From the Charred Remains (Lucy Campion Mysteries)

by Susanna Calkins

  The night of the Fire though, Adam had seemed to cast convention aside. She shivered, remembering his fervent promises. Even in the immediate aftermath, their future together, not quite stated, had seemed possible. But what would that future be like, she couldn’t help wonder. Would she be accepted by Adam’s peers? Certainly not by those who knew her to have been a chambermaid. Would such a poor match hurt Adam’s career? And more insidiously, a little voice whispered inside her, did she even want to get married? The world of dawning opportunities beckoned. Marriage, children—could they wait? The magistrate had told her once how much he had admired several of the petticoat authors, women who had dared take up a pen and promote their own views. Had he been suggesting something to her? She could not be sure.

  With a slight sigh, Lucy remembered her last conversation with Adam, a week ago, in the magistrate’s kitchen. He’d been pressed by the Lord Mayor to help survey the wreckage and assess the scope of the property claims, and had barely slept or eaten for three days. Sitting at the bench, resting his head on his fist, Lucy had never seen him so overwhelmed and distracted. The disaster that had befallen the City was clearly taking his toll.

  Exhausted, he’d barely spoken to her, and seemed to be only half-listening when she broached the topic of her leaving service to look after her brother, Will, a smithy in his own right. “It’s not as if I have a place here. Not truly,” she’d whispered. “Not since Annie has taken on my old responsibilities.”

  At that, he had opened his eyes and frowned. “She’s done so for a few months now. Nothing has changed. There’s no need for you to leave.”

  “Nothing has changed?” she had asked. “It no longer feels proper for me to live here. That’s what changed. Or perhaps you don’t agree?”

  The words came out differently than she intended, and for a second he looked hurt and puzzled. “I was not aware that I had dishonored you,” he said.

  “No, no. You haven’t,” she said, fervently wishing she had not spoken. “Please, you’re exhausted. Let us discuss this at another time.”

  He had closed his eyes. “Yes, I am quite weary. The madness that is out there, Lucy. The beggars, the looters, the liars. So many at the mercy of some truly godless wrongdoers. I should not like you to see it.” Then he trudged up to his chamber to sleep, as he was leaving early the next morning. Given her work cleaning up the rubble, their paths had barely crossed and they had found no time to resume this delicate conversation.

  Watching Sir Dungheap and Lord Lughead again, tilting aimlessly at each other, Lucy was reminded of this promise of a new world. At what other time could ragamuffins become knights, she pondered with a smile.

  Again, Annie was following a different thought. “Those lads best not let them soldiers see them with those swords. They look valuable, fancy-like,” she said, sniffing. “Those boys are going to get hauled off to Newgate. Well, not Newgate, since that’s been burnt, but another jail.”

  Lucy shivered, remembering the long terrible months during which her brother Will had wasted away in Newgate jail, the stinkhole of London. Mercifully, he had been released before the plague had taken hold. Not for the first time, Lucy wondered what had happened to the rest of the prisoners during the Fire, for surely the jailers she had met would not think twice about running off without setting the denizens free. The official word was that no one in the prison had died. She had heard whispers, though, that the prisoners inside had simply been left to the inferno and their eternal damnation. And if Will hadn’t been set free—. She thrust the thought away.

  “Oh, sorry miss, I didn’t think,” Annie said, awkwardly patting her arm. “They won’t be off to jail. More likely they will get their ears boxed.” She set her shovel down, as if she were about to start moving debris again. Instead, she took a half-step closer to Lucy. “Someone’s watching us,” she whispered. “Just yonder, past the stones there.” She discreetly pointed her finger.

  Lucy followed her gaze. Sure enough, a young man was looking at them, not raking as he ought to have been. “Not working too hard, is he?” Lucy commented. Catching her eye, the man began to saunter toward them. “Oh, no! He’s coming this way. Ignore him, Annie. We’ve work to do.”

  The young man planted himself in front of them. “’Tis a shame your pretty hands are getting dirtied in this muck.” When he grinned, his face lengthened, making him look a bit devilish.

