The Thief-Taker : Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner (22 page)

Morton reacted before he thought.

As the first man wrenched open the coach door, the
Runner braced himself and lashed out with his foot as hard as he could. The blow caught the man squarely in the chest and he reeled backward, colliding with his fellows. Morton knew he had to get out of the tight confines of the coach. He was aware of Arabella's shrill cries behind him as she grappled with someone on the other side. He lunged forward and leapt out into the night air, meeting another of them head-on and bowling the man back with his superior weight. An iron bar clashed and rattled on the cobbles as it fell from the hand of his assailant. A sharp blow hit Morton on his shoulder blade, and he whirled and caught the attacker's arm before he could strike again. Wrenching this man around, he thrust him tumbling into the path of another. But there were too many.

“Do him, do him! Smash his pate!”

The frightened cry was coming from above, from the driver, who was struggling to control his pitching, neighing horses. Morton turned and vaulted up onto the swaying body of the coach. Hands grabbed his legs from behind but he kicked out savagely, breaking free and ripping his tight breeches as he did. The jarvey saw him coming and struck down at him with his whip, cutting Morton a searing hot lash across the cheek.

Roaring with pain and fury, Henry Morton seized the driver's wrist before he could draw back, and holding his own position with one hand, hauled the man bodily down over his shoulder. The jarvey cried with panic as he tumbled headfirst toward the cobbles. Morton scrambled with frantic energy up onto the seat, slamming free the brake as he did.

“Arabella!” He glanced down the far side of the vehicle as he fumbled for the reins, and saw his mistress hanging half out the door, struggling with a man who
was trying to pull her into the street. Morton lashed the reins and the frightened horses bolted forward. The man holding Arabella still clung to her, being dragged along.

But then some instinct warned Morton of danger on the other side, and he pivoted. Another figure, lithe and athletic, was bounding up toward him, arm raised. Morton squirmed away, seeing the silver flash. The blade cut through his coat and stuck hard into the wood of the carriage frame close beside him. The attacker did not let go of his weapon, and for an instant he and Morton looked into each other's faces. Morton had a vivid impression of snub features, cheeks deeply pitted with smallpox, a shining bald head. Then he swung his arm and struck the man a tremendous blow with his free hand, catching him squarely in the face, feeling all his strength behind his fist. The man went limp, his eyeballs tilted upward, and he dropped away.

On the other side of the coach there was a cry of pain from a male voice.

“Filthy blowen!”

“Prigger!” howled Arabella.

Morton glanced down to see the figure of a man sprawling on the cobbles behind them. He urged the horses on. Obstacles loomed ahead in the dark passage but he drove straight at them. The carriage bounced crazily over whatever littered the narrow way, but kept its wheels, and in a few moments shot out into the comparative brightness and space of High Holborn.

H
e drove Arabella up to Theobald's Road.
When he opened the carriage door he found her calmly using a fine linen handkerchief to wipe the small dagger she'd used to stab her assailant.

“Have they harmed you?” Morton asked.

“Not so much as you,” Arabella said, reaching out to his bleeding face.

Morton winced, and she offered him her already stained handkerchief.

“I'll be but a trice,” Morton told her.

Once Arabella was safe in her house he drove rapidly back through the thickening fog to Bow Street and there found Vickery and a couple of other officers. By the time they returned to the little alley, however, it was deserted but for a single figure, lying motionless in an impossibly awkward heap on the filthy stones, like an abandoned doll. It was the hackney-coachman, and he was dead, his neck broken when Morton had thrown him from his seat. A few dribbles of fresh blood were the only other sign that anything had happened here at all.

Although a weary hour of police procedures passed before Henry Morton could return, he found Mrs. Malibrant still awake, clutching a glass of brandy in her upstairs parlour. White and shaken, she looked much worse than when he'd left her. He sat beside her and rearranged the shawl over her shoulders. When the maid had gone out, he reinforced the effect by putting his arm around her and drawing her close.

“It is strange,” she said tonelessly, “how it takes a time before one feels afraid.”

“You were magnificent,” Morton told her.

“I don't know what came into me,” she said in vague wonder. “Some sort of fury. I'm frightened out of my wits now, just thinking about it. Is that what men feel in scrapes and battles and so on?”

“Perhaps. When they're finally into the thick of it.”

Now she looked at him with sudden solicitude, and reached again to gingerly touch his face.

“Poor you. Does it sting?”

The line where the coachman had whipped him was rising into an ugly welt, pulsing fiercely and bleeding a little in one corner. The blow had caught Morton across lips and nose and one cheek, but by great good fortune had missed his eye.

He winced again. “The man who gave it me got worse,” he remarked quietly.

“Dead?”

Morton nodded.

Arabella seemed to grow even paler, but then deliberately turned away from her thoughts. “A poultice it needs,” she said firmly. “Christabel! She must make you a poultice.”

