What the Devil Knows

by C. S. Harris

  “I’ve met them, yes.”

  “You knew they were forcing Tower Hamlet publicans to buy their ale and porter from either you or the Black Eagle?”

  Meux’s lips twitched. “I don’t know if I’d say the publicans are forced, exactly. They always have a choice.”

  “You mean, between selling your beer and closing?”

  Meux waved one hand in a gesture that took in the rows and rows of towering vats, the building’s twenty-five-foot-tall, thick brick walls, and heavy-beamed roof. “This is the future you’re looking at. Large companies backed by greater and greater concentrations of capital. We provide this Kingdom with economic stability, greater efficiency, and lower prices. What’s good for us is good for Britain, and the Regent and Parliament know it.”

  “If your prices are lower, why do you need to coerce publicans into buying your beer?”

  Meux’s smirk was still in place, but his eyes were narrowed and glittering. “Publicans in general are an ignorant lot, I’m afraid. They don’t always know what’s best for them.”

  “I see.” Sebastian watched a workman pause beside one of the casks’ massive valves. “Do you have any idea why someone would want to slit the throats of men such as Pym and Cockerwell?”

  “No, but I assume you’re looking for some disgruntled publican or other miscreant.” Meux studied Sebastian with a speculative expression animating his scrunched face. “Why are you involving yourself in this, my lord? I know you have something of a reputation for investigating murders, but Wapping is a tad out of your way, wouldn’t you say?”

  “A tad,” said Sebastian agreeably. “I’m curious: Given that you and the Black Eagle both make it a habit of coercing publicans into buying your beer, how do you decide which brewery gets which tavern?”

  Meux’s full cheeks had taken on a purplish hue. “We work it out.”

  “I see. Interesting.” Sebastian touched one hand to his hat. “Thank you for your time.”

  “Of course. Glad to be of assistance, my lord.”

  It was when Sebastian was walking back to where he’d left his curricle on Tottenham Court that he noticed the red-bodied barouche and magnificent team of bays drawn up nearby.

  “Did ye see ’im, then?” asked Tom as Sebastian hopped up to take his reins.

  “See whom?”

  “The cove what got out o’ that barouche. It was Sampson Buxton-Collins hisself!”

  Chapter 47

  Hero arrived at Hermitage Street in Wapping shortly before one o’clock that afternoon. The sky was still gloriously sunny, the cold bite of the wind lessening as the day wore on, the nearby Hermitage Basin crowded with ships moving in and out of the massive, high-walled rectangular dock that had eaten much of what was once Old Wapping.

  The pink-and-gray parrot was still in its cage outside the pawnbroker’s shop, and Hero studied it with a sad, heavy heart. “I wish I could do something, but I don’t think my big black cat would be pleased if I were to bring you home,” she said.

  The parrot bobbed up and down and squawked, “Furl the mainsail! Step lively there, lads!”

  Hero smiled, then felt her smile fade as she turned to let her gaze drift over the squalid street. She didn’t really expect the girl Molly to come today, but she felt she had to be here, just in case.

  She was dressed in one of her plainest gowns, a soft gray wool walking dress with a high collar and a bodice decorated only with narrow pin tucks. After some forty-five minutes, the gown’s high collar was beginning to feel too warm, and a pin holding her casquet hat in place was digging into her scalp unbearably. She was reaching up to reposition it when she became aware of a girl watching her from near the Jolly Tar on the far side of the traffic-choked street.

  The girl couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, with golden hair and a thin, wan face that might have been pretty if not stamped with the weight of habitual fear and despair and what looked very much like self-loathing. She wore a tattered yellow gown that hung on her underweight frame and a cheap chip hat that was beginning to unravel at the edge of the brim. Hero smiled at her, and the girl jerked her gaze away, her thin chest shuddering with a quickly indrawn breath.

