Gallows Thief

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Sir George picked up his brush. ‘I’m painting now,’ he snarled.

‘I’m cold,’ Sally complained.

‘Too grand suddenly to show us your bubbies, are you?’ Sir George snarled, then looked at Sandman. ‘Has she told you about her lord? The one who’s sweet on her? We’ll soon all be bowing and scraping to her, won’t we? Yes, your ladyship, show us your tits, your ladyship.’ He laughed, and the apprentices all grinned.

‘She hasn’t lied to you,’ Sandman said. ‘His lordship exists, I know him, he is indeed enamoured of Miss Hood, and he is very rich. More than rich enough to commission a dozen portraits from you, Sir George.’

Sally gave him a look of pure gratitude while Sir George, discomfited, dabbed the brush into the paint on his palette. ‘So who the devil are you?’ he demanded of Sandman. ‘Besides being an envoy of Sidmouth’s?’

‘My name is Captain Rider Sandman.’

‘Navy, army, fencibles, yeomanry or is the captaincy a fiction? Most ranks are these days.’

‘I was in the army,’ Sandman said.

‘You can uncover,’ Sir George explained to Sally, ‘because the captain was a soldier which means he’s seen more tits than I have.’

‘He ain’t seen mine,’ Sally said, clutching the coat to her bosom.

‘How do you know her?’ Sir George asked Sandman in a suspicious tone.

‘We lodge in the same tavern, Sir George.’

Sir George snorted. ‘Then either she lives higher in the world than she deserves, or you live lower. Drop the coat, you stupid bitch.’

‘I’m embarrassed,’ Sally confessed, reddening.

‘He’s seen worse than you naked,’ Sir George commented sourly, then stepped back to survey his painting. ‘“The Apotheosis of Lord Nelson”, would you believe? And you are wondering, are you not, why I don’t have the little bugger in an eyepatch? Are you not wondering that?’

‘No,’ Sandman said.

‘Because he never wore an eyepatch, that’s why. Never! I painted him twice from life. He sometimes wore a green eyeshade, but never a patch, so he won’t have one in this masterpiece commissioned by their Lordships of the Admiralty. They couldn’t stand the little bugger when he was alive, now they want him up on their wall. But what they really want to suspend on their panelling, Captain Sandman, is Sally Hood’s tits. Sammy, you black bastard! What in God’s name are you bloody doing down there? Growing the bloody tea leaves? Bring me some brandy!’ He glared at Sandman. ‘So what do you want of me, Captain?’

‘To talk about Charles Corday.’

‘Oh, Good Christ alive,’ Sir George blasphemed, and stared belligerently at Sandman. ‘Charles Corday?’ He said the name very portentously. ‘You mean grubby little Charlie Cruttwell?’

‘Who now calls himself Corday, yes.’

‘Doesn’t bloody matter what he calls himself,’ Sir George said, ‘they’re still going to stretch his skinny neck next Monday. I thought I might go and watch. It ain’t every day a man sees one of his own apprentices hanged, more’s the pity.’ He cuffed one of the youths who was laboriously painting in the white-flecked waves, then scowled at his three models. ‘Sally, for God’s sake, your tits are my money. Now, pose as you’re paid to!’

Sandman courteously turned his back as she dropped the coat. ‘The Home Secretary,’ he said, ‘has asked me to investigate Corday’s case.’

Sir George laughed. ‘His mother’s been bleating to the Queen, is that it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lucky little Charlie that he has such a mother. You want to know whether he did it?’

‘He tells me he didn’t.’

‘Of course he tells you that,’ Sir George said scornfully. ‘He’s hardly likely to offer you a confession, is he? But oddly enough he’s probably telling the truth. At least about the rape.’

‘He didn’t rape her?’

‘He might have done,’ Sir George was making delicate little dabs with the brush which were magically bringing Sally’s face alive under the helmet. ‘He might have done, but it would have been against his nature.’ Sir George gave Sandman a sly glance. ‘Our Monsieur Corday, Captain, is a sodomite.’ He laughed at Sandman’s expression. ‘They’ll hang you for being one of those, so it don’t make much difference to Charlie whether he’s guilty or innocent of murder, do it? He’s certainly guilty of sodomy so he thoroughly deserves to hang. They all do. Nasty little buggers. I’d hang them all and not by the neck either.’

