Chapter 11

 

In Which Gentleman Jack Pickett Is Laid to Rest

 

Before he could begin his investigation in earnest, however, there was his father’s funeral to be got through. A note send round from Mr. Colquhoun had informed him that all was arranged, and he had only to present himself at St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden the following morning at eleven o’clock. His invitation to Kit to join him in their father’s funeral cortège had been accepted with an enthusiasm not entirely appropriate to the solemnity of the occasion, and so after partaking of a rather sober breakfast, the two brothers had set out for the church, both clad in black coats with armbands on the right sleeves and sprigs of rosemary tied with black ribbons pinned to their left lapels.

While Pickett’s feelings toward his father were ambivalent at best, Kit knew no such indecision. “And I’d only just got him!” he complained bitterly. “He was going to tell me all about the Antipodes. Da says—said—the seasons are all mixed up there, that it’s winter in July and you can go sea-bathing on Boxing Day!”

“Did he?” Pickett asked, feigning an interest he did not feel.

“And,” Kit continued, “he said they have all kinds of funny animals that we don’t have here.”

“Do they?”

At least Kit’s constant chatter spared him the necessity of speech, for the boy required no response beyond a vague acknowledgement, just enough to convince him that his elder brother was still listening.

“I showed Da the horse I drew,” Kit continued, when the topic of the Antipodes and its peculiarities had been exhausted, “and he said I might get to where I can draw even better than your mum could. D’you s’pose my mum could draw?” After a contemplative pause, he indirectly conceded the superiority of his brother’s claim in this regard, offering as an alternative, “But Mum can down a whole bottle of Blue Ruin without belching even once, so I guess that’s something, isn’t it?”

Pickett had no opinion to put forth on this subject, so Kit continued his monologue uninterrupted until they reached the church.

Mr. Colquhoun had assumed, quite correctly, that Pickett would not want his father’s body laid out in the drawing room of the house in Curzon Street. Pickett was almost certain the old superstition about pregnant women not viewing dead bodies was exactly that—a superstition—but there was no need in tempting fate, especially now that Julia’s confinement was so near at hand. Instead, the magistrate had arranged for the coffin to be conveyed to St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, adjacent to the market where the deceased had once plied his dubious trade.

Pickett opened the door of the church, and the scent of lilies filled his nostrils. The coffin lid had not yet been put in place, but a large bouquet of the trumpet-shaped white flowers lay at the base of its bier, ready to adorn the top of the coffin once it was closed. Kit’s voice trailed into silence, and a small hand slipped into Pickett’s.

“Do I have to look at him?” Kit asked, his voice a near-whisper.

“No, of course not,” Pickett assured him. “Not unless you want to.”

“It’ll be my last chance to see him,” the boy said doubtfully.

“I’ll go first, shall I?” Pickett suggested. “Then I can tell you what he looks like, and you can decide for yourself if you want to see.”

Kit nodded in agreement, and Pickett approached the coffin alone. Since the knife wound had been in the back, and the crust of dried blood at the corner of his mouth had been washed away by the woman who had laid out the body for burial, there were no visible signs of trauma, let alone violence. In fact, Pickett was struck by how very young his father looked. The lines on his face that had testified to a hard life were now smoothed out in death, and he appeared fully ten years younger than the forty-five years he’d had in his dish. He said ‘Lydia,’ the boy who’d found the body had testified. Pickett found himself thinking not of the transported felon, but of the gallant young footman who had eloped with his master’s daughter in order to save her from an unwanted marriage. To his surprise, he found himself wishing he’d had the chance to know that Jack Pickett better; the Pickett men, it seemed, had a knack for marrying above themselves.

He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, and in the next instant, Kit stood beside him.

“He just looks like he’s asleep,” the boy said with patent relief.

“He does,” Pickett agreed, adding, perhaps unwisely, “Not scary at all.”

Kit bristled with indignation. “Who said I was scared? I’m not afraid of my own da!”

“No, of course not,” Pickett said hastily, scrambling to retrieve his position. “What was I thinking?”

Having corrected this patently false implication of cowardice on his part, Kit readily forgave Pickett for his lapse. “You were probably thinking there would be blood and all,” he allowed generously. “But there isn’t, is there?”

“None at all,” Pickett concurred, keeping to himself the observation that there had been a great deal of blood at first, until the body had been laid out for burial.

“In fact—” Kit looked from his father’s earthly remains to the elder brother who was very much alive, and back again. “In fact,” he said, much struck, “he looks a lot like you.” Realizing this assessment was hardly flattering, he hastily amended it. “I mean, he looks like you would look, if you were dead.”

A smile tugged at Pickett’s lips. “Well, that’s a relief,” he told his young half-brother. “You had me worried for a minute.”

