Chapter 9

 

In Which Is Held an Inquest into the Death of Gentleman Jack Pickett

 

It seemed strange, Pickett thought, to think that he would be attending an inquest not as an investigating officer, but as the subject’s next of kin. Stripping off the fashionable coat he had worn for his interview at the British Museum, he dug into the recesses of the clothes-press and pulled out the sober black coat (a relic of the days before his marriage) that he’d worn during his three miserable weeks as a clerk in the City.

“I suppose,” Julia said thoughtfully, affixing a black armband to his left sleeve just above the elbow, “that I had best select a couple of gowns for Betsy to dye. I should think one for now and one for later, after the baby is born, would be sufficient.”

“Sufficient for what?” asked Pickett, studying the effects of her labor in the mirror over her dressing table.

“For mourning,” she pointed out, as if this should have been obvious—as indeed it would have been, had he been less distracted by his own thoughts. “He was your father, after all, and I would not wish to appear disrespectful—”

“Do you mean,” demanded Pickett, his wife having got his full attention at last, “that you intend to go into mourning?”

“Why, yes, of course,” Julia said, puzzled by his vehemence. “It is customary, you know—”

“I don’t care a button for ‘customary’! Sweetheart, the day after we met, you went into mourning for Lord Fieldhurst. From that day until the night of the Drury Lane Theatre fire—almost a year, all told—I saw you in nothing but black. I hope never to see you wear black again.”

“But John, pray consider how very odd it would look,” protested Julia, albeit halfheartedly. In truth, she had spent much of the first year of their acquaintance chafing under the knowledge that her newly widowed state prevented her from looking her best before the young Bow Street Runner whose good opinion she coveted for reasons she’d not dared examine too closely. “People would say—”

“People have been saying one thing or another about us for the last nine months, most of it unflattering,” he pointed out with unassailable logic. “Besides, since you’re bedridden, at least for the nonce, no one sees you anyway. Who’s to know?”

“I’ll know,” she said, although the element of doubt that had crept into her voice suggested she was wavering.

She completed her operation on his sleeve, and as she released it, he put his now-unencumbered arm around her waist and drew her close. “If there is one thing that can be said of my father, it is that he knew how to appreciate a beautiful woman. Trust me, love. He would agree with me on this.”

* * *

As Limehouse was some distance east of the City, and still further east of Mayfair, Pickett hired a hackney to convey him to the Chalk and Cheese, the public house where the inquest was to be held. He was set down before this establishment some ten minutes before the proceedings were set to begin, and when he entered the room that had been pressed into service in the cause of justice, he was not surprised to see Mr. Colquhoun was already there. If anything was needed to convince him he had done the right thing in taking the murder weapon to the British Museum that morning, it came in the hast with which the magistrate approached him. Clearly, he was not going to be allowed to retain possession of the murder weapon any longer than absolutely necessary.

“I’ll take that knife from you now,” Mr. Colquhoun said by way of greeting, holding out his hand in expectation. “Did you learn anything from it?”

“My original theory was, um, disproven,” Pickett confessed, inwardly cringing at the memory of his invasion of Lord Melrose’s house in Park Lane. “But I did learn something about its provenance. It’s a leilira knife, made by the aboriginal people of the Antipodes. So it appears my father was murdered by someone he knew there, or someone he met on the ship during the voyage home.”

“Not necessarily,” the magistrate cautioned. “Bear in mind that almost everyone who lives and works in Limehouse is connected with the sea trade in some capacity. There might be any number of people who have come into possession of such curiosities through buying or bartering for them, or even having been given one as a gift, without ever setting foot on colonial soil. The possibility of your father’s having had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time can’t be dismissed.”

“Yes, sir,” Pickett agreed, although privately he doubted it. It had always seemed to him that his father had the devil’s own luck. Before he could point out this contradiction, however, the proceedings were called to order, and he was obliged to take his seat.

