by C. S. Harris
“How old is this Striker?”
“Thirteen.”
Sebastian made a strangled noise.
“I reckon it’s the right place,” said Tom, eying him warily. “The ’ouse has them bits that sticks out at each end on the top floor, jist like the Cat’s Tail. And there’s a slew of old stone barns and such.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s sorta ’ard to describe,” Tom said airily. “I reckon I need to show it to ye.”
Sebastian studied the boy’s wily, stubborn face. “I ought to beat you; you know that, don’t you?”
But Tom simply flashed him a cocky grin and scrambled up into the curricle’s high seat.
• • •
The farmstead lay on a narrow, shady lane that curled through the gentle hills north of Pentonville. Nestled in a kind of hollow and half-hidden by an overgrown copse of frost-nipped beech and chestnuts, it would be easily missed if one didn’t know it was there.
By the time Sebastian drew up beside the farm’s low, tumbledown stone wall, the trees in the copse were thrashing back and forth in the wind and the sky had turned dark and menacing. His gaze narrowing, he studied the house’s exposed timber framework and steep, hipped roof. Like most surviving relics of its kind, the traditional fourteenth-century structure had been modified over the years. Someone back in the days of Queen Elizabeth had replaced the original wooden slatted windows with diamond-paned casements. The roof was now tiled rather than thatched, and at some point three chimneys had been added to make the old house more comfortable. But the basic layout was still the same, with a medieval-style hall in the center bracketed at both ends by two-story bays, each with an upper room that jutted out beyond the ground floor’s facade. A jumble of gray-stone outbuildings including a ruined dovecot lay off to one side.
He handed the reins to Tom. “You stay here.” Sebastian swung around to address Giles. “And if he even thinks about getting down, throttle him.”
“Yes, m’lord,” said Giles.
“But—” began Tom.
“No buts.”
Sebastian hopped down, thankful for the small, double-barreled flintlock he’d slipped into his pocket that morning. He approached the house cautiously, although the place looked deserted. No smoke curled from the three silent chimneys, weeds choked the front walk, and the surrounding fields were thickly overgrown with thistle and nettle. The farm obviously hadn’t been worked in years.
He banged on the ancient, arched-top door, not really expecting an answer. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked, but it was far away, probably from one of the cottages he’d passed on the other side of the hill. He listened to the wind whistle through the eaves and lift a loose tile. Except for the dog and the wind, the place was eerily silent. No birds sang in the nearby copse; no lizards darted across the cracked, weedy paving stones.
Reaching out, he tried the latch. It was locked.
He turned and walked toward the huddle of gray-stone farm buildings. They clustered around a muddy yard strewn with broken cartwheels and moldering hay and piles of abandoned rubbish. Most of the structures around the quadrangle were in various stages of ruin, their roofs collapsing, their shutters hanging broken or missing entirely. But the manure pile in the center of the quadrangle was fresh, and a cart shed and attached stable showed signs of repair. Sebastian was about to open the shed’s wide double doors when a guttural voice behind him shouted, “Wot ye think yer doin’ there?”
Sebastian turned to find a roughly dressed man striding toward him across the rubbish-strewn yard. He was a big man, as tall as Sebastian and considerably bulkier, with powerful shoulders and a neck like a tree stump. His face was large too, with beady little eyes and a small nose and mouth that were all scrunched together in the midst of great, slab-like masses of jowls and jaw.
“You live here?” asked Sebastian.
The man drew up a few feet away, his big, work-roughened hands dangling at his sides. “Who wants t’ know?”
Sebastian drew a card from his pocket and held it out between two fingers in a deliberately condescending gesture. “Viscount Devlin. Who is your master?” He didn’t often use his title, but it could at times be effective.
This didn’t appear to be one of those times. The man poked at the wad of tobacco distorting his lower lip and made no move to take the card. “Wot makes ye think this ain’t my place?”
Sebastian tucked the card away and nodded toward the untilled fields. “Because this farm hasn’t been worked in at least two years. Your master: What’s his name?”
The caretaker’s nasty little eyes shifted this way and that as he struggled with the effort of deciding what name to give.
Sebastian said, “And don’t even think of giving me a false name. If I find you’ve provided false information, the consequences will be severe.”
The man’s nostrils flared. “Herbert. It’s Richard Herbert.” And damn you all the way to hell and back, said the glare that accompanied his response.
“How long have you been in his employ?”
“Two years or thereabouts. Why? Wot’s it to you?”
“Where is Mr. Herbert now?”
“I dunno. He don’t live here.”
“Oh? So what does he do here?”
Something flickered across the man’s scrunched features, something that looked like the first faint whiff of apprehension. “I ain’t gotta answer yer questions.”
“Would you rather speak to Bow Street?”
The caretaker’s face hardened. This was obviously not a man who frightened easily. A natural-born bully, he plowed his way through life using his height and his weight and an ugly demeanor to intimidate and to cow. “I don’t know nothin’, ye hear? All I does is take care o’ the horses and such.”
“So where would I find this Mr. Richard Herbert?”
“I told ye, I dunno. He comes when he comes.”
Sebastian nodded to the loft of the stable behind him. “You sleep up there?”
