by Caro Peacock
It was worse when I reached the office and had to stand in a queue behind several others. The fat man’s agent had come looking for me in this place. The only way he could have known to deliver the note to the Heart of Oak was by intercepting the letter to my father I’d left there. I looked at the old clerk, sitting on his high stool with his pen behind his ear and ledger open on the counter in front of him, wondering, ‘Are you in their pay?’ When it came to my turn he blinked at me short-sightedly through his glasses, with no sign of recognition, and accepted my letter.
‘Is there anything poste restante for Mr Thomas Jacques Lane?’ I said, trying to make my voice sound casual. There had been three letters when I first inquired. The clerk blinked again and went over to a bank of pigeonholes. My heart thumped when he took out just one sheet of folded paper. Who’d taken the others?
‘You have his authority to collect this?’
‘Yes. I am his daughter.’
He gave me a doubtful look, asked me to sign the ledger, then handed it over. I hurried out with my prize, looking for a quiet place to read, already puzzled by the feel of it in my hand. It was thick, coarse paper with a smell about it, oddly familiar and comforting. I touched a gloved fingertip to my nose. Hoof oil, memories of stables and warm, well-tended horses. I took refuge in the doorway of a pawnbroker’s shop with boarded-up windows and unfolded it.
With Ruspect Sir, We be here safly awayting yr convenunce if you will kindly let know where you be staying.
This in big, disorderly writing and a signature like duck tracks in mud: Amos Legge. I couldn’t help laughing because it was so far from what I’d been expecting. Certainly not from one of my father’s friends, yet hardly from an enemy either. Neither the man in black nor the one who called himself Trumper would write like that. I went back to the office, paid tuppence for the use of inkwell, pen and paper, and left a note for Mr Amos Legge, saying that I was Mr Lane’s daughter and I’d be grateful if he would call on me at the Heart of Oak. I strolled back to the inn taking a round-about route by way of the seafront. As I passed a baker’s shop, the smell of fresh bread reminded me that I was hungry and had eaten nothing since the tartine on the other side of the Channel. I stood in the queue behind a line of messenger boys and kitchen maids and paid a penny for a small white loaf, then, with a sudden craving for sweet things, four pence more for two almond tartlets topped with crisp brown sugar. I carried them back to the Heart of Oak, intending to picnic on them in my room and spare the expense of having a meal sent up.
As bad luck would have it, the landlord was in the hall. His little eyes went straight to my paper parcel, calculating profit lost.
‘How long are you planning to stay here – madam?’
The moment’s pause before ‘madam’ just stopped short of being insulting.
‘Tonight at least, possibly longer.’
‘We like payment on account from ladies and gentlemen without proper luggage.’
In other words, I was not respectable and he expected me to bilk him. Biting back my anger, telling myself that I couldn’t afford to make more enemies, I parted with a sovereign, salving my pride by demanding a receipt. As he went away, grumbling, to write it, the door from the street opened.
‘’Scuse me for troubling you, ma’am, but be there a Miss Lane staying ’ere?’
I stared. The door-frame of the Heart of Oak was high and wide, but he filled it, six and a half feet tall at least with shoulders in proportion. His hair was the shiny light-brown colour of good hay, topped with a felt hat which looked as if it might have doubled as a polisher, his eyes blue as speedwells. The clean tarry smell of hoof oil wafted off him.
‘You must be Amos Legge,’ I said, marvelling. Then, ‘I am Mr Lane’s daughter.’
He grinned, good white teeth against the brown of his face.
‘I thought you was when I see’d you back there, only I didn’t like to make myself familiar, look. You do resemble ’im.’ E be here then?’
For an instant, seeing and feeling the cheerfulness of him, I was back in a safer world and I think I smiled back at him. Then it hit me that the world had changed and he didn’t know it.
‘I think we had better go in here,’ I said, indicating the snug.
His grin faded but he followed me, stuffing the felt hat into his pocket, dipping his head to get through the lower doorway of the snug. I left the door open to the hall, otherwise the landlord would have put the worst interpretation on it.
