Where the Dead Lie

by C. S. Harris

  “I don’t know as I ever had one,” said the little girl matter-of-factly.

  The child’s lack of any display of emotion clutched oddly at Hero’s throat, and she had to pause a moment before she could go on. “Before your mother was transported, what did she do for a living?”

  “She used to sell oranges and such, m’lady. But she was never very good at it. It’s why she stole the sawney—to give to the mot of the ken.”

  Hero recognized that expression from her previous research. “The mot of the ken” was the mistress of a lodging house. Many also served as casual fences, usually for purloined food items. Lodgers who hadn’t earned enough from their regular employment to pay for their beds could pay with stolen food.

  Hero studied the little girl’s thin, solemn face. Her diction was considerably better than that of Izzy Barnes. “Did you ever go to school?”

  “No, m’lady. My mama had no way to pay for it. But she taught me to read and write herself, and I still remember it. I practice all the time on playbills and pages of newspapers I find in the streets.” She paused, and then in a shy burst of confidence added, “I had a doll once.”

  “Did you now?” said Hero, forcing a smile even though the little girl’s simple pride broke her heart. “What happened to it?”

  “Somebody stole it while we were in Newgate.”

  It was hard to think about this gentle child locked up with her mother in the horrors of Newgate, but before Hero could investigate the topic further, Thisbe added, “The old woman I used to work for gave it to me.”

  “You were in service?”

  “Oh, no, m’lady. It weren’t nothing like that. I used to go to her house every Friday night and stay till Saturday night.” The little girl gave a wistful half smile. “She used to let me have all the food I could eat and she’d pay me tuppence too. All I had to do was snuff the candles and poke the fire and such. She wouldn’t do anything the whole time—even the most ordinary of things. So I did them for her. She called it ‘Keeping the Sa-bath.’”

  Enlightenment dawned. Hero said, “She was Jewish?”

  “Yes, m’lady.”

  “But you don’t go to her anymore?”

  “No, m’lady. She died. Now I only sell flowers.”

  “Oh? Where do you sell them?”

  “Usually on Clerkenwell Green.”

  “And do you make a good living?”

  “Some days are better than others. I do best at Christmastime, when I can sell Christmasing. You know—ivy and mistletoe and such. And it’s good when the primroses come in too, ’cause it makes people happy to see ’em. They’ll say, ‘Ah, primroses! Spring must finally be coming.’ And then they’ll buy a bunch.”

  “Who taught you to sell flowers?”

  That wistful look was back in the child’s eyes. “I learnt it from Mary. She was always better at selling than Mama. Mary said it was because Mama didn’t grow up selling.”

  Hero was beginning to suspect that Thisbe’s mother had been gently born, before being caught in a disastrous downward slide. “Who is Mary?”

  “My big sister.” The little girl’s lower lip quivered. “I keep hoping she’ll come back someday. The reverend, he tells me to pray to the good Lord about it, so I do. But I can tell he don’t think she ever will.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know. She went off one day last spring, saying she was gonna try selling her flowers out by Islington. And then she just . . . disappeared.”

  “How old is Mary?”

  “Fifteen, m’lady.”

  Hero suspected that in all probability Mary had met and run off with some man, or perhaps realized she could make a better living selling her body than she was making selling primroses. But Hero kept those thoughts to herself.

  She became aware of Thisbe watching her with sad, wise eyes. “I know what you’re thinking—that Mary went off and left me. But she wouldn’t do that. Not Mary. She wouldn’t.”

  The certainty in the little girl’s voice was oddly convincing. Hero said, “What do you think happened to your sister?”

  “I reckon somebody took her. It happens, you know. Nobody likes to talk about it, but it does. Happens to both girls and boys. They go off one day just like they always do, only nobody ever sees them again. It’s like . . .” Thisbe hesitated.

  “Like . . . what?” prompted Hero.

