“Think nothing of it,” he says, blushing a little, as if he could read her thoughts. “We must encourage the younger people to follow in our footsteps, mustn’t we, Dr. Strathern?”
Strathern catches Hannah’s eye and smiles. “Yes, we must.” But he is not lighthearted for long. “I fear we must be on our way. Where did you say we could find Thomas’s father?”
They do not find Mr. Spratt at the coffeehouse but at a tavern on Suffolk Lane, where the coffeehouse owner has directed them. When Hannah and Edward step inside, more than a few faces look up from their pipes and pints. They’re all men, of course; no woman of quality ever sets foot in here. A proper young lady such as Arabella Cavendish wouldn’t have stepped out of the carriage, Hannah reflects. As they progress through the smoky, low-ceilinged room, silence falling in their wake, Hannah sneaks a quick glance at Edward. She saw his expression of shock when she insisted on going into the tavern, but it passed quickly enough. If he’s embarrassed by her behavior, he conceals it well. His dignity is such that he might be accompanying her to church.
The only other woman in the tavern is the proprietor’s wife, easily thirty years his junior, who lolls with her elbows on the counter next to where her grizzled husband sits sucking on a pipe, keeping an eye on the patrons. As they approach, she grins lasciviously at Edward and leans forward on the wood counter, revealing more of her well-endowed chest.
“We got us a gentleman here, Mr. Tupper,” she says to her husband. “I told you we’d improve our custom once we put that notice in the Gazette.” She turns to Edward, smiling wantonly, but her husband takes no more notice of her shamelessness than he would a bee buzzing around a flower. “The first pint is on us, sir, just be so good as to tell your friends. And we’ll throw in a glass for your lady, too,” she adds with a wink.
Edward coughs nervously. He looks away from Mrs. Tupper’s insinuating glances and addresses her husband. “We’re not here to sample your ale, which is very fine, I’m sure, but in hopes of finding a Mr. Spratt.”
With obvious reluctance, Mr. Tupper takes the pipe from his mouth. “Spratt? What d’you want ’im for?”
“We would like to speak to him about his son.”
Tupper looks them over carefully. Apparently he finds them harmless enough, for he points to the back of the tavern. “The other room. Tall fellow, head like a boiled egg. He’ll be the one losing at cards.”
A round table with six men fills the tavern’s back room. Judging by the tense silence and the pile of coins in the center, the game is being played for serious stakes. Edward whispers to the tavern boy at the door, who runs to speak to a bald man of middle years. He stands and walks over to them with a wary curiosity in his eyes.
“What can I do for you?” he asks, dabbing at his perspiring forehead with a cotton kerchief.
Edward introduces himself and Hannah. “We’re friends of Mr. Ravenscroft, Thomas’s employer.”
“Yes?”
“It seems that Thomas left three days ago and hasn’t been back since. Have you seen him?”
“Why, no. Has something happened?”
“We have no reason to believe that any harm has come to him,” Hannah says quickly, dispelling Mr. Spratt’s noticeable concern. “But we fear he may have eloped with my maid, Lucy Harsnett. Has he ever spoken of her?”
“Spoken to me about a girl? No, never. But Thomas is almost a man now, he’s got his own life. I’m just his old dad. He doesn’t confide a thing.” He wipes his wet forehead again, smiling ruefully.
“If you should see him,” Edward says, “will you ask him to go back to Mr. Ravenscroft’s? He is quite anxious for his return.”
“Yes, of course. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he nods at his empty seat, “I’ve had a run of bad luck and I’m trying to make up for it.”
The carriage is passing the charred ruin of St. Paul’s before either of them speaks.
“Mr. Spratt did not seem terribly concerned about his son,” Edward comments.
“But as he said, Thomas is nearly a man. Perhaps fathers naturally worry less about their sons than mothers do about daughters.” Or mistresses about their maids.
