by C. S. Harris
“She would have come, but she wanted to finish the letter she’s writing to her father.” The old man’s smile slipped slightly at the thought of his wayward son. “He keeps promising to visit her, but he never comes. He has my father’s papers, you know. I’ve been pressing him to publish them; I’ve even offered to help. But he’ll have none of it.”
Sebastian studied the American’s timeworn face. From what Sebastian had been able to learn, the domestic arrangements of the Franklin males tended to follow a similar, bizarre pattern. An illegitimate son himself, William Franklin had abandoned his own illegitimate son, Temple, to be raised by Benjamin. And Temple Franklin had, in turn, abandoned his illegitimate daughter, Ellen, to be raised by William. They were a brilliant but peculiar family. But then, Sebastian thought, perhaps most families were peculiar, each in its own way.
He said, “I’m told Bishop Prescott was largely responsible for the Parliamentary Commission’s decision to disavow the majority of your claim.”
Franklin cast him a knowing sideways glance. “So that’s why you’re here, is it? You’ve heard about the results of the commission.” He gave a soft chuckle. “Believe me, Lord Devlin, if I ever felt moved to kill Francis Prescott, it was twenty-four years ago. Not last week.”
“Sometimes these things build.”
“True,” said Franklin. “True.” He drew a plain gold pocket watch from his old-fashioned, snuff-stained vest and squinted down at the time. “I promised to take Ellen for an ice at Gunt er’s. But I’ve a few minutes yet.”
Something about the movement stirred the whisper of a recollection in Sebastian’s memory, a thought that was there and then gone before he could capture it.
He lifted his gaze to the ropewalk, where a man with a grooved wooden wedge known as a “top” drew the strands ahead of the twist, keeping it tight. The strands had to be kept under equal tension, without kinking, until the entire fathom of rope was twisted. The standard length of naval rope was a thousand feet.
The length required to hang a man for, say, murder, was considerably shorter.
Sebastian’s hands tightened around the top of the brick wall before them as he watched the strands of rope weave in together. “Good God,” he said. “Why didn’t I think of that before?”
Franklin shook his head, not understanding. “Think of what?”
Sebastian pushed away from the wall. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Franklin.”
“Anytime, anytime,” Franklin called after him. “And good luck to you, Lord Devlin.”
Chapter 38
Stopping by Brook Street, Sebastian slipped a small, loaded double-barreled pistol into his pocket. Then he headed for Bow Street.
He arrived at the Public Office to startle Sir Henry Lovejoy by demanding, “You said you were going to look into the circumstances of Jack Slade’s transportation. Did you?”
“Yes,” said the magistrate, carefully fitting his spectacles on his face and reaching for a file. “I’ve my notes right here. But I was under the impression you’d discounted the involvement of Mr. Slade.”
“I’ve changed my mind. Tell me everything you know.”
Jack Slade was trimming fat from a leg of lamb when Sebastian entered the butcher shop on Monkwell Street. The butcher had a bloody apron tied around his waist. The hand clutching the thin boning knife was bloody, too, as was the ugly-looking cleaver resting at his elbow. The pungent odor of raw meat filled the air.
Sebastian said, “You didn’t tell me it was Francis Prescott’s plea for mercy that saved you from the hangman’s noose.”
Slade glanced up, a smear of blood darkening one cheek, his lantern jaw set hard. “What if it was?”
Sebastian let his gaze rove the small shop, taking in the sides of beef and mutton hung from massive hooks in the walls. A tray of sausages rested on the counter; the battered green shutter that would be used to close the butcher’s shop when the day’s trading ended stood propped against the wall.
He said, “The thing is, you see, I find myself wondering something. Why would Father Prescott—I assume he was only a priest then, and not a bishop? Anyway, why would Father Prescott intervene to help a man convicted of bludgeoning his wife to death in a drunken brawl? That’s right,” Sebastian added when Slade’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve discovered you weren’t being exactly truthful when you said your wife died while you were in Sydney.”
