A Corpse in Shining Armour

by Caro Peacock

  ‘I’m not sure I can live up to all this splendour,’ I said.

  He grinned, spun the phaeton in a circle as tight as a good skater’s on ice and off we went by Mount Street and Park Lane, along Piccadilly at a spanking trot and down Haymarket. For all my worries, I couldn’t help feeling in holiday mood as we bowled along overtaking less nimble vehicles. London on a fine June evening makes you feel more alive than any other city in the world and I’ve always loved the circus from the time my brother Tom and I were taken there as children. At the far end of Whitehall, I stopped myself from looking to the right at the sad wreckage the fire had made of the lovely old palace of Westminster, like a rotten tooth in a beloved face. We trotted on across Westminster Bridge, with the river glinting in the sun beneath us. I hadn’t needed to ask Amos where we were heading. What other circus would it be than Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre?

  Once we were over the river, Amos turned into the yard of an inn, had a word with the ostler, and left the cob and phaeton in his care. We strolled together to Astley’s and Amos insisted on paying for seats in one of the boxes in the middle of the house. Astley’s prides itself on being a theatre and circus combined, so first we had to sit through a comedy about two young lovers and a wicked guardian who wanted to marry the girl to a rich old man instead. I found it tedious, but Amos laughed. At last the lovers were united, the scenery cleared away and the area became a circus ring, with a troop of horse acrobats whooping on, dressed as Red Indians, riding bareback with long feather head-dresses streaming out behind them. Their tricks were amazing: hanging down at full gallop to pick up flags from the sawdust with their teeth, ankles locked round their horses’ necks, leaping on and off each other’s mounts and forming a pyramid of ten riders on the backs of two cantering horses. Three of the horses were piebalds and Amos craned forward for a closer look at them, then shook his head.

  The Indians were followed by a comic routine between a clown and the riding master who was dressed like a cavalryman in white breeches and frogged jacket, then a girl acrobat in ballerina costume, pirouetting and somersaulting on the broad back of a dapple grey. After her, more clowns, a whole troop of them this time. They chased round the ring, assaulting each other with cardboard truncheons, strings of sausages, buckets of water.

  One of the clowns fell over backwards, pretending to be knocked unconscious. To laughs and cheers from the audience, a doctor’s cart came galloping to his rescue.

  ‘There we are.’

  Amos gave a sigh of satisfaction. The cart was rectangular and might at a pinch be described as coffin-shaped, drawn by a piebald cob. The doctor, in black top hat and white make-up, opened the lid and produced a giant syringe and a gallon-sized bottle of red medicine. He managed the routine neatly, although his left arm hung useless at his side. The victim was revived and, after more comic business, the doctor’s cart galloped out. As it passed beneath us, the angle of the gaslight showed a butterfly-shaped brand on a dark patch of the horse’s hindquarters. We stayed for the rest of the performance because it would have been impossible to get out from where we were sitting without creating a disturbance and, as Amos said, the doctor wouldn’t be going anywhere. After the finale, as soon as the audience began to move, Amos cleared a path through them and I followed him into the street.

  ‘There’ll be a back way in,’ Amos said.

  There was, surrounded by street urchins trying to get a look at the horses and riders. We walked past them to a yard at the rear of the arena, full of horses and performers. The rectangular cart was standing by the wall with the piebald, unharnessed, eating from a bucket beside it. The man who’d played the doctor was watching it, still in his chalky make-up and smoking a clay pipe.

  Amos walked up to him.

  ‘Didn’t I see you in Bond Street, day before yesterday?’

  The man jumped and dropped his pipe, but caught it deftly on its way to the ground.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Just interested,’ Amos said. ‘Nice horse you’ve got.’

  The man glanced from Amos to me and back again, wondering what to make of us. I decided to leave the questioning to Amos.

  ‘There’s plenty of people don’t care for coloured horses,’ Amos said. ‘I reckon most of them have got more sense than the rest.’

  ‘Horse sense,’ the man said, grinning uneasily at his own joke. ‘And most horses have got more sense than most humans.’

