CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The mansion gleamed like marble in the moonlight. I kept catching glimpses of it through the elm trees that lined the drive. I knew its name: Fairmount. I had read countless reports in the newspapers about the cost of its construction and the ceilings it had taken a team of Italian masters a year to paint. Built to dominate, rather than inspire, Fairmount’s critics bemoaned the vulgarity of new money. Caro, who came from new money herself, said that by vulgarity they meant power.
We rounded a bend and the house loomed before us. We passed through an ornate set of gates into a gravel forecourt, and liveried footmen descended on us from all sides. They ushered us into a high-domed hall, where Cavill-Lawrence was relieved of his hat and gloves. I’d lost mine back in Bethnal Green and the footmen did a passable job of pretending not to notice my disordered appearance. We were escorted along a colonnade lined with statues of Greek gods into a library painted with classical scenes. The master of the house was waiting there to receive us.
I had seen Napier Smith around Whitehall, though we’d never been introduced. He had inherited his father’s old seat in Parliament, along with a hundred thousand acres of sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Unmistakably tall and thin, tonight he wore a pea-green coat with diamond buttons, and a powdered periwig. Cavill-Lawrence made the introductions and I apologized for my dishevelment. Smith appraised me coolly. ‘I care nothing for that.’
In direct contrast to Cavill-Lawrence’s heavy wearing of his years, Smith’s hairless skin and high-pitched voice made him seem younger even than his tender age of twenty-four. He had a long white face, a largish nose, and a wide, unsmiling mouth. The volume in his hand was Machiavelli’s Il Principe. I wondered if he was really reading it or if it was a prop. Legend had it that old Jasper Smith, the father, had once bankrupted a man because the poor fellow’s racehorse had seen off his own at Ascot. People joked uneasily that the son lacked the old man’s compassion.
Smith gestured us to an arrangement of chairs beneath a large Italian painting. He made no offer of refreshment, though I could have sorely used some wine.
‘I have received a report from Lucius Stokes about your activities in Deptford, Captain Corsham. To say they disturbed me would be an understatement. Yet Mr Cavill-Lawrence has always been a friend to the West India lobby, and he believes that your intent may not have been malign.’ His eyes roamed my face. ‘We shall see.’
It was unbearably hot in that room. A huge fire blazed, though it was not long past midsummer. Amelia’s cold face kept edging into my thoughts. Tad’s ravaged body on Brabazon’s table. Just get through this, I told myself. Say whatever you need to say. Then you can think.
‘I understand you were a friend of the late Mr Thaddeus Archer,’ Smith said. ‘When did you first hear of his murder?’
‘About a week ago,’ I said. ‘Mrs Bradstreet, Archer’s sister, told me he was missing. I discovered he was dead when I went to Deptford the following morning.’
‘How many times did you see Mrs Bradstreet subsequently?’
‘Twice. Once when I returned from Deptford. Then again at Archer’s funeral. Last night would have been the third.’
He questioned me like this for upwards of two hours. I answered him truthfully – I didn’t see that I had very much choice. I told him nearly everything. About The Dark Angel and her crew, about Drake’s attempt on my life, about the things I had found in Tad’s rooms. I left out only my conversations with Cinnamon, Scipio and the Africans at Tad’s funeral. I didn’t want to get anyone else into trouble.
Smith seemed particularly interested in my views on slavery, and I assured him my opinions were perfectly orthodox.
‘You don’t believe in abolition?’
Under the circumstances, I could hardly afford to be equivocal. ‘No, sir.’
‘Lucius Stokes believes you do.’
‘He is wrong, sir.’
‘Did you ever come across any documents relating to the ship?’ Cavill-Lawrence asked. ‘At Archer’s rooms or anywhere else?’
‘Documents, sir?’ My ears pricked up.
‘Legal papers? Contracts? Anything of that sort? We know Archer took possession of them shortly before he died.’
‘Only the pages from the master’s journal I told you about.’ From Cavill-Lawrence’s face I could see this wasn’t what he was after. ‘Perhaps they were stolen by the man who searched Archer’s rooms?’