Sammy, minus his livery coat and wig, brought up a tray on which were some ill-assorted cups, a pot of tea and a bottle of brandy. The boy poured tea for Sir George and Sandman, but only Sir George received a glass of brandy. ‘You’ll get your tea in a minute,’ Sir George told his three models, ‘when I’m ready.’

‘Are you sure?’ Sandman asked him.

‘About them getting their tea? Or about Charlie being a sodomite? Of course I’m bloody sure. You could unpeel Sally and a dozen like her right down to the raw and he wouldn’t bother to look, but he was always trying to get his paws on young Sammy here, wasn’t he, Sammy?’

‘I told him to fake away off,’ Sammy said.

‘Good for you, Samuel!’ Sir George said. He put down his brush and gulped the brandy. ‘And you are wondering, Captain, are you not, why I would allow a filthy sodomite into this temple of art? I shall tell you. Because Charlie was good. Oh, he was good.’ He poured more brandy, drank half of it, then returned to the canvas. ‘He drew beautifully, Captain, drew like the young Raphael. He was a joy to watch. He had the gift, which is more than I can say for this pair of butcher boys.’ He cuffed the second apprentice. ‘No, Charlie was good. He could paint as well as draw, which meant I could trust him with flesh, not just draperies. In another year or two he’d have been off on his own. The picture of the Countess? It’s there if you want to see how good he was.’ He gestured to some unframed canvases that were stacked against a table that was littered with jars, paste, knives, pestles and oil flasks. ‘Find it, Barney,’ Sir George ordered one of his apprentices. ‘It’s all his work, Captain,’ Sir George went on, ‘because it ain’t got to the point where it needs my talent.’

‘He couldn’t have finished it himself?’ Sandman asked. He sipped the tea, which was an excellent blend of gunpowder and green.

Sir George laughed. ‘What did he tell you, Captain? No, let me guess. Charlie told you that I wasn’t up to it, didn’t he? He said I was drunk, so he had to paint her ladyship. Is that what he told you?’

‘Yes,’ Sandman admitted.

Sir George was amused. ‘The lying little bastard. He deserves to hang for that.’

‘So why did you let him paint the Countess?’

‘Think about it,’ Sir George said. ‘Sally, shoulders back, head up, nipples out, that’s my girl. You’re Britannia, you rule the bleeding waves, you’re not some bloody Brighton whore drooping on a boulder.’

‘Why?’ Sandman persisted.

‘Because, Captain,’ Sir George paused to make a stroke with the brush, ‘because we were gammoning the lady. We were painting her in a frock, but once the canvas got back here we were going to make her naked. That’s what the Earl wanted and that’s what Charlie would have done. But when a man asks a painter to depict his wife naked, and a remarkable number do, then you can be certain that the resulting portrait will not be displayed. Does a man hang such a painting in his morning room for the titillation of his friends? He does not. Does he show it in his London house for the edification of society? He does not. He hangs it in his dressing room or in his study where none but himself can see it. And what use is that to me? If I paint a picture, Captain, I want all London gaping at it. I want them queueing up those stairs begging me to paint one just like it for themselves and that means there ain’t no money in society tits. I paint the profitable pictures, Charlie was taking care of the boudoir portraits.’ He stepped back and frowned at the young man posing as a sailor. ‘You’re holding that oar all wrong, Johnny. Maybe I should have you naked. As Neptune.’ He turned and leered at Sandman. ‘Why didn’t I think of that before? You’d make a good Neptune, Captain. Fine figure you’ve got. You could oblige me by stripping naked and standing opposite Sally? We’ll give you a triton shell to hold, erect. I’ve got a triton shell somewhere, I used it for the Apotheosis of the Earl St Vincent.’

‘What do you pay?’ Sandman asked.