‘Had you known my father long?’ I asked him.
His speech might be slow but his mind wasn’t. He’d already caught a whiff of something wrong.
‘Nobbut ten days or so, miss, when he helped me out of a bit of a ruckus in Paris. We was to go on to Dover and wait for ’im ’ere. Yesterday morning we got in.’
‘We?’
I’d put my parcel of bread and cakes down on the table and the wrapping had fallen open. Unconsciously, his big brown hands went to the loaf and tore it in half. It would have been unforgivably impolite, except he did it naturally as a bird eats seed. He chewed, swallowed.
‘Rancie and me.’
‘Rancie?’
‘That’s right. Is ’e not here yet, then?’
He ate another piece of loaf.
‘He’s dead,’ I said.
His eyes went blank with shock, as if somebody had hit him. He shook his head from side to side, like an ox troubled by flies.
‘When ’e said goodbye to me and Rancie, he was as healthy as any man you’d ever see. Was it the fever, miss?’
‘He was shot,’ I said.
He blinked. Amazingly, his blue eyes were awash with tears.
‘Oh, the poor gentleman. Those damned thieving frogs … Excuse me, ma’am, but you can’t trust them, whatever they say. He should’ve come back with Rancie and me. I’d ’ave seen ’im safe.’
‘I don’t know that he was shot by a Frenchman.’ I’d decided to trust him. I had to trust somebody, and he was as unlike Trumper or the man in black as any person could be. ‘The fact is, there’s some mystery about it, and I need to find out everything I can about what happened to my father over the past week or ten days.’
I told him about the black lie and what had happened in Calais. As he listened, he engulfed first one then the other of the almond tarts, not taking his eyes from my face.
‘How did you and my father meet?’ I said. ‘You mentioned something about a … a ruckus.’
He wiped crumbs from his mouth with his sleeve.
‘I got in a bit of disaccord with a frog on account ’e was driving a horse that was as lame as a three-legged dog, only ’e didn’t speak English and so there was no reasoning with ’im, look. So the frog took a polt at me, only I fetched ’im one first, and ’arder. No great mishtiff done to ’im, but ’is friends were creating about it and I reckon they’d’ve ’ad me in prison except Mr Lane saw what ’appened and made them see sense.’
Of course my father would side with the defender of a lame horse. I imagined that he must have slipped some money to the Frenchman to save Amos Legge from having to explain himself to a Parisian judge.
‘So you see, when Mr Lane mentioned ’e was puzzled ’ow to get Rancie back to England, I was glad to be of use.’
‘So you brought her back for him?’ I said.
It amazed me that while the fat man and his agents were scouring Paris and Calais for this mysterious and fatal woman, this well-meaning giant should have escorted her across the Channel, apparently without fuss. But my heart was heavy and resentful because she – whoever she was – had survived and my father had not.
‘Is she here in Dover?’
He nodded. ‘I’ve got ’er here safe, yes.’
‘Then I suppose I’d better come and see her.’
‘Just what I was going to suggest myself, miss.’
The landlord was lurking in the hall, probably listening.
‘Your receipt – madam.’
I tore it out of his
hand. He looked up at Amos Legge then down at me with a greasy gleam in his eyes that made me want to kick him. I wanted to kick the entire world. I stalked out of the door, Legge behind me. I more than half resented him for bringing this female and when he came up alongside me, walking respectfully on the outside of the pavement, I kept as much space between us as I could. He must have sensed my mood because he uttered no more than ‘Left, miss,’ or ‘Across ’ere, miss,’ taking us towards the landward side of the town, away from the crowded streets.
Who was this Rancie person? Badly treated servant girl? Wronged wife? Betrayed sweetheart? Any of those could have appealed to my father’s chivalrous and romantic instincts. He’d eloped with my mother and they lived ten years blissfully together until fever took her. He grieved all his life, but there is no denying that his nature inclined to women. He loved their company, their beauty, their wit. In our wandering life together there’d been Susannas, Rosinas, Conchitas, Helenas … I do not mean that my father was a Don Juan, a ruthless seducer. If anything, quite the reverse. Far from being ruthless, he’d do almost anything to help a woman in distress. His purse, his house, his heart would be open to her, sometimes for months at a time. Undeniable, too, that some of the Susannas, Conchitas and Rosinas took advantage of his chivalrous nature.
