Where Serpents Sleep

by C. S. Harris

  “Help!” she screamed. “Help us, quickly!”

  Sebastian added his voice to hers. “We’re trapped down here behind a gate and the tide is coming in. Get a crowbar to break the padlocked chain. Quickly!”

  The stairwell filled with gruff voices and the clomp of heavy boots tramping down the steps to splash through the water that crept ever higher. A giant of a man with red hair and a full blond beard eased one end of a crowbar into the loops of the padlocked chain, his face purpling with strain as he broke the links.

  “Wot the ’ell ye doin’ down ’ere?” he asked as Hero Jarvis, her wet shift clinging to her skin, fell against him.

  Helping hands reached out to grip them, drag them up to light and fresh air and the blessed, unexpected warmth of the late-afternoon sun. A blanket appeared, passed from hand to hand. Miss Jarvis clenched it around her like a cloak, her face so pinched with cold her lips were blue.

  Sebastian took a deep gulp from a brandy flask pressed into his hands and said, “How did you know?”

  One of their rescuers—the red-haired giant with the bushy beard—said, “We smelled smoke. Ain’t nothing a lumberman fears more’n fire. So we come to investigate.”

  Sebastian’s gaze fell to the charred vegetation at his feet. And he realized some of the clothes they’d thrown to the top of the stairs must have wedged into the gap between the bottom of the old door and the worn lintel beneath. The fire might have gone out in the stairwell, but at some point it had obviously burned beneath the door enough to catch the long lank grass of the Duke of Somerset’s ruined, forgotten garden and set it alight.

  The crowd around them was growing. Smocked workmen from the timber wharf and ostlers from the livery jostled with barmaids from the Crow and Magpie. Sebastian noticed Miss Jarvis studying the sea of curious faces, searching the assembly for their would-be murderers.

  “Are they here?” he whispered, leaning in close to her. But she only shivered and shook her head.

  He found his purse in the pocket of his ruined coat amid the pile of charred clothes at the top of the stairs and stood for a round of drinks at the Crow and Magpie. A cheer went up as the crowd surged toward the inn. A strapping barmaid eyed the coins in Sebastian’s hand and offered to sell “the lady” her best spare dress.

  “An’ I got me a good stout cloak, too,” said the barmaid, “what you could buy.”

  “Get the lady out of this,” said Sebastian, pressing another coin into her hand. “And see that she has some hot water to wash.”

  The barmaid’s eyes widened. “We got a real nice chamber upstairs where she can clean up,” said the barmaid, shepherding Miss Jarvis toward the stairs. For one instant, Lord Jarvis’s daughter turned, her gaze meeting his over the heads of the noisy throng. Then she was gone.

  Half an hour later, he put her into a hackney carriage and gave the driver an address a block from her own home. It was the first private moment Sebastian had had with her, and before he shut the door on her, he managed to say, “I am prepared to do the honorable thing—”

  She snapped, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and told the jarvey to drive on.

  She expected to be stared at. Instead, no one paid her any heed. She was just one more cheaply dressed woman amidst a stream of housemaids and dairymaids, shopkeepers and traders’ wives. And she realized she’d caught a glimpse of the anonymity that Viscount Devlin sometimes employed so effectively in the course of his investigations. She’d never before understood what a heady sense of freedom it entailed.

  Her knock was answered by Grisham, the butler, his condescending attempts to redirect her to the area entrance cut short when she shoved back her hood and brushed past him. “Miss Jarvis!” he said with a gasp. “I do beg your par—”

  “That’s quite all right,” said Hero, heading for the stairs.

  She had the misfortune to meet her mother on the first-floor landing. But Lady Jarvis simply smiled at her vaguely and said, “I don’t recall that cloak, Hero.” The smile faded, her eyebrows puckering together. “We really must consider changing your modiste.”

  Hero gave a startled laugh. “I’m simply trying it on for a costume ball. I was thinking of going as a common barmaid.”

  Lady Jarvis pulled her chin back against her neck. “I suppose you could if you wanted to, dear. But don’t you think it’s rather, well, common?”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” said Hero, as if much struck. “Perhaps I’ll go as Jane Seymour.”

  She was halfway up the stairs to the second floor before Lady Jarvis said, “Is there a fancy-dress ball soon? I don’t recall hearing about it. Goodness, I’ve given no thought to a costume myself.”

  “Perhaps I simply heard someone talk about the possibility of giving one,” said Hero, terrified by a sudden vision of Lady Jarvis bringing up the topic of the nonexistent masquerade at her next soiree.

  “Oh,” said Lady Jarvis, and continued on her way down the stairs.

