“I thought you were dead.”
Jocasta sniffed. “Well, I’m not. Got stuck is all.”
There was a long pause then Sam turned in his bed and began to pick away at his food. “I was up all night.” His voice was sulky and sore.
“What are you, mother to me now, whelp?”
Sam turned his back on her again, through he took his share with him. Jocasta finished eating, balled the newsprint in her hand and said, less fiercely, “Got it though. And Molloy came good. Got me in and saved my arse ten minutes later.”
“How so?” Sam asked, muffled and damp-sounding.
“Gave me a moment to hide when I needed it.” She looked down at the thin bones of his shoulders. “Sorry you were scared, Sam. I was scared enough for us both, but I had to wait till Missus and him were sleeping before I could slip out, and they talked half the night. That is, Milky Boy was shouting and slurping his words. Ripley got him good and drunk at the chophouse.”
Sam shifted and looked at her with his strange, serious eyes. “What were they talking on, Mrs. Bligh?”
“I’ll tell you. Reckon I met your Tonton Macoute an’ all.”
Sam’s eyes got wide. “You saw him?”
“Not saw him exactly, just a little bit. Heard. Or sort of heard. Get us something to drink now, I’ve been breathing slut’s wool all night and my mouth’s too dry to tell.”
He was up and grabbing the pitcher so fast, Boyo spun a circle and barked.
Harriet pushed herself away from the wall while Crowther tried to speak a little more like himself.
“We must examine the body here, I believe. If you would care to send Harwood’s men into the room, we may arrange the corpse and I can begin.”
Harriet took her cloak from the chair behind her and began to set it round her shoulders.
“I shall certainly send them in. But for myself, I have to go, Crowther. I am taking Stephen to visit James this morning. It is already a little past the hour I promised him we should depart.”
Crowther looked at her in surprise. “Surely, Mrs. Westerman, you can have no intention of traveling all the way out to Highgate this morning?”
She paused in the fastening of the cloak and said evenly, “I have every intention of doing so. I made a promise to my son.”
“A promise made before these people were murdered! This is nonsense.”
Harriet stiffened. “You call it nonsense? I have a duty to my husband and son, and what could I do here? You know Bywater bled to death. You do not need me to examine his stomach contents. I have seen the room and we agree. We shall meet later in the day.”
“As you wish, madam.” His voice was very cold.
Harriet’s hands fumbled at her fastenings and she said fiercely, “Oh, don’t talk to me in that tone, Crowther! Lord, I am bullied and harried at every side. Rachel, Graves, Mrs. Service’s concerned looks! Now you begin. You told me yourself to take Stephen. It is not his fault this blood has been spilled, and my husband is ill, and I must care for him.”
Crowther spoke with a faint drawl. “Care for him, or be seen to care for him, Mrs. Westerman?”
She spun toward him, her finger raised and accusing, red spots of color rising in her pale cheeks. Crowther had the startling impression that if she had been within reach, she would have struck him.
“Do not dare, sir! Never for a moment . . . never dare question my love for my husband! Not you! There is not another man in England of half his worth, not another man better loved by his family or more valued. I would gladly give my life . . .” It seemed the air went out of her lungs. She turned away with her head down. “Do not dare, sir.”
Crowther shut his eyes briefly before opening them again and saying, “My apologies, madam. I spoke in haste.”
She would not look at him. “I hope to see you this afternoon at Berkeley Square,” she said very quietly, and left the room.
Crowther turned and slammed the wall above Bywater’s mantelpiece with the flat of his hand.
In his keenness to hear her, Sam seemed to have forgotten he was angry with Mrs. Bligh. Jocasta wiped the small beer off her mouth, took her papers from her pocket and dropped them in front of him. He touched them gently, as if they might sting.
“What do they say?” he asked.
“Can’t tell. Looks like a list of some sort, and there are numbers too. We’ll go and ask Ripley and thank him for getting Fred so messy at the chophouse.”
Sam sniggered. “Was he horrid out of it?”
