a gentleman might order for a long journey on the Continent. Perhaps they’d left in a hurry because there was an oval frame with gold leaves round it painted on the door, ready for a coat of arms to go inside, but it had been left blank. The team were four powerful dark bays, finely matched. There was a boy standing at the horses’ heads dressed in gaiters and corduroy jacket, not livery. The coachman climbed up on the box at the front and the boy pulled down the steps to let us in. The hearty man gave an over-elaborate bow, suggesting I should go first.
‘You might at least introduce yourself,’ I said. In truth, I was still reluctant and wanted to gain time.
‘I apologise. Harry Trumper, at your service.’
I didn’t quite believe him. It was said like a man in a play.
‘My name is Liberty Lane.’
‘We knew that, didn’t we?’
He was talking to somebody inside the coach.
‘How?’
‘We knew your father.’
It seemed unlikely that my clever, unconventional father would have wasted time with this young squire. As for the man inside, I could only make him out in profile. It was curiosity that took me up the three steps to the inside of the coach. The man who called himself Harry Trumper followed. The boy folded up the steps, closed the door and – judging by the jolt – took up his place outside on the back. The harness clinked, the coachman said ‘hoy hoy’ to the horses, and we were away.
There was a smell about the man inside the carriage. An elderly smell of stale port wine, snuff and candlewax. My nose took exception to it even as my eyes were still trying to adapt themselves to the half-darkness. The man who called himself Harry Trumper had arranged things so that he and I were sitting side by side with our backs to the horses, the other man facing us with a whole seat to himself. As my sight cleared, I could see that he needed it. It was not so much that he was corpulent – though indeed he was that – more that his unwieldy body spread out like a great toad’s, with not enough in the way of bone or sinew to control its bulk. His face was like a suet pudding, pale and shiny, with two mean raisins for eyes, topped with a knitted grey travelling cap. The eyes were staring at me over a tight little mouth. He seemed not to like what he saw.
‘Miss Lane, may I introduce …’
Before Trumper could finish, the fat man held up a hand to stop him. The hand bulged in its white silk glove like a small pudding in a cloth.
‘Were you not told to stay at Dover?’
He rumbled the words at me as if they’d been hauled from the depths of his stomach.
‘The note,’ I said. ‘Did you write it, then?’
‘I wrote you no note.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
By my side, Trumper burbled something about not accusing a gentleman of lying. I turned on him.
‘You said you knew my father. What happened to him?’
‘He took something that didn’t belong to him,’ Trumper said.
I think I’d have hit him, only another rumble from the fat man distracted me.
‘I said I wrote you no note. That is true, but if it matters to you, the note was written on my instructions. As soon as I knew of your father’s misfortune, I sent a man back to England with the sole purpose of finding you and saving you unnecessary distress.’
But there was no concern for anybody’s distress in the eyes that watched my face unblinkingly.
‘He hated duels,’ I said. ‘He’d never in his life have fought a duel.’
‘Sometimes a man has no choice,’ Trumper said.
The fat man paid no attention to him, his eyes still on me.
‘That is beside the point. Tell me, did your father communicate with you at all when he was in Paris or Dover?’
Why I answered his question instead of asking my own, I don’t know, unless those eyes and that voice had a kind of mesmeric force.
‘He wrote me a letter from Paris to say he was coming home.’
There was no reason not to tell him. Even talking about my father seemed a way of fighting them. Trumper sat up, feet to the floor, face turned greedily to mine. The fat man leaned forward.
‘What did your father say in this letter?’
I was more cautious now.
‘He said he’d enjoyed meeting some friends in Paris, but was looking forward to being back in England.’
‘Gentlemen friends or women friends?’ said Trumper, eager as a terrier at a rat hole.
The fat man looked at him with some contempt, but let him take over the questioning.
‘Gentlemen friends,’ I said.
‘Did he mention any women?’
The eagerness of Trumper’s question, practically panting with his tongue hanging out, made me feel that my father’s memory was being dirtied. In defence of him, I told the truth.
‘He mentioned that he’d met an unfortunate woman who needed his charity.’
And realised, from the look on Trumper’s face and a shifting in the fat man’s weight that made the carriage tilt sidewards, that I’d made a mistake.
‘Did he mention a name?’ Trumper said.
‘No.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Or any more about her?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What did he propose to do about her?’
His letter had implied quite clearly that he was bringing her back to London with him.
‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘It was only a casual mention of her.’
‘She’s lying.’ The fat man growled it without particular enmity, as if he expected people to lie. ‘He was bringing her back to England with him, wasn’t he, miss?’
‘It seems you know more than I do, so why do you ask me?’
‘He abducted her from Paris. We know that, so you need not trouble yourself to lie about it.’
‘My father would not take away any woman against her will.’
‘Did he write to you from Calais?’
‘No. That letter from Paris was his last.’
‘Are you carrying it with you?’
‘No!’
From the fat man’s stare, I expected him to order Trumper to search me there and then, and shrank back in the corner of the seat.
‘Did he tell you to meet the woman at Dover?’
‘No, of course not. I was waiting to meet him, only he didn’t even know it.’
‘Do you know where he lodged in Calais?’
It heartened me that their inquiries round Calais must have been as fruitless as mine.
‘No. Not at any of the big hotels, I know that much.’
‘So do we,’ Trumper said, rather wearily.
The horses were moving at a fast trot now, the well-sprung carriage almost floating along. There was something I hadn’t noticed until then, with the shock