Chapter 20
Damion Pitcairn, violin case in hand, was descending the cracked front steps of the aged building where he kept a room when Sebastian walked up to him.
At the sight of Sebastian, he paused, the flickering light from the oil lamp mounted above the building’s door flaring across his tense, fine-boned face.
Sebastian had known the swordsmith and musician since the previous summer.
He was young, still in his early twenties, tall and slim, with tawny skin, thick dark hair, and eyes the color of a sun-washed meadow.
Talented and brilliant, he was fiercely passionate about the sort of things that could get a man labeled a dangerous revolutionary—things like democracy, secret ballots, and the abolition of aristocratic rights and privileges.
He was also the kind of man willing to take risks for the things he believed in, and that made him vulnerable.
“One of your friends from Bow Street just left,” said Pitcairn, his face closed and unreadable. “A Constable McCarthy. He promised to arrange things with the hangman so that when they string me up outside Newgate I’ll take at least thirty minutes to slowly strangle to death. Very slowly.”
“I take it you don’t need me to tell you that you’ve emerged as the prime suspect in Bow Street’s investigation into the murders of Marcus Toole and his friends?”
Pitcairn shifted his grip on his violin case and turned to walk toward the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. “No.”
Sebastian fell into step beside him. “It doesn’t help that you’re a known Spencean.”
A muscle jumped along Pitcairn’s clenched jaw. “There’s no law against it.”
“Not yet. But the public meetings at Spa Fields have thrown the Palace and the Home Office into something of a panic. They might not have been prepared for the popularity of the first one, but they’re going to be ready next time.”
Eyes narrowing, Pitcairn glanced over at Sebastian. “You know something?”
“No. But I know Jarvis and Sidmouth. And now we have Sir Samuel Toole telling Bow Street that you murdered his son and his son’s friends because of some confrontation in Southwark. What the hell happened?”
Pitcairn looked away. For a moment, Sebastian didn’t think he would answer. Then he said, “They went after a friend of mine who was distributing handbills near St. George the Martyr.”
“What kind of handbills?”
“Advertising the first Spa Fields meeting. I…stopped them.”
The area south of the Thames was a historically impoverished part of London. Sebastian said, “What were such fine sprigs of the ton doing in Southwark?”
“That I couldn’t tell you.”
“How many of them were there?”
“Five.”
“Not six?”
Pitcairn shook his head. “Bridgewood, Toole, Upcott, Keebles, and—” He paused, then added, “Your nephew, Lord Wilcox.”
“How do you happen to know them by name?”
The fencing master’s lip curled. “I used to give Marcus Toole and Theo Bridgewood fencing lessons. The others would frequently hang around and watch.”
“So you know Emmanuel Royston-Jones, too?”
“Yes.” Pitcairn glanced over at him. “Why?”
“He wasn’t with the others when they confronted your friend in Southwark?”
“No.”
“When did the fencing lessons stop?”
“September.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Sir Samuel learned of my association with certain individuals involved in what he called ‘treasonous activities.’ ”
“And it was shortly afterward that Theo Bridgewood and the others confronted your friend in Southwark?”
Pitcairn nodded. “Bridgewood took a handbill, then laughed, crumpled it up, and threw it in my—my friend’s face.
” The hesitation was slight but there. “I told them to stop it, so they turned on me. I remember Toole smiling and saying, ‘Looks like you forgot to bring your sword, Sir Galahad. Too bad.’ ”
“Two against five aren’t good odds.”
“No,” agreed Pitcairn. “I assume they were counting on that. But the parish had been doing some repairs on the church and had a stack of poles for scaffolding piled up nearby. I grabbed one and tossed another to my friend.” Pitcairn’s eyes creased with a hint of a smile.
“Not proper shillelaghs, of course, but they worked.”
“I didn’t know you were familiar with Irish stick fighting.”
Pitcairn shrugged. “Stick fighting uses many of the same skills and requires the same agility as fencing. Bridgewood and his friends…ran away.”
“Men like that don’t usually forgive or forget.”
“I’d noticed.”
“Did they come at you again?”
“Not yet.”
“And now three of the five are dead.”
“Not by my hand.”
Sebastian studied the other man’s half-averted profile. “Care to tell me the name of your handbill-dispensing friend?”