‘Five shillings a day.’ Sir George had been surprised by the response.

‘You don’t pay me that!’ Sally protested.

‘Because you’re a bloody woman!’ Sir George snapped, then looked at Sandman. ‘Well?’

‘No,’ Sandman said, then went very still. The apprentice had been turning over the canvases and Sandman now stopped him. ‘Let me see that one,’ he said, pointing to a full-length portrait.

The apprentice pulled it from the stack and propped it on a chair so that the light from a skylight fell on the canvas, which showed a young woman sitting at a table with her head cocked in what was almost but not quite a belligerent fashion. Her right hand was resting on a pile of books while her left held an hourglass. Her red hair was piled high to reveal a long and slender neck that was circled by sapphires. She was wearing a dress of silver and blue with white lace at the neck and wrists. Her eyes stared boldly out of the canvas and added to the suggestion of belligerence, which was softened by the mere suspicion that she was about to smile.

‘Now that,’ Sir George said reverently, ‘is a very clever young lady. And be careful with it, Barney, it’s going for varnishing this afternoon. You like it, Captain?’

‘It’s—’ Sandman paused, wanting a word that would flatter Sir George, ‘it’s wonderful,’ he said lamely.

‘It is indeed,’ Sir George said enthusiastically, stepping away from Nelson’s half-finished apotheosis to admire the young woman whose red hair was brushed away from a forehead that was high and broad, whose nose was straight and long and whose mouth was generous and wide, and who had been painted in a lavish sitting room beneath a wall of ancestral portraits which suggested she came from a family of great antiquity, though in truth her father was the son of an apothecary and her mother a parson’s daughter who was considered to have married beneath herself. ‘Miss Eleanor Forrest,’ Sir George said. ‘Her nose is too long, her chin too sharp, her eyes more widely spaced than convention would allow to be beautiful, her hair is lamentably red and her mouth is too lavish, yet the effect is extraordinary, is it not?’

‘It is,’ Sandman said fervently.

‘Yet of all the young woman’s attributes,’ Sir George had entirely dropped his bantering manner and was speaking with real warmth, ‘it is her intelligence I most admire. I fear she is to be wasted in marriage.’

‘She is?’ Sandman had to struggle to keep his voice from betraying his feelings.

‘The last I heard,’ Sir George returned to Nelson, ‘she was spoken of as the future Lady Eagleton. Indeed I believe the portrait is a gift for him, yet Miss Eleanor is much too clever to be married to a fool like Eagleton.’ Sir George snorted. ‘Wasted.’

‘Eagleton?’ Sandman felt as though a cold hand had gripped his heart. Had that been the import of the message Lord Alexander had forgotten? That Eleanor was engaged to Lord Eagleton?

‘Lord Eagleton, heir to the Earl of Bridport and a bore. A bore, Captain, a bore and I detest bores. Is Sally Hood really to be a lady? Good God incarnate, England has gone to the weasels. Stick ’em out, darling, they ain’t noble yet and they’re what the Admiralty is paying for. Barney, find the Countess.’

The apprentice hunted on through the canvases. The wind gusted, making the rafters creak. Sammy emptied two of the buckets into which rain was leaking, chucking them out of the back window and provoking a roar of protest from below. Sandman stared out of the front windows, looking past the awning of Gray’s jewellery shop into Sackville Street. Was Eleanor really to marry? He had not seen her in over six months and it was very possible. Her mother, at least, was in a hurry to have Eleanor walk to an altar, preferably an aristocratic altar, for Eleanor was twenty-five now and would soon be reckoned a shelved spinster. Damn it, Sandman thought, but forget her. ‘This is it, sir.’ Barney, the apprentice, interrupted his thoughts. He propped an unfinished portrait over Eleanor’s picture. ‘The Countess of Avebury, sir.’

Another beauty, Sandman thought. The painting was hardly begun, yet it was strangely effective. The canvas had been sized, then a charcoal drawing made of a woman reclining on a bed that was surmounted by a tent of peaked material. Corday had then painted in patches of the wallpaper, the material of the bed’s tent, the bedspread, the carpet, and the woman’s face. He had lightly painted the hair, making it seem wild as though the Countess was in a country wind rather than her London bedroom, and though the rest of the canvas was hardly touched by any other colour, yet somehow it was still breathtaking and full of life.

