Page 26 of By Marsh and By Moor (Marsh and Moor #1)

It was almost a year before Solomon saw Wallace again. He was leaving the tack room at the Crown, late one evening, when he caught sight of Wallace standing in the shadows by the stableyard’s side entrance. Solomon dropped the empty bucket he’d been carrying and hurried to join him.

“Wallace!” Solomon pulled him into an embrace, then stepped back to take a look at him. “How are you? I thought you must have disappeared off the face of the Earth! How’s Hugo?”

“Oh, he’s keeping well,” Wallace said vaguely.

He wasn’t wearing a coat, Solomon noticed with a frown. “En’t you cold? It’s already November, and you’re walking around in your shirt sleeves.”

“I had to go out in a hurry, and I forgot my coat, that’s all.”

“Has something happened? What’s wrong?”

“Well… as a matter of fact, I just came to ask if you could lend me a shilling or two? I—I should warn you that I can’t tell when I’ll be able to pay you back.”

Solomon stuck his hand in his pocket, and came up with no more than sixpence.

“I can give you whatever I get tomorrow.” The ostlers were only paid their wages four times a year, on quarter days, and tided themselves over in the meantime with the tips they received each day.

Seeing Wallace’s face fall, Solomon added, “But you need it tonight, I collect? What’s going on?

Are you stuck for somewhere to sleep tonight?

Something to eat? En’t you staying with Hugo anymore? ”

“Not—not just now.”

“Oh?” Perhaps they had quarrelled. “Well, you can stay here, if you like.”

“Won’t Bailey object?”

“I’m head ostler now. Bailey broke his leg and wound up retiring.” He could not keep the hint of pride from his voice.

Wallace’s face brightened. “Congratulations!” He looked genuinely happy for the first time since Solomon had caught sight of him, and Solomon realised that he was thinner than before, with shadows under his eyes that weren’t only cast by the lantern overhead.

“You don’t look at all well. Are you still working in one of them gentlemen’s drinking and gambling hells, and never seeing the light of day?”

Before Wallace could answer, a coachman leaned out of the coach-and-six that had just pulled into the yard. He called to Solomon, “Here, what’s the delay, man?”

“You go on through to the kitchens,” Solomon said to Wallace. “Kitty and Isabella are still working there, you remember them. Tell them I sent you.”

He hurried to greet the coachman, resolving to find a moment to talk to Wallace later that night. But by the time he could snatch a late supper, Wallace had left the kitchen.

Solomon was working overnight that night. At dawn, just as he was yawning and thinking longingly of bed, Hugo Vaughan strolled into the yard.

“Well met, my friend,” he greeted Solomon, with that little smile of his that invited a man to let himself be charmed. “I expect Wallace is here, isn’t he? Let him know I’ve come, will you?”

Solomon shook Vaughan’s hand. “Good to see you. It’s been too long.” He turned to see Wallace had just emerged from the kitchen door. “Ah, there he is.”

Wallace had stopped short, an odd expression on his face, looking at Solomon and Vaughan together. For a moment all three of them stood there, in a peculiar frozen tableau.

Then Vaughan held out his hand. “Wallace?”

Wallace bit his lip, but he came to join Vaughan.

“Well, what’s all this, then?” Solomon demanded. “Lovers’ quarrel?” They were standing in a secluded corner of the yard, speaking in low voices, quite privately.

“Afraid so,” Vaughan said with a rueful grin. His hand lay on Wallace’s arm in a proprietary way.

Wallace said nothing. He gave Solomon a sheepish look.

Vaughan gazed at him fondly. “Shall we go? We’re keeping Solomon here from his work. I expect to be accosted by an irate coachman at any minute here.”

“Before you go, tell me where the two of you are living these days,” Solomon said. “I’d rather like to see you both sooner nor this time next year.”

Vaughan laughed. “We’re just about to move to new lodgings,” he said before Wallace could reply. “But we’ll be sure to inform you as soon as we know where we’ll be.”

But they didn’t. Two months passed before Solomon saw Wallace again. It was on a crisp, clear winter afternoon shortly after Christmas, and Wallace was waiting by the Crown’s side entrance, as before. He looked worse than he had the last time: tired and worn.

“You all right?” Solomon asked.

There was a pause, and then Wallace shook his head.

“I’m out of work. I need to find a job.”

That wasn’t his only trouble, Solomon thought. But it was one that Solomon could do something about.

“Come on, let’s go see Sykes.”

Sykes was the chamberlain, managing both the inn and the stables. He was a short, balding man in middle age, with the red nose of a gin-drinker.

