Who Speaks for the Damned

by C. S. Harris

  Sebastian felt a wave of revulsion pass over him. “No. If Seaforth won’t give his cousin a decent burial, then release the body to me. I’ll take care of it.”

  Lovejoy’s eyes widened over the white folds of his handkerchief. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well.” Lovejoy’s gaze shifted to the door, where a debonair, exquisitely dressed older Frenchman was quietly slipping in through the crowd. “Ah. The Count de Compans has arrived.”

  “And Brownbeck,” said Sebastian as the short, self-important merchant pushed his way in behind the Count.

  Lovejoy shifted his handkerchief to pat at the perspiration on his brow. “Theo Brownbeck? What has he to do with this?”

  “He and Hayes quarreled long ago,” said Sebastian, mindful of his promise to his aunt Henrietta. “Before Hayes was transported.”

  “Interesting. There’s talk of the man becoming the next Lord Mayor, you know. People like his no-nonsense attitude toward crime and the lower orders, although I must admit I question the validity of some of his statistics.”

  “With good reason,” said Sebastian as the crowds near the door made way for another aristocratic latecomer: a slight, rusty-haired nobleman with vague inclinations toward dandyism and an exaggerated sense of his own importance.

  The Earl of Seaforth might not be willing to take possession of his cousin’s body, but he was obviously curious enough about the findings of the inquest to want to see it for himself. Drawing up just inside the door, he threw one long, contemptuous glance at Nicholas Hayes’s bloody corpse, then walked over to a silver-haired gentleman who stood near the bar and leaned in to say something close to the man’s ear.

  “Who’s that he’s talking to?” asked Lovejoy, watching him.

  “Forbes,” said Sebastian as the man turned to glance their way. “Sir Lindsey Forbes, of the East India Company.”

  * * *

  The coroner was a stout, middle-aged man named Norquist Gaffney, with full lips, a loud, gravelly voice, and a pugnacious, brusque manner. Dressed in a long powdered wig and a dirty black robe dusted liberally with snuff, he arrived ten minutes late, threw himself into the padded chair reserved specifically for him, and complained loudly about the heat and the crowd. Then he scratched beneath his wig and bellowed, “Right, then. Let’s get this over with.”

  Called to testify first, Sebastian described his discovery of Nicholas Hayes’s body in the blandest terms possible. He’d been careful from the beginning to characterize Calhoun’s role as that of a simple servant, with the result that the valet hadn’t even received a summons. Lovejoy likewise delivered his responses in a dry, forthright manner. The only vaguely sensational testimony in the entire inquest came from a rawboned, nervous gardener named Bernie Aikens, who haltingly admitted to having forgotten his sickle in the clearing on the day of the murder.

  “What time did you leave the clearing?” snapped Gaffney.

  “Around midday, yer honor,” said the gardener in a small voice.

  “What’s that? Speak up, man.”

  “Midday, yer honor.”

  “And when did you realize you’d left your sickle there?”

  “N-not till the next morning, yer honor,” stammered Aikens, a bead of sweat rolling down his sun-darkened cheek. “It wasn’t until I discovered me sickle wasn’t with me other tools and heard that the fellow’d been killed in the clearing where I’d been working that I realized I musta left it there.”

  The coroner glowered at the gardener as if he were the most careless, forgetful, loathsome creature imaginable. “And yet you failed to inform the authorities of this fact?”

  Aikens was sweating so badly now that his entire face glistened. “I told Mr. Pennington.”

  “When?”

  “That morning, yer honor. Almost as soon as I knowed fer sure.”

  A constable standing beside the coroner leaned down to whisper in Mr. Gaffney’s ear. The coroner’s lips thinned, his frown deepening as his eyebrows drew together. But he nodded, then said to Aikens, “I’m told Mr. Pennington’s daughter has confirmed your story. You’re fortunate your carelessness hasn’t earned you a murder charge.”

  Beneath his sunburn, Aikens’s face had gone sickly white, and he was visibly trembling.

