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.