Chapter 25
Leaving Little Windmill Street, Sebastian drove north, to Clerkenwell.
Originally home to the monastic order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell was an ancient, once affluent parish dating back to medieval times.
But those days were long gone. As London’s wealthy inhabitants moved farther west, Clerkenwell had become a depressed area dominated by breweries, distilleries, watchmaking, cheap printing presses, and the infamous Cold Bath Fields prison.
The barren, frost-encrusted open area known as Spa Fields began just at the end of Coppice Row and St. John Street.
And as he reined in outside a dilapidated stone yard near the coffeehouse known as the Rising Sun, Sebastian found himself once again wondering what Keebles, Toole, Upcott, and their friends had been doing here, in a place like Clerkenwell.
The Rising Sun catered to what looked like a cross section of clientele ranging from butchers and blacksmiths to shoemakers, brewery workers, and clerks. Its owner, Sebastian had discovered, was a former militia officer named Adam York with a reputation for being something of a Radical.
As Sebastian paused across the street from the coffeehouse, watching, the door opened, and a familiar slim figure emerged wearing gray Wellington trousers, a slightly threadbare but well-tailored French-cut black coat, and a broad-brimmed hat.
It was the same “youth” Sebastian had once watched fence with Damion Pitcairn in an abandoned courtyard off Swallow Street.
And just last night Sebastian had seen her again, dressed as an opera dancer at the stage door of the King’s Theatre.
“Bloody hell,” he whispered, watching her walk away.
There was a thread that wove through much of what Sebastian had so far learned about Marcus Toole and his friends, a snaking cord that connected the Palace’s obsession with the Spenceans and the Spa Fields meetings to the revolutionary ideas expressed by the likes of Damion Pitcairn and Kate Price’s Poor Man’s Weekly.
But what the hell any of that had to do with an obscure first-century Roman poet and the disputed Celtic practice of human sacrifice was more than he could begin to understand.
Settling his hat lower on his forehead, Sebastian watched Damion Pitcairn’s friend hail a hackney carriage and direct the jarvey to the Haymarket. Then he crossed the street to push open the door of the Rising Sun.
Filled with tobacco smoke and redolent with the scents of roasting coffee beans, hot chocolate, and freshly baked bread, the interior of the coffeehouse was starkly plain.
But Sebastian could see the ghostly outlines of rectangles on the empty dark green plaster walls where he suspected mirrors and pictures had hung until smashed by Keebles, Toole, and friends.
The tables and chairs also showed signs of recent repairs, with a few obviously having been broken so badly that they’d needed to be replaced and were new.
Perhaps a dozen men sat scattered around the room, some conversing quietly in groups, others by themselves, their heads bent over newspapers spread open on the tables before them.
Coffeehouses always kept an extensive supply of newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets, for the reading material formed one of their main attractions.
At the cost of a few pennies, a man could drink coffee and read the kind of publications priced beyond his personal reach by the heavy government stamp tax.
The Rising Sun’s patrons were, of course, strictly male, for coffeehouses were as much male preserves as the men’s clubs of St. James’s.
A woman might work in one, but she would never be welcome as a patron.
And while that might explain why Pitcairn’s friend had chosen to visit the Rising Sun dressed as a man, it did nothing to explain why she had traveled all the way up to Clerkenwell in the first place.
The stout, middle-aged man behind the counter looked up as Sebastian walked toward him and said, “You’re Adam York?”
The man frowned. “I am. Who’re you?”
Sebastian set a calling card on the countertop between them. “The name’s Devlin. We need to talk—in private, preferably.”
York hesitated a moment. At just below average height, he had a plump face with full cheeks, graying fair hair, and watery light blue eyes.
Obviously coming to some kind of decision, he nodded to the middle-aged woman washing cups nearby, then led Sebastian to a small office at the rear of the building, carefully shut the door behind them, and swung to face him. “What do you want from me?”
Sebastian let his gaze rove over the plain but comfortable room with its neat desk, an aged, shaggy dog curled up on a hand-hooked rug, and two worn armchairs drawn up before the hearth. “I need you to tell me why Marcus Toole and his friends trashed your coffeehouse a month or so ago.”
York stared at him with hard, narrowed eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.”
For a moment the coffeehouse owner held Sebastian’s gaze.
Then he sucked his lower lip in between his teeth and looked away.
“You think I know why they did it? I mean, sure, I keep Radical newspapers and pamphlets for my customers. But so does every other coffeehouse around here. It’s what men want to read.
” He jerked his head toward the coffee room and gave a harsh laugh.
“How many you reckon’d be in here if all I stocked was the Morning Chronicle and the Times? ”
“What were Toole and his friends even doing up in Clerkenwell?”
“Damned if I know. It was just my bad luck they decided to come in here to warm up. It was a bloody cold day.”
“When was this?”
“Three, maybe four weeks ago. While I was fixing their coffee, one of ’em wanders over to look at my newspapers and goes, ‘Hey, Bridgewood, come see the treasonous trash this bastard keeps in here.’ Next thing I know, they’re whooping and laughing like a bunch of idiots and ripping ’em all up.
I told them to stop.” He paused, then said, “I may’ve even told them it was that kinda shite that led to a guillotine being set up on the Place de la Révolution.
That’s when they picked up my chairs and started smashing my mirrors and pictures.
