by C. S. Harris
“I thought you were planning to start the interviews for your next article today.” Much to the disgust of her father, Hero was writing a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle on the poor of the city. She’d profiled everyone from London’s street children to its pure finders and night-soil men, and each article enraged Jarvis more than the last.
“I am. But I don’t see any reason why I can’t do both. This article is about the city’s street musicians, and it occurs to me that one of them might have seen the boy. There can’t be that many half-Chinese children roaming around London, and street performers do tend to pay attention to their audiences.”
“I’ve given Calhoun leave to search for the boy as well. I think he plans to begin in Oxford Square, which is where he and Hayes met.”
Hero glanced over at him, her arms falling to her sides, her gray eyes clouded with worry. “If you were a child alone in a strange land, where would you go?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible he’s gone back to where Hayes was staying. But at the moment I haven’t the slightest idea where that was.”
“How will you even begin going about finding who killed him?”
“All I can do is start with the evidence I have—which at the moment consists mainly of Nicholas Hayes’s body.”
* * *
Paul Gibson’s surgery lay in a narrow medieval lane on Tower Hill, virtually within the shadow of the great Norman castle that had guarded London and the Thames for over seven hundred years. He’d been an Army surgeon at one time, until a French cannonball tore off his lower left leg, leaving him racked by phantom pains. When the pains—and his increasing consumption of the opium he used to control them—grew to be too much, he’d come here, to London, to open his surgery and teach anatomy at the hospitals of St. Bartholomew’s and St. Thomas’s. But he continued to work at expanding his knowledge of death and the human body, largely by way of surreptitious dissections performed on cadavers filched from London’s overflowing graveyards by gangs of body snatchers euphemistically referred to as “resurrection men.”
Irish by birth, Gibson was in his thirties now and thinner than he should be, thanks to his opium consumption. His friendship with Sebastian dated back nearly ten years to the days when both men had worn the King’s colors and fought the King’s wars across the Old World and the New. It was Sebastian who’d held his friend down when they sawed off the mangled remnant of Gibson’s shattered calf, and Gibson who’d helped save Sebastian when some painful truths about his parentage came close to destroying him. Theirs was a bond that transcended class, nationality, and other such trivialities.
The surgeon performed both his official post mortems and other, less legal activities in a stone outbuilding at the base of the yard behind his ancient house. It was there Sebastian found him that morning, with Nicholas Hayes’s naked body lying faceup on the raised stone slab in the center of the room. Gibson had a scalpel in one hand and was about to make his first cut on the dead man’s chest, but paused when Sebastian’s shadow fell across him.
“Ah, there you are,” said the Irishman, looking up. “Thought I’d be seeing you soon enough. Is it true, what they’re saying? That this is Nicholas Hayes?”
“It seems to be.”
“I thought he died out in Botany Bay.”
“So did everyone,” said Sebastian. “Christ, look at those scars.”
Thick, ugly bands of scar tissue encircled the dead man’s wrists and ankles. Shackles left scars like that on a man, especially when he was forced to do hard labor in them—deep, humiliating marks of base servitude that never, ever went away.
“He must have worn those chains for years, night and day. They obviously festered badly.” Gibson gave a faint, disbelieving shake of his head. “Why the hell would someone like that come back to England?”
“Love? Revenge? Homesickness? I honestly can’t begin to fathom it. What can you tell me about his death?”
“Not a lot so far that you don’t already know, although I’m only just getting started.” Gibson set aside his scalpel. “Here, help me turn him over.”
They rolled the stiff body onto its stomach. The fatal gashes left by the sickle gaped red and raw, but Sebastian found his attention riveted not by the new wounds but by the thick mat of crisscrossing old flogging scars that completely covered Nicholas Hayes’s back.
When he came to, Calhoun had said, he was lying next to a dead man of about the same height, build, and hair color. The fellow was a freeman who’d once been a soldier, and he’d obviously spent some time in irons and been flogged, because his body was scarred. Hayes changed clothes with him, took his papers, and bashed in the dead man’s face with a rock until he was unrecognizable. At the time, Sebastian had wondered how desperate a man would need to be to do such a thing. Now he understood.
“He’s lucky to have survived that flogging,” said Gibson. “Looks like two hundred lashes or more, laid on hard.”
“I’d be surprised if he was only flogged once.”
They called them “special prisoners” out at Botany Bay: men who could read and write, and who were unlucky enough to talk like gentlemen. The soldiers tended to single such men out for particularly harsh treatment. They didn’t usually survive long.
Sebastian shifted his focus from Hayes’s old flogging scars to the wounds that had killed him. “Looks like he was hit with that sickle—what? Two or three times?”
“Depends on how you count them.” Gibson turned to pick up the bloodstained sickle from a shelf that ran across the back of the room. “The blade on this thing is razor-sharp, so it wouldn’t have taken much force for the killer to drive it in deep. It looks to me as if he sank the sickle into Hayes’s back, dragging the blade down through the tissue in a kind of swiping slash the first time. Then he yanked it out and sank it in again deeper. The first blow would have stopped Hayes if he were walking away, but it’s probably the second one that dropped him to his knees.”