  The coroner waved a dismissive hand at the gardener. “Just go away. Right, then,” he bellowed. “Who’s next?”

  “Paul Gibson, yer honor,” said the constable. “The surgeon what did the post mortem.”

  Slipping quietly from the room, Sebastian went in search of an undertaker.

  * * *

  They called it the “death trade,” the lucrative business of taking care of London’s copious supply of the dead. At the high end of the trade were the “funeral furnishers,” a pretentious and rapacious set of professionals who had been known to bankrupt bereaved families by flattering and shaming them into signing up for elaborate funerals that included hiring a small army of mutes and professional mourners and draping their homes and churches in endless yards of black crepe. At the lower end of the business were simple carpenters and cabinetmakers who did a lucrative side business building coffins and organizing funerals for the poor. In the middle were the undertakers, which is what Sebastian decided he needed.

  The discreet establishment of Joseph Summers, undertaker, lay on a narrow street not far from the Swan. A short, well-fed man with full cheeks and a balding head, Mr. Summers looked like the kind of fellow whose countenance was meant to be wreathed in cheerful smiles. It was not. Instead, he affected a sorrowful demeanor that somehow managed to be both ingratiating and faintly condescending at the same time—that is, condescending toward anyone who might show the least tendency toward anything other than mindless extravagance. When Sebastian introduced himself and explained what he wanted, Mr. Summers bowed so low, his nose almost hit his knees.

  “We would be delighted to make all the necessary arrangements, my lord.” The undertaker’s plump white hands fluttered through the air. “Absolutely delighted. And where will interment take place, my lord?”

  There was a pause. Mr. Summers blinked at him inquiringly, and it occurred to Sebastian that he should have given more forethought to the necessary particulars. “Probably St. Pancras, but I don’t know for certain yet.”

  “I see.” Mr. Summers’s unctuous expression slipped only slightly. “Well, at any rate, the first step will be to convey the deceased from the Swan to your lordship’s residence. We have two wonderfully capable women who will then come to wash—”

  Sebastian thought about Joseph Summers delivering a bloody, decaying corpse to Brook Street and said hastily, “You can’t bathe and prepare the body here?”

  The undertaker’s blobby nose twitched. “These things are generally done in the home of the deceased.”

  “This deceased doesn’t have a home here. He’s a visitor.”

  “Well. I suppose it is possible, although highly irregular.” The undertaker paused significantly, a faint gleam showing in his eyes before he could hide it. “And far more costly.”

  “I understand.”

  Mr. Summers reached for his notebook and pencil. “Now, for the funeral procession itself, you’ll be wanting two mutes, obviously. And at least six pages in addition to the bearers and—”

  “There won’t be a funeral procession or church service,” said Sebastian. “I simply need you to pick up the body, have it washed and wrapped, and then deliver it directly to the churchyard.”

  Mr. Summers stared at him. “No funeral procession or church service?”

  “No.”

  The undertaker swallowed. “You will be wanting a coffin, yes? I mean, I know St. Pancras has a coffin they rent out, but surely—”

  “Oh, I want a coffin.”

  “Excellent. And let me hasten to assure your lordship that our coffins are made
of the finest wide-planked, knot-free elm before being covered in black velvet and lined with padded silk—”

  “Black superfine will do,” said Sebastian. “And given that the man is dead, I don’t think he needs padding.”

  “No padding? Black superfine?” repeated the undertaker in scandalized accents.

  “Black superfine.” Sebastian rose to his feet. “I’ll let you know when I’ve spoken to the vicar of St. Pancras.”

  Mr. Summers rose with him and made a last-ditch effort to increase his revenue. “If you prefer, we would be more than happy to convey the deceased to his home parish for burial—wherever that may be.”

  “I don’t think that would be practical in this case,” said Sebastian, and beat a hasty retreat.

