The old woman was shuffling down Skinner Street toward the top of Fleet Market when Hero spotted her. Dressed in rags, with broken-down shoes tied on her feet with cords, the woman had the handle of a covered basket slung over one arm and the telltale black glove of her trade on her right hand.
This was a section of London dominated by the reeking stockyards and slaughterhouses of Smithfield to the north and, nearer at hand, the ominous presence of Fleet Prison and Newgate and the constant spectacle of public hangings in the Old Bailey. All of which made it a good hunting ground for various types of scavengers.
“Draw up here,” Hero told her coachman.
The basket and glove marked the woman as a “banter” or “pure finder,” one of that army of desperate souls who eked out a miserable living picking up dog feces to sell to the tanneries of Bermondsey, where they were used to dress the skins of calves and lambs. It was called “pure” because, thanks to the feces’ astringent and alkaline properties, it could be used to scour and “purify” the leather.
The woman blinked when Hero walked up to her and explained why she wanted to interview her. Her back was bent from years of stooping, her gray hair matted, most of her teeth either rotted away or sold to dentists. She said her name was Gussie Spilsby, and though she looked eighty, she claimed she was only sixty-two.
Fortified with a meat pie, a cup of tea, and the promise of a shilling, she agreed to sit on the steps of the porch of St. Sepulchre and tell Hero about her life.
“Have you always done this?” Hero asked, her notebook balanced on her knees, the reek coming from the woman’s basket making her eyes water.
“Oh, no. My second husband used to be a barber,” said the woman, sipping her tea with a daintiness that surprised Hero as much as her accent and relatively careful diction. “But he lost his right arm after he got knocked down and run over by a noblewoman’s carriage, so he couldn’t do that anymore. We managed for a time by selling what we had. But when there wasn’t anything left to sell, we took to pure finding. With the two of us collecting, we could make a fair amount a week. Course, the tanners used to pay more in those days.”
“How much can you make a week now?”
“Maybe five or six shillings, at least in summer, when the light lasts a long time—and if I find good stuff.”
“What’s the difference between ‘good stuff’ and everything else?”
“You get the best price for the dry, lime-looking stuff. It works better. Some pure finders mix old mortar with their pure, but I never do. It’s a kind of stealing, isn’t it? And I’ve never been a thief.” She paused, then said, “In some ways, it’s easier being a pure finder than a rag-and-bone picker. You only find rags and bones in back alleys and courts. But dogs go all over, don’t they? Even down a busy street like this one. Mind you, I won’t deny it was hard to bring myself to do it at first. But you get used to it.” She paused, a gleam of amusement lighting her watery brown eyes, so that Hero wondered what the old woman had seen in her face. “You don’t think so, I can tell. But it’s true.”
Hero cleared her throat and consulted her notes. “You said your second husband was a barber. Can you tell me about the first?”
The old woman finished her tea and handed the cup back to the stall’s boy. “He was a sailor, worked on a barge that ran between London and Greenwich. Peter was his name. I met him when I was just fourteen. My father used to own a windmill, you see, but he died when I was twelve, and the man my mother married . . . Well, let’s just say he didn’t like me too much. So when I met Peter, I never looked back. We were very happy.”
“How long were you and Peter together?”
“Seventeen years. Life was good then. He wasn’t away from home for long, and the money he brought in was enough to keep us comfortable. But then one day, the press gang got him. He managed to send me a letter from Rio, telling me what’d happened to him. They say it was just a few days later they ran into a bad storm and a spar fell on him. Killed him.”
“I’m sorry,” said Hero, painfully aware of the woeful inadequacy of her words.
“Those were hard times,” said the old woman, her voice catching for a moment. “But then I met my George and things were good again. Until the accident.” She nodded toward the malodorous basket that sat beside her. “He died doing this. I knew he wasn’t feeling well even though he insisted on coming out with me every day. Then one morning he bent down to pick up a pile and just fell over dead. He was a good man, honest and hardworking and generous to a fault. He didn’t deserve to die in a back alley with a dog turd in his hand.”
Hero stared across the street to where a new row of low brick buildings had recently replaced the old, burned-out warehouse that once stood there. She found she had to swallow several times before she could keep going. “You never had any children?”
“Oh, no; I had eight. One of them, my Sylvia, made it all the way to thirty before she died in childbirth.”
Hero was afraid to ask. “And the others?”
“All dead.” The old woman squinted up at the heavy gray sky above. “It’s just me now. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get too old to pick up dog droppings. It gets harder every year, walking fifteen, twenty miles a day, carrying this stinking basket, bending over time and time again. Some pure finders, they don’t use a glove. They say their hands are easier to keep clean than a glove. But I can’t do that. I’ve always had to use a glove.”
She paused as a dusty mail coach rattled past, its horses lathered and wet with sweat, the guard shouting for an ostler as the coach swung in through the courtyard gate of the ancient inn that stood just to the west of St. Sepulchre’s crowded churchyard. “Sometimes my legs and back hurt me so bad, I can’t sleep at night,” she said, shifting her weight on the cold stone steps with a sigh. “I lay there and wonder where I went wrong in my life, to end up like this. When I was a little girl, I used to work ever so hard in school. I was good at it all too. The teachers told my papa that if I’d been a boy, I could’ve become a clerk or maybe even something better. I married two good, hardworking, clean-living men; birthed eight beautiful children. And here I am, a ragged, lonely old woman sitting on church steps and telling some strange lady about my life, with a basket of dog turds at my side. If I get sick or hurt, what’m I going to do? I’ll just starve to death. I keep trying to figure out what I should’ve done differently. I know there’s no use in thinking like that—I mean, it won’t make a difference now, will it? But for some reason I feel as if I should be able to see where I went wrong. And I can’t. I just can’t.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Hero, her voice tight with an old, gut-deep anger. “Nothing.”
