by C. S. Harris
“Good morning,” said Sebastian cheerfully, resting his forearms on the tabletop and leaning into them.
The furniture maker froze with his fork raised halfway to his mouth. He’d had his head down, his shoulders hunched, and had obviously been too absorbed in either his meal or his own thoughts to notice Sebastian’s approach. Now he looked up slowly, like a man awakening from a bad dream to an even harsher reality. “What do you want with me?”
Sebastian gave him a hard smile. “The truth would be nice. For a change.”
McCay dropped his fork with a clatter. “What are you accusing me of now?”
“Last Thursday evening at dusk, you were seen lurking in the shadows of Curzon Street. What the bloody hell were you doing there?”
Sebastian thought the furniture maker might try to deny it, but he didn’t. Plopping back against the high, old-fashioned bench, he stared directly into Sebastian’s face, his expression one of a man mesmerized by a looming horror from which he could not look away and from which it was beyond his capacity to escape.
Sebastian said, “You told me you hadn’t seen Ashworth since a day or two before he died. You told me you never left your shop Thursday night. You told me a lie. You were in Curzon Street on Thursday night. You were seen.”
McCay blew out a harsh breath and tapped his linked hands against the tight line of his lips.
“Did you kill him?” Sebastian asked, his voice low.
“No! I swear it.”
“Why the blazes should I believe you?”
McCay leaned forward and shoved away his half-eaten meal. “It wasn’t exactly a lie. I didn’t see Ashworth that night; I didn’t even try.”
“So you—what? Contented yourself with lurking in the shadows and watching the house? Do you realize how bad that looks?”
McCay nodded, his face morose. “I guess that’s why I didn’t tell you about it. I had no real reason for being there—I’d just confronted him and handed him my invoice the day before.”
“Why were you there?”
“To be honest? I don’t really know. It wasn’t even the first time I’d done it. It was like this . . . this compulsion I had, sorta like picking at a scab when you’re a kid. You know what I mean? You know it’s wrong, and it’ll only make everything worse. But you do it anyway.”
“So you’d go there and . . . what?”
“Nothing. I wouldn’t do anything. I’d just stand there and look at his house, thinking about the kind of man he was and about what he’d done to us. Thinking about what kind of society lets a man like him get away with anything he wants. Anything.”
“I guess we know where your daughter gets her revolutionary ideals.”
A new flare of fear leapt in the older man’s eyes. “What you heard my Julie say the other day was just talk. Angry talk. She didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, she did. But never mind that now. How long were you on Curzon Street that evening?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe? Not long.”
“And this was at dusk?”
“Yes. I was home by ten. I swear it.”
“What did you see while you were there watching the house?”
“Nothing. I didn’t see anything.”
“No one came to the house or left?”
McCay frowned as if in thought. “Well, Ashworth’s valet came out. He hailed a hackney and drove off. But that was all.”
“When did he come back?”
“I don’t know. I must’ve been gone by then. I told you I wasn’t there very long.”
Sebastian studied the furniture maker’s tired, care-lined face. The man might be telling the truth; but he could also be lying—and for more than one reason. If McCay had seen Digby come back with Sissy Jordan and then had hung around after that, he might well have seen the arrival of Ashworth’s killer.
“There’s something you’re still not telling me,” said Sebastian.
McCay stared beyond him into space, his eyes purposely vacant even as the pulse at the side of his neck throbbed with the intensity of his stress. But it remained impossible to discern what the true source of his anxiety was.
* * *
Sebastian was paying off his hackney back at Brook Street when a magnificent barouche with a crest emblazoned on the panel swept around the corner from Bond Street and drew up behind him.
“Dear Amanda,” he said, walking up to his sister’s carriage as her footman leapt to open her door and put down the steps. “What a pleasant surprise.”
She threw a scornful glance after the departing hackney. “God save us. As if it isn’t bad enough that you amuse yourself by behaving like some grubby little Bow Street Runner. Must you also take to showing yourself around London in a common hackney?”
“Fortunately, I’m not Beau Brummell, so I have no reputation for fashionable fastidiousness to maintain. And as it happens, my tiger is . . . busy.”
She gave him her hand and condescended to allow him to help her alight. “Surely you employ a proper groom? You can’t mean to suggest you are reduced to nothing but that scruffy little pickpocket.”
“Ex-pickpocket. And he isn’t terribly ‘little’ anymore, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Do you seriously imagine I concern myself with your servants?” She swept ahead of him up the front steps and into the house as Morey opened the door with a bow.
He followed her into the library. “Well, you do seem to concern yourself with my mode of transportation.”
She drew up halfway across the room as Mr. Darcy, who’d been curled up on one of the armchairs by the fire, arched his back and hissed. “You still have that nasty cat, I see.”
“We do. But then, he’s only nasty to you.” He gestured toward the chairs by the bow window overlooking the street. “Perhaps you’d prefer to take a seat over here. May I offer you tea? Or would you prefer a glass of Madeira?”
“No, thank you. I don’t intend to be here long.”
