From then on the Western Wedge began to thrive and within two years its returns were standing third on Tybalt's charts. Adam, chuckling over the framed picture of Hamlet Ratcliffe standing beside a sleek, well-fed Dante (the photograph had been taken at his insistence some weeks later) had no more thoughts of replacing his manager for somehow, in establishing himself in his own estimation, Hamlet had confirmed Adam in at least two areas. One was his penchant of picking lieutenants and the other was that press advertising was all very well so long as it was boosted by a news item that the public wanted to read. He had ample confirmation of this within the next few months.
2
Ratcliffe's exploit as a lion catcher, and the publicity it attracted to the firm, were enough to get things moving in the west but because the story had comic undertones the London newspapers reported it with that touch of patronage inherent in all their accounts of occurrences in the provinces. It was otherwise with Blubb's swashbuckling contribution to the publicity drive, for his exploit was performed less than forty miles of the capital and touched on kindred topics that were beginning to bedevil British politics, the Irish Home Rule issue, and the militancy of the newly formed Republican group calling themselves Fenians.
Coastal England, Adam reflected, seldom lacked a fashionable bogeyman. Over the centuries there had been the Papists, the Jacobites, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch and the slave-raiding Barbary Rovers. Now the popular child-scarer seemed to be the Fenian, whom the public, fed on a strong diet of Parliamentary debate supplemented by travellers’ tales of outrage beyond the Dublin Pale, had come to regard as homegrown French Revolutionaries, hellbent on arson and murder.
In fact the Fenians of the sixties were very small beer indeed, currently no more than a nuisance value to Government, police, and informers. It was therefore singular that they should have been instrumental in giving the firm a tremendous boost, and inflating one of its depot managers, no other than Timothy Blubb, into a Kentish hero. For in most respects Blubb, obese, surly, and now entering his own sixties, was an even more unlikely knight-errant than Hamlet Ratcliffe.
To the surprise of everyone at the yard, particularly Messrs. Tybalt and Keate who regarded him as a foul-mouthed old ruffian, Blubb had prospered as an outpost commander of Swann-on-Wheels. His network of acquaintances, that included innkeepers, ostlers, chambermaids, barmaids, tramps, carriers, railwaymen, merchants, longshoremen, and at least a score of ex-gaolbirds and gipsies, had given him immense advantages over the other base managers, and his position as Swann's manager in the Kentish Triangle had done a great deal to restore to him his self-respect as a professional of the open road.
Down at his base he became a man to be reckoned with, and as his hold upon road traffic was enlarged he soon emerged as a man of substance, for he had not forgotten the tricks of the coaching trade and was known to accept gratuities from merchants who wanted goods shifted in a hurry at a cut rate. Adam was far from being unaware of Blubb's sideline, but was prepared to wink at it, so long as the monthly returns in the Triangle doubled themselves every six months. If Blubb lined his own pocket by undercutting a rival service then he also landed more contracts than any other manager in the network. The military contract, entered into with the army ordnance depot at Deal in the first months of that year, was only one example of Blubb's salesmanship and perspicacity, for to get it he bluffed his way into the barracks one morning and emerged, slightly the worse for drink, with a short-term contract to haul small arms and ball cartridge ammunition from a Government arsenal near Maidstone to Deal, Folkestone, Hythe and several smaller military establishments that lay within his territory. It was, as Adam saw at a glance, a very profitable contract. Nobody ever haggled over the spending of Government money and by the summer of 1862 regular consignments of stores were moving out of Maidstone in two-horse frigates, usually over the old coach road between county town and coast, and because some of the loads included gunpowder, carried at transporter's risk, the rates sometimes ran as high as 160 a ton.
No official secrecy was involved in the journeys, but Blubb, at Adam's insistence, selected his most reliable waggoners for the runs, remembering that not long ago, during a haul up in the Midlands, a spark from a clay pipe had blown another carrier's convoy sky high, killing waggoners and teams, and half-demolishing an inn where the drivers had stopped to refresh themselves. Blubb, a two-quart man, accepted the logic of his employer's instructions, and whenever arms were carried the frigates were in charge of two brothers called Arscott, both of them Baptists and teetotallers into the bargain.
It was from one of these drivers that Blubb received a hint that other people, who would seem to have no connection whatever with the transportation of Government property, were showing a lively interest in the consignments and being a naturally suspicious man at once took upon himself the responsibility of personal investigation.
In more than thirty years as a coachguard and coachman, Blubb had outfaced every hazard that could overtake a traveller. In his time he had been snowbound, fogbound and awash, as well as being involved, one way or another, in collisions, runaway incidents, oversets, and at least one highway robbery when he and all his inside passengers were stopped by a couple of footpads near Retford. But adventures of this kind were now reckoned part of the lost tradition of the road. Breakdowns still occurred, even to slow-moving goods convoys, and occasionally there was pilfering at the depot or at an inn, where waggoners risked instant dismissal by leaving their vehicles unattended.
