Chapter 31
Dressed in a plain dark wool cloak with the hood pulled up against a miserable wind, Kate Price stood outside a print seller’s shop in Fleet Street, her gaze on the colored satires arrayed in the shop’s bow window.
As Hero walked up, the journalist glanced over at her, then returned her gaze to the window display.
“I take it you aren’t here by chance.” It wasn’t a question.
“No,” said Hero.
Kate nodded to one of the prints in the window.
A satirical caricature by Rory Mackenzie, it portrayed two corpulent, overdressed dandies mincing across the Strand, their heels comically high, a dozen or more gold fobs dangling from their watch chains, the buttons of their silk waistcoats strained by their bulbous bellies.
Behind them loomed the facade of St. Paul’s Cathedral; to one side slumped an exhausted, ragged little crossing sweeper; a stooped, aged woman held out a withered apple from a rusted tray, and at her feet lay the pallid corpse of a skeletal ex-soldier curled up in the gutter, his body frozen by rigor mortis in a grotesque pose.
“I wish I could draw,” she said. “I sometimes think just one of these images is more evocative than everything I’ve written taken all together. ”
“They can be very effective,” said Hero, keeping her gaze on the delicately colored prints. “You didn’t tell me Marcus Toole and his friends paid a visit to your press recently.”
Kate Price stiffened. “It wasn’t recent—not unless you call something that happened a month or more ago ‘recent.’ ”
“But it did happen?”
“Oh, yes; it happened.”
“Why were they there?”
She expelled a low huff that held no amusement. “Why do you think? They read my article.”
“And decided to pay you back for it by smashing your press?”
“That was the idea.”
“And Damion Pitcairn stopped them?” said Hero.
That jerked Kate’s gaze back to Hero’s face for one tense instant. She looked away again. “Who told you that?”
“Gilbert Keebles mentioned it to someone before he died.”
When the other woman remained silent, Hero said, “Why was Damion Pitcairn there?”
“I sometimes print things for him.”
“For the Spenceans?”
“You’d need to ask him that.”
“And he just happened to have a cavalry saber with him when he dropped by to pick up his broadsheets?”
Kate Price shrugged. “He collects them, you know. Old swords, I mean. He’s always on the lookout for them. He was coming from the secondhand stalls in Brick Lane when he stopped by to see if I had his broadsheets ready.”
“And he found Keebles, Toole, and the others there?”
“Yes. It’s one thing to destroy a printing press when the only thing standing between you and your fun is a small woman. But it’s something else entirely to try it when confronted with a naked blade.”
“Pitcairn drew steel on them?”
“You’re suggesting it was wrong of him?”
“Not at all. And then they simply left?”
“Of course they left. When it comes right down to it, men like that are cowards. Oh, they tried to make out that it was all supposed to be a joke—that they wouldn’t actually have done anything. But that was a lie.”
Hero had no doubts about that. “Did they ever try to come back?”
The other woman was silent for so long that Hero didn’t think she was going to answer. Then she shook her head. “Damion told them that if they did, he’d—” She broke off, her eyes widening as she sucked in a quick breath.
“That he’d—what? Kill them?”
But the journalist only tightened her jaw and refused to be drawn in any further.
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Devlin later when Hero told him of the conversation in Fleet Street. His own attempts to track down Damion Pitcairn had been less successful.
“No.” She tossed her plumed hat onto a nearby chair and stared at it a moment before saying, “Do you think old Mr. Vernon Keebles has spoken to Bow Street?”
Devlin met her gaze. “For Pitcairn’s sake, I sincerely hope not.”