by C. S. Harris
“It’s that feller over there,” said Murphy when she glanced around for the third or fourth time. “Be’ind the dustman’s cart just outside the coaching ’otel there. ’E’s been staring at ye fer a good long while.”
The dustman’s cart rolled forward, and she could see him now, an unkempt scarecrow of a man with sunken eyes and scarred cheeks and a madman’s fatuous grin.
Hero thrust her notebook into her reticule and paid the boy generously for his time. “Thank you.”
With one hand still in her reticule, she strode purposefully across the street toward Jud Foy. She half expected him to bolt. But he just stood there, grinning, while she walked up to him.
“Why are you watching me?” she demanded.
His mouth opened and his chest jerked as if he were laughing, only he made no sound. “Been watching you for days, I have. You only just now noticed it? Saw you talking t’ the little girl in Holburn.”
“Why?”
“Why?” he repeated, his eyes clouding as if the question confused him.
“Why are you watching me?”
“You can learn all kinds of int’resting things about a person by watching them.”
“Follow me again,” said Hero, “and I’ll have you taken up by the constables.”
He gave another of those strange, soundless laughs. “If you see me.”
She started to turn away but stopped when he added, “I noticed you got yourself a cat. Black cats are unlucky, you know.”
She pivoted slowly to face him again. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Time was, people’d drown a black cat. Or maybe—”
She drew the brass-mounted muff pistol from her reticule and pointed it squarely between his eyes. “You’d best hope my cat is very long-lived, because if anything happens to him—anything—you’re going to wish you died a hero’s death on the battlefields of Europe. Do I make myself clear?”
She was dimly aware of a whiskered man in an old-fashioned frock coat who turned to stare at her openmouthed; a dowager in a sedan chair let out a startled shriek. Foy held himself painfully still, his idiot’s grin wiped from his vapid face.
“You’d shoot a man over a cat?”
“Without compunction.”
“Mother of God. You’re as mad as your husband.”
She shook her head. “The difference between Devlin and me is that he probably wouldn’t actually shoot you. I would.” She pointed the pistol’s nozzle toward the sky and took a step back. “Stay away from my cat.”
Sebastian arrived back at Brook Street to find Hero seated on the steps of the terrace overlooking the parterred garden. She still wore her dove gray carriage dress trimmed in the palest pink. But she’d taken off her plumed pink velvet hat and kid gloves and laid them with her reticule on the paving stones beside her. She held the black cat in her lap and was stroking him under the chin when Sebastian walked up to her.
“The Member of Parliament from South Whitecliff tells me that my wife shot three men at Charing Cross this morning. But the baker’s boy swears it was only one.”
She buried her face in the cat’s soft black fur. “You should know better than to believe everything you hear. I found Jud Foy watching me again. He threatened the cat. I suggested that neither activity was a good idea. But with great restraint, I did not shoot him.”
Sebastian moved her reticule so that he could sit beside her and heard the heavy chink of her flintlock. “Was he impressed with your sincerity?”
“I believe he was.”
He reached out to caress her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “I’m sorry.”
She raised her head and looked at him. “I may perhaps have overreacted.”
“I don’t think so.”
She gave a soft chuckle. But her smile faded quickly. “I don’t understand why he’s doing this—what he wants.”
“Matt Tyson says he was kicked in the head by a mule.”
“Tyson? Tyson knows him?”
“Foy testified for the defense at Tyson’s court-martial—he was a sergeant with Tyson’s regiment. A rifleman.”
She flipped the cat onto his back so that she could rub his belly. “Jamie Knox was a rifleman, wasn’t he?”
“Different regiment.”
She looked up then, her gaze meeting his. “You think there are so many ex-riflemen in London that they don’t know each other?”
Jamie Knox was seated at a rear table in an eating house off Houndsditch when Sebastian drew out the chair opposite him and sat down.
“Please, do have a seat,” said the tavern owner, cutting a slice of roast mutton.
