Chapter 6

 

In Which a Midnight Caller Leads to an Unpleasant Duty

 

Pickett wasn’t sure what woke him. But suddenly he was wide awake, realizing somewhat guiltily that he’d fallen asleep in bed with his wife, rather than on the camp bed to which he’d been banished until her confinement. In his defense, he’d had the best of intentions. Julia had not slept well of late, as it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to find a comfortable position, so when he’d realized at some point in their conversation that she was falling asleep in his arms, he hadn’t dared to move for fear of waking her. Eventually he had fallen asleep as well, and now he couldn’t abandon her bed for his own even if he’d wanted to: His right arm was pinned beneath her. He tried to move it, and realized he’d lost all feeling from the elbow down.

Was that what had awakened him?

No, it had been a noise—his father returning from his errand, most likely. It was too dark for him to read the clock on the mantel, but he had the impression that it was very late—late enough, surely, for his father to have fetched any number of valises. The tryst with the beautiful shipmate, then, Pickett acknowledged with a sigh. Well, he hoped his father had found the rendezvous satisfying, for it was proving deuced inconvenient for the rest of the household.

At least, Pickett reasoned, he could go downstairs himself and let his father in, and spare Rogers the necessity. Slowly, so as not to wake her, he slid his arm out from under Julia’s sleeping form.

“Don’t forget the pears,” she mumbled, rolling onto her other side.

“I won’t,” he assured her, his voice scarcely more than a whisper. “Go back to sleep, love.”

He dropped a light kiss onto her temple, then pulled on his breeches, tugged his shirt over his head, and made his way down corridor and stairs in his bare feet, reaching the front door at the same time as Rogers, emerging from the servants’ stair with his dark breeches and coat thrown on over his nightshirt.

“It’s Da,” he told the butler. “I’ll let him in. You go on back to bed.”

For a moment it looked as though Rogers intended to argue the point, but after a brief hesitation, he said, “Very good, sir,” and returned to the servants’ stair whence he had come.

In fact, Pickett was considerably annoyed with his father, but had no desire to take him to task before even so sympathetic an audience as Rogers. To say “don’t wait up for me” was one thing; to roust someone out of bed in the middle of the night to let him into the house was quite another. He shot back the bolt and opened the door, drawing in his breath preparatory to reminding his scapegrace sire that he was no longer a resident felon at a penal colony, but a guest in his son’s house, and was expected to act accordingly.

To his surprise, however, it was not Gentleman Jack Pickett on the other side of the door, but his own former magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun, who stood on the portico with his hat in his hands and a look of unaccustomed solicitude on his face.

Oh, Lord, Pickett thought, stifling a groan, it needed only this. What has he done now?

He let out his breath in a rush. “Sir?”

“Good evening, John, or perhaps I should say ‘good morning,’” the magistrate said, and the familiar Scots burr contained a note of gentleness that he had never heard in it before. “I’m sorry to call on you at such an ungodly hour, but I must ask you to come with me. I need you to—to identify a body.”

Pickett’s hackles rose. “A—who—?” He tried to form a coherent question, but words failed him. In any case, he didn’t have to ask; he knew the answer without being told.

“It’s your father,” Mr. Colquhoun said, confirming Pickett’s worst fears. “I’m sorry to say he’s dead, John. His body was discovered in Limehouse.”

“What—how—?”

The knowledge that his suspicions were correct didn’t seem to have any effect on Pickett’s befuddled brain. Mr. Colquhoun, however, deciphered this disjointed query without difficulty.

“His was not a peaceful passing, I’m afraid, but it must have been a mercifully swift one,” the magistrate assured him. “He was knifed in the back.”

* * *

Knifed in the back…knifed in the back…

The words seemed to repeated themselves in rhythm with the revolution of the wheels of the hired hackney on the cobbled streets as it bore them eastward into the City, past the silent bulk of St. Paul’s cathedral, its great dome reared up against the night sky, blotting out the stars.

“How long had he been in London?” asked the magistrate, breaking the silence at last.

Pickett had no need to ask who “he” was. “I only saw him for the first time today—yesterday, that is—so the day before that at the earliest, I should think.” Recalling something his father had said, Pickett added with more conviction, “Yes, I’m certain of it. That is, the ship arrived two days ago, but it was yesterday before the captain received clearance for his cargo to be unloaded and his passengers to disembark.”

“Did he give any indication that he might have made an enemy among his fellow passengers?”

“No, not unless you count a flirtation with a married woman whose husband was also on board. Oh, and he had someone’s watch off him on a bet. He says—said—he won it fair and square, but knowing him as you do, you may make of that what you will. Aside from that, he seemed to be in prime twig, boasting that he’d become a man of property.” Pickett forced a wry smile. “Other people’s, most likely, but property nonetheless.”

