Murder on Black Swan Lane

by Andrea Penrose

  It would have been hypocritical to argue. Children were a key part of her own information-gathering network. They were far more observant than people thought.

  He took her silence for the pragmatism it was. “The urchins will be able to spot whether Lowell has any sentinels posted,” he explained. “They’ll also be able to give us an accurate description of all the building’s windows and doors. That Raven has seen the interior is an important advantage.”

  “Raven,” she repeated. “You actually know his name.”

  “A lucky guess,” he murmured. “The choice of scavengers is limited.”

  And the ways to mask emotions were infinite, as she well knew.

  “For God’s sake, he’s just a boy. He’s not as tough as he appears. You should try to be more . . .” Charlotte fumbled for the right word and then quickly gave up. “You should try to be more sensitive to his fears and longings.”

  Wrexford responded with a cold shrug. “We can all stand around wringing our hands and sniveling with sentiment, or we can try to save his brother. Which would you prefer, Mrs. Sloane? We can’t do both.”

  She itched to slap him for being right.

  “You ought to snatch a few hours of sleep,” he advised. “It will take some time for the urchins to come back with their reports. And I wish to wait for dusk to provide some measure of cover for the final confrontation.”

  Sleep? Exhaustion was not nearly as terrifying as the prospect of dreams.

  Raven called to the earl, impatient to be off. “What do you think our chances are, sir?” she whispered.

  “Come, Mrs. Sloane, at heart you are as much a clear-eyed cynic as I am.” Wrexford patted at his coat, and on finding the pouch of bullets quickly shifted it from one pocket to another. “You know damnably well what the answer is.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Early evening was giving way to dusk.

  “When do you think the first urchin will return?” Sheffield had salvaged a broken crate from the adjoining alley and was sitting with his shoulders slouched against the soot-dark wall in the narrow cul-de-sac.

  “When she finishes with the task she’s been given,” growled Wrexford. Charlotte and Henning had found perches on a low stone ledge. He had chosen to stand, though the muck slowly seeping through a gash in his boot was making him reconsider his options.

  “Alice is a great gun,” piped up Raven, who had found footholds in the crumbling mortar of the corner building and climbed high enough to peer into the street. He had been angry at the earl’s refusal to let him be part of the surveillance, but had grudgingly accepted the explanation that Lowell or his spies might recognize him. “She ain’t gonna muck up.”

  All of the urchins had been impressive, mused the earl. Their ragged clothes and rough language hadn’t disguised the glint of sharp intelligence in their eyes. They had listened carefully and asked savvy questions. If the plan failed, it would not be because of any mistake on their part.

  “They’ve been told to go in at different intervals, and by different routes so as not to raise suspicion,” added Wrexford in further explanation to his friend.

  He turned and took several steps. Had he failed to think of something? The thought was gnawing at him. One slip on his part and a young boy would pay for it with his life.

  Whinging at the unfairness of life had always struck him as a self-indulgent exercise. Now, however, he was tempted to hurl a litany of curses at the gods. Punish a man for his hubris, but do not strike at him obliquely through an innocent child.

  “You’re squelching,” said Sheffield, making a pained face. The sucking sound of his boots sinking in the foul-smelling mud was not a pleasant one.

  “And you’re stinking,” he shot back. Sheffield was dressed in grubby, ill-fitting clothes that reeked of garlic.

  “Beggars can’t be choosy,” replied his friend airily. “I thought it was quite a stroke of genius that I thought to return to Mrs. Sloane’s house by way of Petticoat Lane.” The outdoor used clothing market was one of the largest in London. “You ought to be grateful that I thought to purchase you a suitable set of togs. Your Mayfair finery would have stuck out like a squealing pig in this neighborhood.”

  “Next time, kindly check the footwear for knife holes.”

  “Point taken,” replied Sheffield. “By the by, you owe me two pounds, tuppence for the rags.”

  “That’s bloody highway robbery,” muttered the earl.

  An evil grin. “That’s only fitting, seeing as the previous owner of your coat was hanged at Tyburn last Saturday for robbing a Royal Mail coach on Houndslow Heath.”