In fact, he was fortunate to find a seat at all, for the room was so crammed with people that several of those present were obliged to stand. Looking about, Pickett recognized several of the men he had seen the previous evening: the coroner, the physician, and the magistrate within whose jurisdiction the body had been found, along with the two youths who had found it—Ned and his compatriot, whose name, if Pickett had heard it at all, he could not remember.

The seven members of the jury were unknown to him, but this was hardly surprising: he’d rarely had cause to venture this far east of the City, even in his Bow Street days.

As for the remainder of those present, many—perhaps most—were probably mere curiosity-seekers. After a five-year career with Bow Street, Pickett no longer wondered how word of the inquest had spread so quickly; Londoners appeared to have some sixth sense where spectacular crimes were concerned. Still, he wasn’t quite certain how many of the people had flocked to the Chalk and Cheese in order to satisfy a morbid fascination for violent death, and how many had come specifically because it was Gentleman Jack Pickett who had in this instance been the victim; his father’s checkered career had rarely (if ever) taken him so far east as Limehouse, but Gentleman Jack’s reputation was widely known amongst a certain set—descendants, no doubt, of the same persons who had so eagerly followed Jack Sheppard’s misadventures a century earlier.

And yet, a few of those present didn’t seem to fit into either of these categories. Their countenances wore expressions too sober to suggest a taste for lurid entertainment, their overall appearances too respectable to be old acquaintances of his father come to pay their last respects.

In the third row sat a tall, thin man of about forty whose rusty black tailcoat, stooped shoulders, and wire-rimmed spectacles forcibly recalled to Pickett’s mind of some of the more senior clerks in the counting-house of Ludlow & Ludlow. The one rather glaring difference was the fact that this man’s spectacles perched on a nose that was pink and peeling, as if, after a lifetime spent largely indoors, he had at some time in the not-to-distant past been subjected to prolonged exposure to the sun.

Seated in the center of the next row was a man who gave Pickett the impression of a sea-farer, although he could not say on what, exactly, this impression was based, save for the weathered brown face that also made the man’s age impossible to estimate with any expectation of accuracy.

Directly behind him sat a lady wearing a bonnet heavily trimmed with black lace, including a veil that covered most of her face. Pickett wondered what made him so certain that she was a lady, instead of some lesser-born female, and decided it was her posture: Her spine never touched the back of her chair, as if she feared contamination from so low an establishment—which raised the question of why, then, she had chosen to attend at all. Pickett put her age at somewhere in her thirties, and the evidence supporting this estimation was not far to seek: The fact that she seemed to be unaccompanied by either a servant or a spouse suggested a certain age, and yet the chin under which the ribbons of her bonnet were tied still appeared smooth and firm.

He recalled his father having mentioned a lady—he had called her a lady, hadn’t he?—with whom he had become acquainted on the ship and in whom he had expressed an amorous interest, and wondered if this woman might be she. In any case, Pickett supposed he shouldn’t wonder at there being a woman present at his father’s inquest; the only real surprise was that there weren’t more.

This thought led, not unnaturally, to Moll, of whom there was no sign. In truth, Pickett was not quite certain whether to be sorry or glad of her absence. Granted, he could very happily live the rest of his life without ever again seeing the woman who, according to his father, had been set in his mother’s place out of necessity, and who had failed in that rôle so abysmally. Moll’s absence suggested that she was as yet unaware of her former cully’s death, quite possibly unaware that he had returned to England at all. If that was the case, did he have a moral obligation to call on her to inform her of the fact? He hoped not; the last time he had seen Moll, she had proposed that he, now that he was grown to manhood, should take his father’s place in that capacity. Pickett shuddered at the memory. There wasn’t enough Blue Ruin in all of St. Giles to make him consider the prospect with anything but revulsion. Still, Moll had loved his father, in her way. More to the point, she had borne him a second son: his own half-brother, Kit, of whose existence his father had been wholly ignorant scarcely more than twenty-four hours earlier. Surely that fact alone was obligation enough—or wasn’t it?