  Terrified of scaring her away, Hero watched the girl, unsure of what to do next. Stay here and wait for her to hopefully get up the courage to approach her? Walk across the street herself before the girl lost her nerve completely and left? Impossible to know which would work and which would be a disaster.

  But after another ten minutes, Hero came to the conclusion the girl was never going to summon up the resolve necessary to come any closer. So with her features carefully schooled into a pleasant, friendly expression, her gaze not on the girl but on a point some feet over her head, Hero started across the street.

  The girl stiffened.

  Don’t run. Hero repeated the thought over and over again as if she could somehow will the girl to trust her. I’m not going to hurt you. Please don’t run.

  By the time Hero stepped up onto the opposite pavement, the girl was trembling, her hands fisted in the skirt of her gown, ready to bolt.

  “Please don’t be afraid,” said Hero, her voice soft and low. “You’re Molly?”

  The girl hesitated, then nodded. A faint bruise in the shape of a hand showed on her white cheek where someone had obviously slapped her hard—someone with a small hand.

  Hero said, “Letitia told you about me?”

  “Her name’s not really Letitia,” said Molly. “It’s Anne.”

  And is your name really Molly? Hero wondered. But what she said was, “I think ‘Letitia’ suits her much better, wouldn’t you say? ‘Anne’ is so staid and commonplace—everything Letitia most definitely is not.”

  She was rewarded with a faint gleam of amusement in the girl’s soft blue eyes—amusement that faded to wistfulness. “I wish I could be more like her.”

  “How long have you been on the streets?”

  “Three years.”

  Oh, no, thought Hero. You poor thing. Aloud she said, “Letitia told you I would pay you to talk to me about your experiences?”

  Molly nodded. “She wanted me to come here with her yesterday, but I was too afraid. She got mad at me.”

  “And slapped you?”

  Molly nodded again.

  “You don’t need to be afraid,” said Hero. “I mean you no harm. Are you originally from Wapping?”

  “No. We had a cottage down in Kent. But we lost it when the lord got his Act of Enclosure, so we come up to London. Da thought he could get work on the docks, and he did. But then a load of sugar fell on him.”

  “It killed him?”

  “Not right away. But he couldn’t work, and Mama was already so sick. She tried to get us into the parish poorhouse, but they said we weren’t eligible because we weren’t born here.”

  “So what did you do?”

  The girl looked at her with wide, hurting eyes, her voice a shamed whisper. “What else could I do?”

  Hero struggled to keep her own voice steady. “Are your parents still alive?”

  Molly shook her head.

  “And now you share a room with Letitia and some other girls?”

  “Yes.”

  “So where do you take your customers?”

  A hint of color rode high on the girl’s cheekbones. “Some of the men’ll pay for a room in a lodging house or a coffeehouse, but most of ’em just . . .” Her voice faded away and she twitched a shoulder.

  Hero felt her stomach twist at the thought of all that statement implied. “Letitia said you saw the magistrate Sir Edwin Pym the night he was killed.”

  Molly took a step back, her eyes widening, her breath leaving her body as if she’d been punched. “She told you that!”

  It hadn’t occurred to Hero that Letitia might not have mentioned her interest in the magistrate t
o Molly. She studied the girl’s wide, terrified eyes and knew that at another word about Pym, Molly would run. Hero said instead, “If you had a chance to leave the streets, to work in a shop or as a domestic, would you take it?”

  Molly swallowed hard and scrubbed a hand across her watery eyes. “It hurts, you know, when men laugh at me, when they call me a whore and worse. I mean, it’s what they made me, you know? I never thought this’d be the life I’d be living. I always thought I’d be somebody’s wife and have a cottage and babies of my own someday. But look at me. Ain’t no man’s ever gonna marry me, and ain’t nobody gonna hire me to do nothing but what I’ve been doin’.”

  “I’ll hire you.”

