Tuesday, 25 July
Early the next morning, Sebastian entered a mean, decaying court off St. Martin’s Lane to find three filthy, ragged, barefoot little boys loading piles of empty soot sacks, cloths, brushes, and poles into their master’s handcart.
“If’n you pack of lazy thatch-gallows don’t want t’ feel the weight of me hand on the back of yer heads, you’ll step on it,” said the chimney sweep, still buttoning his rough coat against the morning chill as he came through an open doorway in one corner of the court. He was a short, thickset man with a bony face, protruding ears, and skin so coated with soot and grime as to appear black. At the sight of Sebastian he drew up sharp, his nostrils flaring on a quickly indrawn breath.
“You’re Hiram Dobbs?” said Sebastian.
“Aye,” said the sweep warily. “Wot you want wit me?”
“I understand you knew Lady McInnis.”
“Knew her?” Dobbs gave a harsh, ringing laugh. “That’s rich. And how would the likes o’ me come t’ know a fine lady like herself?”
“Oh, you knew her, all right. You swept the chimneys of her town house in Grosvenor Square. And when she saw you lighting a fire under the feet of one of your apprentices to force him up a chimney and realized how bruised and battered he was, she tried to have the child taken away from you.”
Dobbs’s lips twisted into a sneer. “You think she’s the first o’ her kind I’ve had to deal with?” He turned his head to spit a mouthful of phlegm at a rat creeping through the rubbish at their feet. “They’re all the same, them softhearted, sentimental ladies, bleating endlessly about the ‘poor, poor little climbing boys.’ ” As he said it, his voice rose in a vicious parody of a gentlewoman’s tones, then dropped again. “But I’ll tell you a secret: Them kind, they’re always the first to call us when the soot builds up in their flues and their fireplaces start fillin’ their rooms with smoke and nasty fumes. Once they start worryin’ their chimneys might catch fire and burn down their houses, it’s amazin’ how somehow they no longer give a tinker’s damn about the poor climbing boys. Not then. They’re all the same.”
Sebastian glanced at the three children, who now stood shivering, silent, and watchful beside their master’s cart, their faces blank with numb acceptance, their eyes red and swollen, and every visible inch of their skin black with soot. In age, they probably ranged from five or six to nine or ten. They didn’t live long, climbing boys. If they weren’t burned alive in a chimney fire, they often fell to their deaths or got stuck in a narrow flue and suffocated, or succumbed to a lung infection caused by constantly inhaling soot. Those who didn’t die often went blind thanks to their endlessly inflamed eyes. And if by chance they survived to reach puberty, they invariably fell victim to what they called “soot warts,” a cancer that began by eating at their genitals before spreading out to consume their entire deformed, wasted bodies.
It was one of the reasons climbing boys and girls were always young—that, and because they needed to be small to fit through the labyrinth flues of London’s chimneys, which were often as narrow as nine by nine inches. The boys climbed the flues by shimmying up like caterpillars, using their backs and knees and elbows. To toughen up the skin on a new boy’s knees and elbows, the sweeps would rub brine into the child’s flesh every night with a brush until it ceased to bleed and hardened up.
“They’re all the same,” Dobbs muttered again.
Sebastian set his jaw against the upswelling of rage that threatened to consume him. “Not quite all. Lady McInnis tried to get your boys taken away from you. That’s when you started harassing her and threatening her—threatening to make her ‘regret it’, was one of the expressions I believe you used. And threatening to make her pay.”
An angry light blazed in the man’s beady gray eyes, and Sebastian noticed the three boys take a wary step back. “Jist givin’ her her own back again, I was. Figured she deserved it. But I didn’t do her no real harm. And as God is me witness, I didn’t kill her.”
The phrase struck Sebastian as both telling and chilling, given the way this murderer liked to pose his victims’ bodies. He said, “Do I take it you’re a religious man, Mr. Dobbs?”
“ ’Course I am. Me parents raised me to fear the Lord and keep to His path. As the Bible says, ‘Gather the people together so’s they can learn to fear me all the days of their lives, and teach their children, too.’ ”
“Or something like that,” said Sebastian.
Hiram Dobbs glowered at him. “I’m a good, God-fearin’ man; you hear me? I work hard and pray hard, and I keep these here children on the path of the straight and narrow. That woman—that lady—she messed with the wrong man. I jist wanted to make sure she knew that.”
“The climbing boy who died—the one Lady McInnis tried to have taken away from you; what was his name?”
For a moment Sebastian didn’t think the man would answer. Then he sniffed and said, “Robby.”
“Robby what?”
“He didn’t have no other name that I ever heard of. He was jist Robby.”
“How old was he?”
“Danged if I know. He was always a sore trial to me, that one. Forever cryin’ for his mama, gettin’ stuck in the flues, afraid of everything from rats and fires to the fallin’ soot.”
My God, thought Sebastian. That poor child. Aloud he said, “Where were you last Sunday, Mr. Dobbs?”
The sweep sniffed again, then wiped the back of one hand across his crooked nose, smearing away some of the soot. “Keep the Lord’s Day, I do.”
“You do?” Most sweeps and their climbing boys worked seven days a week, with only one day a year—May Day—off. Sebastian glanced again at the silently waiting boys, but all three were now staring at their feet. “Commendable, I’m sure.”
Hiram Dobbs gave a snort and slung his broom up to his shoulder. “You might not understand it, you being a fine lord an’ all, but you’re stoppin’ us from gettin’ to work, keepin’ us standin’ around jawin’ like this.”
“Oh? And how do you happen to know I’m a lord?”
“Heard Bow Street had asked some viscount to help ’em look into them murders out at Richmond Park. Must be nice t’ have nothin’ t’ do all day but stick your nose where it don’t belong.”
“ ‘And what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justice?’ ” quoted Sebastian.
The sweep’s eyes narrowed. “Who said that?”
“Obviously not anyone you know,” said Sebastian, nodding to the three watching boys. “We can talk more later.”
“We ain’t got nothin’ t’ talk about,” shouted the sweep as Sebastian walked away. “Ye hear me? Nothin’.”
But Sebastian just kept walking.