by C. S. Harris
“There’s a blackguard called Sid Cotton who has a reputation as a thief, but word is he’s willing to hire himself out for other purposes.”
Sebastian looked up from washing his face. “Murder being one of those ‘other purposes’?”
Calhoun handed him a towel. “They say if the offer is good enough, he doesn’t turn down anything.”
Sebastian dried his face. “Where would I find him?”
“He generally frequents at a tavern called the Black Rose, in Seven Dials. Keeps a room there.”
“Seven Dials? How the blazes did Ashworth ever get mixed up with such a fellow?”
“I’m told Ashworth used his talents more than once.”
Sebastian glanced over at the fine linen shirt, doeskin breeches, and exquisitely tailored coat he’d been about to put on. “I think perhaps I need something less . . . conspicuous.”
* * *
By the time Sebastian reached Seven Dials, the day had turned gray and wet, with rain that dripped from the eaves and collected in malodorous puddles in clogged gutters.
Dressed now in greasy leather breeches and an old coat, with a black kerchief at his neck, he had his hackney driver drop him at the end of Long Acre. Then, with one hand resting on the small, double-barreled pistol in his pocket, he plunged into the area known as Seven Dials. Sandwiched between Long Acre and Broad Street, this was considered one of the most wretched, dangerous neighborhoods in London. It had been laid out like a starburst late in the seventeenth century by a speculator, its name derived from the multifaced sundial column that had once stood at the juncture of the seven converging streets. But the streets had been made too narrow, so that the area rapidly deteriorated. The column was long gone, and the dark lanes were now crowded with gin shops, bawdy houses, secondhand dealers, and a colony of astrologers who found the streets’ layout symbolic. Filthy, ragged children swarmed everywhere he looked; tattered washing flapped from upper windows of low lodging houses so crowded that people lived eight to ten to a room. The entire area reeked of overflowing bog houses, rot, disease, and despair.
The Black Rose was a miserable brick hovel just two stories tall plus a garret. It stood at the apex of two of the converging streets, and even at this hour of the day was crowded with ragged, unshaven men with bloodshot eyes and gnarled hands that shook as they raised tankards to cracked lips.
A dozen pairs of eyes watched Sebastian cross the foul-smelling, low-ceilinged, smoke-blackened room. His was a strange face in a neighborhood wary of strangers. His clothes might have come from a secondhand stall, and he’d rubbed grease and ashes into his hair to obscure its stylish cut. But he could do little to hide his cleanly shaven face or the tall, leanly muscled build that gave silent witness to a lifetime of good, nourishing food.
He ordered a tankard of ale from the slatternly matron behind the battered old bar and turned to survey the pub’s patrons. No one was looking at him anymore—at least not directly. Calhoun had been able to give Sebastian only a general description of Sid Cotton: late thirties or early forties, dark hair beginning to show signs of gray, and a head like a fish.
“What do you mean, a head like a fish?” Sebastian had asked.
“I don’t know. That’s all she said: ‘A head like a fish.’”
Setting aside the fish-head part, Sebastian could see several men in the Black Rose who fit that description. Two were engaged in an earnest conversation at a table near the base of a steep set of stairs and seemed convincingly oblivious to Sebastian’s continued presence. The third man was by himself, nearer the door. He wore a battered brown corduroy jacket and sat in a way that hunched his shoulders and threw his face into shadow. But there was something about the slant of those shoulders, something about the shape of the man’s narrow head, that stirred within Sebastian a memory of snowy streets and stealthy footsteps and the deadly rush of an assassin closing in fast.
As if aware of Sebastian’s focus upon him, the man looked up. For one intense moment, his eyes met Sebastian’s—oddly uneven gray eyes Sebastian had seen before.
Then the man pushed up from his chair fast enough to send it crashing over and bolted for the door.
Chapter 21
Sebastian tore after him, slamming into a blue-smocked chairman who was just coming in the door and tripping over a roasted-potato seller’s barrow on the narrow flagway.
