Chapter Four
Scooting down an alley on the way to The Dancing Swan, the pistol retrieved from Mrs. Baldwin’s at his back as well as the knives tucked in his boots, Fletcher sidestepped a pile of filthy clothes, unsurprised when the heap moved and spoke.
“Coin? Coin for gin?”
He ignored the drunken plea. If he stopped for every beggar whining for gin, he’d never make it out of this filthy warren of streets to the relative safety of the brothel he called home.
Charity wasn’t something those in The Devil’s Acre practiced.
Fletcher looked at the soot-stained buildings surrounding him, all in various stages of disrepair. Heard a baby crying. Nearly slipped in the contents of a chamber pot someone had tossed out the window, and whistled harder.
He detested every inch of this place.
Reaching the end of the alley, he approached a house in far better shape than most to be found here.
The tinkling sound of a piano reached his ears leaking from somewhere inside.
This residence had long ago been split in two, the half facing the street on the other side was The Dancing Swan.
But in this alley, the entrance was for Mrs. Bean.
The only connection between the two halves of the house was a door, hidden in the wall just down the hall from Mrs. Bean’s parlor.
Two half-dead peonies, struggling to stay alive in a red clay pot, graced the sagging stairs and chipped wood of the door. A useless exercise but at times, Mrs. Bean had flights of fancy.
Fletcher rapped sharply until a small peephole opened, revealing a bulbous nose.
“It’s me Ripps,” he said. “Open up.”
“Evenin’ Fletch.” Ripps, a big brutish lout of indeterminate age, opened the door waving him inside. “Wondering when you’d get back. That skirt in Cheapside keeping you busy?” His brows, like two overgrown caterpillars, wiggled suggestively.
“Rare form tonight, Ripps. Damn near took my cock off,” he answered, as the larger man shut and locked the door behind him.
Ripps thought Fletcher had a woman as did everyone else.
A widow whose husband sadly died a year ago.
Safer that way. If he was seen headed in the direction of Cheapside, no one would question visiting a skirt, not even Lark.
So far, no one had seemed too interested in his widow, nor in Fletcher going off to Cheapside.
Not even Mrs. Bean.
Ripps howled with laughter. “Aye. Them widows are wild. I warned you.”
“You did, Ripps,” he agreed with a smile.
Fletcher didn’t trust Ripps. Not the bigger man’s fault of course.
He had as much faith in Ripps as he did anyone else in The Devil’s Acre, which was to say, not enough to divulge any real secrets.
Ripps had worked for Mrs. Bean at least five years, just after the last doorman for The Dancing Swan died during a brawl.
He was likely in Lark’s pocket. Nearly everyone was.
“How’s The Swan tonight?” Fletcher asked, though he didn’t care. “Sorry I’m a bit late. Any trouble?”
“Nah.” Ripps winked at him. “The usual crowd. Had to throw one little lordling out after he thought it’d be great fun to carve up Martha.” Ripps’ ugly face turned murderous. “Won’t be doing that again. Broke his hand.”
“Good man, Ripps. And Martha?”
“A bit banged up but otherwise no worse for the wear. Mrs. Bean gave her the night off.” He smiled, showing off the place where his front teeth had once been. “Patched her up and such.”
“If she’s poorly tomorrow, have her stay in bed,” Fletcher said, irritated he even had to advise the doorman of a brothel that a prostitute might not be well enough to work.
“Mrs. Bean—” The big man gave him a look.
“I’ll speak to her Ripps.”
Unless one of her girls was bleeding excessively, bones had been broken, or a face badly bruised, Mrs. Bean usually dabbed a cloth over the worst of it and sent the girl back to the parlor for the next patron to enjoy.
Mrs. Bean wasn’t known for her compassion. Never had been.
“Lark was here earlier. Asked after you.” Ripps’ eyes shifted to the right. “Told ’im you were off with your ladybird.”
Fletcher regarded the other man calmly with a wink. “Sorry to have missed him but I’m sure he understood. Widows tend to be insatiable.”
“Yeah, he said you were likely gin-drunk too. Said you probably stumbled right between her thighs.” Ripps roared with laughter again. “I say we should all be so lucky, Fletch.”
“Only a little gin-drunk.” Fletcher grinned back.
Lark assumed Fletcher to be an inept, skirt-chasing wastrel, dependent on Mrs. Bean for everything and good for nothing else but managing the ledgers of a brothel, which she claimed he did a poor job of, but she had to give him something to do.
Lord of Pye Street for nearly three decades, Lark commanded a ring of footpads, cutpurses and pickpockets, most of them orphaned children who swarmed around Parliament.
He dealt in gin, favors, and dubious protection.
Whether you needed his services or not wasn’t the point.
