“Married long?”
“Three months now.” Kate looked very sad. “I offered to give up my place at Mr. Broodigan’s perfumes to I serve and help her, and I thought at first she had a liking for the plan, but now she just tells me to stop where I am.”
“And what does Fred say?”
The young woman smiled suddenly. “Oh, we used to laugh at her ways at first, but these last couple of weeks . . . I’ve seen him and his mother talking quiet, and they stop when I walk into the room. I came home last week and there was a man just leaving I’ve never seen before, and neither of them would say who he was. I’m sure he was leaving our rooms. Freddy says now there’s money coming if I’m patient. He bought this pretty table and a brooch for me, though a month ago he was baying at me for buying new gloves, and not fancy ones either! And he’s short with me now, won’t laugh so.”
Jocasta rubbed her nose. “We’ll pick through this, dearie. But you’ll need to talk it out with your boy, somehow. There’ll be no laughing again till you do.”
Kate suddenly stooped to pick up her reticule. Pulling a handful of papers from it, she thrust them toward Jocasta. “And I found these . . .”
The older woman looked up in surprise. “Sorry, dearie. I read cards, not writing. Never got the trick of it.”
Kate gathered them back to herself, doubtfully. “They are letters, but not to Freddy or from him, but from—” She stopped herself. “There now—I’m running on. Mr. Broodigan in the shop, he says I always do—but the customers like to have a chat and a gossip while they are trying their scents.” She closed her bag and gave her head a little shake. “Thank you, Mrs. Bligh. You’ve told me I need to go and speak clear with my husband and stop dancing round it. That’s good advice and I thank you for it.” She got to her feet. “I’ll be on my way.”
Jocasta frowned at the shimmering cards. “I’ve told you no such thing. I’ve hardly tasted air. There’s some stuff here I need to step through with you. I don’t like the look. Sit now.”
Mrs. Mitchell lifted her chin and held out a coin, which trembled slightly. Jocasta drew her shawl tighter round her and would not take it, so Kate set it down neatly in the center of the cards.
“Jenny at the shop was right when she said you were worth speaking with, Mrs. Bligh. But I have what I need now, so I’ll be away. Don’t be offended, I mean nothing against you.”
“Not a case of offended. You’re looking all brave and clear now, but this is something fiercer than a little lack of confidence man to wife, isn’t it, my dear?” She looked up into the young woman’s face. “Let us pick through before you go charging off!”
Kate opened her mouth to speak, but no words came to her, so she turned on her heel and almost stumbled, such was her hurry to get out of the room. The door clapped to behind her. Jocasta sucked in the air through her teeth again and looked back down in the cards. Their whispering was growing clearer, more insistent. A trickle of coldness started to slick in Jocasta’s belly; it grew and spread as if it were embers on dry matter.
Boyo got onto his feet and jumped up beside her. Jocasta put out her hand and rubbed behind his ears, but he could tell he hadn’t caught her attention and whined. She didn’t hear him, she was still watching the cards in front of her. The Moon, cards of the Suite of Swords several and warlike; and worst of all, though that was serious business enough, in the middle of the spread of cards where Kate had laid her shilling, was the picture of a Tower cracked and burning that filled the air with sparks and injury and people falling from it hard.
6
The outhouse into which Justice Pither showed Crowther and Harriet was low, and too dark for its size to be properly judged. However, it seemed to be made up mostly of unlikely angles. It was as if a once reasonable-sized space had been gradually encroached upon by the surrounding buildings; as if its neighbors had shuffled inward at various times and from various directions, so the space had been forced to fold in on itself, jutting out a limb, or fragment of wall wherever it could find a space in the press. The floor was earth and the air smelled damp and brown. Both Harriet and Crowther had to stoop a little as they stepped down through the doorway. The only light came from an oil lamp hanging from a central beam. Below it, on a trestle table, was a human form shrouded in a white linen sheet. The place bred silence.
