Nelly had found the thing she was looking for: a folded piece of paper. She gave the corpse a smile of satisfaction as she examined it.
‘What’s that?’ Child said.
‘It’s mine. He took it from me. Fuckster wanted anything Lucy had given me. I handed it over to stop him hitting me, but it weren’t what he wanted.’
It was a drawing of a young girl, the paper stained by grease and fingerprints. She looked about thirteen years old, her hair dark and curly, her eyes dark and expressive with long lashes. In the corner was the artist’s signature: Agnetti.
‘Who is she?’ Child’s voice was a dry rasp.
Nelly gave him a look of contempt. ‘You’re looking into Lucy’s murder, and you don’t even know that? Her name is Pamela. Lucy knew her. I never did.’
Child shook his head, bewildered. ‘What does she have to do with Lucy’s murder?’
Nelly gave a soft sigh, pressing a hand to the side of her face. ‘This girl, Pamela, she was the cause of all Lucy’s trouble.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BEFORE HER, CRAVEN House bathed in moonlight. Seventy feet of sandstone frontage on the south side of Grosvenor Square, purchased at auction by Caro’s father, along with furnishings, library and paintings, from the estate of a bankrupt marquis who’d put a duelling pistol in his mouth. It was the house in which she’d been born, her haven from her marriage in the early years. Then Papa had died, and Mordechai and Louisa had moved in. Gradually, Craven House had ceased to be hers.
Even then, she’d still had Ambrose. For a year after Papa’s passing, she’d called often at the bank, or at Ambrose’s rooms in the Adelphi, whenever she’d needed to laugh or cry or be a Craven again. Now there was nowhere left to hide, to forget her marriage for a moment, not even Lord March’s rented set of rooms on Duke Street.
The maids had been polishing, and the house smelled of linseed oil. She braced herself in the hall for the onslaught of children, Mordechai, dog, but only old Kendrick hobbled out to greet her. ‘Mr Mordechai is working late at the bank, Mrs Corsham. And Mrs Craven is taking supper with the Henekers.’
‘And Ambrose?’
Kendrick’s watery grey eyes flicked to one of the footmen. ‘He’s been quiet today, Mrs Corsham. But you’d still be advised to keep a servant close.’
The imperial staircase hall was the heart of Craven House, rising like a tower to a painted dome. Caro followed the footman upstairs, to a door on the second floor, and waited while he unlocked it. Despite his protests, she told him to wait outside.
It had been Ambrose’s bedroom as a boy. They’d had his things brought here from the Adelphi when Mordechai had broken up his household three months earlier. Ambrose was sitting in his favourite porter’s chair, angled away from the door.
Her mouth was dry, a head of teazle in her throat. ‘Ambrose,’ she said, ‘it’s me. Caro.’
He turned at the sound of her voice, and her nails dug into her palms. Ambrose blinked in the lamplight as if it pained him. The doctors said he was nearly blind now. Gaunt, crabbed, his dressing gown hanging off him like a scarecrow, his shrunken yellow hands bandaged, riven with sores. The silver nose he wore shielded her from the worst sight of all: the absence of flesh and blood beneath, eaten away by the unstoppable march of the lesions that covered his body. She found it almost unbearable to look, but he was still her Ambrose, and so she forced herself to come, twice a week, to sit with him, to read to him, looking for any small sign that he still loved her.
The doctors said his mind had been eaten by the syphilis too. Sometimes he suffered delusions and fits of violent rage. He would thrash and groan, until restrained by the footmen. Then he’d weep. She wondered how much of him was still in there, convinced his silence was voluntary – because all the words had become too unbearable to speak. She crouched down by his side, and took his hand.
‘I need to talk to you about Lucy Loveless. You introduced her to me as Lucia. That wasn’t kind, Ambrose – but let’s not dwell on that now. She was one of your women, wasn’t she? I can see how you would have liked her. She’s dead, Ambrose. She was murdered. She died in my arms.’