  Amos laughed, took a pigskin tobacco pouch from his pocket, opened it and held it out to the man.

  ‘Like a fill-up?’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

  They filled up their pipes, lit them and puffed away for a while without saying anything. The man was visibly relaxing. After a few minutes, Amos introduced himself and gathered in return that the man’s name was Stanley Best.

  ‘I know the gentleman who owns the armour,’ Amos said.

  ‘Armour?’

  ‘That was what was in the crates you and your friend collected. Didn’t you know that?’

  Stanley shrugged.

  ‘Didn’t know and didn’t care.’

  ‘Did you have to take it far?’ Amos said.

  ‘Belle Sauvage, Ludgate Hill, to await collection.’

  I remembered that the Belle Sauvage was another of the big coaching inns.

  ‘Who was it addressed to?’ Amos said.

  ‘Who wants to know? We wasn’t stealing it. My friend had a note, giving us the authority.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘You’re asking a lot of questions. What’s it got to do with you?’

  Amos plunged his hand into a pocket and brought it out holding a handful of coins. Stan’s eyes went to them.

  ‘You get gentlemen playing jokes on other gentlemen,’ Amos said. ‘Maybe your gentleman’s playing games with mine.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Amos spun a sovereign into the air. Stan’s good hand came up and caught it, quick as a swallow taking a gnat.

  ‘Wasn’t addressed to anybody,’ Stan said. ‘We just had to leave it there, that’s all.’

  Amos nodded, as if he’d guessed that.

  ‘Your friend who drove you to Bond Street, is he in the circus too?’

  ‘One of the Red Indians. I was too, till I got ridden over and this happened.’

  He flapped his useless left arm like a penguin’s wing. Amos spun another sovereign and Stan plucked it from the air, deftly as the first.

  ‘Play this game all night, if you like.’

  ‘Who was the gentleman told you to collect the armour?’ Amos said.

  ‘We never met him. It was a fellow acting for him.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Stan waited for another sovereign but Amos’s hand went back into his pocket.

  ‘There’s a place we drink at,’ Stan said at last. ‘You get all sorts there. One night, there was this fellow in there we hadn’t seen before, putting it around he’d pay good money for somebody who’d do little jobs for him, no questions asked.’

  ‘Against the law little jobs?’

  ‘That’s what everybody thought. They were all stringing him on, laughing at him behind their hands. So my friend and I let him buy us a beer or two and we ask him what he wants. We were having him on. If it had been against the law, we didn’t want nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Stands to reason,’ Amos said, straight-faced.

  ‘Only it turns out it wasn’t. This fellow works for a gentleman who wants to play a joke on another gentleman, like you said. All we have to do is run errands now and then, and not ask questions. He says do we have access to a horse and cart, and we say yes.’

  ‘You didn’t mention it was a circus horse and a clown’s cart?’

  ‘Why should we? He didn’t ask. So we say, all right, and he goes away and says he’ll let his gentleman know and we’ll be hearing from him. For a long time, there’s nothing and we forget about it. Then last Saturday there’s a note waiting for us at the public house,
saying we’re to collect the crates on Monday and take them to the Belle Sauvage, like I said. We’re to give the note to the man at the shop, to let him know it’s above board.’

  ‘Who signed the note?’

  ‘Couldn’t make it out. Began with D or might have been B.’

  ‘Was there money with it?’

  ‘A few quid.’

  ‘How many quid?’

  ‘Five times more than I’ve had from you.’

  ‘Ten pounds, for a little job like that?’

  Stan looked defensive.

  ‘The fellow said there was money in it if we did what we were told.’

  Amos glanced at me. There was no doubt in my mind that the fellow in the public house had been acting on behalf of one of the Brinkburn brothers. The question was which. I tried a question of my own.

  ‘And the man never said anything about who his employer was?’

  Stan hesitated, less at ease with me than with Amos.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You said it was a long time from when he approached you to when the message came about collecting the crates. How long?’

  Stan wrinkled his forehead and seemed to be counting up in his mind.