The butcher sliced a ridge of fat and let it drop into the bucket at his feet. “Reckon he felt guilty. ’Cause o’ what his brother done to me family.”
“That’s one explanation,” said Sebastian.
“What other explanation is there?”
Sebastian shifted so that he had a clear view of the street, where a costermonger was pushing a barrel up the hill toward the churchyard. “Nice shop you have here. Been in business long?”
“Near on five years. Why ye ask?”
“It’s not often a man transported to Botany Bay returns home with the wherewithal to set himself up in business.”
Slade’s head came up, the handle of his knife clattering against the surface of the butcher block. “What ye suggesting?”
“That you were blackmailing Francis Prescott. That you blackmailed him decades ago to get him to use his influence to keep you from being hanged. And then, when you came back from Botany Bay, you pressed him again to give you the money you needed to set up this shop.”
Slade stared at him, forehead furrowed, nostrils flaring with each breath.
Sebastian said, “I suspect he was also periodically slipping you a little sum, was he? Is that why you were arguing with him on the footpath in front of London House on Monday? Because you thought the promise of an archbishopric in his future should increase the price of your continued silence, and he was unwilling to meet your demands?”
Slade swiped the back of his hard forearm across his sun-darkened forehead, leaving another bloody streak. “The Bishop was me friend, see? People know secrets about their friends. People help their friends when they can. Ain’t nothin’ wrong wit’ that.”
“And what secret did you know about the Bishop of Lon—”
Sebastian broke off, his preternatural hearing catching the whisper of shifting cloth, the subtle exhalation of a man’s breath. Sebastian threw himself sideways just as the giant thighbone of an ox still glistening with fat and gristle whooshed through the space where his head had been.
“Mornin’, Captain Viscount,” said Obadiah, his lips pulling back in a grin, his big body filling the air with the scent of hot, stale sweat as he swung the ox bone again.
Snatching up the tray of sausages, Sebastian slammed the wooden board into the man’s face hard enough to send him staggering back against the wall, his face dripping torn sausage casings and ground fat down the front of his leather waistcoat and breeches. With a roar, he pushed away from the wall, head bent like a charging bull.
Sebastian yanked the small flintlock pistol from his pocket and discharged both barrels into the man’s face, obliterating it in a spray of blood and bone. The small shop filled with thick blue smoke and the acrid stench of burned powder.
Jack Slade screamed, “Obadiah!” Snatching up the cleaver from the butcher block, he clambered over the counter and threw himself at Sebastian.
Instinctively flinging up his right arm, Sebastian only partially deflected the blow, the sharp edge of the blade slicing deep. Then the butcher’s massive body slammed into him and the two men went down together.
They careened into the tin pail, tipping it over in a clatter that sent a wash of blood and bits of gore spilling across the floor. Scrambling and sliding in the bloody sawdust, Sebastian managed to roll on top of the butcher. He closed his left fist around Slade’s wrist and yanked the hand clutching the cleaver high over the butcher’s head. But Sebastian’s right arm hung at his side, wet with blood that dripped off his fingertips to mingle with the spilled muck on the floor. He was aware of his vision darkening around the edges. The strength in his grip ebbed
.
Slade reared up, the crown of his head butting into Sebastian’s forehead. Sebastian reeled back, his blood-slicked fingers losing their grip on the butcher’s wrist.
Lurching sideways, Slade swung the cleaver at Sebastian’s head. Sebastian jerked out of the way. The heavy blade sank into the wooden frame of the old green shutter beside him, and stuck there.
Face streaked with sweat and blood and sawdust, Slade rocked the cleaver’s handle, trying to free it. Sebastian slammed the heel of his boot into the side of the butcher’s head, knocking him back. Sebastian closed his own left hand on the cleaver’s handle. Levering the blade free of the wood, he swung around just as Jack Slade charged.
The blade made an ugly thwunking sound as it sank into the butcher’s chest. Slade flopped back, jerked, lay still.
His breath soughing in his throat, Sebastian sank back against the blood-spattered wall. He sat for a moment, his heart beating hard against his rib cage, the blood from his sliced arm pooling on the floorboards beside him. Then he yanked the cravat from around his neck and bound it tightly around his arm.