Caro waited for a reaction, but he only stared. It was a virulent case, the doctors said, the rot spreading fast. A year ago the sores had become too deep to conceal with cosmetics, and he’d confessed his diagnosis to her, his voice rich with false assurance. Soon he’d been forced to withdraw from society altogether, under the pretence that he was abroad, seeking new clients. He’d refused to step down from the bank at first, conducting business from his rooms via trusted clerks – and he still received a few old friends in private. She wondered now if Jonathan Stone had been one of them.
‘Did you meet Lucy at Agnetti’s house? He was painting her for Jonathan Stone. I went to Stone’s house at Muswell Rise. I’m worried he knows about you – about your condition. Were you friends?’
His Agnetti hung over the fire. The Castration of Uranus. Mordechai had thought it in poor taste, painted so soon after Papa had died and Ambrose had taken over at the bank. Caro wondered if that was why Ambrose had commissioned it – to needle Mordechai. But Mordechai had had the last laugh – forcing Ambrose out of the bank, citing his failing wits and some nonsense about unauthorized loans. How could you take that from him too? she’d demanded. Humiliate him before the board like that? How much would it have cost you to wait a little longer? Mordechai had shaken his head, treated her like a child. You haven’t the first idea what you’re talking about.
Ambrose’s grip on her hand tightened, face twitching, as if he was trying to speak. He opened his empty purse of a mouth, his teeth claimed by the mercury cure that hadn’t cured. Only a string of drool came out.
‘Did you ever hear of something called the Priapus Club? Jonathan Stone founded it, together with Lord March and the Dodd-Bellingham brothers. They claim to study classical civilization, but I wonder if there’s more to it than that. The only Greek known to Neddy Dodd-Bellingham is his vintner.’
Ambrose’s days of carousing with men like Stone were long over. He hadn’t been able to walk unaided in many months and, Lord knows, no woman would look at him now. But he might still have heard something about the club – through those old friends he used to receive. Stories of all the things he could no longer do, no longer feel.
‘One of them dropped a ring in the bower where Lucy was murdered. Can you tell me anything that might help me find the man who killed her?’
More twitching. More drool. She should have known this was a hopeless errand. Overwhelmed by weariness, she blinked back tears. Yet somewhere in there was her brother. She searched his ravaged face for a glimpse, needing his counsel now more than ever.
‘I am with child,’ she whispered. ‘It isn’t Harry’s. You once told me, if this ever happened, to hop back into bed with him, but he’s in America and not coming home in time.’
His silence transported her to another day, another conversation about another lover in another lifetime. Ambrose’s rooms in the Adelphi. She’d called and they’d played cards in the thin, grey light of a November afternoon.
‘Are you in love with him?’ Ambrose had asked. ‘Your young architect who looks at you with those calf eyes?’
She’d pretended not to know what he was talking about, until he’d silenced her with a look – brother to sister, their own private language.
‘Sometimes,’ she’d said. ‘In the moment.’
But the moment always passed.
She’d arched an eyebrow. ‘Does anyone ever ask if you are in love with any of your women?’
He’d laughed richly at the suggestion, and she’d laughed too. But as their laughter died, and she studied his florid, amiable face, her smile faded. ‘Sometimes I think we are not capable of it. Love. The Cravens. Even Mordechai seems to feel marriage to be more duty than delight.’
‘You loved him,’ Ambrose said. ‘Harry. You shone like the moon in his orbit, and every gentleman in the room wanted a woman
who would look at him like that. What did he do to you, old girl? To make it all go wrong? Come on, you can tell me.’
But she wouldn’t speak of it, not to anyone – not even to him.
‘Is that why you do it?’ he said, after waiting in vain for a response. ‘Your pretty gentlemen? To get back at Harry?’
‘Perhaps I simply enjoy it. Have you ever considered that?’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt it. You are a Craven, after all. But one truth does not have to negate the other.’
She had simply let the silence draw out between them, studying her cards. Now, crouched by her brother’s side, she gave him an answer: ‘My husband loves somebody else, and always has.’
Saying the words aloud gave them a new potency, a new ability to wound. Broken hearts mend – people often said that. But people told a lot of lies – just like husbands. Now she stood to lose Harry altogether, she felt the pain of those old fractures anew. Foolish woman, she told herself. You’d weep for him?