The caretaker obviously found this new line of questioning confusing. “Aye. Why?”
It meant, of course, that Sebastian could safely come back later, after dark, to quietly break into that oddly silent, half-timbered old farmhouse. It also made it unlikely the mysterious Mr. Richard Herbert and his unknown young helper could come and go without the caretaker knowing it. But Sebastian wasn’t about to tell the big, aggressive countryman that.
Even with a pistol in his pocket.
Chapter 40
Over Tom’s indignant objections, Sebastian drove the young tiger back to Brook Street and left him there with strict instructions to obey orders or die.
He sent word to Bow Street, asking them to look into the mysterious Richard Herbert. Then he spent the rest of the afternoon talking to the various inhabitants of Penniwinch Lane. He discovered the farmstead in the hollow was known as “the Morton House,” after a family that had lived there for generations but died out sometime in the late eighteenth century. Like much of the land in the area, the farm belonged to Lord Cobham. The current tenant had taken up the lease on the property several years before, but no one Sebastian spoke with seemed to know much about him.
“Keeps hisself to hisself,” said a gangly, middle-aged farmer Sebastian found cutting back hazel in a coppice a quarter of a mile down the lane.
“But you’ve seen him, haven’t you?” said Sebastian.
The farmer kept his focus on his task. He had a slow way of talking and a habit of thinking long and hard before answering any but the simplest of questions. “Reckon I seen him once or twice.”
“What does he look like?”
The farmer took another whack at the hazel. “Nothin’ you could say stands out.”
“Would you call him a gentleman?”
Whack, whack. “’S’pose you could. Looks like one. But then, I a
in’t never spoke to him meself.”
“How does he come here? In a carriage?”
“Nah. Always riding a horse, he is.”
“What color horse?”
Again that long, thoughtful silence. “Couldn’t rightly say.”
“Can you tell me anything at all about him?”
Whack. The farmer stood back, squinted at his handiwork, and said, “Nope.”
Sebastian gave up and moved on.
A woman he found pegging out wash on a line stretched between her small stone cottage and a mulberry bush was more pleasant, but she wasn’t really any more informative.
“To tell the truth,” she said, smoothing the sleeves of a wet blue smock hanging on the line, “most folks give Morton House a wide berth these days. My boy, Jonathan, he went pokin’ around there one evenin’—even though we’ve told him time and time again not to—and that nasty brute of a caretaker fired a blunderbuss at him.”
“What’s the caretaker’s name? Do you know?”
“Lyle, maybe?” The woman frowned as she selected a nightshirt from her basket and gave it a shake. She was somewhere in her thirties, with big, strong hands and a powerfully boned face colored a rich tawny gold by a life lived in sun and wind. “No, that ain’t right. It’s Les. Les Jenkins . . . or something like that. He ain’t from around here. Heard he spent a stretch in Newgate, but that could just be people talkin’.”
Sebastian said, “Have you ever seen anyone else around the place? Perhaps a young boy of fifteen or sixteen?”
“Can’t say that I have. Sorry.”
“Did you ever meet the tenant? I’m told his name is Richard Herbert.”
“Aye, that’s what they say. But I’ve only seen him once or twice, and that from a distance. Comes mainly at night, he does.”
“Do you know what he does there?”
“No.” Her basket was empty, and she reached to pick it up. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more about him, but the fact is, the place spooks me. I ain’t never considered myself a fanciful person, but that house—it’s like it throbs with evil. Even the birds and hedgehogs avoid it. Why would they do that?”
Sebastian had felt it himself—the unnatural stillness that hung over the ancient farmstead like a darkness that had nothing to do with the thick clouds bunching overhead to shut out the sun. He said, “Thank you for your help,” and turned to leave. Then he paused. “How old is your boy, Jonathan?”
Something convulsed the woman’s face, something that looked very much like fear. “Twelve. He’s twelve.”
“You’re wise to keep him away from that place.”
She swallowed hard and nodded.
It wasn’t until he was walking away that it occurred to Sebastian that she hadn’t asked him why.
• • •
Sebastian returned to Brook Street feeling hot and tired and discouraged.
He climbed the stairs to the nursery, where he found Claire down on the floor with Simon, trying to interest the boy in a set of tin nesting cups and looking more than a bit frazzled.
“Leave him with me for a while,” he told the Frenchwoman when she glanced up, a lock of lank hair falling into her eyes. “Get yourself a cup of tea or go for a walk in the garden.”
“You’re certain, my lord?”
“Yes, of course.”
After she had gone, he went to hunker down beside his son and assemble the scattered cups. “What have you been doing to your poor nurse, hmmm?”
“Da-da-da-da,” said Simon, crawling determinedly away toward the door.
Sebastian let him reach the corridor before catching him and hauling him back.
Simon wiggled, anxious to be free. But Sebastian closed his eyes, held his child close, and tried for one stolen moment to block out the horror of the world they lived in.
“Da!” Simon squirmed, waved his arms, and hollered a string of indignant gibberish.
Sebastian laughed and let him go. “All right. You’re free.”
Simon plopped on his rump and babbled enthusiastic nonsense.