“You’re lucky,” said Gibson, setting a neat row of stitches along the nasty slash in Sebastian’s forearm. “A fraction deeper and he’d have severed an artery. A trifle to the right and you might have lost the use of your hand.”
Sebastian had stripped down to his torn, blood-soaked shirt and breeches and was sitting perched on one end of the long, narrow table in the front room of Gibson’s surgery. He took a deep pull from the open bottle of brandy he gripped in one white-knuckled fist, and kept his jaw set.
“Hurts, does it?” said Gibson with what sounded suspiciously like malicious satisfaction. He tied off his thread and reached for a roll of bandages. “You think it’s true, then? Slade was blackmailing the Bishop?”
“I don’t think there’s much doubt about it. The question is, what secret was the Bishop paying Slade to keep?”
“That Francis Prescott killed his brother in the crypt of St. Margaret’s thirty years ago?” Gibson suggested, wrapping the bandage around his handiwork.
“I don’t think so. I keep going back to the way Slade laughed when he heard Sir Nigel had been found down in that crypt.”
“If you hadn’t killed him, you could have asked him.”
“If I hadn’t killed him, he would have killed me.”
“There is that.”
Sebastian took another deep swallow of brandy. “Miss Jarvis knew Prescott was being blackmailed. She just didn’t know by whom. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know why.”
Gibson tied off the bandage and handed Sebastian the torn, bloody remnant of his coat. “If you’re planning on going to see her, you might consider stopping by Brook Street first for a new rig.”
Sebastian grunted and eased his arm into what was left of his sleeve.
“And whatever you do, don’t drive those chestnuts of yours,” said the surgeon, fashioning him a sling. “Or the grays. Either stick to hackneys, or let Tom or Giles drive you. You need to give that arm a rest. Overdo things and you could end up losing the use of that hand after all.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, Tom is nursing an injury of his own.”
“I had a look at Tom’s shoulder this afternoon. The young heal quickly. If you ask me, this forced inactivity is doing him more harm than good. Besides, it’s not like he’ll be in any danger. Obadiah’s dead.”
“And if it wasn’t Obadiah who shot at us the other night?”
Gibson picked up the bowl of bloody water and pile of soiled linen. “Somehow I can’t imagine William Franklin lurking in some Brook Street area steps waiting to take a shot at you. It was Obadiah.”
Sebastian held his own counsel. But he wasn’t convinced.
Chapter 39
He found Miss Jarvis surrounded by piles of books and papers, and seated at the dark, heavy table in the library of the house on Berkeley Square.
She wore a simple gown of pale yellow cambric made high at the neck and trimmed with delicate touches of white lace, and she had her head bent over some notes she was making, so that the afternoon sunlight streaming in the tall paned window overlooking the garden fell warmly on her brown hair. At Sebastian’s entrance, she looked up and laid aside her quill, her face studied in its calm repose. He searched her even features for some indication that his suspicions might be true. But if she found his presence a cause for concern, she did not show it.
“Lord Devlin,” announced the butler, hovering nervously, obviously uncertain of the wisdom of abandoning her to the company of such a dangerous visitor.
“You can tell him I promise not to abduct you,” said Sebastian, going to where a carafe of Lord Jarvis’s best brandy rested on a tray.
A suggestion of amusement lightened her features. “Thank you, Grisham. That will be all.”
Sebastian poured himself a drink and downed it in one long pull.
“Do help yourself to some brandy,” she said sardonically.
He refilled his glass. “Thank you.”
Her gaze lingered for a moment on his sling. But rather than remark on it, she pushed to her feet and began assembling her papers.
He said, “Embarking on a new project, Miss Jarvis?”
“Actually, it occurs to me that perhaps you are right, that I have focused too single-mindedly on Lord Quillian. So I’ve decided to pursue several other theories.”
He strolled over to study the title of the nearest tome. “Burke’s Peerage? So you’re . . . what? Expanding your list of suspects to include the entire peerage?”
