Chapter 33
Chapter
Thirty-Three
A Name and a Face
Islept poorly.
Not because of my leg, though it complained with its customary enthusiasm the moment I attempted to stand the following morning.
No. It was my thoughts that had kept the watch.
They spent the whole of the night chasing the same circles they had chased since I left Lark's house, and they were no nearer the center by dawn than they had been at midnight.
Linnet. The ginger-haired man. Kent. Miss Preston's statement. Each one a separate thread, and yet every thread now appeared knotted to every other.
By half past eight, I had given up the pretense of further rest and gone down.
Breakfast had been set out in the morning room, as it always was: eggs, deviled kidneys, bacon, sausages, and fried potatoes steaming under the covers of the chafing dishes, toast and butter and marmalade ranged along the table.
Considerably more than one man intended to eat, and a good deal more than one man should.
After taking his morning constitutional, Ajax stationed himself by the hearth with the patience of a creature who knew some of the fare would find its way to the floor.
I had only just taken my seat and poured a cup of coffee when Dawson appeared in the doorway.
"Good morning, my lord."
"Good morning." I drank. The coffee was hot and strong and the first thing all morning that had behaved as I wished it to. "I have a task for you."
His expression sharpened at once. "I will be glad to do it, my lord.”
"We are looking for a man." That got the whole of his attention. "Description?"
"Ginger hair. A scar down the left cheek. Broken nose."
"Occupation?"
"General villainy."
"Ah." He inclined his head with grave respect. "A specialist."
“One might say so. He runs errands for other villains. I need you to find him." I set down my cup. “A witness—Miss Preston—saw him push Lydia Gray into the path of the carriage that killed her.”
Dawson became dead serious. “A villain indeed, my lord.”
I pushed my notebook across the table. “I talked to her yesterday. Her account is there, near enough word for word. He frequents Bloomsbury—public houses, lodging houses, whatever corners men of his sort inhabit. I want his name. His associates. And where he sleeps."
Dawson took up the notebook and started to skim the pages. "I'll start with the publicans. A man with a face like that is remembered, whether he wishes it or not."
"You'll start this morning."
"I assumed as much, my lord."
"I can help." Will’s voice. From the doorway.
I glanced toward the eager face. “No."
“I know pubs,” Will said, striding into the room. He already knew that my refusals were the opening of a negotiation rather than the close of one.
"You are ten."
"I was younger than that when I started helping Mam at the Hare and Hound.”
"That may be so. But you are still ten now."
He scrunched his mouth. “And I still know pubs."
Dawson had arranged his features into a careful, ornamental blankness.
Will folded his arms across his narrow chest. “I swept the floors. I collected mugs." A pause, weighted with the dignity of a man laying down his credentials. "I listened."
That, I confess, made me pause.
Will saw it. Children possess an almost supernatural faculty for identifying the precise instant an argument develops a flaw.
"I know who talks to who," he pressed on, sensing blood. "I know who drinks too much. I know who starts the fights. I know who owes money to who."
"You are describing half the men in England."
"I'm describing pubs."
Dawson coughed into his hand with elaborate discretion.
I turned upon him a look that had, in its time, silenced colonels.
"Dawson."
"My lord."
"Do not encourage him."
"Wouldn't dream of it, my lord." He busied himself among the chafing dishes. But then after a moment, he said, “The lad isn't entirely wrong."
Traitor.
I returned my attention to Will, who was watching me with the bright, unblinking patience of a terrier at a rat-hole.
"You are supposed to be studying."
The grin arrived in full. "School doesn't start until ten."
There was, regrettably, no answering that.
"Sit," I said, "and eat your breakfast."
He needed no second invitation. He heaped his plate with eggs and kidneys and bacon and sausages and potatoes in quantities that no boy his size could possibly eat.
And then he took the chair beside mine. Ajax, scenting opportunity, relocated from the hearth to a position of careful neutrality between us.
It was impossible, watching him fall upon the food, not to mark how much better he looked than he had the night he first came to this house.
Still too thin. Still too quick to flinch at a raised voice or a sudden movement.
But there was color in his face now, and he no longer eyed each kindness sidelong, hunting for the trap concealed inside it.
"How are your lessons?" I asked, once he had taken the worst of the edge off.
The grin broadened. That alone was startling. No child in the history of childhood had ever looked pleased to be asked about his education. "Good."
I waited.
"Mr. Crawley knows a lot about trains."
Mr. Crawley. The tutor I had engaged for him, and of whom I had until that moment formed only a middling opinion. Of all the answers I might have anticipated, that was not among them.
"Trains," I repeated.
"Locomotives," Will corrected me, with the firmness of a scholar defending his discipline. "And railways."
I glanced at Dawson. Dawson, for once, looked as bewildered as I felt.
"Go on."
"Mr. Crawley says railways changed everything."
"Did he?”
"He showed me drawings of the Rocket."
"I see."