“I’m looking for an ex-rifleman named Jud Foy.”
Knox waved his fork in an expansive gesture that took in the simple wainscoted room with its closely crowded tables and chairs, its cheerfully glowing fire. “Don’t see him here, do you?”
“But you do know him.”
“I know lots of people. It’s one of the hazards of running a tavern.”
Sebastian studied Knox’s lean, high-boned face. The likeness between Sebastian and this man was startling. Both had the same deep-set golden eyes beneath straight dark brows, and similarly molded lips. But it was the differences that intrigued Sebastian the most. In Knox’s case, the nose inclined more toward the aquiline, and there was a faint cleft in his chin. Characteristics he inherited from his barmaid mother? Sebastian wondered. Or from the unknown father both men probably shared?
“You still all fired up about Eisler?” asked Knox, stabbing his fork into a potato.
“I’m still looking into his death, yes.”
Knox chewed slowly, then swallowed. “What’s it got to do with Foy?”
“I don’t know that it has anything to do with him. But the man has been menacing my wife.”
A faint gleam of amusement deepened the gold in the other man’s eyes. “I heard about this morning’s incident at Charing Cross.”
“Did you, now?”
Knox reached for his ale. “Foy’s not right in his head.”
“I heard he was kicked by a mule.”
“That’s the official story.”
Sebastian laid his forearms on the tabletop and leaned into them. “Care to elaborate?”
Knox shrugged. “I heard he was found near the stables with his head bashed in. Could’ve been a mule. Could also have been a rifle butt.”
“Why would someone want to cave the man’s head in?”
“They say Foy had just testified at some officer’s court-martial.”
“This was after Talavera?”
Knox shrugged. “Could be. I’ve forgotten the details. The man isn’t exactly one of my boon intimates. You did catch the part about him not being right in the head, didn’t you?”
“Do you know where I could find him?”
Knox cut another slice of mutton, chewed, and swallowed.
Sebastian said, “You do know, don’t you?”
“If I did, why would I tell you?”
“I think Foy might be in danger.”
Knox huffed a soft laugh. “From Lord and Lady Devlin?”
“No. From the man—or men—who killed Daniel Eisler.”
Knox pushed his plate away and reached for his ale. He wrapped both hands around the tankard, then simply sat silently staring at it.
Sebastian waited.
“I’ve heard he keeps a room at the Three Moons, near St. Sepulchre, in Holburn.” Knox drained his tankard and pushed to his feet. “Don’t make me regret telling you.”
Chapter 42
J
ud Foy was coming down the inn’s rickety back steps, his lips pursed in a tuneless whistle, when Sebastian reached out to clench his fist in the man’s foul, tattered coat front and swing him around to slam his back against the near wall.
“Here, here,” bleated Foy, his hat tipping sideways, his watery eyes going wide. “What’d you want to go and do that to me for?”
Sebastian searched the man
’s mad, gaunt features for some ghost of the stout, brash sergeant who’d testified for the defense at Matt Tyson’s court-martial three years before. But the man was so changed as to be virtually unrecognizable. “I have a problem with people menacing my wife.”
“Me? I didn’t menace her. If anything, she menaced me. Shoved her little muff gun in my face, she did, and threatened to blow my head off.”
“You were following her. Watching her.”
“I wouldn’t hurt her. I swear I wouldn’t.”
“You threatened her cat.”
“I don’t like black cats. Ask anybody. They’re bad luck.”
“Harm a hair on that cat’s body, and I’ll kill you.”
“Over a cat?”
“Yes.”
“And they say I’m touched in the head.”
“Tell me what happened to you after Talavera.”
Foy’s face went slack with confusion. “What you mean?”
“How did you get hurt?”
“Don’t rightly know. They found me near the stables with my head stove in and bits of my skull poking out. Thought I was a goner, they did. But I fooled ’em, didn’t I?” He closed his eyes and huffed his eerie, soundless laugh.
