What the Devil Knows

by C. S. Harris

  “Some. I don’t think Williams was his real name.”

  “Oh? What was?”

  “That I couldn’t tell you.”

  “I’ve heard people say he was Irish.”

  “Ach, no. The Irish are always good for blaming, aren’t they? That’s just people saying what they want to be true. Anybody who listened to him knew he was from London.”

  “He was?”

  “Oh, yes. Nicely spoken, he was. Didn’t talk like your typical seaman at all. Told me once his mother owned an inn, but she married some man from Germany who didn’t treat them well. Used his fists on Johnny during the day and bothered his sister at night.” She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “If you know what I mean.”

  Sebastian stared off across the rows of ancient fruit trees. He was intensely aware of the warmth of the afternoon sun on his face, of the clouds moving in from the south and the buzzing of bees in the scattered asters and silkweed blooming purple in the long grass. It was a moment before he could bring himself to say, “What happened to his sister? Do you know?”

  “Not exactly. I gather they ran away at the same time, but then went their separate ways. She took off with some man she’d met. I remember Johnny saying they hated leaving their baby brother with their mother and that man, but in the end they decided they couldn’t bear it anymore.”

  Sebastian could feel the veins throbbing in his forehead, feel his breath coming shallow and quick. “Did Johnny ever mention his sister’s name?”

  Mrs. Nichols looked thoughtful. “Emma, maybe? No, that doesn’t sound right. Anna? No, that’s not it, either. Let me think.” She paused, then said, “Hannah!” and Sebastian’s world spun around in a whirl of laughing children, blue sky, and dying leaves. “That’s it. The sister was Hannah, and the little baby brother was Christopher.”

  Chapter 56

  It’s not far from Wapping to Shadwell. The two districts flow one into the next so seamlessly as to make the shift unnoticeable to those unfamiliar with the area. Less than two miles separated Pear Tree Alley from Pope’s Hill. Yet they were in different worlds. The Pear Tree Inn stood just a few hundred feet from the Thames, where a man could hear the wind whistling through the rigging of the big ships riding at anchor out in the river and smell the sea in the air. It was a district dominated by sailors and watermen, lumpers and purlmen. But Pope’s Hill lay at the top of the ridge looking down on what had once been marshland. It catered to tradesmen and shopkeepers rather than men whose livelihoods were intimately linked to the water.

  As he stood in Pope’s Hill, his arms crossed at his chest, his gaze on the neat brick facade of the Three Moons across the street, Sebastian found himself thinking about those differences. How many people on the docks of Wapping would recognize the studious, sensitive sixteen-year-old boy who’d once run away from a cruel Shadwell stepfather? How many would see the boy Johnny Bishop in the heavily bearded sailor “John Williams” had become?

  Probably none.

  But the man who’d called himself John Williams had shaved his beard just a few days before his arrest and death. Why? Had it been his intention to play the prodigal son and go home to see the mother and baby brother he’d once loved? To search for the sister who’d gone her own way? And because he was now clean-shaven, had someone in the silent crowd who’d watched the dead man’s body trundle past in that long, drawn-out, degrading funeral procession recognized the boy in the man he’d become?

  Perhaps.

  And then there was the postmortem sketch drawn by Thomas Lawrence’s skilled hand and made into a print that was reproduced and sold as a macabre souvenir by the thousands. Had Hannah Bishop at some point seen that haunting profile and recognized her brother? Surely she had. Would she have believed him guilty of all that he’d been accused of?

  Sebastian doubted it.

  I wasn’t here then, she’d told Sebastian, and a few discreet questions directed at longtime residents around Pope’s Hill elicited the information that she’d been in Kent. No one seemed to know exactly where or with whom, only that she’d reappeared a few weeks after her stepfather’s death to help her widowed mother and younger brother with the inn. Yes, said the aged proprietor of a nearby coffeehouse in answer to Sebastian’s query, there had been an older brother once. Johnny was his name, but he’d run off years before, around the time Hannah disappeared. The coffeehouse owner said everyone blamed Peter Ablass for it.