They lapsed into silence while the carriage made its plodding way through the East End, until Pickett said abruptly, “Sir, I know I’m no longer connected with Bow Street in any official capacity, but I would be obliged to you if you would allow me to take part in the investigation to bring Da’s killer to justice.”

“I’m sure your sentiments do you credit, John, but I can’t think it a good idea.” Mr. Colquhoun’s voice was kind, but underneath it lay a hint of steel. “I was obliged to fetch you for the purpose of identifying the body—aside from the very likely unreliable word of a drunken doxy who hasn’t seen him in ten years, you’re the only one who would be able to identify him with any certainty after so long an absence—but as for any more active role”—he shook his head—“no, I can’t think it wise. Aside from the fact that you are much too closely connected to the crime to remain objective, there are ethical questions to be considered. If we succeed in bringing a man—or woman—to trial, it would be folly to give the defense counsel any ammunition to use against us.”

Pickett made no attempt to argue the point, but he had no intention of meekly accepting this dictum without making the slightest push to change the magistrate’s mind. A few minutes later, the hackney slowed and finally lurched to a stop before the Grapes, an ancient pub whose close proximity to the river ensured a great deal of custom from the men who made their living on the water. Mr. Colquhoun disembarked first and waited for Pickett to follow, then the two men entered the premises which, though it would normally be closed at so inauspicious an hour, had apparently been pressed into service as a temporary mortuary.

At their entrance, the proprietor (a man who bore all the appearance of one summoned from his bed on very short notice) gave a start of surprise. “God bless my soul!”

“The man’s son,” Mr. Colquhoun explained curtly, recognizing at once the reason for this outburst.

The proprietor nodded, saying with considerable relief, “Aye, I can see now that he’s not old enough to—but he gave me a rare turn when I first seen him, and no mistake!”

“A strong resemblance, to be sure,” and was all the magistrate said before turning to the business at hand. “Has he been brought in, then?”

“Aye, he’s”—his tone was businesslike, but he darted a sympathetic glance at Pickett—“he’s in the back room.” He made a vague gesture in the direction of a closed door behind the bar, inviting both mourner and magistrate to follow him.

The room figured ever after in Pickett’s memory as a small, cramped space, but this was quite possibly due to the number of men crowded about the heavy deal table that occupied most of the floor space not taken up with barrels, kegs, and crates. In addition to Mr. Colquhoun and himself, there was the man who admitted them, no doubt the proprietor of the pub; an elderly man with a croupy cough who, Pickett deduced, must be the constable who had been summoned when the crime had been discovered; another man Pickett thought must be the coroner; and a pair of wide-eyed youths who must have been the ones who discovered the body, judging by their not entirely successful attempts to convey a bored air, as if they stumbled across dead bodies every day of their lives.

And then there was the table, the focal point upon which all these persons’ attention was fixed. Something had been placed upon it and covered with a white tablecloth whose folds fell in contours suggestive of a human form underneath. Pickett took a deep, steadying breath, and then, finding that the coroner seemed to be awaiting his signal, gave him a nod. With an air of dignity, almost reverence, the coroner took the two top corners of the cloth and folded it back.

At first glance, it appeared to be someone’s idea—his father’s, most likely—of a joke. Gentleman Jack Pickett lay stretched out at full length upon the table, his eyes closed as if he were sleeping—an impression heightened by the cloth which the coroner had folded back as if it were a counterpane intended to protect the slumberer from the December chill. The sun-streaked hair was disarranged as if from sleep, and the generous mouth was relaxed in what almost appeared to be a smile. Pickett was seized with the absurd notion that at any moment his father would sit bolt upright, throwing off the cloth and shouting “Surprise!”

He choked back a bark of slightly hysterical laughter at the thought. This was not the first time he had been called upon to examine a body, he reminded himself sternly, ignoring the little voice—a voice that sounded suspiciously like Mr. Colquhoun’s—that pointed out he had been summoned for the purpose of identification, not investigation. He took a deep breath and forced himself to look again at the body lying on the table, trying to see it as if it were that of a complete stranger.

“It’s him,” he said tersely, then addressed himself to the coroner. “If you will turn him over, I should like to see the wound, please.”

Mr. Colquhoun made a faint noise of protest, but Pickett’s air of clinical detachment (which was in fact something akin to an emotional stupor, had the coroner but known it) was not without its effect. The coroner took the body by the shoulder and arm and turned it onto its side, revealing the back of a coat that bore a jagged cut some four inches long in its center, the slightly raveled edges of which were dark with blood. The ragged edge of the buff-colored waistcoat could just be seen, and, beneath that, the white shirt. These too were drenched in blood, especially the shirt, which, lying against the dead man’s skin, had got the worst of it.

