Widow's Welcome

by D. K. Fields

Cora put back the woman’s hood, her thin hope of staying hidden. ‘Neither of you are ’tellers now.’

  Fourteen

  She deserved this. That was what she kept telling herself every time the gig stopped and she briefly considered getting out before she reached the Oak. She deserved this and, after everything that had happened, she deserved a lot more besides.

  It was nearing midnight by the time she got there but the streets were still busy, what with it being a warm night. The driver had to crack his whip more than once when a drunkard, Heckling or otherwise, stumbled too close to the horse. She couldn’t shake the feeling she was being watched – Ento’s killer was out there still. Was it the drunkard in the road, the whore fanning herself in a doorway?

  She told herself it was what she’d seen at Burlington that was making her think this way. That and the crowds. It wasn’t only the stuffy air that had driven all and sundry out of their homes and into the streets of Fenest: it was the election. The city was full to bursting. More than usual for the election? It was hard to be sure. But she saw it everywhere she went, this over-fullness – coaches making slower progress because of the bodies in the road, queues in the shops. Even at Burlington, with the horrors there, people from afar had crowded the place. There was no escaping it, and the Oak was no different.

  She headed straight for the ring.

  Three fights came and went, and Cora kept her pennies in her pockets. She hadn’t been paying attention to form and didn’t know who was presenting what these days. It didn’t take long to lose that understanding. It took much longer to get it back. But when a breeder’s name she recognised came up, and the numbers looked right to take some out-of-towners’ money, she placed a few bets. Nothing big. Just to get the feeling again. The hooded cockerels were brought in.

  The first two she had money on were quick, one-sided affairs. The victorious birds were lauded by winners and losers alike – ringside was always a place that enjoyed dominance. Cora was wrong about one of the fights but had hedged her numbers so she still came out on top.

  The last of her bets was with spurs. Nasty one, too, with well-matched birds. The crowd cheered all the louder in their ignorance. The breeders weren’t cheering so much. They’d make their money but even the winner of this kind of fight was not long for this world. Finally, a blood-splattered bird, swaying on its clawed feet, crowed over the fallen. Cora won two marks. She didn’t stay for more.

  Three flights of stairs up, she knocked on another door – softly this time. A girl in her undergarments, eyes downcast, welcomed her to Beulah’s pleasure house, where delights untold await, no desire too—

  ‘Hush now, girlie, I’ve been here before,’ Cora said.

  ‘Can I help you with anyone in particular?’

  ‘I’d heard his name was Lucaszia.’

  ‘Luca is popular tonight. Could I suggest—’

  ‘Tell him I want no one in the room when I enter, and the bedsheets clean. Actually clean.’

  Cora slumped onto one of the sofas, which was mostly cushions. She tossed a few aside to get comfortable. The lounge was opulent, in a tasteless way – everything muted and dark, reds and purples, no surface untouched by lace or silk. Even the walls bulged with hangings.

  She wanted to roll a smoke but couldn’t find her bindle tin. She patted down her trouser pockets and then went to look in her coat.

  Her coat wasn’t there.

  Her hand froze, mid-air, and she remembered the cart, the rolls of bodies, the ash of Burlington Palace. The thickness on the breeze. She’d thrown her coat on that cart because of the plague; the young man in the tent had touched her, Black Jefferey had touched her.

  Despite the warmth of the evening and the heat of the bodies packed into the betting ring beneath the whorehouse, Cora felt cold. Without her coat she was exposed, and that wasn’t a good feeling. Not in her line of work. She folded her arms across her chest. That coat had been with her since she’d made detective. It carried the scars and the stains of all the cases before this one. But this case, Ento’s death, was different to those others. It was the election, it was the Chambers, it was plague. The boy at Burlington had made the choice for her, but it was the right one, because without the coat she felt lighter, somehow. It wasn’t just losing the weight of the cloth. It was about not hiding beneath it.

  But she was still without smokes; when she’d thrown away her coat she’d also thrown away her bindle tin, leaf and all. She coughed to clear her throat but couldn’t get rid of the memory of that smell. Of that place.