  Thisbe’s chest jerked on a quickly indrawn breath. “It’s like the ground just opens up and swallows them.” And then she stared off across the churchyard again, a lonely little girl surrounded by the crowded memorials to Clerkenwell’s known dead.

  Chapter 22

  “Is Calhoun in?” Sebastian asked when he walked into his Brook Street house some minutes later.

  “He is, my lord,” said Morey, taking Sebastian’s hat and gloves. “Shall I send him to you?”

  Sebastian turned toward the library. “Please.”

  He was reading the entry for Hero’s unpleasant cousin in Debrett’s Peerage when his valet appeared in the doorway with a bow. “You wished to see me, my lord?”

  Sebastian set aside the heavy tome and came from behind his desk. “Have you ever heard of a Clerkenwell fence named Icarus Cantrell?”

  Most gentlemen’s gentlemen would be insulted by such a question. Not Jules Calhoun. The pursuit of murderers could be hard on a gentleman’s wardrobe—and on the nerves of his valet. But while Calhoun did at times lament the loss of a favorite hat or coat, he nevertheless managed to take such things as blood, mud, and powder burns in stride. A slim, lithe man in his thirties with a boyish shock of straight, fair hair, the valet was as unfailingly cheerful as he was unflappable. He also knew virtually every cracksman, dollyman, and blacklegs in town, thanks to having been born and raised in one of London’s most notorious flash houses.

  “You mean the one they call the Professor?” he said.

  “So you do know him.”

  “More by reputation than personally, my lord.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Well . . . they say he was born the younger son of a Northumbrian squire—even studied up at Cambridge for a time. But whether that is true or not, I couldn’t say for certain.”

  “He does sound the part. How did he come to be running a secondhand shop in Clerkenwell?”

  “Word on the streets is he was transported to the Colonies for seven years. I believe he acquired the shop when he returned after the expiration of his sentence.”

  “He was in Botany Bay?”

  Calhoun shook his head. “Georgia, I believe, my lord. It was before the American revolt.”

  “What was his crime?”

  “I’ve heard it was murder, my lord.”

  “Good God. Whom did he kill?”

  “That I couldn’t say, my lord.”

  “Do you think you could find out?”

  Calhoun smiled and executed another of his inimitably graceful bows. “Certainly, my lord.”

  He was turning away when Sebastian said, “If a man were interested in purchasing licentious books, where would he go?” The collection of books on Hector Kneebone’s shelf had given Sebastian an idea. It might be a long shot, but it wasn’t as if he had much else to go on at the moment.

  Calhoun paused. “There are a number of bookstalls and shops near the Strand that are known to those with such interests, my lord.”

  “And if said gentleman insisted on nothing but the highest-quality materials, is there one bookseller in particular he would be most likely to frequent?”

  “That would be the shop kept by Clarence Rutledge in Holywell Street.” Calhoun hesitated, then said, “Is it true what they’re saying about the way that boy in Clerkenwell died?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” said Sebastian. He didn’t bother asking how the valet had learned the details
of Benji’s death, since one of his mother’s flash houses was in Clerkenwell. “If you should hear anything that might be helpful, I would be interested to know it.”

  “I could pay a visit to my mother. She and the Professor go back a ways.”

  “Given what I saw in his shop, I’ve no doubt they do,” said Sebastian.

  Calhoun laughed. But he didn’t deny it.

  • • •

  Named after a long-vanished sacred well of clean, sweet water, Holywell was a narrow, ancient street that forked off from the Strand before turning to run parallel to it. Most of the day the street lay deep in shadow, thanks to the overhanging upper stories of the decrepit old wooden houses that still lined much of its length. Once this had been an area occupied by silk merchants, Jewish tailors, and shops that supplied costumes and fancy attire to theaters and masquerade-goers. Their establishments still dominated the south side of the street. But in recent years Holywell had become more and more given over to booksellers and the kind of radical publishers who—inspired by the French Revolution—operated secret presses in hidden cellars. And because political tracts didn’t sell particularly well, they financed their more serious endeavors with the production and sale of dirty books and prints.