When Fletcher had been a child, Lark had encouraged him, in a fatherly way, to steal a purse without the mark knowing it.
The man was drunk. The filching easy. Fletcher had bragged to Mrs. Bean about his sticky fingers, how Lark wanted him to come stay in the shanty with the other pickpockets. He’d been proud at the time.
Until Mrs. Bean had cuffed Fletcher so hard in the ear, he’d fallen to the ground.
You listen to me. The next time, fumble the mark. When he teaches you to shoot with a pistol, pretend you can’t see the target. Let him cut you with a knife when you’re practicin’ so’s he thinks you can’t handle a blade. If Lark finds you useful, you’ll never leave here.
Fletcher thought Mrs. Bean was only being cruel, but over the years he’d realized she was hiding him. Going out of her way to make Fletcher seem soft. Never a threat. No one at all of importance.
So he managed the accounts of The Dancing Swan, the crates of gin, the payments owed by various patrons. That sort of thing. Skills Lark didn’t consider to be anything special at all. Useless, he was often called, which was both good and bad.
“Where’s Mrs. Bean?” Fletcher asked.
“Front parlor havin’ tea. Made if for ’er myself.” Ripps nodded with a worried frown. “Put brandy in the pot. Had to. The cough is a bit worse tonight, Fletch. Must be the damp air.”
“Must be. Good man, Ripps.”
Ripps was the farthest thing from a good man as there weren’t any in the rookery. Mrs. Bean didn’t trust Ripps much either, but if she had him making tea it was a testament to how poorly she must feel. She didn’t like to show weakness, especially to one of Lark’s lackeys.
Her illness had started late last year, with a week spent in bed after a terrible cold.
Mrs. Bean recovered, but never truly became better.
The cough lingered, worsening over time.
Fletcher often thought of it as the roots of a tree, that cough, stretching and growing into Mrs. Bean’s lungs until it would one day kill her.
Blood now dotted the handkerchiefs she used and flecked her lips.
The only thing that kept Lark from barging in to take over The Dancing Swan and murdering Mrs. Bean’s useless grandson was he wanted Bean’s Book.
Lark had a healthy, grudging respect for Mrs. Bean, but that wasn’t what kept him away.
It was Grandmam’s book of secrets. Everyone wanted that damn book, circling The Dancing Swan like a band of sharks that smell blood in the water.
Lark was only the worst of the group. He wouldn’t slit Fletcher’s throat because Mrs. Bean made it clear that a move on The Swan, or Fletcher and she’d burn the book, and no one, including Lark, knew where the bloody thing happened to be.
Don’t matter, Mrs. Bean. You’ll die one day.
Grandmam took his threat in stride. She had earned the respect of The Devil’s Acre, and she wasn’t about to back down.
She’d once been a midwife and there was more than one woman in this rookery who’d given birth with Mrs. Bean at her side.
Lark couldn’t afford to have anyone turn against him.
There was also the matter of poison. Grandmam knew how to kill a man with just a few drops of her special tincture.
Or render him unable to move his limbs or lips.
Lark never once had anything to eat or drink in the home of Delores Bean. Nor did he touch anything in this house, afraid of poison on a seat cushion.
“Well, best get back to it.” Ripps pointed to the seam in the wall barely visible a few feet away. The secret door linking the two halves of the house together. It could be barred from this side, but not from The Swan.
“Give Martha gin if she needs it.”
Nodding, Ripps pushed down on the lower corner of the crease in the wall. A snap sounded and the hidden door opened into a small room located just steps from the main parlor at The Swan.
Fletcher approached the parlor, hoping that Mrs. Bean had fallen asleep in her chair and he might just carry her up the stairs to bed.
He peeked through the half-opened door and caught sight of her emaciated form in a chair, a pot of tea and bottle of brandy at her elbow.
A handkerchief lay in her lap, flecked with blood.
“That you Fletch?” A shrewd, calculating pair of eyes riddled with pain, narrowed on him. “Where have you been?”
“Out,” he answered.
“We had a problem at The Swan.”
“Ripps told me. I’ll go next door in a bit and make sure all is well. Don’t worry.”
A flood of mixed emotions filled him at the sight of Delores Bean, his grandmam.
Least, that’s who she claimed to be. Claimed because Fletcher was supposedly the son of Mrs. Bean’s dead daughter, Hannah.
A woman that Mrs. Bean never spoke about and didn’t have so much as a miniature or a keepsake. Save Fletcher.
Because she hadn’t existed. Fletcher became surer of that by the day.
“Martha got the bad end of a fist,” she said as he walked towards her. “But she’s fine, except for a bit of weeping.”
“I’ll check on her later, Mrs. Bean.”