A malevolent gleam darkened her fine gray eyes. She tweaked the book from his grasp and slipped it back on a shelf. “Did you know that before her marriage to Sir Nigel, Lady Prescott eloped with another man?”
“The unsuitable suitor. My dear Miss Jarvis, have you by chance discovered his identity?”
“Not by chance, my lord. But I have discovered his identity. Lieutenant Marc Hatfield, third son of Lord Bixby.”
“Who?”
“Lieutenant Hatfield. He was killed at Yorktown.”
Sebastian stared thoughtfully at his brandy. “In other words, he predeceased Sir Nigel by nearly a year.”
She nodded. “When I first learned of the elopement, I thought the disappointed suitor might have been responsible for Sir Nigel’s death. Obviously, that was impossible.”
There was something about the airy way in which this was said that told Sebastian more than he suspected she’d intended. He took a sip of his brandy and said with quiet amusement, “You thought the unsuitable suitor was Quillian, didn’t you?”
A faint hint of color touched her cheeks, but all she said was, “What happened to your arm?”
“An unpleasant encounter with a butcher and his meat cleaver.”
“A butcher?”
“A man by the name of Jack Slade. Ever hear of him?”
She shook her head. “Should I have?”
“Last Wednesday, you told me you thought someone was blackmailing Bishop Prescott. As it happens, you were correct. Only it wasn’t Quillian. It was Jack Slade.”
“The butcher.”
“The butcher.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“But I am. You see, this particular butcher grew up on the Grange and nursed a powerful grudge against the brothers Prescott. At some point before he got himself transported to Botany Bay for murdering his wife, Mr. Jack Slade came into possession of a powerful secret.”
He was aware of her watching him intently. She said, “And do you know the nature of this secret?”
“No.” He drained his glass and set it aside. “But you do, don’t you?”
“I beg your pardon?”
He walked up to her, close enough that he could smell the faint fragrance of lavender that dusted her shoulders and see the telltale nervous dilation of her pupils. “When you met with the Bishop last Tuesday evening, what precisely did he say that led you to believe he was being b
lackmailed? And don’t even think about quoting me some pious pap about a friend’s responsibility to honor a man’s confidences even after death. In the past week I’ve been forced to kill three men. I’ve been shot at, horsewhipped, attacked with a meat cleaver, and half drowned. My patience is wearing thin.”
Two tight white lines had appeared to bracket her mouth.
“Tell me,” he said.
She went back to gathering her books, the soft thumps of the bindings slapping together sounding unnaturally loud in the hushed room. He didn’t think she meant to answer him. Then she seemed to come to a decision. She said, “When I arrived at London House Tuesday evening, it was obvious something had occurred to trouble him. At first he simply said he’d received disturbing news. But later, after we’d spoken . . .”
“Yes?” he prompted when she hesitated.
“He said it’s no pleasant thing to be haunted by the secrets of one’s past. And he told me . . . he told me he had fathered a child in his youth.”
“Sir Peter?”
Her head came up. “Sir Peter? Good heavens. I never thought of that. Is Sir Peter his child?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve begun to suspect he might be.”
“I wonder if that’s why Prescott was reading The Libation Bearers?”
“It makes sense, does it not?” He studied her carefully composed features. “What else did the Bishop tell you?”
“Nothing.”
Sebastian looked out the window at the neat, high-walled rear garden, at the breeze-ruffled deep green leaves of the shrubbery, at the blueness of the slice of rain-scrubbed sky. He could think of only one reason for Francis Prescott to have shared this painful burden with Miss Hero Jarvis, and for her to have been so reluctant to reveal it.
He had always thought of her as a formidable, intelligent woman of extraordinary courage and fortitude. But now, standing stiff-backed in the afternoon sunlight streaming in the garden window, she looked suddenly vulnerable, and maybe a little afraid.
“This is not a secret you need hide, or bear alone,” he said quietly. “We can be wed tomorrow by special license. You must allow me to do this, Miss Jarvis. For your sake, and for the sake of the child.”