A Mortal Likeness

by Laura Joh Rowland

  His eyes gleam like I imagine a tiger’s would in the jungle at night. Mick and I back away from the anger in them. “I terminated your employment,” he says. “My family isn’t your business any longer.”

  I’m surprised because he doesn’t seem surprised by my news. Now I understand why he agreed to talk to us in private—he didn’t want the people at the funeral to hear any secrets we might voice about his family. “You already knew?”

  “Yes.” His voice is flat, controlled. “My wife told me.”

  Mick and I exchange disconcerted glances. “When did Lady Alexandra tell you?” I ask. The timing matters because if Sir Gerald knew before the night Robin was kidnapped and murdered, then the crimes could be his doing.

  Sir Gerald ignores the question. “You’ve got five minutes left. Was there anything else you wanted to say?”

  Mick blurts, “We think Lady Alexandra killed Robin because she didn’t want to be saddled with a feeble-minded cripple for the rest of her life.”

  I wince because he’s worded our suspicion so crudely as well as accurately.

  “If you breathe one word of this, I’ll sue both of you, and Lord Hugh Staunton, for slander.” Sir Gerald’s quiet voice hisses with menace.

  “It ain’t slander if it’s true,” Mick says, frightened yet defiant.

  Sir Gerald chuckles. “I’ll win in court. I’ll take every penny you have, and you’ll go to the poorhouse.”

  I feel my terror resonate through Mick; we know he’s right. What chance would we have against him? And everyone knows that life in the poorhouses is hell—squalid conditions, meager food, and backbreaking manual labor. Aghast that we’ve endangered Hugh as well as ourselves, I’m nonetheless puzzled by Sir Gerald’s reaction.

  “When you hired us, you were so determined to find out who kidnapped Robin,” I say. “Why are you satisfied to put the blame on Tabitha and DeQuincey when there’s even a chance that they’re innocent and the wrong person will be hanged?”

  “I believe they’re guilty.”

  His voice rings with less than complete conviction. I press my point. “Lady Alexandra lied when she said she was with Lottie the night Robin was kidnapped. She took away Tabitha’s alibi—and created a new one for herself—after Tabitha was dead and couldn’t contradict her. She set Tabitha up to take the blame for Robin’s murder.”

  “She did it to save her own neck,” Mick chimes in. “She probably poisoned Tabitha, besides.”

  “I won’t listen to any more accusations against my wife.” Sir Gerald turns and walks toward the dim light that emanates from the stairwell.

  Mick and I hurry after him. “But you yourself suspected Lady Alexandra,” I say. “The day you hired us, you seemed willing to let her take the consequences if we found out she was responsible for the kidnapping. Why are you protecting her now?”

  Even as I ask the question, I wonder if it’s really Lady Alexandra he’s protecting. Perhaps he, not his wife, is the monster who killed his defective child.

  Sir Gerald pauses below the first stair and turns. The light illuminates his face, which is stoically impassive. “My wife is expecting.”

  Shock stuns us speechless. This is the last development I could have foreseen, but it explains so much.

  “She’s almost three months along.” Now Sir Gerald’s voice rings with masculine pride. “Her condition’s delicate. Any upset could be dangerous.”

  He’s protecting the baby as well Lady Alexandra. That’s why he’s willing to let Tabitha and DeQuincey take the blame for Robin’s murder. Maybe he’s even convinced himself they’re guilty so that he needn’t think the woman who’s carrying his child is. That’s why he was so quick to put a stop to our investigation, pay us off, and cut us loose. Lady Alexandra’s pregnancy represents a fresh start for him—a chance for a son who doesn’t have Little’s Disease, a new heir that he needn’t hide from the public.

  I was replaced by Sally, Olivia by Robin, and now Robin by a new baby. Sir Gerald and my father have something in common after all.

  Sir Gerald points his finger at us. “If you make a public accusation against Lady Alexandra and she loses the baby, its blood will be on your hands.”

  28

  When Mick and I get home, we find a distraught Fitzmorris waiting. “Lord Hugh went out again,” he says.

  Mick doesn’t volunteer to look for him this time. While we eat a supper of cold meat, bread, and pickles, we commiserate about our clash with Sir Gerald.

