by C. S. Harris
“When was this?”
“I dunno. Maybe a month or so after the King’s Arms killings.”
“And in all that time, no one had thought to search the room of the man they’d decided was the murderer?”
“No. Why would they?”
Why, indeed? thought Sebastian.
“They emptied this here privy, though,” said Vermilloe, climbing down to grab one of the new boards he had lying ready.
“Oh? And what did they find?”
“A pair of old blue seamen’s trousers.”
“They’d been shoved down into the privy?”
“They had. Covered in bloodstains, they were, too. Or leastways, it looked like bloodstains once the shit was washed off them.”
“What size man would they have fit?”
Vermilloe looked at him blankly. “Not sure they ever figured that out. My Sarah always contended they couldn’t have belonged to Williams—said he was such a fastidious fellow that he’d never wear anything so shabby. But now I ask you, who wears their best clothes to go committing murder? Hmm? You tell me that.”
Sebastian watched the man step back up onto his stool with the board and a hammer in one hand. “So what did this knife look like?”
Vermilloe positioned the board in place and fumbled in his pocket for a nail. “Fancy thing, it was. French clasp knife with an ivory handle and a blade at least six inches long.”
Sebastian waited while he hammered in his nail, then said, “How sharp was this knife?”
“Pretty sharp.” Vermilloe fumbled for another nail.
“It wasn’t rusted after lying there for a month covered in blood?”
“Not so much, no.”
“And Jack Harrison swore it had belonged to Williams?”
“He did.” Vermilloe pounded in the second nail. “Like I said, he’d described it before the constables found it in the closet.”
“Perhaps because he put it there?” suggested Sebastian. “Thirty pounds strikes me as a powerful incentive for a man to become inventive.”
Vermilloe paused, his face scrunching up. Then he climbed down for a second board.
Sebastian said, “According to your wife, Williams didn’t get along well with either of his roommates.”
“Nope,” said Vermilloe, stepping back up. “There was a heap of sailors resented him because of what happened on the Roxburgh Castle.”
“Oh? Why was that?”
“There was a mutiny on that ship, you know, off Surinam. Left some bad blood.”
“Williams was involved in this mutiny?”
“He was.”
“Along with the man they call Long Billy Ablass?”
Vermilloe held the second board in place. It was too long, but he simply fished another nail out of his pocket and hammered it in anyway. “That’s right. Ablass was the ringleader. He and Hart and some of the others got in trouble for it, but not Williams.”
“Hart? You mean Cornelius Hart?”
“Aye.”
“He was on the Roxburgh Castle when the crew mutinied?”
“Aye.”
“So why didn’t John Williams get in trouble?”
“Guess they reckoned he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Long Billy was always sorely aggrieved by it, the way Johnny got off so light.” He hammered in a second nail, then paused as if choosing his words before saying, “Heard something interesting about Long Billy the other day.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
The innkeeper climbed back down and lowered his voice. “Folks around here are pretty scared of Ablass, you know. He’s an ugly customer. Very ugly customer.”
“Not to mention large.”
Vermilloe nodded. “Very large.”
Sebastian waited, then, when the man hesitated, said, “What did you hear?”
Vermilloe dropped his voice to a whisper. “Heard he was arguing with Pym. Right before Pym was killed, this was.”
Sebastian nodded. “I’ve heard that.”
Vermilloe’s face fell. “Did you hear what the argument was about?”
“No.”
Vermilloe’s lips twitched into a smile, quickly hidden. “The person I heard this from—”
“Who was that?”
“Never you mind. She don’t want it getting back to Ablass, you see? She didn’t hear everything, but she heard enough to get the gist of what was going on.”
“Oh? And what was ‘going on’?”
“Ablass was trying to blackmail Pym, that’s what!” He said it dramatically, as if delivering a revelation before an audience.
Sebastian kept his voice level. “About what?”
Vermilloe’s face fell again. “I told you, she couldn’t hear that. But it makes you think, don’t it?”
“Think what?”
“Why, that it must’ve been Ablass who killed Pym, of course.”
Sebastian studied the innkeeper’s narrow, sharp-featured face. “Generally it’s the person being blackmailed who kills his blackmailer, not the other way around.”
“Maybe. But Long Billy’s got a temper, he has. Reckon he could’ve killed Pym in a rage over being told no.” Vermilloe licked his lips. “If it turns out Ablass is the killer, you will remember who told you this when it comes time to divide up the reward money, won’t you?”
“Is that what this is? An attempt to earn some more reward money?”
“What?” Vermilloe jerked his head back as if he’d been slapped. “No! Doing my duty, I am, like a proper Englishman.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Hadn’t heard about it then.”
“You’re certain your friend didn’t hear anything else?”
“Nothing she told me about, leastways.”
“Perhaps you could persuade her to remember more,” said Sebastian.
“I can try.”
“You do that.” He started to turn away, then paused. “Was Billy Ablass staying here at the time of the Ratcliffe Highway murders?”
Vermilloe shook his head. “He had a room with some woman over in Shadwell. She’s the one gave him his alibis both nights, although no one believed her.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“Alice something. Doesn’t matter; she’s dead now.”