“I trust everything has been done to your satisfaction?”

Pickett turned at the sound of the familiar Scots burr, and saw Mr. Colquhoun walking up the aisle.

“Mr. Colquhoun!” Kit, sensing a gift of coinage in the offing, cried with an eagerness quite unsuited to the occasion, the gleeful exclamation echoing off the walls of the nave.

He was not disappointed. “Well met, young Kit,” said the magistrate, offering the boy a handshake as a guise for slipping something into the palm of his hand. “Well, John?”

“Yes, sir, very—very satisfactory,” Pickett said gratefully, thinking how inadequate the word seemed. “If you will give me an accounting of the extent of my obligation, I will repay—” He broke off, reading in his former magistrate’s face the unlikelihood of his being allowed to reimburse the expenses, which surely must have been considerable, incurred on his behalf. “But, sir, why should you be obliged to pay for my father’s funeral? You may be sure he would not have done the same for you, although—forgive me—he would have been pleased enough by the occasion that warranted it.”

Mr. Colquhoun chuckled. “No doubt, and can you wonder at it? You might say I owe it to the man,” he added in a more serious vein.

“Nonsense! He willingly broke the law, not only once, but repeatedly. No one would have thought it unduly harsh if you had sent him to the gallows. By sentencing him to be transported instead, you granted him a mercy many would say was undeserved.”

“Aye, and in the process, I denied him the chance to see his son grow to manhood.”

A quick glance at Kit, who had polished the large copper coin on the sleeve of his coat and was now holding it up to the figure in the coffin as if presenting it for his inspection, served to remind Pickett that his father’s sentence had also denied him the knowledge of his second son at all.

Having made his point, the magistrate continued. “Perhaps worse, I claimed that privilege for myself.”

“And if you hadn’t, there is every chance I would not have lived to manhood in any case. If you’ll recall, Da was not the only one breaking the law.”

Mr. Colquhoun needed no reminder. Even after eleven years, he still retained a vivid recollection of the night John Pickett had first made his acquaintance, having been hauled into the Bow Street Public Office for stealing an apple from the fruit and vegetable market at Covent Garden. He had been a gangly and undernourished fourteen-year-old at the time, and yet the officer who made the arrest had apparently felt it necessary to black the lad’s eye and break his nose in order to subdue him. Blood had still been oozing from the boy’s nostrils, but more compelling than his injuries had been the fear in his eyes (or, rather, his eye, as one of the two was swollen almost completely shut), contrasted with defiant tilt of his chin as he regarded the magistrate who possessed the power to sentence him to hang. Mr. Colquhoun had not done so. In fact, he had not charged the lad with any crime at all. Instead, he had taken young John to a pub and bought him something to eat—a ham sandwich, as he recalled, which had disappeared with all the speed of which an adolescent male is capable—after which he had called in a favor and persuaded an old acquaintance, a coal merchant, to take the boy on as an apprentice. Five years later, he had bought the remaining two years of nineteen-year-old John’s contract of apprenticeship out of his own pocket, and had brought him to Bow Street.

And still, at twenty-five, his young protégé felt himself indebted to his mentor for this checkered career, when Mr. Colquhoun regularly cursed himself for his lack of foresight in failing to send him to school, where his natural intelligence, combined with whatever influence the magistrate could wield, might well have earned him a scholarship to university.

The magistrate harrumphed to clear a throat that suddenly felt tight. “Be that as it may,” he said impatiently, “there’s a crowd waiting outside, so if you’re ready, I’ll be on my way. I hope you’ll forgive me for not forming part of the cortège; I suspect my presence would be an unwelcome distraction amongst your father’s former set.”

Pickett had been aware of a muted roar from outside, but he had assumed it to be an especially lively market day in the piazza. To his surprise, the doors flew open and a crowd descended upon the nave, all clad in what he recognized to be their best clothes. Since these garments had been augmented with whatever black adornments they could contrive, from black bands affixed to sleeves to black ribbons fluttering from bonnets, the purpose of their presence was clear. He wasn’t quite sure how word of Gentleman Jack Pickett’s murder in Limehouse had made its way to Covent Garden, but that it had done so could not be denied. Pickett, who had assumed that his father would be mostly forgotten after an absence of more than a decade, was touched. He took a deep breath and stepped into the crowd, prepared to receive the condolences of his father’s friends and acquaintances.

And then the rector took his place at the altar, and the funeral began. Since the service as outlined in the Book of Common Prayer followed a set form, the rector was spared the challenge of representing a notorious felon as a pattern-card of virtue. Even so, it was not long before the service was over and the crowd departed the church and spilled out onto the piazza, separating themselves into those who intended to form part of the cortège and those who did not.