It was pilfering, possibly on an organised scale, that he had in mind when he travelled down to the Ashford area to question Job Arscott, the waggoner, but what he learned encouraged him to take the matter more seriously. Arscott, it seemed, had been questioned concerning the nature of his load by a well-dressed woman who spoke with an unfamiliar accent, and when the waggoner had refused her offer of cheese and porter at an inn where he was changing teams she had followed him, at a distance, almost as far as Deal. This, in itself, was odd and would seem to preclude Blubb's theory of a decoy, the usual method of tavern-thieves, especially as Arscott had seen the same chaise in the inn yard on his return journey. To Blubb it smacked more of a spying foray by a rival haulage firm, and he went on to the inn without much hope of finding the agent in residence. He was therefore considerably surprised when, on entering the yard, he recognised her by Arscott's description, talking to a man wearing a riding cloak and sidearms, an unusual feature of a horseman's outfit since the decline of the coaching era.
It was the man's short, businesslike sword, the traveller's hanger of a past age, that alerted him more than the woman who was, as Arscott had described, a handsome, saucy wench, who made very free with herself, as he learned from Blossom, horsekeeper at the George. Blossom, an old coaching crony, told him she called herself Mrs. O’Connell, and that she was as Irish as the name suggested for her brogue was so rich he had difficulty in following the orders she gave him. She was, Blossom went on, “a tolerably flighty madam,” who had entertained a number of men during her stay at the inn and had made several excursions in a hired chaise. The man she was talking to had visited her on Monday and afterwards ridden away towards the coast on a piebald cob. Blossom also confirmed that Mrs. O’Connell had made approaches to Arscott the previous Monday but attributed this to her readiness to gossip with anyone, even a middle-aged Bible-puncher like Job Arscott.
Blubb at once made up his mind to pursue his inquiries further and booked a room at the George, choosing one with a window that overlooked the livery stable, and it was not long before he saw Mrs. O’Connell set off on another expedition, noticing that she handled the ribbons like an expert and went spanking down the Deal turnpike in a way that recalled the reckless driving of women who had consorted with the racing bucks a generation ago.
He made up his mind there and then to follow her and discover, if possible what she was up to, but by the time he got his trap clear of the yard she was a mile ahead and he did not catch sight of
the chaise until it was turning into a sideroad beyond the hamlet of Mersham Hatch, five miles nearer the coast.
He reined in at the junction, watching his quarry bump along the unsurfaced track and disappear behind a clump of trees straddling the lane but was perplexed when it failed to reappear on the far side, where the country was open. At that moment, while he was still undecided what to do, a little knot of horsemen cantered up from the direction of Deal and turned off down the same track, and he noticed that one of them was the tall, swashbuckling fellow he had seen talking to Mrs. O’Connell in the inn yard.
Blubb was wise in the ways of the world, especially the world of the gentry. If the man with sidearms had been alone he would have accepted the coincidence as evidence of an assignation of a certain nature and would, moreover, have been prepared to wager a guinea that the young buck was not Mr. O’Connell. But a man was unlikely to share a tryst with a pretty woman with half-a-dozen other young sparks. Whatever was intended down there under the trees had nothing to do with romance.
Thoughtfully he turned his trap and walked the horse back to the inn and was stationed at his window when the chaise came rattling over the cobbles, the dashing Mrs. O’Connell perched on the driving seat and looking, he thought, extremely pleased with herself.
By now he was thoroughly intrigued. In some way that woman, and those hurrying horsemen he had seen, were planning something outside the law, and he had a strong suspicion that whatever it was it had to do with his consignments of arms and ammunition to Deal.
He went about forming his conclusions in his slow, methodical way, giving each factor the isolated speculation he had once applied to the hazards of getting his coach from The Bell, Islington, to Newark in under eleven hours, irrespective of weather. There was the woman herself, skittish and yet, in a flamboyant way, mysterious and devious. There was the raffish-looking cavalier with the hanger, who had managed to assemble a group of companions out of nowhere in just over the hour. There was the meeting between these parties under cover and clear of the main road. There was the woman's approach to Arscott, and the fact that she had followed him on the road to Deal. Finally, there was another arms run scheduled for Friday over the same route, with a change of teams due in the same inn where Mrs. O’Connell was a guest. It all added to something but for a long time Blubb was at a loss to know what. Then he remembered that the woman was Irish, and a long way from home, and poked among his memories for what he remembered about the Irish. They were good judges of horseflesh, he recalled, and inclined to indulge in ceaseless chatter when they travelled his coaches as outside passengers. It was this that gave him his idea.
He found Blossom, handed the ostler a shilling, and said, with a wink, “I got two more o’ those in these ’ere britches that tells me you’re going to set me up with that pretty widder,” and when Blossom, biting on the shilling, said that Blubb was too long in the tooth for that kind of frolic, he said, “Mebbe, but I got me reasons, tho’ I’ve no call to tell an ole ruin like you wot they be. Just you set me up like I said. Tell her I’m the best-known whip south o’ the Thames, and down on me luck just now. Do that and there’ll be more money in it for you as soon as my gaffer gets here tomorrer,” for he had decided that he had reached a stage where he should confide in Swann before acting on a plan already taking shape in his mind. In the meantime, however, he said nothing to anybody but went into the supper-room and ordered a roast served with three vegetables and a tankard of Kentish-brewed beer.