‘Oh, he could paint, our Charlie, he could paint.’ Sir George, wiping his hands with a rag, had come to look at the picture. His voice was reverent and his eyes betrayed a mixture of admiration and jealousy. ‘He’s a clever little devil, ain’t he?’

‘Is it a good likeness?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Sir George nodded, ‘indeed yes. She was a beauty, Captain, a woman who could make heads turn, but that’s all she was. She was out of the gutter, Captain. She was what our Sally is. She was an opera dancer.’

‘I’m an actress,’ Sally insisted hotly.

‘An actress, an opera dancer, a whore, they’re all the same,’ Sir George growled, ‘and Avebury was a fool to have married her. He should have kept her as his mistress, but never married her.’

‘This tea’s bloody cold,’ Sally complained. She had left the dais and discarded her helmet.

‘Go and have some dinner, child,’ Sir George said grandly, ‘but be back here by two of the clock. Have you finished, Captain?’

Sandman nodded. He was staring at the Countess’s picture. Her dress had been very lightly sketched, presumably because it was doomed to be obliterated, but her face, as striking as it was alluring, was almost completed. ‘You said, did you not,’ he asked, ‘that the Earl of Avebury commissioned the portrait?’

‘I did say so,’ Sir George agreed, ‘and he did.’

‘Yet I heard that he and his wife were estranged?’ Sandman said.

‘So I understand,’ Sir George said airily, then gave a wicked laugh. ‘He was certainly cuckolded. Her ladyship had a reputation, Captain, and it didn’t involve feeding the poor and comforting the afflicted.’ He was pulling on an old-fashioned coat, all wide cuffs, broad collars and gilt buttons. ‘Sammy,’ he shouted down the stairs, ‘I’ll eat the game pie up here! And some of that salmagundi if it ain’t mouldy. And you can open another of the ’nine clarets.’ He lumbered to the window and scowled at the rain fighting against the smoke of a thousand chimneys.

‘Why would a man estranged from his wife spend a fortune on her portrait?’ Sandman asked.

‘The ways of the world, Captain,’ Sir George said portentously, ‘are a mystery even unto me. How the hell would I know?’ Sir George turned from the window. ‘You’d have to ask his cuckolded lordship. I believe he lives near Marlborough, though he’s reputed to be a recluse so I suspect you’d be wasting your journey. On the other hand, perhaps it isn’t a mystery. Maybe he wanted revenge on her? Hanging her naked tits on his wall would be a kind of revenge, would it not?’

‘Would it?’

Sir George chuckled. ‘There is none so conscious of their high estate as an ennobled whore, Captain, so why not remind the bitch of what brought her the title? Tits, sir, tits. If it had not been for her good tits and long legs she’d still be charging ten shillings a night. But did little Charlie the sodomite kill her? I doubt it, Captain, I doubt it very much, but nor do I care very much. Little Charlie was getting too big for his boots, so I won’t mourn to see him twitching at the end of a rope. Ah!’ He rubbed his hands as his servant climbed the stairs with a heavy tray. ‘Dinner! Good day to you, Captain, I trust I have been of service.’

Sandman was not sure Sir George had been of any service, unless increasing Sandman’s confusion was of use, but Sir George was done with him now and Sandman was dismissed.

So he left. And the rain fell harder.

‘That fat bastard never offers us dinner!’ Sally Hood complained. She was sitting opposite Sandman in a tavern on Piccadilly where, inspired by Sir George Phillips’s dinner, they shared a bowl of salmagundi: a cold mixture of cooked meats, anchovies, hard-boiled eggs and onions. ‘He guzzles himself, he does,’ Sally went on, ‘and we’re supposed to bleeding starve.’ She tore a piece of bread from the loaf, poured more oil into the bowl then smiled shyly at Sandman. ‘I was so embarrassed when you walked in.’