Chapter 11
W here would a man such as Nicholas Hayes go to hide?
Sebastian pondered the question as he guided his curricle and pair through the narrow lanes leading away from Tower Hill. A sailor could lose himself in the crowded alleys and miserable boardinghouses near the docks, but how well would a man such as Hayes blend into that environment? Not well, Sebastian suspected.
Someplace familiar, Gibson had suggested, but not so familiar that he’d run the risk of being recognized. Obviously not St. James’s or Piccadilly. But what about a place where he’d taken refuge once before? A place where constables were unwelcome and the locals knew not to ask too many questions.
A place like the Red Lion off Chick Lane.
Situated not far from the vast, death-haunted meat market of Smithfield, Chick Lane—or West Street, as it was increasingly called—lay in an insalubrious section of London infested with thieves and highwaymen and the kind of prostitutes who were as likely to rob a man as smile at him. Dominated by two foul parish workhouses and a collection of aging breweries, the area had already been in decline twenty years ago. It was even worse today.
The Red Lion was a ramshackle three-hundred-year old inn that backed onto one of the last free-flowing stretches of the Fleet left within the city. What had once been a clear, navigable waterway was now mostly built over and reduced to an underground sewer. These days, the few sections still above ground were usually referred to as Fleet Ditch rather than the River Fleet.
Sebastian had visited the Red Lion only once before. When he drew up outside the ancient inn, he decided it looked even worse than he remembered. The original plaster of the second and third stories had mostly fallen away, exposing the brickette-entre-poteaux, or brick-between-posts, construction beneath. Left to the mercy of the elements, the old, poor-quality Tudor bricks were slowly crumbling away. Someone at some point had covered the ground-floor facade with wood, but even that was now weathered and worm-eaten.
“I remember hearing tales about this place when I was on the street,” said Tom, Sebastian’s young groom, or tiger. Craning back his head, he squinted up at the inn’s leaning chimneys and crooked casement windows. “Heard they throw the bodies of those they murder out the rear windows into the Fleet.”
“I’ll keep my wits about me,” said Sebastian, handing the boy the reins. “But if I’m not back in half an hour, send the constables in after me.”
Tom laughed.
Inside, the heavily beamed ceiling was low, the wainscoting dark with the smoke of ages, the worn flagstone paving underfoot covered with sawdust. It was early enough that the taproom was nearly deserted, with only a couple of rough-looking characters in an old-fashioned booth near the front windows and a dark-haired, middle-aged man with the broken nose and brawny build of a retired Gentleman of the Fancy behind the bar.
“I’m looking for Grace Calhoun,” said Sebastian, walking up to him. “Is she around?”
The man—who was at least six-two and so muscle-bound as to make his movements slow and ponderous—screwed up his lips and shot a stream of tobacco juice in the general direction of a battered spittoon. “Who’s askin’?”
“Devlin.”
“Huh.” The barman turned and disappeared through a doorway behind the bar.
Sebastian could hear whispers—the barman’s hushed voice, then a woman’s. Their words were pitched low enough that they surely had no expectation of being overheard. But Sebastian’s hearing, like his eyesight, was abnormally acute.
“’E don’t say wot ’e wants,” whispered the barman.
“You know what he wants.”
“I kin tell ’im ye ain’t ’ere.”
“No. I’ll see him. Why not?”
She appeared a moment later, a tall, upright woman with unusual, striking features and thick black hair beginning to shade to gray. Sebastian thought she must have been quite young at the time of Calhoun’s birth, because she didn’t look much above fifty now. Her black eyes were shrewd and cunning and utterly merciless.
“How did you know?” said Grace Calhoun, coming straight to the point. There was no need for her to spell out the obvious by saying, How did you know Nicholas Hayes was staying here?
“Deduction. Someone had to tell him where to find Jules.”
She sniffed.
Sebastian said, “When did Hayes come here?”
“Couple weeks ago. Why?”
“Calhoun seems to have the impression he’d only just arrived in London.”
“He figured the less my Jules knew, the better.”
“Yet he contacted him,” said Sebastian. And you obviously told him how to do so.
“He didn’t want to. But he was afraid he might need help.”
“With what?”
“He didn’t say, and I ain’t one for askin’.”
Sebastian studied the woman’s hard, carefully shuttered face. The particulars of her life were unknown to him, but no one reached her position in London’s dangerous, cutthroat underworld without being tough and brutal and very, very clever. “Why let him stay? He was a danger to you.”
“If he’d been caught, you mean?” She gave a dismissive twitch of one shoulder. “Who’s t’ say I knew who he was? The last twenty years been hard on him, that’s for sure.”
“Did anyone come to see him while he was here?”
Grace Calhoun cast a questioning look at the barman, who spat again and said, “Didn’t see nobody ’cept that boy ’e brung wit him.”
“You mean Ji?”
“Aye.”
“Is the boy here now?”
Grace Calhoun shook her head. “We ain’t seen him since yesterday.”
The faint hope Sebastian had nourished that he’d find the boy here, safe, died. “Do you know the name of the man Hayes was planning to meet in Somer’s Town yesterday?”
“No. Why would I?”
“Because you’re far more knowledgeable than you like to appear.”
She remained silent, but a faint gleam of what might have been amusement lit up her dark eyes.
He said, “May I see Hayes’s room?”
“What for?”
“It might help me figure out who killed him.”
Her head tilted to one side. “Why you care who killed him?”
“I care,” said Sebastian.
She was silent for a moment, considering his request and its various ramifications. Then she glanced at the ex-boxer standing nearby with his arms folded at his chest. “Show him.”