Chapter 32
“His name was Jack Donavon,” Sir Henry Lovejoy told Sebastian as the two men stood side by side, staring down at the ashen naked corpse of the man killed in the Strand.
The body lay facedown on an old door propped up on two empty whiskey barrels in the taproom of the Black Swan on Fleet Street, for the viewing of the body of the deceased was an important part of any inquest. The jurors who’d been called to serve were still milling about, along with a number of curious onlookers. By law, any sudden, violent, or unexplained death required an inquest. And because there were so few places capable of holding the kinds of crowds gruesome dead bodies could attract, the proceedings typically were held in a public house or an inn.
“So who was he?” asked Sebastian, his eyes narrowing as he studied the purple knife wound in the dead man’s back.
“A generally unsavory character from the sounds of it, although by all accounts not a simple thief. I suspect he wasn’t after your purse.”
“I didn’t think he was.”
Sir Henry nodded. “Unfortunately, we’ve no idea who he was working for or who his companion—and inadvertent murderer—might have been.”
“Lovely.”
Sir Henry shivered. A fire had recently been kindled on the enormous old-fashioned hearth, but the blaze was meager, and the room was still cold enough that few of those present were inclined to remove their greatcoats. “You’ve no idea who might have an interest in seeing you dead?”
“Not really.”
A commotion near the door foretold the imminent arrival of the coroner. Sir Henry glanced behind them, then lowered his voice to say, “One of my lads did learn something you might find of interest: Edward Ambrose is in debt.”
“Did your lad manage to discover why?”
“The usual: mainly gambling, along with an unhealthy addiction to Bond Street tailors and high-end jewelers such as Rundell and Bridge.”
“Any sign of a mistress?”
“My lads say there is talk, but they’ve yet to verify it.” The magistrate pursed his lips in thought. “The debt obviously reflects poorly on Mr. Ambrose’s character. But unless he’s planning to acquire a new rich wife, I fail to see how it constitutes a motive for murder.”
“It doesn’t—if Jane was murdered. But if Ambrose struck her in anger and accidently killed her, the debt might explain the nature of their quarrel.”
“There is that.” Sir Henry shivered again and drew a handkerchief from his pocket to blow his nose. “You’ve seen the frozen river?”
“Yesterday afternoon. Amazing, is it not?”
Sir Henry nodded, although he looked more troubled than impressed. “There’s talk of setting up a Frost Fair. Personally, I fail to see the attraction of freezing in a tent pitched on ice simply to experience the dubious pleasure of drinking expensive beer or purchasing a useless trinket at twice its worth so that one may afterward boast that it was acquired on the Thames.”
Sebastian laughed just as a constable came bustling into the taproom, clapped his hands loudly, and said, “Right, then, let’s get this started, shall we?”
As expected, the inquest returned a verdict of homicide by person unknown.
Afterward, Sebastian joined Lovejoy for a ploughman’s lunch in the inn’s public room. The pub was crowded with a motley assortment of hangers-on from the inquest—shopkeepers and tradesmen, costermongers and apprentices, all loud and boisterous with lingering excitement from the morning’s entertainment.
“I’ll never understand it,” said Lovejoy, nibbling without much appetite at a heel of bread. “Why would anyone want to deliberately look at the bloody corpse of a murdered man?”
“Presumably for the same reason they attend hangings,” said Sebastian, his thoughts on the ordeal he knew Hero was going through.
“I’ve never understood that, either. We hang felons in public as a warning to all potential lawbreakers; the spectacle is intended to put the fear of God into them. But in reality, all we do is provide the city’s pickpockets with a distracted crowd enjoying a free show.”
Sebastian found himself smiling. “You’re suggesting public hangings might not work as a deterrent?”
“One would deduce. As for hanging a man—let alone a woman or child—for stealing a handkerchief or a pheasant? I fear future generations will conclude we place little value on the lives of England’s poor.”
Sebastian drained his ale and set it aside. “Future generations will be right.”
Sebastian spent the next hour trying to find Edward Ambrose.
The playwright’s nervous servants claimed ignorance of his whereabouts. In the end, Sebastian tracked Jane’s widower to a low tavern on Compton Street. From the looks of it, the place dated back to the last years of the seventeenth century, with low, dark beams overhead and sawdust on the floor and a wide hearth beside which Ambrose sat slumped. He had one hand wrapped around a bottle of cheap Scotch, and he looked up lazily when Sebastian slid into the opposite bench.
“Ah. It wanted only that,” said Ambrose, raising the bottle to his lips without bothering to use the glass that stood near his elbow.
“Bit early, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“So, are you drowning your sorrows or assuaging your guilt?” asked Sebastian.
“You say that as if the two were mutually exclusive.”