” He let out a pained sigh. “I had some real nice framed colored satires on my walls.”
“What did you do?”
“I thought about fetching Constable Caldwell, but the truth is, he wouldn’t have done a damned thing—not against that lot. So I got my blunderbuss and told them to cut it out. They laughed at me, of course. So I put a hole in the wall right above one of ’em’s head. They left.”
“Was that the end of it?”
“No. They came at me a few days later for attempted murder. So I sued them for destruction of property. Everybody around here knows I’m a good shot; if I missed, it was because I intended to.
In the end, the magistrate got us both to drop our cases.
” He fell silent for a moment, his nostrils flaring with his agitated breathing.
“It ain’t right that they can do that to a man—wreck his business and then walk away without paying for it.
But that’s the way this bloody country works, isn’t it?
Two sets of laws, one for the likes of me, and one for the likes of… them.”
Sebastian suspected he’d been about to say, And one for the likes of you. “Who do you think killed them?”
York stared at him. “I don’t know and, frankly, I don’t care. I’m just glad they’re dead—or, at any rate, three of them are. They got away with everything a man can get away with except murder, and who’s to say they didn’t do that, too?”
“You know something,” said Sebastian, studying the other man’s hard, angry face. “What is it?”
York tightened his jaw and shook his head. “I’m not gonna say nothing might put a noose around some innocent’s neck. I know what Bow Street is like.”
“You think those men were killed in revenge?”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it? To set fire to a man and cook him like a side of beef…” York shook his head. “That takes a powerful lot of hate, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes,” said Sebastian, drawing the wolf carving from his pocket. “Have you ever seen this before?”
York stared at it. “No. What’s it for?”
“I don’t know. Do you know much about the Celts?”
The coffeehouse owner laughed. “The Celts? You can’t be serious.”
“I wish I weren’t,” said Sebastian, and tucked the strange carving away.
More troubled now than ever by the suggestive connections between the Spenceans and the three dead men, Sebastian went, again, in search of Damion Pitcairn.
He found the young musician and swordsmith enjoying a pint in a public house called the Cock, in Soho. Pitcairn’s gaze met his across the crowded room. Then the musician said something to one of his companions and walked over to meet Sebastian.
“I take it you’re here to see me.”
Sebastian nodded. “You need to tell me about your friend the opera dancer.”
Pitcairn kept his voice low. “What about her?”
“I know you teach her fencing, and this afternoon I saw her leaving the Rising Sun coffeehouse in St. John Street in Clerkenwell,which incidentally happens to be the same coffeehouse that Keebles, Toole, and their friends wrecked a month or so ago. Right before someone started killing them.”
Pitcairn took a deep drink of his porter and said nothing.
“She’s the friend who was handing out broadsheets in Southwark when Toole and his friends attacked you, isn’t she?” said Sebastian.
Pitcairn hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Except she’s not exactly my ‘friend.’ ”
Sebastian waited for the musician to say, She’s my lover. Instead, he said, “She’s my sister.”
A loud burst of laughter drew Sebastian’s attention to a crowded table of bricklayers beside them. “Let’s go for a walk, shall we?”
“Her name is Sasha,” said Pitcairn as they walked toward Soho Square.
This was an older, decaying part of London, with small two- and three-story houses and simple shops, its streets still lit by dim, flickering oil lamps.
“Sasha Stone. Technically she’s my half sister; we share the same mother but have different fathers. ”
“She’s from Jamaica as well?”
Pitcairn nodded. “Our mother…” He paused as if reaching for words to express the inexpressible.
“She was very beautiful, but she was also what slavers like to call ‘willful.’ A few years after I was born, the Scotsman who had planted me in her belly took me away from her and sold her to a plantation owner down the road.”
Damion Pitcairn, Sebastian knew, had been well educated and set free by his Scottish father. “The man who bought your mother was Sasha’s father?”
Pitcairn shook his head. “That slave owner preferred little boys. His brother fathered Sasha when he was visiting from England one time.”
“And had his brother set her free?”
Pitcairn gave a bitter laugh. “Not hardly. The plantation owner—I guess you could call him Sasha’s uncle—kept her enslaved until she was fourteen. That’s when she blackmailed him into letting her go.”
“By threatening to reveal his sexual practices?”
Pitcairn nodded.
“I’m surprised he didn’t just kill her.”
“I suspect he would have if she hadn’t put safeguards in place.”
“Clever.”
Pitcairn smiled. “Oh, Sasha is very clever.”
Sebastian studied the fencing master’s hard, closed face. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
Pitcairn shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“I’d like to talk to her. Where would I find her? Besides the theater, I mean.”
Pitcairn thought about it, then shook his head. “I think she’d prefer to find you.”
It was when Sebastian was walking back to where he’d left his curricle that he heard someone calling his name.
“Lord Devlin? I say, Lord Devlin!”
He turned to find one of Lovejoy’s constables loping up the street toward him. “What is it?” said Sebastian.
The man drew up, his breath coming hard and fast as he put up a hand to touch the brim of his round hat. “There’s been another murder, sir!”
Sebastian felt his stomach clench. “Who?” he said hoarsely. Not Bayard; please, not Bayard…“Who is it?”
“The tavern keeper out at Chalk Farm, my lord. Alison Cross.”