“Not to be rude, but why are you here, Amanda?”
She stiffened. “Everyone is still talking about this Ashworth business, and it’s becoming obvious that your investigation is much to blame. You need to either hurry up and catch his killer, or simply drop the matter and let people forget about it.”
“You think they would?”
“In time, yes. They can’t keep speculating endlessly. Without new fodder for their conjectures, they’ll soon move on to other scandals.”
“So what are they conjecturing?”
Amanda stood very still, her head held high, her nostrils flaring.
He said, “It might help if you told me, Amanda.”
“Someone has started . . . whispers.”
“About Stephanie?”
“Obviously.”
“What about her?”
“There’s a ridiculous rumor linking her with some common, lowborn builder.”
“You mean Russell Firth? I suppose he is lowborn, but he’s not exactly ‘common.’ He’s brilliant at what he does, and he’s extraordinarily successful. I suspect his name and his work will be remembered long after we are both forgotten.”
“He’s Welsh. His grandfather was a bricklayer.”
“Was he? Then that makes his ascent all the more admirable.”
“Good God. You sound like a republican.”
“Thank you.” He walked over to reach down and scratch Mr. Darcy behind the ears. The cat glared up at him, as if holding Sebastian responsible for their unwanted guest. “So, what else are people saying? Surely they aren’t limiting their speculations to Stephanie?”
Amanda waved one exquisitely gloved hand through the air in a dismissive gesture. “Just the usual silly nonsense. Last night at Lady Farnham’s card party, Emma Townsend was trying to make herself sound important with some tale about
a quarrel she overheard at the Pulteney between Ashworth and one of those Russian women.”
“Princess Ivanna Gagarin?”
He said it so sharply that she looked at him in surprise. “I’ve no idea. Why?”
“When did this happen?”
“The quarrel? Supposedly the day he was killed. Or at least that’s the story Emma was telling. But then, she does like to give herself airs and is always trying to make herself seem far more interesting than she is. I wouldn’t put much stock in it if I were you.”
“What made Lady Townsend think they were quarreling? Did she hear what they were saying?”
“I doubt it. Otherwise she would have added that to the tale, surely. She claims she saw Ashworth grab the Russian woman’s arm before she pulled away from him.” Amanda pressed her lips together in tight disapproval. “Please don’t tell me you’re planning to drag the Grand Duchess and her ladies into this investigation of yours. People will never stop talking about it, then.”
“And that’s the most important thing, is it?”
She readjusted the wispy shawl she wore artistically draped around her shoulders and tightened her grip on her reticule and fan. “I should have known better than to come here and try to talk sense into you.”
“Yes, you really should have.”
For one intense moment, her gaze met his, and he saw in those familiar blue eyes a lifetime of resentment and hate so fierce it still had the power to stun him, even after all these years.
Then she sailed regally from the room.
“What was that about?” asked Hero, coming down the stairs just as Morey was closing the door behind the Dowager Baroness.
Sebastian listened to her receding footsteps and sharp command to her coachman. “Amanda wants me to either find Ashworth’s killer immediately or stop trying.”
“Oh? Somehow I doubt her impatience is devoid of self-interest.”
“It’s not. Someone is spreading whispers about Stephanie and Firth.”
“That is worrisome.”
“It is. And while it might be a coincidence, it could also be an attempt to distract from a competing tale about Ashworth and Princess Ivanna Gagarin.”
“You think Ivanna is behind the rumors?”
“Given what she said to me at Countess Lieven’s ball, I’d say it’s more than likely.”
“That bloodstained gown pulled from the Thames would have fit her.”
“It would, wouldn’t it?”
Chapter 30
That afternoon, Sebastian drove through dreary, wind-scoured streets to Clerkenwell. This was an ancient section of London lying just to the north of the old city walls. In medieval times, it had been home to three wealthy monasteries: the nunnery of St. Mary’s, the London Charterhouse, and the English headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem. After the Dissolution, the nobility turned it into an area of fine town houses, fashionable spas, and bowling greens. But the wealthy and their pleasure haunts were long gone. These days Clerkenwell was a crumbling warren of decrepit houses, straggling tradesmen and artisans, radicals, and prisons.
Sebastian left his groom, Giles, watering the horses at the old stone trough on Clerkenwell Green and walked up the Close to the church of St. James. Skirting the redbrick building that had replaced the ancient chapel of the long-vanished nuns, he cut across a churchyard crowded with lichen-covered tombstones. There near the far corner lay two graves so new that their mounds of earth had not yet sunk beneath the weight of time. One belonged to a murdered street child named Benji Thatcher; the other was the communal grave of his friend Toby Dancing and the bones of more than a dozen other youngsters, most of them never positively identified. The names of the known missing still haunted Sebastian’s dreams, and he’d had them engraved along with Toby’s on a simple tombstone. IN MEMORY OF BRIDGET LEARY, JACK LAWSON, MARY CARTWRIGHT, EMMA SMITH, JENNY HOPKINS, BRADY BARKER, MICK SWALLOW, PADDY GANTRY . . .