‘There’s no great ’urry, miss. She won’t run away,’ Amos Legge protested.
I suppose I was walking fast. We were clear of the town now, only a farm and barns on one side of the road, a broken-down livery stable on the other.
Well, if it had happened like that, it wouldn’t have been the first time. But it had been the last. Violent husband or bullying father had resented it, caught up with him. For the first time, my unbelief in the black lie wavered. Suppose, against his will, that he had been forced into a duel after all.
‘Nearly there, miss,’ Amos Legge said.
We were level with the farm. I expected him to turn in at the gateway. Perhaps my father had instructed him to lodge this Rancie hussy out of town, for her protection. But we walked past the farm gateway and turned in under the archway of the livery stable with its faded signboard, Hunters and Hacks for Hire. There was a groom sweeping the yard. Amos Legge nodded at him and took my arm to keep me from treading in a trail of horse droppings. I drew the arm away. Seeming unoffended, he walked over to a loose-box in the corner, letting out a piercing whistle. A horse’s head came over the door, nostrils flared in curiosity, eyes bold and questioning.
‘What …?’
I was caught off balance, assuming that our journey was not yet over and we would have to ride. Amos Legge stroked the horse’s nose, whispered something then turned to me, the grin back on his face.
‘Well, miss,’ ere’s Rancie for you.’ Then to me, alarmed, ‘My poor little maid, what be you crying for?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
I had the story of Rancie from Amos Legge, sitting in a broken-down chair in the tack room, saddles and harness all round us and flakes of chaff floating in the sunbeams that pierced the curtain of cobwebs over the window. He stayed respectfully standing at first.
‘You see, miss, it all starts with a Hereford bull, look. Red Sultan of Shortwood ’is name was in the ’erd book, only we called ’im Reddy.’
He was clearly one of those storytellers who liked to take his time. I suggested he should sit down. He settled for a compromise, hitching a haunch on to a vacant saddle tree. I’ll abandon my attempt to record his accent because in truth the broad Hereford he talked is the hardest thing in the world to pin down. Those dropped ‘h’s, for instance, are nowhere near the carelessness of the Cockney, more like the murmur of a summer breeze through willow leaves over a slow-flowing river.
‘Reddy belonged to this farmer I used to work for, name of Priest. Well, there was this Frenchman at a place called Sancloo, just outside Paris, decided he was going to build up a herd of Herefords. They do well anywhere, only you can’t get the same shine on their coats away from the red soil at home, no matter how –’
‘But Rancie and my father?’
‘I’m getting to them, miss. Anyways, this Frenchman got to hear about Reddy and nothing would content him except he should have him. He offered old Priest a thousand guineas and all the expenses of the journey met, so we made Reddy a covered travelling cart fit for the sultan he was, and off to Sancloo we went, old Priest and Reddy and me. It took us four days and ten changes of horses to get to the sea, then another six days once we got to the French side, but we got Reddy safely to the gentleman, Old Priest pocketed his thousand guineas, and what do you think happened then?’
‘You met my father?’
‘Not yet, I’m coming to that. What happened was the old dev—, excuse me … He just took off for home and left me. He said all that travelling had brought on his arthritics, so he was going home the quickest way by coach. I was to follow him with the travelling cart and he’d give me my pay when I fetched it safely back to Hereford. So there I was in a foreign country, not knowing a blessed soul. So I took myself into Paris, thinking I’d have a look at it after coming all this way, and that’s when I met your father. After he’d settled my bit of trouble, he mentioned he had a mare he wanted to bring back, and it came to me that if the cart had been good enough for Reddy, it would do for the mare, as long as I washed it down well to take the smell away.’