“Since when?”
“Nearly three years. Wasn’t too long after the Ratcliffe Highway killings they found her. Maybe a month or two after everything settle down.”
“Oh? How did she die? A knife in the back?”
Vermilloe shook his head. “Strangled, she was.”
“You seem to have a lot of murders around here.”
“Only in the last three years or so,” said Vermilloe, and nothing in his face revealed any awareness of the implications of what he’d just said.
Chapter 43
Hero waited at the end of Hermitage Street, near a shop with a new bay window displaying brass sextants, compasses, and quadrants. The brisk wind off the river flapped an awning overhead and tugged at the brim of her midnight blue military-styled hat. It was still only midafternoon, but the public house across the way—a mean, low-roofed establishment with a peeling sign that proclaimed it the Jolly Tar—was already spilling drunken laughter and staggering seamen into the narrow, teeming street. A gray-and-pink parrot in a wooden cage hung before the pawnshop next door, the wind ruffling its feathers as it squawked, “Ahoy, mate! Fifty lashes! Fifty lashes!”
“You poor thing,” said Hero, watching the bird shift on its perch and bob its head up and down. “You were born to fly free through some warm, sweetly scented jungle, and they bring you to . . . this.”
She sucked in a deep breath heavy with the smell of rum and dead fish, her gaze searching the faces of the men and women pushing past�
�laundresses, butchers in bloodstained smocks, laborers with their skin dyed blue by indigo. All around her, ropes splashed; saws grated; men shouted; goats bleated. And from farther up the hill came the striking of the church bell.
Three o’clock. She’d arrived early and been here nearly two hours.
“Blast,” she said softly under her breath. “Come on, Molly. Where are you?”
* * *
Molly never came.
Several hours later, dressed now in an elegant afternoon gown of heavy peach silk with chiné satin stripes, Hero arrived at her father’s town house in Berkeley Square. A light rain had begun to fall, tapping on the leaves in the square and filling the air with the smell of wet pavement.
“Good afternoon, Grisham,” she said with a smile when the butler opened the door for her.
He was a trim, dignified man somewhere in his fifties, with silver-gray hair and an awe-inspiringly wooden countenance. But he allowed himself a faint smile at the sight of Hero. “Good afternoon, my lady,” he said with a bow. “Mrs. Hart-Davis is awaiting you in the drawing room.”
“And Papa?” asked Hero, handing him her wet umbrella and shaking out her skirts.
“Is expected at any moment, my lady.”
“Ah.”
As she climbed the stairs, Hero found herself noticing the new Persian carpet runner, the unfamiliar gold-framed landscapes on the landing. She’d called this house home for twenty-five years, but the sense of belonging here was slipping away from her. And she knew it had little to do with Persian carpets or Turner landscapes.
She found Victoria perched on one of the window seats overlooking the square and working on an embroidery frame. At the sight of Hero, she set her embroidery aside and came forward with both hands outstretched. “Hero. I’m so glad you could come. Jarvis promises he’ll join us shortly, and I told him I intend to keep him to his word.”
Barely five feet tall and delicately built, Victoria always made Hero feel like a hulking giant. She caught her cousin’s hands and stooped awkwardly to kiss her cheek, then let Victoria draw her to the chairs by the fire.
“Dreadful day, is it not?” said Victoria. “I know it’s October, but it’s too early for winter, wouldn’t you say?”
“At least it’s not snowing. Yet.”
Victoria let out a delighted peal of laughter. “Oh, hush! Don’t even think it.”
Raised in India the daughter of an officer in the East India Company, she’d lost her first husband to a fever in Maharashtra and the second to a French bullet before the walls of San Sebastián in Spain. But she was past the prescribed year of formal mourning and now wore a simple gown of corded muslin with a lilac satin shawl that accentuated the lovely blue of her eyes. She was an accomplished harpist and a brutal chess player, spoke French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Urdu, and Farsi, and could read Greek and Latin as well as any Oxford don. Yet she hid it all behind a gay bubble of small talk and frothy laughter that was always pitch-perfect and, Hero suspected, utterly, utterly false.
Hero herself had always been the kind of woman who refused to hide either her intelligence or her accomplishments behind the mask of frailty their society expected of her sex. And it disconcerted her to realize that, despite her best intentions, a part of her both scorned and envied this woman.
In some ways she understood Jarvis’s increasingly obvious infatuation with the pretty young widow, for his taste ran toward petite, fair-haired women. But he’d always claimed to have no use for either opinioned females or what he called overeducated bluestockings. And as much as Victoria hid her intelligence and steely strength from the world, she had never made any attempt to misrepresent herself in that way to Jarvis. Somehow, Hero’s cousin had known Hero’s father better than Hero did herself, and that troubled her more than anything.
“He’s closeted with a courier from Castlereagh,” Victoria was saying. And something about her tone told Hero her cousin was more aware of the progress being made by Britain’s diplomatic mission in Vienna than anyone besides Jarvis and the foreign minister himself.
“Have they formally convened yet?”
