Chapter One

Stanmore — Sunday, 11 March 1781

He woke in the dark because he always did, and lay listening for a bolt. There was none. There was a clock on the landing, a dog in the village, rain on a window he had not yet seen by daylight. It took him the length of three breaths to remember where he was, a fourth to believe it.

Stanmore. His sister’s house. A bed with a Middlesex blanket on it, and a door that opened from the inside. He got up, dressed by feel and went down.

There was a light under the library door. Bensley was sitting at the table under the window in his shirt and waistcoat with the chess board in front of him, where they had left it at midnight. The candle beside him had burned to a stub and been replaced; that one was half gone too.

“You haven’t been to bed,” said Cheston.

“I went. I came down again.” Bensley kept his eyes on the board. “It was your move. You said so. Then you went up and slept like a Christian, and I sat here till two trying to work out what you’d meant by it.”

Cheston came and stood at his shoulder.

The board was as he had left it: the four peas at the corners of the room, the ten beans round them, the pea at the head of the table that was the chair. Away from the room, at two different edges of the board, lay the two peas he had set there before he went up. One for himself. One for the second holder. Apart, as the rule said, never together.

Except that they were together now. At some hour of the night Bensley had picked up his own pea and set it down on the square beside Cheston’s.

“That’s not allowed,” said Cheston.

“I know it’s not allowed. I was in the room when you made the rule.” Bensley rubbed his eyes. “Tell me where you’re going, and I’ll tell you whether I care.”

Cheston pulled out the other chair and sat.

He had read the packet twice in Bishopsgate Street, standing, in under two minutes; it had stayed in his coat since. He did not take it out now. He did not need to.

“Paris,” he said. “By Lady Day.”

Bensley said nothing for a while.

“That’s a fortnight.”

“Fourteen days.”

“And you can’t tell me why.”

“I can tell you it has to be me. Not you. Not anybody I could send. It isn’t mine to hand on, and I don’t think I could hand it on if I were. I can tell you it’s the rest of what we started yesterday. Without it, what those ten men did in that room is a conversation.”

“And the people who took you in November are in Paris.”

“Near it.”

“And the man who looked at your face for a quarter of an hour at Margate on Friday has your name in his book, and mine, Fanny’s maiden name, the room.” Bensley said it flatly, a list read off a sheet. “And you’ve had a letter out of Passy. I’d lay money you’ll have to go within a mile of it, and every clerk in Paris knows who comes and goes at that gate.”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m coming.”

Cheston looked at the two peas side by side on the square.

“That’s why you moved it.”

“That’s why I moved it. Franklin’s man found me in July to keep the First Trustee alive. He didn’t hire me to keep him alive in Middlesex.” Bensley leaned back. “You went into France alone last autumn, and it cost you ninety-three days in a room. I’ve heard every one of them now. I’m not going to sit at Stanmore and read about the next ninety-three in a newspaper that won’t print them.”

“And the rule?”

“The rule says not fewer than three, never travelling together. We haven’t got three. We’ve got two.” Bensley pushed his pea a quarter of an inch further, so that it touched Cheston’s. “You can’t break a rule about three with two. There’s nothing there to break.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“No,” said Bensley. “But it’s a good line. I’d have got a laugh with it at the Haymarket.”

Francina had them in church by ten. She had said so at breakfast, in the tone she would have used about the coal. The rector at Great Stanmore was a man who counted his congregation. Mr Bensley had been at Ramsgate this winter looking at houses and in the Lane on the Fast day until the second lesson. The parish had noticed both. A brother from Maryland staying in the house and not at church would be noticed more.

“Everybody in the village knows you’re here,” she said. “The girl told the baker at seven. The baker told the sexton. Half of them will be looking to see what an American looks like. You’ll let them.”

“I’m not sure I’m an American in church.”

“You’ll be whatever sits quietly in the Bensley pew and stands up in the right places.” She looked at her husband. “And you’ll shave again. You missed a piece.”

The church stood at the top of the hill, a plain brick building with a squat tower and a porch; the rain had stopped by the time they walked up to it. Cheston had not been inside an English church since the spring of seventy-four. He found he remembered the smell of damp stone, candle-grease, wet wool. He had forgotten the order. He stood and knelt a beat behind his sister, following her finger down the page of the prayer book she held open for him.

It was the second Sunday in Lent. The rector read the collect in a high, dry voice that carried to the back of the nave and no further.

Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.

Cheston said amen with the rest of them. He noticed that he meant it, and that he meant the first half of it more.

