Crowther 02 - Anatomy of Murder

by Imogen Robertson

  Mrs. Westerman stood suddenly and began to walk up and down behind her chair, her skirts sweeping over the carpet in regular clicking sighs. The contrast between her activity and Mr. Crowther’s stillness was unnerving. “Yes, yes, Mr. Palmer,” she said agitatedly. “You told me as much months ago—but as I told you James remembers nothing of his last cruise as yet. There is no reason to believe he ever will. You have questioned his officers and I even gave you sight of his private letters home to me. That did not prevent you from harassing my husband under Dr. Trevelyan’s roof ten days ago.”

  “Madam, I did not harass him! The information is so crucial that if there were any chance—” Palmer stopped himself. “I did receive two weeks ago a name from a connection I trust in Paris. That name was Fitzraven. I wondered if it might be familiar to your husband. It did not seem to be. I could discover no more.” He drew breath, but could not resist adding in a rush, “I would have explained as much to you at the Admiralty last week, if you had given me a chance to speak in my defense.” He thought he saw the corner of Mr. Crowther’s mouth twitch at that, and Mrs. Westerman scowled briefly.

  Palmer continued more calmly. “The role of this Fitzraven, his status, his importance in the schemes that move against us—nothing of that could be discovered. Only the name, and with that I was unfamiliar. However, I have made it my business to keep a close watch for him.”

  Mrs. Westerman had come to a stop and they were both observing him now, with something like curiosity. The thin November light caught the red lights in her hair.

  “There are some individuals in the city I employ to listen for items of interest,” Palmer went on. “Any whisper of that name, anywhere in the city, was to come to me—and this morning I hear that a body was pulled from the Thames at first light, and the body was named by a member of the crowd that watched him dragged up the Black Lyon Stairs as Fitzraven.”

  He looked up at Mrs. Westerman. Her expression was neutral; Mr. Crowther was sitting with his fingers tented and very still. “I have arranged for one of the Westminster magistrates, a Mr. Pither, to request your assistance,” Palmer plowed on. “It is not unnatural that he would think to do so, given your investigation of events in Sussex last year. He would like to add a little luster to his name by a connection with yourselves.” At this, Mrs. Westerman’s lip curled. Drawing himself straight in his chair, Mr. Palmer made his final appeal with a certain solemnity. “I have come to you to urge you to supply that assistance and find out what you can of the circumstances of Fitzraven’s death.” He then added with a half-smile as the thought occurred to him, “Perhaps a little show of resistance to doing so might be of use. If Pither can tell the story of how he persuaded you, it will cloud the matter in a way advantageous to our greater cause.”

  “You seem to have a great ability to find things out yourself, Mr. Palmer,” Crowther said with a faint drawl, “and arrange all manner of complicated affairs in a short space of time.” He drew a neat enameled pocket watch from his waistcoat and examined it. Then met Palmer’s eye. Mr. Palmer noticed that though Mr. Gabriel Crowther might be a gentleman the wrong side of fifty, his blue eyes seemed icy and exceptionally clear. “Why do you not look into the matter yourself? Or use one of these gentlemen you trust. Why such unconnected amateurs as ourselves? Why trust a recluse and a known harridan with the secrets of your king?”

  Palmer looked up swiftly at Mrs. Westerman to see how she took this description of herself. She did not flinch but continued to examine the wall to his right. He took a moment to select his words.

  “Three reasons, sir. The first you should be able to supply, if modesty did not forbid. I have not your expertise in seeing the stories a dead body can tell of itself. Very few men do. For the second let me speak to the matter of trust. I know something of you, Mr. Crowther, and all that I have heard suggests to me a man who is unlikely to go gossiping in society of such matters.” Crowther gave a wintry little smile. “Mrs. Westerman has served on her husband’s commands. I believe in her loyalty and her principles. Your temper I have felt the heat of, madam, but I see no sign of foolishness in you.” Mrs. Westerman still did not look at him, but he was sure he was attended to, and carefully. “The third is related to the confidential and delicate nature of intelligence in time of war. I must know, for the sake of our country’s interests and those that serve them, what is afoot here. Is there a conspiracy to betray this nation to the French? Who is involved in the matter and what damage might they already have done? Who was this master sent to lead? What was the nature of this man Fitzraven?”