“Must’ve done something wrong,” said the woman, her eyes narrowing as she continued to stare at the arched entrance to the coaching inn’s yard. “Do you know that fellow, my lady? The one there, in the brown corduroy coat with a squished-looking face? He’s been staring at us ever so long.”
Hero shifted to get a better look at the sagging facade of the Saracen’s Head next door. A man was leaning against one of the old inn’s dark upright timbers. He wore a brown corduroy coat, greasy breeches, and a battered slouch hat tilted back so that the light fell full on his unshaven face. He was a tall, gangly fellow with an oddly narrow head and a protruding mouth that reminded her of a fish. Her gaze met his, and rather than look away he nodded, an insolent smile curling his fish lips in a way that told Hero his study of her was neither casual nor innocent.
“No; I don’t know him,” she said, stowing her notebook and pencil in her reticule. “But I think I’ll ask him why he’s so interested in what we’re doing.” She pressed five shillings into Gussie Spilsby’s hand. “Thank you for agreeing to speak with me.”
“Said I’d talk to you for a shilling,” said the woman. “You don’t need to be giving me more.”
Hero closed the woman’s hand around the money when she would have given some of it back. “No. Please. Keep it.”
Tightening her grip on her reticule, Hero strode purposely toward the odd-looking man. She thought he might turn around and walk away, but he didn’t. He simply stayed put, watching her come at him.
She drew up some five feet from him. “Why are you watching me?”
He readjusted his hat as he pushed away from the wall. “Been watchin’ ye fer a while. Ye just noticed?”
“That doesn’t exactly answer my question, now, does it?”
“Yer husband threatened to blow me brains out yesterday.”
She blinked. “You’re Sid Cotton?”
“Told ye about me, did he?”
“He said you tried to kill him last winter in Fleet Street.”
Cotton’s full lips pulled away from his rotten teeth in a big grin. “Me? Nah.”
“Why are you here now?”
“Curious, I guess.”
“About what?”
He stared at the jumbled assortment of carts, wagons, and carriages passing in the street, those oddly uneven eyes squinting thoughtfully. “Yer husband, he thinks I killed Lord Ashworth, but I didn’t. Not sayin’ I wasn’t plannin’ on it, mind ye. But somebody beat me to it. So I guess I feel like I got what ye might call a proprietary interest in wot was done to him.”
“A proprietary interest?”
“That’s right. I ain’t gonna dance the hempen jig fer somethin’ I didn’t do.”
“You mean hang?”
“That’s wot I said, ain’t it?” Cotton turned his head to spit a glob of yellowish phlegm into the gutter. “Ye see, I know a thing or two his lordship don’t.”
“Oh? So why didn’t you tell him when he spoke to you last night?”
Sid Cotton looked at her as if he were affronted. “Ye reckon it’s easy, thinkin’ with a gun pressed to the side o’ yer head? Well, let me tell ye, it ain’t.”
“What do you claim to know that his lordship does not?”
Cotton scratched the back of his head. “I been thinkin’ his lordship might want t’ take a look at a fellow name o’ McCay. Lawrence McCay. Got a shop in Long Acre, he does.”
Whatever she’d been expecting him to say, it wasn’t that. “How do you know about McCay?”
The foul stench of his breath washed over her as he leaned in closer in the manner of a man imparting a secret. “He was annoyin’ Ashworth somethin’ fierce, ye see. ‘Vociferously dunning’ him, his lordship said.”
“‘Vociferously dunning’?”
“That’s right. He was always throwin’ big words like that at me and smirkin’ when he done it, thinkin’ I’m thick as two short planks.”
“You know what it means?”
“Course I know. It means Ashworth didn’t pay this McCay what he owed him. That furniture maker wanted his money, and he weren’t being quiet about it.”
The man’s eyes weren’t simply off-kilter, Hero realized; one was noticeably larger than the other. She said, “Why would Ashworth discuss his unpaid bills with you?”
“’Cause he wanted me to off the cove, that’s why.”
“He wanted to hire you to kill Lawrence McCay?”
“That’s what I just said, wasn’t it?”
“And did you agree to ‘off’ the man for him?”
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“It’s like I told yer husband. Ashworth already bilked me once. I weren’t gonna sign up t’ get cheated a second time.” He glanced up as Hero’s yellow-bodied coach rolled to a stop beside them. The coach had been waiting by the church, and Hero wondered what her coachman had sensed that compelled him to draw nearer.
“Thing is,” said Cotton, “I been thinkin’ about it, ye see. And it occurs t’ me that meybe Ashworth hired somebody else to off the cove.”
“McCay is still quite alive.”
“I know that. M’point is, what if McCay knowed that Ashworth was tryin’ to have him killed? What if McCay decided to kill Ashworth first?” He raised his eyebrows up and down in a gesture that might have been comic if the man didn’t ooze evil. “Mmm?”
Hero kept her expression blank. “If Ashworth did decide to hire someone else to kill McCay, who would he turn to?”
“How’m I t’ know?”
“Birds of a feather and all that.”
He smiled again, a gleam of what looked like genuine amusement this time that slithered across his face and then was gone. “Won’t deny I know a lot more’n some’d give me credit for. Ye might warn yer husband o’ that.” He tipped his hat in a mocking gesture. “Ma’am.” And then he strolled away, whistling between the gaps in his broken teeth. It took Hero a moment to place the tune.
It was the Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem.