Mrs Grimshaw gave me a long look when I walked into the Noah’s Ark. ‘Frank Drake says I’m not to let you stay here anymore.’
I gave her my most gentlemanly bow. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, madam. What do you say?’
She sighed. ‘I say this is my inn. Who’s he to give me orders? Frank Drake, who was my husband’s junior officer? Besides, we need the money. Here’s your key.’
I thanked her. ‘Is Nathaniel at home?’
‘He’s gone out looking for Jago. Wretched beast has run off.’
‘I’m heading up to the Broadway shortly. I’ll look out for the dog.’
‘If you would, sir. Perhaps you could have a word with my Nate too, if you run across him? He was upset enough as it was, what with losing his father and his apprenticeship. Now Brabazon’s had to take poor Daniel Waterman’s leg and Jago’s gone the devil knows where. A word from you might help. He’s taken quite a shine to you. Said I was to let you stay here, no matter what Drake said.’
Pleased that my alliance with the boy was bearing fruit, I said I would.
‘I’m sorry to hear about Waterman. How is he?’
‘He’ll live, Brabazon says, but what sort of a life is a cripple’s? Nate wants us to keep him here for good, but times are hard for us too.’
I murmured my sympathy. ‘I didn’t realize Nathaniel had been an apprentice. I’d presumed he was always destined for slaving.’
‘Oh, my Amos had grand plans for him – wanted something better for the boy. An attorney up in the Broadway took him on. We couldn’t afford it anymore after Amos passed.’ She brushed away a tear.
I wondered if she knew how much time and money her husband had spent in the Deptford bathhouse. It was anyone’s guess. Sometimes ignorance is a godsend. Sometimes it’s better to know the truth. Often we occupy an uneasy state between the two.
‘I heard about you tricking your way into John Monday’s house,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, sir. Mr Monday is a good man. After my Amos died, when he heard we were likely to lose the inn, he offered Nate an officer’s place, even though the boy had never spent a day at sea. That never happens except with those who’ve paid for the privilege. Then there’s the school he founded here in the Strand. And the surgery for the poor.’
‘A living saint.’
She gave me another look. ‘He does good where he sees bad. There aren’t many in Deptford who do that. Have a care in these alleys, sir. Frank Drake’s put the word round about you. You might come up against some of the bad yourself.’
*
It was another hot day, though the air held a faint promise of rain. I kept an eye out for Nathaniel on my walk up to the Broadway, but I didn’t see him. I wondered if he’d made any progress with my silver ticket, or if he’d been too upset about Daniel Waterman’s amputation. I planned to visit the cabin boy later on, and I very much hoped he’d be able to talk to me. The questions I had for him kept mounting. Was he Tad’s witness? Had he stolen the missing documents? What precisely were those documents? Who had broken his leg? The closer I came to The Dark Angel and the crimes of her crew, I believed, the closer I’d come to Tad’s murderer. If Waterman had any evidence of the insurance fraud, then I needed to hear it.
Similarly, I needed to speak to Cinnamon again. Scipio’s account of her background suggested she couldn’t be the female slave who had returned to Deptford on board The Dark Angel. Yet I wasn’t sure I believed him. Scipio was anxious to preserve his position as the mayor’s secretary, and the girl was his master’s property. It was possible he had lied to protect his own interests. I had no desire to make trouble for him, but in this instance it couldn’t be helped. If Cinnamon was the slave girl in question, then I needed to hear her story. Either way, I’d resolved to help her escape this town and her master. The upshot be damned.
I also wanted to locate The Dark Angel’s captain, Evan Vaughan. If he was truly losing his mind, as his landlady had implied, then he might let something slip once I put him to the question. I hadn’t entirely discounted the possibility that he might be the killer, though I’d been told that he’d left Deptford some weeks ago. His addiction to opium, coupled with Tad’s purchase of that same drug around the time he was killed, certainly raised interesting questions. I would have liked to return to the bathhouse, to have another stab at questioning Jamaica Mary, and to find the prostitute, Alice, whom Vaughan had allegedly assaulted. Yet the proprietor had made it plain that I was no longer welcome on his premises. Was Jamaica Mary responsible for the obeah, as Mrs Grimshaw believed? If I could prove her involvement, then I might get to the truth about Frank Drake’s alibi. Mary’s uneasiness when answering my questions, coupled with her false allegation against me in the bathhouse, suggested she was hiding something.
I decided to give The Dark Angel’s owner, John Monday, a wide berth, at least until I had spoken to his wife, Eleanor. What motive had taken her to Tad’s funeral? Why hadn’t she wanted to be observed there? What did she know about her husband’s business and the secrets of this town? What motive too, had taken the magistrate, Peregrine Child, to London – searching the ministry’s archives, as I had, for The Dark Angel? Given Child’s ambivalence about finding Tad’s killer, his purpose was a puzzle – one I was determined to solve.
First I had a more pressing piece of business. When I reached the High Street in the Broadway, I was pleased to see James Brabazon’s windows standing open. A conversation with that gentleman was long overdue.
Brabazon’s manservant showed me up the stairs to the surgery, where we found his master standing over a steaming kettle. The last time I’d been here, Tad had been lying on that table. It had marked the moment between before and after. I forced my eyes to Brabazon’s amiable face.
‘What a pleasant surprise,’ he said. ‘I was told you had left town.’
The Scotchman looked a little worn around the edges. Stubble darkened his chin and there were shadows beneath his mismatched eyes. Given what I knew of his duplicity, those eyes seemed now to have taken on a Janus-like aspect: one looking outward to the world, the other gazing inwards, a mirror of his secret self.
‘Forgive my appearance,’ he said. ‘I got back from the city late last night to find that Daniel Waterman’s condition had worsened. I took his leg off above the knee in the early hours.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘At some point, I’ll sleep. Was it my tincture for your leg you were wanting?’
‘Actually, I’d like to talk to you about Mr Archer’s inquiry into the massacre on board The Dark Angel.’
Registering my stony expression, his smile faded. ‘Ah, you are upset with me. No doubt because I didn’t mention it myself. Please do not read too much into it. I saw no reason to drag that unpleasant business up again.’
‘Archer was branded with the mark of Monday’s company. You were employed by that company, yet you never saw fit to mention it.’
‘I presumed the brand had been used to implicate us. You cannot think one of us killed him? Why would we mark him with a symbol that could identify us?’
‘To warn others off. Men like me.’
He gave a lopsided grin. ‘That plan’s not working out very well for us now, is it, Captain Corsham?’
Brabazon had sangfroid, I had to give him that. He’d evidently decided the best method to deal with my presence in Deptford was to brazen it out.
‘The killer also murdered and branded two Africans in London in recent days,’ I said. ‘As well as Mr Archer’s sister and her maid.’ It had not escaped my attention that Brabazon had been in London when Proudlock had been killed there. If he only returned late last night, then he could also have been the man Moses Graham and I had encountered at Marylebone.
‘Good heavens,’ he said. ‘Were the women branded too?’
‘No, but as I disturbed the killer he may have been intending to do so.’
‘Did you get a good look at him?’
‘Not his face. He wore a hood.’
‘I am grieved to learn of yet more tragedy.’ Brabazon’s expression was suitably sombre, though I watched his performance with a critic’s scepticism. ‘Yet I don’t see that it has anything to do with The Dark Angel. Archer’s questions were an inconvenience, nothing more.’
‘You call a prosecution for fraud an inconvenience?’
‘I would, yes. There was no truth in his allegations.’
Thinking about those drowned slaves, I restrained a powerful urge to beat the truth out of him. Instead, I decided to play him at his own game. ‘If there is no merit in it, then you will have no objection to answering a few questions about that voyage?’
He hesitated. ‘I don’t like talking about it, but if it will convince you that you are wasting your time, then I suppose it is a price worth paying.’ He removed the kettle from its brazier and filled a bowl with steaming water. ‘You don’t mind if we talk while I work? I used up my supplies of laudanum on Daniel Waterman last night.’
Brabazon took a red waxed-paper package from a drawer. More opium from the Red House. He added the contents to his bowl, and used a pestle to grind the water and opium to a paste. The story he told me as he worked was much the same version of events told to me by John Monday.
‘Do not think it didn’t cost us, those desperate days at sea. Playing God, deciding who should live and who should die. I tell myself that it was akin to drowning bitches in a litter. You kill the weak in order that the strongest will survive. Yet whilst the Negro is not strictly human, he is not an animal either. Animals do not cry out to their loved ones. I still hear their screams.’
‘You think that? Africans are not strictly human?’
‘The science is clear. The Negro is a stunted form of human existence, more akin to an ape than you or I. Have you read Kircher? No? You should. He posits that there were once many competing species of humans. The Negro, I believe, is the last of our rivals. A few centuries from now they will doubtless die out altogether. In the meantime, I see no reason why we should not harness their labour. Yet it doesn’t follow that I liked to kill them. Or that I would have done so had it not been necessary to preserve the lives of others on board.’
Somehow I found these scientific justifications for his cruelty even worse than Drake’s blunt brutality and Monday’s twisted religion. Yet I kept my temper in check, and asked Brabazon a few more questions about the voyage.
‘Why kill the slaves in batches? Why not all at once?’
‘It is hard work killing three hundred men. The crew needed to rest. If it sounds shocking, that’s because it is.’
‘When we last met you mentioned a sea captain who destroyed himself through opium use. Was that Evan Vaughan?’
