Chapter 27
The inquest into the death of Phineas Upcott began at ten o’clock the next morning in a neat brick inn on Baker Street North.
It was as unproductive as everyone had expected.
The jarvey who’d discovered Upcott’s body was still visibly rattled when he gave his halting testimony and knew nothing beyond the obvious.
Because the area was so sparsely settled, no one in the few widely scattered houses around the construction site had seen or heard anything untoward, and no one seemed to know what the dead man might have been doing on the outskirts of London in the middle of the night.
Upcott’s valet, a nervous young man named Twigg, testified that his master had left his rooms shortly after seven without saying where he was going or at what time to expect his return.
Throughout it all, Sebastian was painfully aware of Sir Lawrence Upcott sitting tense and straight-backed, his face ashen, his eyes haunted with a pain that was never going to go away.
When the jury delivered the inevitable verdict of homicide by person or persons unknown, Sir Lawrence sank his head into his hands, and an ugly murmur spread through the assembled onlookers.
“People are frightened,” said Lovejoy afterward as he and Sebastian walked along the empty, weed-choked building sites that lined the nearby Culloden Terrace.
“Understandably so,” said Sebastian. “Although at least the nature of Upcott’s death is ordinary enough that it hasn’t provoked any more speculation about human sacrifices in the press.” At least, not yet, he thought.
“Hanging is definitely less sensational than being burned alive.” Lovejoy paused, then added, “Although certainly no less lethal.”
“Have you heard the results of Alison Cross’s autopsy yet?”
“Not yet,” said Lovejoy. He stared across the dead fields toward the wind-whipped gray waters of the reservoir. “Sir Nathaniel Conant is convinced she helped someone murder Toole, then killed herself in a fit of remorse.”
“She didn’t kill herself,” said Sebastian again.
Lovejoy nodded. “He’s somewhat annoyed that we sent the body to Paul Gibson. Anyone else he might have been able to browbeat into giving the findings he desired.”
“Not Gibson.”
“No, not Gibson.”
The Irish surgeon was in the stone outbuilding at the base of his garden, still washing the naked corpse laid out on his raised granite slab, when Sebastian arrived at Tower Hill a short time later.
“Can you tell me anything yet?” asked Sebastian, pausing in the doorway.
“Beyond the obvious observation that she was strangled, you mean?” said Gibson, carefully setting down Alison Cross’s bloodstained hand and dropping his wet cloth into a nearby basin of water.
“She was strangled first, then hanged? Same as Upcott?”
“The same.”
“Son of a bitch,” whispered Sebastian. “What about her attacker? Anything at all?”
Gibson leaned back against the deep wooden shelf that ran across the rear wall of the building.
“Well, it appears likely he looped the cord over her head from behind, so you’re looking for someone who’s taller than she was and fairly strong.
But since she wasn’t a particularly large woman, I suspect that won’t narrow things down much.
” He pointed to a row of angry wheals on the dead woman’s thin, pale neck.
“She made those scratches herself, trying to loosen the garrote. It’s why her hands are so bloody; she tore six of her fingernails trying to stop the bastard from squeezing the life out of her. ”
Swallowing another oath, Sebastian pushed away from the doorframe to go study a brown leather thong that lay curled up in a chipped basin on the shelves to the left of the entrance, beside the folded pile of Allison Cross’s clothes.
The cord had been fashioned of three lengths of leather braided together, the ends tied in simple knots. “Where did that come from?”
“One of the constables found it in the straw when they searched the barn again this morning.”
“Think something similar was used to kill Phineas Upcott?”
“I’d say so, yes. It might even be the same garrote. I wonder why your killer left it this time.”
“Maybe he dropped it and didn’t want to take the time to search for it. Or he didn’t realize he had dropped it,” said Sebastian, his gaze drawn again to the distorted features of the dead woman on Gibson’s slab.
Gibson pushed away from the shelf and reached for his wet cloth. “I haven’t had time to do a thorough examination yet, but I can tell you one other thing that may or may not be related to her murder.”
Sebastian looked up. “What’s that.”
“She was with child.”
Sebastian felt a pain pull across his chest, his heart aching at the thought of what Allison Cross’s last frantic moments must have been like if she’d known she was losing not only her own life, but the life of her unborn child, too. “How far along?”
“Four or five months, I’d say.”
“So she definitely knew?”
“Oh, yes, she knew.”
Sebastian returned to Brook Street to find a slim youth dressed in a slightly worn but fashionable navy blue coat, pale pantaloons, and boots hesitating at the base of the house’s front steps, with one hand resting lightly on the railing.
“Stable them,” Sebastian told Tom, handing the tiger his reins.
“Aye, gov’nor,” said Tom as Sebastian hopped down to the pavement.
The “youth” turned at Sebastian’s approach, her moss green eyes narrowed and wary. “Damion says you want to talk to me.”
“I do, yes. Thank you for agreeing to see me. Would you like to come in?”
Sasha shook her head. “We can talk out here, while we walk.”
“If you’d prefer,” said Sebastian, turning their steps toward Bond Street. “I wanted to ask about your run-in with Marcus Toole and his friends in Southwark a month or so ago.”
“Damion said he already told you about that.”
“He did. But I thought you might be able to help me understand it better.”
“Not sure there’s much to understand. I was handing out broadsheets for the first Spa Fields meeting when they came at me like a bloody pack of wolves.”
A pack of wolves. Wolves. Wolves… Sebastian felt his heart beat up against his ribs as the implications of that phrase dawned. But all he said was, “Had you ever seen the men before?”
