Honor's Kingdom (38 page)

“Or in bettering themselves.”

Throwing down her trump, Miss Thumper bent toward the child, who cringed still deeper into the folds of my coat.

“Can you
read,
child? Do you have
any
interest in working very,
very
hard and suffering for
many
years in order to learn what may be of
no
use to you whatever?”

“It may be of no use to you of any kind,” Miss Sharp added. “But you may tell us, without the least shame, whether or not you can read.”

“I hae me numbers,” Fanny told them, employing the smallest voice upon the earth.

Miss Thumper fair exploded in triumph, and Miss Sharp stepped back to survey the conquered field.

“The child can’t even read! And she must be eleven years of age. If not twelve.”

“Or thirteen. Perhaps even fourteen,” Miss Sharp judged. “And she hasn’t learned to read!”

“She couldn’t possibly be happy here.”

“There are places for the hopelessly poor and the diseased.”

Now, during this entire inquisition, the colonel’s face had been reddening. As if he had returned to a place under India’s fervent sun. I knew him well enough to take heed of that ever-darkening crimson in his cheeks, and the scarlet of his ears, and the deep and mounting purple of his forehead. I fear my old instincts even caused me to inch back from the present company, and to pull the child with me.

“Damn me from here to the Hooghly,” he cried at last, “you’re quick enough to come around asking for money, and all in the name of the poor.”

“There are the poor, and then there are the poor,” Miss Thumper said reasonably.

“We mustn’t put the poor all in one basket,” Miss Sharp explained. “We must speak of the deserving poor—”

“And of the unworthy, unwashed poor,” Miss Thumper relieved her colleague. “I must not risk diseases in
this
house.”

“Or insolence and disregard for learning,” Miss Sharp concluded.

“Well, I’ll be nackered to Ootacamund!” the colonel barked. “You call that Christian charity, the two of you? If the child can’t read, you can damn well, bloody well teach her. What the blue, bloody blazes is this dungeon of yours for? Give her a wash, and teach her to read and to look out like a lady. Or you’ll never see another pound from me.”

He turned to inspect Fanny, who shriveled in fear, but the old fellow’s face had turned from the blaze of a furnace to the warmth of simple kindness. “She don’t look a bit diseased to me,” he said. “And I could tell you tales of disease would give you the quivering vomits, don’t you know?” I believe he smiled. “She’s a pretty little thing, if you only had eyes in your heads. And the major here says she can sing like a choir of angels.”

“We never said she wouldn’t be admitted,” Miss Thumper said hastily.

“We only thought we should clarify her situation.”

“A lovely voice becomes a fine young lady.”

“And we only elevate the finest young ladies in this house,” Miss Sharp explained.

“The
very
finest.”

“Although their origins may lie in poverty.”

“Among the deserving poor, of course.”

“They are nonetheless fine.”

“Shall
you
want to be fine?” the two of them asked Fanny, almost in unison.

I thought the colonel about to return to the edge of apoplexy, but this time he limited himself to a briefer salvo.

“Damn me, I don’t know what the poor deserve exactly, but I’m buggered if I believe it’s what they’ve got. Christian charity
don’t mean pickin’ and choosin’ any way that suits us. Lepers and all that, don’t you know? Fallen women. Thieves . . .”

At those concluding words, our hostesses turned their somber eyes, reproachfully, to Fanny. And allowed their silence to speak.

“Don’t you read the bloody Holy Bible?” the colonel demanded of the ladies.

“Every morning,” Miss Thumper said, affronted.

“And every night,” Miss Sharp told us.

“And sometimes in the middle of the day.”

“For moral sustenance.”

“Then read it over again, damn me. And bring that girl up proper. Or I’ll give my next hundred pounds to the Irish nuns.”

Miss Thumper and Miss Sharp gasped at the immensity of the threat, and the matter was finally settled. Although I noted a look of satisfaction on the face of the housemaid back along the stairs.

Twas only that, with her future miraculously insured, Fanny did not want to let go of me.