  Gaining the refuge of her own bedroom, Hero tore off her ragged clothes, and rang for her maid and a hot bath. She realized she was shivering again. Wrapped in a dressing gown, she went to sit on the window seat overlooking the Square below.

  The dying light of the day drenched the garden’s plane trees and yew hedges with a golden richness they usually lacked. Yet the scene was otherwise unaltered from the tableau she’d seen every other evening of her life in London. She could see milk-maids heading toward home, their empty pails swinging from their shoulder yokes. A lady’s carriage whirled up the street toward the east, the clip-clop of its horses’ hooves echoing up between the tall houses. Everything was the same as it had been before.

  Only Hero was different.

  Chapter 43

  “It’s fortunate you made your visit to Strand Lane dressed as a groom,” said Calhoun, picking up one sodden boot between a carefully extended thumb and forefinger. “From the looks of it, this lot’s good for naught else but the dustman.” His nose wrinkled. “And from the smell of it. Is it my imagination, or is the dressing room beginning to acquire a fishy odor?”

  Sebastian settled back in his copper hip bath and closed his eyes. “I’ve noticed I’m becoming decidedly popular with the stable cats.”

  “Tom tells me the horses are still missing.”

  “I’ve set the constables to scouring every livery in the area. They may yet turn up.”

  “What was your assailants’ plan, do you think?”

  Sebastian tipped his head forward so he could probe the tender area near the base of his skull with careful fingers. “They probably would have waited until after dark to remove our bodies and dump us in the river someplace. Make it look as if we’d drowned when a wherry boat overturned or some such thing.”

  Calhoun bundled the ruined boots and breeches together, then hesitated. “And would you still be interested in the whereabouts of Hessy Abrahams from the Orchard Street Academy?”

  Sebastian glanced around. “You’ve found her?”

  The valet was looking unusually serious. “Not exactly. But I’ve someone you’ll want to be talking to.”

  “Oh?”

  “A woman named Maggie McQueen. Until two nights ago she was a charwoman at the Academy. She left when she decided the atmosphere of the place was becoming unhealthy.”

  “Unhealthy?”

  “Lethal.”

  “She knows what happened to Hessy Abrahams?”

  “According to Maggie McQueen, Hessy is dead.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, my lord, you look like the devil,” commented Calhoun, taking the forward seat.

  Sebastian sneezed. “I feel like the devil.”

  Darkness had fallen, enveloping the city in a starless black blanket. They rode through streets lit by the flickering light of carriage lamps and the torches of running linkboys. A light rain had begun to fall, glazing the paving stones with a slick wetness and driving indoors the throngs that usually crowded around the city’s grogshops.

  Their de
stination proved to be an unsavory flash house in a back alley in Stepney called the Blue Anchor, owned by Calhoun’s notorious mother. The timbers of the jutting upper story were gray with age. Passing drays had knocked bricks off the corners of the ground floor so that the building gave the appearance of an old man missing half his teeth. But inside, the Blue Anchor was warm and snug. Its ancient bar, booths, and wainscoting might be black with age, but the public room smelled pleasantly of beeswax mingled with ale and gin.

  Sebastian sneezed again. “This is the infamous Blue Anchor?”

  “Not what you were expecting, my lord?” said Calhoun. He led the way to a cabinet behind the stairs. “I won’t be a moment.”

  Sebastian subsided into one of the comfortably worn chairs beside the fire, closed his eyes, and listened to the pounding in his head. Calhoun was back all too soon with a glass of hot rum punch for Sebastian and a wizened little woman with lank gray hair, a broad nose, and unexpectedly bright black eyes.

  “Your lordship, this is Maggie McQueen,” said Calhoun, steering her toward the seat opposite Sebastian. “Now, Maggie, I want you to tell his lordship everything you told me.”

  Maggie ran her shrewd gaze over Sebastian and evidently found him wanting. “What the blooody hell happened to you?” she demanded in a thick Geordie accent.

  “I suppose you could say I fell in the river.” It wasn’t strictly true, of course, since the river had come to him. But he didn’t feel up to explaining it.

  Maggie grunted. “Harebrained thing to have done. Were you foxed, then?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have that excuse.”

  She grunted again. “The boy here, he tells uz you’re interested in what happened at the Academy a week ago Wednesday night.”

  It took Sebastian a moment to realize that by “the boy” she meant Jules Calhoun. “Very interested,” said Sebastian, taking a sip of his hot rum punch. A tingling warmth began to spread through his body.

  “Mind you, Aa never could make sense of it all,” said Maggie, extracting a white clay pipe from some hidden pocket and beginning to pack it with tobacco. “But then Aa divint think anyone could, ’cept maybe them two whores, and they’re long gone now, aren’t they?”

