Chapter 29
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
An Unexpected Caller
Whitfield’s reports lay across my desk in three columns.
I had been at them since noon hunting the seam.
Eleven acres beyond Hammersmith. Fourteen men on the wages of a company that landed no cargo.
A wall of solicitors, a wharf that was a laundry, and somewhere inside all of it a door with a lock on it that a man could be got through.
A little past three somebody struck my front door hard. Not a knock. A knock had a rhythm to it. This was a pounding. I was out of my chair and down the corridor.
Lady Chrysanthemum stood in my entrance hall with Milford’s hand at her elbow. She had no bonnet. Her hair streamed down her back. The shoulder of her gown was open to the seam. Gravel dust marred both palms where she had gone down somewhere.
I raced down the stairs and held her by both arms. “What’s wrong?”
“They’ve taken Rosalynd.” She could barely manage a breath.
The hall did not narrow, or darken, or do any of the things the novels give it. It went perfectly clear instead.
“A chair, Milford. And have my carriage readied.”
“There’s no time for a chair.” She stood in the entrance hall with her fists closed and gave it to me in order. I have never in my life been so grateful for the way that family is made.
The fitting at Madame Delacroix’s in Bond Street. Finch on the pavement opposite. Shooting in the street, five or six shots. Three men through the front door. Furniture over, a shelf of silk down, her sister with a brass candlestick in both hands and a man on the boards at her feet.
“And then a man came in and said ‘Enough,’ and everything stopped.”
“Describe him.”
“Fifty, perhaps. Or a little more.” She frowned, hunting for it. She was very young and doing this very well. “Handsome. Silver at the temples. And he had three marks down his cheek, here”—her fingers went to her own face, cheekbone to jaw—“scabbed over. He had not covered them at all.”
Three lines. Cheekbone to jaw. Healing in the open air, on the face of a man who had walked into a dressmaker’s shop on Bond Street and let a dozen witnesses look at him.
“Sir Reginald Harcourt,” I said.
She stared at me. “Sir Reginald? The old gentleman at Lady Pembury’s? He was—Your Grace, he could hardly stand.”
“He can stand.” I got her into my study and into a chair at last. And then I put the brandy in her hands and closed her fingers round it. “Drink that. How did you come away?”
“The carriage stopped at the corner of the square.” Her voice went then, for the first time.
“He said I might go. He took the gag out of Rosie’s mouth himself, and he was gentle about it.
And then they put me down on the pavement, and Rosie told me to run.
So I ran. They kept her, but they let me go.
” And then finally, with her strength spent and her confession made, she dissolved into tears.
Not mercy. There was no mercy anywhere this afternoon.
I handed her my handkerchief. “You did very well, Lady Chrysanthemum. And you have been very brave.”
“You need to go after her.”
“I will. You can rest sure of that.” There was no version of Rosalynd’s abduction in which I did not pursue them.
“Finch,” I said. “Alive?”
“He was shot. His arm. He was bleeding a great deal.” Her chin came up in the way her sister’s does. “But he was alive.”
“Good.” I crouched to her chair. “Chrissie. Look at me. You have done everything correctly. Every single thing. Now Milford will take you upstairs and send for your grandmother. You will not go back across the square.”
“No. Grandmother must not know. And I must return home. Someone must hold the house.”
Brave. Just like her sister.
The knocker went again.
A bare minute later, Milford was in the study door, his face arranged, his voice not. “Your Grace. A gentleman at the door who declines to state his business. He gives the name Mercer.”
For a moment I did not move at all. And then I asked, “The carriage?”
“Ordered.”
Mercer’s name was on eleven acres of leased ground. In a club visitors’ book five times in two years. A name Whitfield had chased through directories and banks and found nothing fastened to it whatever.
“Show him in,” I said. “And then escort Lady Chrysanthemum home.” I took a revolver from my desk drawer and handed it to him. “Give it to Honeycutt. Tell him I’ll send help.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” He led Chrissie out the back door of the study to the corridor and the library where she could safely wait until he returned.
Mercer came in like a man arriving at a place of business. Middle height, forty-five or so, a good plain coat brushed that morning. Nothing about him would have caused a servant to look up. That, I understood immediately, was the whole of his professional life.
“Your Grace. I’m Mercer, the—”
“I know who you are and who you work for. Where has he taken her?”
“No preliminaries, I see. Very well. Lady Rosalynd was taken out of Bond Street at about three.”
“I know that, damn your eyes. You have ten seconds to tell me where Harcourt has taken her.” I pointed my other revolver at him. It wasn’t loaded, but he didn’t know that.
“I will, but first listen to what I have to say. I have turned on him.” He said it as another man says the time.
“Papers were delivered to Chief Inspector Graves at Scotland Yard at half past two, by hand, in a locked case. Every account. The payments to Marsh, and to Crane, and to the man who shot Crane. Names, dates, and the amounts against them. And all the other rotten business his hands were involved with—the drug trade, the house on the Thames, and more. Twenty years of it. I kept all the records because that’s what a sensible man does. ”
I didn’t believe a word he was saying. “Why would you turn on him?”
“Because I am forty-six and I should like to see fifty.”
He wanted to live, and the only way he could make sure of that was to have Harcourt put away permanently. “You want Harcourt dead.”
“I do.”
“Why now?”
Something came into his face then. It was not shame, but the contempt of a tradesman for spoiled work.
“Twenty years I kept his hands clean. There has not been a thing done in that time that could be laid at him—not a payment, not a body, not a signature. And this afternoon he walked into a shop in Bond Street with his face uncovered and took a woman in daylight, before witnesses, in Mayfair.” He let out a breath.