“Heard him meet sharp with every stick of furnishing in the place, and all the time whining and grieving till the old bitch slapped some quiet into him.” Jocasta smiled, then went more serious again. “He went still as the grave when the other fella came in though.”
Sam shivered. “Tonton Macoute?”
“Maybe. I couldn’t hear him. His side of it was all whispered. Mother Mitchell’s voice could cut rock, though. Heard her.”
Sam had wrapped his arms round his knees. “Did they say anything on Finn and Clayton, Mrs. Bligh?”
Jocasta leaned forward to pick up Boyo by his scruff and set him on her knees. “Reckon they did. From her words, it sounded like they’d decided I’d taken warning and was gone. She praised the fella for it.” She pulled at Boyo’s ears, and the terrier twisted around to lick her hand. “She sounded fat and happy. Something happened last night that made her light—as if all their troubles were neatened. Then I heard her open the table and give him the papers.”
Sam’s eyes went wide. “Did they notice you’d filched some, Mrs. Bligh?”
She shook her head. “There were bundles. I just took a few pages from the middle, is all. Then I heard him speak.”
“What did he say?”
“If you gave a fox or a crow a voice and told it to speak quiet, I reckon it would sound like that. He said his master thought there was a sailor might give trouble. Something about a bloke picked up on a boat what might have said something he shouldn’t, so this sailor needed finding and sorting.”
“Did you hear a name?”
“Maybe. It was said lower than the rest, my mind’s still trying to get its tongue round it, and my old heart was banging about so. Then Fred was promising him more papers and the crow voice was out of the place.”
Sam’s face was so serious and thoughtful, Jocasta almost laughed. “Come on then, lad, if your breakfast’s finished. We got to go and see Ripley, then Molloy. Make our thanks and make our way.”
“What about the sailor?”
“We’ll ask about, and them as we ask will ask too, soon as I can wring a name from my head.”
3
Harriet had been aware of Isabella’s letters to Fitzraven in her possession and the necessity of reading them, but in the rush of the last days she had found it relatively simple to avoid the task. They had not been mentioned at the conclusion of their first interview with Miss Marin, and Harriet had assumed that a tacit agreement had been reached between all those present that they would be read and then returned without comment, unless comment was particularly called for. She had not liked to do so, however; it was a gross intrusion, and her own liking for the soprano had made the issue uncomfortable. Now she opened the package on her lap without any feeling other than a profound sympathy. Crowther had been right. The dead had no privacy at all.
The first letter was written from Milan and was a cautious note saying that she was glad Mr. Fitzraven had written and she would be pleased to know more of him. Harriet smiled. She could imagine that Isabella would have wished to say a great deal more, but that Morgan had been authoritative and insisted on knowing something of Fitzraven’s intentions before allowing Isabella to admit he was her father.
Harriet glanced up. Her son, Stephen, sat opposite her in the carriage in his best Sunday clothes and cradling on his lap a large model of the Splendor, James’s last and most loved command. The model had been made for him by two of Harriet’s servants at Caveley while the family was in London;
both were former naval men as devoted to the boy as they had been to the father. Her housekeeper’s husband, James’s particular servant on all his commands, had recruited those of the crew he thought sufficiently trustworthy to people the vessel with little figures, and the little painted carvings had been sent back with letters and dispatches of the navy. The result was magnificent and had been sent up from the country some days previously with an enormous quantity of cheese, butter and eggs. These last had been welcomed with delight by the housekeeper at Berkeley Square and applauded as paradigms.
Harriet herself had sat at Stephen’s side while he composed his thank-you letter to the boatbuilders. He had done so with painful concentration in his own hand, and she helped a little with phrasing and mended his pen. Harriet could imagine his literary style being praised in the high stone kitchen at Caveley for days, and the little boy’s pleasure being spoken about even now on the open seas. Stephen had asked if he might bring the ship to show his Papa, and after a moment she had agreed. Now he balanced it on his lap, guarding it from every jerk and dip of the road that the Earl of Sussex’s suspension could not iron out, and when he was not lost in contemplation of the rigging, he peered out of the window. He looked, she realized, resolute. Harriet smiled and opened the next letter.