But weep she did, her brother’s bandaged hand pressed against her face. Ambrose would have gone to bat for her with Harry – and if that hadn’t worked, with Mordechai. How dare a Corsham divorce his sister? Who were the Corshams anyway? Just jumped-up Wiltshire gentry. If necessary, he’d have bought her a new husband. Scandals could be ridden out, if a family stood by its errant member. But now Mordechai held the purse strings – and he’d see only dishonour.
‘I tell you all this so you understand that I have no choice. Lucy gave me a tincture, you see, and I think I have to take it. It is very dangerous and I cannot predict what the outcome will be. So if I don’t come to see you any more, it isn’t because I don’t love you. We’ll be together again very soon, I promise.’
If Ambrose was capable of thought on the matter, he gave no sign of it. Her head sunk into his lap – a living morality play or a Hogarth print against the excesses of London life. By the time her sobs subsided, she felt no closer to finding the courage she sought. Only filled with a terrible aching loneliness.
*
Later, at home, Caro stole up to the nursery to kiss her sleeping son. Downstairs she wrote him a letter: pleas for forgiveness, a mother’s love. She sealed it and wrote his name. Pray God he won’t read it.
A slice of lemon floated in the porcelain bowl of hot water. Caro lifted it out with the aid of a quill knife and laid it on her escritoire next to the little glass bottle. Dipping a finger into the water, judging it to be at drinking temperature, she unstoppered the bottle and added the contents to the bowl. It was almost odourless, a very faint trace of mint. Hard to reconcile with Lucy’s dire warnings.
She thought of Harry and Gabriel, then the child in her belly. Was God watching what she did? Many women lost babies a few weeks along – was it really so wrong to give nature a helping hand? And if she had a duty as a mother, wasn’t it to Gabriel, her living, breathing child? How would he fare, wrested from her? Without a mother’s guiding love? It was unconscionable.
Her skin damp with fear, she murmured a swift prayer. Then she lifted the bowl to her lips and drank it down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHILD DRAGGED THE body outside to the bear pit. Rolling it over the edge, he jumped down after it. The pit was full of leaves and stagnant water. Set into the wall was a rusting gate and Child hauled the body over to it. He opened the gate with a kick, and peered into a long dark tunnel. Nelly had told him it led to a set of disused water stairs on the river. Presumably they used to bring the bears in that way.
He needed both hands to drag the body along, so he was forced to work in the dark. Rats scuttled over his boots, and he kept inhaling cobwebs. After about five minutes of this grim labour, the tunnel grew lighter up ahead. Gradually, the black gave way to the dark blue ink of the river, washed with the reflections of lights on the northern bank. At the tunnel’s mouth, Child paused for breath, one hand on the edge of the brickwork, his throat scratched and raw from the dead man’s garrotte.
A wherry sailed past, the boatman hunched in the prow, and Child drew back into the shadows. Only when the white sail had been consumed by the darkness did he move. Manoeuvring the body to the top of the stairs, he rolled it down them, into the water. They’d weighted the dead man’s pockets with stones, yet he still took an age to sink. Finally, what was left of the man’s face disappeared into the murky depths. Farewell Richmond Baird, agent of the Home Office.
*
‘People will come looking for him,’ Child said, when they were sitting by Nelly’s fire. ‘Is there somewhere you could go? Out of London? For a while, at least?’
His motives were not purely altruistic. He could end up on a hangman’s rope for the part he’d played in Baird’s death. That he’d been acting in self-defence would mean nothing to the Home Office. They’d be out for blood.
Nelly had washed her face, but a couple of nasty cuts kept bleeding and she dabbed at them with a cloth. Her nose was swollen, and Child suspected it was broken. As if Nelly needed more bad luck in her life.
‘Fuckster had ten guineas in his purse,’ she said. ‘I’ve got friends in Shropshire who’ll take me in, if I pay my way.’
‘Go tomorrow at first light.’ Child took a sip of the foul spirit Nelly had served them in tin cups. ‘Baird said nothing more about the thing he was looking for?’
‘Just that he wanted everything Lucy had given me to look after. I gave him the drawing, but he said he wanted the rest. I said there was no rest but he kept hitting me.’
