Chapter 29
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
No Line to Hold
The night before, I’d made it upstairs through sheer force of will. My hands had fumbled badly at the buttons of my coat. I’d discarded my boots somewhere between the dressing room and the bed. And then I’d collapsed on the mattress, the pain in my leg throbbing in time with my pulse.
I’d dreamed of Sevastopol, as I do when pain drives. The dream was the old one until it was not.
The old one ran the same course every time, the way a river finds the same channel.
The forward trench in the grey before dawn.
The cold that had found its way into the iron of the rifles and the marrow of the men.
The order I was about to give to advance that I could never call back.
And then the noise—the obscene music of it, shot and shell and the high animal sounds men made when the body discovered what the mind refused to believe.
I was moving up the line. My leg was whole in the dream; it was always whole, which was its own cruelty.
I was looking for someone in the smoke. And I never found him.
But last night the dream did something it had never done. Somewhere in the smoke, threaded through the guns, a woman was screaming.
She did not belong there. There were no women at Sevastopol, not in the trenches, not in the grey dawn with the iron and the cold.
And yet the scream went up and up, and it had a shape to it I half-recognized, the shape of a sound forced out of a body that has just understood it will not be helped.
Over my head, where there should have been only the low Crimean sky, there was glass.
A glass roof. The scream struck it and came back down doubled, the way Mainwaring had explained, the way Brookes had stood in a cold room in Edinburgh and told me it had.
I was running toward it through the smoke and the guns.
But I could not reach it; I could not reach her.
There was a body between us in the dark.
I came awake, my breath loud and ragged, with my hand fisted in something warm and coarse.
Ajax had his head on the mattress beside me.
He had got up onto the bed, which he is not permitted to do.
But which he does on the nights he judges the rule to be the lesser of the evening’s concerns.
He did not whine. He did not fuss. He simply lay his great head down within reach of my hand and let his weight settle against my side and waited—as he had waited a hundred times in a hundred grey mornings—for the thing in me to pass.
So I’d lain still and allowed it to flow through me. There was no quick way through it. There was only the breathing, and the count, and the warm coarse fact of the dog, who asked nothing and told no one and had never once looked at me as though I were less for needing him.
I had never spoken of it to a living soul.
Dawson knew, because Dawson knew everything and said nothing, and the dog knew, because the dog was the only creature I had ever permitted close enough to know.
That was the whole of my garrison against it—a silent man and a silent beast, and the rule about the bed, which Ajax broke when he decided I required it broken.
I had intended to wake early so I could go to Lark and tell her what I’d learned. But my exhaustion, and the pain, and the dream betrayed me. And I didn’t come awake until past noon.
Dawson, when I rang, brought coffee and the news that no message had been received from Everly House, when I asked, but one had from my solicitors. He brought the letter along with the coffee.
I tore open the envelope to find a witness had come forward about the incident that had killed Lydia Gray. They’d interviewed her and found her statement believable. And then they’d included her name and address because she was willing to speak to me.
“You will want to eat something, my lord,” Dawson observed.
My first inclination was to decline the suggestion, but Dawson was right, as he often was. I hadn’t eaten anything since that questionable meal at Waverley Station.
“Eggs, toast, and anything else that can be made in a hurry. I have something I must do.”
“Yes, my lord.”
While he was gone, I bathed and dressed. A soldier learns to fend for himself even when he has a manservant.
My leg had told me in no uncertain terms, during my bath, that I was not to put it through the rigors of yesterday. I was to ease my way through the day or else I would pay the price. So, once the food was consumed, I asked for my carriage.
The address of the witness was close to Gower Street, the place where Lydia had been trampled by a carriage. Too late I realized I should have written ahead and asked for permission. But it was too late for regret. I would have to beg for forgiveness.
The house was one of a narrow terrace, respectable and worn, the brass on the door polished until the maker’s name had nearly rubbed away. I knocked and composed myself to be turned from the step.
The woman who answered was of middling size and somewhere in her fifties, white-haired, with bright black eyes shiny as boot-buttons. They went over me in a single unhurried sweep—coat, stick, the favoring of my left leg, the scar—and made some private accounting of which she gave no sign.
