by C. S. Harris
He told her then about the half-timbered medieval farmhouse on Penniwinch Lane. “I plan to go out there again late tonight and take a better look about the place.”
“You will try not to get yourself killed, won’t you?”
He gave a sharp laugh. “I will try.”
“And have you ever heard of this man before? Richard Herbert?”
“No. I’ve spent the past week harrying everyone from the comte de Brienne and Hector Kneebone to the King’s cousin and my own niece’s betrothed. And while I’ve no doubt they’re all varying degrees of nasty, it now appears possible that none of them has anything to do with these killings at all.”
“Unless ‘Richard Herbert’ is an assumed name.”
“That’s always a possibility,” he said, reaching for Simon as the boy staggered from her to his father. Devlin was silent for a moment as he held the child. Then he looked up at his wife, and the strain of these last days on him was plain to see. “If that’s true—if it is a pseudonym—then I’ll be right back where I started with nothing to go on. Nothing at all.”
• • •
It was sometime later, when they were dressing for dinner, that a message arrived from Bow Street.
Lovejoy reported they were still pursuing the mysterious Mr. Richard Herbert. But the bookseller Clarence Rutledge had been found in the back room of his Holywell shop with a dagger sticking out of his back.
Chapter 41
“You told someone about the house, didn’t you?” hissed the gentleman, his big hand spanning the boy’s face to pin him against the stone wall behind him. “Didn’t you?”
“No, sir,” sobbed the boy. “I swear I didn’t. I never!”
The gentleman squeezed his thumb and fingers together, painfully pinching and distorting the boy’s face. “So how did Devlin discover it?”
“I don’t know! Honest.”
“Honest?” The gentleman’s lips curled away from his teeth. “This has caused me considerable aggravation. You realize that, don’t you?”
The boy tried to say something, but the only sound that came was a whimper. His heart was thumping so hard he could feel it throbbing in his hands and feet.
The gentleman said, “Have you found that last boy’s sister yet?”
“Sybil?” It was becoming increasingly difficult for the boy to breathe. “No, sir.”
“Why the bloody hell not?” The gentleman’s voice was as sharp and cutting as a lash.
“I don’t know where else to look.”
“She can’t simply have vanished.”
“I’m trying!”
The gentleman ground the back of the boy’s head against the wall, then stood back and let him go. “Try harder.”
The boy’s legs buckled. He slid down the wall to huddle at its base, his hands splayed out at his sides, his breath coming in painful, frightened gasps. He watched as the gentleman’s shiny Hessians turned and strode away, leaving him there alone.
But the boy was shaking too hard to get up. And he knew now without a shadow of doubt that once he found Sybil, the gentleman would kill him.
Kill them both.
Chapter 42
The night sky was white with a drifting mist that deepened as Sebastian left the deserted cobblestoned streets of the city and spurred his neat black Arabian into the low hills beyond Pentonville. He rode through stubbly fields of harvested grain, the earthy odors of ripe elderberries and quince and plums hanging heavy in the moist autumn air. Already the cold-nipped maples and hazels were turning a deep scarlet and gold, with the paler yellow of the birch seeming to glow out of the damp gloom.
He rode past the cottage where the woman with a son named Jonathan had been pegging out her wash. The cottage was dark, its inhabitants no doubt long since lost in the deep sleep of those whose days were spent laboring hard with their bodies. The dog he’d heard before bayed once in the distance and then fell silent.
The fog was thicker in the hollow. He turned his horse into the overgrown copse that nearly hid the ancient, half-timbered farmstead from the road and slipped from the mare’s back. She nickered as he tied the reins to a stout sapling, and he touched his hand to her soft muzzle, shushing her. Then he crept toward the house, treading warily, conscious of each snapping twig, every rustle of underbrush.
At the far edge of the copse he paused to study the house standing silent before him. There was still no smoke showing from the three chimneys. He listened carefully, heard the restless movement of horses in the distant stable but nothing more. A flicker of swift black shadows caught his eye. Bats.
Slipping the picklock from his pocket, he crossed to the door, grateful for the mist that swirled damply around him. The lock opened easily, the door swinging inward with only a slight nudge. Les Jenkins obviously had orders to keep it well oiled.
Slipping his pistol from his pocket, Sebastian stepped cautiously inside and quietly closed the door behind him. After a brief moment to allow his eyes to adjust, he moved easily, for he’d always possessed an extraordinary ability to see well in the dark. He found himself in a narrow cross passage, its air faintly stale with disuse. Another outside door lay at the passage’s far end. To his right two round-topped doors led to what in days gone by would have been the buttery and pantry; at the far end of the passage a narrow set of stairs climbed up toward what would have served as quarters for servants and retainers.
But while the farmstead’s end bays consisted of two floors, the central block of the structure was one soaring space that opened all the way to the smoke-darkened rafters high above, forming an old-fashioned, medieval-style hall smaller than and yet similar to what would have been found in the homes of noblemen of the day. On the far side of the hall a second, more imposing staircase rose to what hundreds of years ago would have been the family’s solar.