  In that instant, Lucy recognized him and rolled her eyes. Sid Petry. She’d seen him once pick a woman’s pocket and later being tried at court for another misdemeanor. Like the other laborers, Sid was wearing heavy wool breeches and a jacket, but somehow he didn’t seem quite as raggedy or dusty as the rest of the men, although a light grime covered his features. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his dark blond hair looked fairly well kept. His hazel eyes danced with mischief.

  Her own eyes narrowed. “Shouldn’t you be working, Sid?” she asked. Annie looked at her, surprised Lucy would know the former ragamuffin.

  Sid’s smirk grew. “So we’ve met, have we?” he asked, looking more interested. Not wanting him to recall the exact circumstances of their first meeting nearly two years before, when she was just eighteen, Lucy repeated her question.

  He winked. “Who’s to say I’m not working?”

  Remembering Sid’s penchant for petty theft, Lucy hid a smile. “Looting is a bad business,” she warned. “The justice of the peace may not be so lenient this time. You might get more than the stocks, should you do anything the law might not like.”

  Sid puffed up his chest. “So, you’ve seen me work, eh?”

  “Seen you get caught.”

  “Ah, you cut me to the quick.” He looked around. “Don’t see no Redcoats nearby, do you? They must have pinched off for a pint, I’d wager.”

  “They’re around. Take something. You’ll see.” Lucy warned him again. She looked around. Sure enough, there weren’t any soldiers around anymore. For heaven’s sake, she thought. The looting that could happen if the others realized that the soldiers were no longer paying attention. She turned back to Sid. “You’re familiar enough with the stocks, aren’t you?”

  Sid stepped closer to her. Being close to seventeen or eighteen now, he’d grown taller since she had last seen him, and now loomed over her a bit. “Ah, miss. I don’t even know your name?”

  “She’s Lucy,” Annie piped in, even as Lucy elbowed her in the ribs. “I remember you too, Sid. From the streets.”

  Sid turned his attention to the younger girl, slapping his head in mock dismay. “Now I must be going daft. Not to recall two lovely lasses such as yourselves.”

  Annie looked pleased. “Oh, get on with you.”

  Lucy was about to wave Sid off when she noticed one of the boys, Sir Dungheap, suddenly drop his sword, and rip off his helmet. Looking horrified, he began to shout, making an odd gurgling sound. He pointed downward at something hidden on the other side of the mound of debris. Lord Lughead was nowhere to be seen. For a moment Lucy felt sick. He probably had run his mate through with a sword.

  But then the boy started to call. “Help! Help! A body! A body!”

  Hearing the boy’s cry, Lucy and Annie dropped their rakes and buckets and raced over the rubble, their skirts catching in the debris, Sid a few steps ahead of them. Lucy wondered sickly what they would find. She had heard of a few bodies that had been found here and there. A young woman, too afraid to jump from a burning building. An elderly woman found huddled in St. Dennis, probably thinking the great stone pillars and God would protect her. And most miraculously of all, the corpse of a saint who had died some hundreds of years before, perfectly preserved after being displaced somehow from his crypt.

  But when Lucy reached the boys, she gagged. A man’s body was spilling from a great wooden barrel, where it lay on its side on the ash-covered ground.

  “He knocked it over, he did it,” Sir Dungheap said, a bit resentfully, pointing at the other boy. “Standing on top of that barrel, ’til he toppled it over,
he did.”

  Sir Lughead, who looked a little pale, tried to muster a cheeky grin. “Not my fault the body was in there, though, was it?”

  Ignoring the boys, Lucy took a closer look. From the vermin crawling all over him, he’d clearly been dead for a while. Lucy dimly noted a shock of black hair and brownish skin before her eyes fixed on the handle of a knife protruding from his chest. His eyes—mercifully—were closed. She saw Sid turn away in disgust.

  At the sight of the corpse, a great buzzing began to rise in Lucy’s ears. Annie said something, but Lucy could not hear her. For a moment, the vision of a different gruesome death she had recently witnessed rose before her eyes, and she began to shake. Lucy forced herself to speak. “We must summon a constable,” she heard herself say. Her voice sounded tinny and flat.

  No one moved.