Pickett looked up at the coroner. “And the murder weapon?”

The answer to this inquiry was provided not by the coroner, but by one of the two youths. Upon receiving a nudge from his confederate, along with a whispered urge to “give it to him, Ned!,” he withdrew the object from inside his coat and held it out for Pickett’s inspection.

It was a knife; that much, at least, was certain. But it was a knife unlike any that Pickett—no stranger to the variety of implements with which one might do away with one’s fellow man—had ever seen before. It was scarcely more than six inches long from the tip of the blade to the oddly misshapen haft, and the double-edged blade had been carved from stone rather than struck from steel. The haft was made of some material Pickett could not identify, and although it was hardly more than a lump encasing the last two inches of the blade, presumably to protect the hand of the user, its crude form was obviously intentional, and not the result of some error that had occurred during its manufacture, if the pattern of brownish-red stripes adorning it were anything to judge by—stripes, Pickett noted, very similar in color to the dried blood staining the business end of the blade

“I’m afraid this will have to be kept as evidence,” Pickett told Ned, albeit not without sympathy. It was a curious weapon, and one which any lad still in his teens would be pleased to call his own. Removing the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his coat, Pickett shook it out and spread it out on the table, then placed the knife on it, folded the corners of the handkerchief around it, and rolled it up before turning his attention back to the boy.

“Are you the one who discovered him, Ned? Where was he—it—the body?”

“He were in Gin Alley,” the youth answered promptly, apparently seeing nothing to wonder at in the fact that the victim’s son had taken over the investigation right under the coroner’s nose.

As Pickett’s early days as a pickpocket had rarely taken him so far east as Limehouse, he was unsure whether Gin Alley was an actual street, or if the boy was speaking metaphorically and telling him that his father had been drunk at the time of his death. Pickett glanced somewhat uncertainly to the proprietor of the pub for confirmation.

“Just east of here. A dogleg passage connecting Narrow and Queen Streets,” the publican explained. “It’s dark and shadowy even during daylight hours. For myself, I wouldn’t care to venture down it alone this time of night.”

Alone, he’d said. But what if his father hadn’t been alone? What if someone had arranged to meet him there as a means of luring him to his death? What if he’d gone to the rendezvous to meet one person, only to find someone else lying in wait for him?

“Aye, and such places tend to attract criminals of every sort,” the coroner was saying. “Your father isn’t the first to meet his end there, and probably won’t be the last—although I realize this is but cold comfort,” he added sympathetically.

Pickett, however, had already turned back to Ned and his companion. “And he was already dead when you found him? He spoke no last words that might give some idea as to who—”

Mr. Colquhoun, having obtained the information for which he had originally summoned his young protégé, interrupted this line of questioning. “The coroner can handle matters from here, John,” the magistrate said in a voice that brooked no argument. “I’ll take you home now.”

Pickett might have protested this high-handed treatment, but as he had his own reasons for not wanting to linger, he raised his hand to his mouth as if to cover a yawn, offering no resistance when Mr. Colquhoun took him firmly by the arm and led him outside, where the hackney driver, having been ordered to wait, was walking his horses.

They climbed aboard, and had hardly completed the westward turn into Broad Street when Mr. Colquhoun said, with steel in his voice, “I’ll expect that thing to be returned before the inquest.”

Pickett had been slumped in his seat, leaning his head against the window and gazing out upon the slumbering city, but upon recognizing the veiled accusation behind the magistrate’s words, sat upright and turned to regard his mentor with limpid brown eyes. “Sir?”

Mr. Colquhoun was not deceived. “Save that innocent act for someone who hasn’t known you for the last ten years and more,” he recommended. “I know full well you’ve got that knife secreted somewhere about your person—up your sleeve, unless I miss my guess.”

Pickett opened his mouth to refute this charge, then, acknowledging the futility of such a gesture, reached inside the cuff of his shirtsleeve with a sigh of resignation, withdrew the curious weapon, and placed it in the magistrate’s waiting hand.

Mr. Colquhoun unwrapped the knife and turned it over in his hands, inspecting it as best he could in the feeble light of the carriage lamps.

“How did you know, sir?” asked Pickett, much chastened.

“Aside from long experience with your particular skills, you mean? When you’re interrogating witnesses one moment—something I strictly forbade you to do, if memory serves—and then in the next moment falling asleep on your feet, let’s just say I had my suspicions. It seemed to me that you were hoping for me to intervene. I trust I did not disappoint?”