He took me t’ this big room, Hamish had said. Upstairs, it was.
Sebastian crossed the ancient hall cautiously, noting the comfortable armchairs drawn up before the cold, eighteenth-century hearth, the marble-topped table with its array of brandy decanters and crystal glasses that ordinarily would have no place in such a simple farmhouse. He took the dusty, worn stairs in a rush, then paused at the half-open door to the upper room, his breath coming hard and fast in expectation of what he might find there.
Tightening his grip on the pistol, he nudged the door open wider and breathed in the thick, pungent odor of raw blood.
His horrified gaze took in the shackles sunk high into an old oak support post in the far wall. He saw the dried blood splattered over the whitewashed walls, the stomach-churning assortment of whips and knives that lay jumbled on a nearby table. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a massive old-fashioned oaken bedstead, its mattress stained with more dried blood. At its base, his back propped against the heavy, dark footboard, sat Les Jenkins, his legs sprawled out before him, his chin sunk to his massive chest, his hands curling limply at his sides. The hilt of the dagger that had killed him still protruded from his blood-soaked chest, holding in place what looked like—what was a sheet of fine parchment paper.
Sebastian went to crouch down before the dead man. He was still quite warm, probably dead no more than an hour or two. The front of his worn blue smock gleamed with the dark sheen of his blood. More blood had soaked the edges of the note his killer had left for Sebastian to find, the words printed in bold block letters.
YOU LIKE FINDING BODIES, DON’T YOU, DEVLIN?
Chapter 43
Driven by a powerful sense of urgency, Sebastian searched the silent, ancient farmhouse looking for Sybil Thatcher.
Kicking open the doors to the old pantry and buttery, he found the first room completely empty and the second nearly so, with only a washstand and a bare wardrobe. The old servants’ quarters above were likewise empty. And so, pistol in hand, he expanded his search to the ramshackle
farm buildings.
Going first to the cart shed, he threw open the wide double doors and found himself staring at an antiquated carriage. Once it had been a grand affair, the town coach of some eighteenth-century nobleman or prosperous merchant, with a carved garland of gilded acanthus leaves running along the top like a crown and seats of elegant cream leather. Now the leather was stained and cracked, the paint of the body dull and worn, the gilt tarnished. And yet, he noticed, the braces and limbers were relatively new, as were the wheels and undergear. The carriage had not simply been moldering here for decades; someone was taking good care of it.
He looked over at the pair of curious bay carriage horses hanging their heads over their stall doors to watch him. “If only you two could talk.”
They nickered at him softly. Then his gaze fell on the rough market cart that stood nearby, its bed filled with straw, and for a long moment Sebastian could only stare at it, a chill running down his spine.
He swallowed and turned away.
He searched the haystacks and Les Jenkins’s crude quarters over the stables. Then he moved on to the ruined buildings surrounding the quadrangle. He’d thought he might at least find some indication that Sybil had once been here, or perhaps something to tell them more about the mysterious Richard Herbert. But in the end he had to admit defeat.
Whoever had killed Les Jenkins had made certain of that.
• • •
On his way back to Brook Street, Sebastian stopped by Sir Henry Lovejoy’s house in Russell Square. He told the nightcapped, blinking magistrate what he’d found and arranged to meet Lovejoy and his constables out at the farmstead first thing in the morning. Then he went home and tried to grab a few hours’ sleep.
He was not successful.
He was standing with one hand braced against the bedroom mantel and his gaze on the glowing coals on the hearth when Hero came to touch his shoulder. “You need to rest,” she said.
He shook his head. “Every time I close my eyes, I see that room.” He set his jaw. “Death is too good for whoever is doing this.”
“Yes,” she said simply.
He turned his head to look at her. “I’ll never understand how some people can be so full of selfless love and compassion, while others . . . others are the vilest creatures ever to walk the face of the earth.”
“With humanity’s capacity for great good comes the capacity for unfathomable evil.”
“You think that explains it?”
“No,” she admitted.
He turned to take her in his arms and hold her close. “What if I can’t find him? What if I can’t stop him?”
“You’ll find him. That note he left—everything he does—shows him to be both arrogant and contemptuous. Men like that are too confident of their own superiority to be cautious or wary, and that means he’ll make mistakes—he has made them. You’re getting closer.”
“It doesn’t feel that way. I’ve been grasping at associations, suggestions, and shadows. What if everyone I’ve been looking at is wrong?”
“Then discovering that will be progress.” She pressed a kiss to his throat. “You know what would help?”
He shook his head.
“Sleep.”
He threaded his fingers through her hair and smiled as the sweet, clear notes of a lark broke the silence. “It’s already morning.”
• • •
Sunday, 19 September
A cold wind whipped through the hollow, banging the loose tile on the farmstead’s roof and thrashing the limbs of the ancient oaks in the overgrown copse. A light rain had fallen earlier, but now the clouds simply bunched overhead, dark and ominous.