  * * *

  The ancient church of St. Pancras lay on the banks of the River Fleet, not far from the leafy gardens of the late Irvine Pennington. Most of the crumbling stone building dated from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, but the church itself was older—far older, stretching back through the ages to the seventh century if not beyond. As the only place in London that generally accepted Catholic burials, St. Pancras was popular with French refugees. Sebastian decided it was probably a good place to bury a man who kept a set of Buddhist prayer beads.

  He had a frank conversation with the church’s white-haired, sad-eyed vicar. And then Sebastian went for a walk amongst the vast, sprawling churchyard’s moss-covered tombstones and centuries-old yews.

  He was not wandering aimlessly.

  He visited, briefly, the recent grave of an aged friend named William Franklin. Then, turning toward the section of the churchyard that served as the final resting place for the hundreds and hundreds of refugees from the French Revolution who hadn’t lived long enough to return home, he found the grave of Chantal de LaRivière.

  The Countess’s headstone was a simple one of white marble, inscribed with nothing more than her name and the dates 1774–1796. With the passage of years, the grave had sunken and was now overgrown with long grass that lay wilted in the heat of the brutally sunny day. Hat in hand, Sebastian stood beneath the spreading limbs of a nearby ancient elm and tried to understand both this woman’s death and the part it might have played all these years later in the murders of Nicholas Hayes and Irvine Pennington.

  What were you like? Sebastian found himself wondering as he stared at that starkly plain tombstone. All he really knew about Chantal de LaRivière was that she was young and beautiful and that she had died violently. What else? He remembered someone saying something about a year-old child. Was the child still alive? A boy or girl? He didn’t know. And it occurred to him that, despite having been relatively young at the time of his wife’s death, the Count de Compans had never remarried. Why? Had he loved her that much?

  Lifting his head, Sebastian gazed off across the sea of weathered, thickly clustered tombstones. From here he could see quite clearly the feathery treetops of Pennington’s Tea Gardens. Nicholas Hayes’s life had taken him halfway around the world, from the brutal shores of Botany Bay to the exotic, lotus-scented waterways of Canton. And yet in the end he had come back here to die just a few hundred feet from the grave of the woman he’d been transported for killing. What were the odds?

  Sebastian brought his gaze back to the headstone before him. If Hayes had, in truth, been responsible for Chantal de LaRivière’s death, then Sebastian supposed there was a kind of poetic justice to it all. But he couldn’t shake the conviction that the true story of that fatal night eighteen years before had never been told.

  “What happened?” he said aloud, as if the long-dead, long-buried woman could somehow hear him. “What really happened that night?”

  A hot wind kicked up, rustling the leaves of the elm overhead and dancing patterns of light and shade across the eighteen-year-old tombstone. He could smell the ripening hay from a nearby field, hear the high, clear trill of a wren, feel the warmth of the sun on his face. And he realized that until now, he’d been thinking of this dead woman only in terms of the men in her life: her husband, the Count de Compans; Crispin Hayes, who had admired and desired her; and Nicholas Hayes, who’d been convicted of killing her. But once, he knew, she had been a living, breathing woman with her own hopes, fears, desires, and dreams.

  Perhaps the answers he sought lay there, in her past.

  Chapter 30

  H ero spent the morning in Snow Hill, interviewing street musicians.

  She spoke first to a cheerful blind man who imitated farm-animal sounds on a fiddle—everything from bulls and donkeys to dogs, peacocks, and roosters, all reproduced with an accuracy Hero found uncanny. He told her he used to play the violin at parties until he’d gone blind.

  “The gentlefolk didn’t like the look of my white, vacant eyes,” he said, and then smiled. “I tried playing Mozart and Haydn on street corners, but that didn’t answer too well. So I taught myself to do this.” His grin widened. “Took me a while to perfect it, but folks do like it.”

  Farther up the street she found another blind man who simultaneously played the violin and the bells, a feat he managed by fixing the bells to a board with hammers and rigging up a system of wires and pedals he controlled with his toes. Each man had with him a young orphan he’d taken under his wing to serve as his guide and keep people from stealing the coins dropped in his cup. Hero asked the children if they had seen or heard of a boy who looked as if he might be part Chinese. But first one lad, then the next looked at her blankly and said, “What’s ‘Chinese’?”

