Chapter 44
Leaving his curricle at Chalk Farm Tavern, Sebastian climbed the winding path to the top of Primrose Hill and then turned, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his greatcoat, his gaze narrowing as he studied the distant church spires of London, now nearly lost in the white swirl of a rising mist. He had stopped first in the tavern’s taproom.
And what he learned there from a brief but enlightening conversation with the middle-aged woman tending the bar had driven him here, to stand beside the blackened remnants of a bonfire that had been cold now for more than a week.
He supposed it was vaguely ironic that the modern descendants of those tribal Britons who, two thousand years ago, had ritually drowned, buried, hanged, and burned alive an endless stream of human sacrifices to their gods should now consider murder the ultimate sin.
Today’s Englishmen and -women typically reacted with a special kind of fear, horror, and revulsion to the deliberate taking of another human life.
And yet Sebastian had long been of the opinion that, given the right circumstances, most—if not all—people were capable of murder.
Oh, not the kind of casual, senseless killing committed out of a lust for cruelty or by those rare souls without conscience or scruples.
But when in the grip of strong emotion—anger, fear, greed, jealousy, injured amour propre, shame, grief, or a burning thirst for revenge—ordinary people could find it surprisingly easy to kill.
He did not exclude himself from that calculation.
Most such murders were, nevertheless, roundly condemned by society.
And yet not all killings were viewed with equal revulsion.
Homicides committed in self-defense were generally considered excusable, although some might continue to look askance at the perpetrator.
Wars could slaughter millions of innocents—millions—and still be seen by many as good and just, even holy.
And many of the same Englishmen who would be appalled by the murder of a child typically saw no contradiction in nodding with righteous approval when a desperately hungry ten-year-old girl was hanged for stealing a card of lace.
Lace.
Such executions were, basically, a legally sanctioned system of revenge killing—that ancient, once widely accepted form of justice that the state had now abrogated solely for itself.
But what happens when society refuses to enforce its own rules?
When the rich and powerful are allowed to steal, rape, destroy, and kill with impunity, simply because they are rich and powerful?
What then?
Profoundly troubled by the drift of his thoughts, Sebastian found himself fingering the wooden carving of a howling wolf he still carried in his pocket.
And he wondered, Was it fair to condemn those driven by the failures of their society to take the law into their own hands and exact their own revenge?
And when they did, where did the true blame for their actions lie?
With those who refused to accept the injustice and inequality of their society?
Or with the inescapable failures and blatant hypocrisy of the corrupt system itself?
The early winter darkness was already falling by the time Sebastian returned to the city. Finding the shop in Little Windmill Street once again closed and the Catholic chapel behind Golden Square deserted except for an elderly Frenchwoman, he stood for a moment in thought.
Then he turned his steps toward Fleet Street.
Running east from Temple Bar toward St. Paul’s Cathedral, Fleet Street was famous as the home of the city’s premier morning and evening newspapers—the Morning Chronicle, the Times, the Post, the Morning Herald, and so many others.
But as the ancient thoroughfare that connected the City of London to Westminster, Fleet Street had long been much more than a street of ink.
In addition to booksellers, this was an area known as the haunt of generations of reformers, heretics, freethinkers, and revolutionaries.
Thomas Hardy, the boot maker whose trial for treason in 1794 had popularized the seditious song sung by the patrons of the Rising Sun coffeehouse, had lived here, as did men like Richard Carlisle and Oliver Goldsmith.
The ancient labyrinth of narrow lanes, alleyways, and courts that stretched away toward Covent Garden to the north and the Thames to the south formed its own community.
It didn’t take Sebastian long to discover that Kate Price, her brother Barnabas, and his late wife Beth had all grown up here and were well-known.
But as Sebastian trolled the area’s coffeehouses, shops, and market stalls, he discovered that Beth had actually been Barnabas Price’s second wife; his first wife had died giving birth to a daughter, Rosamund.
A pretty, dark-haired girl with a quick mind and a ready laugh, Rosamund had worked part-time in the printshop still run by her father’s sister, Kate.
But, tragically, the girl had recently died at the tender age of fifteen.
The aged bookseller who told Sebastian the sad tale didn’t know what Rosamund had died of. Whatever it was, he said, it had come on suddenly and carried the poor girl off in mere days.
Sebastian found Kate Price standing at a table positioned beneath the front window, her figure haloed by the wavering golden light cast by a brace of tallow candles at her elbow.
She was setting type with quick, sure fingers, but looked up, faltering, when Sebastian pushed open the door to her small press.
She hesitated, then set aside the half-filled wooden galley and turned to face him, her hands pressed flat against the leather apron that covered her simple black mourning gown.
“I know who you are,” she said.