  “We have to get the constable!” Lucy repeated, her voice sharpening. She looked about at the handful of people who had gathered. Annie looked a bit queasy but, like Lucy, she had seen far too much death in her young life to be very moved by a corpse. Murder, though, that was different. Lucy put her hands on Annie’s shoulders and gave her a little shake. “Annie, you must fetch a constable. Or a watchman. Quickly.”

  Fortunately, Annie seemed to regain her senses. She had lived long enough in the magistrate’s household to know better. “Right, miss,” she said, unconsciously deferring to Lucy, before running off.

  The crowd began to murmur among themselves. Most were the people Lucy had been working alongside all week, but there were a few she hadn’t met.

  “Looks like a foreigner. Probably a sailor.”

  “Dunderhead!”

  “Poor man. What a way to go.”

  “Like as not, he had it coming.” This verdict came from a small rotund man, who Lucy remembered from before the Fire. He used to sell perfumes and spices in the market. “A chap don’t get knifed through the chest for no reason.”

  “Where’s his finger pointing?” a former seller of pies cried, balancing a babe on her hip. “He’s surely pointing to the one who done him in.” Everyone knew that victims who had been monstrously killed would point to their murderers. A few people nodded, but others scoffed.

  “Daft woman,” the perfume-seller spoke again. “Can you see his hands?”

  “Now how can I? They’re all tucked up inside the barrel, ain’t they?”

  “Well, dump him from the barrel then. See where he points.”

  Hearing the crowd hum its approval, two men moved to dump the corpse out. But that would mean the murderer was there. It made no sense.

  “Wait!” Lucy called out, finally finding her voice. “I don’t think we should move the body!” She could almost hear the physician Larimer complaining, as he had many a time while supping at the magistrate’s household. “Bloody fools! I need to look at the body where it lays to determine cause of death.” She shook her head. The cause of death here looked easy to see; the big knife through his chest was a dead giveaway.

  As if reading her thoughts, the man standing at the barrel frowned at Lucy. “He’s dead, ain’t he? Not going to hurt him none, are we?”

  Lucy thought quickly. “Yes, well, his soul might not like being disturbed. He might decide to haunt you.”

  At that thought, a few people crossed themselves quickly, the gesture a holdover from their distant Catholic past, and backed away. No one wanted a spirit following them home, especially with so few crossroads that could confuse the ghost and send it in the wrong direction.

  Luckily, the constable arrived just then, Annie at his heels, panting slightly. A second man, a soldier, followed them both. Lucy recognized the constable. Duncan. Lucy had first met him two years ago when he had brought news to the magistrate of a terrible murder. And just two weeks ago, on the night of the Great Fire, she had stood before him, sobbing out the story of another terrible death that had occurred.

  Taking in the scene at once, Constable Duncan spoke, his Yorkshire accent setting him apart from the Londoners around him. Though young, he commanded respect. “Who found the body?” he demanded.

  Lucy pushed the two young boys forward. “These two, Constable Duncan. They were playing atop the barrels.”

  Duncan glanced at her, his face registering slight surprise at seeing her there. “Indeed, Miss Campion? Alright then. The rest of you. Back to work.”

  Grumbling, sneaking glances over their shoulders, the small group returned to their shovels and carts, resuming the seemingly endless restoration of London. The soldier moved closer, keeping an eye on their work. Lucy noticed that Sid seemed to have disappeared. Not surprising, seeing how he disliked any representative of the law.

  Duncan looked sternly at the boys. “Now, lads, tell me how you came to find the body.”

  In sullen tones, Sir Dungheap explained. “We was just playing, climbing about on the barrels. Just there.”

  They followed his finger. A few more barrels were still stacked against a bit of a stone wall. The rest of the dwelling must have been made of wood, as only a few burned timbers remained. The stone wall, probably once connected to a much older structure that had survived the flames, must have protected the barrels stacked alongside.

  “We was rolling on top of the barrels. Dunno there was a stiff in it,” the boy said sullenly.

  Duncan held out his thumb, looking in the distance first at the ruins of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and then did the same thing to the remains of St. Faith’s. Turning, he did it a third time, looking at the structures at the end of Fleet Street that were still intact, having been just out of reach of the Fire.

