Chapter 35
Chapter
Thirty-Five
A Name at Last
My solicitors did not disappoint me. But then, they so rarely did.
Harkness had the affidavit drawn already—Martha Preston’s account, set down in the clean copperplate of a clerk.
He also laid before me a second sheet I had not asked for but was glad to have—the register of certificates bearing Aubrey Strode’s signature, year upon year, against the establishment in Kent.
Names of women. Dates of committal. Fees received.
The whole tidy commerce of it accounted to the farthing.
“You will want the originals kept where they cannot be reached,” I said.
Harkness removed his spectacles and polished them, which was his way of telling me he had already thought of it and was offended I supposed otherwise.
“They are lodged with the bank, my lord. Sealed. Mr. Poole and I are the only signatories.” He returned the spectacles to his nose.
“A house may burn. A bank vault is a different proposition.”
"There is something else," I said. "What I feared has come to pass. Westmere has set the thing in motion. He has his sister already and means to have her certified within the week. A physician is expected on Thursday, I am given to understand."
Harkness did not exclaim. He merely set down his pen. "Then we are where we expected to be.”
"You are ready, then."
"My lord." There was the faintest reproach in it.
"We have been ready for some time, since you brought the matter to our attention.
The petition to the commissioners wants only the names and the date.
Westmere is about to furnish us both." He drew a single sheet from the folder at his elbow and turned it for me to see—a document drawn close, in the same clean clerk's hand, with blanks left waiting where the particulars would go.
"The moment the certificates are signed, we challenge them.
Strode cannot examine a woman he cannot speak to.
The certificate he signs will be worth no more than the paper, and we shall say so before the board in language they cannot mistake.
The committal will be the rope, my lord. We need only let him fashion the knot."
It was, I thought, a remarkably bloodless way to describe the rescue of a living woman from a stone house in Kent. It was also exactly correct, which was why I employed Harkness and not a man with warmer blood and cooler wits.
I left his offices better armed than I had entered it, which is the most a man can ask of his solicitors, and rather more than most of them provide.
And then I went home to wait, which was the part I had never learned to do.
I did not pace. I have a horror of being a man who paces, and, in any case, it was something I could not very well do.
I sat in the library with a copy of the affidavit on the desk before me and Ajax stretched the length of the hearthrug and read the same paragraph of Miss Preston’s statement four times without taking in a word of it.
He put both his hands flat against her shoulders. And he shoved her into its path.
I knew the shape of the man now. I did not yet know his name.
Somewhere in the warren of Bloomsbury, Dawson was extracting it from a publican, a name being the one thing a face like that cannot help but leave behind.
And somewhere in the same streets—this was the thought that would not let me read—a ten-year-old boy in patched Yorkshire homespun was asking other boys whether they had seen a ginger man with a broken nose.
I had agreed to it. I had even, God help me, been persuaded of its logic. The logic remained sound. It had not grown one degree more comfortable for being sound.
Ajax lifted his head a full half-minute before I heard anything at all. He came to his feet, ears forward, and went to the library door. Then I heard Dawson’s voice, low, and beneath it, Will’s.
The breath I let go then was not a small one.
I had composed myself by the time the door opened.
A man does not greet the safe return of a child he has sent into danger by flinging his arms about, however the impulse may present itself.
I was on my feet, which I permitted myself, because Ajax was already at the door, and a man may follow his dog without comment.
“My lord,” Dawson said.
“Dawson.” I looked past him. “Will.”
The boy came in with his color high, his cap askew, and an expression I knew at once for trouble. He had something inside his coat. The coat was moving.
I elected, for the moment, to address the man rather than the coat. “Well?”
“We have your name, my lord.” Dawson set his hat on the side table.
“Murphy. Took the better part of the day and three public houses to be certain of it, but there’s no doubt.
Ginger. Scar down the cheek. The nose. Goes by Murphy and answers to nothing else.
There’s not a publican in Bloomsbury that doesn’t know the face, though few of them care to say so aloud.
” He paused. “I had to stand a good deal of gin to loosen the last of it, my lord. I’ll render the account. ”
“Render me the man first. The account can wait.”
“He’s hired muscle.” Dawson said it flatly, the way he reported anything that mattered.
“Not a thief, not a tough for the sport of it. A man you go to when you’ve a thing wants doing and you’d rather your own hands stayed clean.
He’s done work for half the bad money south of the river and a fair portion north of it besides.
And—” here he glanced, briefly, at the boy, and chose his words for the smaller ears in the room “—the names that came up most often in the same breath as his were two. A solicitor. And a doctor.”
“Strode and Carmody.”
“The very gentlemen, my lord.” Dawson’s mouth thinned.
“A man at the Wolf and Lamb would say nothing at all of him beyond this one thing. Murphy would just as soon open your throat as bid you good evening and think no more of the one than the other. Said it quiet, my lord. Looked at the door while he said it.”
The room had gone very still. Even Will had stopped, the coat clutched to his chest, watching me with the gravity that came over him whenever the talk turned to the parts of the world that had used him hard before he came here.
