A race of dancing masters

Finished Gallows Thief by Bernard Cornwell. Excellent historical murder mystery. Should have been a series but apparently there is only the one. From the blurb.

The year is 1820. Rider Sandman, a hero of Waterloo, returns to London to wed his fiance. But instead of settling down to fame and glory, he finds himself penniless in a country where high unemployment and social unrest rage, and where men, innocent or guilty, are hanged for the merest of crimes.

When he's offered a job as private investigator to re-open the case of a painter due to be hanged for a murder he didn't commit, Sandman readily accepts, as much for the money as for a chance to see justice done in a country gone to ruins.

Soon, however, he's mired in a grisly murder plot that keeps thickening. Sandman makes his way through gentlemen's clubs and shady taverns, aristocratic mansions, and fashionable painters' studios determined to rescue the innocent young man from the rope. But someone doesn't want the truth revealed.

As usual with Cornwell, excellent on plot, very good on descriptive detail, pretty good with character development. Very evocative of 1820 London.

The protagonist Sandman is interviewing the Earl of Avebury who is monomaniacally focused instead on hearing an account from Sandman of his experiences at Waterloo. In America, we hardly focus on the Napoleonic wars but even in Europe they seem in many respects to have dropped over the memory horizon even though many if not most international issues today are either mirrors of what happened then or are residual waves from that mighty global conflict.

Sandman looked at the model. It was impressive, comprehensive, and all wrong. It was too clean for a start. Even in the morning, before the French attacked, everyone was filthy, because on the previous day, most of the army had slogged back from Quatre Bras through quagmires of mud and then they had spent the night in the open under successive cloudbursts. Sandman remembered the thunder and the lightning whiplashing the far ridge and the terror when some cavalry horses broke free in the night and galloped among the sodden troops.

“So why did Bonaparte lose?” the Earl demanded querulously.

“Because he allowed his cavalry to fight unsupported by foot or artillery,” Sandman said shortly. “And might I ask your lordship what happened to the servants from the house in Mount Street?”

“So why did he commit his cavalry when he did, eh? Tell me that?”

“It was a mistake, my lord, even the best generals make them. Did the servants come back here?”

The Earl petulantly slapped the wicker arms of his chair. “Bonaparte didn’t make futile mistakes! The man might be scum, but he’s clever scum. So why?”

Sandman sighed. “Our line had been thinned, we were on the reverse slope of the hill, and it must have seemed, from their side of the valley, that we were beaten.”

“Beaten?” The Earl leaped on that word.

“I doubt we were even visible,” Sandman said. “The Duke had ordered the men to lie down, so from the French viewpoint, it must have looked as if we just vanished. The French saw an empty ridge, they doubtless saw our wounded retreating into the forest behind, and they must have thought we were all retreating, so they charged. My lord, tell me what happened to your wife’s servants.”

“Wife? I don’t have a wife. Maddox!”

“My lord?” The servant who had let Sandman into the house stepped forward.

“The cold chicken, I think, and some champagne,” the Earl demanded, then scowled at Sandman. “Were you wounded?”

“No, my lord.”

“So you were there when the Imperial Guard attacked?”

“I was there, my lord, from the guns that signaled the first French assault to the very last shot of the day.”

The Earl seemed to shudder. “I hate the French,” he said suddenly. “I detest them. A race of dancing masters, and we brought glory on ourselves at Waterloo, Captain, glory!”

Sandman wondered what glory came from defeating dancing masters, but said nothing. He had met other men like the Earl, men who were obsessed by Waterloo and who wanted to know every remembered minute of the battle, men who could not hear enough tales from that awful day, and all of those men, Sandman knew, had one thing in common: none had been there. Yet they revered that day, thinking it the supreme moment of their lives and of Britain’s history. Indeed, for some it seemed as though history itself had come to its end on June 18, 1815, and that the world would never again see a rivalry to match that of Britain and France. That rivalry had given meaning to a whole generation, it had burned the globe, matching fleets and armies in Asia, America, and Europe, and now it was all gone and there was only dullness in its place, and for the Earl of Avebury, as for so many others, that dullness could only be driven away by reliving the rivalry. “So tell me,” the Earl said, “how many times the French cavalry charged.”

I enjoy picking up new knowledge as an incidental to a good murder mystery. The mechanics of a theatrical production in 1820 -

A cheer sounded as boys went around the theater extinguishing the lamps. The musicians gave a last tentative squeak, then waited for the conductor’s baton to fall. Some of the audience in the pit began to whistle as a demand for the curtains to part. Most of the sceneshifting was done by sailors, men accustomed to ropes and heights, and just as at sea, some of the signals were given by whistles and the audience’s whistling betrayed their impatience, but the curtain stayed obstinately shut. More lamps were extinguished, then the big reflective lanterns at the edges of the stage were unmasked, the drummer gave a portentous roll, and a player in a swathing cloak leaped from between the curtains to recite the prologue on the stage’s wide apron.