“Not yet, but it won’t be long now. Seems everyone who is anyone is in either Vienna or Paris these days. Did you hear Kat Boleyn is abandoning us to spend the season appearing in Paris? I fear London theater will be sadly flat without her, don’t you?”
Kat Boleyn wasn’t simply the most celebrated actress of London’s stage; she’d also at one time been Devlin’s lover, and surely this astute, well-informed woman must know that. Hero searched her cousin’s pleasantly smiling face, looking for a hint of malice, but found none.
“Undoubtedly,” said Hero, keeping her own voice light. “Even Devlin’s aunt Henrietta is making plans to visit Paris next month. And she always swore she’d never travel again.”
Victoria laughed. Then her amusement faded and she tilted her head to one side, her normally smooth forehead puckering with a frown of concern. “Jarvis told me about last night’s attack. How absolutely ghastly!”
“It was, yes,” said Hero. “One presumes if Jarvis knew anything, he would have told Devlin?”
Victoria’s eyes widened. “Good heavens, how can you think otherwise?”
A heavy tread sounded on the stairs, saving Hero from having to answer. A moment later, Jarvis himself entered the room. He went to stand behind Victoria’s chair, his big hands resting on her frail shoulders, his gaze meeting his daughter’s.
“So? Has she told you?” he said to Hero with a smile she’d never seen before.
“Tell me what?” Hero somehow managed to say, although her throat felt as if it were closing.
Victoria smiled up at him and reached to lay one of her soft white hands over his. “Not yet.”
Then she turned to Hero and said, “Jarvis has asked me to become his wife.”
Chapter 44
That night, Hero stood at the bedroom window overlooking the wet, lamplit street below. A hard rain had begun to fall just after sunset, driven by a gusty wind that sent raindrops streaming down the windowpanes in quick flashing rivulets that caught the light from the oil lamps below. She was still trying to come to terms with what she’d learned that afternoon at Berkeley Square, but she wasn’t making much progress.
“You suspected it was going to happen,” said Devlin, coming up behind her to slip his arms around her waist and hold her close.
“Yes,” she said, her gaze meeting his in their reflection in the window. She rested her hands on his at her waist. “But that doesn’t make it any easier.”
“No. I can see that.”
She tipped her head back against his. “I keep telling myself that Cousin Victoria obviously makes Jarvis happy, so I should be happy for him—happy for them both. But it’s not working, and I have the most lowering reflection that I may not be a very nice person.”
He gave a soft laugh and pressed a kiss against the side of her head. “I think it’s because you love him and you don’t trust her. But if any man can take care of himself, it’s Jarvis.”
“I suppose. It’s just . . .” She let her voice trail away and shook her head. After a moment, she said, “I’m thinking I might go down to Hermitage Street in Wapping again tomorrow, when I can stay longer. Perhaps Molly couldn’t come today for some reason. Or perhaps she was too frightened.”
“And you think she might work up her courage by tomorrow? I suppose it’s possible.”
She watched a gentleman’s carriage dash up the street, the spinning wheels throwing up a fine spray that caught the golden lamplight and shimmered against the blackness of the rain-drenched night. She thought about the unknown girl, Molly; about what she might have seen and the danger she might not even know she was in. “Do you think Vermilloe was telling the truth? What he told you about Ablass and Pym, I mean.”
He touched the backs of his fingers to her cheek in
a light caress. “I don’t know. I’m inclined not to believe a word the man says. But Timothy Marr’s brother also mentioned seeing Ablass and Pym together, so perhaps there’s something to it after all.”
“Seems an oddly public spot to choose to approach your local magistrate for blackmail.”
She felt Devlin’s breath flutter the curls beside her cheek. “You have a point there. It also begs the question, blackmail for what? For paying Ablass to murder John Williams in his cell? Or for paying the two of them to murder seven men, women, and children for reasons I can’t begin to imagine?”
“Dear Lord. You think that could be true?”
“That Pym and Cockerwell were behind the Ratcliffe Highway murders? I haven’t found anything to suggest it. But I think someone was directing those killers. I’m finding it more and more difficult to believe that two or three men invaded those homes simply to indulge a desire to kill. And they obviously weren’t there to steal.”
“They did take Old John’s watch.”
“Did they? It was the only thing said to be missing from either house. And there were so many people swarming over that tavern both the night of the killings and in the days afterward that anyone could have taken it.”
She turned to face him. “But why would Pym and Cockerwell want to slaughter two entire families?”
He gave a faint shake of his head. “I’ve no idea. But the deaths of Ian Ryker’s father and that member of Parliament who was threatening to investigate corruption in the East End suggest they weren’t above murder. And men like that don’t do their own killing.”
The wind gusted up harder, peppering the window before them with rain. She said, “So why the differences in the manner of death? Why stab some victims in the back and not the others?”
“Well, a knife in the back is quick, quiet, and relatively easy compared to bashing someone’s brains out and slitting their throat from ear to ear. It could simply be a matter of time and opportunity, although that wouldn’t entirely explain it, either. Whoever killed Pym and Cockerwell wanted us to remember the Ratcliffe Highway murders. Maybe it’s someone’s way of saying, ‘Look at these men. They were responsible.’”