Chapter 34
Sebastian was in his dressing room, dabbing at the blood on his face, when Hero came to stand in the doorway.
“One of the housemaids tells me my husband came home covered in blood. I assumed she was exaggerating. Obviously, I was mistaken.”
“I don’t know if I’d say ‘covered’ in blood.”
“Look in the mirror.” She watched him dip the cloth in the washbowl and squeeze, the gentle trickle of water filling the room’s silence. He touched the cloth to his forehead and winced.
“Here, let me do that.” She pushed away from the doorway and came to take the cloth from him. Her voice and face were both utterly calm. But when she dipped the cloth in the water again, he noticed her hands were not quite steady. She turned his face to the lamplight. “Shouldn’t you have gone to see Gibson?”
“It’s only a scratch.”
“It’s a bit more than that.”
“I’ll live.”
She made an incoherent noise deep in her throat but kept her focus on the task of cleaning the raw, jagged furrows dug into the side of his scalp by the exploding brick. “And was it worth it?”
“I didn’t find Cotton. But a couple of Russians found me.”
Her hand fell. “Russians did this?”
“Mmm. I killed one of them, then beat a prudent retreat for reinforcements. By the time I returned with the constables, the body was gone. I assume his compatriot removed him.”
“You’re certain they were Russian?”
“Yes. I thought Jarvis might find their involvement interesting, but all he did was complain about my dripping blood on his carriage’s upholstery.”
“So, are you going to ask the lovely Princess Ivanna why she wants you dead?”
“Yes, but not until I understand it a bit better myself.” He watched her soak a pad with alcohol. “Has Tom come back yet?”
She pressed the pad to his wound and waited while he let out a long hiss. “No.”
Tom returned to Brook Street late that night.
He was dressed in a pair of ragged breeches so big he had to hold them up with a length of rope. Once his shirt might have been white, but those days were far in the distant, forgotten past. His coat was a motley collection of patches, and the hat he clutched was so battered that half the brim hung loose from the crown.
“Good God,” said Sebastian when he saw him. “I’m surprised Morey didn’t turn you away at the door, thinking you were some grubby beggar.”
Tom grinned, his face so smeared with dirt that his scattered freckles were invisible. “Look the part, don’t I?”
“It’s amazing. Have you eaten?”
“Aye, gov’nor. I nicked some sausages with Waldo Jones.”
“Bonding over theft? I suppose that’s one way to gain his confidence—as long as you don’t get taken up by the watch.”
The boy looked vaguely affronted. “I ain’t lost me touch.”
Sebastian ducked his head to hide a smile. “What did you discover about Ben King?”
“’E’s definitely missing—took off scared the mornin’ Ashworth was found dead. But I don’t reckon Waldo knows where ’e is. Waldo’s afraid ’e’s dead.”
“Any idea where the lad used to sleep?”
“Waldo says ’e’d get a pallet in one o’ the flea traps near St. Martin’s whenever ’e ’ad a couple extra pennies. I thought I’d go there tomorrow.”
Sebastian thought about the stacks of corpses in the deadhouse of St. Martin’s workhouse and felt a heavy weight of unease settle low in his gut. “Just be careful, you hear?”
Tom eyed the sticking plaster on Sebastian’s forehead and gave him a jaunty grin.
Wednesday, 6 April
“I received a visit late last night from one Major Edward Burnside,” said Sir Henry Lovejoy when he and Sebastian met in a coffeehouse near Bow Street early the next morning. “We’re instructed to stay away from both the Grand Duchess’s household and the Russian ambassador and his lady.” Lovejoy paused. “I take it you’re getting uncomfortably close to something?”
Sebastian took a deep swallow of his scalding coffee and grimaced. Major Burnside was one of Jarvis’s most trusted minions. “You heard two Russians tried to kill me last night?”
Lovejoy nodded. “You’re quite certain as to their nationality?”
“Yes.”
Lovejoy nodded again. “The major expressed the palace’s concerns over the recent rise in violent crime on the city’s streets and suggested we might want to conduct a sweeping arrest of undesirable elements. Presumably one or more of them could then be charged with recent events.”
“Tidy.”
Lovejoy sipped his hot chocolate. “Have you seen Gibson since he completed the Jordan girl’s autopsy?”
“Not yet.”
Lovejoy let out his breath in a long, painful rush. “It’s disturbing. Most disturbing.”
Sissy Jordan lay pale and waxen on Gibson’s stained stone slab. In the morning light streaming in through the outbuilding’s open door, she looked even younger than she had in the dim horror that was St. Martin’s deadhouse. Her nose was small and childlike, her chin firm, her eyebrows delicately arched. Looking at her, Sebastian was struck again by the tragedy of both her death and her short life. And he felt a rush of rage so all-consuming that he was practically shaking with it.