He stood beside the two graves for a long time, his hat in his hands, the wind ruffling his hair and thrashing the limbs of a nearby row of maples and horse chestnuts heavy with the fresh green growth of spring. When he’d watched the children laid to rest last September, the trees’ wet, dying leaves had painted the churchyard with yellow and scarlet. For seven months, he had sought to bring their second murderer to justice. But in the end, someone else had done it for him.
“Ashworth is dead,” he told the children. He said it aloud, the wind snatching his words and blowing them away into infinity. “If there were any justice in this world, he would have paid for what he did with everlasting infamy. And even that would never have been enough.”
Because there is no justice in this world. The response echoed through him as surely as if someone whispered it from beyond the grave.
No, he thought. There is no justice. If there were, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be alive and feeling the wind against your faces. You’d grow up to discover love and have children of your own the way you were meant to, rather than lying here forever beneath the cold, dark earth.
He could not have explained why he’d felt the need to come here. He had no illusions; he knew the children couldn’t hear him, knew they had moved beyond hearing long ago. And yet somehow he felt he owed them this.
His society had failed these children both in life and in death. Did they rest easy now? he wondered. Did something of them linger somewhere still? Something beyond the bones swallowed by the earth? He wished he could believe it did. He wanted to believe.
But that comfort, like so much else, remained elusive.
* * *
South of Clerkenwell Green, in the ancient lane that once led to the priory of St. John, stood the worn, two-story sandstone house of secondhand dealer Icarus Cantrell. Built hard up against the crumbling old monastic gateway, the Professor’s Attic sold everything from fine bejeweled snuffboxes and silk handkerchiefs to rusty old fire irons. Some were doubtless legally sourced. Most were not.
People called Cantrell “the Professor,” both because of his establishment’s name and because he’d once attended Cambridge. The road from gentleman’s son to dolly-shop dealer involved murder and transportation and seven years’ penal servitude under the lash on a Georgia plantation. He was an old man now, somewhere between fifty-five and seventy-five. Those cruel years under a hot colonial sun had left his face a burned brown, and he had a thin white scar that curled like a lash around his neck to his cheek and hinted at other scars hidden beneath the old-fashioned velvet coats, lace falls, and powdered wigs he wore.
“Thought I might be seeing you,” said the Professor when Sebastian walked down the lane to the crumbling old gate and pushed open his shop door.
“Saw the newspapers, did you?” said Sebastian.
The old man came from behind the counter to lock the door against the wind and put up a Closed sign. “Did you kill him?”
“No. Did you?”
The old man laughed and turned to lead the way into the narrow kitchen that stretched across the back of the shop. There they sat facing each other across a scrubbed table, two pewter tankards of cider on the worn boards between them. They spoke for a time of the hardships of the previous winter and the coming end of the long French war, and of Sybil Thatcher, the younger sister of one of Ashworth’s victims whom the Professor was now sending to school.
“I thought you were going to train her to be a pickpocket,” said Sebastian.
The Professor’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “I might still.”
“Gammon.” Sebastian took a deep drink of his cider. “Think it’s possible a family member of one of Ashworth’s victims could have killed him?”
The old man sucked thoughtfully on his lower lip. “Most of those children were orphans. I haven’t heard of anyone coming around looking for any of them. Apart from which, how would they know he was one of the kil
lers?”
“You haven’t voiced your suspicions to anyone?”
“Me? No. Next you’ll be saying you’ve got me on your suspects list.”
“I’ll admit the thought crossed my mind. But Ashworth isn’t the only one who has died. And I can’t see you stabbing a fifteen-year-old child.”
“Dear Lord.” The old man stared out the window at the heavy gray clouds tossed about by the wind. “He was an evil man, that one. The world is better off without him. But not at the cost of another innocent’s life. Too many have died already.”
They sat for a time in companionable silence, listening to the bluster of the wind and the soft crackle of the fire on the kitchen hearth. Sebastian said, “Does Sybil know about Benji?”
“She knows where he is. Every week we walk up to the churchyard and put flowers on his grave. But she doesn’t know exactly how he died. To be honest, I’m not sure I’ll ever tell her. What would be the point in forcing her to live with the knowledge of the horrors that were done to him?”
“I can’t think of any. Secrets that shield the wicked should be exposed. But why not hide an ugly truth that would only harm an innocent?”
The Professor nodded. “How is your niece? She did marry him, I take it?”
“She did. He made her life miserable, and now she is free of him.”
“She’s lucky. Does she realize that?”
Sebastian met the old man’s gaze. “Yes.”
“And you’ve no idea at all who killed the bastard?”
“Not really. But whoever did this also killed Ashworth’s valet as well as the young girl from the Haymarket. And there’s a missing crossing sweep and a parlor maid who could be additional victims.”
“Doesn’t sound to me like a dead street child’s grieving parent out for revenge,” said the Professor. “Sounds like someone nearly as sick and twisted as Ashworth himself.”
Sebastian drained his tankard and set it aside. “I’m afraid you might be right.”