by C. S. Harris
Sebastian closed the door behind him. “I’m afraid so.”
“But . . . why?”
“Are you familiar with a man named Sid Cotton?”
McCay looked puzzled. “Cotton? I don’t believe so, no. Why? Who is he?”
“A thief, murderer, and general all-around unpleasant character.”
He gave the chest a final scoot. “Then I’m glad I don’t know him.”
“He knows you.”
“How?”
“Ashworth tried to hire him to kill you. You didn’t know that?”
The furniture maker’s heavily lined face sagged. “You’re not serious?”
“I wish I weren’t.”
“Who told you this?”
“Cotton.”
“Perhaps he made it up.”
“It’s possible. Although that does beg the question: If so, then how did he come to know your name?”
McCay tightened his lips back from his teeth in the manner of a man wrestling with a difficult question. “I don’t know.”
Sebastian watched him carefully. “You do appreciate the implications, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. You take me for a fool?” McCay stood with his hands dangling at his sides as if unsure what to do with them. “You’re suggesting it gave me an additional reason to kill him, aren’t you?”
“If you knew.”
“But I didn’t! How the hell could I?”
“He could have threatened you.”
“Ashworth did threaten me—said he’d make me sorry for ‘bothering’ him. But I thought he meant he’d take legal action against me. I never dreamt he meant he’d have me killed. Who does something like that?”
“A man who has no problem killing his fellow beings. You don’t seem to understand the nature of the man you were dealing with. This is someone who used to abuse and kill street children. For fun.”
McCay stared at him, his eyes flooding with a disbelieving horror. Then his gaze shifted to the window overlooking the street. An instant later, the bell jangled as Julie McCay pushed open the door.
“Papa, you won’t believe what—” She broke off at the sight of Sebastian, the smile sliding off her face. “Why are you here again?”
“Miss McCay,” said Sebastian, bowing politely. The first time Sebastian visited the emporium, Julie McCay’s clothing had barely registered on him. But he paid attention now. Her white muslin gown was fashionably high-waisted but plain, with only a simple piping of green ribbon around the neck and hem. Respectable, but neither high style nor elegant. Not only that, but she was even smaller than he’d remembered—probably less than five feet. The blood-soaked gown retrieved from the Thames could not possibly have been hers.
She slammed the door behind her with a bell-jarring crash. “Why can’t you leave us alone?”
It was McCay himself who answered her. “He says Ashworth tried to hire some fellow to kill me.”
She stared at Sebastian, her face hard and inscrutable. There was a flintiness about her, a determination that arose from a deep and powerful anger that he suspected was not new. “Is that true?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She went to stand beside her father. “So it isn’t enough to ruin us financially? Now you nobs must take to murdering us as well?”
“Not all of us; just Ashworth.”
“You think you’re so different from him? You come here and treat us like dirt, secure in the knowledge that we can’t even resist, let alone fight back. You lot can do anything you want to us, and we can do nothing to you. Nothing.”
“Julie,” warned her father softly.
She ignored him. “It won’t always be like this, you know,” she told Sebastian, her head held high. “Someday it will be different. Someday you and your kind will pay.”
“The way they did across the Channel?” Sebastian said softly. “Be careful what you wish for. Revolutions are easy to start but impossible to control.”
“She didn’t say nothing about no revolution,” said McCay, his face gray with concern.
“No, she didn’t,” agreed Sebastian. He turned toward the door, then paused to look back. “I’m not your enemy, you know. Not if you’re innocent.”
Lawrence McCay stared back at him. His face looked tired and clouded with the wary fear of those who know—who have always known—that power rests with others and that everything they hold dear can be taken from them at any moment by a grinding system they are helpless to resist. “And who’ll decide if I’m innocent? Many a man judged innocent by God has breathed his last at the end of a rope outside the Old Bailey.”
It was an assertion no one familiar with the British legal system could honestly deny. Sebastian didn’t even try.
* * *
“Surely if she knew her father was guilty of murder,” said Hero later as she and Sebastian took Simon for a stroll along the gravel paths of Grosvenor Square, “she wouldn’t have been so brazen as to basically tell you she’d like to see your head on a pike?”
This was a private, gated garden maintained by the occupants of the houses that surrounded it, its once-formal eighteenth-century geometric plantings having given way some years ago to naturalistic clumps of saplings and flowering shrubs. Their walk was extraordinarily slow since their pace was set by Simon, who not only had short legs but also felt compelled to stop and inspect every interesting rock, flower, and random bug that caught his attention.
“It does seem counterintuitive,” Sebastian admitted.
“If she weren’t so short, I might suspect her of killing Ashworth herself.”
“We don’t know that the clothes pulled from the Thames had anything to do with Ashworth’s murder,” Sebastian reminded her.
“So maybe she did do it. And then she—or her father—killed Digby, after which the father stripped him and dragged him into an alley to hide the body.”
“It’s possible.” Sebastian watched Simon hunker down to stare in wonder at a small green lizard. “Leaving aside Digby’s strange death for a moment, I think there are probably three possibilities for what happened to Ashworth that night.”