“Still, I find it odd. Mr. Ravenscroft told me that both Thomas and his father were reliable sorts, not the type one would expect to find gambling in a tavern.” He looks down at his hands, then into her eyes. “I fear we are no closer to finding Lucy.”
“And the day is growing dark. I pray she is somewhere safe.” She musters a brief, sad smile. “Dr. Strathern, in all this confusion, I never did learn the reason for your visit this morning.”
“I hope you will agree there is time for one more stop.”
“To do what?”
“To speak with the sexton who buried your father.”
Chapter Thirty-six
HANNAH LEADS STRATHERN along a dirt path, only wide enough for one, that winds through the burial plots crowding St. Clement’s churchyard. She points to a small outbuilding ahead. Like the church, its stone walls are blackened with soot.
“Mr. Ogle lives there,” she says. “One can usually find him here of a Sunday—that’s when the parish pays him extra to tend to the graves.”
The weathered wood door to Ogle’s cottage is closed. Edward raps hard enough with his gloved fist to make it rattle. They stand expectantly for a minute, then Hannah adds her much softer knock to his. “Mr. Ogle?” she calls tentatively.
“Who’s askin’?”
They both start at the sound of the voice behind them. The tread of Tom Ogle’s boots was muffled by the muddy ground. He carries a rusty shovel, dirt still clinging to the blade. “Oh, it’s you, Mrs. Devlin,” he says. The sight of Hannah puts him slightly more at ease, but he stares at Strathern with a native suspiciousness. On his scarecrow’s frame hangs an ill-fitting suit of work clothes, grimy and threadbare. His skin is so often caked with dirt and coal dust that it’s permanently stained a dull, dark brown. Hannah knows that the sexton is not a bad sort, but his presence in the churchyard is enough to make young children cling to their mothers.
Hannah introduces Edward. “We’d like to speak to you, if you have a moment.”
Ogle squints up at the sky. “You’d best come in, then. It’s startin’ to rain.”
His cottage is cozier and cleaner than one would imagine, with a neat straw bed in the corner, woven mats on the floor, hooks for his clothes on one wall, and hooks for his grave-digging tools on another. The rapidly fading daylight struggles in through two square windows cut into the thick stone. Ogle hangs up his shovel, lights a long wick by holding it over the burning coals in the tiny fireplace, then puts the flame to a candle set on a table just big enough for one. Next to the table is the only chair in the room, which he offers to Hannah. She thanks him and sits down.
“Mr. Ogle,” she begins, “last year you prepared my father’s body for burial. Do you remember?”
Ogle shifts his glance from Hannah to Edward and back again. “I remember. I was wonderin’ when someone was goin’ to ask me.”
“Ask you about what?” Edward says.
“About what I seen.”
A shiver of foreboding runs down Hannah’s back. It took some time for Dr. Strathern to convince her to come here. She agrees with him that the murderer should be brought to justice, but it does not make facing the truth any easier. Who would want to discover that their father was willfully, brutally murdered? She prefers to believe that her father’s killer was poor, starving, afraid, and had not meant to kill him. She prefers to believe that he is someone she can forgive in time.
“Did you find anything unusual about my father’s body?” She wants Ogle to say no, there was nothing, so that she can press a few coins in his palm for the care of her family’s gravesites and leave with an easy mind.
Ogle fixes her with his dogged stare. “Are you sure you want to know?”
Hannah hesitates. She isn’t sure at all.
“We can stop right now if you want,” Edward says.
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Once Ogle tells his story, there’s no going back. Will she be tormented by thoughts of her father in his final moments? Perhaps knowing the terrible truth is the price of justice. “I want to know,” she says softly.
Ogle steps over to the grate. He stirs the burning coals thoughtfully, as if the action might spur his memory. “When the constable first brought him to me I could see he’d been stabbed. And not just once. He’d been cut up real bad—almost like it was done by some demon. I never seen nothin’ like it.”