  Molly might have been young, and she might have been born and raised in the gentle Kentish countryside, but she’d been on the streets of one of the roughest parishes of London for more than three years. She wasn’t innocent anymore. She shook her head, her lips pressed into a tight line. “I’ve heard about women who approach poor girls just up from the country, who pretend they’re going to help them, only to lure them into houses they then can’t leave. If I’m gonna do what I’m doin’, then I’m gonna do it on my own terms, not for somebody who makes me service ten or twenty men a night and then keeps all the money.”

  It took Hero a moment to realize the girl had mistaken her for a procuress. At a loss for words, she nodded to the carriage and team awaiting her across the street. “That’s my carriage. See it?”

  She watched Molly’s face as the girl took in the magnificent barouche with the crest on the door, the four high-spirited, carefully matched black horses, the coachman and liveried footmen. Her breath left her body in a soft sigh. “That’s yours?”

  “It is. I’m Lady Devlin, and I promise I won’t hurt you. I only want to help.”

  The girl’s eyes narrowed. “Why? Why would you want to help me?”

  Hero drew a painful breath. What could she say? Because my life has always been so comfortable and easy that a part of me can’t help but feel guilty for it? Because I feel partially responsible for the way life and my country have treated you? Because sometimes writing articles to stir the public conscience simply isn’t enough? But she couldn’t say any of those things. So instead she said, “I need someone to take care of my parrot.”

  * * *

  “You brought her here?” said Devlin.

  They were in the drawing room, Hero seated in a chair near the bowed front window, a cup of tea in her hand. Devlin had only just come in and stood before the fire drinking a glass of wine. Simon played nearby, the cat curled up asleep beside him.

  Hero took a sip of her tea. “I don’t think she’d have agreed to talk about Pym any other way. She was too afraid, and I can’t say I blame her. She’s upstairs in the servants’ quarters having a bath. Claire has taken charge of her.”

  “What are we going to do with her?”

  “She says she wants to be a housemaid, but I told her that for the time being she can take care of the parrot.”

  Devlin choked on his wine. “The parrot? We’ve acquired a parrot?”

  “Mmm. The pawnbroker said it’s a galah from New South Wales. I was thinking I could perhaps send it home with someone sailing there, but he said it was stolen from a nest as a baby and probably wouldn’t survive if let loose into the wild.”

  Devlin stared at her a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. “So did this Molly ever tell you about Sir Edwin Pym?”

  “Yes,” said Hero. “She did.”

  Chapter 48

  Ben Carter was drinking porter in a low tavern in Farthing Alley, not far from the church of St. George’s, when Sebastian walked up to his table.

  Like most night watchmen, Carter was old, a big, bulky man with shaggy gray hair, rounded shoulders, a short fat neck, and a lined, sagging face. He had his beefy hands clasped around a tankard of ale; his red nose and the enlarged pores on his face suggested he spent most of his off-hours in taprooms. When Sebastian introduced himself and asked if Carter had been on duty the night Sir Edwin Pym was killed, he took a deep drink, wiped the back of one hand across his wet lips, and said, “Aye.”

  “Mind if I sit?” asked Sebastian.

  Carter looked at him with a puzzled frown. “If’n yer lordship wants.”

  Sebastian pulled out the chair opposite and sat. “Were there many people on the streets that night? The night Pym was killed, I mean.”

  “Nah. Fog was real thick that night, my lord. Most folks don’t like being out in the stinkin’ fog.”

  “Especially around midnight,” said Sebastian. Thanks to Molly, they now had a much clearer idea of exactly when the magistrate had died.

  Carter nodded. “That’s true enough, my lord.”

  “So did you see anyone out around that time?”

  “You thinkin’ that’s when Pym was killed? Midnight?”

  “Thereabouts, yes.”

  Carter took another slurping drink. “Well, there was this strumpet. Don’t know her name, but I’ve seen her before. Skinny little thing with yellow hair, cain’t be more’n fifteen or sixteen.”

  “Where did you see her?”

  “Not far from here. Had a couple of seamen, she did.”

  “Did you see Pym?”

  “No. Never did. Not that night, leastways.”

