous and wide, and who had been painted in a lavish sitting room beneath a wall of ancestral portraits which suggested she came from a family of great antiquity, though in truth her father was the son of an apothecary and her mother a parson’s daughter who was considered to have married beneath herself. ‘Miss Eleanor Forrest,’ Sir George said. ‘Her nose is too long, her chin too sharp, her eyes more widely spaced than convention would allow to be beautiful, her hair is lamentably red and her mouth is too lavish, yet the effect is extraordinary, is it not?’

‘It is,’ Sandman said fervently.

‘Yet of all the young woman’s attributes,’ Sir George had entirely dropped his bantering manner and was speaking with real warmth, ‘it is her intelligence I most admire. I fear she is to be wasted in marriage.’

‘She is?’ Sandman had to struggle to keep his voice from betraying his feelings.

‘The last I heard,’ Sir George returned to Nelson, ‘she was spoken of as the future Lady Eagleton. Indeed I believe the portrait is a gift for him, yet Miss Eleanor is much too clever to be married to a fool like Eagleton.’ Sir George snorted. ‘Wasted.’

‘Eagleton?’ Sandman felt as though a cold hand had gripped his heart. Had that been the import of the message Lord Alexander had forgotten? That Eleanor was engaged to Lord Eagleton?

‘Lord Eagleton, heir to the Earl of Bridport and a bore. A bore, Captain, a bore and I detest bores. Is Sally Hood really to be a lady? Good God incarnate, England has gone to the weasels. Stick ’em out, darling, they ain’t noble yet and they’re what the Admiralty is paying for. Barney, find the Countess.’

The apprentice hunted on through the canvases. The wind gusted, making the rafters creak. Sammy emptied two of the buckets into which rain was leaking, chucking them out of the back window and provoking a roar of protest from below. Sandman stared out of the front windows, looking past the awning of Gray’s jewellery shop into Sackville Street. Was Eleanor really to marry? He had not seen her in over six months and it was very possible. Her mother, at least, was in a hurry to have Eleanor walk to an altar, preferably an aristocratic altar, for Eleanor was twenty-five now and would soon be reckoned a shelved spinster. Damn it, Sandman thought, but forget her. ‘This is it, sir.’ Barney, the apprentice, interrupted his thoughts. He propped an unfinished portrait over Eleanor’s picture. ‘The Countess of Avebury, sir.’

Another beauty, Sandman thought. The painting was hardly begun, yet it was strangely effective. The canvas had been sized, then a charcoal drawing made of a woman reclining on a bed that was surmounted by a tent of peaked material. Corday had then painted in patches of the wallpaper, the material of the bed’s tent, the bedspread, the carpet, and the woman’s face. He had lightly painted the hair, making it seem wild as though the Countess was in a country wind rather than her London bedroom, and though the rest of the canvas was hardly touched by any other colour, yet somehow it was still breathtaking and full of life.

‘Oh, he could paint, our Charlie, he could paint.’ Sir George, wiping his hands with a rag, had come to look at the picture. His voice was reverent and his eyes betrayed a mixture of admiration and jealousy. ‘He’s a clever little devil, ain’t he?’

‘Is it a good likeness?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Sir George nodded, ‘indeed yes. She was a beauty, Captain, a woman who could make heads turn, but that’s all she was. She was out of the gutter, Captain. She was what our Sally is. She was an opera dancer.’

‘I’m an actress,’ Sally insisted hotly.

‘An actress, an opera dancer, a whore, they’re all the same,’ Sir George growled, ‘and Avebury was a fool to have married her. He should have kept her as his mistress, but never married her.’

‘This tea’s bloody cold,’ Sally complained. She had left the dais and discarded her helmet.

‘Go and have some dinner, child,’ Sir George said grandly, ‘but be back here by two of the clock. Have you finished, Captain?’

Sandman nodded. He was staring at the Countess’s picture. Her dress had been very lightly sketched, presumably because it was doomed to be obliterated, but her face, as striking as it was alluring, was almost completed. ‘You said, did you not,’ he asked, ‘that the Earl of Avebury commissioned the portrait?’

‘I did say so,’ Sir George agreed, ‘and he did.’

‘Yet I heard that he and his wife were estranged?’ Sandman said.

‘So I understand,’ Sir George said airily, then gave a wicked laugh. ‘He was certainly cuckolded. Her ladyship had a reputation, Captain, and it didn’t involve feeding the poor and comforting the afflicted.’ He was pulling on an old-fashioned coat, all wide cuffs, broad collars and gilt buttons. ‘Sammy,’ he shouted down the stairs, ‘I’ll eat the game pie up here! And some of that salmagundi if it ain’t mouldy. And you can open another of the ’nine clarets.’ He lumbered to the window and scowled at the rain fighting against the smoke of a thousand chimneys.

‘Why would a man estranged from his wife spend a fortune on her portrait?’ Sandman asked.

‘The ways of the world, Captain,’ Sir George said portentously, ‘are a mystery even unto me. How the hell would I know?’ Sir George turned from the window. ‘You’d have to ask his cuckolded lordship. I believe he lives near Marlborough, though he’s reputed to be a recluse so I suspect you’d be wasting your journey. On the other hand, perhaps it isn’t a mystery. Maybe he wanted revenge on her? Hanging her naked tits on his wall would be a kind of revenge, would it not?’

‘Would it?’

Sir George chuckled. ‘There is none so conscious of their high estate as an ennobled whore, Captain, so why not remind the bitch of what brought her the title? Tits, sir, tits. If it had not been for her good tits and long legs she’d still be charging ten shillings a night. But did little Charlie the sodomite kill her? I doubt it, Captain, I doubt it very much, but nor do I care very much. Little Charlie was getting too big for his boots, so I won’t mourn to see him twitching at the end of a rope. Ah!’ He rubbed his hands as his servant climbed the stairs with a heavy tray. ‘Dinner! Good day to you, Captain, I trust I have been of service.’

Sandman was not sure Sir George had been of any service, unless increasing Sandman’s confusion was of use, but Sir George was done with him now and Sandman was dismissed.

So he left. And the rain fell harder.

‘That fat bastard never offers us dinner!’ Sally Hood complained. She was sitting opposite Sandman in a tavern on Piccadilly where, inspired by Sir George Phillips’s dinner, they shared a bowl of salmagundi: a cold mixture of cooked meats, anchovies, hard-boiled eggs and onions. ‘He guzzles himself, he does,’ Sally went on, ‘and we’re supposed to bleeding starve.’ She tore a piece of bread from the loaf, poured more oil into the bowl then smiled shyly at Sandman. ‘I was so embarrassed when you walked in.’