  Harriet turned toward him suddenly. “Are there not continually such plots?” she asked.

  Mr. Palmer nodded. “I find myself much engaged, but let me complete my argument. The agents of the French are not foolish. If Fitzraven was in some way involved, my appearance asking questions as to his life, activities and death will no doubt send the conspirators into hiding, and what I can learn will be severely curtailed.”

  “Whereas Crowther and I can blunder about asking whatever we like, and people will assume we have simply discovered murder to be an enlivening pastime?” Harriet’s voice was softer than it had been hitherto, and was laced now with amusement. Mr. Palmer smiled.

  “Exactly, Mrs. Westerman. It will be thought you and Mr. Crowther seek only to increase or consolidate your renown and so cannot resist the opportunity to examine a man who died in apparently mysterious circumstances. I wish to know of this man’s connections, his habits and nature. I must discover if he was the man my contact learned of, and if, by his death, we may find out what networks of intelligence the French have in this country and where and how deeply they reach.”

  “How mysterious were the circumstances of his death?” Crowther said. “Bodies are pulled from the Thames every day.”

  “I hope you will let the matter speak for itself. The reports I have are suggestive, but at second hand. Let me not cloud your inquiry with imprecise information at this stage.”

  It seemed to Mr. Palmer at this moment that his proposal was still under consideration.

  Crowther picked at his cuff and said, very softly, “To whom do you answer, Mr. Palmer?” There was a cold steel in the words.

  “My remit in these matters is wide,” Mr. Palmer told him. “I have some money and staff at my disposal, and the liberty to act as I see fit in most matters. Lord Sandwich is the First Lord of the Admiralty—beyond that I am answerable to my king, and the law. As are we all.”

  The little clock on the mantelpiece marked the half hour with an elaborate chime that made Mrs. Westerman start. But neither she nor Crowther made him any reply.

  “We are at war,” Mr. Palmer said after some moments of silence. “Information can be as vital, or as deadly, as ordnance. If news—accurate news—of the preparedness of our ships, stores or troops regularly reaches the French naval command, men will die. I come in all humility to ask for your assistance.”

  Crowther tented his fingers again and said, “Then, Mr. Palmer, you shall have it.”

  4

  Some minutes after Mr. Palmer left Berkeley Square, the promised invitation from Justice Pither arrived. Its tone suggested that the idea of consulting them was all his own. Mr. Gabriel Crowther watched Mrs. Westerman read the note in her turn. She was pulling on a red ringlet that framed her face, and seemed in danger of straightening it. She was not looking well, and she had told him enough of her last visit to Dr. Trevelyan’s establishment to know it had not given her any comfort. Her husband’s illness had overtaken her like a damp fog. Her lively eyes had become dull, fading from emerald to pondwater in a little more than three months, and her hair, shot through with a fire that seemed to burn when she was angry or afraid, had begun to look rusty and brittle. She was thin. If she were a horse, he would have had her shot. He resisted the temptation to tell her so.

  “Do stop glowering at me like that, Crowther,” Harriet said, setting the note down and resting her head in her hands for a moment. “I am
afraid you are conjecturing what my lungs would look like in a jar.”

  Crowther had picked up the newspaper again and was reading a report of fears for brave Cornwallis and his gallant little army at Yorktown.

  “I do not think, Mrs. Westerman, the preparation of a human lung I own could be improved upon at this time,” he remarked mildly. “So you may rest easy. I have, in fact, been regretting that the excitement of our success last week when I spoke to the Royal Society seems to have dissipated so quickly. I expected you still to be pleased. But you do not seem it.”

  “Your success, I think. And being told my company is injurious to my husband’s health has not cheered me.”

  “I gave your insights and investigative abilities their due. The gentlemen were properly impressed by our success in finding out the mysteries of ‘a certain great house in Suffolk.’”

