Chapter 15
It took Hero the better part of Monday morning to identify the Radical journal that had once printed a cryptic article attacking Marcus Toole and his friends.
The Poor Man’s Weekly had been begun by a man named Barnabas Price, an advocate of such revolutionary reforms as freedom of the press, universal suffrage, and the need to end child labor.
When Price was convicted of libel and sedition for publishing material that might, in the words of the prosecution, “cause the people to hate their government,” his young wife, Beth, continued printing the paper while he was in prison.
Then Beth, in turn, was sent to Newgate, and Price’s sister Kate took over.
Even after Beth died in prison and Barnabas—a shattered, disheartened shadow of the fiery man he’d once been—was finally released, Kate continued printing the Poor Man’s Weekly from the ground floor of a dilapidated, late seventeenth-century brick building on an ancient narrow lane that wound away from Fleet Street toward the river.
The paper still advocated many Radical reforms, but Kate Price had learned to be more cautious and crafty than her brother.
Dressed in a simple navy wool carriage gown with a black velvet collar and a short-veiled black velvet hat, Hero left her carriage near St. Bride’s churchyard and walked down a decrepit rainswept passage to push open the shop’s warped old door.
She found herself in a small workspace crowded with stacks of crates, an old wooden-framed press, a small coal-fired stove, and rows of freshly printed pages that dangled from the clotheslines crisscrossing the room.
The musty air was thick with the smell of linseed oil, lampblack, and cheap paper; a slim woman with a stained leather apron tied over a simple long-sleeved, rusty-black gown was bent over the press.
She had her back to the door, but at Hero’s entrance she looked around and stiffened.
Still somewhere in her early thirties, with dark blond hair, brown eyes, and a square chin, the woman did not smile. “Why are you here?”
The bell on the old door jangled as Hero pushed it closed behind her. “You’re Kate Price?”
Rather than answer, the woman turned away again to yank the “devil’s tail” on the old-fashioned press, then said, “I know who you are.”
Hero studied that half-averted profile. “We’ve met?”
“No. But I watched your father send first my brother, then his wife, to prison.”
“I’m not my father.”
A hard smile curled the other woman’s lips.
“Did you know Beth died in Newgate? Of gaol fever. She was just twenty-three years old. By the time my brother was released, he was so devastated by what his government had done to them that he couldn’t bear living in England anymore and immigrated to America. ”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I weren’t.”
At that, Kate Price twisted around to stare at Hero again over one shoulder. “No, I don’t believe you would,” she said after a moment, then turned to peel the wet page off the press. “So why are you here?”
“I understand you wrote an article about Marcus Toole and his friends.”
For a moment the woman froze. Then she lifted the wet page and hung it on the line beside the others to dry. “That was some time ago.”
“What prompted you to write it?”
“Have you read it?”
“No. I haven’t been able to find a copy.”
“Good.” Kate reached for a rag to wipe her ink-stained hands. “You’d think I’d have learned from what happened to my brother and Beth, but sometimes when I’m enraged, I’m not as cautious as I should be.”
“And that article was one of those instances?”
“Obviously.” Her fist tightened around the rag. “I take it Lord Devlin has decided to involve himself in the investigation of Toole’s murder?”
“His and the others’. Who do you think is killing them?”
Kate stared at her with tight, unreadable features. “How would I know?”
“Because you were paying attention to the things those men were doing, even when no one else was.”
“And you think that means I know who’s killing them?
” Kate Price huffed a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“Funny how poor people are killed in this city all the time; good people, people with mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sons, and daughters who loved them and mourn them. But you don’t see the Morning Chronicle or the Times or any of the other ‘respectable’ papers spilling buckets of ink to bewail the horror of their deaths, do you?
Yet let someone go after the wastrel son of one of the country’s ‘fine old families,’ and Fleet Street has a collective apoplectic fit. ”
Hero studied the other woman’s hard, angry face. “What did Toole and his friends do to you?”
Something flared in Kate’s eyes, something that might have been fear. “What makes you think they did anything to me?”
“Then why did you write the article?”
“Why?” She hurled the rag away from her as if she’d suddenly realized she was still holding it. “I’ll tell you why. Because I was tired of watching them get away with everything from assault to the wanton destruction of property simply because of who their fathers are.”
“Who do you know that they hurt?”
“You seriously think I would give you their names? So Bow Street can have someone to hang?”
“I told you—I’m not my father.”
“No? So why do you even care? Is one of them related to you?”
“Not to me.”
“Ah, I remember now. Lord Wilcox is Devlin’s nephew, isn’t he?”
“He is. But that’s not why I’m here.” Hero paused. “It doesn’t bother you? Knowing that you’re sharing your city with a cold-blooded killer who burns, drowns, and hangs his victims?”
Kate shrugged. “If I were one of Marcus Toole’s friends, I might be worried. But I can’t see whoever’s doing this coming after me.”
“A man who can coldly take three people’s lives is a danger to everyone.”
“I suppose that depends on what drives him to it, wouldn’t you say?”
“If you change your mind,” said Hero, reaching for the door handle. “You know where to find me.”
But the woman simply tightened her jaw and watched Hero walk away.