  No one Sebastian spoke with seemed to regret the man’s death.

  So how and when had Hannah and Christopher Bishop learned the truth about the Ratcliffe Highway murders? Sebastian wondered. How had they pieced together the sordid, tangled tale of those events? From Long Billy’s ramblings late one night when he was in his cups? Perhaps. And it occurred to Sebastian now, as he crossed the street toward the inn, that Billy Ablass must surely have known who John Williams really was. Long Billy, who’d served with Johnny on the Roxburgh Castle, must have recognized the well-spoken young sailor as his brother’s stepson. Was that part of why Ablass had decided to set up “John Williams” to take the fall for the Ratcliffe Highway murders?

  Probably.

  So why, once they knew the truth and decided to take their own revenge, hadn’t Johnny’s sister and brother killed Long Billy first? Because someone as big and dangerous as Ablass would be difficult to kill? Is that why they began with Pym and Cockerwell and the seaman Hugo Reeves, whose involvement in all this Sebastian still didn’t understand?

  It made sense. And as he pushed open the door to the Three Moons’ taproom, Sebastian was aware of a host of conflicting emotions. What would he himself do if he discovered his own brother had been killed and dumped in a suicide’s grave while the rich, powerful men responsible both for his death and for a series of heinous murders were allowed to go on living their luxurious lives in comfort and safety?

  What would he do?

  He was afraid he knew only too well. And perhaps as a result he was not exactly disappointed to see that neither Hannah Bishop nor her brother was behind the bar.

  “They went off maybe an hour ago,” said the unfamiliar dark-haired barmaid in answer to his question.

  “Any idea where they went?”

  “They didn’t say, but I heard ’em tell the hackney driver St. Giles—the Horse Shoe Brewery in St. Giles.”

  Chapter 57

  The weak October sun was already slipping below the horizon, leaving the narrow, squalid lanes of the city in deep shadow as Sebastian headed toward St. Giles. He felt a sense of urgency that he could not explain, a cold sweat of foreboding that spurred him to drive his chestnuts faster than he should have.

  He told himself there could be an innocent explanation, that Hannah Bishop and her brother might simply be exploring the possibility of shifting their supply source to Meux. But Sebastian knew in his gut that their mission wasn’t harmless, knew that whatever they had planned would surely end in disaster for someone.

  It was nearly dark by the time he drew up outside the brewery’s tall, soot-stained brick walls in a narrow street that was beginning to fill with tired workmen dragging homeward. “Wait here,” he told Tom, tossing the boy the reins.

  He hit the pavement at a run, oblivious to the stares as he sprinted across the road to push his way through the crowd of grimy-faced workmen streaming out the gates. He could hear the roar of the brewery’s steam engines, smell the pungent reek of the fermenting porter and vast stores of malt. Halfway across the lamplit courtyard, he intercepted a gawky, skinny young clerk carrying a leather-covered file under one arm and shouted at him, “Henry Meux’s office—where is it?”

  The clerk stared at him wide-eyed. “By the stables. But if you’re looking for Mr. Meux, he’s not there. A hoop’s slipped off one of the vats, you see, and I—”

  Sebastian had to stop himself from grabbing the man and shaking him. “Damn you, where’s Meux?”r />
  The clerk took a frightened step back. “Last I saw, he was talking to a young woman and a boy.”

  “Where? Where were they?”

  “By the brewhouse.” The clerk nodded toward the northwestern section of the complex. “It’s behind the cooperage, by the—”

  But Sebastian was already running.

  * * *

  The brewhouse lay dark and deserted, its filthy, steamy gloom relieved only here and there by the dim light of the lanterns that hung from brackets set high on the bare brick walls. As he slipped in through the open door, Sebastian was aware of the massive vats soaring twenty-five feet above him, of the roar of a steam engine, and of the powerful stench of a million or more gallons of fermenting beer.

