Free Death at Rottingdean by Robin Paige Page A

Higgs’s cottage was on the mains that came in from Brighton, so he wouldn’t have to haul water all the way from the village tap. “Is that all?”
    â€œUntil lunch, when I’ll need six more buckets.” Mrs. Higgs tore pieces of bread into a saucer of milk for the calico cat. “Off wi’ ye, now. I’ve a big laundry t’do today.”
    Patrick didn’t need any special urging. The hours since the body had been towed in had been uncomfortable ones, and he had several times wished that he’d not told Mr. Kipling what he had seen. Mr. Kipling had required him to tell the man in the brown beard—Lord Charles Sheridan—and if Constable Woodhouse hadn’t proved himself a pigheaded fool, he might have been required to tell him, as well. And that would certainly have created difficulties, for the constable was not to be trusted. In the event, he was glad that Mr. Kipling had gotten annoyed and decided to let dundering old Woodhead discover his own clues.
    Having dutifully delivered six buckets of water and seven baskets of dirty laundry, Patrick was free for his chief employment, at the Hawkham Stable behind North End House. He worked there for Harry Tudwell four hours each morning and five each afternoon, and paid half his earnings to Mrs. Higgs against the delinquent board bill. What Mrs. Higgs did not know, however, was that Harry Tudwell often employed Patrick on other errands in the late evenings, when the boy was supposed to be abed, and that Patrick hid those secret shillings under a stone in the abandoned windmill at the top of Beacon Hill. In the event his father was never heard from again—which was quite likely, in Patrick’s estimation—those shillings would be the only key to his future.
    Patrick’s work at the Hawkham Stables was far more interesting than his work in the classroom. The stables had been built in the 1860’s by a wealthy lord who raced at White Hawk Down, a little way to the west and north. Since then, they had passed to a consortium of owners, most of them residents of Brighton, who raced at White Hawk and hunted with the Brookside Harriers under the direction of the well-known Rottingdean Master, Steyning Beard. This made for a continuous coming and going of gentlemen between Brighton and White Hawk and Hawkham and the kennel, and plenty of odd jobs for eager Rottingdean boys.
    The stables were built around three sides of a graveled yard, in the lee of Beacon Hill. On one side was the coach house, which now sheltered the rickety coaches that plied the Rottingdean-Brighton coach run. The other two sides were enclosed by stalls for fine horses, each stall equipped with an iron manger for grain, a hayrack on the wall, and a door opening into the brick-paved walkway. At one end of the walkway was the red-tiled tack room with its saddle racks and gear hanging on the wall, and next to that the chaff room with its lethal chaff-cutting machine—a vicious blade on a big wheel—which Patrick and the other stableboys treated with respect. Trusses of hay were stacked nearby and more could be pushed down through a trapdoor from the loft above, where the stableboys could be found taking their leisure on a lazy afternoon.
    At the other end of the walkway was the stablemaster’s office, with a scarred wooden table that served for a desk, a wooden chair, and windows from which Harry Tudwell, who had been stablemaster for over a decade, could oversee the gravel yard on the one side, the exercise paddock on the other, and the smithy beyond. The smell of Harry’s room was delectably compounded of tobacco, saddle soap, and metal polish, and on its wooden walls were hung framed newspaper clippings, including one that described the remarkable Derby of 1863, run in torrential rain and preceded by thirty-four false starts. The favored horse, Lord Clifden, slipped on an orange peel near the finish line, lost the race by a head, and