Dancing on the Wind (The Regency Intrigue Series Book 8)

by M C Beaton

  “Nary a one.”

  Mr. Tarry frowned. Perhaps the thief could be one of the earl’s friends. Such things did happen in this age of gambling. “No member o’ the Quality came around then?” he pursued.

  “There was one,” said Mr. Sellen. “A Mr. Pargeter. Friend o’ her ladyship’s.” His eyes drooped in a wink. “If you take my meaning. But Pargeter’s as rich as creases. Couldn’t be him.”

  “He called when the earl and countess were not here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “Asking about some village girl. I told him I didn’t have no truck with the hayseeds and that he should go into the village and ask.”

  “What was the name of this girl?”

  “Bless me, can’t call that to mind. Not as if it would ha’ anything to do with the theft. Bit of petticoat he was arter, most like. Her ladyship gave him his marching orders.”

  Mr. Tarry heaved a sigh. He stood up and fished in a capacious pocket and pulled out a bottle of brandy. It was white brandy—moonshine, as smuggled French brandy was called. Mr. Sellen’s eyes gleamed.

  “Get us a couple o’ glasses,” said Mr. Tarry expansively. “You must be weary with answering questions.” Mr. Sellen produced two glasses from a sideboard and greedily watched Mr. Tarry fill them up.

  The caretaker closed his eyes appreciatively at the first sip of the spirit, leaned back in his chair, and searched for some way to please the amiable Bow Street man.

  All of a sudden, he seemed to be back on the step of the manor on a cold windy night. A girl was asking for … He closed his eyes tightly. Meg Jones, that was it. She wanted someone who knew Meg Jones.

  “I call to mind,” he said carefully, “that a girl called asking about a Meg Jones. I said I’d never heard of such a person and told her to go away.”

  “When was that?”

  “Round last November, as I recall.”

  “Now, say this girl wanted to try her chances at thieving something, could she have waited and got into the house some way when you had gone?”

  “No …” began Mr. Sellen, and then blushed.

  “No?” echoed Mr. Tarry softly. He leaned forward and refilled Mr. Sellen’s glass.

  “Thankee. No, no way anyone could have got in,” said Mr. Sellen in a strong, loud voice. “No way at all.”

  But Mr. Tarry had noticed that telltale blush. So the caretaker had left some window or door open that night.

  Mr. Tarry returned to the village after having secured a description of the girl. Meg Jones, he learned, had been a wise woman, telling fortunes and dishing out herbal medicines. He did not want to ask directly about any young girl connected with this Meg, so Mr. Tarry pretended to have known her himself. Sensing she had been admired, he praised her remedies, while his mind wondered whether the girl had been some helper she had employed or a relative. But perhaps the girl had been just a cunning thief. She had gone to the manor to ask about a woman already dead.

  He was seated in the tap room of The George, the small inn in the center of the village. Opposite him sat three of the local worthies.

  Mr. Tarry paid for another round of drinks and sat down again. “Lovely eyes she had. Violet, they was,” he said meditatively, looking at the ceiling, having picked out the most vivid part of Mr. Sellen’s description of the girl.

  “Ah,” said one slowly. “Wild ’un, her were.”

  Mr. Tarry waited, being careful to show a marked lack of interest.

  The silence seemed to drag on forever, and then one thickset man in a farmer’s smock said, “We was a bit crool to her. ’Cause we knew’d her was no kin to Meg, being only a foundling. Vicar do say we drove her away, but was squire’s bailiffs who was going to put ’er out, see. Her went arter they give ’er a week.” The name! screamed an urgent voice inside Mr. Tarry’s head, but his sleepy expression did not change.

  Another long silence. “My boy, Charlie,” vouchsafed one after what seemed like an hour, “was sweet on ’er. ’Twar Polly this and Polly that, I ’member.”

  Polly Jones, thought Mr. Tarry. I am looking for a girl with violet eyes called Polly Jones. Where would she sell the stuff?

  “Ain’t no big towns hereabouts,” he said.

  The three chuckled and laughed and slapped their knees. The quick little man inside Mr. Tarry’s fat carcass wanted to leap out and strangle these yokels.

  He joined in the laughter. “Reckon I don’t know much,” he said.

  “Reckon tha’ don’t,” said the farmer, wiping his streaming eyes. “Hackminster’s as big as Lunnon and be only a liddle bit away.”

  Soon Mr. Tarry was on the way to Hackminster. As he expected, it was only a small market town, but enormous to the likes of the inhabitants of Upper Batchett. He found two jeweller’s shops in the back streets. He drew a blank at the first, but was lucky at the second. The jeweller, despite the dinginess of his stock, was an honest man. He had carefully recorded the items Polly had sold him in his book. He had believed her story.

  “Now,” thought Mr. Tarry when he stood outside the jeweller’s shop again. “My bird, like all thieves, would try to go to London to hide.” His enquiries at the Three Bells where the London stage called twice a week drew a blank. He checked livery stables, and then the sight of a waggoner’s cart gave him the idea that she might have chosen this unobtrusive mode of transport.

