by C. S. Harris
She was no fool. He had no doubt she had long ago guessed where the extra money came from to buy the fine china, the fashionable gowns, the expensive carpets on her floors. But she had simply accepted it all as her due while remaining nominally ignorant of the activities that made it possible. And for the first time, Sebastian found himself almost feeling sorry for Toop, married to this plain, wellborn, unhappy woman who still felt nothing but contempt for him, no matter how hard he had tried to please her.
He wondered why she had agreed to speak to him when she basically had nothing to tell him. Then he saw the spasm that passed over her features as her gaze wandered to the closed door to the parlor, and he thought he understood. The women who had come to “comfort” her—the wives and daughters of the Canons of St. George’s—still belonged to the world from which she had been demoted. And he had no doubt they were adept at subtly reminding her of her lowered station in life.
He said, “Where will you go now?” This house would be given to the new virger of St. George’s, whoever he might be.
“My widowed sister has a cottage in Eton. I’ll live with her.” A small, wirehaired gray dog came trotting in from the passage that led to the kitchen, and she bent to scoop it up into her arms.
“Please accept my condolences,” he said with a bow. “If you think of anything—anything at all—that might help make sense of what happened to your husband, you will let me know?”
“Yes, of course,” she said.
But he knew she would not.
What mattered to her was that Rowan Toop’s death meant she was now utterly responsible for her own maintenance in a world that was not at all kind to plain, gently bred, impoverished women.
Chapter 39
S ebastian returned to Brook Street to find Sir Henry Lovejoy on the verge of descending the house’s front steps.
“Sir Henry,” said Sebastian, handing Tom the reins and hopping down from the curricle’s high seat. “I’m glad I caught you. Please, come in.”
He led the way to the drawing room, ordered tea for Lovejoy, poured himself a brandy, and told the magistrate the results of his trip to Windsor.
“Merciful heavens,” said the magistrate after listening to the circumstances surrounding Toop’s death. “You don’t think it possible the virger simply slipped into the river and drowned?”
“It would be a startling coincidence if he did. But we’ll know more once Gibson gets a look at him.”
Lovejoy sipped his tea for a moment in thoughtful silence. “If it was murder, then why didn’t the killer cut off Toop’s head, as he did with the others?”
“That, I can’t answer.” Sebastian cradled his brandy in one palm and went to stand before the fire. “Were you coming to see me for a particular reason?”
“I was, yes. It may be unimportant, but you’ll recall that Stanley Preston went off somewhere in a hackney the day he was killed? Well, we’ve finally located the jarvey involved.”
“And?”
“The jarvey remembers the fare quite clearly, for he found it rather peculiar.” Lovejoy set aside his teacup and leaned forward. “Preston asked to be put down at the entrance to Bucket Lane, on Fish Street Hill.”
“Good God; whatever for?” A thoroughfare linking London Bridge to Gracechurch Street and Bishopsgate, Fish Street Hill was the center of a poor, overcrowded area inhabited mainly by those connected in some way with the fish market of Billingsgate, which lay just to the west of the bridgehead. Sebastian could think of nothing that might have taken Preston to the area.
“That we’ve yet to ascertain,” said Lovejoy. “Miss Preston says she has no notion what her father could have been doing there.”
“You believe her?”
Lovejoy looked at him in surprise. “You don’t?”
“I think Miss Anne Preston is being less than honest with us about a number of things.”
“Oh, dear; I hadn’t realized that.” The magistrate looked thoughtful for a moment.
“What?” said Sebastian, watching him.
“Only that the constable who questioned Preston’s servants reported the staff were not as forthcoming as they might have been. You think they could be protecting Miss Preston for some reason?”
“It’s possible. You might have one of your lads take another go at them.”
Lovejoy nodded. “I’ll have Constable Hart talk to them again. I sent him out to Bucket Lane, by the way. Unfortunately, he was unable to locate anyone who would admit to knowing Preston or even remembered seeing him.”