  “What are you doing?” Lucy could not help but ask.

  “Measuring distances,” Duncan said. “A trick I learned from painters. They call it ‘perspective.’”

  “Why?”

  “Well, Miss Campion, I’m trying to determine which tavern this was. There were several on Fleet Street.”

  “How do you know it was a tavern?”

  Duncan pointed at the barrels. “Those are malt barrels.”

  Lucy frowned, trying to remember what the street had looked like before the Fire. Surely, she had walked along here enough times, to and from the market. Right now, without the shops with their signs, she was at a bit of a loss.

  Duncan, however, had figured it out. “The Cheshire Cheese!” he said.

  With a flash, Lucy remembered the old sign that had hung out front. She couldn’t remember ever having been inside, not because she didn’t enjoy a pint from time to time, but because that tavern hadn’t seemed to draw the most respectable sorts. She said as much to the constable.

  “Hmmm,” he said, not listening to her. “Now the question is, when was this poor sot put in the barrel? I assume before the Fire, since the soldiers have been patrolling this area. But how long before?”

  “The physician should be able to tell you that,” Lucy said. “What he can’t tell you, though, is who murdered the poor man. Or why.”

  2

  Later, as the sky grew dark, all the Fire workers were given a few coins and sent home. The Lord Mayor had imposed a curfew on the City to help restrict lawlessness. He had also temporarily restricted travelers from carrying lanterns, for fear another fire would start again. The fog and smoke still lingered, making the early-September evening look as black as a smithy’s forge.

  Feigning a bravery she did not feel, Lucy took Annie’s arm. “Come on. We’ve got to get home within the hour, lest we break curfew.”

  As they walked, the two young women clung together, making their way cautiously through the dark. Lucy had never longed so deeply for a lantern. Fortunately, some kind souls had placed candles in their windows to ease the path of nighttime travelers. This charitable act allowed them to keep to the main paths fairly easily. Only when they approached the last desolate field they had to pass through before reaching the magistrate’s home did Lucy feel a bit anxious.

  Hearing a step behind them, they both froze. “Did you hear that?” Anni
e whispered, gripping Lucy’s arm painfully.

  “Who’s there?” Lucy called, trying to keep her voice from wavering. For a long moment, she held her breath. When a man stepped out of the shadows, they both gasped. Instinctively, Lucy pushed Annie behind her.

  “Afraid are you?” a familiar voice asked. “Nay, calm your fears. ’Tis only me.”

  “Sid!” they cried out in unison.

  Though she relaxed a bit, Lucy was still wary. She had learned the hard way that a friendly grin could easily mask a murderous heart. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Sid’s grin was wide as he regarded them. “I wanted to talk to you some more. Get to know you a bit.”

  Clearly relieved, Annie smiled back. “What about that stiff today?” she asked, seemingly eager to make conversation. “Gaw! That nearly scared me witless.”

  Lucy shot her a reproachful glance, and the younger woman fell silent. “Where’d you get to, Sid?” Lucy asked, frowning at the young pickpocket. “Earlier? When the body was found? I looked around and you were nowhere to be seen.”

  “You were looking for me?” His tone was suggestive.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Lucy said, annoyed. “Enough already!” She took the younger woman’s arm again. “Come, Annie. We must make haste.” To her vexation, Sid started walking with them. “Hey, what are you doing? You know we’re almost at curfew. We’ll hear the bellman toll the warning any moment.”

  Sid had fallen into step with Annie, and seemed intent on walking with them. “Oh, I was going this way anyway,” Sid said, pointing vaguely in the direction they were going. “I’ll just keep you company. You need a man to make sure you are alright.”

  Lucy ignored Annie’s gratified look, and pressed him a bit. “And where are you living these days, Sid?”

  Sid had no cheeky reply. “Nowhere, truly,” he mumbled.

  Lucy sighed. “You lost your home in the Fire, didn’t you?”

  Annie squealed. “Oh, Lucy, Sid should come home with us. Right, Lucy? Surely, he could use a bite to eat. The master won’t mind.” To Sid, she added, “The master’s a magistrate, you know. We live in a fine house. Though not as fine as the house we used to live in.”