  “Lady A is gonna get away scot-free,” Mick concludes glumly. “And if we rock the boat, Sir G will cook our goose.”

  I’m forced to admit that Hugh was right. “It’s over,” I say, despite my disturbing sense of unfinished business. “Raphael DeQuincey will hang.” And there will be no justice for Robin.

  That night, after Mick is in bed, I go upstairs to the attic. Rain patters on the roof as I unearth two suitcases from among the old furniture and other cast-off items. I take the suitcases down to my room and remove my clothes from the cupboards. As I fold dresses and undergarments, Fitzmorris comes to the door.

  “Sarah, are you leaving?”

  I swallow the lump in my throat before I turn to him. “Yes.”

  His expression is filled with concern. “Why?”

  “I can’t stay here. I’ve taken too much advantage of Hugh’s hospitality, and now that we’re”—my voice breaks—“not friends anymore . . .”

  “But surely you’ll make up?”

  I shake my head, unable to face Hugh again and see the hostility in his eyes where there was once affection. “It’s best that I leave now.”

  “But where will you live?”

  “At one of the hotels by St. Pancras station. Until I can find a room in a lodging house.”

  “Sarah, please don’t go,” Fitzmorris says. “Lord Hugh loves you and needs you. He’s just so upset that he’s forgotten.”

  I can’t forget that involving Hugh in my troubles last fall ruined his life and almost got him killed. He would be better off if we’d never met. My lips tremble, and I press them together as I close the suitcase.

  “At least wait until morning.”

  I sigh and nod. I don’t really want to trudge through the cold, wet night to sleep in a cheerless hotel room. I take the other suitcase downstairs to my darkroom. There’s little to pack besides the extra tools, trays, negative plates, and photographic paper I didn’t take to Mariner House. I sort through my exposed plates and printed enlargements. Because I don’t want a reminder of Hugh’s and my high hopes for our detective agency, I throw the plates and prints of my photographs from the Crystal Palace into the kitchen wastebin without looking at them. I pack the best pictures I took around London and in my studio; they’ll serve as my portfolio when I apply for work at the big photography companies. I come across a portrait of Hugh, and my heart aches at the sight of his mischievous smile. I put it in the suitcase with my photographs of Mick, Catherine, Fitzmorris, the Lipskys, and my father, his shadowy figure in the woods near a daffodil-strewn graveyard.

  A tear drops on my father’s picture. I wipe it off with my hand. As I carry the suitcase out of the kitchen, the top print in the wastebin catches my attention.

  It’s the one I took by the glass fountain in the Crystal Palace—the shot that failed to capture Noel Vaughn and Ethel Norris because someone bumped my camera. My heart thumps as I unexpectedly recognize someone among the strangers gathered around the fountain. I take the photograph out of the wastebin and study the tall, slender, dark-haired man dressed in black. I didn’t notice him on the day I took the picture because I didn’t know him at the time.

  He’s Raphael DeQuincey.

  #

  The next morning, I join a long queue of people outside Newgate Prison, the granite dungeon that occupies an entire city block by the Old Bailey courthouse. The day is cold, the mist laced with eye-stinging smoke from the factories. Carriages in the street splash through puddles left by last night’s rain.
As we inch toward the visitor’s entrance, I shiver, recalling my own brief but terrible incarceration last autumn. We climb a short flight of steps, walk along a dim passage, and emerge in a courtyard surrounded by prison wards that rise three stories high. Inmates shout greetings, pleas, and obscenities to us from the barred windows. The queue ends at the guards stationed near the visiting box—a big iron cage with a slanted roof, built against one wall. I see prisoners inside the cage facing visitors who stand on the outside. They talk and argue; they press their hands together and kiss through the metal grating between the bars of the cage. When I finally reach the front of the queue, I tell the guards I’m here to see Raphael DeQuincey.

  “Yeah, everybody and his brother wants a gawk at the scum who killed Robin Mariner,” one guard says as the other searches my satchel for weapons, liquor, and other contraband while a female warder pats me down. He points to a group of people standing by a door opposite the visiting cage. “You can wait over there. The next tour starts in a few minutes. That’ll be ten pence.”

