The Darkest Walk of Crime (16 page)

“Sims! Have you checked in
here?”

“The door’s locked, Sir Robert.”

“I know it’s locked, Sims! Have
you checked inside?”

“No, sir.” The voice ended in a
yelp of pain.

Mendick ran quickly to the
window, but a brief glance revealed a group of servants standing immediately
outside. He would have to sit tight and hope that nobody came in.

“Damn you, Sims, can you not
perform the simplest of tasks? Find the key and check the damned room!”

Mendick heard scurrying feet and
then the strange, indrawn laugh of Rachel Scott.

“My, Robert, you
are
masterful when you are angry, but should you not dress yourself?” There was the
sound of a soft slap. “You might shock the servants.”

“I’ll dress any way I like in my
own house, Rachel - if the servants don’t like it, they can damned well leave.”

Rachel laughed again. Very
slowly, Mendick unlocked the door and peered out, to see Trafford, stark naked,
grasping a riding whip and facing away from him with Scott at his side. She
wore what appeared to be a white sheet inadequately draped over her body, so
her right leg and left shoulder were left shockingly bare.

“Light every damned candle in
the house and search every room!” Trafford flicked the whip through the air as
he took charge, his rich voice penetrating into every recess as he organised
the hunt.

“Rouse everybody out of their
beds, even the blasted tweenies; I want the house turned upside down, dammit! I
want this blasted thief found and I want to see him swinging at the gallows!”

Mendick pressed hard into the
darkest shadows on the wall as a host of servants appeared; he was quite aware
that Trafford had the power to carry out his threat. Although burglary may not
be a capital crime, a major landowner like Sir Robert could say anything he
liked in court. He could claim the burglar had threatened violence, which could
be enough to have him sentenced to death, and suddenly Mendick remembered Mr
Smith’s words: “If you are discovered . . . we may not even be able to admit
you are one of ours
.
”

The prospect was alarming. Previously,
when he had faced danger, he had had the security of a uniform and an official
position. The regiment would support him, the police force had been there to
back him up, but now he was truly alone, trapped in an English country house
with a vengeful proprietor after his blood and scores of staff only too eager
to help.

But what exactly had he learned?
Mendick thought of the muskets in the cellar and the legal document in the
desk. The law did not forbid anybody owning muskets and many landowners were in
financial difficulties, but taken together with his knowledge that Sir Robert
was befriending the Chartists these isolated facts could be significant. The
quantity of muskets was particularly worrying. Mendick was not sure exactly
what his intelligence meant, but he knew that he must escape and inform Mr
Smith of all that he had discovered.

Candles were being lit all over
the house as servants ran this way and that, dressed in their night clothes and
shouting contradictory orders as they got in each other’s way. For a second
Mendick contemplated waylaying a footman and swapping clothes, but he discarded
the idea at once; there was bound to be noise, and where could he put his
victim? His only sensible option was to find somewhere to hide until the
initial panic had subsided.

He waited until the corridor was
clear before he slipped away, but then shadowy figures ahead and the glow of a
candle made ducking through the nearest door prudent.

He was in the withdrawing room,
with a huge piano against one wall and a selection of chairs and small tables
crouching on an Axminster carpet. As voices sounded outside he ducked behind
one of the largest chairs. He was suddenly aware of the hammer of his heart and
the dryness of his mouth.

“Check in here!”

There was the butler’s
authoritarian voice, and a young man then entered the room. He was ludicrously
dressed with his trousers pulled over a baggy nightshirt and a nightcap on his
head, but there was nothing amusing about the stout stick in his hand. When he
held up a candle in a brass holder, shadows jumped around the room.

“Hello?” The man did not
penetrate far, peering nervously into the room. “Is there anybody here?”

Mendick kept still. He knew that
it was almost impossible to distinguish shapes in a half-lit room, but any
movement would mean instant discovery.

