The Path of the Wicked Read Online Free Page A

Hunt stage from London to Cheltenham, leaving three days after Amos and I started, so that we should arrive at approximately the same time. She listened impassively to instructions from me about visiting the bath house round the corner, washing her hair in anti-lice tincture and getting out her respectable grey dress from wherever she’d stored it or pawned it. I gave her three sovereigns, broken into silver and copper coins, for the expenses of the journey and wrote Mr Godwit’s address on a piece of card so that she could show it to people when she arrived in Cheltenham. It was a risk, sending her on her own so far from her usual haunts, but perhaps it would lift her out of her sullen mood. Amos came round in the evening to bring a couple of saddle bags for the things I’d need on our journey and to ask what we should do about Rancie’s cat, Lucy. It was a problem that hadn’t occurred to me until then.
    â€˜We can’t take the cat with us, but will Rancie settle without her?’
    â€˜Need be, I could put her in one of my saddle bags,’ Amos said. ‘But the cat’s happy where she is. Rancie should settle, long as you’re there.’
    I was worried that the cat might pine without her companion, but Amos said she was on friendly terms with the little hackney in the next box, so we decided that Lucy could stay in Bayswater. When Amos had gone, I packed a few necessities into the saddle bags and reread a hurried letter from my brother Tom, sent from Cairo. He’d be at sea again now, on his way back to Bombay. I missed him dreadfully – another reason for wanting to be away from London.
    As agreed, Amos was down in the yard at first light on Sunday morning, holding Rancie and a dark bay charger I hadn’t seen before. It was a great heavy-headed beast, over seventeen hands high, and the first thing he did as soon as we’d mounted and were moving along the mews was snort in terror and perform a four-footed sideways leap at the sight of a small stray dog. Amos urged him on as if nothing had happened.
    â€˜Does he often do that?’ I said.
    â€˜Only two or three times a minute.’
    It turned out that the animal, named Senator, was a reject from the cavalry, with the looks of a war horse and the nerves of a white mouse. He’d have had a bullet through the brain by now if Amos hadn’t bought him at a knock-down price and determined to cure him of shying. He thought a journey of several days cross-country, with the start of it being along some of the busiest roads in the kingdom, was just the prescription. By the time he reached his home county, he reckoned he’d have taught Senator enough manners to make a gentleman’s hunter out of him and would sell him to pay his expenses for the journey. This made for a lively first day, first along the familiar main road route over Hounslow Heath, then turning north-westwards and stopping for the first night at an inn near the Thames at Cookham. When we arrived there, as always on our travels, Amos switched from friend to groom. As I followed the maid upstairs to my room, it was a respectful ‘Early start tomorrow, then, Miss Lane’ from Amos down in the hall. It had worried me in the past, but I knew now that he preferred it that way. In any stable yard in the country, Amos was guaranteed to meet an old friend or find a new one among the grooms and ostlers and join that network of gossip from the horse world that was so much part of his life. There was another woman staying at the inn, which meant ladies and gentlemen could all, with propriety, dine together at the parlour table.
    We were on the road early, after a breakfast of good coffee and yesterday’s bread. The horses were fresh and rested. Senator was already responding to Amos’s firm but gentle treatment and managed to react to oncoming carriages with no more than a rolling eye and an attempt to sidestep. This meant that Amos and I