‘Yes, I tried to help him wean himself off it, but the poppy does not let go easily. It is something I’d like to research one day: the properties of addictions and how to fight them.’
‘Did his habit have anything to do with the failures on that voyage?’
‘Oh no, the leak could have happened to any ship under any captain. And at the time Vaughan’s use of opium was purely sybaritic. It was only afterwards that it got worse, in Kingston. When we returned to Deptford, he started smoking more and more – I believe to keep the memories of that voyage at bay. I’ve seen it happen before, to some of the hardest men you ever saw – and God knows, Evan Vaughan is no angel. They work the Middle Passage for twenty years, and never give it a moral pause, then one day wake up weeping at all the things they’ve seen and done. In Vaughan’s case, perhaps it is not surprising.’
‘Do you know where Vaughan is? His landlord says he’s left town.’
‘I advised him to get out of Deptford and take some rest. He decided on Brighthelmstone, I think. Or was it Margate?’
All very vague. Perhaps deliberately so.
‘How about John Monday? Does he use opium?’
‘I’ve never observed him do so, but it’s possible. A lot of seafaring gentlemen retain old habits when they retire.’
Seemingly satisfied with the consistency of his mixture, Brabazon added a clear spirit to the bowl, stirring to let it down to a liquid. Then he decanted the laudanum through a funnel into a bottle. ‘This will need to steep for a while. Shall we go next door?’
Brabazon’s parlour was not dissimilar to my own bookroom: a refuge of dark furniture, bound volumes and Morocco leather. A skeleton in a corner gave the only clue to his profession. There were no mementos of his slaving at all. Perhaps Brabazon, like Amos Grimshaw, preferred to forget the horrors of the Middle Passage when in port.
The manservant had brewed a pot of coffee, and Brabazon offered me a bowl. As he poured, he leaned over to close one of his desk drawers. It was one of those inconsequential gestures that seem to have no purpose, and attain every consequence and purpose as a result. I wondered if there was something in that drawer that he did not wish for me to see.
‘Where were you on the night Archer was killed?’
He stirred sugar into his bowl. ‘What a question. I attended a lecture that afternoon at the Naval Hospital at Greenwich. There was a dinner afterwards and I stayed almost until the end. Over thirty surgeons and physicians were in attendance. You can check.’
‘I will. What time did it finish?’
‘Did you go directly home afterwards?’
‘No, I went to check on Daniel Waterman.’
‘Can anyone confirm that?’
‘The boy himself. He should be more lucid by tonight.’
‘Those papers people say that Waterman stole. Why was everyone so convinced that it was him?’ I was chancing my arm here, seeking confirmation of my suspicions.
Brabazon arched an eyebrow. ‘You have been busy. Who else could it have been? I was in the warehouse myself at the time the papers went missing and I saw Waterman go up to the office. Naturally, I regret saying anything to Monday, but neither he nor I can blame ourselves. Drake was only supposed to punish the boy, not leave him a cripple. I’m afraid the other man I hold responsible is Mr Archer. He dangled an inducement in front of Waterman to tempt him into a criminal act. That’s reprehensible.’
So Tad had bribed Waterman to steal the papers from the warehouse, and Monday had ordered the attack on Waterman as a reprisal, based on Brabazon’s evidence. It explained Nathaniel’s hostility towards them. I was not in the least surprised to learn that it was Frank Drake who’d carried out those orders.
‘What are these papers?’
‘They relate to The Dark Angel, though I’m not sure how. Monday will be able to tell you more.’
I doubted Monday would tell me anything at all. ‘Did you hear about the dead bird on Monday’s doorstep?’
‘Another one? How tiresome. Archer spread it around town that we killed those slaves, and now the Deptford Negroes seek to punish us. To me a dead cock is just a dead cock, but this is a superstitious town. Monday’s been struggling to find crew for The Dark Angel ever since.’
‘I heard Vaughan was rather shaken up by it all.’
He smiled. ‘Drake too. He denies it, but you can see that it unsettles him.’
I questioned Brabazon a little more, on these and other matters, but he seemed quite unruffled. Truly, the man was slippery as a slow worm. Yet Nathaniel had said he’d been frightened like the others. I wondered what Tad had known that I did not.
For the time being, I admitted defeat. Brabazon walked me to the door, where he laid a hand on my arm. ‘A word of advice, Captain Corsham. Friend to friend, so to speak. Monday and Vaughan might not take too kindly to you repeating Archer’s lies. That theory of his is slanderous after all. I’d hate to see you end up in a court of law.’
‘Thank you for your concern,’ I replied pleasantly, as though we were indeed good friends, ‘but I don’t believe you need worry on that score. I think a court of law is the last place those gentlemen would want this subject raised.’
He only smiled. He knew that I knew that he was lying. But I couldn’t prove it – and to my great chagrin, he knew that too.