Corpse Thief

by Michael Arnold

  The worry and the guilt, churning together like the ingredients of a most potent tincture, caused a knot to form in his guts. He swung a leg over the side of the bed. It hurt, but it was bearable, and he let the other one follow. He cringed as he pushed up, a low growl escaping unbidden from his chest as his side burned like hellfire. Mercifully, his back cracked without persuasion.

  And then he was walking. Slowly, falteringly, but the steps came, for he would permit no refusal. He reached the window and looked out. It could have been any street in London. Taverns, homes and shops. The building opposite was high and leaning, caged from foundation to roof in scaffolding. Nearby, a team of workmen dug the ground, leaving the roadway half blocked by a huge pile of spoil, over which urchins picked in their search for plunder.

  “He stirs,” the man said. “Holy Mother be praised.”

  Hawke cricked his neck, so rapidly did he twist to see Colan Szekely, who had somehow reached the chair at his bedside unnoticed. The man was truly a wraith, he thought with a new pang of sickness. “Mister Szekely, sir, I...”

  “Hush, my dear Sólyom,” Szekely said, smooth as a snake. He was clothed all in black, but had removed his hat and gloves. His chalk-white hands and skull seemed positively ethereal in the dimness of the room. The thin facial scar looked like a thread of silver tugging between eyelid and mouth. His lips, by contrast, were a purple slash as they widened into a smile above a plate of boiled potatoes and greens that he held beneath his nose to sniff. “Conserve your strength.” He offered Hawke the food, along with a little fork. “You have suffered much.”

  Hawke sidled back to the bed and took the plate, resting it on his lap. He was ravenous, but Szekely’s sudden presence made him too anxious to eat. “I was shot.”

  Out on the street, a man broke into slurred song, the verse bawdy and out of tune. Szekely seemed not to notice. “By Blackbird, of all people.” He half-smiled. “His aim was ever dubious.”

  “He was aiming at Clem-”

  “I am aware of all that transpired. Indeed, he confessed to nearly offing my beloved, which would have been a singular tragedy.”

  Hawke relived the moment Blackbird had fired. Or, rather, he remembered the noise. Ear-splitting, teeth-aching, heart-stopping. The flash had blinded him and he could still smell a trace of smoke. The blunderbuss could be a true fiend in a confined space. What differentiated it from a musket was the distinctly flared muzzle, a feature designed to enable rapid reloading while on the move; on horseback or atop a coach. It was what made it the weapon of choice for postal coachmen in their perpetual battle with highwaymen and footpads. But what it also provided was an increase in the spread of shot. The tiny lead balls, packed tightly like fish-eggs in the barrel, would fan outwards when the trigger was pulled, rendering them next to worthless at long range, but shockingly effective when the target was close. They could take a door off its hinges, a head off its shoulders.

  He felt himself flush as the memory crystallised. “Miss Lott?”

  “Is well, all told,” Szekely said. “She has nursed you attentively.”

  “Clementine?”

  “Not quite as fortunate.” Szekely leaned back and adjusted the silken scarf about his neck. “Took the brunt of the shot, despite your valiant efforts to shield her.”

  “I assure you, Mister Szekely, I...” Hawke stammered, desperate to head off any hint of collusion with the murderess.

  Szekely dabbed his lips with a slender, lily-white finger. “Hush hush hush. A jest and nothing more.” He tutted softly. “Sweet Clementine. Clementine O’Neill, to give her her proper name. The wee bullets made the devil of a mess of her. Looked like a shark took a nibble, truth be told. She is very much dead, dear Sólyom.” He spread his pale palms in a gesture of resignation. “But we are now at war. Her blood will not be the last drop to taint the Thames.”

  Hawke peered around the room again. “Where am I, sir?”

  “Arundel Street. Little drinking ken called The Lion. You know it?”

  “Aye.”

  “It is my good fortune to own the place.”

  “How did I come to be here?”