  She was going to give up the leaf. After Burlington, it didn’t feel like she had much choice in that matter either. She fussed with the sofa cushions some more to distract herself, and she waited. At last, the girl came to summon her.

  Luca’s room was on the top floor. The girl opened the door for Cora and then left. Cora vaguely recognised the room from years ago – well before Luca’s time. There was no one else inside, as she’d demanded. The bed was in the corner, away from the eaves, with a lamp set to low beside it. She pulled off the covers and ran a hand over the sheet. Dry, and none of the scurf or roughness that spoke of use. None of that, just the feeling of her hard, worn hands on starched cotton.

  She checked over the room, like she did every time she slept in a bed that wasn’t her own, but this time she was more thorough: under the bed, behind the privy screen and in the wardrobe. She opened every drawer and lifted out the clothes, jewellery and the like. There was nothing to worry her. Nothing sharp – not even a razor or a letter opener. No secret pots of powder or droppers full of who-knew-what. None of the kinds of things people liked to hit each other over the head with – no vases, mantel clocks or plant pots. If the boy wanted to hit her with a table, or the short bath tub, so be it.

  There was a soft knock at the door, and he came in.

  ‘Lock it,’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t—’

  ‘Yes, it does. And don’t worry, it’s for me, not you.’ The feeling she’d had earlier, of being watched, was still with her.

  He twisted the handle twice over and a click echoed in the room.

  He waited there, letting her look at him. He was wearing a simple white shirt and breeches. None of the flounce and flair she saw at the ringside. Beulah’s hand was evident in that – as it was in the preparation of the room. She knew what Cora wanted.

  Cora went over to him. He smelled of rose water. She ran her fingers through his sandy hair, then felt behind his ear. He, too, was clean.

  She pulled his shirt over his head. His chest was well-defined and muscular, but not overly so. He wasn’t a heavy-set boy; not a boy who’d worked a plough or loaded a barge. He had a body for use between the bedsheets. His skin was perfect. Not a mark or blemish, and no ink.

  She stepped back and sighed.

  ‘Those too,’ she said, gesturing to his breeches.

  He undid the button and let them fall to the floor. Naked, standing there, prick to the wind, without a hint of self-consciousness.

  ‘Turn around,’ she said.

  Hairless back, taut buttocks. No ink.

  ‘You’ll sleep facing the wall.’

  He nodded.

  ‘You don’t snore, do you, Luca?’

  ‘No, Detective.’

  ‘Good. Now, get into bed.’

  She undressed down to her undergarments, her trousers and shirt a pile on the floor, and joined him.

  As she pulled up the cover she found herself thinking of Finnuc. A Casker, no longer safe on the streets of Fenest – and he had the cut to prove it. She hoped he was doing the sensible thing and staying at home, wherever that was. She couldn’t even send him a note.

  With her back to Luca, Cora shifted until she touched him: his shoulders, the base of his back, the balls of his feet against her calves. She felt his warmth – he roared like a fire. For the first time in days, weeks maybe, she relaxed. It all drained out of her, from her muscles and her nerves and her very bones, soothed away by
the heat of a young man.

  She slept soundly enough to interest the Widow.

  Fifteen

  Cora left before anyone else was up. Nothing so depressing as a whorehouse in the first light of day – the harshest light for a place that did its business in the borrowed kindness of night time. The boy, Lucaszia, mumbled something as she pulled on her clothes, then shrugged the bedclothes over his head. She left him some pennies by the door. For his purse, not Beulah’s.

  It wasn’t just the staleness of early morning in a whorehouse that made Cora get going. She wanted to be across town before the streets became too crowded. She didn’t remember having to do that in other elections, busy as they were.

  The air had a chill she felt sharply without her coat, but she hurried along to warm herself up. The coat was gone. She was facing the day without it.