They came to the prayers. The rector prayed for the King, as the book required, for the Queen, the Prince of Wales and all the Royal Family, and for the High Court of Parliament under our most religious and gracious King at this time assembled. Cheston stood with his hands on the pew in front and did not open his mouth. Nobody could have seen it. He had sworn his thirty words at Passy in a minute and forty seconds, and he found that he was not going to unswear them in a Middlesex parish church for the sake of looking like everybody else.

Francina kept her eyes on the book. She turned the page.

It was during the sermon that he saw the man. He had not been looking. He had been looking at the back of a farmer’s neck two pews ahead, at the hatchments on the wall, at a boy in the gallery who was carving his name in the rail with great care and no fear at all. Then he had turned his head, idly, as men do in a long sermon. There at the back of the nave by the font, standing because there was no seat, was a man in a brown coat with his hat in his hands.

Middle height. Middle years. A face that nobody would carry away.

He had last seen that coat at a quarter past two yesterday afternoon, through the fanlight of a counting-house in Bishopsgate Street, on the opposite pavement, above a newspaper.

Cheston turned back to the pulpit. The rector was on the temptation in the wilderness, and had been for some time.

He found Bensley’s sleeve without looking, and pressed it once.

Bensley did not turn his head. After a minute he took out his handkerchief, wiped his nose with it slowly and put it back in his pocket; in the course of it he had looked at every face at the west end of the church. He folded his hands on his knee.

“I see him,” he said, under the rector’s voice, without moving his lips at all.

The man in the brown coat was not in the porch when they came out. He was in the churchyard, on the path that ran round to the north side, reading a headstone with his hands behind him.

The congregation came out into the thin sunshine and stood about in knots on the path, as congregations do. Three people came up to Mrs Bensley to be introduced to her brother. A stout woman in purple asked him whether it was true that the Americans had no bishops. When he said it was, she said she had always thought so, and went away satisfied. The rector shook his hand and said he hoped Mr Cheston would be with them some time. Cheston said he hoped so too; neither of them believed it.

“Fanny,” said Bensley. “Take your brother home. I’ll follow.”

She looked at him. Then she glanced past him at the north side of the churchyard, once.

“Don’t be long,” she said, and took Cheston’s arm.

They walked down the hill. Cheston kept his eyes on the road. It took more effort than he would have guessed.

“Who is he?” said Francina, when they were past the pond.

“I don’t know his name.”

“But you know him.”

“I saw him yesterday. In the City. Across the street from a door I went into.”

She walked on for a few paces. Her hand did not tighten on his arm. He noticed that it did not.

“And today he’s in our church,” she said, “reading old Mr Wilkes’s headstone. It says nothing but his name and his dates. I’ve read it. There’s nothing else to read on the north side.”

“Yes.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“I don’t think so. Not yet. I think he’s been told to watch a house, and is watching it.”

“This house.”

“This house.”

They had come to the gate. She stopped with her hand on it.

“James. I told you yesterday I didn’t want to be told anything. I meant it yesterday.” She pushed the gate open. “I’m not sure it will keep.”

Bensley came in an hour and a half later, with mud on his boots and his hat in his hand. He was smiling.

He kept it out of the hall. He went through to the library, shut the door and stood with his back to the fire, while Cheston put down the book he had not been reading.

“His name is Castle,” said Bensley. “Or it’s the name he gave at the inn, and for our purposes that’s the one that matters. He came up from town on the Stanmore coach yesterday evening, the late one, took the back room over the tap, and paid for it to Saturday next. In advance. In silver. The landlord was very pleased with him, because nobody takes a room in Stanmore in March; nobody pays in advance for anything.”

“How did you find that out?”

“I went round to the yard and asked the ostler whether a gentleman in a brown coat had left a grey mare with him, because I thought I’d seen one of my wife’s cousins in church and missed him in the crowd.” Bensley took his hat off the chair and hung it on the fender to dry. “He hadn’t left a grey mare. He’d come on the coach. The ostler told me the rest because I asked him about his own horses first, and listened to him for twenty minutes about a spavin. I know a good deal about spavins, as it happens, from a part I played in seventy-three.”

“And Castle?”

“Castle was in the tap. I went in for a pint of their beer, which is bad, and I stood at the other end of the bench. He was writing a letter. He writes a clerk’s hand, small and upright, blotting every line.” Bensley sat down at the table. “He didn’t look up. He knew exactly who I was. You don’t sit in a country tap on a Sunday forenoon with a man from Drury Lane two yards off, and not look up. Everybody looks up. It’s all I can count on in this world.”

“So he’s Hurrell’s.”

“He’s somebody’s who can pay in advance to Saturday. I’d put money on Hurrell.” Bensley reached out, took a bean from the saucer and set it down at the edge of the board, by the gate of the square that was the room. “That’s Castle. Paid to Saturday. So he’ll be here when we go, and he’ll be here after.”