She did not even look at the lot of them, but raised her face to mine. Now, I am not tall, and though she was small, the top of her head come up near to my shoulders. For all their redness, I saw the loveliest set of gray-blue eyes. Nor did they seem to me to lack intelligence.

“Can I na stay wi’ ye, sir? I’m a guid girl, and I would na be a trouble.”

“Now, lass,” I said, “I am a man, and you are a girl, and we have no blood relation. Such would be improper, see. And I must tend to things that would not suit you.” I tried to express a confidence I hardly felt. “These two fine ladies are going to do wonders for you.”

“Wonders,” Miss Thumper confirmed.

“And you’ll have a nice gray dress, like all the other girls,” Miss Sharp assured her.

But the child spoke only to me. “I would na be a trouble, and I’d work sae hard ye’d be ’stonished.”

“I will come to visit,” I told her. “Tomorrow. To see that you are properly bestowed.”

Miss Thumper sniffed.

Miss Sharp snorted. Which I did not think ladylike to an excess.

At last, we got away, the colonel and I. Although I cannot quite say how. We left the lass in tears, with those two crows perched over her. Twas all for the best, of course. For rigor, within measure, is a blessing. But I know what it means to be handed to strangers.

There is ever a shortage of kindness in this world.

Well, better Miss Thumper’s Home than the corner of a room in the Old Vennel for the girl. The poor thing had not even possessed a spare set of unmentionables, but had retrieved only a splintering box hardly bigger than a pencil case. And when I returned to my hotel, I would need to pick over my coat in case a louse or two had preferred my freshness to her familiarity.

The faintest of drizzles filtered through the dirty clot of air, but the colonel resolved to walk me to my hotel. And I was glad of his company, though I still felt a bit awkward about the old difference in our ranks. It did not seem to matter to him at all, now that everything had been explained, but once a man has been placed low, a part of him has trouble coming up. Perhaps I was his equal as a Christian, but I could not feel his equal as a man.

“Those two witches,” he said abruptly, as a passing constable touched his fingers to his visor. The gaslamps wore damp haloes. “Have no fear, I’ll see they treat her properly.”

“I am indebted to you, sir,” I told him.

But he was a true Christian, and did not look for thanks. He marched along, and muttered at the world, and confided, “Georgiana would have put the two of them right, don’t you know? Never had any of that woman fuss from my Georgie. Miss her, I do, the old campaigner.”

We walked in silence for a time, communing with separate ghosts. Then, of a sudden, the colonel said, “Sometimes I want to beat the Gospels into the whole bloody pack of them.”

TWAS GRACIOUS OF THE COLONEL to accompany me, but it tired him. When we parted before the hotel, he asked the porter to summon a cab. And off he went, through the warm and glistening streets.

I thought to go straight to my room, for I was weary myself, but the fellow who had the duty of the desk presented me an envelope with my key.

A telegraphic message it was. I stepped away to the privacy of a gas fixture and fingered it open.

It come from Mr. Charles Francis Adams himself:

AJ. DIFFICULTY OVER LTRS. HA LONDON TRAIN TOMORROW NIGHT. ACCOMPANIED. BG MURDERED. RP IN CUSTODY. DIVISIONS IN HP. REASONS UNCLEAR. CFA.

Of course, anyone might have understood the message, as you doubtless have done. I needed a code, and had none, and Mr. Adams had done the best he could to confuse our enemies.

There was a problem about the letters, and Henry Adams was coming to Glasgow the following night to enlist my aid, likely accompanied by a bodyguard, if not a police inspector, given the violent turn of events and the young man’s lack of physical robustness. Betty Green had been murdered, and I saw the beauty of the deed at once: If anyone had written her compromising letters, that person would appear doubly compromised now, even if he bore no least blame for her demise. And woe unto him with political aspirations. A lover’s murder may delight the public, but it will not please the sort who hold the franchise. Nor did I think it would amuse the Queen. And Reginald Pomeroy had been taken by the police, perhaps because he had botched a deed of which I would not have thought that young man capable. It doubtless would cost his father his hope of a peerage. Lastly, there were unexpected divisions in Parliament,
the causes of which could not be understood by Mr. Adams, though worried he was.

