Chapter 14
Fourteen
THE BOXING CLUB, BETHNAL GREEN
brODIE
He was awake in an instant with a sense that someone had entered the room— someone who hadn’t been invited. He reached for the revolver when a sound came that might have been surprise as he found the matches and struck one.
The flame caught, momentarily casting light across features as the man who had made that sound tried to fight off the other one, who pinned him against the wall beside the door—Munro.
Brodie lit the nearby lantern. It sputtered to life, growing stronger as it found the oil in the bowl of the lantern, the man Munro had caught dangling like a fatted pig—Ives.
“There’s been word,” Ives managed to choke out as Brodie came to his feet and crossed the room.
“What word?” Brodie demanded.
“It came from Mr. Brown’s man,” Ives managed to squeeze out a reply. “Ease off, I’m just delivering the message.”
“By stealing into the room,” Brodie demanded.
“He said to bring you. Best speak with him.”
“It would be easy to gut him like a fish,” Munro commented.
“And wot of the dozen or so others who are no doubt about the place?” Brodie commented with a bit of dark humor. “A few more than we might prefer. Let us see what Mr. Brown has learned.”
Ives cursed as Munro finally released him. “If I had me way…”
“If you had yer way, you would be dead,” Munro told him.
They followed Ives down to the second floor where Brown sat at his desk, the sky pale with first light through a window beyond.
Had Brown received word where Blackwood could be found?
“Your man, the one who goes about on that platform like the devil was chasing him. He sent word that you need to get back to the Strand straight away.”
“What’s happened?”
“He didn’t tell my man the purpose, only threatened to take his legs out if he failed to get word to you.”
Mr. Cavendish had spent twenty years at sea until an accident aboard ship took his legs and left him land-bound. But, if need be, he could be quite dangerous, and had been known to use the deception of his infirmity to catch others unaware.
He was quick and strong, in great part due to the physical demands of his own personal transportation.
He had seen the man take another man three times his size off his feet at the knees.
The rest of the lesson was administered with the knife he carried but was rarely forced to use for such encounters.
Mikaela was fond of the man and always called him Mr. Cavendish, a sign of respect. Now, with the need to find Blackwood, if Mr. Cavendish said that the matter was urgent, it was urgent.
“I thank you, Mr. Brown.” Brodie then nodded to Munro and left the boxing house as the first participants arrived for a morning bout.
“We’ll be seein’ each other, my friend,” Brown called after them as they left the boxing club, found a driver, and promised twice the fare as they left Bethnal Green.
Brodie cursed the weather and the traffic on the street, even at that early hour of the morning. Still, they arrived at the Strand in quick time, Mr. Cavendish rolling out from the alcove as the driver pulled to the curb. He had the driver wait.
“I used the key Miss Mikaela gave me and put a woman upstairs,” Mr. Cavendish informed him. “Mrs. Ryan… She brought word from Mayfair.”
#204 THE STRAND
Brodie quickly took the stairs with Munro a short distance behind. He threw open the door to the office.
Mrs. Ryan rose from the chair across from his desk.
“Saints be praised, you’re here Mr. Brodie!”
“What’s happened? Tell me!”
He listened to all of it—Blackwood’s threats reaching back across the years, what’d he’d lost—his family, his home, the family fortune. Threats that were made when Brodie, with the help of others, finally tracked him down.
Then the murder charge against Blackwood, the trial that followed. He’d avoided the hangman’s noose and was sentenced to Newgate.
Never once did he show the least remorse for the life he’d taken, claiming he was innocent and had been wronged, protests and bold threats he made from the dock at the Old Bailey.
After the trial, articles filled the crime sheet of the Times. Even then, Blackwood refused to claim responsibility for the mistakes he’d made or the man he’d killed.
Instead, he blamed those who caught him—for tracking him down that last day, and for the loss of everything, the mistress he kept, the club he belonged to, the loss of his home and family fortune, the divorce that followed, and the loss of his son, as his wife took the child and fled the scandal.
He swore revenge.
Mrs. Ryan hesitated.
“Tell me all of it,” Brodie told her.
“He said that he would take from you, what you have taken from him. Oh, Mr. Brodie… Miss Mikaela is strong, but I’m afraid for her!”
“Aye.” He comforted her as best he could.
“What do ye want to do?” Munro asked from where he stood at the open doorway. He had heard the message given to the woman to deliver.
“I need to go to Mayfair,” Brodie replied, a familiar coldness tightening inside him.
That message—that Blackwood would take from him what he had taken from the man—was even grimmer with drugs and the cancer feeding the insanity.
Such viciousness was no stranger to Brodie. He had encountered it before on the streets, driven by hunger, poverty, and desperation. But he had closed the door on that life, on people like Blackwood, for which there was only depravity and revenge. Blackwood had thrown the door open.
What would he find when he got to Mayfair?
Munro saw the grim expression on the face of the man who was like a brother.
Nothing was said as Brodie pushed past him and then strode down the stairs in the pouring rain to the street below. It wasn’t necessary.
There were too many years between them, too many cold nights shared in a rat-infested hideaway trying to survive, a loaf of bread stolen and shared, a bond that went beyond blood.
Mr. Cavendish was there at the bottom of the stairs, with the hound beside him. He nodded and whistled sharply for a driver.
He greeted the man who swung his rig about and pulled to the curb. Brodie climbed inside before the coach came to a full stop.
“Take the hound with you,” Mr. Cavendish said, not a question, as Munro swung up into the coach.