“There is nothing to be saved after that. So I did not save it. I banked it.”
“The money?”
“All of it. It left England before the shooting started. For America. He thinks it’s gone to France.” He said it without any pleasure at all.
“You stole from him.”
“I did not steal. I earned that money. It wasn’t his. It was mine.” He pounded his chest. “And he went and tossed it all away. For a woman.”
“You wanted her dead as well,” I said.
He met my eyes then for the first time. “I offered that twice. After Trinity Lane, and then after the river. I offered, but I was refused. He told me I mistook thoroughness for feeling.” A pause.
“I did not mistake anything. He has spent an entire enterprise on a woman who wants nothing to do with him, and today he spent the last of it. If he had let me see to her three months ago, there would be no cell in Holloway with an earl in it, and no papers in Graves’s hands.
And I would be a rich man in a country of my choosing instead of standing in your study wondering if you will end my life. ”
“I will if you don’t tell me right now where he has taken her. I will not ask again.”
“Wapping. A bonded warehouse off the High Street with a private stair to the water. It is in no register you have looked at, because it stands in a name I never signed.” He said it flatly.
“You have had men on the Hammersmith ground for several days. You are not going to find her there. That is where the trade is. This is where he goes.”
Finch's best men had spent days in a hedge on the Middlesex shore, watching a wall where the man we sought would never be found.
“And?”
“And there is a steam launch at the stair with her fires banked since noon. He ordered it at eleven o’clock this morning, before the Bond Street business, which should tell you what he meant to do all along.
” He paused. “Once your woman is on the tideway you will not get her back. Not this month, not this year, not ever.”
“Take me there. To Wapping.”
Boots in the hall then, heavy and uneven.
Finch came into my study holding his left arm across his body. The sleeve was gone from elbow to cuff and what remained of it was black-red. Somebody had tied a neckcloth above the wound and knotted it hard.
“You’ve been shot.”
"Nothing like stating the obvious, Your Grace.
" His mouth twitched. "A mere scratch. Only a through-and-through, above the elbow.
Missed the bone." He opened and closed his fingers to prove it and went white doing it.
Then he saw who was standing at my window, and everything in his face changed at once. “Who is this?”
“Mercer, Mr. Finch. You have been looking for me.”
“The gentleman who dined with Marsh at the Argosy. Five dinners in a private room and never a face to hang on you.” Finch’s voice was pleasant, which in Finch was not a good sign.
“Enough of this,” I said. “Harcourt has taken Rosalynd to Wapping. Mercer will take me there. You are staying here.”
“The hell I am. I’m coming with you. You need me.
” He shifted his arm and set his jaw against the pain.
“You are going to the Wapping shore in the last two hours of the tide, and you don’t know a stair from a set of dock steps.
You can’t ask a boatman for a thing without knowing what to call it.
I, on the other hand, have thirty years of that river.
” He looked at me steadily. “I was on that pavement on Bond Street, Your Grace. Someone owes me and I mean to have that debt paid.”
Damn him twice. He was right on the first count, and on the second I would have said the same in his place.
“Your pistol,” I said to Mercer, pointing my revolver at him.
He drew it out without a word and gave it to me butt first. I broke it open, tipped six cartridges into my palm, dropped them in my waistcoat pocket, and put the empty revolver inside my coat.
“You will walk in front of me the whole way.”
“I expected nothing else.”
I took a sheet from the desk and wrote the lines standing.
Graves,
Lady Rosalynd is taken. Wapping High Street, a bonded warehouse with a private stair, name unknown to us.
A steam launch at the water with her fires up.
Mercer is with me and is leading us there.
Every armed man you can put in a boat or a van, and quickly.
The papers that reached you at half past two are true.
—Steele
“Milford,” I yelled.
My butler came at a run, breathless. “Your Grace.”
“Everything well at Rosehaven House?”
“Yes, Your Grace. Honeycutt assured me he will not fold.”
“Good. Send every footman we have to Rosehaven House to help him.” I handed him the note. “Except for James. He is to ride to Scotland Yard and put this into Chief Inspector Graves’s own hand and no other.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
“Before you go, bandage Mr. Finch’s arm, if you would. I will not have him fainting on the road to Wapping.”
Finch snorted. “I have never fainted in—”
“Of course, Your Grace,” Milford answered with a slight lift of his lips.
Another five minutes were gone before we could climb into the carriage. And then finally, we were on our way.
I have crossed London a great many times and never once like that.
Oxford Street, Holborn, the City with the clerks coming out and the light going long and gold over Cheapside.
And my coachman using the whip in a manner for which I would owe, at the very least, the horses an apology.
Mercer sat forward, giving directions through the panel.
Finch sat opposite me with his hand clamped on his bandaged arm and his eyes shut, husbanding what he had left.
Nobody spoke for two miles.
Then Mercer said, “There is one more thing.”
“If it does not help me take her off that wharf, it can wait.”
“It will not help you this afternoon.” He turned from the window. “When this is finished, dig up the grave at Torquay.”
“Explain.”
“Sir Reginald went to the sea air three years ago for his chest. His man went with him. The parish register at Torquay has a manservant of Sir Reginald Harcourt’s dying there and being buried in the churchyard at his master’s expense, with a decent stone and a name cut into it.”
The carriage went over something in the road and none of us moved.
“That grave does not hold the valet.”
He said the rest of it quietly, and without any weight on it at all, which was how I understood that it was true.
“It holds Harcourt.”