The Color of Death (18 page)

“Thank you, sir,” said I.

Then did I turn and walk the length of the study. Only at the door did I pause and turn back to Mr. Bilbo.

“Sir,” said I, “on the way in I happened to meet a Mistress Pinkham whom I had earlier met at Lord Lilley’s. Do you know much about her?”

He sighed. “No, I don’t. She’s an old chum of Nancy Plummer’s, she is. We sometimes take in orphans who got no place else to go — not just anyone off the street, you understand. They got to be vouched for, and Nancy vouched for her. Beyond that, you’d have to ask Plummer.”

“All right then, I’ll begin with Bunkins, if they’re through with class for the day.”

And that I did. I shall not linger over my interview with Jimmie Bun-kins — our acute embarrassment, his inability to provide details — nor shall I detain you long, reader, by reporting directly on what was said between me and the coach driver and the footman. It was all a great waste of their time and mine — or so it seemed to me. And of course it earned me their resentment, and perhaps also Mr. Burnham’s enmity.

They all told exactly the same story with exactly the same details. According to each and all, Mr. Burnham had retired to the drawing room to read. What was he reading? A book. What was the title of the book? The vicar of someplace or other. Who wrote the book? No idea. Then how could you be sure that this was the particular book he was reading? Because he kept running out to read aloud parts of it he specially enjoyed. (There was some intentional irony in Mr. Burnham’s choice of the book he purported to be reading that night, for it was my copy of The Vicar of Wakefield, by Oliver Goldsmith, which I had lent him.) According to them, Mr. Burnham would make regular rounds from the drawing room to the kitchen below, where the coachmen sat at the table, then up to Bunkins s room, every quarter hour or less; that was how they were all so sure he had been present through the entire evening and had not slipped out, robbed a house around the corner with his crew of black villains, and then slipped back in so that no one had noticed.

All of that struck me as a bit ludicrous, I fear.

As it happened, I talked to the coachmen in the stable behind the house. In all truth, they paid me little heed as I questioned them, for they were occupied in hitching up the team and otherwise readying the coach for a trip up the river to Richmond, where Mr. Bilbo had an appointment with the duke, no less. Indeed they left me behind, though not alone, for as I stood in the great, wide door, watching them go, I was joined there by the stable boy, a young country fellow of about fourteen who had not worked there long; whilst the coachmen had hitched the horses, he had labored at cleaning out the stalls. He smelled rather strongly at that moment, yet I stayed close, for just as I was about to leave he started talking. I was keenly interested in what he had to say.

“Can’t figure why Mr. Bilbo don’t take that trip on his saddle horse. That gray mare is just the prettiest and the best I ever did see. It’s a shame the master don’t ride her.”

I attempted to explain to him that seamen like Mr. Bilbo are often poor horsemen and shy about exhibiting their lack of skill. The boy, however, seemed not to listen to what I had said. He continued in the manner in which he had begun.

“If it wasn’t for Mr. Burnham, that mare wouldn’t get no riding at all,” said he. “He sits well in the saddle, I’d say. Wonder where he learned.”

“Does he take the horse out often?” I asked.

“Oh, not often, I wouldn’t say — two or three times a week, four at the most. Always on Sunday.”

“Did he have her out last evening?”

“Oh, didn’t he, though! He didn’t get in till near half after eleven and kept me up till near midnight, rubbin’ her down, coolin’ her off. Must’ve taken her on a pretty long ride.” The boy paused, reflecting upon that. “Well, if he didn’t, nobody would.”

I thanked him and, with a wave, walked slowly away. What I might have done instead was grab the young fellow and kiss him on both cheeks in the French style, then turn a couple of cartwheels, for he had turned my fool’s errand into a rewarding investigation. I could hardly contain myself as I returned to the house.

Yet I was not so excited by what had transpired that I failed to notice a familiar figure descending the stairs. It was none but Nancy Plummer, of whom I had recently seen a great deal. I hastened to overtake her, ere she disappeared. I hailed her by name. She turned and frowned when she recognized me.