Pitcairn gave a slow smile. “I think not.”
They had almost reached the King’s Theatre.
The usual assortment of young bucks had already gathered around the side entrance, ogling, groping, and shouting crude suggestions at the opera dancers trying to push their way through to the stage door.
One of the dark-haired dancers, a tall, lean young woman with golden skin and familiar, delicate features, turned her head toward them.
Sebastian watched as, for one telling moment, her gaze met Pitcairn’s, and Sebastian knew where he had seen her before: dressed as a boy and fencing with Pitcairn.
“If I were you,” said Sebastian “I would advise your ‘friend’ to avoid handing out Spencean broadsheets, at least for a while. And I’d stay away from next week’s meeting at Spa Fields.”
Pitcairn turned to look at him, his face hardened. “You have no idea what it’s like to be me. Or my ‘friend.’ ”
Sebastian drew up. “You’re right; I don’t. But I have a pretty good idea what Jarvis and his ilk are capable of.”
“There are more important things than survival.”
“I won’t argue that. Just…be careful.”
Sebastian was turning away when his gaze fell on a roughly dressed young man of perhaps thirty who was loitering near the arched entrance to the coaching yard of the George, a busy inn lying just across the street from the theater.
He wore nondescript kerseymere breeches and a buttoned-up olive green coat and was quite ordinary-looking, with a snub nose and dark blond hair cut short.
It was only by chance that Sebastian had noticed the man earlier, staring with apparent interest at the window display of a confectioner two doors down from Pitcairn’s lodgings.
Settling his hat lower on his forehead, Sebastian began to stroll back toward where he had left Tom with the curricle.
He thought it likely the man had been sent by Bow Street to keep an eye on Pitcairn.
But then Olive Coat pulled a watch from his pocket and appeared to study it for a moment before turning to follow Sebastian.
Acutely aware of his shadow, Sebastian swung onto the first quiet lane that opened up beside him, then turned immediately left, into the more brightly lit Oxendon Street.
The man stayed behind him, not gaining but not falling behind, either.
Halfway up the street, Sebastian stopped to admire the window display of a plated-goods dealer.
Olive Coat paused, too, his attention seemingly caught by a passing dowager’s landau.
But when Sebastian continued on, the man once more fell into step behind him.
At the next corner, Sebastian drew up abruptly and turned to stride back the way he had come. Caught off guard, Olive Coat swung away to gaze intently at the dusty window of an umbrella shop. Sebastian walked right up to him and said, “Why the devil are you following me?”
The man’s eyes widened. Then he whirled and took off.
Sebastian tore after him.
They raced back down Oxendon Street, careened onto Panton.
Erupting back into the surging, lamplit crowds of the Haymarket, Olive Coat darted in front of a heavily laden coal wagon that pulled up sharply, its team of six shaggy shires snorting and plunging, the irate driver shouting, “What the bleedin’ ’ell? ” as Sebastian raced past him.
A man in the scarlet frock coat, drab hat, and white trousers of a coachman spun around as Olive Coat slammed into him and then took off running again.
Sebastian dodged the coachman, a blind man playing a flute, a middle-aged woman with a basket of hothouse flowers on her head, and a skinny black dog eating a discarded sausage beside the doorway of a shuttered cheesemonger.
But Olive Coat was deliberately leaving a trail of havoc in his wake.
He flung up a hand to smack the handles of the soot-encrusted brushes held across the shoulders of a tired chimney sweep on his way home, sending the tools tumbling across the pavement, so that Sebastian had to leap over them as he ran on.
Olive Coat tipped over the red-and-white-striped booth of a Punch and Judy show at the corner of Little Suffolk Street, the audience howling as the portly, bald-headed professor tumbled out, his sock puppets still on his flailing hands.
Then, after upsetting a man bent beneath a heavy trunk at the entrance to the Queen’s Head, Olive Coat darted out into the street again.
Nimbly hopping over a steaming pile of manure, he rammed a sedan chair, knocking over the lead porter and sending the white-haired, elderly passenger flying.
Aware of Olive Coat disappearing up the street, Sebastian stopped to help the trembling gentleman to his feet and offered to buy him a drink.
The old man accepted.