  Cora caught a gig and settled in for the journey across to Derringate, the part of the city where Nicholas Ento had lodged. She went to roll a bindleleaf before remembering she had given it up. She could still taste the ash of Burlington Palace, as if it were caught between her teeth. This case was bad enough and now it was taking away the few pleasures she had left. To distract herself from the lack of smokes, she picked up the pennysheets left on the floor of the gig. They were yesterday’s, but better than nothing, even if one of them was The Daily Tales.

  If she’d wanted to forget about what she’d seen at Burlington, the ’sheets weren’t the place to go. The Daily Tales had little else to report. The cause of the plague was clear, said the unnamed writer: those coming to the city from outside its gates were to blame. A certain kind of person, for which Cora read ‘poor’ and ‘southern’. The ’sheet suggested a more selective entry policy was needed for future elections, ‘to protect the safety of Fenest’.

  Cora scrunched the sheet into a ball and threw it over the gig’s side. With any luck another gig would soon trample the ’sheet and its message into the muck; little good it would do in stopping the spread of such ideas. Even now, over breakfasts and first smokes, there would be people in Fenest saying to one another that southerners brought disease, because they were poor, because they were dirty, and so it only made sense to keep those people out… Her parents would have been loud in saying such things. Ruth wouldn’t have though. Cora picked up the other ’sheet from the floor.

  The Fenestiran Times took a different view of the plague. What could be more certain than sickness if people were left with nowhere to stay? The plague at Burlington was the result of the city’s neglect, not a fact of southerners being where they shouldn’t. That led neatly to the Perlish and their failure to invest in necessary things like new houses, more water pumps, drains. Which led back to the election. Like always.

  And back to Ento’s death too. The plague had been foretold by the Caskers in their election story, which meant it had to be connected to the murder somehow. If she could find the killer, she could find answers about the sickness – what it meant beyond people dying just in Fenest. Audience knew if that would put an end to pennysheet guesswork.

  The gig came to a stop and the driver called down: they’d reached Derringate.

  *

  Cora walked the last part of her journey, to Teilo Street where Ento had lodged. The ’sheets talk of plague had reminded her too much of Burlington and she wanted to clear her head.

  Derringate was a nice part of the city. A quiet, respectable part. Fresh paint everywhere, even on the fences and iron railings. Cora reached the lodging house in Teilo Street and knocked. The paint on the door appeared new; no scuffs along the bottom, no dust or grime in the panel corners. A family was taking advantage of the warm spring morning on the green. Cora wondered why the parents weren’t at work or the children in school. Then she realised she had no idea what day it was.

  She turned back to the door, ready to knock again, but there was an elderly woman standing there tapping a fan in her hand.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mrs Kettleby?’ Cora said, taking out her badge.

  The woman peered closely at it. She was smartly dressed in a dark dress and silver graced her ears and wrists. There were lines at the edges of her eyes, and her lips seemed at their ease when pursed.

  ‘I told the girl everything I know about Nicholas Ento, Detective Gorderheim.’

  ‘I thought you might have remembered something else since then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then maybe you’d indulge me,’ Cora said, ‘and talk me through what you saw the night before Ento was found dead.’ She rummaged in her pockets for her notebook. ‘You know these youngsters, rushing all the time, forgetting all the important things.’

  Kettleby raised a plucked eyebrow at that. ‘All right, Detective, you can come in. But wipe your feet.’

  Cora did, noting the new carpet in the hallway and on the stairs beyond. ‘Business is good then, Mrs Kettleby?’

  ‘The election,’ she said with a lazy wave of her fan, as if those two words could account for everything and anything. These days, Cora was inclined to agree.

  The thin woman led them into a small sitting room at the front of the house. Nicely done, with soft leather seats each with their own side table and a ready stack of pennysheets – that morning’s editions.

  ‘So,’ Cora said, ‘why don’t you tell me about your house guest? About Nicholas Ento.’

  Mrs Kettleby looked hard at Cora, but instead of objecting she gestured for her to take a seat, and then sat down opposite.

  ‘I didn’t see much of the man. He was up early for his… wanderings. I suppose they’re all like that.’

  ‘You mean the Wayward? So I’m told. Did he ever say where he went on those trips?’