  “Anyone else?”

  Carter scrubbed a rough hand over his face, his eyes slipping out of focus as he fought to remember. “Let’s see. . . . There was the girl, and the two seamen. And then there was an apprentice runnin’ an errand for his master. That’s about it.”

  “What apprentice?”

  Carter stared at him with vaguely hostile, watery eyes. “Ye think I asked him?”

  Sebastian rested his forearms on the table and leaned into them. “Who do you think killed Pym?”

  “Reckon it was that strumpet.”

  “The girl?”

  “Aye.”

  “What exactly did she look like?”

  “Like I said, she’s got yellow hair. Tiny little thing. Don’t look like she gets enough t’ eat—but then, most of ’em don’t.”

  “How could a tiny little girl bash in a big man’s head?”

  “Reckon she lured Pym into that alley, and her flash man’s the one who beat his head in.”

  “I suppose that could have happened,” said Sebastian, although he thought no such thing. Molly’s halting recital of that night’s sequence of events dovetailed with Paul Gibson’s findings. According to Molly, Pym had coupled with her at around half past eleven, pinning her against the base of one of the church’s distinctive pepper-pot towers. He must then have walked south toward the river and away from his house for reasons Sebastian couldn’t begin to guess. According to Molly, it was just past midnight when she’d literally fallen over his body in the alley off Nightingale Lane. Minutes later, Carter walked down the misty lane, iron lantern and rattle in hand . . .

  And had obviously seen nothing.

  Molly swore to Hero that she’d taken nothing except the magistrate’s watch, and she’d done that only because he’d refused to pay her for that rough coupling.

  “Did you sell it?” Hero had asked.

  Molly had shaken her head, her voice a frightened whisper. “I didn’t know who to take it to. I’ve never done anything like that before, I swear. And I was afraid if I tried to pawn it, someone would find out and think I was the one who killed him.”

  “So you still have it?”

  “No. Somebody stole it. One of the other girls, I guess. And that scares me more’n anything, because what if she pawns it, and then the constables track her down and she says she got it from me? They’ll hang me!”

  “Although now that I think about it,” Ben Carter was saying. “There was somebody else—and not too far from Nightingale Lane, too.”

 
“Oh? Who’s that?”

  “Thief by the name of Faddy. Seamus Faddy.”

  “You’re certain?” Sebastian’s voice came out sharper than he’d intended.

  “Oh, aye. Known Faddy since he was a wee tyke causin’ trouble, I have. He was gone fer a while, but he’s been back two or three years now.” The night watchman’s face darkened. “And up to no good, you can be sure of that.”

  Sebastian didn’t find himself inclined to disagree with that summation. “Do you remember when Faddy moved back to Wapping after being gone?”

  Carter brought up one blunt-fingered hand to rub the back of his neck. “Don’t remember exactly, but I know it was before the Ratcliffe Highway murders.”

  “How can you be certain of that?”

  “ ’Cause I remember seein’ him fer the first time in years at the King’s Arms. He was there with everybody else, gawkin’ at the bloody bodies. I told him he could just go back wherever he’d been, that we didn’t need any more of his kind around Wapping.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He didn’t say nothin’. Just tipped his hat and laughed in my face.”

  * * *

  Sebastian found Grace Calhoun looking over a stall of dried herbs at a street market in Saffron Hill. She watched him walk toward her, then deliberately turned her back on him, her attention all for a bunch of sweet-smelling lavender.

  “I need to talk to Seamus Faddy,” he said, pausing beside her.

  She didn’t look up. “I take it something’s made you suspect him again?”

  “He lied to me.”

  “And you’re surprised?”

  “Not really. Where can I find him?

  She moved on to the next stand, this one selling soft white cheeses that filled the air with an earthy, ripe scent. He thought for a moment that she wasn’t going to answer him. Then she said, “There’s a public house down by the river, in Wapping Wall. The Pelican, it’s called.”

  “Thank you,” said Sebastian.