“And after I’d raised him as if he were my own son—”

A querulous voice cut through the babel, a voice Pickett recognized at once. He scanned the crowd and soon located Moll, clearly in her element. Somehow she’d contrived to procure a slightly faded gown of black satin cut in what must have been the latest fashion twenty years earlier. It appeared she had cast herself in the rôle of grieving widow, never mind the fact that her union with his father—whom she had not seen in ten years, and whose place had been filled with a succession of men in the interim—had never been blessed by a parson.

“And then what must he do but take my boy away from me—me, that cared for him like a mother—”

Pickett felt a tug at his sleeve. “John,” Kit said timidly, “will I have to go back and live with Mum, now that she’s seen me?”

Pickett might have assured him that Moll had no real desire to have her son returned to her, as no mere human child could take the place that Blue Ruin held in her affection. But surely no child would want to hear such a thing, even if the child knew it to be true.

“No,” he said firmly. “You can go and say good morning to her, if you feel you ought to, but if she wants you to stay with her, just tell her that I won’t let you go.” Moll would like that, as it would appear to confirm the tales she was pouring into the ears of her cronies. In the meantime, it would serve to distract Kit from any sounds he might hear from within the church as the coffin lid was put in place and nailed down. Now that he thought of it, he wouldn’t mind having something to distract him from those sounds, as well.

At last it was time to depart for the burial ground where Mr. Colquhoun had arranged for his father to be interred. The coffin had been loaded onto a hearse and draped with a black pall, while the horses hitched to the vehicle were similarly garbed in black, their elegant headdresses of black ostrich plumes fluttering with their every movement. As the hearse turned into Bedford Street, the church bell began its mournful toll—another funeral custom for which Mr. Colquhoun would have borne the expense—and it occurred to Pickett that his father had achieved in death a dignity that he had never possessed in life.

As the chief mourners, Pickett and Kit followed behind the hearse. Rather to Pickett’s surprise, Moll did not accompany them, and he breathed a silent thanks to whoever had dissuaded her. He wondered if someone had pointed out that Gentleman Jack’s lawfully wedded wife—a lady born and bred, albeit one who had been in her grave these twenty years and more—would never have done anything so vulgar as attend a funeral; he couldn’t imagine any other argument that might have had the power to move her.

They had not gone far when it began to rain, a cold, steady stream that trickled down the back of Pickett’s neck and caused the horses’ handsome feathers to droop. And yet none of the mourners abandoned the procession; on the contrary, several bystanders, upon being told who it was whose body was being laid to rest, had joined the cortège, giving the proceedings an almost festive air.

Gradually, however, Pickett became aware of a disturbance somewhere behind him. He turned to identify the source of the confusion, and saw a carriage being forced past the procession, a sleek black carriage with—yes, Pickett was almost certain there was a crest on the door. The mourners were compelled to make way, lest they fall afoul of the coachman’s whip, and so it did not take long for the vehicle to draw abreast. The coachman slowed his team to a walk in order to keep pace with the cortège, and it struck Pickett that the matched black horses might be mistaken for part of the funeral procession themselves.

And so, in a way, they were. For the carriage door was flung open, and a curt voice from inside commanded, “Get in.”

The interior of the vehicle was lost in shadow, but Pickett recognized the voice at once, and did not hesitate to reply, “No, thank you.”

“Don’t be a fool, boy!” Lord Melrose snapped. “D’you think your freezing to death will punish me? Well, it won’t.”

Pickett might have asked why, if that were the case, his lordship had bothered to seek out his father’s funeral cortège at all. Instead, he glanced hesitantly at Kit. The boy was following the exchange with interest, but his cheeks were red, his nose was dripping, and he was shivering so violently that his teeth chattered with cold.

“All right, then. Come on, Kit,” he called to his young brother, prepared to hoist him bodily into a carriage whose step was not lowered. “Up you go.”

“Not him. You.”

“I beg your pardon?” Pickett asked, certain he could not have heard aright.

“The boy is nothing to me. Just because I choose not to have my grandson making a spectacle of himself don’t mean I intend to do the same by every tag, rag, and bobtail who has a fancy to stay warm and dry.”

“In that case, I thank you, but I would prefer to walk.” Turning to his young brother, he said bracingly, “Chin up, Kit. Not much farther now.”

In fact, he had no idea how much farther they had to walk. Still, he had no intention of riding comfortably in his grandfather’s carriage and allowing a ten-year-old boy to follow his father’s coffin alone, no matter how inclement the weather.

“Oh, have it your way,” Lord Melrose grumbled. “Let the brat ride; it’s nothing to me.”