  Henning let out a snort of laughter.

  Charlotte attempted a smile, but the lines of worry at the corners of her mouth quickly pinched it off. She appeared distracted.

  Wrexford gave himself a mental kick for stating the obvious. He couldn’t begin to plumb the depth of her feelings at this moment. Unlike him, she had the capacity to care—more passionately than was good for her. For him, this was mere logic. The supreme satisfaction of taking on an intellectual challenge and seeing that no untidy elements marred the elegance of his solution. He still did not know for sure the motive behind the murders, and that bothered him.

  And yet, that did not quite explain why he felt jumpy as a cat on a hot griddle.

  “I see Alice,” announced Raven, and dropped down to the ground.

  “Amat victoria curam,” Wrexford murmured. Victory loves preparation.

  Charlotte looked up sharply. Her lips moved—a silent prayer?

  He stepped closer, just in time to catch the last of her whisper before it was tugged away by the breeze.

  “. . . and let us hope you are correct, sir.”

  Dusk was fast leaching the light from the sky. Angled shadows stretched over the alleyway as one by one the urchins darted in to report on what they had seen. Wrexford pressed and prodded until he was satisfied that he had extracted every last detail from them.

  “You’ve done very well,” he said, taking out his purse and shaking out five gold guineas into his palm. “For your efforts,” he added, extending his hand to the grubby figures gathered around him.

  One of the urchins—Skinny, he guessed, by the painfully thin silhouette cast by the sinking sun—stared at the unspeakable riches for barely a moment before shaking his head. “Don’t need no reward. Hawk be a friend, and friends take care o’ each udder.”

  The other four urchins nodded solemnly.

  Honor appeared in the oddest of guises. “It’s not a reward,” he said softly. “It’s a token of our gratitude.”

  “Grati-what?” whispered the girl who smelled of fish.

  “He’s saying thank you, Alice,” explained Raven. “Take the blunt—he’s rich.”

  “Oiy, well in that case . . .”

  Five hands shot out and snagged the coins. Like fireflies flitting through the gloaming, they scampered away, trailing tiny flashes of gold in their wake.

  “So, laddie . . .” Henning rose and removed the unlit pipe from his mouth. He had kept quiet, perhaps sensing his usual sarcasm would only rub raw on Charlotte’s already tender nerves. Instead of tossing out verbal barbs, he had busied himself with unwrapping the vials of chemicals sent by Tyler. They were now neatly arranged in the small box, which he held out for inspection.

  “I assume you have a plan of how to fight fire with fire.”

  “These may prove useful.” Wrexford pocketed several of the vials. “But I am counting on stealth and surprise rather than flash and bang to win the day.”

  “Subtlety is not usually your strong point,” murmured Sheffield. “But of late, you are proving surprisingly capable of the unexpected.”

  Charlotte said nothing, which had him worried. However well she hid her innermost feelings, she had never shied away from expressing her opinions or observation. He had grown used to her sharp-tongued intelligence, her badgering, her challenging his every move. This unnatural silence was unnerving.

>   “Let us hope our plan will be completely unexpected by Lowell. I think his cleverness will play into our hands. He has every reason to be confident that his hiding place is safe from discovery, and that hubris may prove to be his Achilles heel.”

  Moving to one of the few remaining spots of faint light, Wrexford crouched down and sketched a rough map in the mud with a stick. “I intend to enter here, at the back window of the storage room used for the art materials.” Skinny had noted that because of the spiked iron fence around the coal chute door that particular window was unbarred. The gate lock would not be a problem.

  “From there I can make a methodical check of the other upper rooms, though I doubt I shall find Hawk there. Lowell will likely be holding him somewhere in the cellars, close to the laboratory.”

  “Lucifer toiling away to create misery and mayhem in his private hell,” muttered Henning.

  “My aim is to free the lad, and get him safely out of the building. Then I will confront Lowell,” went on the earl. “Henning, you will take up position at the west end of Artillery Lane, while Sheff, you will stand here, at the east end.” Based on what the urchins had observed, he was confident that Lowell had no sentries posted around his lair. “If Lowell escapes from me and tries to flee, your job is to stop him.” He looked up. “I take it you didn’t come unarmed?”