  He paused to allow his eyes to adjust to the near darkness, holding himself still as he listened for the least betraying sound. At first he heard nothing. Then he caught a metallic clang from somewhere in the depths of the chamber and the whisper of a voice too soft to be heard distinctly over the thunder of the engine.

  The vats here, like those at the Black Eagle in Bethnal Green, stood in rows on iron foundations, edged by walkways accessed at intervals by skeletal iron staircases red with rust and grime. Sebastian crept forward, keeping to the darkest shadows of a row of enormous vats some sixty to seventy feet across. As he ventured deeper and deeper into the vast building, the hot vapors grew nearly smothering, the smell of rust and dirt and beer thick in his nostrils.

  He could see them now, up on the walkway that ran along the next row of vats, where a lantern cast a faint light that caught the steam in a shimmering, ghostly glow. As he watched, the glow wavered, and Sebastian realized the light came from a lantern Hannah held for her brother, who was bent over doing something—something that involved a spanner. Then Sebastian heard a trickle of liquid hit the metal platform. The trickle grew stronger as he crept forward, and he knew what they were doing.

  They were opening the valves on the vats.

  There was no sign anywhere of Henry Meux, and he thought the brewer must be lying unconscious someplace.

  Unconscious, or already dead.

  The stream of porter from the open valve was gushing now, splashing down from the metal grating above to the flagged flooring, mixing with the rust and grime and oil as it flowed in all directions. Then the metal platform vibrated as brother and sister shifted to another vat.

  Sebastian stepped out from beneath the shadowy foundations of a vat as high and wide as a barn and shouted, “Don’t do it!”

  His voice echoed and reechoed in the cavernous space. Brother and sister jerked around, their faces pale in the shimmering, vaporous light. Then Christopher threw the spanner at Sebastian’s head and took off running.

  “No!” screamed Hannah as Sebastian sidestepped the spanner and tore after him.

  The boy was no more than twenty-five or thirty feet ahead, but he was running on the dry metal grating of the walkway, while Sebastian was slipping and sliding down below in a growing toxic mix of spilling beer and grime. He saw Christopher clatter down the last iron-framed staircase and turn to dart along the back of the building. It made no sense until Sebastian caught sight of the open door in the high brick wall and realized they’d had the forethought to break the lock that normally barred it and propped the door open as an escape route.

  He saw the boy disappear through the doorway. Then he was through it himself, erupting into the cold night air to find himself at one end of a narrow, squalid street of wretched, tightly packed old houses flanking the yard of a mean tavern with a crumbling, vine-covered wall. He saw Christopher throw a quick glance over one shoulder, then swerve to leap up and grasp the top of the wall just as a rumble sounded from inside the depths of the massive brewhouse.

  A thunderous explosion split the night, shaking the ground beneath them. Turning, Sebastian watched as a section of the twenty-five-foot-high back wall of the brewhouse collapsed in a roar of gushing hot porter and crashing bricks that sent great roofing timbers hurtling like sticks into the night.

  Flinging up his arms to protect his head from the debris raining down around him, Sebastian felt the first wave of the dark, foaming river hit him, swirling up around his knees with a powerful force that nearly swept him off his feet. Then another explosion rocked the night, and another, and he realized that the cascading flood of beer and the flying pieces of shattered casks and massive iron hoops must have been breaking the other vats, one by one.

  A second, higher wave slammed into his chest, lifting him off his feet to hurl him into the darkness. His shoulder smashed against a wall; something hard struck him in the ribs as the night around him filled with the crash of falling masonry, the groans of tearing timbers, the screams of terrified women and children.

  Then a massive beam borne along on the crest of the flood raked across the side of his head, knocking him under the hot, foaming river. His sight dimmed; he breathed in porter and felt it fill his lungs. Choking, fighting blindly, he clawed up toward the surface and felt his hand brush against soft yielding flesh that was there and then gone.