The servant brandished his
stick. “I can see you,” he said and moved cautiously across the carpet to the
mantelpiece with the candle guttering in his hand and his nervous breathing
audible in the otherwise silent room. Without lingering he lit one of the
candles on the mantelpiece and withdrew quickly, obviously relieved that the
room appeared empty.

“There’s nobody in here, Mr
Sims.”

Mendick sat tight, listening to
the scurry of passing feet, the querulous voices of servants and the banging of
doors, until the sounds faded into the distance and he emerged from behind the
chair. Now he had to escape from an alerted building and send his message to
London.

He was fortunate that the
withdrawing room had large windows which opened directly to the terrace; it was
simple to slip the catch and roll to the ground outside. Although the terrace
was empty, there were men in the policies with their lanterns high and their
voices raised to give each other courage. Mendick tried to gauge their numbers
and swore softly as he saw the whitely naked form of Trafford leading a small
patrol of the outdoor staff.

“I want this thief caught, and I
want him hanged!”

Standing in the shadow of the
wall, Mendick knew that he would be reasonably secure once he reached the
woodland. The danger was in crossing the immaculate sweep of the lawn. With
half the lights in the house blazing, the immediate surroundings were as
illuminated as one of those new-fangled Christmas trees that Prince Albert was
blamed for bringing over from Germany. For a moment he was back before the
walls of Amoy, with the lights flaring and the Chinese Army waiting for the
assault, but he shook away the memories.

The sounds died down as the
servants moved to a different section of the house. Mendick counted to ten,
took a deep breath and ran across the short grass, not bothering to dodge as he
relied on speed to carry him to safety.

“There he is!”

It was almost inevitable that
somebody should see him but rather than hesitate, Mendick ducked his head and
ran all the faster. He heard the sharp crack of a firearm but the shot was so
poor that he did not even hear the wind of its passage. Somebody was running
behind him, other people were shouting uselessly, that damned dog continued to
bay and then he was amongst the trees with darkness a cloak and the servants
crashing behind him clumsily, beating the bushes with their sticks.

“Come out, you bastard!”

“I saw him; he went that way”

“Should we be doing this? Would
it not be better to just let him go?”

After dodging Tartars and
Mongolians during the Opium War, Mendick was not concerned about a score of
British house servants although he was slightly wary of the gamekeepers. He was
also nervous that he might trip one of the man traps, so he moved slowly
through the trees until he found the boundary wall. The final barrier, but
Mendick was in no mood to be delayed and scrambled up the bole of the nearest
tree, gathered his courage and leapt into the darkness.

He felt the sharp pain of a
twisted ankle, but the relief of leaving the policies of Trafford Hall was more
than adequate compensation, and he limped back to his remaining pigeon. It
seemed pleased to see him as he fed it a handful of seed from the jar beneath
the basket. He composed a short note:
Trafford friendly with Chartists. Has
large quantity of arms
.  He pondered for a while, wondering if he should
mention the lawyer’s letter and the white horse but decided that they were not
so important. Instead he added,
Will remain in position.
He tied the
message to the pigeon’s leg and launched the bird into the air.

“That’s all I can do for now,”
he told himself, but the image of those muskets remained with him together with
the memory of Trafford and Rachel Scott. It was not until he returned to his
cottage and the anxious face of Peter that he realised he may have been wrong.
Perhaps Trafford was not friendly with the Chartists? Perhaps Rachel Scott was
a Chartist plant in Trafford’s house and he had just sent misinformation to Mr
Smith?

This possibility left him very
troubled. He also began to wonder why Scotland Yard had not sent back any of
his pigeons.

Chartertown: December
1847

Mendick permitted himself some
slight satisfaction as he walked around Chartertown. With the meal and
delicacies the volunteers had liberated from Trafford Hall, the people of
Chartertown enjoyed their first decent Christmas in years. He started as
Preston’s wife smiled to him. Normally she greeted him with a suspicious
glower, as if he was personally responsible for leading her man into danger.