“Yes?”
“I beg your pardon, ma’am. I am Everthorne. I am looking for Martha Preston. My solicitors tell me she witnessed the incident on Gower Street, where a woman was run down by a carriage.”
The black eyes widened by a fraction. “Oh. You’re the gentleman whose solicitors came to see me.”
“I am.”
“Then you’d best come in.”
She stepped aside without ceremony, and I followed her into a front room no larger than my dressing closet.
A fire burned in the grate despite the mildness of the day—the small, careful fire of a household that counted its coals.
A sewing basket sat open beside the chair nearest the hearth, a half-darned stocking laid across its rim.
Everything in the room had its place, and everything in it had been put there by hands that did not waste motion.
This was not a woman given to fancy, nor to telling tales for the pleasure of being listened to.
“Please sit down, Lord Everthorne.”
I obeyed, lowering myself into the chair she indicated with more gratitude than I let her see. She took the seat by the fire and folded her hands in her lap.
“My sister tells me I ought to begin by apologizing.”
“For what?”
“For not coming forward sooner.”
“I confess the delay has puzzled me.”
“It would puzzle me as well, my lord, had I not spent the last three weeks in York.”
I retrieved a notebook and pencil from my coat. “Why York?”
“My sister took ill. A chest infection. For several days the doctor feared the worst of it.” She smoothed the stocking across her knee with one thumb, a small steadying gesture.
“The very afternoon of the accident I’d had a telegram bidding me come at once.
I gave my statement to a constable and was on a train out of King’s Cross within the hour. ”
“You spoke to the police.”
“I did.”
A familiar heat moved through me, low and old. Three weeks. A witness had stood on a London pavement and told a constable what she had seen, and in three weeks no man in the whole of the Metropolitan Police had thought it worth a letter to anyone who cared.
“And what, precisely, did you tell them?”
Miss Preston blinked at the sharpness I had not quite managed to keep from the question.
“The truth.”
“Which was?”
She studied me for a long moment, and something in her face shifted. “You truly do not know?”
“No.”
“It was no accident, my lord.”
I felt myself go very still. “What did you see, Miss Preston?”
She drew a slow breath, and her gaze drifted from my face to some point above the fire, to the afternoon three weeks gone.
“I was on the far side of Gower Street. There was a flower seller at the corner, and I had stopped to look over the roses. I had half a mind to carry some up to York.” Her hands settled.
“The woman stepped down off the pavement. She seemed distracted, as though her mind were elsewhere entirely.”
Lydia. Carrying her poem, or the memory of it, into the last street she would ever cross.
“Then a man came up to her.”
“A stranger?”
“I believe so. She looked startled when he spoke to her—the way you do at a face you don’t know.”
“What happened then?”
“They had a few words between them. I was too far off to hear, and the cart traffic was loud.” Her mouth thinned. “And then he pushed her.”
For the space of a breath, I thought I had misheard her over the snap of the fire. “Pushed her?”
“Directly into the road.”
The little room seemed to draw in around the two of us.
“You are certain of it.”
“I watched it happen, my lord. With these eyes. I have turned it over a hundred times since, looking for the innocent shape of it, and there is none.”
I leaned forward, both hands on the head of my stick. “Tell me exactly what you saw. As you would tell it to a man who must act upon it.”
She inclined her head, as if she approved of being asked so.
“The carriage was already coming on—a closed carriage, moving faster than it had any business moving on that street. The woman turned, as though she meant to walk away from the man. He put both his hands flat against her shoulders.” Miss Preston raised her own hands a little from her lap to show me, palms out. “And he shoved her into its path.”
My grip tightened until the brass of the stick bit into my palm.
“And then?”
“The horse took her. She went down. There was shouting—a man near me, and then half the street at once.” She swallowed, and for the first time her steadiness wavered.
“And then the carriage was gone. The driver never stopped. And the man who pushed her, he was gone as well. Almost before she struck the stones.”
“Did he run?”
“No.” She looked at me directly. “That was the thing that struck me hardest and has struck me every night since. He did not run. He walked.”
