When the Devil Drives (12 page)

She listened. She didn't like what I said to her, but had little choice.

Half an hour later, I was back at 4 Grosvenor Street reporting to Mr Clyde. ‘That's obviously what she heard from the man Courtney,' I said. ‘Somehow she's found a spy at court who lets her know the prince's movements in advance.'

‘She has the address in Kensington?'

‘Yes. We're to wait outside it in her carriage. Since she can't put her foot to the ground, I'm to get out and deliver the note to him.'

‘While she sits in her carriage and takes aim with the pistol, or turns it on herself? Suppose it's a suicide note you're delivering.'

‘I don't think so.' I took out the pistol that was weighing down my pocket and gave it to him.

‘I made conditions. One, she should hand this over to me. Two, I must be allowed to read the letter I'm to deliver. Three, I'm to be present when her maid dresses her, just in case she possesses the twin to this one.'

He laughed, a good genuine laugh. ‘Miss Lane, you are a wonder. She's lucky to have you, even if she doesn't think so.'

‘She doesn't. And we're only buying time. This won't solve the problem.'

‘If we can buy enough time, the problem solves itself.'

‘There's still a month or more of his visit to go. I can't be with her all the time. I suggest you have some urgent words with her other friends about getting her out of the country.'

I wondered whether there really were other friends or if his were a one-man crusade. I thought he might resent my tone, but he took it calmly.

‘Yes. I've been thinking over what you said to me. Kidnap may be the answer. But it's important that she must have no suspicions and go on trusting you.'

I did not much like the idea of being the one to lure her into a cage, but it had been my suggestion after all, and the other possibilities were even worse.

‘I shall let you know what happens tomorrow,' I said.

‘It's getting dark already. May I not escort you home?'

I said no thank you, wanting time to myself. On the landing, he waved Suzette away and came downstairs to open the door for me himself. On the step, he took my hand and held it for a moment.

‘I am more grateful to you than I can say, Miss Lane. Go safely.'

As I walked through the gateway into Abel Yard, there was Tabby in her street waif clothes, idly throwing stones at the pump under our stairs. Then, as a well-aimed cobblestone made the metal clang like a bell, it struck me that the onslaught looked anything but idle.

‘Tabby, have you gone mad? You'll break the pump if you go on like that.'

She turned, scowling. ‘There's a man hid himself behind there. I'm trying to get him to come out.'

‘Who is he?'

‘Dunno. I saw him looking out, then he saw me and ducked back in again.'

She stooped to pick up another stone. I took it from her.

‘Whoever he is, that isn't going to encourage him to come out.' I walked towards the dark place under the stairs. ‘Who is it?' I called. ‘Come out of there.'

‘I can't come out. There's somebody chucking rocks at me.'

The voice sounded only mildly annoyed about it.

‘Tom Huckerby?'

‘The very same.'

‘You can come out. No more rocks.'

‘Nor bailiffs?'

‘No bailiffs either.' I turned to Tabby. ‘It's all right, it's a friend.'

‘What's he doing at the back of our pump, then?'

‘It's just how he lives.'

She accepted that and watched as Tom Huckerby emerged from the dark. He looked more dishevelled and strained than when I'd last seen him, but Tabby's target practice might be enough to account for that. I asked him what the trouble was.

‘Apart from Boadicea here, you mean?' He gave Tabby a friendly grin, not returned. ‘I'd just come to see the press was safe, only there was a man out in the mews and I thought I caught a whiff of bailiff off him, so I ducked in here.'

He jumped at the offer of a cup of tea and a sandwich, so I left him with Tabby while I went upstairs to prepare them. Mrs Martley was at the table working on her scrap book and looked over her spectacles at me when I brought out the loaf and ham.

‘Are you giving our good food to that ragamuffin again?'

Now I thought of it, feeding Tabby seemed a good idea too. I carried three cups of tea and two doorsteps of sandwiches downstairs on a tray. Tom Huckerby and Tabby were sitting on the mounting block, chatting like old friends.

‘He's been in Newgate,' Tabby said, in tones that put it several notches above Eton.

‘Just for five weeks on remand,' Huckerby said modestly. ‘They were trying to put me away for years on a charge of seditious libel, but the jury wouldn't have it. Here's to the incorruptible British jury.'

He and Tabby toasted it in tea. I guessed she had no idea what he was talking about. He told me, through mouthfuls of sandwich, that they were thinking of moving the press to Wales as soon as they could get transport organized. He thought the workers of Cardiff and Newport might be more likely to stand up for their rights than spoiled Londoners.

‘Thought you might like to see this. Latest edition of
The Unbound Briton.
We got five hundred copies printed off before they came for the press.'

He pulled a much folded newspaper from his pocket and gave it to me. I perched on the step of the mounting block and scanned the front page, laughing.

‘Oh, that really is very wicked.'

It was mostly taken up with a caricature of Queen Victoria. She was sitting on the lap of our old roue of a prime minister, Lord Melbourne, like a wide-eyed china doll. He was pulling a string that guided her hand while she put her initials to a stack of new laws. In the background, a line of haggard men queued outside a building marked ‘Workhouse'.

‘Good, yes?' Huckerby asked.

Undoubtedly. But a little unfair too, since the little Vicky had shown signs of having a mind of her own, even if she did lean heavily on Lord Melbourne. It was a fairly mild sample of Tom Huckerby's productions. I turned the page and there was another Victoria cartoon, this time simpering like a girl on a Valentine, hand in hand with life-size tin soldier with ‘Prince Albert' written helpfully on the sash across his chest. Moneybags with pound signs on them were heaped at his feet. A couplet underneath, in Gothic type, read:

‘You couldn't quite describe her as fat,' I said. ‘Plump maybe. Is this Albert going to marry her then?'