  He rode out to the London road and asked each wagonner who passed if they had ever seen a girl of Polly’s description. Mr. Tarry knew from the jeweller what clothes she had been wearing when she was in Hackminster.

  At last, at the end of a weary day, a waggoner said he had seen Silas Brewer on the London road last November with a pretty girl in maid’s dress sitting beside him.

  Mr. Tarry heaved a sigh of relief.

  The hunt was nearly over.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Barney and Jake, driven on by the lash of their mistress’s tongue, grew weary of searching for the shop where Polly had sold the gown.

  “Reckon she didn’t sell it,” grumbled Barney. “Reckon one o’ the marquess’s fine friends took her up. Stands to reason, a girl like that.”

  “Our Poll wouldn’t ha’ gone with no man,” said Jake. “No, she’ll ha’ sold the gown and shoes and found work. Decent she was, despite her tales o’ thieving.”

  It was a fine April day and their search had taken them into the City of London, that part which the fashionables had gradually left to merchants and commerce as they created an empire in the West End. They turned into a coffee house and called for chocolate and newspapers. As Jake put it, it was a fine thing to get away from being a whoremaster once in a while, although Barney said whoremaster was too grand a title, they being more in the way of whore-mistress’s servants.

  Both Barney and Jake had been brought up in an enlightened orphanage where they had been taught to read and write. Jake read every advertisement in the newspapers when he had the chance. He was sipping his chocolate and studying the lists of advertisements which contained interesting items such as: “Military gentleman willing to marry any Lady of Damaged Reputation for only a Small Sum. He promises that the Chains of Hymen will lie lightly.” His eyes travelled down the page and then he let out a gasp and straightened up.

  “Listen here,” he said. “For sale. Gown worn only once by a Lady of Quality. Of finest blue lutestring over blue quilted petticoat with white satin stomacher. Ain’t that Poll’s gown? Look at that description Ma Blanchard gave you.”

  Barney pulled out a dirty and much-thumbed piece of paper. “Matches the description all right,” he said. “Where does it say to enquire?”

  “Barking’s Pastry Shop, Pudding Lane. That’s down by the Monument.”

  “What’s a pastry shop doing selling gowns?”

  “Let’s go and find out.”

  Mr. Barking, the pastry cook, was in a great taking when he found himself being accused of trafficking in stolen goods. He protested he had bought the g
own for his wife from a most worthy citizen. But Mrs. Barking had complained that the gown was too grand—and too tight—and so he had decided to sell it.

  “Looks like you bought it honest,” said Barney, leaning confidentially on the shop counter and picking his teeth with that implement in his pocket knife for taking stones out of horses’ hooves. “See here, we’ll go along and have a quiet word with this citizen and tell him the folly of his ways. What’s his name?”

  Mr. Barking looked nervously at the two men, at one-eyed Jake and squat and swarthy Barney. But then, he reflected in a cowardly way, if Silas Brewer was an honest man he had nothing to fear.

  Armed with Silas’s address, Jake and Barney set out for Shoreditch.

  “He’d need to be honest to live here,” sniffed Jake. “Either honest or a gin drinker,” these being the only two types of people in Jake’s experience who were condemned to live in poverty.

  Silas was not at home. Instead, it was Mrs. Brewer who answered the door, a Mrs. Brewer supported by a neighbor and near fainting.

  “Go along with you,” said the neighbor when they asked for Silas. “Don’t you see the pore thing has had enough, what with Bow Street men taking her husband away to show them where that girl worked?”

  “What girl?” asked Jake sharply.

  “Oh, poor, poor Polly. I can’t believe it,” wailed Mrs. Brewer.

  “We’re friends of Polly’s—from the country,” said Barney quickly. “If she’s in need of help, you’d best tell us where to find her.”

  A little hope came into Mrs. Brewer’s tear-washed eyes. “Polly is working for a merchant, a Mr. Gander at 350 Cheapside. Tell her …”

  But Barney and Jake were off and running.

  When they got as far as Mr. Gander’s house, it was to find the pavement blocked with sightseers craning their necks. Barney and Jake roughly pushed their way to the front of the crowd.

  And then the door of the mansion opened. Barney and Jake, recognizing an officer of the law, shrank back a bit and pulled their hats down over their eyes. When they looked up again it was to see Polly being dragged through the crowd. Someone had pulled her cap off, and the masses of her hair spilled about her shoulders. She was wearing a low-cut chintz gown with a frilly fichu about her shoulders—one of the outfits in which she delighted the lecherous eyes of Mr. Gander’s guests.

  “I knew she was a robber and slut!” screamed a massive woman from an upstairs window, her orange moustache bristling.

  Polly was led away in the direction of Newgate. The crowd followed along. On the steps of Mr. Gander’s house, Monsoor Petty sat crying his eyes out, the only member of the household to mourn Polly’s going.

  “Well, that’s that,” said Barney when the great doors of Newgate Prison closed in their faces. “She’ll be hanged. One of the men said she’d stolen from a duke or something. Poor Poll. Tell you something, Ma Blanchard can fry in hell. I ain’t going back.” He turned and hurried off.