As a man walks who has finished an errand and has another waiting.
“What did he look like?”
She answered without a moment’s hunting for it, the way an honest witness does when the picture is burned in. “Medium height. Strongly built through the shoulders. Rough-looking.”
“Anything more particular?”
“Ginger hair. Bright with it. And a scar. Here.” She touched her own cheek, drawing a fingertip down toward the jaw. “Running down to about there.”
“Anything else?”
“A broken nose. Or one that had been broken more than the once—it sat crooked on his face.”
I had the man drawn in my mind before she finished.
Not a gentleman. Not a clerk, nor a tradesman, nor any creature whose living depended on being thought respectable.
A bruiser. The sort hired to settle a difficulty for people unwilling to soil their own gloves—plentiful enough in any city, and never far from where money met inconvenience.
“Had you ever seen him before that afternoon?”
“Several times.”
That brought my head up. “You had?”
“Oh yes. About Gower Street, this twelvemonth and more.”
“Doing what?”
She lifted one shoulder. “Lingering, mostly. Standing where a man stands when he is waiting, and means you to know it. Talking with rough company. Carrying a parcel here and there. Running errands.”
“For whom?”
“That I couldn’t tell you.”
“But you knew his face.”
“I did.”
“Would others?”
A small, dry smile touched the corner of her mouth. “Certainly.”
“Why so certain?”
“Because men of that kind are rarely invisible in a neighborhood, Lord Everthorne. They put down roots in the public houses and the lodging houses. They want to be known—it is half of what they are paid for. Someone always has a name to put to them.”
“Did you ever hear his?”
“No.”
A disappointment, but a small one only. She had given me a great deal more than a name.
“But I heard enough,” she added, “to know what sort he was.”
“What sort?”
“The sort who’ll do near enough anything, my lord, if someone is willing to pay him for it.”
Silence settled between us, broken only by the fire.
Twenty-one days. For twenty-one days the death of Lydia Gray had been written down as a tragedy of the streets—a distracted woman, a careless carriage, the ordinary cruelty of a crowded city.
And now, in the space of a quarter hour in a stranger’s parlor, with a half-darned stocking in her sewing basket, that careful fiction had come apart.
It was a murder. Deliberate. Arranged. Paid for in coin.
“One last question, Miss Preston.”
“Of course.”
“Why answer my solicitors’ notice at all? You had given your statement once and been ignored. Few would trouble to give it twice.”
She looked faintly surprised that I should ask.
“Because a woman is dead.”
The answer was so plain, and so wholly sufficient, that I was briefly ashamed of having put the question.
“I came back to London two days ago,” she went on.
“Two days ago, I bought a newspaper, as I have every morning of my life, and there was your solicitor’s notice in it.
The constable had not listened to what I said.
So I thought I would try once more, with a man who had gone to the trouble of asking. ”
The constable had not listened. Or had been paid not to listen.
I closed my notebook.
"Miss Preston, would you be willing to repeat all of this before my solicitor?"
"Mr. Harkness?"
"The same."
"Of course."
"The statement will need to be taken formally."
She gave a short nod. "Then tell me when to be there."
I hesitated. "Any expenses you incur will be reimbursed."
A look of faint annoyance crossed her face. "No, my lord. Keep your money."
"Miss Preston—"
"I did not speak because of the notice. I spoke because a woman was killed, and because no one listened when I said so." Her mouth tightened. "If your solicitor needs a formal statement, I will be more than happy to provide it to him."
I inclined my head. "Very well."
"I want the man caught," she said.
I believed her. “Thank you, Miss Preston. You have done more this afternoon than the whole of the Metropolitan Police managed in three weeks.”
Her expression softened, and the boot-button eyes lost a little of their sharpness. “I hope you find him.”
“I intend to.”
A man with ginger hair. A scar to the jaw. A broken nose. The sort who let out his fists by the job.
London was a large city. But men of that description tended to leave footprints wherever they trod. And somebody, in some public house off Gower Street, knew exactly whose errands he had been running.
I would find out who.
But first, Lark. She needed to know.