“You’ll be coming to our
Christmas, then?” Mrs Preston asked, her thin face taut but with new warmth in
her eyes.

“I would dearly love to come,
Mrs Preston, if I am not inconveniencing you.”

“You made it possible,” Mrs
Preston told him. “It’s the first time in their lives my children have had full
bellies.” She turned quickly to rebuke her son. “John Frost! Stop pulling at
your sister’s hair!” Her slap lacked any force. “We’ve called all our children
after the great Chartist leaders,” she explained. “They’re all we have,
really.”

Mendick smiled and nodded. John
Frost had led the Chartists to disaster at Newport in 1839. He was hardly the
most auspicious of heroes.

With so many working class
people gathered together, Mendick was surprised that most of the celebrations
involved little of the heavy drinking he had come to associate with an English
Christmas. The absence of alcohol did not seem to spoil the general feeling of
goodwill, however, and he was even more pleased that Armstrong had called Peter
away on some private mission.

Following a series of muted
protests from the wives, he had cancelled his programmed Christmas Day
training, and everybody gathered at the simple church where a Chartist pastor
delivered a traditional Christmas message of peace and goodwill.

“We are gathered in hope for a
better future.” Dressed in respectable clothes but with no pretence of
formality, the pastor addressed his congregation as if they were friends,
rather than speaking down to them in the clergy’s usual patriarchal manner. “And
although we prepare for the violence of war, let us all pray for a peaceful
resolution to our difficulties, an extension of the franchise and a better life
for everybody, with co-existence rather than conflict.”

Following the sermon, there were
carols with a Chartist message, and a communal meal to which everybody had
contributed. The pastor raised his hand in blessing.

“May God grant peace to
everybody here and to everybody in this country. Let us pray that the
government can find it in their hearts to accept the Charter and bring a more
equable society to us all.”

The messages of peace heartened
the congregation as they filed outside to enjoy the warmth of the bright fire
outside the church wall. Mendick was struck once again by the philosophy that
these Chartists embraced. Used to seeing his volunteers as prototype soldiers,
when he saw them mingling with their families he realised they were husbands
and fathers first, and for a moment he saw them, however distantly, as the
inheritors of exactly the utopian community that they desired. He saw them
working their few acres as independent yeomen, much as their ancestors had done
before industrialisation; he saw them with a say in this country that had
cheated them of so much, and he wondered if he had the right to destroy their
dream.

At that moment it would have
been easier to join them, to throw in his lot wholeheartedly with these
hard-used, stubborn, undernourished people and fight against the inequalities
of the established system.

Until he remembered the stacked
boxes of Brown Bess muskets, and the prospect of the horrors that Civil War
would create. There was no utopia in war, only blood and agony, broken minds
and mutilated bodies. Looking around the gathered families, he shook his head;
if these people were not volunteers for a glorious, just cause, neither were
they raging revolutionaries. They were all victims of two contrasting
ideologies, one of selfish privilege and the other of bitter resentment.

In the eyes of the chief
protagonists these people, these intense, suspicious, impetuous, emotional
people, counted less than an indrawn breath. Did it matter if it was Monaghan
or Earl Russell, Josiah Armstrong or the Duke of Wellington who consigned them
to the muzzle of a musket? Either way they were doomed to be blown this way or
that, dependent on the whims of their political masters, and that was the real
tragedy of their lives.

Whatever they did, and however
well they did it, did not matter. They would leave no mark on the world, they
could only live their brief lives and disappear, unknown, unrewarded and
unrecognised by anybody in any way.

“God save you all,” he
whispered, “for I am an agent of your destruction.”

He saw Mrs Preston lifting young
John Frost Preston in the air, laughing at the simple pleasure of having a full
belly. He saw Eccles’s sardonic face split into a huge grin as a young woman
slipped her arm into his and presented her lips for a kiss. He saw Duffy pull a
bottle from inside his jacket, take a sly sip and hand it over to the eager
hands of a friend.