  “Blackbird brought you, bless his heart. Over his shoulder like sack of turnips.” The corners of Szekely’s baby-blue eyes crinkled. “Made for a pleasant change, I shouldn’t wonder, carrying a live body for once.” He leaned in a little, as if conspiring with Hawke. “If I didn’t know him better, I’d say he felt a touch guilty for blasting you almost to oblivion. Now hush, I tell you. Recover yourself. There are graves to be emptied. Profits to be made.” He stood abruptly, retrieving gloves and hat. All that black against his porcelain skin made him look like a magpie. He glanced at the doorway, making a soft clicking sound with his tongue, as if to hail someone. “I simply wished to assess your progress, and I am heartened by what I see.” He bowed low. “There will be a reward, dear Sólyom. Rooting out Clementine and her foul scheme was a grand service to render. It shall not be forgotten. Now, business requires me elsewhere.”

  Szekely vanished as rapidly as he had arrived, leaving Hawke to stare dumbly at the empty doorway. Outside, a workman dropped a shovel or hammer, the heavy tool clattering all the way down the scaffolding. Hawke almost jumped out of his skin. The residual anxiety of a meeting with the Irish-Hungarian would linger cruelly. This time, at least, it was mingled with a profound sense of relief. Clementine was dead; Szekely was, for now, satisfied.

  Corissa Lott entered the room. The warm cinnamon tone of her skin contrasted so starkly with Szekely’s that Hawke took an involuntary intake of breath. He was immediately embarrassed, acutely self-aware, and yet entirely unable to tear his gaze from her. She crossed the room like moving sunlight, a gentle waft of lavender accompanying her as she took a seat.

  As mesmerised as he was, Hawke caught the glimpse of a grimace as it inhabited her features. “You’re hurt.”

  She had been holding a scroll of some kind, which she dropped so that she could touch a hand to her shoulder. “A piece of shot clipped me. Still in there.” She smiled wanly. “A souvenir.”

  “God damn it all, Corissa, I am sorry. I...”

  She stayed him with a scornful snort. “Sorry? That bastard would have killed me in a heartbeat if it meant killing Clementine too.”

  “Szekely would-”

  “Colan Szekely would discipline Blackbird for the inconvenience. Dock him a week’s wages if he felt particularly put out. Oh, do not be so naive, Joshua,” she added peevishly. “It is very well to have a woman on his arm. A half-caste to-boot. Adds a little mystery to his persona. But he would find a replacement in an hour or two.” Her almond eyes narrowed with amusement, skewering him. “Of course, you have impressed him in this business. A possible leader of men, and a clever one too. Which makes you a rival to Mister Blackbird. Better grow some eyes in the back of your skull.”

  “Christ,” Hawke sighed, rubbing a hand over new stubble. “Does it never end?”

  “You know better than that.”

  Hawke acknowledged the fact with a rueful grunt. The world of the St Giles body-snatchers might not be the one he would choose, were he given his time again, but it was the one in which he now lived, and violence, vengeance and death were as elemental as the air he breathed. The reality made him think upon those who had not asked to be embroiled in Szekely’s web. “Does he know of the help I have received?”

  She shook her head. “He cares only that the immediate threat has gone. Your apothecary and his good wife are safe in anonymity.”

  “Good.” Hawke looked down at his bandages, the top part of which was still on show above the sheet. “I believe I have you to thank for this.”

  She frowned. “You did not see Goaty in here, hour upon hour, cleaning your wounds and changing the dressing.”

  He laughed. It hurt. “Thank you, Corissa.”

  “You saved my life,” she said. “Took the shot that was meant for me.”

  “I did not know he was going to bloody shoot.”
>
  She gasped. “Chivalry is truly dead.” To his surprise, she leaned in, placing her hand on his leg. “It may have been an accident, Joshua, but it happened all the same.” Then she got up, moved in, kissed his forehead.

  Hawke was dumbfounded and terrified all at once. He searched the door for Szekely but saw no-one. “How long have I been here?” he blurted eventually, obfuscating to give a chance for the heat to leave his cheeks.

  She had taken her seat once more. “Two days.”

  “The Ember Week...”

  “Has begun.”

  “And?”

  Corissa bent to reach a hand to the floor, bringing up what he had first thought was a scroll. It turned out to be a rolled newspaper. She unfurled it and handed it over. “Trouble.”