The sheet used for a covering had soaked up the damp from the corpse, making it limp and heavy, as if a solid slice of river fog had stolen over the man in his sleep and smothered him. Harriet was reminded of the deepest places in a ship after a long voyage. The air here was a little foul, but she could not say if that was the breath from the body or the river water that clung to it. Either way there was an air of contagion about the place. It was a room for things to rot in, forgotten and brooding.
The atmosphere could not still Justice Pither, however. He had done nothing but apologize since their arrival. He continued to do so now, caught between pride at their coming and embarrassment at the cellar-like outhouse into which he had shown them. He was also disposed to treat both Harriet and Crowther with a deference that the former at least found a little grating.
“I do not wish for miracles, sir, madam,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “But my wife, she is an energetic woman, saw your names in the paper, the Royal Society . . . and of course we had read about last summer . . . and so when this poor fellow was brought along, she suggested we might call on you for your assistance . . . and she was right. We must do what we can, and we would be so glad of your acquaintance.”
Crowther looked down at him. “Have you been a justice long, Mr. Pither?”
“No, no, sir. That is to say, not so long—three months now. My wife suggested I put myself forward for it—she says London has a great need of righteous men. And I have been reading of what other men in the metropolis have managed in their areas, so I made some modest proposals . . . The sheriff seemed most willing—then when this . . . and I thought, perhaps if you were at liberty . . . The manner, the supply of magistrates in this borough is uneven . . .”
Harriet looked at his rather pinched and narrow face. She guessed he was a man who, no matter the skills of his tailor, would always look rather swamped by his own clothes, but he seemed to her in many ways a cut above the usual justices in London. The city was not known for the quality of its officers of the law. Only that spring, Mr. Burke had, in the House of Commons itself, called the Middlesex justices who were supposed to administer the law in the city “the scum of the earth.”
In the countryside, a justice was expected to be a gentleman, and a figure of some standing in his community. He had powers, and those powers were traded for influence and respect in the rural body of England, but here, in London, the choking and congested heart of an empire, the justices took another currency. The populace ignored them when they could, and paid them off when they could not. There were exceptions, of course. Since the Fielding brothers had shown what a magistrate might be in London from their house in Bow Street, the situation had improved, but it was said that barely half the magistrates of London could write their own name, and the fragile peace of the city still rested on the ancient and ignored officers of the watch, the constables unable to pay their way out of their obligations to the parish, the prosecutions of thief-takers, the rough justice of the crowds, and the occasional intervention of the troops. It seemed that Mr. Pither was trying to follow more in the footsteps of the Fieldings than suck up his living in the wake of the other sort of justice. Harriet might be a little skeptical about his chances of success, but the little man should be encouraged, surely.
“Sir,” she said, with a graceful nod of her head. The man hurrumphed into his cravat and looked pleased. “You have mentioned the manner in which this body was found, but no specifics. What was unusual?”
A young male voice spoke from the shadows at the back of the little room. “He was tied.”
Harriet, startled, found herself looking for a moment at the corpse itself. Then from
the gloom behind the body two men wearing the red jackets of the Thames Watermen came forward into the little ring of light. The shadows of the room went back a long way.
The man who had spoken looked almost a child, lithe and slender with high cheekbones, and smooth-skinned enough for Harriet to wonder if he was yet out of his teens. Shuffling out of the dark beside him was an older man, bearded and a little stooped though his chest was broad and his hands, held clenched at his sides, looked fearsome enough. Justice Pither waved toward them.
“These are the fellows who brought him in. They run a wherry from the Black Lyon Stairs. This is Proctor, and this his nephew Jackson. I thought perhaps you might wish to speak to them.”
The older man grumbled under his breath, “Aye, though it keeps us from our trade half the day and there’s rent to be earned. Regular passengers of ours crossing the river in our rivals’ boats.”