“You don’t remember what happened to you?”
“I don’t remember much of anything from before then.”
“You’d recently testified at a court-martial. Do you remember the name of the man on trial?”
“Aye. That I do remember. It was Tyson. Lieutenant Matt Tyson.”
Sebastian released his hold on the man’s ragged coat and took a step back. “When you told me you saw me coming out of ‘his house,’ whose house did you mean?”
Foy grabbed his battered hat as it started to slide down the wall. “That diamond merchant what lived in Fountain Lane. Can’t remember his name now.”
“Eisler?”
Foy carefully replaced the hat on his head. “Aye, that was it. Daniel Eisler.”
“Why were you watching his house?”
“He had something that belonged to me.”
“What?”
The man’s thin chest shuddered with his silent laughter. “What you think?” He leaned forward as if whispering a secret, his breath foul. “Diamonds.”
“Eisler had your diamonds?”
“He did.”
“How did he get them?”
“Somebody sold them to him.”
“Define ‘somebody.’”
“Never give me my share, he didn’t.”
“Who? Who never gave you your share?”
“I can’t remember.”
Sebastian studied the man’s skeletally thin face, the gaunt, beard-stubbled cheeks, and rainwater gray eyes lit by an unearthly gleam. And he found himself wondering not for the first time just how much of the man’s madness was real and how much was put on for effect. “You say you were watching Eisler’s house on Monday?”
“I was.”
“Eisler was dead by then.”
“I know that.”
“Were you watching the house the evening before?”
“I was.”
“Did you see who came in and out that evening?”
“I did.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
“Why should I?”
Sebastian took a menacing step toward him again.
Foy threw up his hands and skittered sideways along the wall. “All right, all right!”
“Who did you see?” Sebastian demanded.
Foy’s tongue flicked out to wet his dry, cracked lips. “Well, first there was this gentleman.”
“Who?”
“How would I know? Never seen him before.”
“How old?”
Foy shrugged. “Forty? Fifty? Hard to tell sometimes, ain’t it?”
“What did he look like?”
“You think I can remember?”
“Tall? Thin? Short? Fat?”
A frown contorted the man’s face. “Tallish. I think. Dressed dapper. I told you, I don’t exactly remember. I didn’t pay him no mind. Why would I?”
“How long did he stay?”
“Not long. Ten minutes. Maybe less.”
“What time was this?”
“’Bout the time it was gettin’ dark, I reckon. I didn’t see him too good.”
Sebastian tamped down a welling of frustration. “Who else did you see?”
Foy screwed up his face again in thought. “I think the doxy came next.”
“A woman? When did she come?”
“Maybe an hour later.”
“Do you remember what she looked like?”
Foy shook his head. “It were dark by then. Can’t nobody see in the dark.”
“How did she arrive?”
“Some gentleman brung her in a hackney. He waited in the carriage while she got down and went into the house. Then he drove off. And I didn’t see him, so there ain’t no use in asking me what he looked like.”
“If you didn’t see him, then how did you know he was a gentleman?”
“Because I seen his outline in the window when he leaned forward. He had a dapper hat on.”
“His hat? You know he was a gentleman by the silhouette of his hat?”
“Aye. He had one of them folding, two-corner jobs, like what the gentry wears to the opera.”
“You mean, a chapeau bras?”
“You think I know what they’re called?”
“And then what happened?”
Foy twitched one thin, ragged shoulder. “I dunno. I left not too long after that.”
“You didn’t see the woman come out again?”
“No.”
“Did you see anyone else hanging around while you were watching the house?”
“No. It’s nearly all warehouses and storerooms down there now; have you noticed?” A tic had started up to the left of the man’s mouth, the grainy, filth-encrusted skin twitching in tiny, uncontrollable spasms.
Sebastian said, “I think you’re holding back on me, Foy. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
Foy stared at him with vacant, rheumy eyes.
It might have been impossible to tell how much of the man’s madness was feigned, how much was acquired, and how much had always been there, but Sebastian did not make the mistake of believing the ex-soldier harmless. Madness was always dangerous, especially when coupled with brutal self-interest. Yet he suspected that Foy was outclassed in perhaps all but evil by those into whose orbit he had now drifted.
Sebastian said, “I don’t know how much of what you’re telling me is true, and how much is sheer, unadulterated balderdash—”
“That’s a right hurtful thing to say, it is.”
“—but I think you’ve stumbled into something you don’t understand here. Something that could get you killed.”
Foy grinned, opened his eyes wide, and pursed his lips to push his breath out in a mocking sound. “Ooo-ooo. Think I should be scared, do you? I’m missing a chunk of my skull and a part of my brain, and I’m still here, ain’t I? I reckon I’m a pretty hard fellow to kill.”
“No one’s hard to kill,” said Sebastian, and left him standing at the base of the stairs, a skeletal figure clothed in tattered rags that hung like a shroud about the frame of a man long dead.
Charles, Lord Jarvis, leaned back in his chair, his feet stretched out toward the hearth in his Carlton House chambers as he studied the man who stood before him. He found Bertram Leigh-Jones a slob of a man, big and unkempt but full of bluster and self-importance tinged, Jarvis suspected, with no small portion of vice.
Jarvis lifted a pinch of snuff to one nostril and sniffed. “I trust you understand your instructions?”
“I do, my lord. But—”
“Good.” Jarvis closed his snuffbox with a snap. “That will be all.”
“But—”
Jarvis raised one eyebrow.
Mr. Leigh-Jones’s full cheeks darkened. He set his jaw, said, “As you
wish, my lord,” and bowed himself out.
Jarvis was gazing after him, a thoughtful frown on his face, when one of the ex-military men in Jarvis’s employ appeared at the entrance, his dark, rain-splattered cloak swirling as he swung it from his shoulders.
Jarvis smiled. “Ah, Archer. Come in and close the door. I have an assignment for you.”
Chapter 43
A
lthough both men had already denied it, Sebastian suspected that the shadowy chapeau bras glimpsed by Foy through the windows of a hackney the night of the murder in all likelihood belonged to either Blair Beresford or Samuel Perlman.
He decided to start with the young Irish poet.
It took a while, but Sebastian finally traced Beresford to the churchyard of a small eighteenth-century chapel that lay just to the northeast of Cavendish Square, where the younger man was winding his way among the tombstones. Pausing beneath the arched lych-gate, Sebastian watched as Beresford stood beside one of the newer monuments, removed his hat, and bowed his head in prayer.
Beresford prayed silently for some minutes before replacing his hat and turning toward the street. Then he saw Sebastian and drew up, an angry flush mottling his cheeks. “What? A man can’t even pray over his own dead sister without being spied on?”
“You have a sister buried here?” said Sebastian in surprise.
“My younger sister, Elizabeth. Louisa invited her to London two years ago, for the Season. It was a dream come true for her. I’d never seen her so excited.”
A breeze rattled the yellowing leaves of the hawthorns in the churchyard and brought them the scent of damp earth and dying grass. “What happened?”
“She died of fever just five weeks after she arrived.”
“I’m sorry.”
A muscle jumped along the younger man’s jaw, but he said nothing.
Sebastian turned to leave.
Beresford stopped him by saying, “I take it you wanted to speak to me about something?”
Sebastian shook his head. “It can wait for a more appropriate time.”
“Why? Out of respect for my sister? She’s dead. If you’ve something to say to me, just say it.”
Sebastian squinted up at the chapel’s awkward, neoclassical facade. “I have a witness who says he saw a man in a hackney carriage drop a woman of the street at Eisler’s house an hour or so after sunset the night of the murder. A man wearing a chapeau bras.”