Before his plate was clean Mrs. O’Connell came in and before he was halfway through his second tankard she crossed over to him and asked if he had a reliable map about him saying she intended visiting friends at a place called Dymchurch the following day and was unsure of her road.
He found her ploy crude, in that she went out of her way to flatter him and his like, declaring that it was a crying shame that coaches had been ousted by “that stinking tea-kettle.” Blossom, he reflected, must have primed her very well, for she plied him with a score of questions concerning his former calling, and it was some time before he could let slip that he was now employed by a carrier service called Swann-on-Wheels hauling military stores from the Maidstone arsenal to Deal barracks. She sparkled a little at this, he noted, so he went on to tell her that he was awaiting Friday's convoy, and was charged with taking over from the Maidstone waggoner when the teams were changed at the halfway mark. That, as he had hoped, proved her excuse to break off their chat and after he had accepted a third tankard of ale “to drink to the good old days,” she left him, went up to her room, reappeared in a blue riding habit, and crossed the yard calling for Blossom. Ten minutes after that she came posting out of the stableyard on the best riding horse the inn possessed. He watched her out of sight and then, reserving his own room and one other, took the road for Ashford.
Adam was sceptical when he arrived in response to his manager's cryptic telegraph, but it did not require a great deal of persuasion on Blubb's part to half-convince him that some kind of attempt on the next consignment by Fenians, or some kindred body, was a possibility. When Blubb declared that in his view it was a certainty, he said, “Very well then. Our obvious course is to pass the information to the constabulary. I imagine they’ll make thorough inquiries concerning this Mrs. O’Connell, and that might save you and I making damned fools of ourselves,” but Blubb said, obstinately, “Aye, you can do that if you’ve a mind to, but if it was me I’d look to the advantages you could wring out of this kind o’ lark. Ketch ’em red-handed ourselves, that's my fancy!”
“Come, now, you can’t be serious, Blubb,” protested Adam, but Blubb said he was, and the risk of failure was minimal. “Send the waggon on as usual, wi’ both they Arscotts aboard. Offload the stuff inside the stable, when we change teams at noon on Friday, stow the pair of us under the canvas and see wot comes of it down at that crossroads beyond Mersham ’Atch. Why, damme, we could wing two of ’em before they got the tailboard down. Then, mebbe, the Arscotts could take a shot at ’em before they run for it.”
The prospect of a brush of this kind appealed to the man of action in him, but Adam said, doubtfully, “I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, Blubb, but I’ve no right to risk your neck in this kind of scrape.” Blubb said, almost passionately, “Lookit here, gaffer, it's my neck, and to my way o’ thinking it’ll pay off handsome. Not on’y to you, but to me, on account o’ the blood money the Guvverment hands out to anyone who fetches home a footpad dead or alive. It woulden surprise me if there ain’t ten pund apiece on they Irishers. You take the credit an’ I’ll take the money. There's not much risk, neither. I woulden show my arse to no Paddy alive, and there won’t be no more than five of ’em, if that. They’re taking enough risk as it is gallopin’ about in a bunch in country where they’m seen an’ noted by the locals. Tidden as if it were London, where ’arf the dam’ population is Irish.” And then, almost wheedling, “Look at it from my standpoint. It means little enough to you to get your name in the papers, tho’ you won’t dispute that it’d do the business a power o’ good in passing, but me—well—I was somebody once, when you was no more’n a gleam in your dad's eye. I was looked up to an’ thought well of by the swells. There weren’t one of ’em who wouldn’t have parted wi’ silver to take the ribbons from Tim Blubb, driving the Telegraph or the Tally-Ho up the Great North Road, or down the Brighton Turnpike. Those days are gone, I’ll own, and I’m getting up along now, but I’ve a fancy to be spoke well of again before I drop the whip in the bracket. Let's do it, Governor, without calling the bloody sodgers in. For if we do then mark my words they’ll botch it, and they Irishers’ll get clear away and try their luck on some other road Fishguard or Liverpool way.”
It was impossible, Adam thought, to resist the old rogue and also, to an extent, to look at the situation through his eyes. He was old and fat and gross but at this moment, with a man's job ahead of him, he was suddenly Tim Blubb again, flattered and petted by all the inside passengers, and God's gift to every
tavern trollop along the routes he travelled. He said, chuckling, “You really back yourself to bring this off, Blubb?”
“Aye, I do that. Providing you’ll stand by me, and you a trained man wi’ firearms, no doubt.”
“Can you use a pistol if you have to?”
“I can use my old blunderbuss,” Blub said. “I once put a handful of rusty nails into the arse of a likely lad who tried to stop the old Wellington at Stamford one dark night. That was when I was riding guard tho’.”
God is an Englishman Page 36