That seemed enough for any man to sleep on. But the city of Glasgow had not yet had its fill of me.

When he tapped me on the shoulder, I leapt to defend myself. For I had not heard the big fellow coming up. He moved like a Pushtoon.

Inspector McLeod it was. His hat was in his hand, and his orange whiskers and hair taken together might have lit the room in the absence of the gas fixtures.

He gently pushed my cane aside until it no longer threatened his person.

“I hae heard you made braw use of that today. Down in the Gallowgate.”

“I was set upon.” For a moment, I suspected he had come to question me, if not make an arrest, because of the violence I had done.

“Weel, it does na matter to me, if it does na to you. A good thing that paddy won’t need more jaw than you spared him, for young Doctor Russell says it’ll serve as a lifelong reminder that he’s to mind his manners around his betters. Tither one an’t much for talking, either, though I’m na sure what you did to him.” He glanced toward the guardian desk, where the clerk was hard at the ledger. “If you do na mind, I would like to hae a private conversation.”

I recommended my room. And we went up. To tell you the truth, I was almost glad to have him along with me, for I was growing wary of British hotel rooms.

When we were alone—with no evidence of the severed hands of children, or penny-gaff Eves, or deadly gifts—I offered him the single chair and sat myself on the bed, though my legs were dangling.

“I hae also heard,” the inspector said quietly, “that the Earl of Thretford appears to covet your company. Would that hae to do with your questions about shipyards, now?”

“Yes.”

“And would it hae to do with dead Americans?”

“It may.”

“And mought I ask what the Earl thought sae important that he lowered himself to the streets like the dirty thousands of us?”

“He wants to speak with me. Tomorrow. At his house in town.”

Inspector McLeod nodded. “Weel, then you’ll see a bonnie house. Though na sae bonnie as his hunting lodge in the hielands, which is na the quarter sae bonnie as the castle along over the muirs, which his father also bought with his English money. And though I hae na seen it myself, I hear the castle’s as nought to the Earl’s possessions south of the reivers. But you’ll see a bonnie house, and that you will.”

“A fine house, is it? Then I will mind my manners.”

“Aye. And hope that he minds his.”

“You take an interest in the Earl yourself, then, Inspector?”

“I would na call it a proper interest. Na more than I would call him a proper earl.”

“And that would make him an improper earl?”

“Aye. Like his bluidy, black sire afore him. Wha bought his portion in the north and treated the land folk crueler than Stafford treated Strathnaver. Wha burned all that he could na break, and called for the Gordons when his hired men would na do. So that he mought gi’ a portion to sheep, and hae the rest for his shooting. Twa thousand people put from their land. For sheep and the pleasure of shotguns. Aye, that would make a man an improper earl, and carry the impropriety down to his son and his grandson. Not that the true lairds did na betray their own, and by a multitude. But the sting gaes deeper coming frae an English wasp. Wha favors a grouse o’er man, or woman, or child.”

“And in the time of the burning,” I said, “would one of the children have carried the name McLeod?”

“Aye. One and more.”

“And that is what you have come to tell me tonight?”

He shook his head. “I hae said more than I wished, and I hae said less. My purpose was to tell you to gae careful with the Earl.”

I wanted a potent ally. Badly. So I asked him, “Then will you go along with me tomorrow? His carriage will call for me at two o’clock. Here.”

He began to shake his head, then stopped and thought for a moment. “I can na say that I will gae along. Not now. For all things want their proper way of doing. But if you call tomorrow, in the morning, and find me at my desk, then you mought ask me for the courtesy of my company. Since you are from the American legation. Aye, that would be the way, all public and above an English suspicion.”

He rose to go. Scotsman though he was, he could not stop himself from offering a final observation. “I hae thought, from time to time, I mought jeck up meself and go to your America. For when I gae through the streets of the city, I see a’ ghosts upon twa legs, and I think of what mought hae been had sheep na been given the preference over men these hundred year. And then I’m angered, and there’s na good will ever come of it.”