  The Morning Post was cock-a-hoop with rabble-rousing relish as it described the descent of a dozen of Bow Street’s finest upon the Italian neighbourhood in Clerkenwell. Hawke read quickly, scanning the black lines of text for salient information, all the while feeling his heart sink into his stomach. “A mob followed them in?”

  “Aye,” Corissa replied. “A whole crowd by torchlight. Ransacked a few homes, dragged out a few men of the right age. Butcher Milne was there too, so Colan tells me. One or two Italians got a hiding for good measure, but lucky none were strung up there and then.”

  “The right age for what?”

  “Murder.”

  Pressure grew behind his ribs, making his breaths shallow. “There’s been another?”

  She shook her head. “The magistrates got nervous. Folk are demanding answers. Justice. And the papers whipped them up so as riots looked likely.”

  So Ruthven made good on his threat, Hawke thought. Better to sacrifice one community than risk seeing the whole city burn. He swore softly. “They are scapegoats.”

  “Aye, that may be, but you said yourself that these strange vines, this witchery, is an Italian vice. Might the Runners not stumble upon the true murderer in spite of it all?”

  “They might,” Hawke conceded bleakly. In his head he ran through what he knew. A child grotesquely murdered. Pagan practises harking back to Medieval Italy. A French military button. An Irish harp. There was much here, and yet there was nothing. And now it no longer mattered, because George Ruthven had decided to close the case and take the plaudits. Hawke had been dismissed, and a perpetrator had been decided upon, regardless of guilt or innocence.

  Exhausted and frustrated in equal measure, Hawke flung the Morning Post petulantly away. It flapped in the air, turning inside out, then skidded on the smooth floorboards, finishing in a crumpled pile like the carcass of a shot pheasant. Two pages of advertisements found themselves at the outermost. Hawke stared at the bolder examples. A product guaranteeing the simplest and most complete shoe blacking available, a cordial for women that promised the dissolution of crow’s feet in ten regular doses, the announcement of a much-vaunted prize-fight between an English champion and his American counterpart.

  A theatre production on Drury Lane. Shakespeare’s King Lear.

  Hawke’s eyes latched onto the notice as if grappling hooks had been flung from between the bold type. Corissa was saying something, but she might as well have shouted from the scaffolding across the road. He only saw the newspaper. Only heard his own voice. After a short while, she touched his shoulder, shaking him gently.

  Hawke looked round. “I need to go to the Theatre Royal.”

  Θ

  Between Corissa and the hackney driver they managed to manhandle Hawke into the otherwise empty vehicle, the coach listing slightly as he clambered awkwardly aboard. Corissa joined him on the bench, snapping orders through the window before swiping shut the leather drapes. In Hawke’s desperation he had professed utter disinterest in whether they were spotted leaving The Lion by one of Szekely’s people, but that did not mean she would entertain complete carelessness.

  They thundered north on Arundel Street, a portentous wind, foul and biting, rushing up from the Thames at their backs. Hawke grunted and winced as they juddered over cobbles, swerved pedestrians and picked a haphazard route between rival hackneys, brightly coloured coaches and lumbering ox-carts. He cursed the streets and cursed his wounds, breaking out in a sweat that was cooled by the rushing air to make him shiver uncontrollably. But it was worth the discomfort, he told himself. Speed was all.

  They turned west onto The Strand and were immediately snarled in a sluggish current of traffic as the road rounded St Clement Danes, the church named for its early Norse parishioners, now a grand edifice, towering over the community with its steeple and domes. Hawke banged the roof with his fist, bellowing for the driver to force a way through, but he knew it was futile. He would have leapt out and run for it had he been physically able, but it hurt badly enough just to walk, and he quickly abandoned the notion.

  “Shall I?” Corissa asked, reaching for the door, evidently reading the conflict on his face.

  “No,” Hawke replied. “Too dangerous.”

  She sat back with a sour look. “Better explain, then, Joshua.”

  “The murderer of Betsy Milne.”

  Her jaw slackened. “Is at the theatre?”