This moral dilemma was interrupted as the coroner addressed his opening remarks to the jury, and it was with some relief that Pickett turned his thoughts to the matter at hand.

“Let me remind you,” the coroner instructed the seven men who comprised the jury, “that this is an inquest, not a trial. It is not your responsibility to determine whose hand held the knife, nor should you indulge in any speculation as to that point. Your duty is merely to determine the cause of death, whether by accident or misadventure, suicide, or intentional murder by person or persons unknown. This, and only this, is the question you must consider as you hear the facts of the case.”

The facts, such as they were, offered little enough to go on. Pickett himself was the first person called upon to testify, primarily for the purpose of identifying the deceased and giving a brief account of his father’s last day of life: his return to London from the penal colony of Botany Bay, his setting out that evening for Limehouse with the expressed intention of returning to his son’s house in Curzon Street, albeit at an unspecified time, and, finally, his own visit from the Bow Street magistrate with news of his father’s death. Pickett couldn’t help noticing that, although he played a much more passive rôle in this inquest than in any of the dozens of such proceedings he had attended over his five-year career with Bow Street, he was treated with far more respect than in any of those other inquests at which his testimony had been of much more significance so far as the law was concerned. He reflected rather cynically that he might have had “Bereaved Son” tattooed on his forehead.

After he was invited to return to his seat, however, the first of the two boys who had discovered the body was summoned, and the mood in the crowded pub changed from solemn condolence to something akin to eager anticipation.

When questioned, Ned Mullins, stiff and uncomfortable in his Sunday-best clothes, recounted having left the Grapes in Narrow Street some few minutes before midnight with his boon companion, Bob Pendleton, and had cut through Gin Alley to Queen Street.

“It bein’ the quickest way to get to the Rope Walk, where I lives with my aunt and uncle,” Ned explained.

They’d made as if to pass a man lying in street, assuming he was the worse for drink, until Bob had noticed a trickle of blood coming from the corner of his mouth. Even then, it hadn’t occurred to them that the man was dead, only that he’d been beaten up and perhaps robbed by someone belonging to the rougher element usually to be found loitering about the waterfront late at night.

“So we went to see if we could be of any help to the fellow,” Ned recalled, “only when Bob shook him by the shoulder—him not meaning any disrespect, mind, but not getting any response any other way, y’see—his head sort of flopped back, limp as a rag doll. And then I caught a glimpse of something dark on the back of the fellow’s coat, only it wasn’t a shadow, for Bob had a lantern with him, what with his mum bein’ a widow who don’t like him to be out so late at night. So I told Bob to roll him over, which he did, and we seen the back of his coat cut open and all drenched in blood, and there underneath him a knife like none I’ve ever seen in all my born days! We reckoned somebody must’a stuck it in his back, right between his shoulder blades.”

“Yes, Mr. Mullins, that will do,” said the coroner, cutting off this bit of deduction lest the jury be influenced by it. “You are to tell only what you saw or heard, not what you thought.”

“Yessir.” Ned, much chastened, dipped his head in acknowledgement. “Only there weren’t much to hear, since the fellow was as near to bein’ dead as made no odds. He only spoke the one word.”

“Oh?” the coroner’s voice sharpened. “You said nothing of this last night. What one word did he say?”

“It didn’t seem to mean nothin’,” Ned insisted. “It was so soft I wasn’t sure at first that I really heard it at all, not ‘til Bob said he heard it, too.”

“And what was it that you and Bob both heard?”

“It was a woman’s name,” recalled Ned. “It weren’t nothing but a whisper, really.”

Pickett glanced toward the veiled lady in the fifth row. If her posture had been erect before, she was stiff as a ramrod now. He could practically feel the tension emanating from her halfway across the room.

“And just what, precisely, was this woman’s name?” the coroner asked, his patience obviously wearing thin.

“ ‘Lydia,’ ” the boy said at last. “Just that…Lydia. And then he was gone.”