  As long as he remembered that “Aa” meant “I” and that Geordies liked to put as many vowels as possible into a word, Sebastian figured he might be able to get through the conversation. He said, “You mean Rose Fletcher and Hannah Green?”

  “That’s right. It wasnit until after we’d found the bodies that anyone even noticed they’d up and disappeared.”

  “Bodies?” said Sebastian.

  Maggie kindled a spill and held the glowing end to her pipe, her cheeks hollowing as she sucked. Sebastian waited with mounting impatience until the tobacco caught and she drew on it several times, blowing out a stream of fragrant smoke. “Bodies,” she said. Only, the way she said it, it came out sounding like “booodies.”

  “Men, or women?”

  “One man, one woman.”

  Sebastian sat forward, the rum punch clasped in both hands. He breathed in the fragrant fumes of allspice, cinnamon, and hot rum, and felt the pounding in his head begin to ease. “Do you know who they were?”

  “Aa divint know nothing abooot the man, ’cept that he was a cooostomer. But the dead girl, she was Hessy Abrahams.”

  “They were found together?”

  “Ach. No. The man, he was in the Chinese room, while our Hessy was in the peep room near the back stairs.”

  “The peep room?”

  “For them that likes to watch,” said Maggie without a trace of embarrassment or coquetry.

  Sebastian exchanged glances with Calhoun. They had started out investigating the death of one young woman shot down in an alley, but the number of dead just kept multiplying. He said, “The dead man in the Chinese room . . . whose customer was he?”

  “Why, he was Rose’s.”

  Sebastian took a long, thoughtful sip of his punch. “Can you tell me what he looked like?”

  Maggie drew on her pipe, her eyes half closing in thought. “He was young.” She subjected Sebastian to a moment’s scrutiny, then said, “Abooot your age, Aa’d say. Maybe a mite older, maybe a mite younger. But fair, like the boy here.” She glanced at Calhoun. “Can’t remember anything remarkable abooot him, ’cept he had a scar across his belly. Like this.” She drew a diagonal line across her stomach.

  “He was naked?”

  Maggie nodded. “Some men just drop their breeches and get dooon to it, but this ’un, he’d paid for a whole hour.”

  “How did he die? Do you know?”

  Maggie shrugged. “Stabbed, Aa suppose. Leastways, he was sure bleeding all over the place. Took uz forever to clean it all oooop.” She hesitated. “Didint see a chir, though.”

  “A what?”

  “A knife,” supplied Calhoun.

  “Ah.” Sebastian fortified himself with more punch. “What about the man who was with Hannah Green?” he asked. “Did you see him?”

  “No. But Aa heard him, all right. He raised quite a ruckus on account of her going off and leaving him like that. Miss Lil had to give him his money back.”

  “Ian Kane wasn’t there?”

  “Not then, no. Miss Lil sent for him, after she found the bodies.”

  “What did Kane do with them?” Sebastian asked, intrigued. “The bodies, I mean.”

  Maggie McQueen narrowed her eyes against the smoke of her pipe. “You ask a powerful lot of questions for a lord.” She cast a sideways glance at Calhoun. “You sure he’s a real lord?”

  “The bona fide article,” said Calhoun solemnly.

  “The bodies,” prompted Sebastian. “What did Kane do with them?”

  She shrugged. “Dumped ’em someplace. Aa divint knaa wair. What else was he gonna do with ’em? Call in the magistrates?” She gave a low, earthy chuckle.

  Sebastian glanced at his valet. “ ‘Aa divint knaa wair’?”

  Calhoun leaned forward to whisper, “I don’t know where.”

  “Oh,” said Sebastian. Tipping back his head, he drained his glass. The movement made him vaguely dizzy so that it was a moment before he could say, “The man who was with Hessy Abrahams—her customer. Did you see him?”

  “Nah. Aa s’pose he walked ooot the house alive. Aa only seen the dead man because Aa helped wrap him in a length of canvas so’s Thackery could carry him oooot the house,” she added by way of explanation.

  “Thackery?”

  “He used t’be a gentleman of the Fancy.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Sebastian, remembering the pugilist with the broken nose and cauliflower ear. “I believe I met Mr. Thackery.”

  Maggie McQueen squinted at him through a cloud of tobacco smoke. “You don’t look so good. Too many late nights’ll do that to you.”

  “Indeed they will,” agreed Sebastian. “How well did you know Rose Fletcher?”

  “Know her?” Maggie gave a harsh laugh that ended in a cough. “Aa’m a charwoman. You think them whores had aught t’do with the likes of uz?”

  “But you knew who she was.”

  Maggie sucked on her pipe. “Aye. She was the one who cried all the time. When she thought no one was looking, of course. But Maggie sees more than most.”