“I’m not surprised.” People who lived in places such as Fish Street Hill weren’t exactly known for their friendliness to constables. “Your constable was lucky to get out of there alive.”
“That’s what he said. And he’s refusing to go back again.”
Sebastian was rubbing a nasty mixture of bacon grease and ashes into his hair when Hero came to stand at the entrance to his dressing room. “Seven Dials?” she asked, watching him. “Or Stepney Green?”
“Billingsgate.”
“Really? Whatever for?”
He told her.
She said, “Why Billingsgate? It makes no sense.”
“I know.” He paused to slip his small double-barreled pistol into the pocket of one of his most old-fashioned and ill-fitting Rosemary Lane coats. “That’s what makes it so intriguing.”
Chapter 40
A pungent, seaweed-like odor permeated the air around London Bridge, taking on the more distinct smell of fish the closer Sebastian came to the bridge and its adjacent fish market.
For as long as anyone could remember, the bridgehead had been dominated by the fishmongers of Billingsgate. This was an area of brawny women in aprons shiny with fish scales, of men in slime-stiffened canvas trousers or the red-worsted caps of sailors. The tangled rigging of oyster boats showed in the breaks between the tightly packed buildings, and seagulls wheeled overhead, their plaintive cries mingling with the shouts of “Plaice alive, alive, cheap,” and “Mussels, a penny a quart.”
The stretch of the bridge approach known as Fish Street Hill was crowded with shops selling everything from cod and periwinkles to stores of wine, pitch, and tar. But in the warren of narrow lanes and mean courts to the west lived the fishmongers themselves, along with the costers who bought the fish of Billingsgate to sell on the streets of London.
Sebastian arrived by hackney, slipping easily into the persona he had chosen to adopt: Silas Nelson, a somewhat mentally deficient bumpkin from a small village in Kent. By the time he paid off his hackney at the entrance to the narrow passage leading to Bucket Lane, all trace of the self-confident viscount had vanished. His shoulders slumped, and he walked with his head thrust forward, his gaze flitting nervously from side to side, a foolish half grin plastered on his slack features.
It was a trick his former lover, Kat Boleyn, had taught him long ago, when she was first making her mark on the stage and he was an idealistic youth just down from Oxford. “It’s not enough simply to dress the part of a character,” she’d told him. “You need to let their personality infuse every fiber of your being—the way you walk and talk, your attitude toward yourself and others, even life itself.”
The lesson had served him well during the war, when he’d operated as an exploring officer in the mountains of Italy and the Peninsula. . . .
But he slammed his mind shut against those memories.
Now, shuffling along with an awkward gait, he cut through the passage to find himself in a dim lane of bleak, dilapidated houses that seemed almost to touch overhead, shutting out all sunlight. Tattered laundry hung from upper-story windows, while vacant-eyed children and half-starved, snarling dogs clustered in the narrow stretch of mud and steaming garbage that passed for a street. The air was thick with the smell of decay and excrement and the inescapable, oppressive odor of fish.
He knocked on the first door to his right and waited, still vaguely smiling.
No one answered.
Tipping back his head, he peered up at the cracked, grimy windows of the overhanging second story. He could feel the inhabitants inside, hear their soft whispers and furtive movements. But the door remained closed.
He moved on to the next house and rapped loudly on the worn, weathered door.
Silence.
“Hey!” he hollered. “Anybody home?”
Farther down the lane, a door opened and an old man came out leaning on a cane, a cap pulled low over his ears and a tattered scarf wrapped thick about his neck.
“Excuse me,” called Silas Nelson, hurrying toward him. “Can I talk to you?”
The man glanced once at Sebastian, then turned to walk in the opposite direction, his cane gripped tightly in his fist.
“Hey! I’m lookin’ for Mr. Stanley Preston; you know him?”
The man kept walking.