  Harriet raised her eyebrows. “Yes, I got the impression afterward that you must have been quite generous, since a remarkable number of men in bad wigs and stained coats took the opportunity to be introduced to me and patronize me a little while we drank tea. Their wives approached me as if they feared I would stink still of the dissecting room.” She fidgeted in her chair like a child confined to a schoolroom on a hot day. “And it seems ridiculous that on these occasions we cannot refer to Thornleigh Hall by its name. Everyone knows the story. Rachel is constantly having to hide the more hysterical pamphlets detailing the circumstances from the children.”

  “Such are the conventions. And I must say you are most ungenerous in your description of my colleagues. There were mavericks and thinkers there enough to excite even your admiration, I believe.”

  Harriet made no reply, and looking again at Mr. Pither’s note had to admit to a certain grudging admiration of the way Mr. Palmer had engineered the invitation to examine the body. But she put the letter down with a sigh.

  “What could I possibly contribute to this matter that you could not manage better and much more properly alone, Crowther?”

  Crowther realized where her thoughts had led her and gave the question some consideration. Mrs. Westerman was certainly right. It was neither her profession, nor her proper sphere to inquire into the deaths of strangers, nor to bring murderers to justice, although as the pamphlets she mentioned had recorded in great detail, she had done so in the past. He considered briefly the possibility of going alone to Justice Pither’s house, but it occurred to him—and it was not pleasant to consider it—that he would not, in fact, be of very much use to the magistrate or to Mr. Palmer without Mrs. Westerman. He had spent many years in the study of the human body, and had a particular interest in the marks and traces violence leaves on its victims, but he lacked Mrs. Westerman’s ability to power forward into other people’s lives, asking questions, conjecturing as to their motives. He had tried in his early adulthood to remove passion from his soul with study, scalpel and syringe. It had been only a partial success, but he had winnowed himself to the extent that he still needed to borrow her warmth—if she had any left to spare him. The idea that she might desert him entirely made him uneasy. He was rich, an acknowledged expert in his field, but he needed her—a woman designed by society only to run a household and amuse herself—to turn his expertise into something of practical use. It was somewhat humbling. He examined his cuffs.

  “In the initial examination of the body, perhaps not a great deal, madam. But you have a certain animal intelligence that I occasionally lack. Further to that, you do not look well. You are a creature used to activity, and simply writing letters about your husband’s health is not activity enough.”

  She glanced at him, and something of her old self glinted in her green eyes.

  “London does not improve your manners, Crowther.”

  “I do not wish them improved.”

  “That is lucky.” Harriet stood and paced across the hearth rug like a dog testing the limits of its chain. “Do you think Dr. Trevelyan is in Mr. Palmer’s pay? That he forces me into an idleness I cannot bear . . . Perhaps I should repair my reputation in the world and stay here still and grieving till I am summoned to Highgate again.”

  Crowther considered the threateningly ornate chandelier above them. “I believe the captain would wish you to do all in your power to help his friends. And I think, Mrs. Westerman, if your husband had wished to marry a woman who would sit by his bedside weeping for more than three months at a time, he would not have married you. Or if he did wish some sort of paragon of patience, ready to play martyr, he was already an idiot before he received that blow to his head.”

  Harriet was surprised into a shocked gasp. He met her gaze with an innocent smile and the gasp became a choking sort of laugh.

  “Your complimentary mood continues, I see.” She folded her arms and rapped her fingers against the dull green sleeve of her dress. “And why do you wish to serve your king?”

  “Mr. Palmer has flattered me; and besides, I have finished reading my paper.”

  “Then let us order the carriage.”

  5

  Anyone else who had a choice—that is to say those with money enough to make a choice—had moved west of here. The ways around Covent Garden had been bad for twenty years, but Jocasta was happy to stick with what she knew, even when there was gold enough in her bag to crawl toward the cleaner air. The press of people suited her, and the house in which she lived showed no sign of falling down as yet. More than that, people knew where to find her while she bided here. From early in the day till lighting up when the boys went around with their tapers sparking up the oil lamps on St. Martin’s Lane she sat at her table and turned cards. She told the fortunes of drunks and whores, pickpockets and thief-takers, of serving girls and journeymen, weavers and sailors. There was no class of person, no matter their desperation or their fear, that did not tend hopes for better times under their greasy clothes. Sometimes even Quality found their way to her and left coins fat and gold as the sun reflected in a puddle. She would tell them what she could see, and tell it gently, and hoped they’d leave a little lighter, because for all her scowls her heart was kindly at its core.

