Chapter 3
T he area known as Somer’s Town lay just to the north of Bloomsbury. Home to artists and writers and the middling sort of refugees from the revolution in France, it was the site of market gardens, brickfields, and several different tea gardens. The gardens were close enough to the densely crowded streets of London to make them an easy walk for young apprentices and seamstresses as well as the families of tradesmen, artisans, and shopkeepers. For sixpence, one could spend the day enjoying the fresh air of the country and listening to music while drinking tea or ale and eating roast beef and cakes.
And maybe getting stabbed in the back with a sickle, thought Sebastian as the carriage rolled through the hot, darkening streets of the city.
He shifted his gaze to the valet on the opposite bench. “So, are you going to tell me how you came to be acquainted with an earl’s son transported to Botany Bay eighteen years ago?”
Calhoun brought up tented hands to cover his nose and mouth, then let them fall. “I knew him before that—before he was accused of murder but after he was disowned by his father, the Earl. He had a room at one of my mother’s inns.”
“Ah.” Calhoun’s background was unusual for a gentleman’s gentleman. The son of an infamous underworld figure named Grace Calhoun, he’d grown up hanging around the most notorious flash houses in London. “The Blue Anchor?”
The valet gave a faint shake of his head. “The Red Lion.”
“Good God.” Situated in a back alley near Smithfield, the Red Lion was a known resort of thieves, cracksmen, blacklegs, and beau-traps. “What the devil was he doing there?”
“To be honest, I think he came there planning to kill himself.” A faint smile that hinted at old, fond memories lifted one corner of Calhoun’s mouth. “He changed his mind.”
“How long was he there?”
“Nearly six months. Shortly before he arrived, my mother had hired an ancient, broken-down valet to teach me how to ‘act and talk flash,’ as she put it. But my sixteen-year-old self was less than impressed with the dotard, and I didn’t want any part of her scheme. Then I met Hayes.”
“How old was he at the time?”
“Twenty, or thereabouts. My mother let him stay for free, hoping he’d succeed where the dotard had failed—teach me to dress, walk, and talk like a gentleman. She had ambitions of me becoming a confidence man, you see. Near broke her heart when I decided to take everything I’d learned and become a valet instead.”
“No doubt,” said Sebastian, who had met the formidable Grace Calhoun. She was the kind of woman a wise man didn’t turn his back on—or cross in any way.
Calhoun’s smile faded as he shifted to stare out at the shadowy streets flashing past, his body swaying with the motion of the carriage. “If it hadn’t been for Hayes, I’d probably have been hanged long ago.”
“I was under the impression he’d been transported for life, without eligibility for parole.”
“He was.”
“Yet he came back to England?” For a man transported for life to return to Britain without a pardon was to court a death sentence. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’ve seen him since he came back?”
Calhoun nodded.
“Why did everyone believe he’d died in Botany Bay?”
“He told me they had a flash flood on some big river out there that swept him away from the chain gang he was on. When he came to, he was lying next to a dead man of about the same height, build, and hair color. The fellow was a freeman who’d once been a soldier, and he’d obviously spent some time in irons and been flogged, because his body was scarred. Hayes changed clothes with him, took his papers, and bashed in the dead man’s face with a rock until he was unrecognizable. And then he seized the first chance that offered to get away from the colony.”
Jesus, thought Sebastian. “And went to China?”
“Eventually.”
“Why did he contact you?”
“He said he might need my help, and he wanted to know if I’d be willing to give it.”
“Your help with what?”
“He didn’t say.”
“And what did you tell him?”
The valet met Sebastian’s gaze, and held it. “I told him yes.”
“Dead bodies in my gardens?” muttered Irvine Pennington, sweating heavily as he led the way along a central allée of pleached hornbeam underplanted with low-clipped hedges of boxwood and waves of purple allium. “It’s an insult, it is, even to suggest such a thing. An insult!”
The owner-manager of Pennington’s Tea Gardens was a short, stout man in his middle years, with heavy jowls, a long upper lip, and bushy side-whiskers. They’d arrived in Somer’s Town to find that the tea gardens closed early on Thursdays. Pennington had resisted Sebastian’s request that he reopen the gardens for them and scoffed loudly at the idea that one of his patrons might be lying dead somewhere within. But at the magical words “Bow Street,” the garden owner’s opposition evaporated. Leaving one of his lads at the gate to await the magistrate and constables, he insisted on personally accompanying Sebastian.
“So, where is this mythical corpse?” Pennington grumbled, holding his horn lantern high. “Hmmm? You tell me that.”
Sebastian glanced at Calhoun, who said, “According to Ji, he’s lying somewhere to the west of the pond, near a brick wall.” They’d hoped to find Ji waiting for them at the tea gardens, but they’d yet to see any sign of the child.
“Where’s your pond?” asked Sebastian.
“Just up ahead. But it’s nonsense to suggest—”
“Then let’s go left.”