Had it been merely his own comfort at issue, Pickett would have taken great pleasure in flinging his grandfather’s unwilling generosity back in his teeth. One look at Kit’s misery, however, was enough to put paid to this tempting prospect.

“I’m obliged to you,” Pickett said in accents every bit as grudging as his grandfather’s had been, then boosted Kit up into the carriage and climbed in after him, closing the door behind him.

“Who are you?” Kit inquired artlessly of his reluctant rescuer, bouncing experimentally on the elegantly upholstered and well-sprung squabs.

“Lord Melrose, this is my half-brother, Christopher, familiarly known as Kit,” Pickett put in quickly, before his lordship could annihilate the boy with a brutal snub. “Kit, Lord Melrose. He’s—well, it looks like he’s my grandfather.”

“Oh.” Far from being awed by his brother’s exalted connection, Kit took this revelation in his stride. “Are you my grandfather, too?”

“I thank God, no,” said his lordship in crushing accents.

“Is this your carriage?” continued Kit, undaunted. “Julia—John’s wife, you know—she has a carriage, too, but hers doesn’t have that—that thing on the door.” Kit’s hands described the shield shape of the Melrose coat of arms emblazoned on the panel of his lordship’s carriage.

“She used to,” Pickett told him, unwilling for Julia to appear in any way inferior to his lordship. “When her first husband was still alive.”

“Do you have to be very rich to have one of those things?” Kit’s inquisition of Lord Melrose continued. “Is that why you have one and Julia doesn’t anymore?”

Lord Melrose did not answer either of these questions directly, only observed that if his petition should prove successful, Kit’s sister-in-law might someday have a crest on her own carriage doors.

“Will she?” Kit turned to his brother for confirmation. “Why?”

“Let’s—we’ll talk about it later, shall we?” Pickett suggested, avoiding his grandfather’s eye.

Some time later, standing with his arm about Kit’s shoulders beside the hole dug to receive their father’s coffin, Pickett was hard-pressed to pay attention to the rector reading the burial service, so conscious was he of his grandfather’s carriage waiting some distance away. Lord Melrose did not join the mourners at the graveside, but Pickett had been so certain that the marquess would quit the premises as soon as he had delivered his passengers to the burial ground that he could hardly have been more surprised if his grandfather had personally delivered the eulogy.

At last the coffin was lowered into the ground, and the brothers Pickett removed the black-ribboned sprigs of rosemary from their lapels and tossed them onto the lid of the coffin. Pickett promptly led Kit away from the grave, wishing to spare the boy the grim sight of the sexton and his assistant shoveling dirt onto the casket containing their father’s body.

If he had any doubts that he—and, by default, Kit—were to ride back to Curzon Street in the marquess’s carriage, these were settled by the sight of his lordship’s coachman climbing down from the box, opening the carriage door, and lowering the step. Boarding the vehicle was considerably easier when it was standing still, and so it was not long before they were threading their way through the dispersing mourners. If any of these resented the fact that Pickett and Kit were being conveyed to and from their father’s funeral while they were obliged to trudge back to Covent Garden or its environs in the rain, this was not apparent in the friendly waves or respectful tugging of forelocks directed toward them. Pickett acknowledged these with a sober yet grateful nod, but when he imagined what the situation might have been had Moll decided to accompany her former cully’s coffin, he could not quite suppress a smile at the thought of Lord Melrose’s discomfiture had he insisted that she, too, be offered a seat in the carriage.

The conversation on the return to Mayfair was strained, even Kit having been cowed into uncharacteristic silence, until at last the vehicle came to a stop before the tall, narrow house of which he had become master upon his marriage. Pickett gripped Kit’s sleeve to prevent the boy from opening the door and jumping down to the pavement as was his usual habit, while the coachman climbed down from the box to open the door and lower the step—tasks that Andrew, Pickett’s own footman, might have performed, had he any reason to expect Mr. Pickett and young Master Kit would be not be returning on foot, just as they had set out.

Once his sleeve was released, Kit lost no time in bounding down from the carriage and bolting into the house, eager to tell Rogers that he had been given a ride in a carriage, one with a “thing” on the door, by his half-grandfather—a relationship that Lord Melrose must surely have found appalling, had he been privy to it.

Pickett’s own disembarkation was rather more sedate. He said nothing as he exited the vehicle, but upon reaching the pavement, he turned back to address the one remaining passenger.

“I—I’m obliged to you, sir,” he said stiffly.

Lord Melrose harrumphed in a manner that might have signified anything, or nothing at all, and then the driver raised the step, closed the door, and climbed onto the box. A moment later, the carriage was bowling smartly down the street and around the curve that hid it from view.

Suddenly feeling very tired, Pickett heaved a sigh, then climbed the two shallow steps onto the portico and entered the house, closing the door behind him.