  I’m disgusted because the guards are showing off DeQuincey as if he’s a freak at a carnival but glad I’ll be able to see him. I hand over the money and join the group, which includes reporters and photographers. Soon a guard leads us into the jail, single file through a dim labyrinth of corridors paved with flagstones. I’m last in line, and when we stop, the people ahead of me murmur in awe, horror, or glee. Flash powder lights up the corridor as the photographers take pictures. The reporters call out,

  “Mr. DeQuincey, what have you to say for yourself?”

  “Which of you put Robin in the pond—you or Tabitha Jenkins?”

  “Are you sorry?”

  I hear whimpering, the only response. At last it’s my turn. A thick, iron-studded door stands open. I peer into a narrow cell that has stone walls and an arched ceiling. In the light from the single barred window, I see a man curled on the wooden bed. His right leg, in a thick white plaster cast, protrudes from beneath the blanket that covers him. DeQuincey’s hair is shaved on one side where a blood-stained bandage covers his scalp. Dark bruises circle his eyes, and red cuts mar his pale, gaunt face. His left front tooth is missing. Whimpering and grunting, he seems more animal than human.

  “What happened to him?” I ask the guard.

  “The other prisoners beat him up. That’s why he was moved to solitary confinement.”

  The man who allegedly killed Robin became a punching bag for his fellow inmates and, I suspect, the police and guards. I feel guilty because my information contributed to his imprisonment, but then I recall that my photograph proves he was at the Crystal Palace on the day of the ransom exchange and murders. Perhaps everything I thought I knew about the kidnapping is wrong, and DeQuincey is where he belongs.

  “Time’s up.” The guard herds people down the corridor.

  “If you let me talk to him alone, I’ll pay you ten more pence,” I say.

  The guard considers me with a sly, lewd expression. He must think I’m among those women who are attracted to criminals. “Make it a half crown, and you get fifteen minutes.”

  After the coin exchanges hands and the guard escorts the group outside, I enter the cell and say, “Mr. DeQuincey?”

  He gazes at me without recognition. His white, trembling hands creep out from the blanket and pull it tighter around himself. The last two fingers on his left hand wear splints and bandages. His right wrist is chained to the bed. He blinks, trying to focus on me. “Who are you?”

  I hope the injury to his head hasn’t damaged his wits. “Sarah Bain. We met at Mariner House.”

  Fearful awareness creeps into his expression. I look around the cell and see a water tank, basin, and a chamber pot in the corner, a shelf by the window that holds a Bible, and a wooden stool. I pull the stool close to the bed and sit by DeQuincey. Then I reach in my satchel, pull out my photograph of him, and hold it in front of his face.

  “I took this on the day of the ransom exchange. You said you weren’t at the Crystal Palace, but there you are.” I point him out among the people admiring the glass fountain.

  A spark of horror glints in DeQuincey’s eyes. He understands what I’m telling him. His bruised, puffy lips form the word no.

  “You lied. You said you and Tabitha didn’t go to collect the ransom money, but you actually did.” I shake the photograph at him before I replace it in my satchel. “This is proof.”

  DeQuincey shakes his head, winces in pain, and gingerly touches the bandage on his scalp. “Not Tabitha.”

  His meaning sinks in. “You mean you went to the dinosaur park alone?”

  “She didn’t know.” DeQuincey sounds eager to defend Tabitha.

  “Because you didn’t tell her?”

  “Yeah. We decided not to go, but . . .” Tremors ripple through DeQuincey, and I wonder if he’s ill or the beating damaged his nerves. “I kept thinking about the thousand pounds. I couldn’t resist,” he says sheepishly.

  “Where’s the money now?” The logical question springs to mind despite the fact that the money is the least of my concerns.

  DeQuincey’s body twitches convulsively. “Hell if I know. I didn’t take it.”

  Confused, I say, “But you just admitted you went to the dinosaur park.”

  “Went there, yeah. Took the money, nope.”

  I begin to realize that there’s more to this story than my photograph of DeQuincey suggests. “What happened at the park?”

  Sudden anger sharpens his gaze. “Hey. I remember who you are.” He points a wobbly finger at me. “You’re Sir Gerald’s lady detective. You and the boy found me in the woods and broke my leg. Then you turned me over to the police.” He recoils under his blanket like a snail into its shell. “I’m not talking to you anymore.”