Without waiting for Mr. Pennington, Sebastian veered onto a narrow path that wound through a shrubbery toward the high wall that separated the gardens from the hayfields to the west.
Mr. Pennington hesitated a moment, then charged after them, his lantern held high. “Wait, wait!” Pennington shouted. “How can you even see where you’re going?”
“I have good eyesight.”
“But it’s too dark! What a fool’s errand this all is. Your lad probably saw someone who’d simply lain down and dozed off after drinking too much ale. Havey-cavey it is, accusing me of leaving corpses littered about my gardens. Why, I’ve a mind to—”
“There,” said Sebastian.
The man lay facedown in a small clearing just off the path, his head turned to one side, his widely staring eyes already beginning to flatten and film. His clothes and boots were of a similar quality to those of the missing boy, respectable but neither fashionable nor expensive. The back of his coat was dark and shiny with the blood that had spilled out around the sickle buried deep between his shoulder blades.
Pennington gave a gasp and stumbled to a halt, his lantern swinging wildly. “The Lord preserve us.”
“Grab that lantern before he drops it and starts a fire,” Sebastian told Calhoun.
Calhoun lifted the lantern from the garden owner’s unresisting grasp and brought the light closer. “Is he dead?”
“Very,” said Sebastian, hunkering down beside the body.
Nicholas Hayes—if this was indeed Hayes—couldn’t have been more than thirty-eight or thirty-nine, not too many years older than Sebastian himself. But life had been hard on this earl’s son. His once-dark hair was thickly laced with gray, his complexion weathered by years of hard labor beneath the blazing hot sun of New South Wales. Born with all the advantages of wealth and lineage, he should have lived a comfortable, dignified, even productive life. Instead he’d endured nearly two decades of unimaginable horrors that ended in . . . this. Sebastian felt the tragedy of the man’s wasted life and senseless death press down on him like a heavy weight of sadness mingled, he knew, with an unsettling realization of just how easily this man’s miserable life could have been his.
“Is it Hayes?” he asked his valet.
Calhoun crouched down beside him, the lantern dancing a macabre pattern of shadow and light across the still, alabaster flesh of the dead man’s face. “Dear God. It is.”
Sebastian glanced over at him. “Not simply the man you saw recently, but the man you knew eighteen years ago?”
“Oh, yes. I’m certain of it. He’s older, but I knew him the instant I saw him.”
Sebastian brought his gaze back to the body before them. He’d been a handsome man, Nicholas Hayes, tall and leanly built, with a long, straight nose, straight dark brows, and high cheekbones. Why would a man so easily recognizable return to England? Why come back and risk near-certain death?
Sebastian looked at the tea gardens’ owner. “Is this sickle one of yours?”
Pennington began to back away. “Mine? Oh, surely not. What a thing to ask.”
“It strikes me as a reasonable question.”
Pennington backed into the trunk of a linden tree and stopped, his head shaking slowly back and forth, back and forth. “This won’t be good for business. It won’t be good for business at all. Perhaps we could—” He licked his lips. “Perhaps we could shift the body? Just a tad? There’s an access gate in the wall near here. If we were to—”
“No.”
“Who would care? Look at him. He’s—what? A shopkeeper, perhaps? A cobbler or maybe a—”
“As it happens, he’s the youngest son of the late Earl of Seaforth.”
“The Earl of—” A succession of emotions flickered across the garden owner’s face as shock gave way to wonderment, followed almost immediately by a gleam of hopeful avarice. “Really? Well, well, well. Perhaps this won’t ruin me after all. I could make the site into a special attraction. Yes, that might work. I could even fence off the area and charge a separate admission. I wonder if they’ll let me have the dead man’s clothes. I could have them stuffed and restage the murder scene. I could even—”
“Why, you sick, greedy bastard,” swore Calhoun, surging to his feet. “The man is dead, and all you can think about is—”
Sebastian just managed to snag his normally mild-mannered valet’s arm and haul him back. “Calhoun,” he said softly.
Mr. Irvine Pennington threw up both hands and scuttled around behind the linden tree as if using the trunk as a shield. “Merciful heavens.”
“May I suggest you await the arrival of Bow Street at the entrance gate? That way you can direct them where to go when they arrive.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll do that. I’ll do that right away.” He hesitated, then added timidly, “May I have the lantern back, please?”
Sebastian waited until the garden owner trotted off, the lantern light swinging wildly over the darkened shrubbery. Then he let the valet go.
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” said Calhoun, smoothing the tumbled hair from his forehead and repositioning his hat with unsteady hands. “That was unforgivable of me.”
“Yet understandable.” Sebastian brought his attention back to the dead man at their feet. “I suspect Bow Street won’t take kindly to the realization that you knew Hayes was an escaped convict and yet failed to report him to the authorities. We need to come up with a convincing story to tell Sir Henry. Quickly.”