Where Serpents Sleep

by Harris, C. S.

  Their destination 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.”

  “Why do you think she cried?”

  “Why do you think she cried?” said Maggie scornfully. “Why does any woman cry?”

  Sebastian studied Maggie McQueen’s bright dark eyes, age-worn face, and work-gnarled hands. “Do they cry much?” he asked quietly. “The women of the Orchard Street Academy?”

  Maggie shook her head. “Not most o’m. Most o’m have more’n they ever dreamed of—plenty of food, a roof o’er their heads, nice clothes.”

  “But Rose?”

  “That one . . .” Maggie hesitated, the smoke from her pipe drifting up to waft around her head. “She grew up dreaming of other things.”

  Yet still she stayed, Sebastian thought
, caught in a purgatory of her own making, trapped by self-loathing and misplaced guilt and suffering for the sins of others. Aloud, he said, “Why did you leave the Academy?”

  Maggie knocked the ashes out of her pipe against the hearth and prepared to stand up. “You come around asking questions. They got nervous.”

  “They?”

  She shrugged. “Mr. Kane. Miss Lil. Thackery. Aa seen ’em loooking at uz. Wondering if Aa’d squawk. Old woman like uz, who’d notice if Aa disappeared one day? So Aa disappeared meself. Afore they could make uz disappear.” She hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and shot it at a nearby spittoon with flawless accuracy.

  “Did you see Hessy Abrahams’s body?” asked Sebastian.

  “ ’Course Aa did. Aa wrapped it in canvas, too.”

  “Was she stabbed, as well?”

  Maggie pushed to her feet. “Nawh. Twern’t no blooood on her. Somebody’d gone and snapped her neck. Just like a chicken ready for the pot.”

  Chapter 44

  SATURDAY, 9 MAY 1812

  The Black Dragon lay somber and quiet in the cold light of early dawn, a dark lair for the shadowy prince of an underground realm of sin and despair. Ian Kane might not have all the answers to what had happened at the Orchard Street Academy on that fateful Wednesday night, but Sebastian had no doubt the Lancashire man knew more about those events than his charwoman. The problem would be getting close enough to the man to question him.

  Sebastian watched the tavern for a time from across the street, where a scattering of ashes and a black scorch mark on the broken paving stones marked the spot once occupied by the hot potato seller. A few men turned to stare at him as they passed, their jaws unshaven, their eyes sunken. But the streets were largely empty. This was a district that really only came to life in the afternoon and evening.

  A noisome alley ran along the south side of the tavern. Crossing the street, Sebastian took a deep breath and ducked down the passageway, his bootheels crunching the debris of broken bottles and oyster shells and rain-sodden playbills that fluttered halfheartedly in the breeze. Like most alleys in London, this one served the area’s residents as an outdoor chamber pot. It made a change from the smell of fish, but he doubted Calhoun would consider it an improvement.

  After his last visit to the Black Dragon, Sebastian suspected his chances of simply strolling in the front door unmolested were limited. He needed a less direct entrance.

  He found the door that opened onto the alley from the tavern’s kitchens and, just beyond it, a flight of rickety wooden steps that led up to the first floor. Beyond that the alley ended abruptly in a high brick wall. Sebastian was standing at the base of the stairs and considering his options when the kitchen door opened behind him.

  He swung around to see a burly man wearing a brown corduroy coat back into the alley as he wrestled with an overflowing dustbin. He was followed by a second man with a broken nose and cauliflower ear who dumped an armload of broken-up crates to the side of the door, then straightened. Sebastian recognized Thackery, the ex-pugilist from the Orchard Street Academy.

  “Well, well,” said Thackery, his small black eyes lighting up at the sight of Sebastian. “Look what we got here.” His smile widened to show his broken brown teeth. “I see ye forgot yer bloody walking stick.”

  With a brick wall behind him and two thugs in front of him, Sebastian’s options had suddenly become limited. He took a step forward and slammed his bootheel into the pugilist’s right knee. “That is the one I hit before, isn’t it?” he said as the ex-fighter went down with a howl.

  “Wot the ’ell?” The burly man in brown corduroy set down his dustbin with a thump and reached inside it to pull out a broken bottle. “Ye know this cove, Thackery?” Moving into the center of the passageway, he crouched down into a street fighters’ stance, the broken bottle held like a knife. “Looks like ye wandered down the wrong alley,” he said to Sebastian.

  One hand clamped to his knee, Thackery staggered up to lean against the soot-stained brick wall behind him, his breath coming hard and fast. Sebastian kicked again, this time aiming at the dustbin. It toppled over with a cascading crash of broken glass and animal bones that knocked the other man off his feet in a swill of stinking refuse. Leaping over the strewn garbage, Sebastian managed to take two steps toward the mouth of the alley before Thackery came off the wall at him.

  Big and enraged, the man caught Sebastian in a rush that carried him across the alley to slam him up against the far wall. The impact sent the breath whooshing out of Sebastian. He was dimly aware of light spilling down the steps as the door to the first floor opened above them. Then Thackery picked Sebastian up bodily and pinned him to the bricks.

  Gripping his hands together, Sebastian pyramided his forearms and drove them up, intending to break the pugilist’s grip on his jacket. It didn’t work. Nonplussed, he hammered his doubled fist down into the man’s face. Thackery grunted but stood firm.

  His hands still locked together, Sebastian swung his doubled fists back, then slammed them into the side of Thackery’s head. He still didn’t budge.

  “That’s enough,” said Ian Kane from the top of the steps. “Let him go.”

  Thackery hesitated.

  “You heard me. Let him go.”

  Breathing heavily, his face red, Thackery took a step back and let Sebastian slide down the wall.

  Sebastian straightened his lapels and adjusted the folds of his cravat.

  “Since you’re here, you might as well come up,” said Ian Kane, resplendent in buckskin breeches and a silk paisley dressing gown in swirls of red and blue.

  “Thank you,” said Sebastian, aware of Thackery’s angry gaze following him as he picked up his hat and mounted the steps.

  “Some ale?” asked Kane, leading the way into a comfortable old parlor with gleaming wainscoting and an elaborately carved stone hearth.

  “Please,” said Sebastian, his gaze on the carved caryatids holding up the mantel. “Lovely piece.”

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

  Sebastian surveyed the damage to his hat. “I’ve been hearing some interesting tales about the Academy.”

  “You know what they say,” said Kane, going to pour two glasses of ale. “You don’t want t’be believing everything you hear.”

  “No denying that,” agreed Sebastian. “For instance, I heard there were only two women missing from your house—Rose Fletcher and Hannah Green. Now I discover there’s actually a third. Hessy Abrahams.”

  Kane’s head came up just a shade too fast. But otherwise, he gave nothing away. He held out one of the glasses of ale. “It seems you know more about my establishment than I do.”

  “Do I?” said Sebastian, taking the ale. “It’s my understanding Hessy Abrahams didn’t run away like the others. She was murdered.”

  Kane raised his own glass to his lips. “You must have been talking to one of my competitors. They’re always spreading dastardly tales about me.”

  “Actually, I’ve been talking to Maggie McQueen.”

  “Ah. Dear Maggie. I wondered where she’d taken herself off to.”

  Sebastian held his ale without tasting it. “Something rather spectacular happened in your house on Wednesday of last week, Kane. What was it?”