She looked over at him. “Three?”
He nodded. “The most obvious is that Ashworth passed out drunk, and the woman he was ‘entertaining’ that night killed him—either in a panic because he frightened her or in revenge for his humiliating her. Although it’s also possible she’s as twisted as he was and did it for kicks. Or she could have drugged him and plotted the whole thing ahead of time in revenge for something he’d done in the past.”
“That’s four possibilities.”
He huffed a soft laugh. “That was only the various permutations of the first possibility.” He sobered quickly. “And although it grieves me to say it, I think we still need to include Stephanie in there. The second scenario involves someone with a grudge—say, McCay or Cotton, or maybe even Steph again—who managed to slip into the house while Ashworth was busy ‘entertaining’ his female guest and killed him.”
“If that’s true, then what happened to the woman Ashworth was ‘entertaining’?”
“Presumably she ran screaming into the night while the killer was busy hacking Ashworth’s chest to a bloody pulp.”
“After grabbing all of her clothes? That shows enormous presence of mind.”
“Perhaps she hadn’t taken them all off yet. And she did leave one stocking.”
“What’s the third possibility?”
“That something more complicated and devious was going on. Something I can’t even envision yet, but which would also explain what happened to Digby.”
They’d reached the grassy platform at the center of the garden and drew up as Simon gazed openmouthed at the towering, gilded equestrian stature of George I in Roman dress before him. “Have you considered that Ashworth might have been e
ntertaining two women?” said Hero.
“No, that hadn’t occurred to me. And it should have. Knowing what we know about Ashworth, it could be two women in any combination. Two highborn ladies; a lady and a prostitute; two prostitutes, or even a lady and a shopkeeper’s assistant.”
“Or a shopkeeper’s daughter.”
Sebastian met her troubled gaze. “Or daughter.”
* * *
“There you are, my lord,” said Morey when they returned to Brook Street. “Calhoun is looking for you. He’s found that bit of muslin you were interested in.”
“Ah, good,” said Sebastian as Hero carried Simon up the stairs.
“Not exactly, my lord. He says the woman is dead.”
Chapter 27
The dead woman’s name was Sissy Jordan, and she’d kept a room in a cheap lodging house just off the Haymarket.
A broad thoroughfare running from Pall Mall north to Piccadilly, the Haymarket was a lively area crowded with coaching inns, taverns, coffeehouses, hotels, supper houses, and shops of every description. Thanks to the presence of the King’s Theatre, it was also home to a shifting population of opera dancers, Italian singers, and so many prostitutes that “Haymarket ware” had become a synonym for practitioners of the occupation.
“How did you find her so quickly?” Sebastian asked his valet as they climbed the musty, battered staircase to the third floor of a ramshackle building that had been erected atop an old tennis court dating from the days of Charles II.
“My mother is acquainted with her roommate.”
“I take it she’s in the same business as Sissy?”
“Not ‘she.’ He. Giovanni Perosi. He used to be an opera singer until someone ruined his vocal cords by garroting him with a strap.”
“So they were lovers?” Many prostitutes kept lovers or even husbands and practiced their trade on the side.
“No. Just friends,” said Calhoun as they reached the dark, narrow corridor of the third floor.
At his knock, the nearest door opened with a jerk to reveal a tall, extraordinarily thin man with unusually long limbs and the smooth, unbearded face of a boy. He looked to be perhaps thirty or thirty-five, with dark hair and big brown eyes and the strangely ethereal, almost angelic beauty of a musico, also sometimes known as an evirato or castrato. Emasculated as boys before their voices changed, the castrati never went through puberty, thus retaining forever a boy’s vocal range while joining it to the lung power and breath capacity of a man.
“I look out the window and see you come in the building,” said the castrato in a whispery, ruined voice still heavily accented with his native Italian. His gaze darted to the empty, dusty corridor behind them before he opened the door wider. “Come in quickly, before anyone see you. You are certain no one follow you?”
“Who do you think would follow us?” asked Sebastian, squeezing into the garret room.
“The killer.” Perosi closed the door and stood with his back pressed against it, his arms wrapped around his middle as if his stomach were hurting. He wore a respectable pair of breeches and a decent shirt open at the neck. But his face was haggard, his eyes looking bruised from lack of sleep and fear.
“You mean Sissy’s killer?” Sebastian let his gaze rove over the narrow room. Divided down the middle by a ragged curtain, it contained only two low beds, a blackened washstand, and several changes of men’s and women’s clothing hanging from hooks on the wall. A small cracked window overlooked the court below.
“Sì,” whispered Perosi.
“Do you know who he is?”
Perosi licked his lips. “No.”
“Tell his lordship what you do know,” said Calhoun.
The Italian perched on the edge of one of the lumpy straw mattresses and ran a trembling hand through his dark, wavy hair. “I don’t know where to begin.”
“Tell us about Sissy,” said Sebastian. “Was she from London?”
Perosi shook his head. “She come up from Hampshire, two years ago. Her parents, they die. She say she hope to go into service, but she have no references, and her clothes, they ragged, so no one hire her. When I meet her, she keep herself alive the only way she can, by selling herself on the street.”