Sebastian stood with Lovejoy on the cracked pavement before the old, half-timbered farmhouse. It was considerably warmer inside the house than out, but neither man was inclined to linger within those horror-drenched walls. Sebastian had searched the house once again in the dreary morning light, as had several of Lovejoy’s constables. But they’d found nothing to tell them the true identity of its tenant or suggest what had happened to Sybil Thatcher.
“The note was addressed to you by name,” said Lovejoy, hunching his shoulders against the wind. “The killer knows you’re after him.”
“I did identify myself to the caretaker.”
“True.”
They watched in silence as two constables labored to maneuver the death house shell with Les Jenkins’s heavy body though the old narrow door and down the overgrown path toward a waiting cart. “Watch it,” said one of the constables as the murdered man’s hand slid off his chest to drag through the mud.
Lovejoy cleared his throat. “I’ll organize some men to begin searching the fields for graves first thing tomorrow morning.”
Sebastian wasn’t happy with the delay. But there were church strictures against conducting such work on Sundays, and Lovejoy would never violate them. And the truth was, another twenty-four hours would make no difference to any forgotten, homeless child already buried here.
He said, “Were you able to learn anything yet about the farm’s tenant?”
“Only that it appears his name is, indeed, Richard Herbert.”
Sebastian turned up the collar of his driving coat. The cold was starting to get to him too. “So who the devil is he?”
Lovejoy eased out a heavy breath. “We’ve no idea. Lord Cobham’s estate agent communicated with Mr. Herbert’s solicitor, while the solicitor claims he never actually met his client.”
“The solicitor must have had an original address for the man.”
“He did. A house in Bethnal Green.”
Sebastian met the dour little magistrate’s gaze. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
Lovejoy nodded grimly. “We haven’t had a chance to check into it more thoroughly, but it seems the house in Bethnal Green was also leased. Richard Herbert was there four years, from 1807 to 1811.”
“In other words, at precisely the time when the street children of Bethnal Green were disappearing.”
Lovejoy shivered again. “I’m afraid so.”
• • •
Leery of what he might find next, Sebastian left Lovejoy at Penniwinch Lane and drove east, to Bethnal Green.
The house once occupied by the mysterious Mr. Richard Herbert was a surprisingly ordinary-looking brick cottage. It stood on the eastern edge of the parish in an area of market gardens and orchards and open fields occupied by a rope walk and a tenting ground. There were no near neighbors, no one to watch and wonder at any odd comings and goings.
No one to hear a terrified youngster’s desperate pleadings and screams.
Built sometime in the last century, the cottage had sashed windows and a front door painted a cheerful red. Yet even with rows of soft blue Michaelmas daisies lining the front walk, there was something vaguely grim and forbidding about the place that Sebastian couldn’t define—and that he fully acknowledged could be nothing more than a product of the horror he’d found in that upstairs chamber in Penniwinch Lane.
“I wish I could help you,” said the plump, flaxen-haired woman who answered Sebastian’s knock. “But I really don’t know anything about the people who used to live here.” She was young, probably no more than twenty-five, with a chubby baby on one hip and a big-eyed, tow-headed toddler clutching her skirts. She said she was originally from Bermondsey; her husband, John, had been supervisor at the tenting ground for eighteen months now.
“You never met Mr. Herbert?”
She shook her head. “No, never. From what we hear, nobody did. And he was gone a good six months before we come.” The baby on her hip began to whimper, and she jiggled him up and down. “If it was up to me, I’d be out this house tomorrow. But my John, he tells me I’m too fanciful, that it’s a nice place and we’re lucky to have it.”
“Is something wrong with it?”
A faint flush touched her cheeks, and her gaze slid awkwardly away from his. “It’s just . . . there’s a reason it sat empty forever before we come. Nobody wanted to live here.”
“Why?”
“They’ll tell you it’s because of the body, but that can’t be true because they didn’t find the body till the house had already been empty for months.”
“Body? What body?”
She jerked her head toward the rear of the house. “The neighbor’s dogs dug it up. In the back garden.”
Sebastian felt a hollowness open up within. “A boy’s body?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no; from what I hear, it was some big, strappin’ fellow. Most folk reckon it was a man by the name of Jim Kimball who used to look after the place most the time. But the body was too far gone to tell for certain.”
“This Kimball was a caretaker? So Mr. Herbert was away often?”
“So they say. Nobody liked this fellow Kimball, so they weren’t sorry to see him go when he disappeared. Can’t say they were sorry to find him dead, neither.”
“Did anyone ever ask Mr. Herbert about it?”
“How could they? He was long gone by then, wasn’t he?” She reached down to ruffle the hair of the little girl at her side. “I can tell you this: I don’t let our Sarah dig none in the back garden. I mean, if somebody buried one body back there, how do we know there ain’t another?”
Sebastian thought the woman was probably wise. But all he said was, “Do the authorities know how the man they found was killed?”
The baby started fussing again, and the woman shifted him to her opposite hip. “Weren’t hard to figure out, I guess. They say the knife was still there, stickin’ out his back.”
“He was buried facedown?” It came out sharper than Sebastian had intended.