“Wallace Acton,” he said, looking Wallace up and down, his lips pursed in the sour expression that was habitual to him. “A bad penny always turns up again. But—as Master Dyer so earnestly reminds me—we do need another ostler just now. You can start tonight.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ll be working nights for the first two weeks at least.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Well, go on, then. Clear off out of my office. I have work to do, unlike some people around here.”

Back outside in the yard, Solomon threw Wallace a smile. “You remember where everything is, I don’t doubt?”

Wallace’s answering smile was half-hearted. He rubbed a hand over his face. “Christ, it’s strange to be here. It feels like when I last worked here, it was in another life.”

“It does?” Solomon wasn’t sure what to make of that. “What have you been about in the meantime?”

“Nothing much. Only… I’ve been living in a fog for I don’t know how long. And now my mind has finally cleared.”

Solomon looked him up and down. “You don’t have any of your things with you, I see. Do you want to borrow some blankets and a clean shirt?”

Wallace winced. “It pains me to be such a burden.”

“You’re nothing of the sort. En’t you helped me out as often as I’ve helped you?” Solomon gave him a friendly punch in the shoulder. “Come with me. I’m working overnight tonight too, and I must get something warm in my belly first.”

Even after dark, travellers could arrive at the Crown at any hour, and there were always at least two ostlers and a stable boy on duty overnight.

That night, Solomon and Wallace were accompanied by a scrap of a boy called Timmy.

They were kept busy until midnight, but then there came a lull between travellers, and they stepped into the tack room to shelter from the bitter cold.

They were alone; Timmy had crept away to sleep until he should be called.

Wallace sat on a barrel, his head bent. Solomon watched him out of the corner of his eye, not liking to press him with questions.

Finally, Wallace said, “Thank Heaven Sykes was willing to take me back on. I haven’t tuppence in my pocket.”

“What have you been doing for work? Have you been working as a waiter?”

“Yes, and… other things.” He fell silent, but after a moment he went on again, “Hugo has an arrangement with a Camberwell moneylender. He haunts any gentlemen’s club he can get into, and befriends naive young men who’ve been living beyond their means and might need a loan to tide them over.

Young gentlemen as are in London for the first time and don’t have over many friends in town—you see the sort I mean.

He sends them to his Camberwell friend and gets a commission on every loan. ”

Solomon winced. “At a monstrous rate of interest, I take it.”

“Mmm. Yes. And the moneylender, as you may imagine, en’t fussy about how he persuades his debtors to pay up when they start to fall behind.”

“Never thought I’d feel sorry for rich young men.”

“As a general thing, they en’t even all that rich. Younger sons of obscure country squires and that kind of thing.”

Solomon said, slowly, “I would never have imagined Hugo Vaughan being mixed up in such dealings.”

“No. I know. He has… more sides to his person than you see at first.” He had been studying his hands while he spoke, but now he glanced up at Solomon, half-ashamed, half-challenging. “You en’t asked me what my role in all this was.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

“I went down to Camberwell once a week to see the moneylender and collect the money Hugo was owed. But that weren’t the worst of it.

The worst was at the club where he’d got me employment.

While serving drinks I was meant to keep an eye out for likely targets.

Point them out to Hugo.” He hunched into himself, picking at a splinter of wood in the barrel he sat on.

“He taught me to pick out what he called the ‘most likely young cubs.’ He weren’t too fussy about his victims. The younger and more friendless the better. ”

There wasn’t anything Solomon could say in reply to that.

In the stable next door, a horse whinnied softly. A lone carriage rumbled along in the street outside.

Wallace said, “If Hugo comes looking for me, don’t tell him I’m here? Please?”

“All right,” Solomon said slowly. “But—”

“Please. I—I need to make a clean break from him. It will be easier if I don’t see him. Promise me? I know he’s your friend—”

The rumble of wheels on cobblestones told them that the carriage had turned into the inn’s yard. Wallace broke off.

“Hey!” a voice shouted. “Don’t anyone work here?”

Reluctantly, Solomon left off the conversation and stepped out into the yard to greet two young gentlemen who jumped down from their phaeton, complaining volubly about the flooded road that had held them up south of Peckham.

It was after dawn by the time Vaughan strolled into the yard.

The other ostlers had already risen, and the inn was its busy daytime self.

Vaughan stepped around the crowd of people waiting to board the Canterbury stagecoach, and directed a cordial smile at Solomon.

“Would you be so kind as to tell Wallace I’m here? ”

Solomon froze. “What makes you think he’s here?”