When Sebastian remained silent, Ambrose took another drink, then wiped his wet lips with the back of one hand. “I was a rotten husband to her. She was brilliant and beautiful and giving, and I took it all without appreciating any of it.”
“And you hit her.”
Something flared in Ambrose’s eyes, something that was hidden when he dropped his gaze to the bottle again.
“Exactly how deeply in debt are you?” said Sebastian, then added when Ambrose’s head jerked up, “And don’t even think about trying to deny it.”
Ambrose slumped back in his seat. “How the devil did you discover that?”
“Did you think I would not?”
Ambrose shook his head and swallowed hard.
Sebastian said, “How deep?”
Ambrose’s face twitched. “Nearly five thousand pounds. A large but not insurmountable sum for a man in my position. Theoretically.”
“Theoretically.”
“I did not kill my wife,” said Ambrose, his lips pulling away from his teeth as he enunciated each word carefully. “That is why you’re here, isn’t it? You think my debts somehow implicate me in her death. Well, believe me, you couldn’t be more wrong.”
“Why the bloody hell should I believe you?”
“Why?” Ambrose gave a ragged laugh. “Because only a fool would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping. “You don’t understand, do you? Oh, I had a couple of plays produced before Jane and I married, but their reception was only lukewarm. It wasn’t until I turned my hand to opera that I had real success. Lancelot and Guinevere opened a week after our first wedding anniversary.”
“You’re saying—what? That Jane was your muse?”
Ambrose gave a ringing laugh. “My muse? God, that’s rich. For all intents and purposes, Jane was Edward Ambrose. Oh, I wrote some of the libretto. But the music—that glorious music was all Jane’s. Not mine. Jane’s.”
Sebastian watched the playwright bring the bottle to his lips and drink deeply, a rivulet of alcohol escaping to run down the side of his chin. “Did no one ever suspect?”
Ambrose set down the bottle with studied care. “Her twin, James, knew the truth. She couldn’t hide it from him; he knew the instant he heard that first opera that the music was hers. She never told Christian, but I think he pretty much figured it out, too.” He brought up trembling hands to rake the disheveled hair from his face with splayed fingers. “So you see, I’m the last person who’d ever want Jane dead.”
“Unless she threatened to leave you.”
Ambrose froze with his elbows still spread wide, his gaze on Sebastian’s face.
Sebastian said, “I can see a certain kind of man who owed his success—his very livelihood—to a woman becoming enraged if she threatened to leave him.”
“Jane would never have left me.”
“She would never leave you when walking out on her marriage meant losing her sons. But now? If she found out you were drowning in debt and spending the money she’d actually earned on a mistress? I can imagine her at least threatening to leave you. And I can see you flying into a rage and hitting her, the way you’d hit her so many times in the past. Only this time she struck her head on something when she fell and she didn’t get up again. And when you saw what you’d done, you wrapped her body in—what? A carpet? A blanket? An old greatcoat?—and carried her out into the snowy night to leave her in Shepherds’ Lane.”
Ambrose stared at him, jaw slack, nostrils flaring with alarm. “No.”
“The only thing I don’t understand is, why Shepherds’ Lane? Did you mistakenly think her lessons with Mary Godwin were on Thursdays rather than Fridays?”
“I didn’t kill her, damn you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Ambrose might be drunk, but he wasn’t too drunk to know that men had swung on flimsy conjectures such as this. His tongue flicked out to wet his lips. “You . . . you were asking me the other day about the Rothschild girl Jane was teaching.”
“Yes.” Sebastian frowned. “Why?”
Ambrose leaned forward. “Jane had an aunt who was married to Sheridan—Richard Sheridan. Sheridan and I never exactly got along, but he came to see me last night. Spun some crazy tale about Rothschild and gold shipments to France, and wanted to know if Jane had ever talked to me about it.”
“Had she?”
“No. I’d never heard any of it before. But Sheridan was damnably upset about it all. I can tell you that. Went away muttering under his breath. I couldn’t catch most of it, but he was saying something like ‘I blame myself.’”
“‘I blame myself’?”
Ambrose nodded. “I did tell you I thought her strangely frightened by her last meeting with Rothschild. Didn’t I tell you?”
“You did.”
“So you’ll look into it?”
“I will.” Sebastian pushed up from the table. “Why would Jane tell her late aunt’s husband what was frightening her but not her own husband?”
Ambrose’s head fell back as he stared up at Sebastian. “What do I know of the government’s gold policy? Sheridan spent decades in Parliament.”
“That he did,” said Sebastian, reaching for his hat.
But Edward Ambrose only tipped his head and frowned, as if the larger implications of his statement eluded him.
Richard Sheridan was feeding scraps to a colony of stray cats in the noisome alley behind his house when Sebastian came to stand with one shoulder propped against a nearby corner.
