Chapter Sixteen
The big man greeted as Kenny wore an expensive dark suit, with what looked a very fine wool overcoat over his arm.
He walked with a swagger, soaking up the fawning admiration of his acquaintances, his violent face smug as though he realized the honor he was conferring on this squalid den of iniquity by his mere presence.
A pace or two behind him came his friends or minions, lean, whippet-like men who looked both malnourished and vicious.
Two men at the largest drinking table in the middle of the room—which also boasted the most comfortable chairs—sprang up and effaced themselves to let the great man sit at what was, presumably, his customary place. Kenny enthroned himself without acknowledging their courtesy.
Solomon glanced back at Madly and found the man watching him with a sardonic curl to his sensual lips.
“A friend of yours?” Solomon asked.
“Why, do you want an introduction to the newly great man?” Madly’s contempt was more pronounced now, though whether for Kenny or Solomon and David was not clear.
“Newly?” Solomon prompted him. “Who is he?”
“Minor criminal like so many around here, hired muscle like those on the doors—until a year or so ago, when he came into a wife with some money.”
“Does he live around here?”
“Not anymore. He has a place near Bond Street, so he says. What’s your interest in the great man?”
“Is his wife called Veronique?”
Madly’s eyes changed, though Solomon could not quite read their expression. “That name again. Is he responsible for the troubles of this lady of yours?” He spoke very softly.
“He’s one of several possibilities.”
Madly stared at him, then barked out a laugh. “As am I? Who the devil are you two?”
Solomon passed a card across the table.
Madly looked at it, then at David, who smiled. “Not me. I’m only here for pleasure.”
“This foiled elopement of yours,” Madly said. “The father would never have told. And a duchess vouched for the young lady herself.”
“Which leaves the maid.”
“And the husband. An honorable woman would have told her husband.”
And he had died for it…?
*
“He’s an odd duck,” David remarked, when they finally sat in a hackney. It felt like three o’clock in the morning, although in fact it wasn’t quite midnight. “A gentleman gone to the devil who doesn’t even miss his old life?”
Solomon shrugged. “I don’t think it’s so very different from his old life. Except he doesn’t feel obliged to shave every day. And I expect the bed’s less comfortable. By all accounts, he was a nasty piece of work in both lives.”
“It’s odd, isn’t it?” David mused. “We can all lead several lives, one after the other…except you, who seems to lead them all at the same time. What made you this way, Solomon?”
Startled, Solomon peered at his brother through the darkness. “What way?”
“You move among the ladies and gentlemen, dispensing charity from your massive, self-made fortune. You married a courtesan and investigate other people’s problems for money.
You deal with low-lifes and dangerous situations as though you’ve done so all your life.
You’re my brother, and I don’t know who you are. ”
David had never talked so personally since he had come back into Solomon’s life.
For once, Solomon didn’t know what to say.
A light rain had begun to fall, pattering on the carriage roof, reflecting the moving street lamps as they passed by the windows.
The streets were quiet, the clop of their horse and the rumble of carriage wheels loud in the silence.
“What is it you’re asking me?” he said at last.
“I don’t know… I suppose… We’ve talked about me, what I remember and what I’ve forgotten, what I can do in my life going forward.
You’ve told me about Father’s death. You’ve never told me about your life on the island.
Tell me what you did, Solomon, what it was like for you when slavery ended, why you left, where you went, why you stayed here in London. ”
It’s not important. The words died in his throat.
Compared with what David had suffered, perhaps it really was nothing, but who wanted to be reminded constantly of their own wounds?
They had both been formed by their experiences together and apart.
It had just never entered Solomon’s head that David might want to know.
“Is there any wine in your house?” he asked lightly.
*
It really was three in the morning by the time he knocked quietly at the area door of the establishment. The door was opened almost immediately by Constance herself, though a large footman called Ally lurked not far behind. Seeing Solomon, he effaced himself.
Constance almost dragged Solomon inside. “There you are! What happened?” The fright and relief in her face amazed him.
He touched her cheek in contrition. “Nothing bad. I’m sorry. I just went back to David’s to talk. I didn’t mean to stay so long, or I’d have sent word. Is all quiet here?”
“So far. What did you learn?” she demanded as he sank down by the kitchen table. She poured him a cup of coffee from the pot. Her own cup was half full.