Silas Nelson drew up, his shoulders slumping more than ever. “Why won’t anybody talk to me?” he asked of the now empty street. Even the children had disappeared.
“Who’re you?” demanded a voice behind him.
Sebastian spun around.
A woman stood in the center of the muddy, refuse-strewn lane, her arms crossed at her chest, her head thrown back as she stared at him with narrowed, startlingly turquoise eyes. She looked to be somewhere in her thirties and was stunningly beautiful, with smooth café au lait skin and rich dark hair that peeked from beneath the red kerchief she wore around her head. She was built tall and slender, with a graceful long neck and high cheekbones and full lips.
“You deaf or somethin’?” she asked when he didn’t answer. “I said, who are you?”
“Silas Nelson, ma’am,” said Sebastian, snatching off his moth-eaten cap and executing a jerky bow.
The woman sniffed. “Ne’er seen you before. What you doin’ here?”
“Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but I’m lookin’ for Mr. Preston—Mr. Stanley Preston. Would you know him, by chance?”
“Ain’t no one by that name lives round ’ere.”
“I’m told he was here last Sunday.”
“Who told you that?”
It had occurred to Sebastian that Lovejoy’s constable had probably agitated the neighborhood to the extent that any stranger suddenly appearing in their midst that day would be immediately suspect. So he twisted his cap in his hands and said, “Constable, ma’am. Well, I s’pose I should say, the innkeeper of the Red Fox, what had it from the constable. That’s where I’m stayin’, you see—at the Red Fox, on Fish Street Hill. When the innkeeper heard I’d come t’ town lookin’ for Mr. Preston, he said, ‘That’s right queer, for we had a constable here just this mornin’ askin’ about him. Said he’d been in Bucket Lane.’” Sebastian’s Silas Nelson leaned forward eagerly. “Have you seen him, then? Oh, please say you have.”
Her expression turned from one of suspicion to mild disgust. “Who are you?”
“I’m Silas Nelson, ma’am.”
“You already told me that. What I mean is, where you come from? What you want with Preston?”
“I’m from Dymchurch, ma’am, down in Kent. I come up to London because my sister’s been takin’ care of me. But she done gone and died, and now what’m I to do? I remembered her husband had some dealin’s once with Mr. Preston, so I come to town, hopin’ maybe he could find somethin’ for me to do. I hear he’s powerful rich. Only, I don’t know his direction and London is ever so big. I’d no notion; it’s nothing like Dymchurch, you know. I was puzzlin’ on how to even begin lookin’ for him when the innkeeper tells me about Bucket Lane.” Sebastian gave a broad grin. “So here I am.”
“You’re an idiot.” It was said more as a statement of fact than as an insult.
Sebastian widened his grin. “Yes, ma’am.”
She pushed out her breath between her teeth and shook her head. “Your Mr. Preston don’t live ’ere. He lives in a grand house out Knightsbridge way. Or I suppose I should say, he did. He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Sebastian let his face fall ludicrously.
“That’s right.”
“But . . . what’m I to do?”
“Go back to Kent?” she suggested.
“But . . . you did know Mr. Preston, yes?”
She didn’t deny it, but simply stared at him, waiting for him to finish.
He leaned forward. “Maybe . . . maybe you know somebody could find me work? I may not be smart, but I am strong. Sorta.”
“Sorry.” She threw an expressive glace at the surrounding squalor. “Take a look around. People here have a hard enough time feedin’ themselves, let alone findin’ work for others. And you’re wrong; I didn’t know Preston.” Her upper lip curled in disgust. “The only people like me that man ever knew was workin’ in his sugarcane fields and callin’ him massa.”
Sebastian looked confused. “Ma’am?”
“Never mind.” She jerked her head toward the passage leading back to Fish Street Hill. “Just . . . get out of here before somethin’ happens to you. This ain’t no place for the likes of you.”
“Ma’am?”
“You heard me. Take yourself off. Now.”