‘So it's said.'

I couldn't help laughing, though my heart sank at the thought of what Mrs Martley would say if she knew that the press producing these disloyalties was hidden practically under her bedroom. Tom and I talked politics for a while, then he said he should go. He departed with a courtly bow to Tabby.

‘Farewell, Boadicea. We shall meet again.'

Thinking about it later, it struck me that if Prince Ernest's younger brother really were going to marry Little Vicky, that made the contessa's position even more precarious. A scandal over a minor visiting royal would be bad enough, but ten times worse if it involved the monarch's future brother-in-law. Did the contessa, with her mysterious sources of information, know that? It made me worry even more about what I'd committed myself to do.

SEVEN

I
needed Amos. That was the thought in my mind when I woke on Tuesday morning. True, it would mean compromising my promise of confidentiality to Mr Clyde, but I didn't need to tell Amos everything, just enough to have him keep a close watch on the contessa while I carried out her errand. At our usual time for a ride, I waited for him by the gate. He didn't appear, so I guessed that his trip to Surrey had taken longer than expected. Later in the morning, I walked across to the livery stables in Bayswater Road and asked one of the lads in the yard if Mr Legge had come back.

‘Yes, ma'am. But he's not seeing people.'

Puzzled, I found a groom who was a particular friend of Amos.

‘Is Mr Legge out on a ride?'

‘No, ma'am. He said if you asked for him, I was to tell you he's sorry not to have been with you this morning, only he's indisposed.'

‘Indisposed?' Amos was an oak tree. Illnesses glanced off him and rebounded to softer targets. ‘Do you mean he's been hurt?'

The groom muttered an apology and disappeared into a loose box. I strode towards the owner's office. On the way, I was aware of a movement behind the closed door of the fodder room.

‘Amos Legge, is that you?'

A shuffling inside, then Amos's voice, through the wooden wall. ‘Miss Lane? I'm sorry. One of the lads'll look after you.'

The voice was husky. I pushed the door open. He was turned away with the lid of a feed bin up.

‘Amos, what is this? Are you really ill?'

He turned reluctantly, letting the lid bang down. I gasped. ‘What's happened? Were you thrown, trampled?'

Until then, I'd have sworn that no horse ever foaled could throw Amos.

‘Something like that.'

His left cheek was discoloured by a great purple bruise, his right eye shut and the skin round it shiny and stretched like an overripe plum. He pulled his hat down, but not quickly enough to hide the bandage round his forehead, clumsy because his fingers were swollen and bruised, his knuckles raw.

‘You weren't thrown, were you? Someone attacked you.'

‘More than one, it was.'

At least a flash of pride there. No one man could have done that to him.

‘Was it horse dealers?'

Then I saw the expression on his face and knew that I'd made the wrong assumption and he was relieved about that.

‘It wasn't, was it? It was something else. Something more serious.'

He looked at me almost as if I had turned into an enemy. ‘Don't ask questions. It's my business and I don't want you having anything to do with it.'

It was the first time he'd tried to keep me out of anything and we'd been in some dangerous circumstances together.

‘Do you want them to get away with what they did to you?' I said.

He looked at me, face hard. My heart sank even lower. Amos was slow to anger, but any man who did him a deliberate wrong would pay for it.

‘When will you be well enough to ride out with me?' I said, letting him know from the coldness of my voice that he'd hurt me.

I was too worried to care much, but I had to find some way of making him talk to me. He touched his bruised cheek.

‘Tomorrow, if you don't mind being seen out with this.'

‘Amos, as if I'd care about that.'

It went to my heart how much his pride had been hurt. We agreed to meet in the morning as usual. The owner of the livery stables was lingering outside. He was a decent man and a worried one.

‘He won't tell me what happened,' I said.

‘He won't say much to any of us. He told you he was going to Surrey on Sunday? He was delivering a horse somebody had bought from us and going to look at another two on his own account. He expected to be back late last night. He arrived this morning, looking like you see him now, only worse, and all we could get out of him was that half a dozen men had set on him and attacked him.'

‘Here or in Surrey?'

‘Here, just across the park in Knightsbridge. Later, I got him to talk a bit, mostly about the horses. He'd delivered the one of ours, then he stayed down there overnight Sunday and had a look at the other two. One suited and one didn't, so he rode the one back. It was late yesterday evening when he got back, but he delivered it straight to the stables of the man who's thinking of buying it. He'd started walking back across the park, in the dark of course by then, and they jumped out of the bushes and attacked him.'

‘Did they steal anything?'

‘Not a brass farthing. He still had the money he got for our horse in his pocket, first thing he said to me, as if that was all that mattered.'

I walked slowly home, knowing that in spite of his injuries and the new coldness between us, Amos would be there to help me if I'd said the word. Only I couldn't say it, so would have to manage without him.

Four o'clock on an overcast afternoon saw the contessa and me bowling westwards along Rotten Row towards Kensington. Even in that blasé thoroughfare, the contessa's bright blue droshky with a golden pony drawing it and young Pan on the box turned heads. She was comparatively soberly dressed by her standards in a blue velvet mantle edged with chinchilla and a matching hat with a plume of silver-dyed feathers. Her small hands were coddled in a chinchilla muff that had caused me anxiety back at her lodgings. I'd picked it up from a chair while she'd turned away to consult with her maid about stockings, trying to look casual about it. She'd pirouetted round on her unhurt leg, grabbed it from my hands and turned it inside out to show the grey silk lining.