It was raining harder now, a cold patter that splashed in the dirty puddles of the gutters and stung Sebastian’s cheeks as he chased Cotton down one of Seven Dials’ grimy narrow spokes. The miserable weather was thinning the rookery’s usual crowds, but not by much. Sebastian was able to follow the fleeing man by the wave of angry hisses and shouts that rose up as Cotton trod on an upended umbrella filled with knitted nightcaps for sale, clattered into a stall selling patched tin saucepans, then smacked into an old man hawking rat poison from a rusty tray slung from a strap around his neck.
With a panicked glance thrown over one shoulder, Cotton darted across the lane, cutting between a cart and a brewer’s dray. Sebastian swerved after him and lost his hat to the drayman’s whip.
“Bloody hell,” he swore, the rain running down the back of his neck as he veered under a broken gutter to avoid a man mending cracked china and dodged a woman crouched against a wall with a basket of dried herrings.
The two men ran on, feet sliding on the wet, muck-smeared paving stones as they pelted past a stinking soap boiler’s shop, a ballad printer’s, a line of stalls selling penny-pies and peas soup and sheep’s trotters. As they rounded the nearest corner, Cotton grabbed a ladder from a passing workman and turned to swing it at Sebastian’s head. He swerved, and the ladder hit the shoulder of a large woman sitting behind a pickled-egg stall. With an angry bellow, she rose up and threw her stool at Sebastian. He tried to duck, but his foot landed in a fresh pile of manure, and he went down on one knee, barely catching himself on outflung hands.
“Ho!” shouted Cotton, laughing, his face wet with rain as he took off again.
Sebastian pushed up and raced after him.
The man was surprisingly quick and agile, but Sebastian was gaining on him. Breathing heavily now, Cotton ducked into the yawning mouth of an alley and snatched up first a broken crate, then a worn-out broom handle to throw back at Sebastian on the fly.
Leaping the back of a foraging half-grown pig that Cotton tripped over, Sebastian drew close enough to slam the man in the small of the back and send him careening into a tower of barrels that shuddered and collapsed around them with a rolling clatter. As Cotton flung up his arms to protect his head, Sebastian grabbed the man by his ragged coat and spun him around to slam him up against the soot-stained wall of the brewery that ran alongside the alley.
“Why the ’ell ye chasing me?” demanded Cotton, bucking against him.
“You know why.” Sebastian yanked the pistol from his pocket, pressed the twin muzzle against the side of the man’s head, and calmly pulled back the first hammer.
Cotton froze.
“Good idea,” said Sebastian, breathing heavily. The rain poured around them.
Cotton’s breath was coming hard enough to make his chest shudder. He was a strange-looking man, his unshaven cheeks sunken, his head unnaturally long and narrow, his lips full. His eyes were oddly mismatched, one larger than the other and not quite even with its partner. He licked his protuberant lips, his eyes rolling sideways as he tried to get a better look at the pistol digging into the flesh just above his ear. “Wot ye want from me?”
“I hear you were angry with Lord Ashcroft about something—angry enough to want to kill him. Why was that? I wonder.”
Cotton gave a weak excuse for a laugh that was almost lost in the pounding of the rain. “Wot would a cove like me have to do with some bloody Marquis’s son?”
“A great deal, from what I’m hearing. Why did you want to kill him?”
“I ain’t the one who done for him! I swear to ye.”
“Why the blazes should I believe you?”
“Because it’s batty, thinkin’ I coulda done it. Why, the way I hear it, his lordship was found tied to his own bed. How you reckon I got in there to do that?”
“You’d have me believe you don’t number housebreaking amongst your many talents?”
“We-ell . . .”
“Stubble it.” Sebastian tried to blink the rain out of his eyes. “You’re a talented man by all reports. You could have done it.”
Cotton looked faintly aggrieved. “Ain’t my style. Now, if’n you’d found the bastard in some back alley with a knife between his shoulder blades, ye could by rights be thinkin’ maybe it was me. But I hear it didn’t happen that way.”
