Chapter 26
It was only a mile walk, but I was so shaky by the time I arrived at Amelia’s door that I had to pause at the second-story landing. Amelia’s door opened, and she looked out. “Kit?” She hurried down the steps to put her arm around my waist and help me up the final steps. Her usual aplomb was gone.
“What on earth happened?” she asked. “I expected you back hours ago! Are James and Art all right?”
“They’re alive,” I said.
She blew out a sigh. “Sit here.” She poured a glass of whiskey and thrust it into my hand. “Drink this. Good lord, you’re white as a sheet and your hands are like ice. I’ll put on water for tea.”
I bolted the whiskey and let the burn sink into my belly as I sat shivering in a chair by the warm stove.
“The diamonds?” she asked.
I nodded. “But James is in hospital.”
Her look of relief gave way to dismay. Her shoulders drooped over the kettle, the cups, the saucers, the spoons. I watched her in silence, suddenly, desperately wanting to do nothing, to plan nothing, to decide nothing. I struck a bargain with the world.
Only for as long as it takes to make tea, I thought. Surely you can grant me this much.
I closed my eyes, letting myself think nothing until she finished pouring.
The kettle clinked, hollow copper on sturdy cast iron.
She stood before me with a cup of steaming tea and a hunk of bread slathered with butter. “Here, eat this. What happened?”
I was ravenous, my insides hollowed out by the hours in the cold water and fear.
Between bites, I told her everything from the moment we reached the tunnels until I woke up in the chair at the strangers’ house, concluding, “I never met the doctor. I only heard him. He spoke with a Cockney accent. He said, ‘Ah, Art my boy.’”
“It’s likely Art’s father.”
I stared. “His father?”
“His mother was Chinese,” she said. “His father was a doctor on a merchant ship. He met her in one of the port cities and brought her back here. She died not long after Art was born.”
“We could never have done this without him,” I said soberly. “He swam me out of that tunnel, Amelia. I’d have drowned. Who is he?”
“An old friend. Dependable as the day is long. Like James.” She gave me a searching look. “You love that boy, don’t you?”
I nodded unhappily. “I haven’t told him I’m leaving.”
“No, I can see that,” she said. “Some might say it’s heartless, but it’s for the best until he’s cured.” She twitched at her skirt. “I’m not the praying sort, but . . . he’s young and strong, he has that on his side.”
“I hope so.”
“And you have the diamonds, so you’ll have Sarah soon. You’ll see Maggie this morning?”
I wrapped my palms around the cup. “I need to see Mr. Fuller first. Maggie won’t release Sarah until the story breaks. I hope he’ll talk to me without James.” I drank the last of the tea. “Can I borrow your pistol?”
She raised an eyebrow. “To convince Fuller?”
“Not him,” I said. “Maggie. In case I need to remind her of our bargain. She’ll be furious I did this on my own.”
My hair, bundled into one of Amelia’s nets, still stank of the river, but at least I appeared respectable in one of her dresses and her coat, which fit me better.
With her pistol in my pocket, I made my way to the newspaper offices, putting my prepared letter for the marquess into the post for delivery before noon.
It was still early when I pushed open the door with the mirror in metal letters above, and the desk near the entrance was unoccupied.
From behind the wall came the steady thump of the press.
I climbed the rickety steps to the first story.
Half a dozen men sat at canted tables, with wooden boxes holding bits of lead type in the upper cases and lower cases, their fingers quick, setting the letters in rows.
The noise of the press was louder here, and I had to speak up to have one of them notice me.
“Where’s Mr. Fuller?” I asked, half shouting.
The young man nearest to the door turned, and his mouth fell open. “Ach, miss!” His eyes goggled at me, and I repeated my question. “How’d you get in?”
“The door was open,” I said.
He pointed. “Up those stairs, down the hallway.”
I climbed again, a narrower set of stairs with no banister. I reached a windowed hallway with long, dusty floorboards and half a dozen doors. The first one on the right was open, and I found a young woman of about twenty-five seated at a desk, a lamp on either side, her pen dashing across foolscap.
The press was still audible, but up here I didn’t have to shout to make myself heard. “Begging your pardon,” I said. “I’m looking for Mr. Fuller.”
She paused her pen, settling her elbow on the desk. Her eyes were bright, inquisitive, mischievous, even. She studied the bruise that had darkened and ran diagonally along my cheek. “You look like you could tell a story.”
“I have one,” I admitted. “But it’s for him.”
She shrugged good-naturedly and pointed the top of her pen to the right. “Three doors down.”