The veiled lady suddenly slumped in evident relief, and Pickett realized she had feared it might be her own name that had been spoken by the dying man. His father’s shipboard inamorata, perhaps? It would certainly go a long way toward explaining her presence at the inquest, but who was she? Clearly, it behooved him to obtain a look at the ship’s manifest; this document, as he had learned during his brief career as a counting-house clerk, would list the names of the ship’s passengers as well as itemizing its cargo.

Upon being called to give his evidence, Bob Pendleton corroborated Ned’s testimony, although he was less forthcoming than Ned had been, and so the coroner did not detain him for long. He sent the boy back to his seat and summoned the doctor, the same man Pickett had seen in the back room of the Grapes the previous night.

“Will you please state your name and profession for the jury?” prompted the coroner.

“Jonathan Carstairs, physician and surgeon,” came the reply.

“You examined the body of the deceased last night?”

The doctor inclined his head. “I did.”

“And what did you deduce from your examination?”

The doctor launched into a description so larded with technical jargon as to be virtually incomprehensible to the layman. The coroner allowed him to continue until at last he ran down, then said, “Once again, if you please, in plain English this time.”

“In short, the deceased suffered a stab wound to the back. Although one cannot be certain without an autopsy, it appears that the blade punctured the right lung. He would have died within a very short time, and as the lungs filled with blood, he would have been unable to draw sufficient breath to shout for help.”

“In your opinion, could such a wound have been the result of an accident?”

The doctor’s eyebrows rose, and he blinked in surprise. “If it was, then I can only say that the victim must have been prodigiously unlucky. In order to puncture the lung, the flat of the blade”—he demonstrated with his hand held palm down—“must have passed between the ribs. To intentionally strike with such accuracy would be difficult enough; to do so as a result of random chance—well, it staggers the imagination,” the doctor concluded, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Very well, then, do you suppose such a wound could have been self-inflicted?”

“In other words, could the deceased have committed suicide? The obvious answer, of course, is no; that is, it would have been impossible for him to reach behind his back”—once again he demonstrated, closing his fist about the hilt of an imaginary knife and stretching his arm behind his own back—“and stab himself with sufficient force to penetrate three layers of clothing, a dense layer of skin and muscle, and finally a lung—aside from the fact that it would be a damned silly way to go about the thing, even if he were so inclined. Although…” The doctor’s voice trailed off, and he frowned thoughtfully.

“Go on,” urged the coroner.

“It seems to me that if a man is tired of living and yet can’t quite bring himself to do the deed, he might deliberately put himself in harm’s way, and trust to some obliging member of the criminal classes to do the rest. One can’t help but wonder why he was alone in such an insalubrious spot at so late an hour.”

“Have you any reason to suspect he might have done such a thing?” asked the coroner, clearly taken aback.

“None at all,” the doctor hastily demurred. “I had never laid eyes on the man until last night, after he was already dead. I would not presume to make any such judgment on his state of mind.”

“Nor are you”—the coroner turned to issue a caveat to the jury—“to engage in any such speculations. If you believe the hand that held the knife to have been anyone’s but the deceased’s own, then suicide is not a legitimate verdict, no matter what the deceased may have thought or hoped.”

And with this stern warning ringing in their ears, the jury withdrew to begin their deliberations.

* * *

Having tried and failed to persuade Kit that he would have been bored to tears had he prevailed upon his brother to take him to the inquest—an argument which she then inadvertently destroyed by assuring him that John would certainly tell him anything interesting that had been revealed during this procedure—Julia had seized upon the happy notion of inviting him to sit cross-legged on the foot of her bed and read aloud to her from Malory’s tales of King Arthur. In a little more than a month, Kit would be going off to school, and while she could do nothing about his complete lack of Latin, she could at least see to it that he was as literate as possible in his native language. She was well aware of the attraction the stories of Camelot and its knights held for boys, for she remembered her brother-in-law, Jamie Pennington, at the age of twelve, and how any stick discovered lying on the ground was instantly transformed into the sword Excalibur in his hand. Kit, only a little younger than Jamie had been, would very likely prove to be equally susceptible.

