Chapter Fourteen #2
“Mr Hamley,” Crabb said with crisp authority, “Forgive the intrusion but we’d like a word with your apprentice.”
Crabb nodded toward Mr Henderson, who turned pale as suet. The butcher gave him a shove forward, and he stumbled—though James suspected that was less nerves than the consequence of moving too suddenly in breeches that tight. Every step, James thought, must have to be carefully considered.
“You heard his lordship,” Mr Hamley grunted, before turning back to Lord Crabb, “The back room is free, my lord, if you need privacy.”
James and Lord Crabb followed Mr Henderson—who trudged with the air of a man walking to the gallows—into a room at the back of the shop.
There, knives of every size and purpose dangled from hooks above a block table.
As Mr Henderson slouched insolently against the wall, James reached up and plucked one down.
He examined the edge with careful deliberation, gratified that the afternoon sun streaming through the window obliged him by making it glint menacingly.
Mr Henderson’s eyes followed the knife in James’s hand, his bravado draining away with every heartbeat.
“What’s all this about then?” the young man asked, standing nervously to attention.
“We believe you killed Sir Ambrose Quill,” Lord Crabb calmly informed him.
The accusation hung in the air for a moment, before Henderson replied.
“I never!” he blurted, making a good show at indignation.
“That,” James remarked coolly, turning the knife in his hand deliberately, “Is precisely what a man who doesn’t wish to swing from Tyburn’s tree might say.”
At the mention of the notorious gallows, Henderson went ashen, the cocky gleam in his eye vanishing.
“I never killed him, I swear it!”
“Oh?” James leaned a fraction closer, his voice calm but cutting. “Then how do you explain the quarrel you had with Sir Ambrose on the morning of his death? Witnesses heard it plain enough.”
He knew he was stretching the truth slightly but wanted to shock a confession from the lad.
Henderson’s lips parted, then pressed together again, his tongue darting nervously to wet them. He wasn’t so handsome now, James thought, in fact, he looked rather weasel like.
“And your sudden change in fortune?” Crabb added, his gaze dropping deliberately to the lad’s legs. “Those breeches are Weston’s work, if I’m not mistaken. Quite extravagant for a butcher’s apprentice.”
“Do you really think they look like Weston’s?” Henderson brightened for half a second, vanity eclipsing fear. “They’re from a tailor in Stroud—copied straight out of an Ackermann’s print of Mr Brummell himself.”
“The crowds at a hanging don’t care for fashion,” James cut in, exasperated now. “And the courts won’t look kindly on a man who kills just to dress like Beau Brummell.”
“I didn’t kill him, I swear it!” Henderson stammered, his eyes darting nervously to Lord Crabb as though hoping for reprieve.
“Then explain yourself, boy,” the viscount said sternly.
“I didn’t kill him—I was bribing him. It was Mrs Pinnock who put me up to it,” he muttered at last. “She had proof of something shameful in Sir Ambrose’s family history. She told me he’d pay handsomely to keep it quiet.”
“Mrs Pinnock?” James couldn’t keep the incredulity from his tone as he pictured the elderly dame.
“It’s true!” Henderson blustered. “She wanted revenge on him; she said he’d conned her father out of money, years ago.”
James felt a pang of regret; Flora had suggested that might be a motive for murder and he had dismissed the idea.
“And what sort of scandal did she share with you?” he pressed.
Henderson’s expression turned smug. Clearly, he disliked Sir Ambrose enough to relish the telling of how he had exploited the man.
“His knighthood wasn’t so grand as he pretended,” Henderson leered. “His mother had an affair with a minor royal — for all his pomp, Sir Ambrose was baseborn. He came by his title because of his mother’s indiscretions - not for services to education and all those papers on bogs, like he claimed.”
“Latrines,” James corrected absently.
It sounded plausible enough, yet James wanted more before he acquitted the lad.
“Sir Ambrose had far more influence than you, boy. Why didn’t he simply tell you to be off?”
“Because Mrs Pinnock gave me proof.” Henderson lifted his chin, almost proud. “A book of clippings on the whole scandal.”
James recalled the scraps he had found in Ambrose’s bureau drawer — a butcher’s receipt, an old gossip-sheet clipping. Good Lord, it all fit.
Lord Crabb was staring at him, eyebrows raised. “Well, old chum?”
“It’s plausible,” James exhaled slowly, then turned back to Henderson. “But how can we be certain that Mrs Pinnock didn’t push you further—toward murder?”
“And kill off my only source of income?” Henderson interjected indignantly. “Do you know what what an apprentice earns? I was devastated when he died.”
“You’ll forgive me if I can’t summon sympathy for your loss,” Crabb said dryly.
James fixed the boy with a final look. “Do you believe Mrs Pinnock wanted him dead?”
Henderson nodded gravely. “She hated him. I wouldn’t have mixed myself up in it if I’d known.”
“Keep all of this to yourself,” James cautioned, then beckoned Crabb to follow him out.
The viscount hesitated. James heard him murmur to Henderson, “What did you say the name of that tailor in Stroud was?”
He caught up with James outside, sheepish. At James’s raised brow, Crabb muttered defensively, “It’s devilish hard to find a good tailor in these parts. Now, don’t keep me waiting, what do you make of it all?”
“It’s possible Henderson may be lying,” James said with a shrug. “But if he is, time is on our side with the roads impassable.”
He recalled overhearing Mrs Pinnock’s eagerness to be off to Bath—was that another clue? And had she not been top of Flora’s list of those who might have had opportunity to steal the wolfsbane?
“So you believe we should bide our time and look more closely at Mrs Pinnock?” Crabb asked with a frown.
James quickly explained Flora’s theory—that Mrs Pinnock had lost part of her fortune to bad investment advice from Sir Ambrose. The viscount’s brows shot up, then he gave a slow, thoughtful nod.
“The brandy bottle, her sudden journey to Plumpton, her taste for revenge…” James concluded. “It sounds absurd to imagine an elderly lady committing murder, but there’s more to her than we credited.”
And Flora, he thought with a stir of admiration, had been the first to see it.