He closed the old wooden door behind him. “That’s convenient.”
Her chin lifted. “If you decided to come yourself rather than sending your wife this time, it must be serious.”
Wordlessly, Sebastian drew the wolf carving from his pocket and laid it atop the half-filled galley.
She eyed it warily. “What is that?
“I’m told it’s a copy—or perhaps, more accurately, an adaptation—of an ancient Celtic relief carving discovered some years ago at a site in Ireland known as Tara.”
“And what has it to do with me?”
“You’ve never seen the carving before?”
“No.”
“But you know an Irishwoman named Ciana O’Leary. She keeps a shop off Piccadilly selling books and various other objects of a kind that tend to appeal to neo-Druids. Things like drums, runes, and horns, but also various animals carved in stone or wood. Like this one. Very like this one.”
Something flickered in her brown eyes, and he knew she was considering denying it. Then she shrugged and said, “And if I do?”
“How did you happen to meet her?”
“What concern is that of yours?”
He let his gaze drift around the small printing shop, now mostly lost in shadow: the silent, old-fashioned wooden press, the stacked bundles of paper, the ink-stained wooden cubbyholes of type stationed beside the table at which she had been working.
The pungent scent of boiled linseed oil hung heavily in the air, mingling with the smell of hot tallow from the burning candles.
“It was the seeming links to the Druids that confused me,” he said, bringing his gaze back to her face.
“Primrose Hill. The Celtic-styled wood carving. The bodies posed to look like the victims of human sacrifice. Taken all together, they suggested there was something ritualistic about the killings, something dark and mysterious. But I don’t think there was—at least, not at first. And while I still don’t understand all of it, it’s starting to make a lot more sense. ”
“Is it?
“You were seen, you know. That night on Westminster Bridge. Three women, dressed to look like young men of the middling sort, following a foppish aristocrat who’d picked up a bit of muslin with the idea of taking her up against one of the new gas lamps on the bridge.”
He saw the flare of surprise in her eyes, quickly hidden by lowered lids. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. And because you were seen, we now know that Gil Keebles wasn’t thrown into the Thames like a sacrifice to the god Teutates; he simply fell when he climbed up on the parapet to try to get away from his killers.
You probably thought you were lucky, that the body would be swept out to sea; it was your bad luck it washed up at Rotherhithe instead.
And while I could be wrong, I suspect you didn’t throw Toole’s body on that bonfire, either; I think he fell into it when he was shot. Taranis had nothing to do with it.”
She stayed silent, but he could see the pulse in her pale, slim throat begin to beat fast and hard.
He said, “But it’s what gave you the idea of posing the rest of them to look like sacrificial victims, isn’t it?
You even had me thinking the killer must be Theo Bridgewood.
He’s the only one of the original six friends left standing, and it seems he’s rather fond of threatening people with a nasty schoolboys’ taunt about human sacrifice.
But I’ve just had a message from Bow Street, and they checked with his servants: Theo spent all of that fatal Saturday night a week ago casting up his accounts in a chamber pot.
There is literally no doubt about that, which means he couldn’t have killed Marcus Toole.
And that’s apart from the fact that I’d swear the man is genuinely terrified that he’s about to become the next victim of his friends’ killer. ”
“Is he?” she said, her voice low and harsh. “Good.”
Sebastian paused, choosing his next words carefully. “I know about your niece, Rosamund.”
She stiffened.
He said, “I take it that after Pitcairn stopped them from destroying your printing press that day, Keebles, Toole, and friends came back another time, looking for you. Except they found Rosamund instead.”
“No,” she said fiercely. “Rosamund died of a fever. Do you hear me? A fever!”
He shook his head. “What I don’t understand is, why kill Alison Cross and Jenna Diamond?”
Her lips parted on a quickly indrawn breath. “But we d—” She broke off. “Why would I kill Alison and Jenna? You’re wrong. Do you hear me? You’re wrong!”
“Am I?”
Rather than answer, she turned abruptly away, one hand coming to her forehead as she drew up and swung to face him again. “What do you intend to do?” she asked, letting her hand fall. “Take this—this fantasy of yours to Bow Street?”
“No. I have no proof of any of it. But tell me this: What do you intend to do when Sir Nathaniel Conant arrests Damion Pitcairn for the murders? Will you let him hang for something you did?”
“Damion?”
“You didn’t know?”
She stared at him. “Bow Street has arrested him?”
“Not yet. But Conant intends to. If you—” He broke off at the faint, telltale sound of a familiar click coming from the dark lane outside.
“Get down!” he shouted, throwing himself forward as the front window shattered in a cascade of splintering glass and a fiery, crackling boom flared in the darkness beyond.