I continued on and paused at the threshold.
Mr. Fuller was bent over a cluster of written pages, a pen in his right hand, making notes in the margins.
His gingery hair was thinning in an uneven patch at his crown, and the sight unexpectedly made my heart soften.
He was a man, after all, not merely a journalist.
“Mr. Fuller,” I said.
He started and looked up, blinking through silver-rimmed spectacles, which his left hand promptly removed.
“Where’s James?”
I stepped inside and closed the door. “He’s in hospital. There was an accident.”
“So you’re here to deliver the story instead.” He scowled his disapproval, and I didn’t blame him. He trusted James; he barely knew me.
I’d spent the walk here trying to decide how I would unfold the story for him.
Over the years, I had seen how different newspapers portrayed crimes, how they presented facts in ways that left varying impressions, cast the police as heroes or fools, danced around questions of blame, even left perpetrators unnamed, and yet still told a tale worth reading.
Like dodges, they gave people a story they could readily believe.
I knew that Mr. Fuller wanted to write the story. His promise to James and me aside, I believed he wanted to help Sarah; he longed to help the Yard; he wished to see justice done and the brutal murderers caught.
The story of stolen jewels was good newspaper fodder; the sticking point would be naming the Simonsons.
Still, Mr. Fuller was clever, and I believed he could manage it.
But would he want to?
Instinctively, I felt a call to right an injustice was my strongest card. Simonson had behaved vilely—criminally, and he had escaped punishment. I’d draw Simonson as a villain and hope it was enough that Mr. Fuller would want to find a way to implicate him.
But first, the proof.
I slid my hand into my pocket. At Amelia’s, I’d separated the diamonds, folding two inside a handkerchief; three were still in the pouch.
Inside my pocket, I loosened the drawstring, took the diamonds into my palm, then set them gently on the scribbled page before Mr. Fuller.
He drew back as if they were a vial of poison. “Are those real?”
“They are.” I removed Amelia’s coat, folding it over the back of the wooden chair, sat facing him across the desk, and said, slowly and carefully, “These three diamonds, from an important family heirloom, have been replaced with counterfeit gems on the premises of Simonson’s Jewelers in Hatton Garden. ”
His expression was wary. “What heirloom?”
“The Hargrave necklace,” I replied. “Lady Hargrave is to wear it at Lord Charleton’s ball this week.”
He picked up one of the stones, replacing his spectacles and bringing it close to peer at it.
“Each of those is approximately one carat weight, clear and well cut, valued at over two hundred pounds. A thief could disguise them by having them cut down. The owner might never know of the substitution, until it was too late to recover them.”
He set the stone down. “Can you put those away, please?”
I replaced them in their pouch. “You promised us you would print the story we gave you,” I reminded him.
“I will, so long as I don’t have to commit a crime to do it.” He sniffed. “I have not forgotten your young sister. The thought of a kidnapped child harrows my bones. But to accuse a jeweler of fraud—to destroy his livelihood when he was no true party to it—”
“You simply write that it occurred in his shop, where it was being cleaned and repaired. That is the truth.”
“I need to know why.”
I’d expected he would.
“What do you know of a woman named Maggie Wirth?” I asked.
His eyes narrowed. “Nothing.”
“Patty Wirth?”
His face cleared. “The Southwark thief. Of course.”
“Maggie is her daughter, and twenty years ago, she was caught thieving by a jeweler,” I began. I unfolded the story, piece by piece, describing the day of the theft, giving every detail I could remember about Simonson’s attack on Maggie.
Horror dawned in his eyes. “He outraged her?” It came out in a voice scraped raw, barely above a whisper.
It didn’t take a clairvoyant to understand this cut close to the bone for him. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Women in London were assaulted every day. It wasn’t unlikely he knew one.
He pushed back his chair with a slow scrape, crossing the creaking floorboards to stand at the window, his back to me. His fingertips rested against the sill, his thumb beating his usual tattoo. He stood there for so long that at last I spoke his name.
“He should have been hanged,” he said thickly.
“Wealthy men don’t hang in this city,” I said. “Not for assaults on women. You know that. And the law will do nothing to him, twenty years later, not on behalf of a convicted felon.”
He returned to stand behind his chair, resting his hands on the top rail. “Go on, finish.”
I described the injustices of Maggie’s trial and dwelt on the suffering she experienced in Swan River. Despite what Maggie had done—was still doing—to Sarah, I had the peculiar, surprising sense of my sympathies shifting toward her.