“That for a duke’s son, Grizelda’s brother frequents some filthy dens.”
“We always knew that,” Constance said impatiently. “Did you find Madly?”
“Eventually, yes,” he said, and told her of the encounter.
She listened avidly, occasionally frowning or nodding, and he knew she was committing every word to her phenomenal memory. Tomorrow, she would write it into her notes, not to remind herself but to straighten her thoughts and look for the patterns that might lead to the truth.
“So you don’t think Madly is our blackmailer?” she said in frustration.
“No, I don’t. He wouldn’t talk about her because he never has. He’s fallen low, and doesn’t much care, but there’s still a speck of honor there. Love, even.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You think he genuinely loved Jacintha St. John?”
“You find that hard to believe?”
“Well…I suppose she doesn’t seem a very lovable person to me.
So rigidly ruled by appearances and convention that she stopped her husband playing his violin except behind closed doors.
She kept him from his old friends. Even this afternoon…
Behind her veil, she wasn’t exactly overcome by grief, was she? ”
“A discontented woman,” Solomon said thoughtfully. “Possibly forced into marriage by her parents because of her youthful indiscretion with Madly. A loveless marriage with a man she did not understand, and who did not understand her…”
She waved that hurriedly aside. “Perhaps. So you don’t think Madly’s involved?”
“Not with blackmail. I wouldn’t put murder past him, though.”
“After twenty years?” Constance said doubtfully. “Why? He’s finally ready to settle down with a rich widow?”
“Except I don’t really see him as a poisoner.
Though experiments with opium are unlikely to be beyond him.
No, on the whole, I believe he’s no more than the cause of the blackmail.
Though he did suggest we look more closely at her maid of that time—who, sadly, was not Veronique.
On the other hand, the surprise of the evening was the sudden arrival of one Kenny, who has a rich wife in the West End. ”
Constance sat up straighter. “That is unexpected…”
While Solomon told that tale, too, she looked increasingly excited.
“All these disparate people from different worlds, but we’re finding connections all the time.
St. John and Neville, Mrs. St. John and Veronique, Mrs. Willow and Veronique, Mrs. St. John and Madly, Madly and Veronique through her husband Kenny… It must mean something, Sol.”
He met her gaze. “What do you think it means?”
“I wish I knew,” she said ruefully. “Because you’re right. I really don’t see blackmailers killing the source of their wealth.”
“Unless…” Solomon said, setting down his coffee cup with a dangerous crack. “St. John had had enough and refused to pay anymore. They were bleeding him dry, after all, and paying hadn’t got them off his back. Perhaps he decided to stand up to them, and they made an example of him.”
“Because they had Mrs. Willow and her sister waiting in the wings,” Constance said thoughtfully. “I wonder what sin these impossibly self-righteous ladies committed? Snaffling the church collection?”
“It can’t be that trivial.”
“You think not? For blackmailers, it’s not about the actual sin, is it?
It’s about how their victims perceive that sin.
Mrs. St. John is obsessed with respectability and conformity—of course she is, after her youthful adventure almost ruined her.
Mrs. Willow and Miss Morton have so hemmed themselves in with righteousness that any trivial, one-off folly would cause them to be mocked and jeered out of Town by all, from duchesses to maidservants to whores. ”
She sounded eager, and yet he knew she didn’t really believe it.
“Constance—”
The kitchen door was opened with a key and Ally the footman came in. “Trouble in the mews.”
Solomon leapt to his feet and Constance reached for her shawl. “What sort of trouble?” she asked.
“Someone creeping about, peering over walls and gates. He’s carrying something heavy, too.”
“Oh, God, not another body…”
“Why don’t you wait here?” Solomon suggested, and just as he’d expected, she sailed first out of the back door. He tried not to grin as he followed her.
“Where exactly was he when you saw him?” Solomon murmured to Ally in the doorway.
Ally pointed diagonally to the left, and then swept his arm right to explain the direction of the man’s movement.
“Did you recognize him?”
Ally shook his head and locked the back door.
Moving as fast as they could without making a noise, the three of them crept across the garden to the well-oiled gate.
Interestingly, the object of their suspicion seemed to have walked straight past the establishment gate, for faint, slow footsteps sounded to the right.
Solomon opened the gate and peered in that direction.