  ‘A good three weeks, I’d say. Back at the start of the month or even late May.’

  ‘Can you describe him? Was he tall?’

  He looked at Amos. Another sovereign flipped through the air into his hand.

  ‘No, short as what I am.’

  Below average height, then.

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Not young. Thirty or a bit more.’

  ‘What did he look like.’

  ‘Nothing remarkable.’

  ‘You must remember something. What colour was his hair?’

  He thought about it.

  ‘He didn’t have much of it. I remember noticing that when he pushed his cap back. He was bald up to the top of his head and he had this funny mark where the hair would have been.’

  ‘What?’

  I must have yelped it out because he looked startled.

  ‘Funny mark?’ I said. ‘What sort of funny mark? Was it the colour of a liver chestnut horse?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘And this shape?’

  I picked up his whip from where it was leaning against the wall and used the end of it to draw a rough outline of the map of Ireland in the dust.

  ‘That’s the one. You know him then?’

  I nodded, mind whirling. It must have been Handy who recruited them, but the note on Saturday couldn’t have come through Handy, who’d been dead six days by then.

  ‘And you never saw this man again, after the first time in the public house?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  I looked at Amos. We’d got as much from the man as we were likely to get, for the while at least, and I wanted time to think. We thanked Stan, who looked wistful at the thought of no more sovereigns, and walked back towards the yard where we’d left the phaeton.

  ‘That man he saw,’ I said, ‘he was the dead man in the crate. Handy.’

  ‘Certain of it?’

  ‘Certain. How many men have birthmarks that shape?’

  ‘What was his game, then?’

  ‘I’m nearly sure he was working for either Stephen or Miles. It makes sense, when you think about it. There he is, their father’s old servant with a not very good reputation, kicking his heels and wondering what to do with himself. When this question over the inheritance started, it must have occurred to one of them that it would be useful to have a spy in their mother’s house.’

  ‘He wouldn’t need two men and a cart for that,’ Amos said.

  ‘No, but suppose it didn’t stop at just spying? We know Miles played at least one nasty trick on Stephen that day at the Eyre Arms.’

  ‘If the man Stan’s got it right, it was a while before that when Handy went looking for helpers.’

  ‘That would fit. Either of them might have been thinking up ways to annoy or humiliate his brother from weeks back.’

  ‘So why does Handy make himself as conspicuous as a rook in a dovecot, going to people from the circus?’

  It was a fair point, and I’d been doing some thinking about it while we’d been walking.

  ‘Because I don’t think Handy was as clever or worldly wise as he thought he was,’ I said. ‘He might have boasted to whichever brother was employing him that he had useful friends in low places. But after all, he’s spent most of his life abroad. Who would he know in London? So when Stephen or Miles took him at his word, he had to do the best he could. He probably decided that people who worked round circuses were not always models of respectability…’

  ‘He just might have been right there,’ Amos said.

  ‘…and didn’t realise he’d gone and recruited a clown.’

  ‘So which of ’em was he working for then: Miles or Stephen?’

  ‘Stephen, I’d say. Miles was angry that the armour had been carted away.’

  ‘Or pretended to be.’

  I looked at Amos.

  ‘You really think Miles is that clever?’

  ‘I reckon there’s more under that one’s hat than he lets on.’

  We were going up Haymarket on our way home when another thought came to me. I had to shout it to Amos above trotting hooves and jingling harness, but with no danger of anybody outside our phaeton hearing because of the noise of the traffic.

  ‘Suppose it wasn’t one or the other. From what I’ve heard of Simon Handy, he was quite capable of double-crossing them and working for both.’

  ‘Wondered when you’d get there,’ Amos said, looking straight ahead.

  ‘If he was, and if one of them found out, that might have been why he was killed.’

  ‘If it was Miles, he’d have been a cool customer, standing there while that crate was opened, knowing what they’d find inside.’

  ‘He seemed genuinely shaken. And Stephen’s the one who hasn’t been seen since Handy’s body was found,’ I said.

  ‘Reckon he killed him and done a bunk somewhere abroad, then?’