She gave an offhand shrug that could have meant anything. “Their kind like to hang around the Round Room.”
The Round Room was a mirror-lined circular chamber at the King’s Theatre where the wealthy young bucks of the ton were encouraged to congregate, evaluate the season’s crop of new opera dancers, and select their mistresses. “One of them approached you there?”
She drew up abruptly, raw anger flaring in her eyes. “Lots of men ‘approach’ me. Constantly. People think if you’re an opera dancer, you’re for sale. Well, I’m not.”
He turned to face her. “I don’t think you are, and it was not my intention to imply it.”
A quiver passed over her features. She gave a quick, jerky nod, then turned to walk on.
He fell into step beside her again. “Did you have trouble with all of them, or just one in particular? At the theater, I mean.”
She hesitated, then said, “Bridgewood. Theo Bridgewood. Men like him don’t like to take no for an answer.”
“How do you come to know Adam York?”
That question seemed to take her by surprise. She glanced over at him. “Why you asking about him?”
“You were seen leaving his coffeehouse yesterday.”
“So?”
“I’m told Toole, Keebles, and the others wrecked the place a few weeks ago.”
Her lip curled. “Does that surprise you? That they’d do something like that?”
“No. They seem to have made that sort of thing a habit. But I’m trying to understand why they would be hanging around areas as depressed as Southwark and Clerkenwell. Do you know why they were in Southwark the day they confronted you?”
“You think I asked?”
“I thought you might have noticed where they came from.”
“No. I was just handing out broadsheets and talking to anyone interested in the meeting when suddenly they were…there.”
“And Bridgewood took a broadsheet, crumpled it up, and threw it back at you?”
She nodded. “I don’t think they’d noticed Damion sitting on a low stone wall nearby. Some workmen had taken copies of the broadsheets and were just walking away when Bridgewood and his friends came up.”
“Were you dressed like this?”
She made a low scoffing sound, deep in her throat. “Of course I was. You think I wanted trouble?”
“So they didn’t know who you were?”
“Oh, Bridgewood knew.”
“How?”
She glanced over at Sebastian, her expression unreadable. “Perhaps he’s unusually observant.”
She was keeping something from him, he knew, but he was damned if he could figure out what it was or how to get at it. He tried a different tack. “How long have you been in London?”
“A couple of years. Why?”
“You came here from Jamaica?”
She nodded.
“You knew Damion was here?”
She nodded again. “He always found a way to keep in touch with us—me and our grandmama, even after Mr. Pitcairn sent him to Scotland.”
“Damion tells me you have the same mother.”
“That’s right, but she died when I was eight.” Sasha paused, her expression hardening. “You know how she died?”
Sebastian had a feeling he didn’t want to know. “No.”
“He whipped her to death. The man who ‘owned’ her, I mean. My uncle. After that, her mother—Damion and my’s grandmama—raised me. I saw her whipped a couple of times, too. But she survived it.”
“The man’s name was Stone?”
“No, that’s my name. Before I left Jamaica, I went to the slave cemetery where they’d buried my mama and piled her grave high with stones so I’d be able to find it if I ever came back.
And then I took Stone as my name to remind me always of what those bastards did to her.
You think I want to carry their name?” She drew up and turned to face him again.
“What does any of this have to do with the death of those three men?”
“I’m just trying to understand why they decided to pick on you.”
“Why? It’s not all that hard to figure out, is it?
To people like them, a woman like me—or a man like Damion—isn’t quite human.
We scare them, except not for the reasons they tell themselves.
We scare them because just by being alive and looking different, we threaten their belief in who they are.
As long as they keep us as slaves, then they can feel superior, convince themselves that we’re lesser than them and deserve everything that happens to us.
But when they see us walking down the street—maybe not as their equals, because how many are seen as the equals of that lot?
—but when they see us free, our own masters, it forces them to maybe consider that we’re human beings, just like they are.
And that they’re guilty of a grave sin for all the horrible things they’ve done to us and to people like us.
And they can’t bear that. It’s an insult to everything they’d like to believe about the world and about themselves. So they hate us.”
Sebastian was silent for a moment. It was a profoundly insightful analysis that applied not simply to Bridgewood and Toole, but to far, far too many others. He said, “Who do you think is killing those men?”
She stared up at him, her face hard. “I neither know nor care.”
“That seems to be a common sentiment.”
“Yeah? Well, that ought to tell you somethin’, hmm?”
Sebastian drew the wooden carving from his pocket. “Have you ever seen this before?”
She glanced at it. “No. Why?”
“You described those men as a ‘pack of wolves.’ ”
“So?”
“This was found on Primrose Hill, near where Marcus Toole was killed.”
Some emotion he couldn’t define flitted across her delicate features, then was gone. Reaching out, she took the carving, then held it cradled in both hands. “ ‘Now the hungry lion roars,’ ” she quoted softly, “ ‘And the wolf behowls the moon.’ ”
For reasons he couldn’t quite have explained, he felt a chill run down his spine. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”
She nodded and held the carving out to him. “So maybe somebody else thought of them the same way I do—somebody who decided to give them their own back again. Although me, I’m thinking it’s an insult to wolves.”
“I have to agree with you on that,” said Sebastian, tucking the piece away.
Someone else, he knew, had referred to Toole and his friends as a “pack.” Not a wolf pack, though, so he hadn’t made the connection with the carving. But the memory was ephemeral and slippery, there and then gone. And the harder he tried to retrieve it, the more it eluded him.