“How old was she?”
“Then? Thirteen.”
Dear God, thought Sebastian.
“I notice her one rainy night—she curled up in a doorway across the court, trying to stay dry. She remind me so much of my little sister, Caterina, that I can’t leave her there. So I bring her up here. She . . .” His ruined voice cracked, his lower lip trembling, and he squeezed his eyes shut and brought up a fist to tap against his mouth. After a moment, he swallowed and said, “She a child in so many ways. She learn a woman’s lures and the ways of the street, but beneath it all, she still a child—bighearted, loving, funny. I cannot believe she’s dead.”
“When was she killed?”
“Last night.” The Italian drew in a ragged, shaky breath. “She tell me for days that someone follow her. Watch her. I think she being silly, letting what happen to that lord in Mayfair get to her. But it’s him, yes? Whoever kill that lord come after her too. And he get her.”
“What did she tell you about last Thursday night?”
The Italian hunched over, his hands thrust together between his knees, his entire body now rocking back and forth.
Sebastian’s gaze met Calhoun’s over the ruined singer’s head. “You’ll be safer once his lordship knows what you know,” Calhoun said gently. “Do you understand that?”
Perosi nodded.
Sebastian said, “Did Ashworth come here, to the Haymarket, to hire her that night?”
“No. The valet, Digby. He hire her.”
“You know Digby?”
“Everyone around here know Digby. Sometimes Ashworth, he come to pick out his own women. But usually he send Digby. He know what his master like.”
“The young and pretty ones,” said Sebastian. “The younger the better.”
Perosi nodded again, his features strained. “I know other girls who go with Ashworth or Digby, before. I warn Sissy she no want to have anything to do with him. But she too excited to pay attention to Giovanni. All she think about is riding in a carriage and seeing the inside of a lord’s house.” He swallowed. “She no listen.”
“She went there in Ashworth’s own carriage?”
“No. The valet take her in a hackney. She disappointed about that, but the lord’s house was a wonder to her. Digby take her to his lordship in the drawing room.”
“That’s unusual, isn’t it?”
“Not for him. She tell me she nervous, remembering the things I warn her about. But she say I wrong. His lordship kind and charming; give her wine. But then someone knock at the front door below.”
“Who was it?”
“She not know. The valet, he come to the drawing room and whisper something in his lordship’s ear.”
“Could she hear what he said?”
“No. She tell me, whatever it is, Ashworth is annoyed. He tell her to sit and wait for him—and not steal anything while he gone. But then Digby come back, give her a guinea, and tell her to go away—that her services aren’t needed anymore.”
“She left?”
“Yes. She happy to get the money without having to work for it. She come home laughing about it, thinking it’s all a lark. For hours, she talk of nothing but his lordship’s marble floors and gilt mirrors and grand chandeliers. And then the next morning we hear he found dead in his bed.”
“She didn’t think of going to Bow Street to tell them what she knew?”
Perosi’s eyes widened. “Dio, no. She terrified they think she kill him.”
“When did she notice someone watching her?”
“That day, or maybe the next. I no think she ever see anyone. It’s just a feeling she has.
She so scared.” He bowed his head and laced his fingers behind his neck. “And I laugh at her. God help me.”
Sebastian said, “Where was she killed?”
“They find her body in an alley near here.”
“Stabbed?”
“Yes. In the chest.”
“You saw the body?”
Perosi looked up, showing a ravaged face. “I identify her.”
“Where is she now?”
“They take her to the deadhouse in St. Martin’s.”
“Did Sissy know if it was a man or a woman who came to the door while she was with Ashworth?”
Perosi shook his head. “No. She in a panic the next morning when we find out Ashworth dead. She afraid she be blamed for it, and she afraid the killer come after her, thinking she know who he is. But she know nothing.”
“She knew that someone knocked at the door, that the valet came to tell Ashworth, and he then went downstairs to talk to the new arrival.”
“Yes. But that is nothing.”
“Did she notice a carriage or hackney waiting when she left the house?”
“I no think so. Digby give her money to take a hackney, but she save it and walk home.”
“What time was this?”
“Midnight? Somewhere around there.” He let his head fall back, his eyes wide and hurting, his ruined voice grating. “Dio. I wish I listen to her when she tell me she afraid.”
“You didn’t know this was going to happen,” said Sebastian. “You didn’t know, and you couldn’t have stayed with her every minute of every day even if you did. You tried to stop her from going to Ashworth that night. You can’t blame yourself.”
Yet even as he said it, Sebastian knew it was useless. Giovanni had already picked up his burden of guilt, and he would carry it with him to the grave, if not beyond.
* * *
No one wanted to end up in one of London’s deadhouses.
Typically located in churchyards or attached to workhouses and hospitals, some deadhouses were little more than toolsheds. They were the penultimate destination for the numerous drowned bodies pulled from the river or the unidentified dead picked up from the street. Here too came the paupers from the city’s poorhouses as well as the insane asylums, hospitals, and prisons. Murder and accident victims and suicides were also often brought to deadhouses to await inquests.