  ‘It’s possible, isn’t it? After all, by disappearing like this, he’s left the field open to Miles in every sense. There must be some serious reason for that.’

  When we got back to Abel Yard, I insisted on refunding to Amos the three sovereigns he’d given Stan.

  ‘No necessity for that,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s a lawyer’s money, not mine.’

  He nodded and pocketed the coins.

  ‘Not many folks get money out of lawyers. Shall I be seeing you tomorrow then?’

  ‘Not tomorrow. I think I must go back to Buckinghamshire. I’ll be in touch.’

  I didn’t want to leave Tabby to her own devices in the country for too long.

  ‘Staying in the same place as before?’

  ‘Same place. And thank you, Amos.’

  I watched him drive out of the yard and went upstairs. Mrs Martley was posting snippets from magazines into her Queen Victoria album at the kitchen table. We chatted for a while about nothing in particular, then I went up to my room, opened the window and looked out over the rooftops towards the trees in the park. Somebody was growing sweet peas on a nearby balcony, in pots squeezed behind wrought-iron railings two storeys above the street. The smell of them filled the air. A woman’s laughter rose from the pavement, along with the music of a waltz, from one of the big houses fronting on to the park. I felt my feet twitching. I had no business to want to waltz but, for a moment, I envied dancers with nothing more serious to worry about than whether their shoes would last the night. That reminded me that I still had Celia’s ridiculous invitation cards in my reticule. I’d had no real intention of using them. I hadn’t been invited, had no partner to go with and was not in a position to honour Celia’s condition that I must carry whole slices of gossip to her.

  I re-read her note: you know who and you know who else, who have definitely been invited. One of the you knows must be
Miles. Was the other one meant to be his brother or Rosa Fitzwilliam? I needed to talk to Miles. In spite of their long day, my feet needed to waltz. Quite wrong, of course, to let my frivolous feet have any influence on the matter, but after all it was a June night in Mayfair.

  The invitation card said costume medieval. There was nothing of that description in the wooden chest where I keep my best clothes, but it did contain my favourite blue-green silk dress, the shade of the sea on a fine day, with long white lawn sleeves, gathered in a series of puffs all the way down the arm and trimmed with ribbons to match the rest of the dress. It was an extravagance, compounded by matching silk slippers with bows. I swept my hair up high at the back and pinned it in place with a dragonfly made of amethysts and emerald-coloured enamel, a present from a satisfied client. Mrs Martley blinked as I rushed past.

  ‘Going out again at this hour?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t wait up.’

  I slowed to an easy walk once I was outside, careful where I placed my silk slippers. It was past ten o’clock, but still almost full light. The house where the ball was taking place was only a short walk away, quite possibly the one from which I’d heard the music. I was gambling that by this time of night arrangements for greeting guests would be less formal than at the start of proceedings. If there was a footman in the hall, announcing people as they arrived, a single woman with a second-hand invitation card would not be welcome. The gamble succeeded. The double doors were wide open to Park Lane, light and music pouring out. The road was half-blocked by a confusion of carriages: some people leaving already, others just arriving. Ladies and gentlemen in evening costume congregated on the steps, chatting to friends or cooling their faces in the fresh air from the park.

  I went up the steps into a wide hallway lit by hundreds of candles and draped with bright new heraldic banners. A footman moved towards me but made no attempt to bar my way and instead offered a glass of champagne from a tray. I accepted it and followed the sound of music through two more sets of double doors to the ballroom. A polite form of country dance was in progress, three lines of people the length of the room, bowing, bobbing and twirling. The ladies were showing inventive variations on the medieval theme, from muslins and conical hats with scarves that floated out as they danced, to stiff brocades, jewelled stomachers and embroideries that would have weighed down a pack pony. The men had mostly opted for conventional black and white evening wear, except for the few who considered their legs were shapely enough to risk doublet and hose. Miles Brinkburn was one of that minority. I noticed him almost at once, dancing opposite one of the muslin girls, and had to admit that the costume suited him. I could see no sign of either Stephen or Rosa.