‘Did he tell you how he came by the horse?’
Amos swatted a fly away from his face.
‘Won her at cards, from some French fellow.’
‘Did he say if the French fellow was angry about it?’
‘No. From the way he told it, the mare had already changed hands three times on a turn of the cards. Your father was thinking of selling her in Paris, only he looked at her papers and decided to keep her.’
‘Papers?’
‘Oh yes, she’s got her papers. And he wanted you to see her.’
‘He said so?’
‘He said he’d got a daughter at home with an eye for a horse as good as any man’s, and it would be a surprise for her.’
I had to blink hard to stop myself crying again. My father loved a good horse as much as he loved music or wine or poetry, and I suppose I caught it from him.
‘Was my father to travel with you?’
‘No. He had things he wanted to do before he left Paris, he said. Me and the horse were to start right away and he’d probably go past us on the road, because we’d be travelling slowly. But if we didn’t happen to meet in France, I was to wait for him at Dover and leave a message, which I did.’
‘How was he, when you saw him?’
‘How do you mean, miss?’
‘Well or ill? Harassed or anxious at all?’
‘Blithe as a blackbird, miss.’
‘Did you talk much?’
‘I told him I didn’t think much to France, and he laughed and said it was the best place in the world, apart from England. He’d missed England, and you, and he was glad to be going home and settling with a bit of money in his pocket. Quite open about that, he was, and paid me expenses for the journey.’
‘Did you meet any of his friends?’
‘Yes, I did. When he’d finished sorting out my bit of business it was late so I had to stay the night in the same hotel where he was. He had friends there and they were up all hours talking and playing music. I looked into the room at midnight to say did he want me any more or could I go to bed? He said to sit down and take a glass of punch to help me sleep, which I did.’
‘These friends, how many would you say?’
He thought, rubbing his head. ‘Half a dozen at least, maybe more.’
‘English or French?’
‘Mostly English, but a couple of Frenchmen. Your father was jabbering away to them in their lingo, easy as I’m talking to you.’
‘Did they seem angry?’
‘Not in the world. They were as comfortable a crew as you’d see anywhere; bowl of punch, pipes going, some books open on the tables – quite
a few books, I remember – and fiddles and flutes and so on all over the place.’
It rang true. My father had a knack of finding friends wherever he happened to be. As children, many’s the time Tom and I had crept out of our beds and looked through keyholes at exactly the scene Amos was describing.
‘Were there any women there?’
‘Not one. All gentlemen.’
‘Do you remember what any of the men looked like?’
‘Not to describe, no. Truth was, I was dog-tired by then.’
‘Was one of them a thin, elderly man with a greyish face, dressed all in black?’
‘I don’t recall any elderly men there. They were mostly about your father’s age.’
‘Or a very fat man?’
‘A couple of them stoutish, I wouldn’t say very fat.’
‘Or a young fair-haired Englishman in a blue jacket?’
‘I don’t recall a blue jacket, no.’
A blank. If my father’s convivial party had included a snake in the grass, I was no nearer to him.
‘Can you describe anybody there at all?’
Amos thought hard.
‘There was this little black-haired gentleman, played the fiddle like he was possessed by Old Nick.’
‘Not much taller than I am?’
He nodded.
‘In his mid-thirties, and very thin?’
‘Thin as a peeled withy.’
‘With his hair coming to a point like this?’
I sketched a widow’s peak on my forehead with my finger.
‘Yes, that’s the gentleman. You know him, miss?’
‘Daniel Suter.’
I felt myself smiling as I said the name, it brought back so many good memories. Daniel Suter was one of my father’s dearest friends, although around ten years younger than he was. He had ambitions as a composer but had to earn his living as a musician, playing everything from a piccolo to a cello. It was not surprising that he should be in Paris or that, being there, he and my father should have found their way to each other. It was my first step forward, that at least I knew the name of someone who’d shared part of my father’s last week on earth. Daniel was witty, observant. If anything had happened in Paris, he’d know about it. The only drawback was that he was presumably still in Paris.