“I’ve a few questions regarding Mary Pinkham,” said I.

“Well, I’ve a few questions for you regardin’ what you said to her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that soon as ever you talked to her, she come back to me, askin’ about you. And that she did whilst she was throwin’ everything she owned into her portmanteau. She left,” Nancy declared. “She left just like that, cursin’ your name, she was.”

It often seemed that Sir John Fielding responded rather poorly to news of the sort that a lad of seventeen would deem of the utmost importance. One such instance occurred upon my return to Number 4 Bow Street. I burst into the kitchen, thinking to travel through it up to his bedroom. But I found upon my entry that he was seated at the table, half-clothed, as Mr. Donnelly dressed his wound. As chance would have it, I had not been present previously during such an exercise. This was my first glimpse beneath the bandages since they had first been applied. To me the wound appeared rather ugly — red and puckered and scabbed over — but the surgeon seemed well-pleased with its condition.

Having first made certain that Annie was not within earshot, I blurted out the story of my visit to Mr. Bilbo’s residence: I told of the strange and quite unacceptably complex manner that had been devised to convince us that Mr. Burnham had been present in the house all through the evening; of the stable boy who, without malice and unintentionally, revealed that Mr. Burnham had been gone all through the early part of the night; and finally did I tell of my odd encounter with Mistress Pinkham and her hasty departure thereafter.

Sir John listened closely, as only Sir John could, squeezing his lower lip gently, stroking his chin. Nevertheless, when I had concluded that part of my report, his only comment came as something of a disappointment.

“Hmmm, yes, well, that is most interesting, isn’t it?”

Yet I was too excited and eager to impart what more I had to tell to be greatly discouraged. So I then launched into the remainder of my tale. I began by telling of my chance meeting with Mossman, the porter, and how he had informed me that Mr. Trezavant had departed to bring back his wife from the family manse in Sussex.

This information seemed to stir Sir John rather more than anything I had brought back from Mr. Bilbo’s residence. He was moved to comment, “Ah, yes, that gives us a day or two in any case.”

And I was moved to wonder, a day or two for what? Yet I said nothing and continued directly to the news of Mr. Collier’s sudden appearance as butler in the Trezavant house, and the tale told me by Maude Bleeker. I recall that I told the latter in great detail, though not, I’m happy to say, in such great detail as Maude Bleeker had given it to me. Attempting to inject a bit of drama into it, I concluded, “And she discovered that the man’s true name was John Abernathy when he appeared before you in the Bow Street Court below.”

“And he was the man she recognized among the robbers?”

“He was the man she had known as Johnny Skylark, yes sir.”

“She’s sure of that, is she? After all, the fellow she spied for a minute, or perhaps a little more, in the kitchen, had a black skin and not white.”

“True, but — ”

“And it does seem to me, Jeremy, that even given the possibility that he wore blackface as a disguise, his face might well have changed greatly under that dark paint in twelve years’ time.”

“All I can say, sir, is that she seemed quite sure.”

“Yes, well … perhaps.” He lapsed into silence, but I said nothing, for it seemed quite certain that he would have more to add. “The fact is,” he resumed (confirming my supposition), “I do remember this fellow John Abernathy. I remember his voice as he called curses upon me. He was angry at me because of the case I had assembled against him. I had a number of his robbery victims from years past right there in magistrate’s court. One after the next, they identified him as the thief who had robbed them at sword-point, at pistol-point, whatever. The case against him was as sure as any that ever I sent on to Old Bailey. I’ve no idea what happened to him there, however. I was on to other things. He could have been sentenced to transportation, rather than the rope, I suppose.” He tested that in his mind for a moment. Then did he add: “Not really very likely, though.”

“Perhaps I might invite Maude Bleeker here, sir,” I suggested, “and you might hear her story for yourself.”