‘The man you saw at Archer’s rooms was working for me,’ Cavill-Lawrence said. ‘We took Archer’s papers to stop them falling into the wrong hands. Yet certain documents we sought were not among them.’
‘I see.’ What did this mean? I couldn’t think. ‘Archer told his sister he was going to Deptford to collect something important. Perhaps it was these papers?’
Cavill-Lawrence glanced at Smith. ‘Do you think it possible?’
Smith thought for a moment. ‘If they were still in Deptford, then Lucius Stokes would have surely found them. The killer can’t have them, for why else would he have tortured Mrs Bradstreet?’
Cavill-Lawrence closed his eyes. ‘Those papers were precious to Archer. If he’d taken possession of them that last time in Deptford, then why didn’t he simply return to London? Why risk being caught with them? They were stolen property after all. And why wait around to be murdered?’
Smith toyed with a jewelled snuffbox in his hand. ‘Archer might have been talking about anything. My guess is that he received the papers from the thief in London, and then gave them to someone he trusted for safekeeping. We know he had help.’ His cold, blue eyes returned to my face. ‘Did he give them to you?’
‘On my word as a gentleman, I never saw them.’
‘In my experience gentlemen lie just as well as other men.’
‘I’m not lying, sir.’
I was taking a careful mental note of everything they said. What thief? What papers? And what was Cavill-Lawrence’s part in all of this? It felt like more than a simple political favour to the West India lobby.
His gaze wasn’t much warmer than Smith’s, and I realized that he didn’t believe me either. ‘You are a pragmatic man. I cannot see you as a secret radical. Loyalty would more likely be your weakness. Perhaps Archer asked you to look after these papers and a promise was made? Now you feel beholden.’
‘No, sir. That did not happen.’
‘Perhaps you think Archer’s motives were honourable? Nothing could be further from the truth. He was a secretive, dangerous man, obsessed with The Dark Angel. Ultimately she proved his undoing.’
‘I know he felt very strongly about what happened to those slaves.’ I was hoping to draw them out on the subject of the ship. As long as they thought I might have these papers, I could keep them talking.
‘You think this was all about the dead slaves? You couldn’t be more wrong. Archer knew a good opportunity when he spied one. He planned to prosecute those sailors for his own political ends.’
That much I had worked out in the carriage, but one part still eluded me and I gave voice to my objection now. ‘Those slaves were accounted property. They couldn’t be murdered under English law. So how could Archer prosecute the crew?’
Cavill-Lawrence made an ambiguous gesture with his thumbs, and Smith spoke sharply: ‘We are concerned here not with the how, but with the why. Suffice to say that Archer found a way. He was a devious, clever man and he knew a lot of devious, clever lawyer’s tricks.’
I chose not to press the point. Smith was still watching me like a Spanish inquisitor, and I didn’t want to let them see the extent of my interest.
‘We don’t think Archer came across The Dark Angel entirely by chance,’ Cavill-Lawrence said. ‘We think he’d been looking for something like this for a long time. To him, you see, this was so much more than one rogue voyage. So much more than three hundred slaves drowned at sea. The crew were largely irrelevant, a means to an end. For all Archer’s indignation, so were the slaves.’
This pa
rt, at least, I believed I understood. ‘The ship was a symbol. The worst example of the slave trade he could find.’
‘Precisely,’ Smith said. ‘It wasn’t representative at all. Yet when did the facts ever count in the court of public opinion? Put those men on trial, force them to defend themselves, and standing alongside them in the dock you’d have the entire institution of slavery itself.’
Cavill-Lawrence’s signet ring winked in the candlelight. ‘We are a nation of hypocrites,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s the simple truth. People don’t inquire too closely into how their sugar gets into their tea, because they don’t want to know. Put it in a courtroom, put it on the front page of a newspaper, and it’s hard to ignore. Win or lose, you force men to stand up in court, on oath, saying things we’d rather not hear said.’