“Can you describe what you saw?” Edward asks.
“His stomach was sliced right open, all the way across. His chest was all cut up. Deep wounds, about this wide.” He holds up his thumb and forefinger about an inch and a half apart. “And there were marks cut into his flesh.”
“Do you remember what they looked like?” Edward asks.
“Of course I remember. I tried to forget it, but I couldn’t. I never wanted to say, knowin’ your father was a good man, Mrs. Devlin. But they was like something’ made by the Devil hisself.”
“Could you draw them for us?” Edward surveys the room and realizes at once that it doesn’t hold any writing accoutrements. “I suppose I could fetch some paper and ink—no, wait.” He crouches down by the fireplace. With a pair of tongs he withdraws an ashen lump of coal, then brushes off the smooth hearthstone in front of the grate. “Draw them here.”
Ogle takes Strathern’s improvised writing instrument and kneels down next to him. The rain gently patters on the roof while Ogle slowly draws, the charcoal scraping softly on the stone. When he is finished, Edward stands back so Hannah can see.
The shapes the sexton has drawn are similar to the markings Strathern found on the other bodies, but not precisely the same: a circle with a dot inside, a slender crescent moon, a vertical line adjoining a small half circle at the top.
“I’m sorry, Hannah,” Edward says.
Ogle looks up at her, the whites of his eyes bright against his brown skin. “There’s something more,” he says. “His finger—the little finger on his right hand—it was cut off.”
In the carriage they sit facing each other, each of them nearly lost in the shadows.
“I neglected to tell the coachman to put in new candles,” Edward says apologetically. “I didn’t think we would be out so late.”
Night has fallen. Under a steady barrage of rain, the streets are slick and empty. “It is of no consequence,” Hannah replies. She doesn’t mind the dark. There is a certain comfort in being in Dr. Strathern’s carriage, in listening to the rain and to the slow clatter of the horses’ hooves along the cobblestones of Wych Street. She feels safe in a way she hasn’t felt in some time. It’s reassuring to gaze upon Edward’s countenance. At regular intervals, the sight of his face emerges from the darkness as the orange glow of a street lantern illuminates the coach, then disappears into shadow again. It occurs to her that they’ve spent nearly the entire day together. She hasn’t spent an entire day in a man’s company since Nathaniel was alive. What’s most odd about it is that it doesn’t seem odd at all.
Edward called her Hannah earlier, saying her name easily, naturally, as if they were already intimate. Something has happened between them, though she cannot say exactly when or where or how. When did it happen? While they were dancing, or before, at the anatomy theatre when she unburdened herself to him, or even before that, as they stood by poor Mr. Henley’s bedside? Perhaps it happened at the very start, when they first looked into each other’s eyes during the surgery. How could something so momentous result from such small events: a glance, a few conversations, the discovery of a shared passion? She did not imagine that it was so easy to fall in love, but she is forced to admit that it is.
Her whole world has suddenly shifted in a way she didn’t anticipate or even desire. It hardly seems fair. Only a few days ago she would have said that Mr. Montagu impressed her as the most attractive of men: worldly, charming, witty, gallant. But she suspects that she would never have told Montagu about the darkest time in her life or allowed him to see her mother in her fragile state. She can’t explain even to herself why she trusts Dr. Strathern, a man she hardly knows, except to say that what she first mistook for vanity she now recognizes as a quick understanding coupled with intellectual curiosity. His face has become as dear to her as any she has ever known. She tries to discern what exactly has charmed her so: the cleft in his chin, the strong jaw, the slightly asymmetric but graceful nose, the eyes that betray so many of his emotions? It’s the sum of all of these and more. It’s in the remarkable feeling of familiarity, as if they met before. Each conversation between them seems as if it has its beginnings in the past and its end sometime far in the future.
Presently, Strathern’s gray eyes cloud with concern. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Devlin. About what we discovered about your father, I mean.”