“No! no! no!” He flapped his hand irritably. “It would do no good, or very little, unless we knew what had become of Mr. Abernathy — how he had been sentenced, et cetera. And Jeremy, I fear I must ask you to find that information for me. It will be in the file. If the cook is correct, and all this happened twelve years past, then you shall have to look for it in the cellar.”

My heart sank. I greatly disliked digging through the files in the best of circumstances. But what to me was quite the worst was searching through those dusty files in the cellar; I had no idea how I might go about it, now that Clarissa had rearranged them.

As if reading my mind, Sir John remarked, “It will give you an opportunity to learn the new filing system. I’ll urge Clarissa to help.”

Through it all, Mr. Donnelly had stood and listened, apparently quite fascinated, to my report to Sir John and the discussion that followed. Sir John had stated his intention to sit up and have dinner with “the family.” The surgeon had consented, and in celebration Annie had made a special trip to Covent Garden that she might get from our butcher, Mr. Tolliver, a piece of meat worthy of the occasion. And so, I buttoned Sir John’s shirt and helped him gingerly into his coat.

Mr. Donnelly asked the magistrate s permission to take me downstairs with him. “I have,” he said, “a few things to discuss with Jeremy.”

Sir John, assuming those few things would have to do with his treatment, granted permission indifferently, though he warned the surgeon he would not likely take any of the cures that were prescribed. “Food and drink are all I shall allow inside me,” said he. “I saw what the learned doctors did to my poor Kitty.”

(He referred, reader, to his dear first wife, who had died of a tumor four years before; she was grossly mistreated by a series of doctors with potions and medicaments until Mr. Donnelly came along and properly diagnosed her malady, yet was too late to do more than ease her passing.)

“I shall keep that in mind, Sir John,” said the surgeon. “In the meantime, do you wish to be assisted up to your bed for a rest before dinner?”

“No, I shall take my rest here at the table. Annie should be along soon to keep me company.”

And thus did I accompany Mr. Donnelly down the stairs and to the door to Bow Street. It was there at the door, in the dim light provided by the small window above the lintel, that we had our discussion.

“I called you down,” said he, “because I have two matters that I wished to talk to you about.”

“By all means, let us talk, sir.”

“The first matter has to do with Mr. Robb.”

“Robb?” Oddly, the name meant little to me, spoken thus by him. Yet it took but a moment to puzzle my way to the proper answer. “Ah,” said I, ” you mean the butler at the Trezavant residence. I knew him as Arthur.”

“Yes, he is the one. I saw him earlier today at St. Bart’s, and I must say I was not pleased by his condition. He speaks and is occasionally conscious, though perhaps not fully. I’m told by the caretakers at the hospital that these periods, short at best, are becoming rarer and, well, shorter. I believe that he is slipping into a coma state — a deep sleep from which he will never waken. Death will soon follow.”

“There is nothing that can be done to save him?”

“I know not what it would be. He is old — I have no idea how old. His brain has had a great shock. He has only taken a bit of water since his arrival in St. Bart’s, and if he goes into a coma, he will not be able even to take that. Without water, without nourishment, he will surely die of thirst or hunger.”

“How terrible,” said I.

“Yes, it is, but I do not tell you simply to draw sympathy from you. I know that you have questions for him. My advice to you is to go to him at the hospital and put them to him during one of his intervals of consciousness — that is, if you can catch him during one of these.”

“I shall,” I promised. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow may be too late.”

“Oh … well, do they allow visitors at night?”

“I foresaw this,” said he, as he removed a letter from his pocket, “and wrote out a kind of pass for you which should enable you to visit Mr. Robb at any time of the day or night.”

Taking the letter as it was offered, I thanked him and promised to get to St. Bartholomew’s as soon as ever I could. “But,” I added, ” you heard of my duties of this evening.”

