by C. S. Harris
At that moment, Sabrina opened her eyes and turned her head, saw Hero, and said, “Oh.”
“I told the footman I’d announce myself,” said Hero, going to embrace her in a gentle hug. “I hope you don’t mind?”
“No, of course not,” said Sabrina, pulling her down on the window seat beside her. “It was good of you to come.”
Hero took the girl’s hands between hers. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m trying to be brave,” said Sabrina, her lips trembling slightly. “I know it’s what Alexander would wish. But I miss him dreadfully. And when I realize I’ll never see him again—” Her voice broke.
“I am so sorry. I wish I’d had the chance to know him better.”
“Oh, Hero; he was such a wonderful person! So kind and generous. Always laughing and yet so fiercely honorable, so determined to stand up for what he believed in and do the right thing. What is it they say? ‘He whom the gods love dies young’?” Her voice caught on a small sob.
“You’d no notion he wasn’t well?”
She shook her head, her dark curls fluttering about her wet cheeks. “No. To tell the truth, when I heard he’d been found dead, my first thought was—” She broke off.
“Your first thought was—what?” prompted Hero.
Sabrina simply shook her head, her lips pressed tight.
“You thought someone might have killed him, didn’t you?” said Hero.
Sabrina drew a quick, frightened breath. “It was just—Oh, I don’t know. It’s foolish of me to even think such a thing.”
“Had Alexander quarreled with someone?”
What little color had been left in Sabrina’s face now drained away. She pushed up from the seat to take a quick, agitated turn about the room. “I probably shouldn’t even speak of it, but—” She swung back to face Hero. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
“No, of course not,” said Hero with earnest mendacity.
Sabrina came to sit beside her again, her voice dropping low. “He was involved with something important at the Foreign Office. Sir Hyde had him handling these massive amounts of gold. It made Alexander dreadfully anxious. Don’t misunderstand me: He was excited about it, to be involved in something so important. But, well, who wouldn’t be nervous, dealing with so much money?”
“Gold?” said Hero.
Sabrina nodded. “I don’t know if it was a bribe or a payment or what, but it was being transferred in staged allotments to an agent of some foreign country.”
“What country?”
“Alexander wouldn’t say. He shouldn’t have told me what he did, but I had . . . overheard some things. Things I wasn’t meant to hear. He felt he needed to explain.”
Hero searched the girl’s delicate, grief-pinched face and wondered what she was hiding. “How was this transfer made?”
“I don’t know exactly. All I know is that it was going on for weeks, with deliveries being made every few days.”
“When was the last transfer?”
“Friday night.” Sabrina gave a ragged sigh that shuddered her small frame. “I know because he was to go with us to my aunt’s—Lady Dorsey’s—ball that night. She’s been sponsoring my come out, you see. Only, Alexander was so late we had to leave for the ball without him. When he finally did arrive, I ... I’m afraid I wasn’t as understanding as I might have been.”
In other words, Hero thought, Sabrina had subjected her betrothed to an angry, emotional scene she would probably now regret for the rest of her life.
Aloud, Hero said, “Was that the last time you saw him?”
Sabrina dropped her gaze to her lap, where her fingers were alternately pleating and smoothing the matte black cloth of her gown. “Yes.”
The girl was a terrible liar.
Hero said, “How did Alexander get along with Sir Hyde Foley? Do you know?”
Sabrina looked up. “Sir Hyde? Why, he always had great respect for him. At least until ...”
“Until?”
Sabrina’s gaze darted away and she shook her head. “They quarreled about something recently. Alexander wouldn’t say what.”
“Was it the gold, do you think?”
She thought about it a moment, then shook her head again. “I really don’t know.”
Hero studied her averted profile. “When was this?”
“That they quarreled? Wednesday? Perhaps Thursday. I’m not—”
She broke off as a ponderous step sounded in the hall and her brother entered the room.