“Was he still alive then?”
“I’d say so. I’ll know more when I get a good look at the heart, but I suspect that once Hayes fell, your killer grabbed hold of the sickle’s handle again and twisted the blade in the wound, driving it deeper and hitting either the heart or a major artery.”
“Lovely.” Sebastian went to stand in the doorway and look out at the sun-drenched garden that had recently replaced what was once a weed-strewn wasteland.
“You’ve no idea who did it?” said Gibson, watching him.
“At the moment, my only suspect is the man who’s been calling himself the ‘Earl of Seaforth’ all these years—and that’s simply because he has an obvious motive.” Sebastian turned to glance around the room. “Where are his things?”
“There,” said Gibson, nodding to a shelf behind the door where the dead man’s clothes lay neatly folded beside his boots and an old wooden platter containing a fat purse and the other contents of his pockets.
“Doesn’t look like the motive was robbery,” said Sebastian, reaching for the purse.
“Don’t see how it could be,” agreed Gibson. “Footpads wouldn’t have bothered to stab him more than once; they’d simply grab that purse and run. Why waste time sticking around to make certain the fellow’s dead?”
Sebastian studied the scattering of disparate personal objects on the platter: a few loose coins; a silk handkerchief; a small metal disk of some kind; an ivory toothpick in an enameled brass case. “No watch?”
“No.”
Sebastian picked up the bronze disk, which was about the size of a large coin and decorated with a relief of an ancient-looking stone building with a row of arched windows and an exotic dome; the other side was the same. “Must be a token of some kind. It looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it.”
“Does it? Don’t think I’ve seen it before.”
Sebastian bounced the token up and down in hi
s palm. “If you were an escaped convict fresh off a ship from Canton, where would you stay?”
“Canton? Is that where he’s been?”
“For most of the time, yes.”
Gibson looked thoughtful. “I think I’d be tempted to go back to someplace that was familiar, but not so familiar that I’d need to worry about people I didn’t trust recognizing me.” He paused. “Although if Hayes was worried about being recognized, why come back at all?”
“Whatever his reason, it was obviously important to him—important enough to risk being caught and dying for.”
“What’s important enough to lure a man into risking both his freedom and his life?”
Sebastian closed his fist around the token and brought his gaze back to the dead man’s silent, yet oddly peaceful-looking face. “Maybe the question isn’t, What? Maybe the question is, Who?”
Chapter 10
Oxford Market lay just to the north of Oxford Street. A large, sunlit square of stalls and shops bordering an old wooden arcade, it was a popular spot for a variety of street performers, from hurdy-gurdy players and barrel organ grinders to fire-eaters, conjurers, street singers, jugglers, and a little old man with three trained dogs.
Strolling through the market early that morning with a broad parasol to protect her from the sun, Hero found her attention caught by a tall, dark-haired, copper-skinned man dressed in a loose knee-length tunic over trousers of the same cloth. He had with him a slim boy of perhaps six or seven—also dark haired but much lighter skinned—who wiggled through the crowd with a cup to collect offerings while the father sang a haunting, undulating melody and beat out the rhythm on a barrel-shaped drum.
Joining the crowd gathered around him to watch and listen, Hero caught the little boy’s attention and bent down to his eye level while holding up a shilling. “Tell your papa he can have three more of these if he’ll talk to me for a few minutes.”
The boy’s eyes widened and he nodded as his fist closed around the coin.
She watched him dart back to his father. The man glanced over at Hero, then finished his song with a flourish.
His name, she learned, was Dinesh Chakravarty, and his English surprised her. “You want to know how I came to do what I do?” he said when Hero explained she wanted to interview him for an article.
“I do, yes.”
“That is very strange.”
Hero laughed out loud. “The article is on London’s street musicians.” It was hard not to ask the man right away if he knew anything about Ji, but Hero suspected she’d have a better chance of getting an honest answer if she approached the subject in a more roundabout way. “Where were you born?”
The man’s teeth flashed in a wide smile. “Calcutta.”
“How long have you been in England?”
“Eight years. I came here as a servant to a British Army officer.” The smile faded. “He died.”
“That’s when you became a street musician?”
“Not at first, no, my lady. I tried to get another position as a manservant. But with my last master dead, I had no letter to recommend me. You can’t get a position without a character reference, so I bought the drum.” He cocked his head and beat a little flourish on the drumhead.
“Do you make a good living?”
“Good?” Again, the smile. “No. I did better at first. That’s the way it always is, you know? When something is new and different, everyone stops to watch and listen. But now I’m lucky if I make six or eight shillings a week. Winters are always worse.”
Hero found herself looking at the little boy. “It must be hard to keep a family on that.”
“It is, my lady. My wife, she sometimes takes in washing, but it is hard when she’s so heavy with child.”
“Your wife is English?”
He smiled. “Scottish. I also pose for artists at the Academy. They say I have ‘the look’ they want, whatever that means.”
He would be interesting to paint, Hero thought, with his hawklike nose and deep-set eyes and arresting bone structure. “Have you thought about going back to India?”