It must have been this note that had led to Fitzraven’s commission to go abroad for His Majesty’s. In it, Miss Marin said that if circumstances allowed, she would be very glad to spend some time in London. She said further that it would be a great pleasure to meet in person with Mr. Fitzraven; she would meet him and listen “with an open heart” to all he had to say, and do so in hopes of developing a fuller friendship.
Harriet could easily imagine Fitzraven coming to see Harwood with this letter in his hand—how he would have boasted of his cleverness in securing such a positive beginning to negotiations with Miss Marin. To Harwood it would look as if the prize of having the celebrated Isabella Marin singing on his stage was within his reach; to Fitzraven it would seem his luck had finally rewarded his merits and that his bastard daughter would open up a world of new influence, money and connections. And Isabella? Harriet looked out of the window, where the new buildings along Gray’s Inn Road were giving way to fields and hedgerow still dewy with the early hour. Smoke reared and bent from the chimney stacks, and Harriet’s fingers tapped on the paper in her lap. Isabella was a romantic. She had seen the possibility of redemption for her own fouled childhood; for her mother knocked down in the mud of the street. She had wished to save Fitzraven and call him Father, and now she lay, lost herself, in His Majesty’s Theatre while the street outside silted up with the tribute of yellow roses. A touching image, but not what she had had in mind.
How had their meeting been? Isabella, trying not to be disappointed in her father. Fitzraven, finding himself on short commons from Harwood’s bankers, and his daughter defended by the indomitable Morgan. It would have been indeed the moment for some enterprising agent of the French to notice him, and see a man with connections and ambition; to whom loyalty was nothing when it could be parlayed into money or influence; who wanted nothing more than to ferret out information from those who liked to have their business concealed.
To be an agent of the French would act like an aphrodisiac on Fitzraven: secrecy, knowledge, money, power—revenge perhaps on all those such as Sandwich who would not be his friend. Harriet could imagine that, if she had been in the position of an agent of the French, she would have thought him an excellent character to put to work. He would also be able to carry instructions and money from France to those already in place in London without arousing suspicion.
She looked again at Isabella’s handwriting. It was graceful and flowing and used a great quantity of very fine paper. Then back in London, Fitzraven perhaps could not resist still spying for old reasons, his personal strategies, and, already having to step around Morgan, found in the affection between Isabella and Bywater another frustration. It would have been another opportunity to feel himself at first hard done by, then superior, controlling.
Stephen sat up a little straighter and Harriet realized the carriage had turned into Trevelyan’s driveway. The little boy looked at her with an air of slight nervousness. She put her hand on his knee and, meeting his blue eyes with her own emerald gaze, said, “Stephen, remember, if Papa still seems strange it is only because of his illness. He loves us. Be brave, as he would be.”
The carriage door opened and one of the footmen let down the step. Harriet was handed down first, then Stephen was lifted out, still clutching his model. The footman ruffled Stephen’s hair and winked at him. The boy smiled. Harriet thought it best not to see the exchange, but was grateful, then stepped smartly forward as Dr. Trevelyan emerged from the portico to greet them.
Ripley was quiet for a space. Jocasta sat opposite him in the back of the chophouse and Sam was frisking with Boyo under the table.
“It’s a list.”
“That, Ripley, I can see, even with no reading—but of what?”
Ripley put his hand up to his chin as if to try and find the bit of fluff that was starting to sprout, and twisted the paper around so it sat between them.
“These are names of boats, I think. I recognize one or two from reports of battles with the Frenchies. They’re some of them written out full, some of them noted quick, like. This here at the top . . . and here . . .” his finger drifted farther down the page and jabbed at another word on its ownsome “. . . these are places. Spithead and Portsmouth. Then under each are the boats and each name has a note or two. Like here—says Pegasus, six months provisioned, ready for sea, and here says Repulse 64 will be ready in fourteen days.”