Harriet looked directly at him, her eyes frowning. “I know you, Proctor.”
He smiled and kept looking at his boots, saying, “Why, you’re as good as your husband for a face, Mrs. Westerman. I would not have spoken, but I served with the captain when he was nothing but a scrap of a lad, and he touched his hat to me a few times in Gibraltar when you were there and on his arm, and looking as pretty a thing as ever man got hold of.”
Harriet’s eyes brightened. “Of course! James told me you stood between him and a whipping once.”
Proctor laughed, a great throaty rumble from his belly. “I did, I did. Told you that, did he? He returned the favor in time.” He cleared his throat and examined the earth floor with great concentration. “Sorry to hear he’s gone a bit . . .” He touched his hand to his forehead. “We’ve been grieving for you and the little ones up and down the river. Us that know him.”
Harriet found she could not speak, but she nodded.
“So tell us then,” Crowther asked. “How was this man tied?”
The younger man stepped forward and flicked the bottom end of the sheet up the body a little brutally, letting them see a pair of sodden white stockings and the start of the pale breeches above them. The ankles were bound together with rope the thickness of a thumb. Its long end had been neatly curled across the dead man’s shins when he had been laid on the table, rather than cut free or left trailing on the earth floor. Harriet’s mind flickered with images of ropes coiled on the decks of her husband’s commands. She believed a sailor would stop to neaten any piece of loose stuff like that, even if he saw it in a burning house. The stockings dripped onto the floor.
“See for yourself,” Jackson said. “The other end of the rope was tied to something heavy enough to hold him against the tide. Meant to hold him under, I reckon, though if it was meant to hide him too, it did a poor job in the end. We spotted him from the bank just after dawn. You could see wig and coat enough to guess it was a man.”
Proctor put his head on one side and pulled at his beard. “Another three, maybe four yards out toward the middle of the river and we’d never have seen him till the fish were done feasting. Tide is a monster on the Thames. Where he was stuck, he would have been covered by ten feet at high water. Funny rope too.” Crowther lifted his eyebrows and Proctor pulled harder on his beard. “It’s braided. Not laid.” Harriet nodded, and Proctor met her eye, satisfied to see she had understood. “I’ve not seen it used much on the river, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Thank you, Proctor,” Crowther said. “May I ask if you found anything on this man’s body? And how did you know his name?”
The two men in front of him looked rather uncomfortable. It was Proctor who replied.
“His pockets were empty, and there was no fancy stuff on him. As to his name, some woman in the crowd spoke it, but she was gone before she said any more. I don’t know this fella. Can’t have much business across the river, or far along it, or we’d have seen the face, I’d reckon.”
Crowther nodded. “Very well, and thank you.” Then, turning to his host he added, “And thank you, Mr. Pither. You may all leave us with the body.”
The three men shuffled out, but as he passed her, Proctor put his hand out and Harriet felt it close with gentle pressure on her arm. She looked up into his face and saw her own history of foreign waters and winds behind his eyes. It was only a moment, and he was gone, ushered back out into the yard by Mr. Pither, who looked, beside him, like a pilot fish trying to shepherd a whale.
7
In Jocasta Bligh’s early days in Town, when she worked in the Rose and Grape tavern in the thick of the city, she’d lived in rooms shared with ten others where the banisters were stolen to feed the feeble fires of the residents. A hard place to keep yourself to yourself if that was what you wished, though Jocasta had managed it. Then the cards had arrived, whistling and chattering into her life.
They had come to her by accident or chance, as most things do. She’d discovered them, a little greasy and torn, wrapped in a newspaper, in a dingy corner of the dingy bar where she earned enough pennies to keep from starving. She kept them about her, thinking their owner might come back and ask for them, but a month later no one had done so, and she had grown to like looking through the pictures of strange people, the designs that looked like playing cards, but weren’t. Cups and swords, coins and clubs; men, women, stars and angels. Then a seed merchant, a Frenchman, had spotted her dealing them to herself in a quiet moment when the publican wasn’t hovering, and had some talk with her. The cards were known in his country, he said, people used them to tell fortunes, and for a week he found her out every night and told her more; the meanings he gave to the pictures, and how to lay down the cards so their messages bled into each other to make new stories. It was like mixing wines, he told her. One card lay next to another, and some new thing emerged that tasted like neither, only existing where they joined.