  “I realised that night, when Clementine attacked me. You said something. The musicians playing the entr’acte. You likened them to peacocks.”

  Corissa’s brow furrowed as she searched her memory. “Monsieur Blanc’s ensemble?”

  “They wore brooches, you said.”

  “And ribbons,” she nodded, “feathers, lace.”

  “Brooches, Corissa,” Hawke said, hissing as one of the hackney’s wheels bounced over a pot-hole. “The killer wore a brooch.”

  “In the shape of a harp,” she answered dismissively. “No harpists in the ensemble, Joshua. And none as would don a brooch of that kind, lest they be accused of being an Irish traitor.”

  And that was the crux of it, Hawke had come to understand. He leaned closer to her, their knees touching as he clung to the edge of the bench. “It wasn’t a harp, the tosher-man saw.” He was almost whispering in his earnestness. “It resembled one, but he was mistaken. What design were Blanc’s brooches?”

  She bit her lower lip hard enough for the plump flesh to blanch. “I do not recall.”

  “My money is on a stand.”

  “Stand?”

  “To hold the sheets of music. When we were in Drapers Gardens with the Brommetts, we walked past a music shop, do you recall?”

  Her nose wrinkled. “Vaguely.”

  “Something rankled when I looked into the shop window. Something in the back of my mind. I couldn’t place it.” He paused, grimacing, as the hackney swung a violent right into Catherine Street. They immediately ground to a halt. He leaned out of the window to see that they were behind a pair of young lads, both barefoot and toting sticks, driving a flock of lily-white geese up the middle of the road. Back inside, he said, “But the other night, just before Clementine lunged for you, it all made sense. Through all this,” he flapped a hand at his damaged midriff, though it was concealed now by his shabby clothes, “the thought escaped me, but seeing the advertisement for King Lear, in the Morning Post, it hit me like a punch in the face. The shop at Drapers Gardens had a music stand in the window, Corissa. It was shaped like a lyre.”

  “I know the kind,” she said dubiously.

  “And what does a lyre-style music stand resemble?”

  Her wide, brown eyes did not waver from his, though their pupils seemed to dilate and contract as the notion settled. “A harp,” she murmured.

  “Don’t you see? It isn’t an Irish connection we seek, but a musical one.”

  “And Blanc’s ensemble are French to a man,” Corissa said. She put a hand to her mouth as though she had witnessed something terrible, mulling the theory while the geese outside honked and squawked to the bellows of the two boys. The hand went down suddenly, gripping Hawke’s knee. “Wait. French musicians are hardly rare.”

  “But we know some play the Theatre Ro
yal this very day,” Hawke countered, determined she would not water down his conviction while he was resolute enough to overcome the pain. “And we know these don brooches, possibly ones shaped like harps. So let us begin here.”

  The geese turned noisily into an adjacent alley, and the way was clear. As the hackney coach accelerated, Catherine Street became Brydges Street, and almost immediately the large, rectangular structure of the theatre rose out from amongst the other rooftops and chimneys.

  “I will go in,” Hawke said. “Bow Street is a stone’s throw from here. Will you take a message to Ruthven?”

  For a moment it looked as though Corissa might demur, such was her antipathy towards the Runners, but she could hardly escape the entreaty in his face. She nodded, adding, “If you tell me what Peterloo means to you.”

  Hawke was about to pull back the curtain to check on their progress, but he found that he could do nothing more than grip the leather, letting his weight hang from it as he digested her statement. He tried to look at her, but his eyes would not leave the coach floor. He opened his mouth. No words would come.

  “You have been delirious these last two days,” she said, taking the initiative while he worked his jaw dumbly. “Thrashing and sweating and sobbing like a baby. All the time returning to one word. Peterloo. Peterloo.” The name was like a lightning bolt striking his skull, making him flinch and cower. “Peterloo.”

  “Did we not all hear about it?” he managed to answer. He could sense the lack of authenticity in his own words. “All read of it in the newspapers?”

  “But we do not all dream of it,” she said coldly, cutting him off. “Do not take me for a fool, Joshua. We have come this far, you and I.”