"And then he explained how the steam works. The boiler and the pistons and all of it. And why Liverpool got bigger after they built the railway."
"Indeed."
"And how much iron it takes to lay a single mile of track."
I was beginning to detect a pattern and to revise my middling opinion sharply upward.
Crawley was a cleverer man than I had given him credit for.
He had taken a ten-year-old's passion for locomotives and smuggled an entire education inside it—arithmetic in the iron and the fares, science in the steam, history in the towns that had swelled or starved as the lines ran past them or didn't, and, improbably, the rudiments of engineering besides.
He had got the boy to swallow the whole of it.
And Will never once suspected it was learning, because it wore the livery of the only thing on earth he loved.
Clever. Very clever.
Will sat back, glowing with the unselfconscious satisfaction of a boy who has had a good morning. "I like him."
"That is the first encouraging thing you have said since you came into the room.”
He smirked. “And he doesn't talk like a book."
I laughed before I could help myself. It was a criticism the boy had leveled at me before, and not without justice.
Having taken the measure of my goodwill, Will returned at once to the matter that interested him. "I can help you find that man," he said around a mouthful of sausage.
"No. And a gentleman does not speak with his mouth full."
His face fell. Then, with the resilience peculiar to the young, it brightened again, lit from within by some fresh inspiration.
"I still have the clothes."
The clothes from Yorkshire. Of course he did. The very clothes I had told him we would replace. With everything that had transpired, we hadn't yet seen to his wardrobe.
"I told you they might be useful."
At the sideboard, Dawson became suddenly and profoundly absorbed in rotating the chafing dishes.
"Turns out I was right," Will added.
"One useful application does not constitute a victory."
"It sounds like a victory."
"It is not."
"It sounds exactly like one."
"Dawson."
"My lord."
"Say nothing."
"I wasn't planning to, my lord." A beat. The potatoes received further attention. "Though I confess it does sound rather like a victory."
The pair of them had plainly held a council of war while I slept, and signed terms I had not been invited to read.
"But it does occur to me, my lord," Dawson went on, abandoning the potatoes and turning, "that Master Will might be of some use. Not in a public house—I'd not take him over a threshold like that. On the street."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The crossing-sweepers. The news vendors.
The errand boys. The children who see the whole of London pass under their noses and are themselves seen by no one.
" He nodded toward Will. "He is of an age with them, my lord.
A grown man asking questions in Bloomsbury puts every mouth shut.
A boy asking another boy is only a boy."
Before I could frame an answer, Will had one of his own. "Why shouldn't I help?"
"Because you are ten."
His brow drew down. "That's not a reason."
"It is an excellent reason."
"No, it isn't."
And the maddening thing was that, on this narrow point, he was not entirely wrong. I considered the matter properly, against my own strong inclination not to.
A ten-year-old boy in good wool and clean linen would draw the eye in every mean street in Bloomsbury, a sovereign dropped in a gutter.
But a ten-year-old boy in patched Yorkshire homespun would do the opposite.
He would vanish—not into danger, never that, I would see to that—but into the ordinary moving furniture of the city.
One more ragged lad among the sweepers and the newsboys and the errand boys, beneath the notice of any man with a guilty conscience and a scarred face to hide.
I disliked the idea intensely. I disliked the logic of it a good deal less, which was precisely the trouble.
At length, I let out a breath—and knew the instant I had done it that I had erred, for the pair of them recognized the sound for what it was. Not consent. Surrender.
I had said no, and now, three minutes and one criminal partnership between my manservant and a ten-year-old later, no had somehow become yes.
Not because I had been argued out of my objections, but because I had run out of better ones, and a boy who knew how to read a room full of strangers was worth more than a marquis who did not.
I told myself Dawson would keep him close.
I told myself that Yorkshire had taught him the same lessons Bloomsbury would only ask him to apply to new faces.
I told myself a great many reasonable things and none of them touched the plain fact underneath: I had just agreed to send a child hunting a man who pushed women beneath carriage wheels for a living.
If anything happened to him, no amount of sound reasoning would matter to me at all.
"You do not leave Dawson's sight," I said.
Will sat up very straight.
"You do not follow anyone."
"Right."
"You do not set foot inside a single public house."
“I won’t.”
"And you do not, under any circumstance, attempt to apprehend a murderer."
Will looked frankly insulted. "I wasn't planning to."
"You are ten. I have not the faintest notion what you were planning."
"We'll be careful, my lord," Dawson said, and for once there was no dry edge to it. "I'll keep him close."
"You had better. Both of you." I held his eye a moment longer than the words required. He understood the whole of what I had not said, as he always did.
Will's grin threatened to divide his face in two.
I leveled a finger at him. "This is not a victory."
It was, of course. I had lost it somewhere between the coffee and the kidneys, and every soul at the table—the boy, the manservant, and very probably the dog—knew it perfectly well.
Before I could lose another battle, I came to my feet and made for the door. At least at my solicitors' I would be assured of a victory. Or, at the very least, not a loss.