  Two grunts confirmed the surmise.

  “And me?” Charlotte’s voice finally stirred the air.

  Her place was a far more ticklish choice. He knew she—and Raven—would never accept a spot safely away from any danger. But too close and he worried they might ignore his orders and plunge in to help.

  And that could prove a fatal mistake.

  He glanced at the map for an instant before making his decision. “Here,” he said, pointing to the building directly across the street from Lowell’s secret laboratory. A narrow cart path ran along its right side, and Alice the Eel Girl had noticed a recessed stairwell leading down to the coal hatch. It was a good hiding place and had the added advantage of being far enough away that reason might have enough time to overcome impulse.

  “I want you and the weasel here,” he said.

  Charlotte studied the sketch. “And our job is?”

  “To wait for me to bring Hawk to you,” answered the earl decisively.

  Raven met the assertion with a stony-faced acceptance that belied his age. “S’all right. You don’t have te pretend. I know Hawk’s going to die. I just want you to kill the bastard who snatched him.”

  “We’ll get him back,” repeated the earl.

  “You can’t promise that.” Raven wiped his nose with his sleeve. The fabric came away rusty with dried blood. “Bad things happen all the time. M’lady’s husband died, your brother died. Now Hawk’s gonna die, too.” He sniffed. “It’s just how it be.”

  “The reaper doesn’t always win,” said Wrexford.

  “Yeah? Who’s gonna beat him to a bloody pulp? You?”

  “Yes, lad. Me.” In that instant, Wrexford had never believed anything so strongly. I will get him back. For all the brothers who had perished.

  The force of it took him aback. God curse it, had he become a sniveling sentimentalist?

  Raven was watching him intently, with eyes too old and too wary for a boy.

  Curling a light fist, he brushed a quick cuff to the upturned chin before turning away. What did it matter if one more entry was added to the litany of his faults? Both the Devil and St. Peter had likely long since lost count.

  * * *

  Charlotte wasn’t sure whether she wanted to laugh or weep. The sardonic Earl of Wrexford—an irascible cynic, renowned for his hair-trigger temper and utter disdain for sentiment—was seeking to comfort a ragged little imp from the stews?

  Perception, she reminded herself, rarely aligned with reality. In her experience, no one was either all bad or all good.

  All of us are all simply human.

  “Mrs. Sloane?” Shadows tangled with the strands of black hair curling, making his face as shapeless as his rag market hat. “No protest? No demand to charge in where angels fear to tread?”

  Charlotte wished she could see his expression. There was an undertone to his question that she couldn’t quite identify. “I know you think me ruled by impulse rather than logic—”

  “Intuition, not impulse,” he corrected. “Which I’ve learned to respect. If you have an objection, I am willing to listen.”

  “And I, sir, have learned to respect the way you use reason to attack a problem. Even with all the information we’ve gathered, there are many unknown variables within Lowell’s hideaway. It would be foolhardy of me to demand to accompany you. Worrying about me making a misstep would be a dangerous distraction.”

  “A wise decision,” said Henning. “But then, I expected no less of you.”

  She glanced up at the sky. The purples and pinks of dusk were darkening. Lowell’s ultimatum was fast approaching. “Shouldn’t we be going?”

  Wrexford took Henning and Sheffield aside. A quick exchange, too low for her to hear, and then his two friends slipped away into the gloom. “We will follow shortly,” he said. “By a different route, to err on the side of caution.”

  She nodded. A fluttering rose in her chest, a steel within velvet sensation of butterflies beating their wings against her ribs. The curse of a febrile imagination, she thought. In her mind’s eye, they all were colored in garish shades of gold.

  Wrexford was calmly contemplating some faraway spot on the wall. Charlotte sought to draw strength from his unruffled attitude. For him, life was like science. It had a certain ruthless logic to it. One could control only so many variables of an experiment; then one simply had to step back and let the physics of the universe take its course.

  Detachment disengaged from emotion.