It was several hours later before Sebastian was able to tuck his elderly new friend into another sedan chair and send him on his way home. He returned to Brook Street, picked up a specialized set of skeleton keys popularly known as a picklock, and headed toward St. James’s Street.
Running from Piccadilly down to the redbrick Tudor bulk of St. James’s Palace, St. James’s Street was the heart of London’s fashionable male world.
This was the site of White’s, Brooks’s, and various other exclusive gentlemen’s clubs; of Berry Bros.
and Rudd wine merchants; of Lock and Co.
hatter; and numerous other famous establishments that catered exclusively to wealthy, privileged men.
The rooms kept by Marcus Toole lay in a small gaslit court off St. James’s Place.
Typical of those in the area given over to fashionable young bachelors and the mountebanks and sycophants who fed off them, the buildings clustered around the court were respectable without being too expensive for a young man still subsisting on an allowance from his parent.
As Sebastian let himself in the front door of the building on the left and climbed the darkened staircase to the second floor, he found himself wondering what it said about the relationship between Sir Samuel Toole and his only son and heir that Marcus had chosen to keep bachelor quarters here rather than remaining under the paternal roof.
The third skeleton key on Sebastian’s picklock set tripped the old warded lock on the door to Toole’s rooms. Quickly letting himself in, Sebastian eased the door closed behind him, then paused for a moment, his gaze drifting over the darkened front room.
The space was lit only by the dim light cast by the gas lamps in the court below, but Sebastian’s ability to see clearly at night had always been unusually acute.
The room was carelessly but fashionably furnished with a burgundy silk settee, a high-backed brocade armchair, a bulky Chippendale chest that looked as if it dated back to the eighteenth century, and a newer, classically styled mahogany table positioned below the front window.
Between Lovejoy’s request that Toole’s valet avoid disturbing anything in the rooms and the valet’s own shock and grief, the place appeared to still be essentially as Toole had left it Saturday evening.
The table was littered with a pile of newspapers and a jumble of random objects that included racing guides, a riding crop, and a crumpled cravat; a boot lay discarded just inside the front door, with its mate halfway across the room.
A couple of dirty crystal glasses stood near a half-empty carafe of brandy on a table beside the cold hearth; near it lay a portfolio that opened to reveal a collection of graphic satires making fun of everything from the deposed French emperor to henpecked husbands and pretentious cits.
There was not a book in sight—at least, not if one discounted the Debrett’s Peerage lying on the floor near one of the chairs.
Sebastian worked his way quickly around the room, then moved on to the small, shadowy bedroom beyond.
Toole’s neatly made bed was still turned down, its pillows plumped, just as his valet had left it in readiness for his master’s return before retiring to his own bed in the attic on that fateful night.
Aware of a growing sense of futility, Sebastian set about methodically searching this room.
He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, and so far he hadn’t found anything unexpected.
A drawer in a high chest near the door held an array of vowels and tradesmen’s bills, but nothing exorbitant or shocking.
A heavily scented billet-doux from an admirer of the fair sex lay discarded on the floor nearby; Sebastian noted the name, then moved on to where a tattered, decades-old copy of Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies lay open on the beside chest. Once sold as a risqué guide to the area’s prostitutes, the books were now collected by some as humorously erotic. Picking it up, Sebastian read:
Liz is truly worth the money; she knows it, and is prudent enough to realize that the harvest of pleasure cannot last long. The time will come when goldfinches will fly from her ground, and none but boobies, noddies, and old carrion crows will nestle in her bush…
He put the book back in place and moved on.
He was searching the pockets of a dark blue morning coat cast carelessly over the back of the chair drawn up to the room’s dressing table when he came across a square of cheap, somewhat grubby paper.
Carefully unfolding the crackling sheet, he found himself staring at a bold, crudely printed headline:
ENGLAND
Expects every Man to do his Duty!!!
The Next Meeting in Spa Fields will Take Place on
Monday, December 2nd 1816…
A loud burst of male laughter from the courtyard outside jerked Sebastian’s attention to the window.
Tucking the broadsheet into his own pocket, he waited until he heard the men stagger up the stairs, still laughing and calling to each other as they shut the door to one of the sets of rooms on the third floor.
Then he slipped quietly from Toole’s rooms and locked the door behind him.