  Frustrated, she moved to Cock Lane, where she talked to an old Italian barrel-organ grinder with a capuchin monkey. Dressed in a broad-brimmed felt hat with a jaunty red kerchief, the man played his organ while his monkey—clad in a red soldier’s jacket and a Bonaparte hat—beat a drum and danced.

  “I teach him with kindness, I do,” said the old man, smiling as the monkey scrambled up onto his shoulder and gave a loud screech. “Only way to do it. I had a dog who dance too, and the monkey, he dance with the dog. Had that dog fifteen years.” His voice broke. “But he die last winter, so now it’s only Alessandro and me.”

  The old man had at least heard of China, but he hadn’t seen any “Chinamen” since he’d been down near Portsmouth a decade or two ago when an East India Company ship wrecked along the coast. “Musta been a dozen or more of ’em washed ashore,” he said. “But they was all dead.”

  Hero thanked him and started to hand the man his shillings for the interview, but he said, “No, give it to Alessandro.” So she held the money out to the monkey, who screeched, then whipped off his hat and bowed.

  It was when she was laughing at his response that Hero felt it—the powerful and unmistakable sense of being watched. She glanced quickly around, her breath catching, her gaze raking first the flagway’s steady stream of passing tradesmen, apprentices, and shoppers, then the wagons, carriages, costermongers, and carts clogging the street. She couldn’t see anyone who appeared to be paying her any heed. But as she continued up the street, talking first to a conjurer, then to a clown, the feeling of being stared at persisted.

  Someone was watching her. And their interest in her was not friendly.

  Chapter 31

  T he Dowager Duchess of Claiborne was standing beside the counter of a fashionable Bond Street milliner when Sebastian pushed open the shop door with a jangle of bells.

  Grandly dressed in an elegant gown of hyacinth-spotted silk with an intricately worked flounce, the Duchess had her eyes narrowed as she tried to decide between the rival merits of two caps: one with a fetching azure blue ribbon, the other ornamented with tasteful little tucks. At the sight of Sebastian, she drew her chin back against her chest and scowled. “Devlin. Good heavens. Whatever it is you want to know, I can’t talk to you about it here.”

  He gave a soft laugh. “Am I so transparent?”

  “In a word? Yes. Now, go away.”
>
  He leaned one hip against a nearby display cabinet and crossed his arms. “I can wait until you’re finished.”

  “I can’t decide which of these caps I want with you standing there.”

  “So buy them both. They’re both lovely.”

  “They are, aren’t they?” she agreed. She set them down and said to the clerk, “Both it is.”

  Leaving her abigail to supervise the wrapping of her purchases, Aunt Henrietta tucked her hand through the crook of Sebastian’s arm as they left the shop and headed up Bond Street. “Right, then, what is it now?”

  “I need you to tell me everything you know about Chantal de LaRivière.”

  The Dowager gave him a speculative sideways glance. “What about her?”

  “All I know is that she was young and beautiful, and she died. What was her background? Do you have any idea?”

  “I believe she came from the lesser nobility or perhaps even the bourgeoisie. Her marriage to the Count de Compans was considered something of a coup. But then, she was very beautiful.”

  “That’s all anyone ever says about her. ‘She was beautiful.’”

  “Well, she was. Enchantingly so.”

  “There must have been more to her than her looks.”

  Aunt Henrietta was silent for a moment, her eyes focused on something in the distance in a way that made him wonder what she was thinking. “Our society doesn’t simply reward beauty in women,” she said after a moment. “People act as if a woman’s beauty is an outward manifestation of her inner goodness. As a result, there’s a tendency to credit a beautiful woman with any number of positive characteristics that she may not, in fact, actually possess. Have you noticed? A beautiful woman—particularly if she’s fair-haired—is automatically assumed to be sweet and gentle, loving and giving, innocent and good. At the same time, people tend to discount both her intelligence and her strength.” Henrietta paused, then added, “And her potential for cunning.”