So now it’s back to Mrs. Devlin; but that’s as it should be. Dr. Strathern is much too respectable to disregard the rules of propriety. Nor does she want him to. She has had an entire day to think about the possible consequences of an attachment between them, and heartbreak is the only outcome she can envision for herself. Even though he indicated that his engagement is based on affection, she is certain that money plays no small part, and its appeal shouldn’t be underestimated. Furthermore, he is an aristocrat and she is not. Men such as the Honorable Dr. Strathern marry not only for themselves but also for their families. Would he ignore all of that to be with her? Even if he were not engaged to another, would he actually marry her? She may trust his judgment, she may even trust him with her life, but she will not risk putting him to that test.
“Thank you for your kindness.”
“I can only imagine how you must feel.”
“Indeed, I’m not entirely sure myself. I have so many different emotions I feel they are at war inside me.” And that’s without including her complicated feelings about him. “I was more content when I thought my father’s death was indiscriminate, perhaps even unintentional. And now…” She shakes her head in despair. “It’s clear we must proceed, but how?”
“I have thought about this. I believe we could benefit by following the principles of modern philosophy. First, we must carefully examine the physical evidence, then proceed to an hypothesis.” He leans forward eagerly. “For instance, we know that the manner of your father’s, Sir Henry’s, and Roger Osborne’s murders were nearly identical, by which we can deduce that these killings were probably carried out by the same man.”
It’s a brilliant idea and a unique approach. Crimes are usually solved by the testimony of witnesses or by confession; to her knowledge, no one has ever considered another method. “Which would narrow the list of potential killers down to someone who knew all three men, someone who had been involved with each of them in some way. But there is a matter that perplexes me. My father was killed more than a year ago, and Sir Henry and Mr. Osborne only recently.”
“I wish I knew what to make of that. I can only hope that we’ll learn something more that will help us understand why.”
“You told me that you saw my father with both those men in Paris. What were the circumstances?”
“They were all at the Palace of Saint-Cloud the night that Princess Henriette-Anne died.”
“My father was there because the king asked him to accompany the princess back to Paris after their reunion at Dover. But why were you there?”
“For a completely frivolous reason—a party, or so I’d been told. Sir Granville, who was at that time visiting Paris, insisted that I was too serious in my studies and would benefit from the diversions of the French court. I was by no means convinced of this—which is to say that he practically had to drag me there. We didn’t know the princess was ill until we arrived. Apparently, the sickness came upon her quite suddenly. And tragically, as it turned out.”
Hannah thinks back to what her father told her of that sad incident. “There were rumors of poison.”
“There always
are when a member of the nobility dies in such a manner. But your father’s postmortem put an end to that.”
Hannah nods. “He spoke to me of it. He was certain that she died of an ulceration of the stomach.” She pauses thoughtfully. “About the markings—there is one that I recognize. This is what I meant to tell you earlier. I remembered it the night of the dance. The x inside the square is a symbol used by apothecaries. It means month.”
His brows knit together. “Month?”
“As they might write on a recipe—as in, ‘use once a month.’”
“And the others, could they also be apothecaries’ marks?”
“I didn’t recognize them as such.”
He stares out the window, ruminating. “Did your father keep records of his patients or his cases?”
“Yes, quite a lot.”
“Have you ever looked through them? Perhaps you would discover a reason why someone would want to kill him.”
“No, but until today I did not know that his death was due to anything other than a robbery.”
Strathern looks chagrined. “Of course.”
The coach stops outside her house. Neither makes a move to leave the carriage. Perhaps he knows, as she does, that doing so will mean good-bye. All that must be left unsaid fills the space between them, awkward and painful. But she must know one thing. “Dr. Strathern, why is it so important to you to solve these murders?”
He seems surprised by her question. “A killer is on the loose. Is that not reason enough?”
“No other reason?” The words seem to come from deep inside her.
The Devlin Diary Page 30