"Go on, ask it then. Am I lax, too? No, Will, I'm not. I'm not and never will be. I hate the ship, I hate that master Gunning, I hate most of the men, and most of all I hate Slack Dickie Bloody Idle Kaye. Why do I tell you this? Because I think I like you, Will, and I think that you will see the merit of my views in double quick time. And you, like me, will wish, and want, and hope, and strive to find some mettle and to grasp it. I want to fight the enemy, that's what I want and wanted from my service here. And the Biter is a shitty ship, a filthy and corrupt ship, that needs some iron in her soul, and I would like to be it." He stopped. "I speak too much, and far too openly. One word from you to Kaye on this and I am finished." He was not one whit abashed. "You have not met him yet. He too is rich. Perhaps you'll find a kindred soul, and then I'm finished ditto. Ah well, a short life and a merry one. I can always sell my arse."
"I am not rich, Sam. I..."
"No matter if you are. I'm not. I'm damn near destitute. I mentioned parasites just now, did you notice that? I can be bitter, I have prejudice, please guard against me on that score. Richard Kaye is not a parasite deliberately I do not think, but he is very, very rich. I do not know why he needs the Biter, he uses her somehow like old King Charlie used his yachts, in golden days. I do not trust him, and I hate the way he uses her. Now I grow confused, ignore me. I need the privy, then a shave. Do you bother?"
William, for reasons he could not have quite explained, made a joke.
"Indeed I do, Sam. Indeed, I went just now!"
Perhaps it was a kind of indicator, to tell Samuel that he, himself, was not so very grand, that they should be open friends. Samuel, calmly, held his eyes.
"I am very blunt, like a poor sailor," he said. "Do not feel you have to emulate. I don't think badly of you, that you are well bred.
Think well of me despite that I am not. Pay the reckoning, although you are not rich. The barber is a furlong down the way. But first the jakes."
Will Bentley finished his coffee slowly. And while he drank, he thought.
In the breakfast room at Langham Lodge, Sir Arthur Fisher took tea with Mrs. Houghton, and pondered gloomily over the fate of Cecily and Deb. He had known for two hours that the maids had gone, but had not known what definite action, if any, he could take. Mrs. Houghton had been set on to sound the household girls and women, while Tony and his cohorts had searched the park and grounds, then asked out on the roads if anything was seen or heard at night.
"The general feeling," said Mrs. Houghton," is that they deserved their fate. Our girls, as usual, sir, are hardly charitable."
Both Sir Arthur and his housekeeper smiled ruefully. They knew, indeed, the girls would have raised their eyebrows even at this sight. It took some of the country people time to adjust to the baronet's modern notions. A woman who, at bottom, was just a servant taking tea with the master led sometimes to jealousy or disapproval, and endlessly to speculation. Sir Arthur was a wisp, the woman like a hard, fit pudding, who had never shown a moment's interest in a man. Never mind: folk speculated happily.
"Maidens are such pea ky things," said Sir Arthur. "But do they know what that fate might have been, deserved or not? Did any of them hear anything, or see movement at all? Maybe some of them talked the night before. Were there no hints?"
"Liza said they were spirited," replied the housekeeper. "They were all much taken by the figure of the mountebank, who it is assumed was using the maids' bodies throughout the journey south, and Liza says the hurt one told her he would come for them whatever, that he could glide through walls."
"Which of them is Liza? Am I wrong? I thought Liza was the sensible one?"
Mrs. Houghton nodded.
"She is, sir, you're not wrong. The others were twice as daft. In short, they all know nothing, so fantasticals are rife. Both maids are pregnant, says Harriet, and the man had to have them so to sell the babies for a devil-worship celebration due at Kingston on Black Sunday. I boxed her ears most soundly."
"Are they, though? With child?"
"Lord, how should I know, sir? Deb in her shift was well formed for her age I take her for sixteen or so she is even luscious. Her nipples were quite pale though, if I may be so frank, and her belly only rounded as you'd expect from such a shape of maiden. Cecily I bathed, and she was but a little slip, although well-breasted. Nipples also very pink and flat. Unlikely, sir, unlikely."
Sir Arthur sighed.
"I never had a daughter," he said.
No, you had three sons, thought Mrs. Houghton, and her heart was filled. Sir Arthur shook his head, as if to clear it.
"Most like they ran," he said. "I feel keenly I have done them ill, you know. They expressed a worry, I dismissed it. That was bad in me."
"No, sir." She moved her head from side to side, slow and emphatically. "Their worry was absurd. An unknown magistrate, they claimed, who did not know where they were taken by Mr. Samuel and his friend, but who was going to track them here to Langham. Absurd on every count, sir, even the first. Surely you do not believe the story of the teeth?"
He studied her round, taut face for seconds. Mrs. Houghton did not get flustered but her eyes dropped, and, imperceptibly, her shoulders.
"Poor Cecily's teeth were taken," he said simply. "Someone paid the quack to rip them out. Such a business does cost money, I would guess, and not a pauper's portion. It might be absurd to think the perpetrator or his quack would find out they were here and come for them, but they would see it differently, perhaps. All they know is that some rich man living hereabouts would want them back, or Deb at least, because he had been cheated."
Mrs. Houghton said, with passion, "But you would have stopped them, master! You have not done them ill, you took them in, protected them! To even think that is to do you ill! Ingratitude!"
Sir A did not respond. She stopped, then quickly coloured.
"I beg your pardon, sir. I should leave such nonsense to Liza and to Harriet, perhaps. They were not ungrateful, but"
"But afraid. Indeed." He sighed again. "Call Tony for me, Mrs. Houghton, please. I will send him out again to look around and ask more questions. I have some idea as to who might have done this gross transaction, as do you. But we must not leap in the dark. It is a very bitter thing to think of someone, very bitter."
When she had gone to fetch him Tony, Sir Arthur thought about the girls, and the wide and wooded country locally, and hoped the ass they had 'borrowed' would help them gain their objective, which he guessed would be London, not many miles north from where he sat, and where the streets to girls like Deb and Cecily were paved with gold, a tradition set in stone. He doubted, sadly, that he would ever see them more, but hoped they might survive to tell a tale to ones who loved them. Which thought led him to his nephew, and another worry. He was south, down Portsmouth way with good Charles Warren, and Sir Arthur had expected to have heard from him before this. Truly, dark times, he thought; foul times.
At about this time broad day, warm sunlight getting warmer by the minute they buried Warren in a field. Not in a grave, a hole in the ground however shallow, but in a haystack, that was hard and wet. Charles Yorke, from fifteen yards away, watched without discernible emotion, indeed hardly capable of structured thought. He lay along the horse's back, head resting sideways on its neck, too dulled by ill-treatment and exhaustion to do more than gaze. He found the antics of the murderers more interesting than the fact of Warren's death; they were like dervishes and ghouls, but slowed down by exhaustion in their turn. Three or four just sat apart, lost in the thick steam arising from the soaking grass, immobile in the aftermath of drunkenness.