“You all right?” asked Gibson, watching him through narrowed eyes.
Sebastian turned away and went to slap his open palm against the doorframe as he stared out at Alexi Sauvage’s dew-dampened garden. “Damn. Damn, damn, damn. She was only fifteen years old—thirteen when she had to start selling herself on the streets so she could eat. What the bloody hell is wrong with us? What kind of society turns its back on the neediest amongst them?” He flung his arm through the air in a sweeping motion that took in the awakening city. “They call themselves Christians; they smugly go to church every Sunday and pat themselves on the back for being so damned holy. And then they allow this?”
“‘For I was hungered and ye gave me no meat,’” quoted Gibson softly. “‘I was thirsty and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger and ye took me not in.’”
Sebastian turned to look again at the dead child prostitute. “Can you tell me anything?”
Gibson stood with his hands tucked up under his armpits. His face was unshaven and sallow, his eyes sunken and bruised-looking in a way Sebastian had learned to recognize. “Well,” said the surgeon, “she was stabbed, but not with as large a knife as Ashworth or Digby—probably more like a dagger. And unlike the other two, she fought back. There are cuts on her hands from when she tried to either grab the knife or at least deflect it.” He picked up her nearest hand and turned it over to show the lacerations on her palm and fingers. “See?”
“Brave girl.” Sebastian shifted his gaze to the bloody wounds in her chest. Sissy had been stabbed again and again, but not nearly as many times as Ashworth or Digby. “I wonder why the differences. Think we could be dealing with two different killers?”
“No way to tell, really. Perhaps your killer is simply gaining confidence as he gains experience.”
“Now, there’s a frightening thought.”
The sound of a door opening drew Sebastian’s attention to the ancient stone house where Alexi had appeared on the stoop wearing an old gown and a simple hat with a wide brim. Her gaze met his across the yard. Then she turned away to kneel at a patch of some dark green herb, a trowel in her hand.
Sebastian said, “I’ve discovered there’s a boy missing too—a crossing sweep named Ben King who carried a message from Digby the night Ashworth was murdered. He disappeared the next morning.”
Gibson reached for the sheet and drew it up over the dead girl’s face. “Please tell me you’re close to figuring out who’s doing this.”
But Sebastian could only shake his head, any possible reply he might have made lost in a swirl of frustration and fear.
Later, after Gibson applied a foul-smelling ointment and a fresh sticking plaster to Sebastian’s head wounds, he walked across the yard to where Alexi Sauvage still knelt in her garden. Her hands were deep in the dirt, the sun warm on her back, her face a study of serene contentment. Then his shadow fell across her and she looked up. Her expression of peace drained away.
She said, “Paul tells me you were asking about soporifics. Something that might have been used to render Ashworth unconscious so he wouldn’t fight back when he was killed.”
“Do you know of something?”
She tugged at a stubborn clump of grass. “There are dozens of possibilities. Laudanum would do it, although he’d need to take it himself, because it would require too large a dose for someone to slip to him unawares. The same is probably true of herbs such as valerian and skullcap. Henbane can cause a stupor, but it usually also provokes convulsions, and Paul says he saw no evidence of anything like that on his body.”
“What else?”
She thought for a moment. “Most plants that cause paralysis can also cause death if you’re not careful and don’t know what you’re doing. Although given that your killer’s plan was to then stab Ashworth, I suppose that wouldn’t matter. So if you’re not deterred by the fear of accidentally killing someone, the number of possibilities expands dramatically. There’s a pretty yellow-flowering vine from America called Carolina jessamine that would do it. But many more-familiar garden plants can also be dangerous. I’ve heard of people falling unconscious from breathing in the smoke of burning oleander branches or even after eating food stirred with a twig. And simply chewing a foxglove leaf can cause temporary paralysis—or stop your heart if you’re unlucky.”
“Something as common as foxglove?”
“Yes. But if I were to pick the most likely culprit, I’d probably go with belladonna, or deadly nightshade as it is sometimes called. The wives of the Roman emperors Augustus and Claudius are said to have used it to dispose of their husbands, but it can also be used to create hallucinations or a stupor. It was supposedly a favorite of witches, but I don’t know if that’s true.”
“And there’s no way to detect it?”
“No.”
“How common is this knowledge?”
“It’s probably less common in London than in the countryside, where these things are passed down from mother to daughter. But the city is full of apothecaries who would know.”
Sebastian blew out a long, harsh breath as he watched her set to work trimming a woody, upright shrub with long ovate leaves. “What’s that?”
She looked up and smiled, her lips parting on a laugh he didn’t understand until she said, “Nightshade.”