Rather than settle beside him again, Sebastian simply stood where he was, his gaze on the now happily chattering baby. He felt his love for this child swell within him, so sweet and fierce it took his breath and brought a rare and wholly unexpected sting of tears to his eyes. And it came to him in a kind of wonder that if he were to find out tomorrow that this funny, determined, stubborn, unbelievably precious little boy was no true child of his, it would make no difference at all to his love for Simon. Oh, he’d be angry. He’d be furious at Hero for having deceived him and rage at the fates for depriving him of the joy of having fathered one he loved so intensely. He’d be hurt and devastated and bereft more than he could imagine. But his love for the child himself would be undiminished.
Sebastian watched, humbled and troubled, as Simon seized two of the cups, one in each hand, and banged them together with a wide grin that revealed his new tooth.
And he fell in love with his own child all over again.
• • •
That afternoon, Hero returned to Clerkenwell for interviews with two more of the area’s abandoned children.
The first child was a wan-faced girl of ten named Judith Simmons, whose widowed mother had been transported for passing forged documents, or uttering. The second was a lean, bright-eyed, attractive boy of about fifteen who said he was Toby Dancing.
“You’re the one they call the Dancer?” said Hero, looking at him with interest.
He laughed. “Aye. That’s what they call me.”
“Care to tell me why?”
He laughed again. “No, ma’am.”
He was better dressed than the other street children she had interviewed. When she remarked upon it, he said it was because he knew how to sweet talk the old clothes sellers of Rosemary Lane.
“Are you certain it’s not simply because you’re better at certain other things you do, as well?”
She said it with a smile, and the lad’s eyes sparkled with answering amusement, but he simply ducked his head and kept silent.
“The reverend tells me your mother was transported,” Hero said, starting a new page in her notebook.
The quiet laughter drained from his face as he shook his head. “It was my father. When I was twelve.” His accent and diction were good, Hero noticed; surprisingly so.
“What was he charged with?”
“Embezzlement, my lady. He used to be a bookkeeper at the Exchange. Always claimed he weren’t guilty, of course. But I reckon he was.”
“Have you heard from him since he left?”
“No, ma’am. But he was transported for life, so he won’t be back.”
“Did your mother die before or after he was convicted?”
The boy stared at her a long moment, then gave another little shake of his head. “I told the reverend she’s dead. But the truth is, after my father was sentenced at the assizes, my mother took off and left us. Can’t tell you where she went, but wherever it was, I reckon she figured she had a better chance of making a new life for herself without a couple of children.”
It was said casually enough. But nothing could disguise the boy’s hurt and soul-deep devastation. Hero herself could not begin to imagine it. How could any mother abandon her own children? But she knew it happened. It happened more than she could bear to think about.
She forced herself to focus on his words. “So you have a sibling?”
“I had a little sister; Gabby was her name. But she died of the flux just a couple weeks after my mother left. I always figured it was something I gave her to eat that made her sick. I wasn’t real good at finding food in those days.”
“I’m sorry,” Hero said quietly.
The Dancer nodded and looked away, his throat working as he swallowed.
Hero consult
ed her notes. “Did you ever go to school?”
“Yes, ma’am. Before Father was arrested, I was hoping someday I could set up as a shopkeeper. Maybe sell tea or tobacco. Tobacco would be grand.”
“You don’t still want to do that?”
“To tell the truth, ma’am, I don’t often let myself think too much about that sort of thing.”
“But when you do?”
“I dunno. Sometimes I think I’d like to sign on with a merchant ship and just sail away. I hear those merchant ships, they don’t treat you anywhere near as bad as the navy.” A glow of enthusiasm lit up the boy’s smooth young face. “Then maybe I could go to America. They say a fellow can start over in America, make himself whatever he wants to be.” That brief flare of hope died. “But the truth is, ma’am, I’ll probably always be what I am now.”
“And what’s that?”
He swung his head to look directly at her, his soft green eyes now painfully bleak in a solemn face. “Just alive. I reckon I’ll be happy if I grow up to be alive.”
• • •
Devlin was sitting cross-legged on the nursery floor and building a tower for Simon out of upside-down tin nesting cups when Hero came to stand in the doorway.
“That’s not exactly the idea,” she said with a smile.
“I know.” Sebastian looked up just as Simon squealed with delight and swiped out one chubby arm to send the latest creation crashing to the floor. “But they’re so much fun to knock down.”
“Seems there should be a warning in there somewhere.”
She went to hunker down beside them, the hem of her sprigged muslin gown trailing over the nursery’s scrubbed floorboards.
He said, “I take it your interviews today were troubling?”
“How did you know?”
He reached out to touch a fingertip, gently, between her eyebrows, where a line always formed whenever she was concentrating or disturbed by something. “This.”
“Ah.” She took Simon’s hands and held him steady as he pulled himself up to a stand. “I thought I’d take a break from it all tomorrow. Maybe go with Simon to see my mother. She’s been wanting to show him off to Cousin Victoria.” The babe babbled and reached out to close his fist over the lace trim of her dress, and she laughed. Then she looked up, her smile fading when she noticed Devlin’s expression. “You don’t appear to have had a particularly pleasant day yourself.”