  ‘Hardly. I dare say I would rather not know. Though he did seem to favour the Seats.’

  ‘Really? Whose?’ Cora said.

  ‘The Commoner and the Widow.’

  The first was to be expected, Cora thought, given why Ento had come to Fenest: the Commoner would have been sympathetic to his task as the Wayward storyteller. But the Widow? Had Ento feared for his life?

  Mrs Kettleby flicked open her fan which, to Cora’s surprise, was rather lurid. ‘My husband likes to travel,’ she said by way of explanation. The lithe figures did have an exotic look about them.

  ‘Did Ento ever discuss his reasons for coming to Fenest?’ Cora said.

  ‘Detective Gorderheim, this is a respectable lodging house. I do not pry into the affairs of my guests.’

  If that was to be believed, it made her unique among landladies across the Union. Cora cleared her throat.

  ‘Of course,’ Mrs Kettleby said, ‘I was as shocked as everyone else when I heard he was a storyteller. And the awful things in the pennysheets. His mouth—’

  ‘I gather from Constable Jenkins that you saw Ento leave the house that night. The night before we found him.’

  ‘I was reading the evening editions in here, as I do most nights before bed. Sometimes the guests join me but that night I was alone. I heard a coach draw up outside.’

  ‘Do you know what time that was?’

  ‘A quarter past midnight. I’d heard the clock chime.’

  ‘And then what happened?’ Cora said.

  ‘Well, nothing. Not right away, which I thought quite strange. I didn’t hear the door of the coach – no one stepping out or getting inside. And then Mr Ento came hurrying down the stairs.’

  ‘Hurrying?’

  ‘Still putting on his jacket. Ridiculous man – his handkerchief was flailing about like a pennant in a squall. He didn’t even stop to bid me goodnight.’

  ‘He didn’t see you?’

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ Mrs Kettleby said. ‘He usually told me when he would return. I deadbolt the door at night, you see.’

  ‘So he regularly went out late?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say regularly, but yes, he was out from time to time. I assumed he found another, warmer bed on those occasions.’

  Mrs Kettleby might
not be one for prying, but she was certainly one for assumptions. It rankled some part of Cora that landladies’ gossip was right more often than not, but this wasn’t the first time she’d used such a source.

  So, Ento had left the boarding house knowing full well that Mrs Kettleby deadbolted the door. That went some way to corroborate Nullan’s story of a night planned with Ento at Corner House.

  ‘You looked out to see the coach, though?’ Cora asked.

  ‘Well of course I did! Coming that late, stopping right outside the house.’ Mrs Kettleby fanned herself. ‘I knew my neighbours would be asking about it in the morning.’

  ‘Did you notice anything particular about it?’ Cora said.

  ‘I could barely see the blasted thing. Couldn’t even tell you how many horses it had.’

  ‘But you said it drew up right outside.’

  ‘It was between the lamps,’ Mrs Kettleby said.

  Cora went to the window and shoved aside the thick lace curtains. There was a street lamp maybe twenty paces off. She looked in the other direction and spied a second lamp, but that was even further away.

  ‘Your own light,’ she said, ‘above the front door. That was out by the time Ento left?’

  Without needing to turn around she knew Mrs Kettleby was bristling; Cora could hear it in the creak of the leather chair.

  ‘Business isn’t so good I burn oil all night.’

  ‘And the coach – none of its lamps were lit?’

  ‘Not inside or out.’

  That was unusual for hired coaches. Cora turned to face the landlady, to be certain of her understanding.

  ‘No lamps, even when Ento got in?’

  ‘That is correct, Detective.’

  ‘But you did see Nicholas Ento get inside the coach?’

  ‘Yes, and before you ask, I know it was a coach and not something smaller. That girl you sent round kept asking that question – so often I wondered if she was hard of hearing.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cora said, ‘I’ve wondered about that myself.’

  *

  Cora left the lodging house and stepped back into quiet, leafy Teilo Street in Derringate where Nicholas Ento had begun a journey he would never return from. Now she needed to find a coach herself.