So. Not a brute who had blundered. Not an accident of the street. A professional, kept on a retainer of fear, who had put his two hands against a woman’s shoulders on a clear afternoon and walked away. And either Strode and Carmody, or maybe both, had paid for Lydia’s murder.
“You did well,” I said to Dawson, and meant the whole of it. “Both of you.”
“The lad earned his share, my lord.” Dawson said it without his customary dryness, which was how I knew he meant it. “It was a crossing-sweeper put us onto the Wolf and Lamb. Boy of about his age. Wouldn’t give me the time of day, but he talked to Will here readily enough.”
It had not been my notion. It had been Dawson’s, and Will’s before it, and I had merely surrendered to it at the breakfast table. I did not correct him. Some victories a man permits the field to record in his favor, and this was not one I had won.
“And what,” I said, turning at last to the coat, “is that?”
Will’s chin came up. The defense he had been preparing all the way home arrived in a single breath. “You said I could choose it, that I could choose a dog of my own.” He drew the thing out of his coat and held it up before him in both hands.
It was a dog. After a fashion.
It was small, although I confess I had imagined something of a more finished sort—a neat terrier, perhaps, of decent breeding and biddable temper, a dog a gentleman’s ward might walk in the square without comment.
What Will held out to me was none of these things.
It was a wiry, dun-colored scrap of indeterminate parentage, caked to the elbow in the distinct grey of London gutters, with one ear that stood and one that had given up the attempt, and an aroma that preceded it into the room by some distance and would linger after.
It regarded me from Will’s hands with a pair of bright black eyes entirely undaunted by the grandeur of its surroundings, and, having taken my measure, drew back its lip and produced a growl of astonishing volume for a creature that would have fit in my hat.
Ajax, who outweighed it by perhaps eleven stone, took one dignified step backward.
“He was under the cart at the Wolf and Lamb,” Will said. “Nobody owned him. I asked. He bit a man already today.” This was offered not as a caution but as a credential. “Only a little. The man deserved it.”
“He smells,” I observed, “of the Thames at low tide.”
“He’ll wash.”
“He just growled at me.”
“He doesn’t know you yet.” Will gathered the appalling animal closer against his chest, and the growl subsided into a low rumble of provisional truce.
“He’s brave. He’s not scared of nuttin.” He looked up at me.
Beneath the defiance was the thing I had heard once before on the day he had first named what he wanted and braced himself to be refused it. “You said I could choose.”
I looked at the boy. I looked at the dreadful, valiant, malodorous creature he had carried halfway across London inside his coat, having selected it, of all the dogs in the city, precisely because no one else had wanted it.
Because it was small and ferocious and afraid of nothing and had survived alone under a cart by the sheer force of refusing to be got rid of.
He had not chosen a dog. He had chosen himself.
“So I did,” I said.
The grin broke across his face like sunrise.
“He will be bathed,” I said, “before he sets one paw above stairs. He will not bite the staff. And he will not”—I looked at the thing, which looked back at me with frank contempt—“he will not, under any circumstances, be permitted upon the furniture.”
“Right,” said Will, in the tone of a boy agreeing to terms he has no intention whatever of honoring.
“Dawson.”
“My lord.”
“Have a bath drawn for the—” I considered the word. “For the dog.”
“At once, my lord.” Dawson inclined his head. But I caught, beneath the gravity, the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“Might I ask what we are to call him?”
Will answered with the instant certainty of a decision long since made. “Rocket.”
Of course it was Rocket. The boy loved locomotives, and here was a small fierce thing that went off without warning and could not be stopped once it started. The name was, I was forced to admit, very nearly perfect.
“Rocket,” I agreed.
“Thank you, Uncle Julian.”
Uncle Julian. He had said it without ceremony, in the same breath as the thanks, already half turned back to the small warm riot in his arms. He could not know what he had done.
No one had spoken my Christian name in years—not my father, who had unmade me with it; not William, who was past calling anyone anything at all; not my grandmother, years in the ground.
But here was a boy thrust upon me by nothing better than chance, who had looked at the whole bankrupt inheritance of the name and found in it, of all the things he might have wanted, an uncle.
When I had command of myself again, I said only that Rocket would want feeding, and that a gentleman saw to his animals before himself.
Will bore his prize from the room in triumph, Dawson following.
No doubt the household’s evening would be disrupted by the urgent business of one disreputable dog. I could only imagine his reception.
Left alone again in the failing light, with Ajax pressing warm against my good leg, and the affidavit on the desk, I pondered the name I had wanted all day.
Murphy.
We not only had a name, but a face, a trade, and a witness who would put him on the street the afternoon Lydia died.
But we had something else now too, and it was less welcome.
A man with a knife and no conscience, standing between us and the truth, who had killed once to keep it buried and would not scruple to do so again.
Lark did not know the half of what I now knew. I would have to tell her—tonight.
From somewhere in the house, a small dog barked at the indignity of soap with a violence wholly disproportionate to its size.
I glanced down at Ajax. “Do not trouble yourself. You still rule this house." Ajax thumped his tail once against the floor, supremely unbothered, while somewhere above us the new claimant to the throne shrieked on. "All evidence to the contrary."
And then I ordered the carriage brought round.