“Get on with you now,” he told Rupert, and the hound quickly followed.
Brodie shouted their destination. Mr. Jarvis swung the team about and sent waves of water exploding beneath the wheels from the driving rain.
Brodie saw the smoke before they reached Hanover Place. Then the fire at the townhouse, the street before it filled with the wagons and water tenders of the fire brigade.
“I will take from you what you have taken from me!” A desperate last threat as Blackwood screamed from the dock at the court.
That knot inside Brodie tightened into a hard, cold fist as he vaulted out of the coach and ran toward that fire.
He threw off the hand on his arm as he reached the steps.
“She’s not there!” Munro shouted over the roar of the fire and the explosion of water from a pumper truck as Brodie pulled him back.
“She was taken away by the man the housekeeper spoke of!”
A crewman from the fire brigade was there, his face smudged from the smoke as he shouted.
“A gentleman across the way informed us when we arrived. He saw a coach leave just as the fire began. Sorry, sir,” he apologized, as he no doubt assumed it was his residence.
Not his, but near enough in the time they had been together there, Brodie thought.
“The best we can hope for now, sir, is to prevent it spreading to the other residences,” he said in parting as he ran and rejoined his men as the fire engulfed the townhouse.
‘I will take from you…’
Beside them, the hound whined pitifully, as Brodie stared at the flames. He suddenly turned and ran back to the coach.
“I know where Blackwood has taken her.”
When he reached the coach, he shouted up to Mr. Jarvis.
“Victoria Station! And hurry!”
MIKAELA, VICTORIA STATION
He was mad, I was certain of it, as he pushed me ahead of him through the crowd of arriving and departing passengers. His hand tightly clasped my arm, the revolver in his other hand concealed in the pocket of his coat, its barrel pressed against my back.
I couldn’t help but think about that message he’d given Mrs. Ryan to deliver to Brodie.
Had she reached the office? Even if she had, would Mr. Cavendish be able to find him to deliver that message? What did it mean?
‘I will take from you what you’ve taken from me.’
His freedom, lost twelve years before, when Brodie was an inspector with the MET and had been given the case to find Blackwood after that duel that had taken the other man’s life?
Or was there more to his deranged plan, and I was now the helpless lure in his trap for Brodie?
What part did Victoria Rail Station have to play in this? Did he hope to escape, perhaps taking me with him? Where?
Dover seemed the most likely, since the Victoria line connected there, and then take a ferry across the channel? To what? Freedom?
What was there for him now, after all this time?
Ever since leaving the townhouse, I went through everything I had learned from Burke at the Times from the articles he had written about Blackwood. Columns written at the time of the murder in the aftermath of that duel, and the trial that had followed.
Blackwood had lost everything according to Burke’s account—his family home, his position in society, his wife and child when they fled the scandal, what was left of his life to be spent in Newgate prison, a place as good as death, some said.
I thought again of that message he’d given Mrs. Ryan: ‘I will take from you what you have taken from me.’
He had to be deranged, perhaps insane, considering all that had happened since his escape, but what he intended was clear…to take from Brodie what had been taken from him.
Did that included killing him, since Blackwood was now dying of cancer, the morphine only delaying it long enough to come here…?
If he received that message, Brodie would come after me. I was certain of it as I scanned the faces among those we passed.
And he would die.
I continued to watch the faces of the passengers who departed the train that had arrived at the platform, people at the ticket counter we passed, and those around us as we moved along the platform to the next train that waited.
Was Brodie already there, somewhere amidst those who chatted amongst themselves, some not even passengers, perhaps escaping the weather and usual gloom of London in winter?
Would he be able to find us? There were at least a dozen platforms and an equal number of booking offices with the names of the rail companies serviced by the rail station.
The answer was there as Blackwood jerked painfully at my arm and pulled me from the crowd before the booking offices for the Dover line.
“Here!” he said, a sharp sound as he winced with pain. “We will wait here!”
I thought of alerting the clerk at the ticket counter as he assisted an elderly man and woman with their tickets, but decided against it. I would not endanger anyone in Blackwood’s mad scheme.
I glanced about for any sign of Brodie. It was possible he never received that message.
It was obvious that Blackwood was suffering. I felt no sympathy. The man was a murderer, and he was dying.
What would he do if Brodie failed to appear? How long was Blackwood willing to wait?
The answer was there in that message.
He would wait here, or some other place known to both of them, and then take what had been taken from him.
The crowd that moved about us began to thin as passengers boarded their train. While others entered a nearby shop or one of the refreshment rooms that served tea and meals while they awaited their own departures.
Might there be a means of escape at one of the shops, I thought, as I felt once more the weakness in the hand that gripped my arm.
Blackwood was weak, however, not dead. He had sensed my movement, and his hand tightened, immediately alert once more.
“Not yet, Lady Forsythe!” he snarled. “But soon enough. I want Detective Brodie to feel what I felt when I lost my family. I want him to watch you die! And then it will be his turn!”
Detective Brodie? He was mad.
I saw it in Blackwood’s eyes and heard it in his voice. Anything I attempted needed to be done quickly. That revolver at my back was a reminder. I would not endanger others.
The next train rolled into the station at the far end of the track. A rail clerk walked past and announced the arrival of the Dover-bound train. Those who had waited in one of those refreshment rooms began to fill the platform once more.
It was distant at first among the conversations that around us, amid the clatter and hiss of the train as it rolled toward us.
Then nearer, amidst sudden shrieks and shouted warnings from waiting passengers…