The regulars thought for a while that the “Northern Fortress”—what they called her in those days—might have been breached. But there was nothing in that. Jocasta learned; the seed merchant completed his business in London and left; and she was there with her picture cards and a little hope.
The drinkers heard and asked, so she started telling fortunes for the people who drifted through the bar, getting them to lay down the cards and turn them over. People began to seek her out, scraping up pennies and the occasional shilling to have her tell them what she heard in the pictures till she found herself with enough chink in her pockets to take this room and leave off working for others. Twenty years ago now that was. Twenty years of pretty comfortable with a candle. Men she avoided, but for the last ten years she’d had Boyo. She was grateful, and when she had walked her feet off to arrive in London, having abandoned her home of mountains and lakes, she had never expected to feel like that again.
Not happy though. Every now and again, just when you were feeling a little too at ease, the cards had a habit of tapping you sharp-like on the shoulder and reminding you there was a price to be paid still. She did not like having to know some of the things they insisted on telling her. There had been a knock or two at the door since Kate Mitchell went off, but Jocasta hadn’t moved from her place or shifted the lay she had made for the young woman.
Jocasta looked hard at the cards till her head began to ache. All Swords. A dark woman. The Magician with his sticks and balls laid out before him, upside down. The Moon all sick and fading, The Hermit with his lantern and stick like the watchman up in Seven Dials—it was so like the man you’d have said they’d used him as a model. Then The Tower. Most of the cards could be kind or vicious with their predictions, depending on how they fell and what conversations they had with their place or the other cards near them. The Tower she’d never seen as anything but angry, though.
She smelled the sea again. She’d seen it only the once, but she remembered the stink. Then she got again that smoky smell, and these lies. Not the normal man-woman lies, not the kind ones or the cruel, or the words you just let slip that might be true when you say them but are lies as soon as s
unlight hits them. Those lies she saw in the cards all the time, but these were others. She put her head on one side and screwed up her eyes. Had the thing been done? Was there still any stopping of it? That the cards would not tell her.
Once, when she was just beginning to turn the cards for other people in the tavern and winter was making the roads more dirty and foul than ever, a man had asked to have his fortune read as a lark with his friends. She’d laid them out and looked up into his square red face, and blurted out that he would be dead before the year’s end. He’d stopped laughing, but asked her how, all the time acting like he was paying no mind to it. Again, without a thought she told him he’d be hanged, and he pushed his way out of the bar and onto the streets in a rage. His friends had thought it all fine entertainment and given her more than she usually asked for in coins, then followed him out. The next day the whole street was alive with the story, and Jocasta felt ashamed. The day after, news reached them that the man had been taken up by one of the thief-takers, was a known highwayman and was likely to be at Tyburn before the end of the month.
Jocasta immediately became famous in the parish and found herself dealing cards a dozen times a day. She’d been to the execution, saw the cart bringing the man from Newgate with the priest beside him and the crowd cheering. She was sure he’d noticed her in the mass of people, and nodded to her. The crowd loved him. He went bravely with his head up. Jocasta spent two pennies on a pamphlet of his last confession and got a boy who’d been to the charity school to read it to her. The woodcut didn’t look much like him, and the words, though entertaining in their account of his terrible crimes, didn’t sound as if they came from his mouth. Jocasta couldn’t watch the drop; just heard it, the clap of the opening trapdoor in that moment of stillness, then the roar of the crowd. She had felt sick and wouldn’t read cards for a week. Then she got hungry.
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