Jocasta frowned. “What’s the sixty-four?”
“Number of guns on the boat, I think, Mrs. Bligh. And on it goes—both these pages are covered with names like that. Here’s one arrived from Ireland, here’s another they say on a cruise.”
“What’s that then?”
Ripley shrugged and turned the paper back to her. “When they go out and find another fella’s boat and take the stuff on it. Or so I think. Naval types all go to Maisie’s chophouse farther up the Strand when they’re about. Her husband was in the service till he died of it, see. So I don’t hear a lot of naval talk.”
“Fred comes here, mind,” Jocasta said, as she folded up the paper and put it back in her pocket.
Ripley sat back and stretched his arms. “That’s clerks not sailors. We get a fair few of them, all inky and thin and gnawing on the bones past where your dog’d leave them.”
“You did us a good turn with that Fred last night, Ripley.”
“Always glad to do you a favor, Mrs. Bligh. Not that it was much of a trial. He was in here with two others and they were glowing before they sat down.” He curled his lip. “All mighty pleased with themselves and trying to grab Sally’s arse, though his wife’s only been in her grave a day. I’d call him a dog but that would be an insult to your Boyo.”
“He turned mournful by time he got home.”
“Sally got sick of it and gave him a slap and an earful. He was so pissed by then he turned from up to down like a hoop.”
They paused, both examining the grain on the rough table between them. Ripley spoke up again first.
“Were there lots of papers like that, Mrs. Bligh?”
“Aye. Plenty.”
Ripley scratched slowly at the back of his neck. “It’s treason, isn’t it? They don’t just hang you for that. If that list was meant for the French or Americans, that’s cause to cut a man’s guts out while he’s still breathing. Legal. Have an eye to it. I heard about Finn and Clayton.”
Jocasta stood heavily and beckoned Sam over. “You’re getting awful wise as you grow, Ripley, ain’t you?”
He folded his arms. “Don’t have no choice in the matter, Mrs. Bligh. Anyways, I’m saying you need a sailor, one you can trust, and a high-up.”
“I know. And higher than I can reach so we’d better find a way to climb.�
��
4
Captain James Westerman got up very quickly when they entered the room. He had been reading in his armchair in the large room that was currently his home. For a moment he seemed confused about what to do with the book that he now held in his hands, then, having laid it very carefully on the side table, he came toward them with a swift, awkward stride.
Harriet moved forward and said his name. His face brightened as she did so. She held her face to one side to be kissed but found herself instead folded hard in his arms. The strength of the embrace drove the air out of her lungs. “Harry, Harry, Harry . . .” he said. His stubble was rough against her skin. “You are my wife.”
She made her body as soft as possible, her voice steady, closing her hands behind his back as best as she could. “I am, James.” His hand swam down her spine and pulled her firmly against him, pressing his mouth against her throat. Then he suddenly released her, and stepping back, took her shoulders in his hands and studied her. He was smiling widely, his eyes glittering like the water on a fair day.
“My beautiful wife.”
He then turned toward his son. Stephen had set down his model by the door and now approached slowly with his hand extended in front of him. “. . . And my boy!” Ignoring the hand, James picked Stephen up under his arms and swung him around. Harriet saw a moment of fear in the child’s eyes and began to step forward, but before the thought could catch into form, she heard her son’s fierce high laugh. James gathered the boy to his chest and bent over till the lad was almost upside down, giggling and struggling. James tipped him back up and threw him in the air again before setting him down on his heels and crouching down so they were eye to eye.
“And what will you be when you grow up, Stephen?”
“A sailor, sir.”
James roared with laughter. “That’s my lad! That’s my good boy!” Stephen flung his arms around his father’s neck and James patted his back. “That’s my good boy! And you shall have fair winds and fine battles and a pretty wife and a clever son just like me.”
Crowther 02 - Anatomy of Murder Page 30