  Bursting into the cold night air, he gasped for breath and swung around, thrusting his hands into the steaming torrent again and again. He found the child’s arm and grabbed it just as his head almost went under again. Scrabbling to keep upright, he yanked and hauled a little girl not much older than Simon out of the swirling flood.

  “I’ve got you,” he told the sobbing child as she frantically wrapped her arms around his neck. He hugged her tight. “It’s all right. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

  The torrent was subsiding. He staggered to his feet, turned in a slow circle.

  What had once been a mean, narrow lane of decrepit houses now looked like the artillery-blasted rubble of a war-ravaged village. He glanced back at the brewhouse and saw a gaping sixty- to seventy-five-foot hole that had been torn in its back wall. From all around him came cries for help, the wail of frightened children, the groans of those trapped beneath collapsed houses.

  “I want my mama,” whispered the little girl, wet and shivering in his arms.

  Sebastian sucked in a deep breath that stank of porter and swiped with one crooked elbow at the mingling beer and blood running down the side of his face. “Let’s go find her, shall we?”

  * * *

  They worked through the night, a motley collection of volunteers and frantic fathers, sons, and brothers. It soon became obvious that most of the victims were women and children, for the flood had struck at half past five, when the men were still at work or just heading home.

  The first victim they found was a young girl of perhaps fourteen, crushed beneath the rubble of the tavern’s collapsed wall. Then a child of three and an aged woman with gray hair and staring blue eyes.

  Some were pulled out of collapsed houses grievously injured but alive. Every once in a while someone would hear a plaintive cry, and there would be calls for silence, the rescuers standing still, straining to catch the sounds of the living. At one point Henry Meux—quite alive and unharmed—appeared dressed in evening clothes and a silk cloak. He set guards around his shattered brewhouse to keep the riffraff from trying to steal any of his remaining beer, then left.

  Sebastian chose that moment to slip away from the search long enough to find his tiger and send the lad home with a message for Hero.

  Tom was obviously fretting that his responsibility to the horses was keeping him from pitching in. “I want to help,” he insisted.

  Sebastian studied the boy’s freckled, earnest face and thought about the shattered body of the tiny boy he’d just pulled from a flooded basement. “It’s ugly.”

  “Ye think I can’t take it?”

  “No,” said Sebastian. “I know what you’re made of. Carry the message to Lady Devlin, then catch a hackney back up here. But best grab something to eat first. It’s going to be a long night.”

/>   * * *

  Working side by side, he and Tom found Christopher Bishop just before two in the morning, pinned beneath the rubble of a collapsed wall. He was still alive when they dug him out, but it was obvious he wouldn’t be for long.

  “Hannah,” said the boy with a gasp when his eyes focused on Sebastian’s face leaning over him. “Where’s Hannah? Did she get out?”

  “She’s fine,” lied Sebastian. Hannah’s body had been found shortly before midnight, floating amongst the butts in the brewhouse.

  The boy struggled to draw breath, his face contorting with a grimace. “Don’t understand . . . what happened. Didn’t mean . . . to do this. Just wanted to let out some of the bastard’s porter . . . make a mess of that brewhouse he’s so proud of.”

  “It’s all right,” said Sebastian, gripping the boy’s thin shoulder. “Don’t try to talk.”

  “No.” The boy flung up a bloody hand to grab Sebastian’s arm. “It was my idea, you know. All of it. After we heard Long Billy talking to Reeves that night about what they’d done—about what Pym and Cockerwell and the brewer had them do . . . Hannah wanted to go to the authorities, but I said . . . I said, ‘They are the authorities. Nobody’s ever gonna hold them accountable for what they did to Johnny . . . to that baby. . . .’”

  “The brewer?” said Sebastian. “Only one? So it was Meux and not Buxton-Collins?”

  Christopher’s head shifted restlessly against the wet, beer-drenched earth. “Billy didn’t say which. I wanted to kill them both, but Hannah . . . she said . . . wouldn’t be right, because we didn’t know.”

  A new spasm of pain convulsed Christopher’s features. And by the time it had passed, the boy was dead.