Again Smith took up the thread: ‘The housewives hold the purse-strings and those sailors dropped children into the sea. It doesn’t take a clever lawyer to work out what comes next. Petitions and pamphlets, people disavowing West Indian sugar. It was a gift to the abolitionists and Archer knew it. Where it would have gone from there, God only knows.’
Tad thought he’d known. He had told Amelia that he believed he could end slavery. Originally, I had believed it another of his exaggerations. It still seemed a leap to suppose it could have such powerful ramifications. Yet looking at the tense, troubled faces of the men sitting before me now, I realized that they believed it too.
Tad’s murder had solved one problem for them, but it had presented them with another. If one of the ship’s officers had killed him to prevent the prosecution, then any trial of his killer would inevitably touch upon motive. The story of The Dark Angel aired in a public courtroom, precisely the outcome the West India lobby wished to avoid.
Presumably Lucius Stokes had ordered Peregrine Child not to exert himself over Tad’s murder. He’d had Tad’s room at the Noah’s Ark searched, trying to find these missing papers. They’d swept everything under the rug – until I’d come along and swept everything back out.
‘We are a nation at war,’ Cavill-Lawrence said, ‘and one of our foremost industries is under concerted attack. Archer was not an agent for the French or the Americans, but he might as well have been. His confederates may seek to pick up where he left off. If he gave you those papers, then it is imperative that you tell us now.’
Were the Children of Liberty Tad’s confederates? Or Moses Graham and Ephraim Proudlock, who had looked so frightened at Tad’s funeral?
‘Tell him the rest,’ Smith said, mistaking my silence for complicity. ‘Archer’s debauchery. His vile habits. Let him truly understand the man he called a friend.’
I gazed at his young, arrogant face and my flesh prickled with unease. ‘If you mean that Archer consorted with prostitutes, then that was well known. Lincoln’s Inn almost evicted him from his chambers over the scandal.’
Smith’s eyes shone with malice. ‘I wasn’t talking about his whores.’
‘Mr Smith had a man look into Archer’s habits,’ Cavill-Lawrence said. ‘He managed to track down one of those jezebels from Lincoln’s Inn. What she told him is curious, to say the least. Archer invited her to his rooms, that part is true enough. Yet when she got there, he didn’t bed her. He didn’t even try. They simply conversed for an hour, he paid her, and then she left.’
My ears were buzzing again. I chose my words very carefully. ‘You’re saying he manufactured the scandal himself? Why would he do that?’
‘To conceal a different stripe of debauchery altogether,’ Smith said. ‘Archer was a molly. A sodomite. A buggeranto. Whichever word you use to describe his perversions, it’s all the same.’
The buzzing grew louder. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘He imposed upon you,’ Cavill-Lawrence said. ‘He deceived his friends. You must ask yourself whether any promises made to such a man should be respected.’
‘I never made any promises.’ Blood had rushed to my face. ‘I never saw your damn papers.’
Ultimately, I think it was my discomfort that convinced them. They mistook it for disgust, for anger, for embarrassment. All the things they supposed a man would naturally feel, if he’d just found out his oldest friend was a secret sodomite.
Cavill-Lawrence arched an eyebrow. ‘Then where the devil are they?’ he muttered. ‘Corsham doesn’t have them. Archer didn’t have them at his rooms in London or in Deptford. Mrs Bradstreet didn’t have them. Nor, we presume, does the killer. Is it possible Archer gave them to some sodomite friend he trusted?’
‘His encounters at the molly-brothels seem to have been of the fleeting variety.’ Smith gave a sardonic smile. ‘Yet my man is looking into his past. If he ever had an attachment of greater significance, the molly will be found.’
A tingle of fear skittered down my spine, an old, unloved acquaintance. Smith turned to me, his eyes devoid of emotion. ‘Return to Deptford again and I will hear of it. Make any more inquiries into Archer’s murder and I’ll hear of that too. Involve yourself in my business again and I will take your life apart piece by piece.’
I bowed my head. ‘I understand, sir.’