  It was a trait she seemed to be lacking.

  Head bowed, Raven shuffled his feet. She moved closer to him and set a hand on his shoulder, sensing any further show of emotion might embarrass him. He flinched at first, but then allowed his scrawny body to slump against hers. The warmth of him was comforting.

  Time seemed mired in molasses. The minutes slid by with a viscous slowness. The fluttering was now a drumming against her tautly drawn nerves.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  At long last, the earl turned. “Let’s be off.”

  They moved in single file, three wraiths threading their way through the shifting shadows. Charlotte led the way, with Wrexford guarding the rear. He moved lightly, his steps sure and silent over the uneven ground. She could feel the thrum of a stalking predator’s flexing muscle in the night air. Repressing a shiver, she quickened her pace.

  They were still several streets away from their destination when the earl drew them deep into a gap between two buildings. He pitched his voice low, the terse whisper nearly swallowed by the creak of a rusty sign swinging in the breeze.

  “I’m counting on you to keep your position, no matter what you might see or hear.”

  “I understand, sir,” answered Charlotte. She felt she owed him that.

  “What if there’s an explosion?” demanded Raven. They hadn’t told the boy about Lowell’s chemical compound, but she wasn’t surprised that he had caught wind of it.

  Crouching down, Wrexford leaned in nose to nose with him. “You don’t move.”

  Charlotte didn’t hear a response. She wondered if the earl remembered just how defiantly stubborn boys could be.

  Wrexford seemed, however, to have taken that into consideration. He held out his hand, the upturned palm a flicker of pale silver in the mizzling moonlight. “Give me your pledge of honor that you’ll do as I say.”

  Raven hesitated, then slowly sealed the promise with a touch of his own hand.

  “Excellent. I should have disliked hanging you by your toes from that butcher’s sign overhead. But I would have done so.”

  Charlotte didn’t doubt it.

  Raven grinned. “I wudda found a way te wriggle
free.”

  “I think not, Weasel. But we shall leave testing each other’s mettle for another time.” He rose, and Charlotte felt the brush of his clothing against hers as he edged toward the opening. “I’ll leave you two here, Mrs. Sloane, and will count on you using your good sense to take your appointed place.”

  He was gone before she had a chance to wish him good luck.

  Perhaps that was for the best.

  “Come,” she murmured to Raven. “Let us hurry.”

  * * *

  The knife blade found the brass catch. A slight jiggle released it, allowing the window casing to ease open.

  Wrexford held himself still, listening for any sounds from inside before pulling himself up to the ledge and slipping inside. The long room was still cluttered with art supplies. Perhaps Canaday and his coconspirators had harbored illusions of reviving their swindles. The trouble was, men of artistic genius were far rarer than those who counted greed and an utter lack of morality as their primary talents.

  Like had found like, he thought, as he quickly searched the space for any sign of Hawk. Lowell’s evil had proved even more powerful than that of The Ancients. His clever manipulations had destroyed their schemes.

  As I shall destroy his.

  The central corridor was unlit. Feeling his way along the rough, plastered wall, Wrexford cursed the fact that Sheffield had convinced him to trade his supple, well-fitting boots for the Petticoat Lane pair. The loose leather and frayed stitching around the thick sole was making it hard to move quietly. He slowed a half step, hoping the deference to disguise wouldn’t turn out to be a grave miscalculation.

  There were two other rooms abutting the art storage area. A quick look in each showed them to be empty. The large space across the corridor was also devoid of furnishings, save for a few old writing desks and a three-legged chair sitting forlornly in the dusting of light allowed in by the barred windows.

  Wrexford had expected no less. The basement and cellars were Lowell’s lair, and when vermin were being hunted, they always went to ground.

  He drew the door closed and headed for the stairwell leading down to the bowels of the building. As he approached the double doors, he paused to slip his knife back into his boot and readjust the weight of the pistol in his pocket. His coat, a plain-cut garment thankfully unembellished by the shoulder capes and fancy lapels favored by a gentleman, buttoned up snugly to the throat, hiding the white of his linen. The hat he dropped as an unnecessary encumbrance.