“I did, yes, and that brings me to the second matter I wished to speak to you about. When I found you there at the Trezavant house, doing the sort of work always done in the past by Sir John, I thought, Indeed, why not? Sir John could not go. Jeremy has always been with him on these visits to the setting of the crime and knows which questions to ask; and I’m sure you did a good, workmanlike job there.”

“Well, I tried, but -”

“Let me finish. That was my impression then, but as I listened to your report to Sir John, I was struck by what you had accomplished with your investigation. You’d made it your own. You brought important information to him. He knows it, and will use it, though he would not let you see that.”

“But why?” I interjected. “Why is he so guarded with me? Why will he show no enthusiasm — no satisfaction even — for what I bring him? No matter what it may be, he always gives me the feeling that somehow I have fallen short. Wasn’t it so today?”

He conceded it was so. But then he continued: “I had a teacher at the University of Vienna, a teacher of anatomy, which for one who wishes to be a surgeon, is probably the body of knowledge most important of all. His name was Grabermann, which translates roughly as gravedigger, if I’m not mistaken. In any case, I was quite certain that he was digging my grave for me. Though I tried to please him, studied tirelessly for his lectures, and answered all his questions correctly, I was constantly exposed to the bite of his sarcasm. He never accepted what I had to say without some belittling comment, and sometimes such were tossed out quite gratuitously. His object? Well, I never could quite grasp what was his object. And so, you can imagine my surprise when I heard from one of my friends, also a medical student, that he had heard our Professor Grabermann commending me to another member of the medical faculty as ‘the most knowledgeable and promising of all his students.’ I was astonished, so much so that when his course of lectures in anatomy was done, I went to him and asked him how I might reconcile his treatment of me with his opinion of me. He thought that very bold and said so, but because it was bold he responded. ‘My dear young fellow,’ said he to me, ‘I kept returning to you for answers to my questions for I could be sure that you would give me the right answers. Yet I could tell that you wished most of all to please me with the answers. You sought my approval, where as my personal approval had nothing to do with the subject of anatomy, nothing at all. And so, Herr Donnelly, I derided you, made sport of you before the class so that you might understand that anatomy was all-important and my approval, nothing.’ “

He peered at me. There was something challenging in his look.

I said to him, “I think I understand, sir.”

“Do you? Well, let me put it plain. I think you are more interested in pleasing Sir John than you should be, or you need to be. Sir John, on the other hand, has noted this, and he seems to withhold his approval for just that reason. He wants you to — ”

Just then the door did interrupt us. Annie was on the other side, pushing against it, returning from Mr. Tolliver’s stall in Covent Garden with a cut of meat judged worthy. Having bumped us out of the way with the door, she begged pardon and hurried past. Something seemed to be troubling her.

Mr. Donnelly and I did not resume our talk. With Annie gone, he held the door open for himself and smiled a goodbye smile at me. “Well, I’ve talked quite enough,” said he in farewell. “Let us leave it that you’re doing well, very well. Don’t worry that Sir John may not be pleased. Please yourself.”

And having said what he had intended, he departed, leaving me to reflect upon it.

The dinner, which was intended as something of a celebration, seemed hardly that, for Annie was ominously quiet throughout. She had cooked with her usual skill, no doubt of that — the beef roast that she had selected was perfectly prepared, with abundant dripping for the potatoes and carrots. Yet our group, which Sir John called his “family, ” was such that when one member was downcast or out of sorts he (or in this case, she) could bring down the rest. Not even the bottle of claret that Sir John had opened helped much to enliven the feast.

When we were done, Annie cleared the table and volunteered to do the washing up. Though Lady Fielding at first offered objections — (“She’s done enough cooking the meal, don’t you think?”) — Sir John overrode them and sent Clarissa and me down to the cellar in search of John Abernathy.

“Who is this fellow, Abernathy? ” she asked, eager to hear the worst. “How many did he murder?”

“Perhaps none, or so he claimed. Yet he was a dedicated and most active thief; what Bunkins would call ‘a village hustler,’ always on the scamp.”