Jasper Cox was older than his sister by a decade or more, and little like her. Where his sister was dark, he was fair; where she was thin, he was already stout and would probably run to fat by middle age. The same small features that gave his sister such a winsome, appealing look were lost in his own full-cheeked face. Hero had never liked him; he reminded her too much of his mother.
“Cousin Hero,” he said with boisterous heartiness, advancing on her with hand outstretched. “How good of you to come.”
Sliding off the bench, Hero found her hand taken in a firm grip. “Jasper,” she said.
He glanced over at his sister. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready?” His lips were smiling, but his eyes were hard. “You’ve not forgotten we’re to go to Lady Dorsey’s?”
“I’ve time yet, Jasper.”
Hero cast a deliberate glance at the mantel clock and withdrew her hand from Cox’s grasp. “Goodness, look at how late it is.” She turned to plant a kiss on Sabrina’s cheek. “I’ll see myself out.”
“I’ll walk you to the door,” said Jasper, as if determined to see her off the premises and prevent her from having any further conversation with his sister.
Hero wondered why.
It took Paul Gibson the better part of the day, but he managed to get most of Alexander Ross back.
Then he ran into a snag with Jumpin’ Jack Cochran.
“Cain’t be done,” said the resurrection man when Gibson met with him in the grassy fields of Green Park.
“I’m willing to pay two hundred pounds,” said Gibson, then, “Three hundred!” when the resurrection man continued shaking his head.
Jumpin’ Jack hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and spit it downwind. “’Taint a matter o’ the money. I’d do it fer ye if I could, Doctor. The thing is, ye see, there was a wee young lass planted in St. George’s Mount Street burial ground the very mornin’ after we lifted yer Mr. Ross, and her grievin’ parents have set a guard on the place.”
Gibson stared at him. “Can the guard be bought, do you think?”
Jumpin’ Jack scratched the several days’ growth of beard under his chin. “Meybe. It’s not like we’re wantin’ t’ steal the tyke, after all. I’ll see what I can do and get back with ye.”
Chapter 24
Sebastian returned to Brook Street to find a note from Gibson awaiting him.
There’s something I think you need to see, the surgeon had written.
Puzzled, Sebastian called for his curricle and headed back to Tower Hill.
By the time he reached the surgery, the sun was high in the sky, the heat intense, and the smell emanating from the small, stonewalled mortuary at the base of the yard so rank it made his eyes water.
“My God,” he said, pausing in the doorway. “How do you stand it?”
Gibson glanced up with a grim smile. “After a while, you don’t notice it so much.”
“Is there a problem with Jumpin’ Jack?”
“No, no; things are progressing nicely,” he said a bit more airily than Sebastian would have liked.
He dropped his gaze to the bloated, discolored remnant of humanity that lay facedown on the slab between them. Six years of fighting across the battlefields of Europe, and the sight of raw, ugly death still unsettled him. “So what have you found?”
“Watch.” Reaching for a probe, Gibson slid the thin metal rod into a small slit at the base of the cadaver’s skull.
“Bloody hell,” said Sebastian softly. “He and Ross were
killed by the same man.”
Gibson limped from behind the table. “Not just by the same man, but on the same night. The difference is, this one was left exposed to nearly a week’s worth of sun and the rain before he was brought in.”
“So who is he?” Sebastian asked, forcing himself to take a closer look at the wreck of a face.
“Last I heard, no one knows.” He nodded to the clothing stacked neatly on a nearby bench. “Those are his clothes.”
Sebastian went to study the coat, stained now with mud and vegetation and other things he didn’t want to think about. It was a gentleman’s coat, although far from the first stare of fashion. The breeches were a trifle worn, the linen fine but serviceable. He looked up. “No identification of any kind?”
“Nothing. Probably stripped off him when the body was dumped.” Gibson rolled the body onto its back with an unpleasant plop. “As far as I can tell, he was a man in his thirties. Well formed, slightly above medium height. Good musculature. Sandy-colored hair.” He pulled back the cadaver’s lips to reveal a ghoulish grin. “This is probably his most prominent feature. Look at the size of those front teeth. They overshot his lower jaw in a way that must have been prominent.”