“No, sir,” Pickett said sheepishly. “It’s heavy for its small size—you can feel that for yourself—and I wasn’t sure how long I could keep it from falling out. Raising my hand to cover a yawn pushed it back to my elbow, but only temporarily. As soon as I lowered my arm, it was going to fall right back down to my wrist, and I wasn’t sure my cuff would hold it.”

“Then, too, there was always the possibility that you might accidentally slit your wrist,” observed the magistrate. “Awkward for you.”

“I never intended to keep it,” Pickett insisted. “It’s just that—I have a feeling I may know who it belongs to.”

Mr. Colquhoun’s bushy white eyebrows lowered thoughtfully. “Oh?” He waited expectantly for Pickett to enlarge upon this theme, but when no further explanation was forthcoming, he gave the odd little knife one last look before returning it to his protégé, saying sternly, “I trust you know what you’re doing. I still don’t like it, mind you, and I meant what I said about returning it in time for the inquest. Perhaps you’d best give it to me right before the proceedings begin. I’ll tell the coroner you’d suffered a nasty shock, and put it into your pocket without thinking. I daresay it won’t be far from the truth,” he added, regarding Pickett with an appraising look.

“Perhaps not.” Pickett shook his head as if to clear it. “Truth to tell, I can’t quite believe he’s really gone. I don’t know why not; it’s a wonder someone didn’t take him out years ago. If ever a man was ‘born to be hanged,’ as the saying goes, it was Da.”

“I’m sorry, John,” the magistrate said quietly.

“It’s not your fault, sir. God knows he tempted fate often enough.”

Mr. Colquhoun continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “I deprived you of a father at an age when you badly needed one.”

“I never blamed you for that,” Pickett insisted, taken aback by this admission. “You might have sentenced him to the gallows.”

“The end result was the same, so far as you were concerned. To a lad of fourteen, a father ten thousand miles away might as well be dead. I might have commuted his sentence at any time over the last ten years; I certainly should have done these last five.” The magistrate sighed. “The truth, I suppose, is that I envied the man too much.”

“You, envy Da? Why should you?”

“Because he possessed the one thing I never could, and held it so cheaply,” was the cryptic reply.

“Oh?” Pickett asked, bewildered. “What was that?”

The Scotsman shook his head. “Never mind.”

Pickett did not dwell for long on this conundrum, for his mind was filled with other things. Suddenly he burst out, “I’ve never had any illusions about who or what I was—the son of Gentleman Jack Pickett, by gad! A pickpocket, an occasional mudlark, and a thief—and a damned good one, thanks to my father. But all this time, I knew nothing! Nothing at all! I have a grandfather, did you know?” he asked, causing the magistrate to blink at this sudden non sequitur. “He’s a marquess; Da was once his footman!”

Seeing that Mr. Colquhoun appeared to be as stunned by this revelation as he had been himself, Pickett launched into explanation, recounting the whole story of his parents’ doomed romance and clandestine marriage, his own birth, and his mother’s illness and death, and, finally, his abduction in Covent Garden and the revelation to which it had led.

“God bless my soul!” breathed the magistrate at the conclusion of this narrative. “And Lord Melrose? What has he to say to all this?”

Pickett gave a bitter laugh. “He ignored my existence completely until his only son died without issue. Then he needed an heir, and whatever my deficiencies, it seems I’m better than nothing. He’s even petitioning the Crown to allow me to inherit the title through my mother!”

But that, if his suspicions were correct, was not the worst of it. According to Da, Lord Melrose had known of his grandson’s existence since the day of Pickett’s own birth, more or less, but had chosen not to acknowledge him. And then, after a silence of twenty-five years, he’d not only acknowledged him, but had even had him abducted off the street. And at almost the same moment, Gentleman Jack Pickett, newly returned from Botany Bay, was making his own presence known in Curzon Street. Two men, his only living ancestors, who despised each other and who had not been in communication with each other for a quarter of a century. And now, less than twenty-four hours later, one of them was dead. It couldn’t be a coincidence…could it?

“Look here,” he said abruptly, as the gaslit streets of Mayfair came into view, “will you object to setting me down now? It isn’t far to Curzon Street, and I could use a brisk walk in the cold air. It’s—it’s been a lot to take in, all at once.”

Mr. Colquhoun regarded his young protégé with a long, measuring look, then rapped on the roof and gave the order.

“Thank you, sir.”

As the vehicle slowed, Pickett opened the door and leaped down without waiting for it to come to a complete stop, then raised his hand in farewell as the hackney bore the magistrate away.