The young Arthur had scarcely pulled the sword from the stone, however, when they were interrupted by a light scratching at the door, and a moment later Rogers peered into the room.

“Begging your pardon, madam, but Lord Melrose is below, and is quite insistent upon seeing you.”

“Me?” asked Julia in some surprise. “You are quite certain it was not Mr. Pickett he wished to see?”

Rogers inclined his head. “Quite certain, ma’am. I told him the young master was not at home, and he said he had not come to call on that—well, never mind his exact words. Suffice it to say that he described the young master in the most unflattering terms, and said he wished to see the lady of the house.”

“Oh, dear,” she said with a sigh. It was hardly surprising that, having made himself known to his grandson, Lord Melrose should wish to make the acquaintance of that grandson’s wife—his “St. Giles wench,” as she recalled—but she had neither expected nor desired that meeting to take place so soon. “I shall have to see him, Rogers, but I will not do it here! Show him into the drawing room and offer him something to drink—preferably something that will put him in a mellow mood—and tell him I shall be down in ten minutes. No, best make it fifteen.”

She punctuated this last by giving a sharp tug to the bell pull which would summon her lady’s maid, Betsy, who would be charged with the task of making her presentable to receive her husband’s exalted relation. After sending Kit upstairs to his room, she once again addressed the butler, this time in hushed accents in spite of the fact that they were alone in the room.

“I daresay you will hear it soon enough, Rogers, so I might as well tell you that Lord Melrose is Mr. Pickett’s maternal grandfather. I have no intention of toad-eating him, but nor do I wish to put Mr. Pickett to the blush.”

If Rogers was surprised at all by this revelation, he hid it admirably. “Very good, madam, I believe I know just the thing to do the young master proud and make Lord Melrose, er, mellow.”

She gave him a conspiratorial smile. “Somehow I thought you would.” In a more serious tone, she added, “I have never thanked you properly for the way you have accepted Mr. Pickett as master. Please know that you have my eternal gratitude.”

“I assure you, ma’am, young Mr. Pickett has always been a pleasure to serve.”

“That I can readily believe, for I have never known a man with a sweeter disposition! Still, I suspect you may have much to bear amongst your fellows at the Silver Tray, particularly those who know you were previously in service to a viscount.” She frowned uncertainly. “It is the Silver Tray, is it not? The pub where butlers tend to congregate on their half-days?”

“It is, ma’am. But I pay no heed to the idle talk of vulgar persons, well aware that there are those in service to demanding aristocrats who secretly envy me. And while I would never stoop to gossip, I can think of more than one underbutler who will be obliged to eat his words once the young master’s true parentage becomes known. I am sure Mr. Pickett deserves every bit of his good fortune.”

Julia made a wry face. “Yes, but at the moment, it remains to be seen whether Lord Melrose will prove to be good fortune or no.”

Their hushed conversation was interrupted at this point by the entrance of Betsy through the jib door. “You rang, ma’am?”

Rogers bowed and then took himself off in search of the spirits that would have so beneficial an effect upon his lordship’s temperament. Scarcely twelve minutes later, Julia entered the drawing room, her golden hair simply coiffed and her figure clad in an elegantly simple morning gown of soft blue wool with a high waist and skirts cut full enough to accommodate her swollen midriff.

“Lord Melrose,” she said, making a very credible curtsy. “An unexpected pleasure.”

The marquess put down his glass and rose, returning the briefest of bows and saying without preamble, “I daresay your husband must have told you that he’s my heir.”

“Those are not quite the words he used, but yes, I’m aware that you are his maternal grandmother. Have you come to buy me off, then?” she asked, a hint of mischief in her eyes. “He tells me you have your own plans for his marriage, and I confess, I’m curious to know how much you intend to offer me.”