“That’s all we have to go on? He was a man in his thirties with blond hair and buckteeth?”
“Sorry.”
Sebastian tossed the stained clothes aside. “Maybe Bow Street’s had some luck with him.”
“You could try them.”
Sir Henry was eating a quiet dinner in the Brown Bear across the street from the Bow Street Public Office when Sebastian walked up to him.
“My lord,” said the magistrate. “Please, sit down. You’re looking for me?”
Sebastian slid onto the opposite bench and ordered a tankard of ale. “I’m interested in the gentleman whose body was dumped out at Bethnal Green last Saturday.”
“You are?” said Sir Henry with obvious puzzlement. “Why?”
Sebastian leaned forward, his forearms on the table. “I think he was killed by the same man who killed Alexander Ross.”
Sir Henry took a bite of his pasty, chewed slowly, and swallowed. “You have a reason for this belief, my lord?”
“I do. Only, I’m afraid I can’t explain it to you just yet. Have you made any progress in identifying the body?”
“As a matter of fact, we have. It’s difficult to confirm, given the state of the corpse in question, but we have reason to believe he may be a Mr. Ezekiel Kincaid, who disappeared from an inn called the Bow and Ox on the Blue Anchor Road, near the Surrey Docks.”
“Ezekiel Kincaid?” Sebastian frowned. The name meant nothing to him. “Who was he?”
“As far as we can tell, he was an agent in the employ of the Rosehaven Trading Company.”
“Rosehaven? Now, why does that sound familiar?”
“Perhaps because it is owned by Mr. Jasper Cox, brother of Miss Sabrina Cox, the young lady who was betrothed to the late Mr. Alexander Ross.”
Sebastian stared at him. “The trading company reported Kincaid missing?”
“No, actually. They were under the impression he had sailed for the United States.”
The United States again. Sebastian said, “So what makes you think Mr. Kincaid didn’t sail?”
Sir Henry reached inside his coat. “It seems the young thatchgallows who reported the body to the constables first helped himself to this—” He laid a plain gold pocket watch on the table between them.
Sebastian flipped open the watch and read the inscription. To Ezekiel with love, Mahala. “It’s an uncommon name, I’ll grant you that. But if Mr. Kincaid wasn’t reported missing—”
“Ah, but you see, he was. He never retrieved his possessions from the Bow and Ox. I understand the ship he was set to sail on—the Baltimore Mary—waited as long as they dared. But they were finally forced to sail without him or miss the tide.” Sir Henry rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’ve had a look at the man’s baggage; they were keeping it for him at the Bow and Ox. In it was a letter from his wife, Mahala.”
Sebastian was aware of a suspicion forming on the edges of his thoughts. “A letter from where?”
“Baltimore.”
“Kincaid was an American?”
“Oh, yes. Didn’t I say?”
Chapter 25
The Surrey Docks lay on the south bank of the Thames, some two miles below London Bridge, in Rotherhithe. Once, this had been the center of the great Arctic whaling expeditions that set sail from London every April to return at the end of the season bearing blanket pieces of blubber that were then cut up and melted in vast iron pots. The stink of hot oil still permeated the district, mingling with the foul stench drifting downriver from the tanyards of nearby Bermondsey.
It was a squalid area of canals and basins lined with storehouses, of factories and artisans’ shops and reeking tidal ditches. The air rang with the pounding of hammers, the thwunk of axes biting into wood. Wagons loaded with iron and hemp, canvas and squawking chickens, clogged the mean, narrow lanes. “Place always gives me the willies, it does,” muttered Tom as they rattled over the uneven cobbles. “Too many foreigners, I s’pose.”
Sebastian gave a soft laugh. “That must be it.” He swung the chestnuts in through the arch of the Bow and Ox. “The inn at least appears respectable—and very English.”