  In addition to the bookstalls lining the pavement barrow to barrow, there were also a number of shops. Sebastian found the one he sought in a crumbling old gabled house next to a low tavern called the Dead Dog. The original Elizabethan windows on the house’s ground floor had been enlarged at some point, and the dusty glass panes now displayed a selection of bawdy prints—mainly fat naked men who looked suspiciously like the Regent and his brothers chasing nubile young women.

  “Looking for anything in particular?” asked the solidly built, middle-aged proprietor when Sebastian stepped into the shop’s musty, dusty interior. With his roughly cut, graying brown hair, broad face, and plain clothes, the man looked the part of a simple tradesman. But his fingers were stained with ink, and the fires of iconoclasm and revolution burned in his intelligent brown eyes.

  “Actually, yes,” said Sebastian, his gaze roving tables and shelves crammed with a jumbled collection of rare old books mixed in with dog-eared, largely worthless volumes. Much of Clarence Rutledge’s business appeared to be devoted to vast collections of sermons indexed by subject and available for either sale or hire, so that Sebastian found himself wondering if Calhoun had sent him to the wrong shop. “I’m interested in a particular volume bound in tooled black Moroccan leather with the title in blood red. About this size—” Sebastian spread his hands in the approximate dimensions of the volume he’d found on Hector Kneebone’s shelves of erotic literature. “It purports to be a lost work by de Sade.”

  “I’m not certain I know what you seek.”

  Sebastian held the man’s gaze steadily. “I think you do.”

  The bookseller blinked. “It’s very rare.”

  “But you do have it.”

  Clarence Rutledge slipped behind the wooden counter that ran across the back of his shop. “Only fifty were produced, and of those, only three made it to our shores.”

  “How many have you sold?”

  “Two.”

  “Let me see it.”

  Wordlessly, the bookseller turned to what looked like a solid paneled wall behind him. Pressing a style, he released a hidden catch and a section of the paneling slid back to reveal a secret cupboard filled with forbidden volumes. He selected one, then carefully slid the section back into place.

  Unlike Napoléon’s France, England had no clearly defined prepublication censorship laws. English plays could not be performed until licensed and approved by an officially appointed Examiner of the Stage. But one could technically publish whatever one wished. The sticky part was that authors, publishers, and booksellers could all be charged with “obscene libel” and disturbing the King’s peace if the material they produced was deemed offensive. Blasphemy, improper language, and sexually explicit passages could all lead to imprisonment and the confiscation of any offending stock.

  “How do you know I’m not with the Society for the Suppression of Vice?” asked Sebastian as the bookseller laid the book on the counter between them. One of the main objectives of the zealous members of the society was to destroy the trade in “bawdy stuff.”

  “I know who you are, my lord,” said the bookseller, and turned the book to face him.

  Like the book he’d seen on Kneebone’s shelves, this volume was exquisitely produced, with a fine leather cover and gold leaf on the page ends. Sebastian opened the book to its title page and stared at what was printed there.

  LES 120 JOURNÉES DE SODOME, OU L’ÉCOLE DU LIBERTINAGE

  Marquis de Sade

  “You’ve heard of it, my lord?”

  Sebastian nodded silently. Oh, he’d heard of it, all right. Considered by de Sade as his magnum opus, The 120 Days of Sodom had been written in 1785, while de Sade was confined to the Bastille. Since he wasn’t allowed paper, he’d composed the work on tiny scraps smuggled into the prison and then glued together to form one continuous, forty-foot roll he kept hidden in the walls of his cell. When the manuscript was destroyed in the demolition of the Bastille in 1789, the Marquis claimed to have wept tears of blood at its loss.

  Sebastian looked up to find the bookseller watching him intently. “I assume it’s a forgery? Someone’s imaginative attempt to re-create the Marquis’s lost work?”