  Mostly the fortunes she told were simple enough to unpack. Some young girl would come knocking on her door with a coin warm in her hand and stutter out a question about her lover, or her chances of honest work, and even before Jocasta had let her shuffle and choose her cards she’d know what they were to say, and was forming in her mind some way to say it without it stinging too hard. It led to calm days and regular habits, and times where she’d feel comfortable, almost content, and find herself singing songs from her youth as she pumped her water in the morning. From the moment she’d recalled the dream though, realized its heaviness had shut her lips over her song that morning, she’d known that her latest period of ease was done, and that sometime in the day a man or woman would come in and turn the cards, and they’d be hurtful and snarling, and as ready to burn her own hand as the person she read for.

  And so it was. Right now she saw all sorts of pictures swirling about on the table in front of her and none of them tasted good on her tongue. Jocasta Bligh stared at the cards before her and sucked in air noisily through her teeth.

  The woman seated opposite her had knocked on the door ten minutes ago as Jocasta was stirring the fire to drive out the cold London damp. She was now shifting in her seat a little restlessly, trying hard not to ask what Jocasta could see. She was a neat and pretty young woman who dressed well, but not so well she looked far out of place in the alleyway outside. A shopgirl, Jocasta reckoned. Her hands looked too fine to think her a maid or a cook, and her manner was too quiet to think she would sell gin to maintain herself; she had a bloom on her still and no one who traded for men’s affections kept that more than a month. Kate Mitchell, she’d named herself. She’d got herself decent, it seemed, to pay her visit, though Jocasta did not see it as a compliment to herself. The girl had brushed her blond hair and neatened it to face what knowledge was coming, to try and aid her courage. Her eyes were d
arting, and she held her hands together on her lap quite tight. When she spoke, her voice placed her as a native of the city, and not educated further than the charity schools, but by the look of her she’d done well after that.

  Jocasta looked at the cards again; they seemed to bob and skip lightly in front of her, back and forth. She was tasting salt, and gunpowder.

  “You have any sailors in the family?”

  Mrs. Mitchell frowned and put her head to one side. “My dad was a sailor, though I can’t say I knew him. Him and Mom got married in the Fleet and he was off again before I was born. She said he had a pigtail though, so she’s sure he wasn’t lying about that. Can’t see why he’d show his face in the cards.” She bit her lip and looked down at her hands. “Though my husband, Mr. Frederick Mitchell, he clerks for the Admiralty. That might be what you’re seeing.” She craned her neck, trying to spot in the cards in front of her whatever Jocasta was catching sight of, then sighed and sat back. “I come to you full of concerns regarding him, Mrs. Bligh. And in need of some words from a lady of sense and sight like yourself.”

  “I smell gunpowder,” Jocasta replied.

  Kate’s fingers worked at the folds of her dress. “I cannot say why you would. Fred’s business is all ink and papers. But still, his business is war in a way. Making sure the orders are made for the Fleet, and they are firing on the French and Americans every day now. Perhaps . . .”

  Jocasta let her attention fall on the picture of The Moon in front of her. It glowed and whispered. She couldn’t catch the words, but she didn’t like their tone.

  “What’s he up to, this husband of yours?” she murmured, as if to herself. “And who’s the old woman who doesn’t like you?”

  Mrs. Mitchell looked as if her eyes were suddenly stinging her. She started to speak low and quick. “We share rooms with his mother. I don’t think she is fond of me. She runs a coffeehouse on Whitehall and goes to serve the gentry with refreshments at their entertainments in the Season too. I think she does a pretty trade, though Freddy and I both turn our wages over to her then she hands out shillings as if we were bleeding her dry.”