And for a while Morton let her minister to him, as it seemed to help her as much as it did him. He knew she was recovering when she began to laugh and make bawdy jests with her maid Christabel about the rather revealing rip in Morton's best breeches.

Then they talked about it, both with a glass at hand, Morton lying back holding the dressing across his tender face.

“They must have corrupted the jarvey,” he said. “He was so ready to take us at the theatre, you remember. And then he drove to where they were waiting. But my guess is that he wasn't really one of them. He seemed to have little enough stomach for the business, once they'd begun.”

“He's past regretting now,” remarked Arabella.

“Aye, a pity too. He could have told us much.”

“But who were they, and … and …
why
?” Arabella sounded a little fragile still—the shock that evil intentions should come so close, personally, to her.

“Robbery seems unlikely,” he said, thinking aloud. “There were plenty of better marks, and they didn't go about it like highwaymen.”

“I don't suppose it could have been directed against me?” Arabella asked in a small voice.

Morton gave her a painful, but he hoped reassuring, smile. “I trust you haven't been saying anything too intolerably cutting to your rivals, Mrs. Malibrant.” When her look showed she was trying seriously to remember, he laughed affectionately. “Nay, it was no theatrical tiff,” he told her. “They were after Henry Morton, and it was only a shame that you were with me.”

“Then whom have
you
antagonised, Mr. Morton?”

This needed real consideration.

“A Runner has no end of foes,” he remarked. “The question only is, who hates him most? Whom has he thwarted most recently?”

“And… ?”

“I suppose, especially after the attack on my lodgings, that the friends of the Smeetons come to mind. Yet I cannot feel that they would be so well organised, so patient and cunning as these were.” Morton knit his brows, but even that hurt.

“Who else?”

“O'Doyle, Raggles, Thurtell, Otley,” he wearily rhymed off. Arabella looked at him in alarm. “And these are just a few of the men I've had transported, or sent up to prison, and who've cursed me for it.”

“Lor',” breathed out Arabella. “You ought to have warned me when we met.”

“Then there's Rokeby.” Morton's eyes narrowed as he thought. “I insulted him at his club, but he's not like to meet me at Gentleman John's. If he cannot line up a man to shoot him with a pistol, perhaps this is what he would do. He certainly has the resources to pay for it. And if he did, then his poisoning of Glendinning suddenly seems more likely. Is he so vengeful, do you think?”

“Perhaps he does not like it that you are enquiring into the death of Halbert Glendinning.”

“Perhaps not,” agreed Henry Morton. “Or perhaps, at any rate,
someone
doesn't.” They sat musing in silence awhile, and then his eye lit on the dagger on the walnut side table at Arabella's elbow. It was only a few inches long, almost an ornament really, contrived to dangle discreetly within her outer garments on a fine silver chain.

“I never knew a woman to bear such a thing,” he said.

She looked back at him innocently. “If you did,” she said, “we'd have lost the element of surprise, wouldn't we?”

Morton smiled in acknowledgement.

Arabella abruptly turned quite businesslike. “Now that we know the truth about Richard Davenant,” she said, “how do we proceed?”

“Well, Miss Hamilton's to be informed, I suppose. I expect that in itself is worth her two hundred pounds. And another visit to the Otter is in order.”

“I should look out of place in the Otter,” Arabella said decisively. “So I will bear the good news to Louisa.”

Morton opened his mouth to object but then thought better of it.

There was a sudden hailing and din of raised voices from the street, and Morton and Arabella went to the window, casting it open. People were spilling out of doors, and all along the street windows were being thrown open.

“What is it?” Morton called down, and a boy of perhaps sixteen, catching sight of Arabella, stopped in his flight.

“Wellington has been defeated,” he cried breathlessly. “At Quatre Bras. The army is routed and retreating in tatters. Bonaparte is marching on Brussels!”

M
orning light revealed a Bell Lane that
looked little different from a thousand other small, unfashionable London streets. Heavy drays rumbled down its narrow length with barrels from the brewery, and it was otherwise crowded with ragged but apparently innocent commerce. There were even the usual milkmaids in their white pinafores and black taffeta bonnets, pails dangling from the yokes across their shoulders. From a particularly pretty girl Henry Morton bought a cup of milk and flirted for a few pleasant moments, finding that, despite the neighbourhood, she was the very pattern of modesty.

The Otter's door stood open, airing, and he stopped a moment to inspect its strong and polished Bramah lock. Aside from it, there was no bar or other fastening.

When he went down he found the barroom deserted except for an old crone wiping the tables. Constellations of dust motes hung in the beams of light that angled from two basement windows high in the wall.

“This house be closed, yer worship,” said the old woman in a toothless mumble.

Morton looked around thoughtfully. He wondered what secrets the rest of the place might hold. What would he find if he went up those stairs behind the bar? But even for a Runner, armed only with a clasp-knife and his baton, it might be ill-advised to mount them alone and unannounced, especially when no one at Bow Street knew he was here. His could be the next corpse found floating facedown in the Thames.