“You are impertinent, miss!”

“Am I? But then, I’m not the one arranging other people’s marriages. Nor am I a ‘miss,’ for that matter. But how rude of me!” she exclaimed in quite a different voice as she sank gracefully onto the sofa. “We must not quarrel, since it appears we are to be family! Do sit down, and let us get to know one another. I’m sorry John is not here to receive you.”

“Well, I’m not,” Lord Melrose said bluntly, returning to his seat. “It was to see you that I came.”

“Oh?” The slight lift of her eyebrows invited him to explain.

“I suppose he’s told you that I’m petitioning the crown to allow my title to pass through the female line if there is no male heir. If my petition is granted, your husband will become the Marquess of Melrose upon my death, with all the properties and privileges that entails.”

She nodded. “Yes, I’m aware of how the laws of succession work. My first husband was the Viscount Fieldhurst.”

“Exactly!” The marquess slapped his knee for emphasis. “Although I should like to know what it is about these Pickett fellows that make otherwise sensible women of good breeding—but that’s neither here nor there. Having come from an aristocratic background yourself, you are well aware of the advantages that come with such a position. Can’t you do something to make him see reason?”

“I am certainly aware of the advantages that come with a lofty title,” she agreed in measured tones, “and I’m not unsympathetic to your desire to prevent its falling into abeyance. But I must caution you to go gently. John has the sweetest temperament of any man I’ve ever known, but don’t mistake it for weakness. He won’t be driven. Any attempt on your part to do so will only set up his back.”

“Hmph! I daresay it was sweetness of temperament that led him to barge into my house in the middle of the night accusing me of murder!”

“Did he do so?” she asked, taken aback by this revelation. But then, she supposed she shouldn’t be; if she and Emily Dunnington had wondered if perhaps Lord Melrose had taken a belated revenge against his despised son-in-law, then surely John, with five years’ experience with Bow Street under his belt, must have considered the same possibility. The only real surprise was that he had not mentioned his confrontation with his grandfather to her himself. “I confess, that doesn’t sound at all like something he would do. But then, only consider what a day he’d had: he’d only just learned of your existence—and what possessed you to have him abducted from Covent Garden, I can’t imagine—and then he came home and what should he find but his father, for whom his feelings are ambiguous at best, returned from Botany Bay, only to be awakened a few hours later in the middle of the night and obliged to identify his father’s body, stabbed to death in a back alley in Limehouse.”

Lord Melrose made an impatient motion with his hand. “You need not tell me that. I know all about it.”

“Then, too,” she continued as if he had not spoken, “he has little enough cause to love you, and every reason to resent you.”

The marquess took instant umbrage at this suggestion. “What the devil—I’d never even laid eyes on the fellow!”

She nodded sagely. “Exactly. He has no memory of his mother, you see, and his father had only just told him about the circumstances of their marriage and her death.”

Lord Melrose gave a derisive snort. “How old is he now, twenty-four? Twenty-five? And he was about four years old at the time, so she’s been gone twenty years at the least reckoning. It’s all water under the bridge now—ancient history!”

“To you, perhaps, but not to him. You see, he has lived with the consequences of Lady Lydia’s death every day of his life.”

“Nonsense!”

“Not at all. It was to buy medicine for her that Jack stole from his employer, and after that, when the theft made it impossible for him to find honest work, he—and, later, John—was obliged to steal for a living.”

“But—well, but damn it all, what does he expect me to do about it now?” he demanded, and beneath the combative tone, Julia caught a glimpse of a very lonely man who had lived with deeply buried regrets for more than twenty years.

“May I make a suggestion?” she asked gently.

“I wish you would,” he grumbled in a tone that suggested quite the opposite.

“Abandon any talk of titles and estates for the nonce, and just get to know him—not as the baseborn heir you’d thought to mold to your satisfaction as if he were a lump of clay, but as the rather remarkable man he is.” She smiled. “You may find you like him a good deal more than the paragon of your imagination.”