Baird was probably looking for the same papers that Sir Amos Fox’s men had been searching for at Lucy’s rooms – presumably also at the behest of the Home Office. Child wondered if they had any connection to the letter that Mrs Corsham thought she’d seen lying next to the body.
‘Will you tell me about Lucy?’ he asked. ‘Anything that can help me find her killer?’
Nelly sighed. ‘I can still hardly believe she’s dead.’ She worked something in her mouth with her tongue and spat a tooth into the fire. Then she started telling him about the early days, when she’d first met Lucy Loveless living in Whitechapel.
‘It were a real plague-pit rookery. A penny a night, fifteen to a room. Irish, thieves, you know the sort of place. One night there was an argument on the stairs and I came down to see what all the fuss was about. Saw this girl screaming at a man, a baby in her arms. The man was shouting, the baby was crying, people were screaming at them to be quiet. Lucy was barely fourteen, selling her quim, like we all were. Her customer wanted to put the baby out on the stairs while he did his business, and she wouldn’t let him. Eventually, he slapped her in the face, which was when I pulled a knife. Fuckster left, she kept his money, and that was it, friends for life.’ Nelly shrugged. ‘Almost a year anyway, which is next best thing to life down there.
‘Lucy was green as Dutch glass – needed someone to show her the ropes. Didn’t know how to spot the cruel ones, or the ones who’d beat you and take your money. Her biggest problem was her daughter, Olivia. With Lucy’s face, she could be earning a fortune up west. But they won’t take you in a fancy brothel with a baby.’
‘Who was the baby’s father?’ Child asked.
‘Some rich city merchant. Lucy’s mother had brought her to London when she was twelve. She thought she was being apprenticed to a milliner, but the old woman was one of those who trades in virgin goods. Lucy had a brother, see, and her mother wanted him apprenticed as an attorney. She needed money to do it, which was where Lucy came in. This merchant set her up in rooms in St James’s, and it worked all right for a time. Then she got pregnant and he threw her out.
‘There were options, I told her – the Foundling Hospital would take Olivia – but she wouldn’t hear of it. So we muddled along for a few months and wound up playing the Ring Game.’ She grinned, then winced as if it hurt her. ‘Lucy was a bloody natural from the first. We pretended we was three orphan sisters of good family – her, me and the baby. Her stories of our woes had people weeping. We had
a forty-guinea gold ring what I’d napped off a client, and we looked for a certain sort of gentleman: the tricky sort who’d take advantage of a trusting lady. Lucy made out she didn’t know the ring’s true value – offered it for sale at ten guineas. She did all the talking, I made the switch. Gentleman takes his ring home to celebrate his cunning, only to find he’s paid ten guineas for pinchbeck and polish.’ She cackled. ‘Must have sold that ring thirty times.
‘It was a good enough living, until someone peached on us, and we got taken up by Bow Street. I got off lightly, Lucy didn’t – talked back to the Bridewell governors, silly cow. She didn’t want to take Olivia into Bridewell, so I found her a wet-nurse. But the old bitch kept the milk-money, and the baby died.’ Nelly scowled. ‘It weren’t my fault. And it was better for Lucy in the end. That baby was holding her back. Anyone could see it.’
‘Is that the way Lucy saw it?’
Nelly turned, a shadow passing across her face. ‘She was broken, bereft. When she came out of Bridewell, she hired some mountebank parson to say some words in a churchyard. The baby had gone in a pauper’s pit, weeks before. Lucy just stared. No tears, just that look on her face. White as parchment, as if every word was a torture. At the end of it all, I took her off to get her drunk on brandy and all she would say was “I am Lucy.” She meant the world could go fuck his wife, and anyone else, but not her. She’d survive – just as she’d survived all the rest.’ Nelly sniffed. ‘I didn’t see much of her after that. I heard about her though. She was on the stage for a time. Then off to them fancy brothels in St James’s. I got people to read me stories about her in the newspapers. Once I saw her riding past in a carriage, like some duchess, a proper lady. She was doing well. I was happy for her. She deserved it.’
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