“An interesting observation, given that his valet was found stabbed in the back in a nearby alley.”
Cotton’s eyes widened. “That weren’t me. I don’t know nothin’ ’bout that.”
“Why did you want to kill Ashworth?”
Cotton licked his lips again, then pressed them tightly together. The rain ran down his unshaven face in irregular rivulets.
“Come on,” said Sebastian. “Out with it.”
Cotton swallowed hard, his labored breathing beginning to ease. “His lordship, he hired us to do a job fer him—me and my mate, Joey. Only, then he refused to pay up.”
“What did he hire you to do?”
A sly grin slid across the man’s face, revealing a mouthful of brown and broken teeth. “Kill somebody.”
“You mean me?”
Cotton laughed out loud. “Think I’d tell ye if’n it was?”
“You don’t need to tell me. I couldn’t see most of your face last January in Fleet Street because of the scarf. But I remember your eyes.”
Cotton’s grin slid away.
Sebastian said, “Given that I’m still alive, you didn’t actually do the job Ashworth hired you for. So I’m not surprised he refused to pay you.”
“I keep tellin’ ye, it didn’t have nothin’ t’ do wit ye. He cheated us over somethin’ else.”
“You don’t strike me as the sort of man to take being cheated.”
“Nobody cheats me and gets away wit it,” Cotton said with some pride. “I won’t deny I was plannin’ on killin’ the bugger. But somebody beat me to it.”
“Perhaps it was your mate, Joey.”
Cotton shook his head. “Joey is dead.”
“I thought your dead mate was named Jack.”
“That was me other mate. Got lots of mates, I do.”
“So how did Joey die?”
Cotton peered at him through his thatch of matted, graying brown hair. “Wot’s that matter t’ you?”
Sebastian said, “It’s been two months since Ashworth hired you to kill me—”
“I never said he did. If’n somebody tried to kill ye, it weren’t me.”
“Two months,” said Sebastian again. “Seems to me that’s plenty of time for you to have killed him, if you were so inclined and if—”
“See! I keep tellin’ ye it weren’t me.”
“—if you were planning to simply stick a knife in his back on a dark night. But if you were planning something considerably more elaborate, that might take time.”
“I don’t believe in complicated or fancy. Fancy gets ye killed. Stick a knife in their backs when they ain’t lookin’ and run. That’s me motto.”
Sebastian wasn’t inclined to believe much of what the man had told him. But that had a ring of truth to it.
“Who told ye about me, anyway?” Cotton demanded, his eyes narrowing with vengeful purposefulness.
“The moon and the stars and a hanged man,” said Sebastian, stepping back and letting him go.
“Wot?” Cotton sagged against the wall, one hand coming up to cup his ear. “Wot’s that mean?”
But Sebastian simply backed away, the pistol in his hand, every sense alert to the dangers of the deadly neighborhood around him.
Chapter 22
This time, the door to Madame Blanchette’s strange rooms on Golden Square was opened by a thin servant girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen. She was a fey thing, with hair so fair it was nearly white, a pale face, and wide, childlike eyes that nevertheless seemed to possess an aura of age-old wisdom that Sebastian found disconcerting.
She said, “Madame is waiting for you in her cabinet d’études.”
“Of course.”
He followed her to the small room he’d once assumed was a bedchamber but now realized was devoted to something far different. Yards and yards of deep red cloth draped the walls, giving it a tentlike effect. There was no window, only another door that must open back onto the corridor, presumably to allow those having their fortunes read to leave unseen by anyone who might be waiting their turn in the parlor. The only illumination came from a pierced brass Moroccan lantern that hung above an inlaid table that was a larger version of the one he’d noticed in the parlor. Madame Blanchette occupied one of the two stools flanking it; the other stood empty, waiting. The air was dense with exotic scents: frankincense and myrrh and something else he couldn’t quite identify. An articulated skeleton stood grinning in one corner; stuffed bats hung on thin wires from the ceiling, and an owl sat on its perch. He assumed it was also stuffed until he saw it blink.