A wistful expression crept into the man’s sad, dark eyes. “I’m afraid my Marie wouldn’t like it there. But I think of it all the time, especially in the winter. I doubt there’s a Bengali in London who doesn’t think of it.”
“Are there many?”
“Oh, yes, my lady. They come here as Lascars.” Lascars were Asian sailors who served as seamen on British ships to replace the sailors who tended to die at such alarming rates in the East. Particularly during the war when the British Navy was impressing so many sailors, the East India Company was often seriously short of crews for their return voyages.
Dinesh drew a deep breath that flared his nostrils. “So many of the young men, they think it’ll be a lark, or at least a way out of misery. But they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into—the floggings, the wretched holes they’re expected to live in. The East India Company, they pay Lascars only one shilling for every five they pay an Englishman—and give them less food too. A lot of the men, they reach port and they won’t go back on a ship. So they starve here instead of in Calcutta.”
Hero had heard horror stories about Lascars starving to death in the streets of eastern London. She said, “How do people tend to treat you?”
He stared across the square, to where Hero could see Jules Calhoun talking to a woman selling apples. “Sometimes people insult me, call me ugly names,” Dinesh said slowly, the flesh seeming to pull tight across the bones of his face in a way that left him looking gaunt and troubled. “Some even hit me and spit on me. They have much hate in their hearts for anyone who looks different from them. They think the color of our skin makes us less than them—as if we were more animal than man. I am glad my son’s skin is so light. It will be easier for him.”
“What about the Chinese?” asked Hero, aware of a strange burning in her chest that was half shame and half rage. “Are there many Chinese people in London?”
“Not so many, no. Some also come as Lascars to replace the English sailors who die on the way to China. But they tend to stay close to the port.”
“I’m told there’s a little half-Chinese boy who hangs around this part of London—a child of perhaps eight or nine.” Hero was careful to keep her voice light. “I’m thinking it would be interesting to interview him. Do you know him?”
Dinesh shook his head. “No, my lady. Sorry.”
“You haven’t seen him?”
“No, my lady.”
“Where would a child like that go, do you think?”
“Is he a street performer? Because most street performers move around. We need to. People get tired of seeing or hearing us. So he could be anywhere from Billingsgate to Covent Market to Portman Square.”
Hero was aware of Calhoun working his way back around the arcade, his alert, watchful gaze raking the crush of shoppers and sellers. “He might be a beggar,” she said. Or he could be reduced to stealing, Hero thought with a sudden upsurge of alarm.
“Beggars usually stay farther east,” said Dinesh. “Workingmen and -women tend to be more generous with beggars than folks around here.”
“That’s a sorry comment on the people of Mayfair,” said Hero, handing the musician his shillings.
Dinesh gave a very Eastern shrug. “It is what it is.”
* * *
“Anything?” Hero asked Calhoun when he walked up to her a few minutes later.
He blew out a harsh breath and shook his head, his gaze still hopefully scanning the crowd. “No, my lady. No one’s seen him.”
“Yet he was here just last week.”
“He was. But he was with Hayes then. People might not have noticed him as much.”
Hero watched a couple of ragged, appallingly dirty boys dart past, one tossing a loaf of bread—doubtless purloined—t
o the other. “Perhaps Devlin is having more luck.”
“Perhaps,” said Calhoun. But she knew from the pinched look on his face that he didn’t believe it any more than she did.
Chapter 11
W here would a man such as Nicholas Hayes go to hide?
Sebastian pondered the question as he guided his curricle and pair through the narrow lanes leading away from Tower Hill. A sailor could lose himself in the crowded alleys and miserable boardinghouses near the docks, but how well would a man such as Hayes blend into that environment? Not well, Sebastian suspected.
Someplace familiar, Gibson had suggested, but not so familiar that he’d run the risk of being recognized. Obviously not St. James’s or Piccadilly. But what about a place where he’d taken refuge once before? A place where constables were unwelcome and the locals knew not to ask too many questions.
A place like the Red Lion off Chick Lane.
* * *
Situated not far from the vast, death-haunted meat market of Smithfield, Chick Lane—or West Street, as it was increasingly called—lay in an insalubrious section of London infested with thieves and highwaymen and the kind of prostitutes who were as likely to rob a man as smile at him. Dominated by two foul parish workhouses and a collection of aging breweries, the area had already been in decline twenty years ago. It was even worse today.
The Red Lion was a ramshackle three-hundred-year old inn that backed onto one of the last free-flowing stretches of the Fleet left within the city. What had once been a clear, navigable waterway was now mostly built over and reduced to an underground sewer. These days, the few sections still above ground were usually referred to as Fleet Ditch rather than the River Fleet.
Sebastian had visited the Red Lion only once before. When he drew up outside the ancient inn, he decided it looked even worse than he remembered. The original plaster of the second and third stories had mostly fallen away, exposing the brickette-entre-poteaux, or brick-between-posts, construction beneath. Left to the mercy of the elements, the old, poor-quality Tudor bricks were slowly crumbling away. Someone at some point had covered the ground-floor facade with wood, but even that was now weathered and worm-eaten.