Sebastian pulled his cap down on his head with both hands and allowed his whole being to sag with dejection and despair as he turned back toward Fish Street Hill.
He paused at the dark mouth of the passage to look back.
She still stood in the middle of the muddy lane, her arms crossed at her chest, her gaze narrowed as she watched him. Although whether she watched to keep him from harm or to make certain he actually did leave, he couldn’t have said.
Sebastian settled against the worn squabs of the hackney carrying him back to Brook Street, his gaze on the tumbledown buildings and ragged, desperate people that flashed past on the far side of the carriage window. The farther west they traveled, the finer the shops and houses became, the wider and better paved the streets, the better dressed—and better fed—the people, until it seemed to him that he might have entered a different land.
Their society was one of infinitesimally exact gradations, with each individual acutely aware of his or her own place in relation to all others. Grand nobles such as Sebastian’s aunt Henrietta were casually contemptuous of mere landed gentry such as Stanley Preston. Yet Preston had considered himself fully justified in despising—and protecting his daughter from—the likes of Captain Hugh Wyeth, who might be gently born but was nevertheless woefully impoverished.
Intelligence, moral fiber, education, talent—all counted for little without birth and wealth. What mattered in their world was a carefully calibrated interplay of those two vital attributes. It was a delicate equation that would no doubt baffle an outsider, but never those who lived within it, who grew up instinctively attuned to the implications of their subtlest gradations.
And then there were those without either birth or land, those engaged in that shameful thing called trade. Make enough money and a man could buy an estate and in a few short generations convince his peers to forget his plebian origins, his ties to that great horde who actually worked for a living. Yet even the common multitude had their own distinct gradations in rank. Merchants, craftsmen, innkeepers, laborers, costermongers, prostitutes—all knew their exact place in society and considered themselves superior to those ranked below them. Even the thieves had their elites and their dregs, with highwaymen looking down on the housebreakers, who in turn despised the mere cutpurses and pickpockets.
By all reports, Stanley Preston had been both painfully aware and deeply resentful of what he saw as his own inadequate position in the grand scheme of things. Desperate to claw his way higher up the social ladder, he had married a lord’s daughter and fought hard to secure advantageous marriages for his children, all the while
surrounding himself with artifacts of the great nobles and kings and queens of the past. And yet fewer than twelve hours before someone cut off his head and set it up on the parapet of Bloody Bridge, he’d traveled across London to a mean lane off Fish Street Hill to interact in some unknown way with a tall, dusky-skinned woman with turquoise eyes who despised him.
Why?
She was no simple prostitute; of that Sebastian was fairly certain. The neighborhood was one favored by costermongers, who tended to cluster together close to the markets they visited at dawn to buy their stock. From her dress, Sebastian suspected the unknown woman of Bucket Lane was a coster herself, while her appearance and remarks suggested that at least one of her grandparents had been of African blood. Was that significant?
Perhaps.
A new theory was forming in his imagination, outlandish, improbable even, and yet . . .
What he needed, he realized, was to speak to someone who knew Preston well. Really knew him. And that meant not his daughter, Anne, but his longtime friend, Sir Galen Knightly.
Chapter 41
N ewly changed into doeskin breeches and a well-tailored dark blue coat, with his hair still damp, Sebastian knocked on the door of Sir Galen Knightly’s town house in Half Moon Street to find the Baronet standing in the stately, old-fashioned hall with his gloves in one hand and a walking stick tucked up under his arm.
“I beg your pardon,” said Sebastian. “Have I caught you on the verge of going out?”
Sir Galen looked vaguely chagrined. “Well . . . actually, yes. Did you need something?”
“I had a few more questions about Preston I was hoping you might be able to answer.”
The Baronet glanced at the hall clock. “Would you mind walking with me toward Bond Street?”
It was Sir Galen’s practice, Sebastian recalled, to dine at Stevens every Wednesday and Sunday at half past six. “Of course,” said Sebastian, and the older man’s face cleared.