Cheston looked at the bean.

“Then Stanmore’s known.”

“Stanmore was always known. Fanny’s name was in Hurrell’s head in February. He told me so over a glass of Smith’s wine.” Bensley kept his eyes on the board. “What’s new is that he’s paying a man to sit in it. He didn’t need to do that for me. He’s doing it for you.”

“Because I came off the boat without a paper.”

“Because you came off the boat, and told him the truth for a quarter of an hour, and he couldn’t find what was wrong with it.” Bensley almost smiled. “Nothing frightens a man like Hurrell more than an answer that adds up. He’ll want to see where you go next. And you’re going to France.”

They went at it through the afternoon. Francina left them to it, sending in bread and cheese at three without knocking.

The crossing first. Not Margate: that was settled before it was said. Not Dover, where the packet had not run in three years and every man on the quay was a King’s man or wanted to be. Not any port with a Custom House, a clerk, a book.

“Then what?” said Cheston.

“Leave the crossing to me.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting today.” Bensley put a pea at the far edge of the board, the sea edge, and left it unexplained. “I know a way. It’s not a nice way, it’s not a legal way, and there are men on it who’d sell us both for the price of a cask. But it’s a way the King’s messengers don’t sit at the end of. I’ll know by Tuesday whether it’s open.”

“How do you know it?”

Bensley looked up at him. For a second there was nothing on his face at all, the actor’s nothing, the look he had worn on the stair at Bishopsgate for Pym.

“From before,” he said. “From the marines.”

That was all he gave, and Cheston let it lie. He had learned at Charonne to hear when a question was being kept back for a reason; he could hear this one.

Then Paris. Lady Day was a Sunday. Whatever had to be done on it would have to be done in a city that had put him in a carriage four days after he walked into it, by people who had now had three weeks to learn that he had been let go, a month to learn from Madame Bosquet’s book that he was not at Charonne.

“We’ll want somewhere to lie,” said Bensley. “Not an inn. Not a lodging with a book that goes to the commissaire twice a week.”

“Every lodging in Paris has a book.”

“Then somewhere whose book goes to us.”

Cheston sat back.

He was thinking of a house at the east barrier with raked gravel and a pear tree against the south wall. A woman with spectacles in a case who spelt his name right without being told. A receipt for everything he owned. Whoever pays, monsieur, and gives no trouble, and is entered.

“There may be one,” he said.

“Where?”

“Where they kept me.”

Bensley looked at him, then began to laugh, quietly, with his hand over his eyes.

“God help us,” he said. “Franklin knew what he was doing. He found the only man in France who’d go back.”

It was after five, going dark, when they came to the rule again. They had walked round it all afternoon, as a man walks round a hole in his own floor, until there was nowhere left to walk.

Two peas, side by side, on the square at the board’s edge.

“We can go,” said Cheston. “Both of us. And break it on the first day, then stand up at the next meeting and say so. That’s what the first item’s for.”

“We can.”

“Or I go alone, you stay, and the rule’s kept. If I’m put in a carriage again, there’s one of us left who knows what the ten agreed, knows the instrument, and can put it in front of them.”

“Also true.”

“And if we both go and neither of us comes back—”

“Then there’s nobody,” said Bensley. “Not a man in the world who could call those ten back into a room. They’d sit in their four countries with their hundred thousand apiece, waiting for a letter that never came, and in thirty years their sons would sell the claim to a broker in Amsterdam for a tenth of its face.” He put his finger on the board beside the two peas. “I know. I did that sum at two this morning. It’s why I was still up.”

“Then we need a third.”

“We need a third who isn’t coming.”

“Somebody who can keep a secret,” said Cheston slowly. “Who’s been keeping ours all winter without being told what it was. Who can read a room. Who has a head for a book and won’t write in it.” He heard what he was saying before he had finished saying it. “Who has already paid for this. Without knowing she was paying.”

Bensley did not answer. He was looking past Cheston’s shoulder, at the door.

Cheston turned in his chair.

Francina was standing in the doorway with a candle in her hand. She had not knocked. The door had been ajar since three, when the bread and cheese came in, and nobody had got up to shut it. She was not looking at her brother. She was looking at her husband. She had the long upper lip and the straight dark brows of their father, and the stillness he used to have on the landing at Chestertown before he said what could not be taken back.

“Robert,” she said. “I asked you in December. You’ll remember the night.”

“I remember it.”

“I said if it was to do with James, I’d never forgive you.”

“I remember that too.”

She set the candle down on the corner of the table, next to the board. The light came across the peas, the beans, and the two on the square together at the edge.

“Is it?” she said.

Bensley looked at his wife, and stopped acting.

“Yes,” he said.