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