“How’d you find me?” asked the old man without looking up. He was wearing a tattered greatcoat, scuffed boots, and the same nightcap Sebastian had seen on him before. Gray stubble shadowed his unshaven face.
“Your housemaid.”
“Ah, Lizzy. She’s a treasure. Poor girl hasn’t been paid in months, but she won’t give up on us. Don’t know what we’d do without her.”
Sebastian said, “Why didn’t you tell me your niece tangled with Rothschild over a shipment of smuggled gold?”
“Been talking to Ambrose, have you?”
“Yes.”
Sheridan reached down to pet a gray tabby rubbing against his legs. “It all happened so many weeks ago, I frankly wasn’t even thinking about it when you were here before. I was focused on the last time I’d seen her. It wasn’t until after you’d gone I started wondering if Rothschild might have had a hand in what happened to the poor girl.”
“I take it she overheard something in his house she wasn’t meant to hear?”
The old man nodded. “It’s frightening, isn’t it? The simple, seemingly inconsequential decisions we make that can shift the entire course of our lives. She went to use the water closet after her lesson with the child and was coming down the stairs when she heard Rothschild consulting with one of his men. I suppose he thought she had gone. There was little in Jane’s world beyond music—and her boys, of course, when they were alive—so she didn’t know the background of what she was hearing. I suspect if Rothschild had simply smiled at her and let her go on her way, she probably wouldn’t have given it another thought.”
“What did he do instead?”
“He came the ugly—threatened her with all sorts of dire repercussions if she told anyone and then ordered her never to come near his house again.” Sheridan shook his head. “The man might be a wonder when it comes to manipulating markets and turning this nasty war to his advantage, but he’s a poor judge of people. He thought he was frightening her—and he did frighten her. But he also put up her back. She went home, thought about it all for a while, then came to ask me to explain it to her.”
“So Rothschild knew about the gold guineas hidden aboard the Viking?”
The old man gave a rude snort. “Of course he knew. He’s been smuggling gold out of England for years. Last December alone he shipped something like four hundred thousand guineas’ worth.”
“Good God,” said Sebastian.
The exportation of gold from Britain had been illegal for almost twenty years, ever since a disastrous run on gold stocks that took place shortly before the turn of the century. At the same time Parliament outlawed gold exports, they’d also made it illegal for the Bank of England to issue gold coins, forcing them to use only nonconvertible paper notes.
“The problem is,” Sheridan was saying, “thanks to this blasted war, the value of the pound has been going down at the same time the price of gold has skyrocketed. It’s a situation ripe for gold speculators, and the most successful speculator of them all is Nathan Rothschild. He buys gold in London with devalued British banknotes and then sells it on the Continent at a profit of twenty percent or more.”
“How . . . patriotic.”
Sheridan huffed a scornful laugh. “Oh, he’s that all right. And he’s not the only one, not by a long shot. Look at the Hopes’ bank! They helped arrange the bloody loans that enabled the United States to buy Louisiana from France, thus injecting millions of pounds into Napoléon’s war effort against us. How is that not treason? How? If there were any justice in this world, the lot of them would be tried and hanged. Instead, their descendants will be wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, while the poor women and children of this land starve in the streets and their menfolk are used for cannon fodder.”
“Speculators always manage to profit from war.”
“Yes, but this goes beyond mere speculation. What’s most disturbing about that gold shipment on the Viking is where it was headed. Rothschild used to send most of his gold to Amsterdam, Vienna, and Frankfurt. Now it’s all going to France, and the shipment on the Viking was only one of many he’s sent there this month. He has agents stationed at Gravelines to collect it and quickly send it directly to his brother in Paris.”
“You told this to Jane?”
The old man let out his breath in a pained sigh. “Some of it. I didn’t know it all at the time. I had to look into it a bit.”
“Do you think Jane might have told someone else about what she heard?”
“I did warn her not to.”
“So why do you blame yourself for what happened to her?”
Sheridan squinted over at him. “How do you know I do?”
“Ambrose said he heard you mumbling to yourself as you walked away.”
“Ah.” The old man rasped one hand across his beard-roughened chin. “I warned her not to tell anyone about what she’d heard, but it occurs to me that in the process of looking into it I may have accidently betrayed her. I mean, Rothschild knows I’m her uncle. What if someone told him I was poking around, asking questions? The man could easily have put two and two together.”
“And had her killed?”
Sheridan shook his head, although it was in uncertainty and confusion rather than in denial. “I don’t know. Would he do that, you think?”
“You said he threatened her. Threatened her with what?”
“He said if she breathed a word about what she’d heard, he’d break every bone in her body.”
“That sounds pretty specific to me.”
Sheridan looked up at him with troubled bloodshot eyes. “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”