  “Oh, no. I can assure you, it is quite genuine. The Marquis’s original manuscript was believed to have been lost, but it was actually discovered and rescued at the time of the Bastille’s destruction. It was only recently smuggled out to Amsterdam and set in print.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “I have. Although I must warn you, it’s not for the faint of heart.”

  Sebastian slowly turned the pages.

  “Only the first part of the manuscript was complete,” said Rutledge. “The rest is more in the form of an outline.”

  “So tell me about it.”

  The bookseller cleared his throat. “Well . . . Basically, it’s the tale of four wealthy men who join together in search of the ultimate in sexual fulfillment. To this end, they kidnap a number of young boys and girls and shut themselves up for four months in an isolated mountain castle.”

  “And?”

  Clarence Rutledge spread his hands wide. “It’s de Sade at his most imaginative and depraved—a disturbing exploration of the darkest promptings of humanity’s potential for evil. Incest, rape, sacrilege, flagellation, torture . . .”

  “And murder?”

  “Of course.”

  Sebastian closed the book. “How much?”

  “Six guineas.”

  The price was outrageous. A nicely bound three-volume novel typically sold for a guinea, although bawdy books could go for three times that. Sebastian dropped the coins on the counter without comment and waited while the bookseller wrapped his purchase in plain brown paper.

  Then he said, “Who bought the other two books?”

  Clarence Rutledge froze. “I can’t tell you that.”

  Calmly slipping his knife from the sheath in his boot, Sebastian came around the counter to back the bookseller up against the paneled wall. “I think you can.”

  The man swallowed hard, his eyes rolling inward toward his nose as he stared at the blade held inches from his face.

  “Let me explain something to you,” said Sebastian. “Earlier this week, the body of a young boy was discovered in Clerkenwell. He’d been whipped, tortured, raped, and strangled; his little sister is missing and has probably suffered the same fate. I am in no mood to humor anyone who is protecting the monster who did that. Tell me who bought the other two books.”

  The bookseller licked his dry lips. “The—the first was acquired by a veiled gentlewoman. I’ve no idea who she was. She said it was a g
ift for a friend.”

  Sebastian suspected Clarence Rutledge knew the veiled woman’s identity very well. But since she was in all likelihood the source of the volume on Hector Kneebone’s shelves, he let it go for now. “And the other?”

  The bookseller’s eyes slid away toward the street, then focused back on Sebastian’s face. “The other volume was purchased by a French émigré. De Brienne.”

  Sebastian took a step back, the hand with the knife dropping to his side.

  Amadeus Colbert, the comte de Brienne, was a well-known figure in fashionable circles. Slim, vivacious, and unmarried, he was both an entertaining dinner guest and an elegant dancer, always more than willing to please his hostesses by partnering shy young girls overwhelmed by their first Season.

  “Is he a frequent customer?” asked Sebastian.

  Clarence Rutledge carefully straightened his modest neckcloth. “Frequent enough.”

  “Then I wonder why you surrendered his name so readily.”

  An angry muscle jumped along the bookseller’s hard jaw. “I don’t like knives.”

  “Perhaps. But that’s not the only reason, is it?”

  “Let’s just say that I had already heard about the boy they found in Clerkenwell.”

  “Do I take it the comte is particularly fond of de Sade?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you must have other customers with similar inclinations.”

  The bookseller hesitated a shade too long. “None like de Brienne.”

  Sebastian slid his knife into its sheath and tucked the brown-paper-wrapped book under one arm. “If I find you’ve been less than honest with me, I will be back.”

  Clarence Rutledge’s nostrils flared with a deeply indrawn breath. But he didn’t say anything. And in the silence that followed, Sebastian’s acute hearing caught the rhythmic thump-thump of a printing press hidden someplace deep below.

  Chapter 23

  Sebastian found the comte de Brienne engaged in a fencing match on the terrace at the rear of his house on Half Moon Street.