Again I was treated to Cavill-Lawrence’s hard stare. ‘Captain Corsham is an ambitious man. Of course he won’t involve himself again. Not now he understands the consequences for the kingdom – and for himself.’ His lip curled with distaste. ‘As for Mr Archer, corrupt in mind, corrupt in body. If he wasn’t already dead, I’d have him hanged for a sodomite.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
When I got home, I went to my bedroom and locked the door. It still lay upon me. Fear’s cold shadow. A face from an old memory, an echo of a voice once heard.
I knew what I should do. Forget Tad. Forget Amelia. Forget I ever heard of The Dark Angel. Do and say all the things I had been doing and saying for the past few years, until Amelia Bradstreet had knocked upon my door.
Had they believed me? Napier Smith and Cavill-Lawrence? Had I betrayed myself in gesture or in word? Done anything to give them cause to suspect I’d already known about Tad’s secret desires?
It was all flooding back over me. Oxford. His earnest face. So much engraved on my memory, no matter how hard I tried to forget.
I stared at my reflection in my dressing table mirror, and it was as if I gazed into all my past selves. The man I was before Tad. The man I was with him. The man I was with Caro. The man I was now.
Memories came thick and fast, and I struggled to catch hold of them. That day with Tad on the river. Days together in taverns and teagardens. Nights talking and laughing in our rooms. The day I left for America. The day I first killed a man. The day my father opened his jugular vein with his own quill knife.
Something else was building inside me besides the fear. I had been conscious of it before, but I felt it stronger now. It was as if a tide had been rising ever since I’d learned that Tad was dead, perhaps for many years before that. I felt the pressure inside my chest, inside my stomach, inside my head. I gasped for breath and a lurching sob came out.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Oh God, Tad, I’m so sorry.’
It was the living Tad who answered. ‘Prince Hal,’ he said. ‘I heard a rumour you were back. It’s good to see you.’
We were in his rooms at Lincoln’s Inn, over three years earlier. It was the last time I’d seen him alive – six years since we’d last met, since I’d run away to America without a word. Six years since the fear had last crawled inside of me.
We had faced one another in his sitting room. The lamps were dim and the fire low. I saw things I recognized: his writing box, the Turkey rug. The place smelled of him: a faint musk of wine and scent and tobacco. His face was cast in shadow. One cheekbone shone like a sliver of ivory. God, how I’d missed him.
‘No more letters, Tad. It needs to stop.’
My voice was constricted, my tension mirrored in his rigid body. I’d meant to work up to it, to talk to him first as old friends do. But I couldn’t do it.
I
saw something go out in his eyes. Some faint gleam of hope, perhaps. ‘That’s why you’ve come?’
‘Those letters could ruin us both. If they fell into the wrong hands – people would misunderstand.’
His hands trembled and his voice caught. ‘They are only the truth, Hal. How I think, how I feel. Would you take that from me too?’
‘Just because a man feels something, it doesn’t mean that it is right.’ I drew a deep breath. ‘I’m getting married. That’s the other thing I came to tell you.’
Silence. Then his voice came quietly from the shadows. ‘Do I know her?’
‘Caroline Craven. You probably remember her brothers.’
‘I remember all the Cravens. Caroline was a friend of my sister.’ Another silence. ‘It is a good match.’
Don’t let him cling to that. ‘It isn’t the money, you understand. We are in love.’
He came forward into the light and I saw his face properly for the first time. The shadows beneath his wet eyes looked like bruises.
‘An ocean,’ he said. ‘A marriage. Why not just build a wall?’
Why would he never understand – even though it had cost us both so much? ‘I’m not like you, Tad. You’re wrong. You just can’t see it.’
I took the bundle of letters from inside my coat. Some he’d written at Oxford, some in the years that followed. Each blotched with tears, written in drink-soaked moments of despair.
He gazed at them, and then at me. ‘If they are so dangerous, then why did you keep them all these years?’
I had no answer for him. Nor any answers for myself. I only knew that it needed to stop. For his sake, for mine, for Caro’s. ‘I’m going to burn them, and you’re going to watch me do it.’
Blood & Sugar Page 15