  “We rescued you after you broke your leg,” I say. “The police caught us.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not how I remember it.”

  Maybe the beating did damage his mind. “I’m trying to rescue you now,” I say, although if I learn that he was involved in Robin’s murder and the fires that almost killed Hugh and me, I’ll gladly forsake him. “Tell me what happened. It’s your only chance to save your life.”

  DeQuincey’s expression turns forlorn. “There’s no saving me. I’ll be meeting the rope-maker’s daughter soon.”

  “Then why not tell me anyway? You can’t make things worse.”

  “That you know of,” he retorts.

  It’s an odd thing to say, and it hints that the truth is odder than I can imagine. “So you’re soon to be hanged, and Tabitha is already dead. What could be worse?” The answer occurs to me. “You’re protecting someone. Who is it?”

  DeQuincey chews his lip, torn between his will to remain silent and an urge to confide. Dissolving into tears, he says, “I’ve a wife and two boys.”

  “You’re married?” Here’s something else that Tabitha didn’t know about DeQuincey. “I thought you and Tabitha were planning to elope.”

  “That was what she wanted. She didn’t know I already had a wife and family.” Shamefaced, he says, “I couldn’t think of a way to tell her.”

  I’m outraged on Tabitha’s behalf. “You could have said, ‘I’m married. We can’t be together,’ and walked away. Instead, you led her on. You’re a greedy, selfish cad!”

  “Don’t you think I know it?” DeQuincey says woefully. “But I cared about Tabitha. I really, truly did.”

  He doesn’t say he loved her, and his remorse doesn’t excuse him or lessen my outrage. “If you really, truly cared about her, you wouldn’t have involved her in your scheme to profit from Robin’s kidnapping.”

  “The ransom note was her idea too,” DeQuincey protests.

  “Then you must have planted the idea in her mind. I doubt she was cunning enough to think of it all by herself.”

  “Well, now I’m left to take the whole blame.”

  “Poor you.” I regard him with disgust.

  How I would like to believe
that Tabitha’s death and his arrest are his fault! If he hadn’t romanced Tabitha, there would have been no love scene in the ballroom for Hugh and me to witness, and nothing for me to tell the police about Tabitha and DeQuincey. I’d like to believe that DeQuincey deserves his sorry fate. But hanging is too extreme a punishment for seducing a willing woman and sending a ransom note to the parents of a child that somebody else kidnapped and murdered. Besides, it was my choice to talk to the police.

  “I’m going to die,” DeQuincey wails. “My wife will be a widow, and my children will be fatherless. They don’t deserve this!”

  His fate and his family’s are at least partially my responsibility, like him or not. “So you’re protecting your family. Has someone threatened them?”

  DeQuincey doesn’t reply, but his gaze shifts and his Adam’s apple jerks.

  “Was it Sir Gerald?” I feel the chill of encroaching distress. Sir Gerald would surely make it his business to uncover the dirty laundry of any person who associated with his wife. If he or Lady Alexandra murdered Robin, what better use for his knowledge than to force DeQuincey to take the blame? “Did he promise you that if you keep quiet, your family will be safe?”

  “Not Sir Gerald!” DeQuincey blurts. I’m relieved, but he trembles harder, with panic, because he’s admitted that someone has indeed threatened his family to buy his silence.

  “How can you be sure this person will keep his word? How are you going to protect your family after you’re dead?”

  “I never thought of that.” DeQuincey bursts into sobs. “I don’t know what to do!”

  “The only way you can make sure they’re safe is to exonerate yourself,” I say. “I’ll help you, if you tell me everything.”

  I’m far from certain my help will save him, but he grasps at this only available straw. “I sneaked out of Mariner House without telling Tabitha, and I went to the dinosaur park. Our ransom note told Sir Gerald to leave the money in a hollow tree at two o’clock. I got there half an hour early, so I hid in the woods and waited. About ten minutes later, I saw John Pierce coming with a valise. He put it in the tree and left. I waited a few more minutes to make sure he was gone. I was just heading for the tree when I heard footsteps. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, a trap!’ I ran back in the woods. I was so scared I almost wet myself. Then I saw Pierce coming back. He walked straight to the tree, and he took the valise and left again.”