“Atmospheric,” he said.
A faint smile touched her lips. “Image and illusion are important in my business.”
“At least you admit that it is a business.”
She gave a Gallic shrug. “We must all live somehow.”
“True.”
She spread her hands in a gesture that took in the opposite stool. “Please. Sit.”
“I’m all wet.”
“So I see. But it was considerate of you to clean the muck and manure of Seven Dials off your boots before coming to visit me. Thank you.”
Sebastian felt a faint prickling at the back of his neck. “I tried.”
“You are angry, I take it?”
He wiped the sleeve of his secondhand coat across his dripping face and sat. “You don’t think I have a right to be?”
“Anger is sometimes useful. But more often it is a handicap.”
“How the bloody hell did you know Ashworth hired Sid Cotton to kill me two months ago?”
“Perhaps I saw it in the cards.”
“No you didn’t. It doesn’t work that way.”
“At least you acknowledge that it does sometimes work.”
He studied her smooth, calm, ageless face. “Why give me his first name but not the last?”
“I did not know it at the time.”
“But now you do?”
“Yes.”
“He says he didn’t kill Ashworth.”
“And you find him an honest and forthright fellow?”
“Sid Cotton is a conscienceless killer. I’ve no doubt he wanted to murder Ashworth. But that doesn’t mean he did.”
“Because you think a knife in the back on a dark night would be more his style?”
Sebastian found his hands clenching against his thighs and forced himself to open and press them flat on the tabletop before him. “Did you see that in your cards too?”
Rather than answer, she reached for the worn tarot deck that lay before him. “You are thirty-one?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Your favorite color?”
“Blue.”
She handed him the cards. “Coupez.”
He hesitated a moment, then cut the deck. She took the first card, laid it faceup to one side, and said, “Encore.”
Again and again he cut the deck, with her drawing the first revealed card, until she had arranged thirty-six cards in four rows of nine each across the tabletop. Sebastian
had seen cartomancers at work before. Their tarot desks were typically printed in black and white on matte cardboard with the crude images then colored in. But these were exquisite individual works of art that reminded him of the strange pictures he’d seen on the walls of her parlor. All were doubtless by the same hand.
“Who did these?” he asked.
“Does it matter?” She studied the selected cards for a time, the patterns of shadow and golden light cast by the pierced lantern overhead lending a mysterious aura to her features. When she spoke, he found her accent more pronounced; at times she slipped completely into French. “You have seen this done before?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know that few cards are either all good or all bad. Their meaning alters depending on how they fall in relation to one another.”
When he remained silent, she tapped the fourth card in the first row, an image of a beautiful young woman standing on a jagged rock above a storm-tossed sea, the wind blowing her glorious long, fair hair. “If you were a woman, this card would represent you. But because you are a man, it represents a woman in your life. She is very strong, and her intentions toward you are only good. But she is . . . conflicted.”
Sebastian’s gaze met hers across the card-covered table. “Given that you know who I am, you obviously must know who she is as well. You don’t need the cards to tell you the source of her . . . conflict.”
The Frenchwoman lowered her gaze to the cards, her expression never changing as she pointed to an image of a knight, his helm held beneath one arm, a magnificent black stallion prancing at his side. “The man is you. You see the card beside it? The scythe? It is a warning that you are in danger. You must take heed and be cautious when you visit unsafe places or associate with dangerous people.”
“You mean places such as Seven Dials and the likes of Sid Cotton?”
Rather than acknowledge his sarcasm, she simply moved on to the image of a coiled snake that lay beside the scythe. “Because the snake can shed its skin, it sometimes represents change and renewal. But here the serpent signifies more danger, except this danger is hidden. Be especially wary of those you think are your friends or whom you assume are well-disposed toward you. They may not be.”