  “Where you going?” screamed Jake.

  “To get drunk!” yelled Barney over his shoulder.

  “Wait for me,” shouted Jake. “I’m going to get drunk, too!”

  After a fortnight spent in Newgate, Polly’s fetters were knocked off and she was taken to the courthouse in Old Bailey. The courthouse was a stark, forbidding building on the south side of the prison.

  In the vast Justice Hall, the tall chair of the Court President dominated the silent and depressing scene. Above the chair was a statue of a particularly stern and unrelenting Justice looking toward the middle of the stone floor, where the prisoner’s box stood.

  Polly was already in this box when the officers of the court came into the Justice Hall: Sir Peter Devine, the Lord Mayor, followed by Sir Walter Browne, the Recorder, and Serjeant Pugg, the Recorder’s Deputy. No attorney rose to introduce himself as counsel for the defense. A prisoner was not allowed a lawyer nor was he allowed to go into the witness box.

  The Clerk of Arraigns read the indictment to the court and then the Old Bailey attorney rose to say, “May it please your lordship and you gentlemen of the jury, I am counsel for the King against the prisoner at the bar.”

  Mr. Tarry gave evidence and then the caretaker, Mr. Sellen. Mr. Paul Jenner, the earl’s secretary, represented the earl, the earl of Meresly being considered too grand a personage to be summoned to court himself.

  It was soon over. The jury did not even bother to retire. Guilty. The judge picked up his black cap and put it solemnly on his head and pronounced sentence of death by hanging.

  The condemned cell was a relief after the noise and squalor of the women’s quarters where Polly had awaited her trial. She was now allowed exercise each day in a prison yard reserved for the condemned, and visited regularly by a chaplain, a determinedly cheerful man who tried to raise her spirits by telling her that the powers that be in their mercy would hang her on a Friday so that she would have the whole of Saturday free to make her journey to Heaven, arriving just in time for Sunday morning. Polly crossly asked him how the powers that be had managed to work out this absurd timetable and was reproved for blasphemy.

  Silas Brewer came to see her, having used the money he had saved for her to bribe the jailor and to provide Polly with a clean bed and good food. When Polly admitted she was guilty of stealing from the earl of Meresly, Silas looked so wretched that Polly felt his look was more punishment than the judge and jury had inflicted. Honest Silas begged her to pray for her soul, but Polly’s violet eyes hardened and glittered like jewels as she said she had no intention of praying to such an unmerciful God.

  To Polly’s surprise, she was given a hairbrush, pins, and rouge and powder. She was even given a change of clothes. Silas had told her the luxuries did not come from him. She reasoned that such treatment must be meted out to the condemned, and then immediately wondered why the other women in the condemned cells did not have such privileges.

  Hanging day was to be the first of June. Unlike the other prisoners, Polly did not mark off the days on the wall of her cell. She lived in a vacuum, numb and devoid of feeling.

  Unused to the ways of London, Polly did not know that a public hanging at Tyburn, up at the corner of Hyde Park, was a great event. Although prisoners were often hanged on the triangular gallows in batches, sometimes as many as seven on a side, Polly was still not aware that because of her beauty she was to have the “stage” all to herself.

  It was Barney and Jake who broke the news to her. Barney had filched a gold watch from a gentleman’s pocket on the very day he and Jake had decided to quit Mrs. Blanchard. News that tickets for Polly’s execution were now changing hands among the gentry for as much as two hundred and fifty pounds had staggered them. Bribing their way in to see Polly, they sat before her and gazed at her in awe. “Never knew you’d be so famous,” said Jake at last.

  Polly tried to rouse herself from her lethargy. “Famous,” she said in a dull, flat voice. “Why, there was ten condemned along o’ me and one o’ them stole four sheep!” A tinge of remembered awe crept into Polly’s voice. She obviously thought the stealing of four whole sheep a much more dramatic crime than pilfering a few trinkets from the earl of Meresly.

  “It’s because you’re beautiful, see,” said Jake. He squinted with his one good eye at the brushes and rouge on the dressing table. “That’s why they gave you the clothes and gee-gaws. Got a big crowd attending. That’s why you got this cell to yourself ’stead o’ being crammed in with the others.”

  “Since I’m to be hanged,” said Polly with a shrug, “I don’t care whether I hang alone or in company. What brought you buzzards here? The one consolation I got is that Mother Blanchard can no longer get her claws in me—unless she wants to sell my body to an anatomist.”

  “T’ain’t that,” said Barney restlessly. “We quit Ma Blanchard. You got kin, Polly?”

  “No,” said Polly.

  “Well, see here, that’s why we come. You get put on a cart and taken to Tyburn. The clergyman sits in th
e cart along o’ you. Five minutes before you is topped, your relatives are allowed in the cart for a last word. Then the cart is driven off and leaves you hanging in midair. Takes a long time to die sometimes. So often the relatives pull at the prisoner’s legs to end the agony quick. So me and Barney thought that if you could say we was your kin, we could swing on your legs. Break your neck in seconds.”

  “Thanks,” said Polly grimly. “But I’ll die alone.”