An ancient, half-timbered inn with a lichen-covered tile roof and cantilevered galleries, the Bow and Ox catered to the company agents and factors whose business required them to frequent the nearby docks and their less than savory environs. “Water them,” said Sebastian, handing the horses’ reins to his tiger. Despite the lengthening shadows that told of the coming of evening, the afternoon sun was still brutal. “Just don’t let them get carried away. I shouldn’t be long.”
He found the landlady in the taproom. She was a short, rotund, grandmotherly-looking woman with a disarmingly beatific smile, who tsked sadly when asked about Ezekiel Kincaid.
“Aye, I remember Mr. Kincaid all right, poor lad,” she said, drawing Sebastian a pint of ale. “Said he had a wife and two sons, back in America. I keep thinking of them so far away, waiting for him to come home and never knowing what happened to him.”
“What do you think did happen to him?”
She set the tankard on the boards before him. “Footpads, if you ask me. Should’ve known better than to go off alone at night like that. And him so nervous, too.”
“Nervous? In what way?”
“Oh, just ever so anxious, if you know what I mean?” She reached for a towel. “I kept his things for him, in case he came back for them. But that magistrate from Bow Street carried it all away with him.”
Sebastian took a sip of the ale. “How many days was Mr. Kincaid here?”
“Never spent a night, poor man. Why, he’d only just docked that very morning. Took a room and ate a meat pie in the public room, he did, then went off for a good long while. If I recall, he said something about needing to see someone in the West End, but I could be wrong.”
“He never came back?”
“Oh, no; he did.” She ran the towel over the ancient dark wood of the bar. “Came back and had his dinner. But then he went off again, and that was the last anyone saw of him.”
“No idea where he went?”
“Well, he did come and ask how to get to the St. Helena tea gardens. It’s a lovely place, you know, with a brass band and dancing most every evening in summer.”
“Where is it?”
She nodded downriver. “You follow the Halfpenny Hatch there, through the market gardens, to Deptford Road. ’Tisn’t the best area to go walking through after dark, mind, seeing as how the top of Turndley’s Lane is known as something of a resort for footpads. That’s what we thought, when we realized he didn’t ever come back—that he’d run afoul of footpads.”
“You notified the constables?”
“The next day, yes. They checked along the pathway and all around St. Helena but never found a tr
ace of him. No one at the tea gardens remembered seeing him, so we reckoned something must’ve happened to him before he got there.”
“Tell me, what did Mr. Kincaid look like?”
“Hmm ...” She paused, her face screwed up with thought. “He was in his thirties, I’d say. Hair the color of a haystack. Didn’t notice his eyes, I’m afraid. He was a nice lad, to be sure, but it was hard when you were talking to him to notice anything but his teeth.”
“His teeth?”
“Aye, poor lad. Could’ve eaten an apple through a picket fence, as the saying goes.”
Sebastian drained his ale. “What ship did you say he came in on?”
“The Baltimore Mary. She was at the Greenland Dock.” She gave him a considering look. “Going down there now, are you?”
“Yes. Why?”
She nodded toward the window, where the westering sun was casting long shadows across the road. “Best hurry, then. You don’t want to be anywhere around there when it starts getting dark.”
Chapter 26
Sebastian drove through long stretches of biscuit factories and anchor forges close built with sail lofts and tumbledown cottages. At the outskirts of the Greenland Dock, he left the curricle with Tom in the shade of a big brick storehouse on a quiet, cobbled lane and pushed on afoot through throngs of workmen in leather aprons and merchant seamen stinking of gin and old sweat.
The Surrey Docks were a jumble of harbors, canals, and timber ponds lined with warehouses and granaries and immense piles of timber or “deal wood.” The vast whaling fleets of the previous century were almost gone now, their place taken by ships bearing timber from Scandinavia and the Baltic or wheat and cotton from North America. The air was thick with the stench of tar and dead fish and the raw sewage that scummed the water.
Sebastian had a double-barreled pistol in the pocket of his driving coat, primed and ready, and a knife in his boot. But he had every intention of heeding the landlady’s warning to be gone from the waterfront before nightfall.